Strain!

Creepy swamp time!

I guess I hit 50 just in time! Honestly when I was planning to get to 50 before the Strain ultra-drop happened, I didn’t think it would be happening on July 1. When’s the last time a game developer promised you something “in July” and delivered on the very first possible day? Once again three cheers for the hardworking staff at Carbine for exceeding my expectations.

I definitely didn’t feel completely prepared for the new content after only having a couple days to get used to being 50 but after the long holiday weekend here in the States I’ve worked through much of it and had some time to digest. Here are some of my random musings.

Northern Wastes: I love how both of the daily questing zones have taken starter areas (one Dommie, one Exile) and revamped them to level 50 content. The landscape is the same, and presumably saved a lot of development time, but they do feel quite different from the starter experience due to the change in quest hubs and mob populations. The newer zone added with the ultra-drop feels like it has more quests, but they’re grouped so tightly together that they are a breeze to complete. At least one of the dailies was bugged on the first day but got fixed quickly. Overall there’s nothing Nexus-shattering going on here but as far as daily questing goes the zone is quite enjoyable.

Obligatory Drusera Pic

Blighthaven: I am not quite sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t a fully-developed zone with multiple pieces of story woven into a long quest chain and capped off with incredible 5-person content and some solid 20+ world boss/event stuff too. I mean, that’s exactly what we were promised in the teasers, but for some reason it never occurred to me to expect it to be so complete. Over the weekend I found a pug to knock out the 5-person “nursery” quests, and that whole area just blew me away. No spoilers, just a comment that it was more involved than I expected, chock full of lore, and easily completable with pug folks who had no clue what they were getting into. A+++

Now my next steps will involve slowly working on my attunement, running dailies, poking at veteran dungeons and adventures, and most likely leveling an army of alts. Also I guess I’ll probably be killing that flaming 20+person raid chicken a lot to try to get enough rep to buy all the strain goodies. Oh, and saving up the ridiculous amount of plat needed to buy the strain hoverboard!