All Quiet on the Madness Front

Yeah, I've been a bit slack on the posting front. I've had a couple of tests and essays to do, which have kept me kind of busy.
I have now finished my lectures at undergraduate level (I hope!), and am currently in the very narrow breathing space between the end of lectures, and the start of exams (I believe this space is meant to be devoted to what some call "study"). Having had a less-than-stellar academic record since taking up my alternative life in Azeroth, I do feel that I should focus a bit now, so over the next three weeks WoW will be droppng a bit on the priority list.

That being said, let's take a look at what I've done since 3.0.2, and include a few thoughts:

- hunters are a lot of fun, as BBB will tell you (seems to have been converted to eing a druid/hunter, which led to an interesting incident with BRK). New pets are totally, udderly awesome. Gorilla aoe grinding (using Thunderstomp and Volley, aka Gorilladin grinding) is bucketloads of fun (and a good source of leather) and should be better now that Smack and Cower no longer turn themselves on. I've created the following macros to aid my mass-slaughter of wildlife in Black Morass and Nagrand:
Macro 1: Turns Thunderstomp off autocast and allows you to gather mobs, target each mob and press it to make Gorilladin tag it
/petautocastoff Thunderstomp
/petattack

Macro 2: Use this once you're ready to start blowing stuff up, may need to press it twice to get Mend Pet to work
/cast [combat] Kill Command
/cast [combat] Bestial Wrath
/cast [combat] Thunderstomp
/petautocaston [combat] Thunderstomp
/cast Mend Pet

Then just Volley everything to death.

- is it just me or do Boars kind of suck now? For a special skill, Gore doesn't seem that awesome, especially compared to the focus-dump Bite which all pets get anyway (or an equivalent thereof)

- arena as BM is very cool. I ditched my Core Hound for a level 67 spider (shock! horror! although there are far too many Core Hounds running around at the moment anyway; no love for Spore Bats? And why no Worms, they're exotic too). A 4 second web on a 28 second cooldown is very nice for keeping people in the right place for Bestial Wrath to rip them up. Teaming up with my old partner Meellow facilitated the gibbing (with extreme prejudice) of various enhancement shamans and the like, and with the new addition Octavio (Stupidcow's retadin) I had the entertaining experience of blowing up a warrior who had ventured up one ramp on our side of Blade's Edge arena before his druid partner got a good view of what was happening. No more lengthy irritating drain games for me!
I will say though, that the white Core Hound is still the coolest looking pet in the game, imo.

- although title-ratings were locked prior to the release of 3.0.2, it was stated by Blizzard that we could continue to acrue arena points right up until the release of Wrath of the Lich King in November. Yet I have received no points for activity this week; possibly they were lost in the various server FAIL! of the last week

- "The Hallowed" is an awesome title, and my druid has avidly been trick or treating all over the world in order to obtain it, but neither the Squashling nor the Helm have made their way into his hands. I do hope he can get them, since "Beathooven Jenkins" is just not the same

- on that note, I'm pretty indifferent to the new Achievement system, since I've done stuff like Trophies and similar in a number of MMO games. The titles are pretty nifty though, although I think the Loremaster will take too much work to be worth it (e.g. another 300 Eastern Kingdoms quests on my hunter), although I may try for it at 80. At the moment the Achievements just seem like a way to keep people spending more time on WoW. But that's what we do, right?

- I'm currently leveling my mage and paladin, both are now at 46 (edit: paladin now 47). Flamedancer has swapped elements from Fire to Frost, and is enjoying her frequent 950 damage Frostbolt crits (although her crit rate against Frozen targets is a lot less than what Shatter should be producing). Ephylia has decided that the incredibly powerful Judgements of the Wise, together with the rather awesomely-named The Art of War make Retribution a much better specialisation than her previous Protection training, and with the buffed Consecration (and ridiculous mana efficiency) she can still down 3-5 opponents insanely quickly

PS: kinda only just sunk in that I'm done with lectures for my degree O.o
PPS: Purple Death is one of the oddest drinks I know of. A fortified wine, it is brewed exclusively in West Auckland and tastes a lot like grape-flavoured bubble gum disolved in cough syrup. Thankfully the bottle, which we've had for about a year now, is finally empty.