Zombies in the morning

I woke up at 5 am this morning, and couldn't sleep any more. Instead of tossing and turning, and waking up the wife, I decided to get up and play World of Warcraft. I had ended last evening trying to get some necrotic runes from the zombie invasion event for my warrior, but didn't have much luck. The attack places were heavily camped in the evening. So I thought 5 am might be a much better time. And that worked much better than expected.

Turned out I had two more sleepless guild mates, a mage and a priest. So we formed a group, with me gathering up all the undead, the priest healing me, and the mage using AoE spells to kill them. Worked like a charm. And then we started killing the elite Shadow of Doom with good effect as well. A bit over an hour later we stopped, but by that time I had two epics and 179 necrotic runes.

I flew to Light's Hope Chapel and handed in the quests, and spent the necrotic runes. I bought the other two pieces of the epic set (although the shoulders for some reason are shown as rare, not epic, in spite of epic stats). Only two things wrong with that set: It doesn't have any defense bonus, and is thus useless for tanking, and the plate leggings turned out to be a skirt. So now my warrior is running around in good-looking armor that makes him look like a priest or mage. Guess Blizzard didn't invest too much time designing these. Well, I'll only wear them for soloing anyway.

Then I still had tons of runes left, so I bought the tabard for the achievement, and the three trinkets: war horn, tome, and standard. The trinkets turned out to be all pretty useless. The war horn summons a level 60 paladin for a short time, who deals so little damage that he can't even kill one of those level 50ish undead in Eastern Plaguelands. He is funny though, because instead of just disappearing, he actually casts a bubble and hearthstones out. :) The tome just causes a holy explosion for minor damage, and the standard also deals holy AoE damage, but in several small pulses for a short duration. I'll probably end up deleting all those trinkets, because I don't have enough inventory space to keep them all, and even at level 70 they are sub par, at level 80 they'll be downright bad.

I'm pretty sure my priest doesn't need the epics you can get from killing Shadows of Doom or necrotic runes, he should have better gear already from raiding. But I'll have to check whether my mage still has some blue gear in one of the 4 spots you can get that new gear for. At least the mage has an easier time to reach an attack zone before it is cleared, even if I play in the evening.

In other news it appears that the zombie infestation part of the event ended naturally, a day after we got the quest that told us to visit various apothecaries to search for a cure. In the end the zombies were pretty bad, because the infection timer was down to 1 minute, from an initial 10 minutes, and the range and radius of the retching and zombie explosion had increased so much that it was pretty easy to wipe out the whole bank or auction house. I still liked that part of the event, because it got everyone involved, whether they liked it or not. You can't have a world-shattering invasion of zombies and have half of the population just ignore it. But its good that the infestation is over now, it would have been too annoying to let it run another two weeks until the expansion. I'm looking forward to find out how the story evolves further, and what will be the next part of the event. I find it great fun to be part of one of the few dynamic events of World of Warcraft, instead of just doing static stuff all the time.