Generating Heat in Northrend

Wrath of the Lich King has been out for a few weeks now, and I admit my Tauren Shaman hit 80 within 12-13 days after its release. Now this seems relatively fast to me considering how long it took me to finally hit 60 on my first high level character and coming down to the last quest in my Onyxia attunement quest, and then Burning crusade was released. So i never completed that chain. Instead I slowly started grinding my way up to 70 to hopefully participate in a little more end game this go round.

Now I admit I happened to play a lot of hours those first couple weeks after the release of WOTLK which attributed to my shaman reaching the next level cap relatively quickly. But the real reason I leveled so quickly was a couple of reasons.

1. The quests are dynamic and fun.
2. I had a friend to do most of the quests with me.

These 2 things really allowed me to burn up the leveling in Northrend to just shy of a level a day.

Personally I love all the new quests in Northrend especially anything that requires me to ride inside, on the shoulder of, on top of a head, in a giant's fist, etc. These are all the new siege warfare like quests and they are a ton of fun. In fact I almost wanted to fail them over and over again just so i could keep doing them. But i have other characters that I will get to do these quests again. Luckily some of the dailies remind me of a couple of these quests so even doing the dailies is fun in my opnion.

Anyways, back to the key at hand. Now that I'm a new 80 Tauren Shaman i look back at everything I've done so far in Northrend and I have to wonder to myself..."Where's my parka? And why didn't i catch a cold?" Notice i mentioned a Cold which although is a disease of some sorts i believe my disease cleansing totem only works on bacterial style infections. That and scourge like infections. Colds are viruses and even though shamans can walk on water like Jesus, they can't cure the common cold.

I guess maybe I was just doing things fast enough that I created my own little heat pocket and didn't have to worry about the cold weather affecting my character. But now that I'm 80 I fear he might come down with something as I change my play style a little bit.

But I have an idea that might keep me occupied and feeling fresh on my shaman for a bit. I'm thinking of switching to Elemental for a while. I love enhancement...always have and always will. But the new skills that shaman get just seem more viable for elemental spec. Lava Burst takes a couple seconds to cast and doesn't work with maelstrom weapon which would make it instant cast for me. I don't know about the other enhancement shamans out there, but standing still for 2 seconds to cast a spell just doesn't cut it for me anymore. I can be pew pewing with my massive mace and offhand fist weapon for a lot more during that time. So I've used it like 3 times since I got it at lvl 75.
My other skill at 80 I have used quite a bit mostly for fun and novelty. Hex is something shamans should have had at lvl 40. I'm guessing that those trolls in Zul'Furrak must have some massive mojo going on because not only can they cast it in their 40s...they can instant cast it. Poof your a frog. And the trolls can keep killing you for the duration.
Obviously this can never bee the case for shamans because then we would be instantly OP in PVP. Not that that would be a bad thing. Shamans need a little PVP love. So I do like hex (especially to show off to the other crowd control players and say "eat that" Mr. I -have-cc-and-you-dont-so-we-dont-want-you-for-the-dungeon-even-though-you-kill-things-by-making-them-explode).

I even got enough loot from quests so far that I have a complete blue set for enhancement and mostly blue set for elemental/healing. So I'm going to respec for the fun of it.

That about sums it up for now. I'll be talking more about upcoming patch notes in the near future to share my complete and "udder" joy at some of the changes coming.

So until next time, when you feel like you aren't killing things fast enough...check your weapons for windfury.