Staff writer and veteran World of Warcraft player LockeColeMA feels completely reinvigorated by the launch of Cataclysm. He explains how the third expansion was able to lure him back to Azeroth.

I consider myself a World of Warcraft veteran. I started in December 2004, soon after release, playing with several friends from high school. By the time I hit level 60 on my Paladin, on the Eredar server, the honor system had just been introduced and, of all us who started together, I was the only one still playing on the server. I continued off-and-on over the years, experiencing a cycle: a new expansion would be released, I'd be obsessed with the game for a few months... and then I'd just stop logging in. The Burning Crusade was amazing, Wrath of the Lich King was even better. But over the summer, something happened that had never really happened before. Of my own volition, I simply stopped playing.

I had seen it all. I could tell you the ins and outs of Alliance leveling. I had two high-level Horde characters as well, so I had the hang of both sides. If you wanted to level your professions, I could tell you the best spots to find materials. If you wanted to know the best professions at the end-game, I had that information too. I had taken down everything short of the Lich King himself with my casual guild. I had "The Insane" as my title, arguably the most hardcore title in the game (I say arguably because I think Battlemaster is much tougher, but most other people think I'm insane; which I am). I was bored. Cataclysm loomed on the horizon and as Dec. 7 approached, I didn't even bother to preorder it.

The day after, I went food shopping, and right next to the supermarket was a GameStop. "Oh, why not," I thought, "I'm sure they're all sold out." In fact they had approximately enough copies of the expansion left to make a small fallout shelter, so I shrugged, shelled out $40 and figured I'd give it a try. By the end of the week I can honestly say that the end of the world was the best thing that's ever happened to the game!

Cataclysm, for those not in the know, completely changed the majority of the game (fine, technically patch 4.0.3a did, but I still claim it's Cataclysm). Deathwing, one of the major Dragon Aspects, bursts from beneath the crust of Azeroth, causing the elementals to go out of control and the world to experience its biggest facelift since the Sundering. Every location in the original game has some kind of change, and some zones have been completely revamped. Thousand Needles is covered in water. The Western Plaguelands are regrowing. The Barrens has split in half, with the northern part relatively similar to the old world and the southern part higher level and focusing on combat between the Horde and Alliance in the shattered savanna.

When I logged in, I was overwhelmed. There was simply too much to try out. I started off leveling a low-level Tauren druid I had made before the expansion, and ended up going through the Northern Barrens, Ashenvale and Stonetalon Mountains before remembering that humans need sleep to survive and going to bed. The storyline for Ashenvale and Stonetalon had completely changed, and it kept me interested and excited the entire time. The end of the Stonetalon quest chain was amazing. I hate using the word "epic," but it was the very definition. Determined not to become addicted to just old-world leveling, I vowed next to try out the new profession, archaeology.

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