I wish I'd played earlier

My friends tried for over a year to get me to play WoW, and it wasn't until I was out of grad school and laid up sick for a week that I finally gave in and gave it a shot. Now that I've hit 61 with Ideale, though, I really wish I'd played earlier, before the Burning Crusade expansion came out.

Why? Not because I'd be at the level cap by now, although it would have been really awesome to be one of the people going through the Dark Portal for the first time right after BC was released.

I've had Saffron since Ideale was level 37. I tamed her to get stealth and fell in love, and since the highest level cat to tame with her skin was level 41 anyway, I kept her. And even though I never set foot in an inn again except for when I hearthed, I had a hell of a time keeping both my kitties caught up. In fact, I switched to Cinnamon every time I dinged a new level, and by the time I got Saffron caught up, I'd be only a couple hundred XP from dinging the next. And the few times I wanted to keep going instead of finding a stable master or that I had a ton of quests to turn in, it'd take 3-4 levels to catch Saff up.

This is one of the main reasons I have considered releasing Tshaya's owl, Artemis, near the Felwood border and then "finding" her later, and why I have banned myself from any new pets before the late 50s on Kresha or Daj.

So, for the first time since 37, I can keep my kitties in step. And not only that, I can do it with RESTED BONUS. So I'm going out on Hellfire Peninsula and going, "OMG! OMG that boar just gave me over 1K XP! OMG! THIS IS SO COOL."

So yeah, it would have been nice to play before the 20-60 leveling nerf, just so that I could have had a pretty blue XP bar before now.