Stuck in the Freezing Jihad

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm level 77 now, and the zones are starting to feel more and more tedious. I've been questing in the Hinterl.. Grizzly Hills. All of the old favourites are there: Camping and ninjaing of quest mobs, animals with no body parts, a whole lot of different vendor trash types to fill your inventory, quests which require you to travel all across the zone multiple times.. Fortunately I got my netherdrake back.

To top it off, the western part of the zone seems unfinished. The terrain and the doodads are there.. but considering the quest density of the eastern side of the zone, it seems that Grizzly Hills is missing at least 20 quests. It also seems like the main Horde base in the zone, Conquest Hold, has less quests than the small quest hub in the eastern part. The west has some Kill Ten Rats quests, a few quests against the only Vrykul presence in the zone, a small chain about the furbolgs, and the rest is in the eastern parts. The civil war between Rune Dwarves and the earth elementals, the Worgen, the Drakkari, the clues to Brann Bronzebeard's location and some more Kill Ten Rats. At least it wasn't as group-quest-happy as the Dragonblight, and I got only three group quests littering my quest log. I did run out of quest slots, though.

There's also a small PvP subzone called Venture Bay, where the Venture Company gets trampled between the Horde and the Alliance. Fair enough.. but it seems like it offers only level 74 PvP gear, just like Halaa and other PvP objectives in TBC. To top it off, it seems even more vulnerable to level 77+ players dominating it with flying mounts than Halaa or the Hellfire Peninsula towers. There's plenty of buildings to stand on, and it's somewhat simple to snipe any hostile forces trying to mow their way through friendly NPCs.

I like the looks, especially the height differences and the redwood trees, but the whole zone really feels like an afterthought.  

I've also switched to the Only Spec™ for mages, the deep fire/light frost Frostfire spec. Frostfire Bolt gets synergy benefits from both frost and fire talents, and the end result is a very crit-dependant build. Ice Shards coupled with Ignite means big crits.. but lackluster damage when you don't crit. And thanks to the diminishing returns from crit rating, my crit % has been steadily decreasing. It's probably the only accepted choice for raiding, though. Hopefully I'll ding soon, the rate at which the guild is clearing raid content is somewhat worrying, and they might be done with both 10- and 25-man versions of the raid content within a week or two. It seems that my worries about 10-man content being tougher than 25-man is misplaced, though. Apparently it can be cleared with five people.