Lok’tar Ogar!
When I got my brand new blindingly fast Mac Pro, I had a weekend by myself with the new computer. You see, Allyson was heading out of town with my mom and sister for a “girl’s night out” sort of deal, and that left me alone in the house with the fastest computer I have ever owned. I got all my software installed. I ripped a DVD or two to illustrate the raw speed I was dealing with. And then I did something almost unthinkably dangerous.
I re-installed World of Warcraft.
After checking in with my old characters, I fired up a new dwarven warrior, which I played while I chatted off and on with my friend Richard all that weekend. I played pretty much all weekend and had a great time. Unlike most people who leave MMORPGs, I had never really gotten frustrated or even bored with WoW. When I quit playing, it was primarily so that I could do other things with my time. Nonetheless, I was blown away by all the enhancements they had made in my absence, leveling via questing — which has always been one of the great successes of WoW — was even smoother and faster than I remembered. The server economy had really blossomed, allowing even low level characters with gathering skills to make a comfortable amount of money. Also, with so few newbies/lowbies around, competing for mobs seemed to be a thing of the past. In essence, all the strong parts of World of Warcraft seemed to have gotten even stronger. WoW really seems to fly when compared with when I played before. I think that they increased the XP rewards and the speed with which you progress from level to level. That makes sense when you think about it from a game design perspective. I was playing WoW right when the game first started as a result they had an influx of people they were trying to slowly build to 60. Now that nearly everyone who plays has at least one level 60/70 character, they’re mostly dealing with people leveling alts. With fewer people in lower-level zones, it makes sense to give a boost to soloing and leveling in general.
Over the next several weeks, I reverted to my usual WoW form, starting lots of new characters of various class and race combinations with one or two primary characters that actually progress out of the starting zones. I’ve never had a character above level 36 (my trusty human priest Marilyn). For an extremely casual WoW player like me, I’ve found that it’s good to have several options for playing on the table. When I can’t bear to cast another Shadow Word: Pain, I put Marilyn on the shelf for a while. When I can’t bear to hit Mortal Strike one more time, I put Mugwort the dwarven warrior on the shelf.
What is slightly different this time, though, is that I’ve switched over to playing mostly on the horde side. I had pretty much always played on the alliance side because Richard’s main toons were both alliance. Then on a whim, I started a Tauren hunter, and I’ve really been consistently having a blast with that combo ever since. Hemlock the Tauren hunter is now level 23 with Nightweb spider pet, which looks frighteningly like a giant real-world black widow. I think I’m digging my hunter because they’re one of the ultimate solo classes. Because hunters have a pet, it’s almost like you’re something of a group even when you’re going solo. Your hunter is free to be your DPS damage dealer while the pet tanks for you. For someone who was stupidly insisting on leveling a holy-spec priest back in the day, this is truly heady stuff.
I’m really enjoying playing again, and I figure I’ll keep regularly playing until that changes and/or something shinier crosses my path. Feel free to send me a tell if you see me on the Garona server.
For the Horde!