Video Games

I have 3 characters on World of Warcraft that I’ve been cycling through to some extent.  One common thread on these characters I’ve found are random Guild invites.  I have no idea how they find me, I’m often alone in an area when I will suddenly be invited to a guild.  I have always declined these.  If I can’t even see you, I don’t want to be a part of your guild.  At least talk to me first.

Which one guild did.  Instead of a random invite, I received a random question of why I wasn’t in a guild.  i can almost guarantee I was alone at the time, so i still don’t know how they found me, I was, in the heart of Dwarven Alliance territory at the time.  I had a little discussion about how I’d gotten invites but no real discussion or information.  They pitched the guild to me a bit and said if I wanted to join to just let them know.  I said sure, mostly on the grounds that they had actually chatted with me a bit and hadn’t just been casting a wide net to see who would bite.  I figured that I could always leave.

Another reason I hadn’t joined a guild was that I hadn’t really looked into the details and ins and outs of guilds.  Would I be paying some sort of fee?  Would I be locked into one guild forever?  That sort of thing.  I didn’t think either situation was the case but I wanted to be sure.

There are actually a lot more benefits to being in a guild.  You get all sorts of perks to speed up leveling and reputation gains and transport speed.  I kind of wish I had joined a guild earlier actually.

They seem to be an interesting bunch at least.  They chit chat to each other about this and that.  I get to feel slightly bad for not being a high enough level to join in any of their little group activities.  Still, it’s nice to have someone to chat with occasionally, even if it’s to make little jokes about things going on in the game.  They are also helpful if I have questions about things I’m not sure about.

On the other angle of being social, I also made a small group in order to try to tackle a boss type monster.  The previous bosses I’ve had to face I just ended up skipping them, returning later when I’m ten levels overpowered and any quest rewards are meaningless.  Unfortunately we didn’t beat the boss, a huge Yeti packing a killer throwing attack.  I did end up getting help with this slime boss that I couldn’t quite handle alone.  It’s kind of neat how it works, you basically just share credit for the quest objective while rolling a random number for any good loot. 

There are some downsides to being friendly I suppose, though I got a good laugh out of it.  Upon my first visit to Orgrimmar as a Blood Elf, I was heading out into the wilderness and as I was exiting the building, I met a higher level player running towards me being chased by something like 20 low level Boars.  He seemed more than capable of handling such a large pack but also seemed distressed about it a bit.  So I stepped up to help him fight them off.  He suggested I use my Thunderclap Attack, which I had just recently learned.  It’s an area affect attack that affects all nearby enemies.

This was my undoing.

While standing in the middle of the pack, I unleashed the Thunderclap.  This caused all of the Boars to retarget me instead of their previous target.  I put of a decent fight but they got the best of me.  I revived and found the guy still standing over my corpse laughing.  Fortunately, i was laughing too.  there really isn’t much consequence to dying in WoW so I had no real reason to be mad.  Still, I guess this is sort of the WoW equivalent of griefing.

I need to start doing this more often, I’m starting to get a bit ahead of myself and starting to forget what I wanted to talk about.  I am trying to keep SOME level of continuity here.  When I last posted, i had mentioned the huge patch for Mists of Pandaria.  I managed to get beyond that, mostly, my laptop still hasn’t finished downloading it all.  Anyway, the update wasn’t as bad as I had thought since you can still play during the update process.  The download for WoW goes through several stages including “Playable” and “Optimal”.

The ultimate issue wasn’t the size up the update but the sweeping changes made to the class mechanics.  The whole thing was basically simplified, you no longer get points to buy traits from a tree, you just automatically learn them.  Some abilities were changes, some added and, some removed.  The removed thing really hurt my Fury Warrior.  I don’t recall all of my old move’s names but before the update, I am pretty sure I had moves which would spawn short term regeneration on being hit and on issuing a hit.  Basically, I recall seeing a lot more green “healing” numbers flying about and less “I died” moments.  My Warrior went from being a bad ass damage dealer to a pokey loser overnight.

Frustrated, I started a new character.  I wanted to try the Alliance side of things despite wanting to try Troll and Tauren out, so I made a Gnome Priest.  I wanted to try my hand at being a healing class.  Then I became traumatized by memories of the few times I played D&D and always got stuck being a cleric and always ending up being the crappy healer class on those old school RPGs where you could name the pre made characters as well as the irritation I had with my Orc Hunter as a support character.  So I made another new character in a Dwarf Paladin.  A nice respectable fighter that can also heal.

I’m not going to pour through the tedious details of low level Dwarf Quests.  The whole experience is comparable to the Orc and Blood Elf experience.  Start in an isolated “beginner area”, work your way out into the real war.  The Dwarf area is just filled with a lot more snow and technology.  Something interesting I found though was fighting Trolls.  When I was a Blood Elf I fought Trolls, I forget if I had to face any as an Orc.  Basically, everyone seems to hate on the poor Trolls.

Anyway, after playing through as Paladin for a while I decided to go back to my Blood Elf.  She is still my favorite character to play and I decided to just explore a but more back on the East continent away from the zone I was having trouble with.  This is kind of the real beauty of this game I suppose, you can just explore and do whatever you want if you get stuck.  You can always just, go somewhere else.

So I went to visit my Dwarf.  Or more accurately, I went to visit his starting zone, deep within Alliance Territory.  This was a really interesting experience.

All of those NPC guards that look really tough on the Horde side?  The Alliance has them too.  They seem friendly enough when I am a Dwarf, not so much as a Blood Elf.  They tend to be level 80+ and can pretty much one hit kill enemy players.  I did manage to slip by all of the guard (sometimes by dying and reviving myself beyond them) and make it all the way to the starting zone of the Dwarves.  It was deserted and I didn’t find any newbies to try to harass or kill but it felt like an accomplishment and was quite a fun trip.  It’s something I wanted to try from the first day I entered the world.

Coming up in future posts, Guilds, Socializing, and the Walking Dead!

So, I’m a bad ass Blood Elf Fury Official now.  You can tell because I’m wielding a bloody cleaver and killing WoW Lions and Goblins and Dark Elves and shit with it.  If wielding a meat cleaver over a sword doesn’t scream BLOOD FURY WARRIOR I don’t know what does.

I have managed to surpass the Level 20 mark, which is the threshold for Free to Play.  In fact, there is a magic gate thing that prevents you from going farther in the world.  I saw the same gate on my Orc Hunter in Orgimmar.  A bit of lead up to that point…

I’ve had to leave a few quests behind.  There was one “Epic Quest” involving hunting down a couple of large Ogres (maybe it was just one Ogre, don’t they have two heads in Warcraft?).  Anyway, I saw him several times stalking around and even confronted him once despite that his is enormous and was several levels above me.  No luck, I barely did any damage before he totally crushed me.  I’ll go back and try again later.  I also had to skip what seemed to essentially be the Boss of the newbie area.  I managed to complete every other quest but this boss is pretty tough and it’s not helped that he is in a room with 4 other normal monsters.  If I could lure the other monsters out I MIGHT be able to get him, but I had some difficulty and decided I’d return to the area around level 30 and crush both of these guys.

The idea is of course that by now I’d have recruited some people and have a small war party or Guild I could use to assist in taking out these enemies.  Unfortunately my experience has been that the land of Azeroth is pretty sparsely populated.  I kind of get the impression that there simply aren’t many low level new players.  I’ve seen a few wandering around, but they tend to either be way above or below my level and point in the game.

Anyway, after completing all of the other quests, i was left only with one optional quest on my list.  It was several regions away.  This was a bit disturbing.  Previously, when i was nearing the end of the quest options in a particular region, at least one of the new quests would direct me to the next area to continue my journey.  It’s cheesy and convenient but it works for encouraging the player to proceed.  This left me with no real direction other than a lone quest that I had only picked up by happening on a special item dropped by a monster.  I figured I’d just proceed to follow the road forward.

I found the enemies in the forward area were pretty high level.  At least, the ones that didn’t have ???? listed for their level, they were in the 40s range, they were also giant slug looking guys.  Maybe I was just being paranoid but, they looked like trouble, so I hopped on my mount and hurried along the road trying to avoid encounters looking for the next guest filled village.

Nothing, nada, zilch.  I found a castle, but it was full of unfriendly folks who, while not attacking me, were not really into asking me to fetch crap for them in exchange for money and experience.  The village did have a flight stop, which led to several areas that i had not been to yet at all.  After consulting some maps online, I took a flight to Undercity, then wandered around until I found the Zeppelin to Ogrimmar.  My plan was, at least I could maybe find the quests that I had done previously as an Orc Hunter on my other Avatar.

No luck.  These quests are apparently considered too low level for me.  This is when I noticed that each region has a level range located next to the name.  Makes sense I guess, and after heading to a region of an appropriate range, I found… quests!  Something to do.  I was starting to worry that I’d reached a complete dead end of activity and somehow the point of the game simply broke down into nothing after Level 20, but no, there was more to do. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details of my exploits helping a bunch of Goblins.

Instead I’ll make a comment on the recent patch, which seems like a huge mess, quite literally.  I went to play yesterday on my Laptop only to find the game had to patch, then do some sort of crazy reconfigure.  This is mostly in preparation for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Expansion.  The process of getting to the Reconfigure stage took like a half hour or more, and then, it starts downloading a 10GB (13 on my desktop install) Patch.  GIGABYTES.  At the speed it said it was running I was looking at a 12 hour download.  There isn’t a better way to handle this?  Really?

I am a pretty big advocate of digital distribution but one of my hugest pet peeves is being all stoked to play a game, and then, HUGE PATCH.  Team Fortress 2 is pretty bad about this, though Steam is decent about updating itself.