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!
