WoW: It’ll Be….Just Like Starting Over

Well, the poll I posted tells me that enough people are interested in me nattering about WoW and most people don’t care as long as I cut tag them, so I’m going to forgo a special filter. I hate making locked posts anyway, unless it’s really something I want to keep to a restricted audience.

So, starting out, we’ll talk about what my low-level alt is doing….

A couple of months ago, catalana mentioned that she had succumbed to the siren call of World of Warcraft. Since we had been wanting to find a way to spend a bit of time together, I suggested that we should roll a couple of characters and play them as a duo. That way we could choose classes to complement one another, and since we’d only play those characters when we were together, they’d stay the same level. (The hardest thing to coordinate playing with friends is when the friends are vastly different levels to each other.)

Knowing that we’d always have a partner in crime, we decided to play a couple of classes that were more challenging to solo and mitigate the weaknesses of each. (I contend that Hunters and Warlocks are relatively easy to solo, in no small part because of their pets. Druids, Paladins, Rogues and Mages are reasonably easy, though they have some challenges here and there that can be frustrating. I know little to nothing about Shamans, a class th at has yet to really interest me. And that leaves us with…) After some discussion, we decided on a Warrior+Priest combo. catalana would handle the bash, and I would take care of the Flash….heals that is.

And thus it came to be that Kithra, the gnomish warrior with an obsession for shiny objects, and Periglorion, her dwarven priest companion, debuted in the snow-capped peaks of Anvilmar. On our first night playing, we didn’t have voice chat set up, but we still managed to rock the newbie zone in quick order, finishing up all of Anvilmar and most of Kharanos before calling it a night, having advanced all the way to level eight. The entire time, we only had one fatal encounter, when we pulled just a few too many of the lepers outside of Gnomeregan and I couldn’t quite heal through it.

Week two was celebrated by the establishment of a Ventrillo client on catalana‘s end, allowing us to actually talk to each other while we quested. This made for a much more enjoyable time, not to mention making it easier to coordinate. We quickly wrapped up the last of the Dun Morogh quests and made our way down in the lush green valley that is Loch Modan. And it was here that I remembered something that I had forgotten, in the many months since I last quested here.

Loch Modan sucks. I mean, seriously. We spent most of the evening running around pestering the wildlife so we could make sausages, interspersed with making deliveries for people back to Ironforge and down to Stormwind, or ransacking the Loch Modan Sanctuary for Deaf Kobolds (No? Ok, you can explain to me how we killed over a hundred of those little buggers and only got 5 ears between us.) As a final cap o the evening, we found ourselves rather put upon by the trolls in the southern part of the zone, who were just a bit bigger than we were. (Cue Kithra: “There are *bushes* here bigger than I am.”) Still, we managed to end up the night at level 12, so that wasn’t really a bad night’s work.

Week three, we decided that enough of this really was enough. We decided to abandon Loch Modan, pretty as it may be, and made our way down to Stormwind. We did a few of the various top-end Elwynn Forest quests for some easy xp, and then made our way over to Westfall.

Westfall is a zone that many experienced players would rather gouge their eyes out than go through again, but in all honesty, of the four 10-20 zones, it’s second only to Bloodmyst Isle. There’s a lot of quests densely packed, an interesting storyline to follow, and an instance to run at the end of it. We ran around bounding on Defias Brotherhood goons and gnolls and various critters, collected a few recipes, and finished the night at level 16. catalana jokingly noted that our progression curve was worrisome — 8 levels, then 4, then 2, indicating a long haul ahead of us if the trend continued. But that’s typical of the newbie areas in any game — the first few levels are really just to get you situated. In the case of WoW, the game doesn’t *really* start until level 20, IMO.

¹

Week four, we met again and pretty much wrapped up the rest of the Westfall quests. There was one remaining, which we found ourselves unable to do because a level 30 was dragging a level 13 around, killing all his mobs for him. Which was nice of him and all, but he killed them so quickly that we couldn’t manage to get any for ourselves. We did, however, manage to waylay the Defias Messenger and do the escort quest that leads up to the Deadmines, which would come in handy later. Giving up on the idea of finishing the patrol quest, we headed back to town to round up the other Deadmines quests, then hit up the auction houses and bank. Just as we were coming out of the auction house, we saw a mage with a portal to Shattrath City open, and I bribed him to let us go through it.

Shattrath City is the place to have your hearthstone set. (The hearthstone is a once and hour trinket that will teleport you from wherever you are in the game to wherever it’s been tuned for.) The reason for this is simple — Shattrath has portals in the centre of the city that will take you directly to any of the four capital cities on Azeroth. This makes travel exceptionally easy. The purist would say too easily, but I’m not a purist. We made a new home on the Scryer’s Tier, on the premise that falling to our deaths from Aldor Rise wasn’t really something we wanted to make a habit of, and then popped over to the Exodar so that Kithra could learn jewelcrafting. (The JC profession was added in the expansion, and for some reason can only be trained in that one place. Kinda annoying, really, but that’s the way it is.) I shuffled some money from my main over to both of us so we could spend some time over the following week leveling up our tradeskills — while we’ll only quest together, we both agree that sitting around doing tailoring and jewelcrafting when we could be out questing wasn’t a good use of our scant time together. We finished the night at 16.

And finally, this last Friday (which brings our tale current), we went back to wrap up that last Defias quest, and then debated if we wanted to try and run Deadmines the proper way, or if we wanted to take the shortcut. We decided on the shortcut, and one of our guildmates went through with his level 70 paladin and did all the heavy lifting, leaving us with a fair amount of stuff to cart off, about a levels worth of XP, and several quests knocked out. We probably won’t be able to take this shortcut for *every* instance, but this particular night, we really just wanted to knock it off the list and move on. We then went over to the Redridge Mountains and picked up the huge number of quests over there.

Up to this point, we had been questing in “safe” areas, where, despite being on a PVP server, the opposing faction couldn’t really touch us. Lakeshire and its surroundings are the first contested lands you’ll venture into over in the Human areas, but we didn’t actually run into a single Horde player that night. We did get our posteriors handed to us by any number of NPC orcs, though, mostly due to a bad pull wiping us, and then having respawns jumping us as we tried to rez. We finally made our way out, *with* the quest complete, and turned it in, ending the night at level 20. Over the weekend, we took advantage of our new lofty level to skill up our tradeskills to 225, which is as high as they can be pushed until we hit level 35, which I wager will take at least a few weeks of one-night-a-week play.

So that’s the adventures of Kithra and Periglorion, so far. I’m having a grand time back in the leveling game, and I now look forward to Friday for more than just the start of the weekend.

1. A slight digression…it’s been pointed out before, but the Humans really get shafted on the lore surrounding their newbie area. The night elves have a storyline about their mystic past, and about how they have lost and hope to regain their immortality.. The dwarves are delving into the clues about the creation of their race. The gnomes have their lost city, overrun by troggs and irradiated by a desperate but failed defense. Even the Draenei, johnny come lately to the party, have their crashed spaceship and Battlestar Galactica-ish flight from the blood elves and the Burning Legion on Draenor. The humans have the Defias Brotherhood — a bunch of disgruntled union workers upset because they got stiffed on a construction bill. Seems very….mundane, compared to the others.  ↩