The WoW Experience Ft. Jamie Part 1

So begins my multi-part series (?) on the times I had playing WoW. I honestly have no idea if anyone will read these or find them interesting, but I think it will be fun for me to write, and maybe it will give people that played WoW (even if they never played with me) some fond memories. I think I will be speeding through this first part a bit, since it was longest ago (and least documented by screenshots), but it has some important set-ups for later on.

So anyway, I'll just jump right in. It begins waaay back, I BELIEVE in 2004, in WoW's first stress test. I know the game came out in 2004, so it was probably early to mid-way through that year. It was basically just a weekend of not doing very much, as there were a lot of people trying to play, in order to test the servers. I think I also played in another stress test, and then also in the open beta, where I created a human warlock.

I don't remember too much from any of those, but the one thing I do remember, being a huge fan of WarCraft 3, was how awesome it was to be IN the world that I'd spent so much time looking down upon. Seeing some of the characters and locations from the older WC games was almost surreal, especially when I went though the area from that cutscene in WC3 when Arthas kills his father. That was one of those moments from the game that I'll never forget.

So then in November of 2004, the game launched! And I got the Collector's Edition, OBVIOUSLY. I still love those pets that came with it, I think they're pretty rare nowadays. I actually have a funny story about one of them, but that will come later (well it's funny to me anyways..). Anyway, when I started playing I decided to re-make my female human warlock from beta, cause warlocks looked friggin' sweet of course, and the human females looked hot back then. I played on the Eonar server, as it was the one that was recommended to me by the game.

I don't remember too much from those days besides spending a LOT of time in Westfall. I remember doing Deadmines a couple of times, and getting really excited when I got a blue (rare) cloth chestpiece. Then it turned out to not be a robe, and excitement turned to disappointment. I mean honestly spellcasters just look ridiculous without robes. BUT of course I would later learn that all characters would look terrible until you got to level 60 and started collecting sets. Blah. Wonder if that's still true these days...

Anyways, I got my first warlock to about level 20, and then one of my best friends from school, Akshay, started playing. So I decided to take the opportunity to re-roll and try something different - I switched to horde and made a female undead rogue. I think Akshay made an undead priest for his first character...which ended up working pretty well. I would kinda tank stuff from melee range and he would damage from a distance and heal me. Fun times were had!

Somewhere along the way, we ran into a friendly undead warrior called Savoirfaire (Sav for short), and we became buddies with him. He actually ended up getting us invited to his guild, The Sacred Brotherhood. So this was my first guild, but since Akshay and I were only level 20-30, we couldn't really contribute much. It was a small guild but the guys in it were cool and offered help whenever we needed it, and it was nice to have other people to chat with.

Then, I'm not exactly sure what happened next, but I think Akshay and I stopped playing for a while. Maybe we got too busy with school, or stopped playing over summer...can't remember exactly, but it was something like that. Anyway, eventually we decided to play again, but we wanted to start fresh. So this time Akshay made a tauren druid, and I made an undead warlock called Frostt (cause Frost was taken). I think Akshay brought his guy over to the undead lands so we could level together, and away we went.

So things were going pretty well, but I think around the time we got to level 30 or 40, we decided that it would be cool to have a guild again. By this time The Sacred Brotherhood had died (RIP), so we weren't left with too many options. Then we got the idea to try contacting Savoirfaire to see if he remembered us. It turned out that he did, and he ended up getting us into his new guild, a really big guild called Massacre.

However, it turned out that Massacre was having some problems, and the leaders decided to disband it and make a new guild called Mass Anarchy. Luckily, I got invited to the new guild, but I think that it was around this time that Akshay decided to stop playing. It might have been because we were starting University that year, I can't remember for sure...but I decided to keep playing anyway.

At this point I was around level 45 or so, while most of the rest of the guild was level 60. So again, there wasn't too much I could contribute, so I just tried to focus on leveling up. I remember once period of time (it might have actually happened earlier on, not 100% sure) that I spent at least a few full levels killing only black dragon whelps in the Badlands. The reason for this was they dropped a dragon whelp mini-pet that I wanted, but it was an extremely low drop-rate. So I would spend hours each day following the same respawn pattern, killing baby dragons. When I did finally get the pet, again I had gained I think at least three levels, when each kill only gave me a tiny sliver of my exp bar. DEDICATION, MY FRIENDS.

So anyway, along with leveling, this was around that time that I started to really get into exploring the world, too. Later on I would get into much higher-level exploring, but at this time it consisted of running around new areas trying not to get killed by the massive monsters that I found. That was often a fruitless mission, but it was still a lot of fun going around seeing new places and things.

You can imagine a Neo 'whoa' here.

So, I just went along my way, slowly leveling up and seeing all the sights. At this point, I piped up in guild chat at some points, but mostly kept to myself. As in real life, it took me a while to warm up to my guild mates and get comfortable with them, I suppose.

Below is a pretty unrelated screenshot, but I really like it. To those that won't know what's going on, Blizzard obviously made graphical improvements over the life of the game, and one of the first was called 'death effect'. This added a cool ethereal effect to the screen when you were dead. Cool I guess? The only problem was when you died in Tanaris, a desert area covered in white sand. Observe:

I feel like someone didn't think this through.

Anyway, once I got up around level 50, I was high enough to start to doing some instances with the level 60s. And I started making some friends in the guild too! In fact in the screenshot below are 4 people that I talked to quite a bit.

Killin' internet dragons with my bros (and sis). Aw yee.

I think now would be a good point to give a shoutout to two of the best friends I made in Mass Anarchy (and WoW altogether), Stormchild and Ashok. These two guys stuck with me all the way till I quit, and even beyond then. True bros. Some of the other best friends I had in Mass Anarchy were Zulin, Nerey, Liberto, Scorpius, Jadhug, Vashty, Ciaobella, Schlachter, Arachne, Everterce, Saitin, Aldamir, and Brukmoon. I know there is a 99% chance none of them will ever read this, but...I remember them!

So of course, I kept leveling, and kept exploring, The latter was made easier once I got the Eye of Kilrogg spell, which sent out an invisible little eyeball that I could use to scout around. When Blizzard released the World Dragons, they were in for a serious eyeballing.

Nightmare from the Emerald Dream? Well there's your problem.

Then, as I started getting more friends in the guild, I was able to get some help with group quests and challenges, like my special warlock quests. One of the more memorable ones was the quest to get the spell to summon an infernal (a big fiery demon). My buddy Saitin helped me with this one, which I think is better explained with the picture than words.

Well...that happened.

So, between fun diversions like that, I kept grinding and grinding my way towards level 60. My main goal was to be able to go on the 40-man raid into Molten Core, and I was really looking forward to it. Eventually, I was able to go on my first raid - though just a 15-man one. However I was happy to get into any dungeon group that I could, to start gearing up to be able to jump into MC.

UBRS. It was a big deal to a greenhorn like me!

Then, eventually, after a loooong long time, many dungeon runs, quests, and grinding sessions, I finally hit level 60.

18 days, 14 hours. I don't know why but I am innately painfully slow at leveling.

After I hit level 60, I had lots of things to do. Gear up for raids, see all the highest level areas of the game. But the first thing I wanted to do was complete the quest to get my Dreadsteed. If you're unfamiliar, the Dreadsteed is a warlock-only epic (fast!) mount that looks like a really badass demonic horse. The quest to get one took a lot of time, and quite a lot of money, but luckily I knew about it beforehand, and had been saving up. The final part of the quest required me to enter a 5-man dungeon and kill a special boss. Below is one of my favourite screenshots ever, though I'm not really sure why. I guess it's cause I had some of my best friends helping me out with the quest, when they had pretty much nothing to gain there for themselves. Again, true bros.

Man I was so excited. It's hard to explain how long I'd been waiting for that Dreadsteed.

So after this point, I started going on more raids, and even did a bit of PvP with the guild, though that was never my strong suit. Nothing of terrible note happened during this time, but I was having a lot of fun after finally reaching max level. Unfortunately though, the good times would briefly come to a halt.

See, the reason that Massacre was reformed into Mass Anarchy way back was because they could never get a good organized group to raid MC. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the guild's leadership, the problem persisted in Mass Anarchy. We were able to run the 20-man dungeon, Zul Gurub, but could never get a consistent enough group to do MC. So, eventually, people got tired of that stagnation, and the guild collapsed. What would I do now?

Well, I think this is a good point to end part 1. In the next installment, we'll find out where I went next, and if I was ever able to get into the glorious instance of Molten Core. Stay tuned!