The Start

So, I play WoW. There, it's out. By day, I wear a suit and make decisions affecting the academic futures of hundreds of college students, but by night I log in and...well, kill stuff. There's more to it than that, of course, but "I kill stuff" is pretty much the core.

I've been playing for some time. No, I'm not quite nerdy enough to be able to claim to have played since Beta...did they actually HAVE a Beta?...but I started my life on Shadow Council, one of the older servers on the game, back when there were very few 60's around. I remember, in fact, the first time I saw a 60...the guild was getting ready to run Wailing Caverns, and a 60 orc shaman came running past us. We all were speechlessly in awe.

Anyway, this blog is here for a couple of reasons. First, I'm addicted to creative writing, and this is certainly going to be creative. Second, there were a lot of things I and we decided on just...well, because...and I'm wanting to capture that for anybody else who's curious.

First decision...Horde or Alliance? At the time, I had no idea what that meant. I suspect few really do at first. The group I was in, that ended up being the mighty Chaotic Onslaught guild, had been playing D&D via e-mail and tabletop for quite a long time, and so we wanted an RP experience yet we didn't want to be like everybody else, plus there were probably other reasons that I really can't remember now, but we ended up a group of orcs and trolls in Durotar. I ended up as the group's hunter because of how much I liked the ranger class in...that other game. I'd just had a really bad series of experiences at tabletop gaming, and was rather fed up with the cheesiness some people bring to the rolling of the d20's, so in a fit of...um, something...I named my orc hunter Malqueso, which is sort of Spanishy for "bad cheese." It's gotten me giggles ever since, so it really was a brilliant move.

Speaking of brilliant moves, I was really proud of my first pet, a boar. Had no idea how the pet skills worked, or even that there WERE type-specific skills for pets, or that boars made particularly good tanking pets. I was really amused by the fact that I could rename my pet, and then disappointed when I found out I couldn't rename it again. As for combat, all I really knew was that holding the Ctrl key and pressing 1 made the boar attack whatever I was attacking, and then I could shoot it without it coming after me for a while, and that was a Good thing. Then the group...we weren't a guild yet, because 10 gold was an awful lot of money...got together once in Razor Hill...you know, that little outpost in the center of Durotar that's needed a flight path forever and a day. The rather short conversation went something like this: "Dude, you have a pig." Hmm...out went the pig, to be replaced by a scorpid named Fluffy.

Somebody...don't remember who, might've been the manual...introduced me to something called professions. What would Malqueso do, I pondered. At the time, I really didn't know that Blizz had designed the professions choices for hunters particularly poorly and made nearly a set requirement that hunters go engineering. Instead, engineering seemed...gimmicky. And useless. But leatherworking meant he could make his own armor, which seemed a grand idea at the time (remember, I hadn't discovered the Auction House yet either, nor did I know what a Raid was or that the armor there would make anything a LW could make seem silly). Of course, a LW without skinning was as useless as a hunter without arrows...more on that later...so, my choices were made, and off I went for several months of srs adventuring, learning awesome acronyms like WC (Wailing Caverns), SM (Scarlet Monastery, not that other one), and ST (The Temple of Atal'Hakkar...didn't say they all made sense).

Incidentally, Malqueso is still a skinner/leatherworker to this day. I wanted, later, to switch him to engineering, but by that point I'd already gotten several epic LW patterns that I just didn't want to give up. Plus, he had drums, which were the coolest thing Blizz ever gave leatherworkers (at least till they nerfed them).

Months and months of play later, well after BC had come out, I realized all the other character slots could be put to good use. Thus began my altoholism.