What a long strange trip it's been: World of Warcraft
By Renahzor 19 Comments
No, unfortunately I did not just get my violet drake, I'm not that dedicated anymore and still have a lot of the seasonal events to complete.
I did, however, recently re-activate my account because my GF was wanting to give it a shot. After a 9 month hiatus, I started reminiscing about why the game held such appeal to me for such a long time. So, here's my abbreviated, long strange trip highlights.
In December of 2004, a good friend gave me a call, and told me to go pickup WoW, as we had been playing Diablo 2 off and on for quite a few months prior. After some debate (I played UO and everquest and never really got into them), I gave in and thus began my multi-year journey into the World of Warcraft. After several max level characters, hundreds of hours of play, a few headaches, and probably a few too many extra late nights, I always look back fondly on WoW and consider it one of my favorite games. After just over 5 years now, I can still fire up the game and have a couple hours of enjoyment.
And it all started back in 2004, wandering through the expansive and new areas, completing some not-too-original quests, and BSing with a friend about random
After finally hitting level 60, a few months of messing around in PvP, and gearing up in dire maul, patch 1.7 hit and allowed our smaller guild to get into ZG, a 20 man raid zone. For me, this is where the game came alive. There was no more boring questing, no more pvp grind, no more 5 man stuff that was now far too easy for us. Our guild used it as a stepping stone into 40 man content, and finally started killing the bigger raid bosses in the game. We got through ZG, MC, Onyxia, BWL, and finally hit a wall late in AQ which stopped our guild, the Twin Emperors. After a month of grinding for poison resist gear and finally dropping Huhuran, our progression in vanilla wow was halted as announcements of TBC hit. It is this time frame that hold some of my fondest memories of the game. Many of our guild mates were real life friends, and family of members were invited along. The content was not difficult really, just required a bit of coordination and a little teamwork, nothing like Naxxramas, or the TBC raids to come. We never killed anything first, always months behind, but it didn't matter. We had fun.
The Expansions basically ended our "Hardcore" raiding mentality. The Gruul encounter we hit very early on in TBC, and it was still far far over tuned for a guild like ours. For the entire month after we got to Gruul, only a couple dozen guilds world wide had killed him. By the time they re-tuned the encounter the damage had been done. We were not "good enough" to raid at that level. As such, I saw SSC and The Eye at a pretty normal pace, but only saw MT, BT, and Sunwell very late in the expansion, and not all of the content. I was a little disheartened, but Wrath of the Lich King allowed us to go to Naxx and see the fights newly tuned, which was nice. I took my longest break right after naxx 25, having just come back a couple weeks ago. I enjoy the new changes, being much more of a casual player now the way they have added some new features has really allowed me to play for just an horu or two and get some enjoyment out of the game. I've seen everything in wow up to now, excluding ICC, and had a good time doing it. Maybe some Dungeon reviews are in order? Or maybe some short reviews on the new systems in place for the casual grumpy old player like myself. Only time will tell!
Thanks for reading through my reminiscing.
19 Comments