Stories of WoW

Computer problems and lack of time have delayed this post for a while, but rest assured: the cows are doing their thing and rocking Azeroth.

We’re going to be dungeon-leveling, so the first and foremost goal was hitting level 15. But our hunter was late, so me and Truffles starting playing the “Make Lurky dance” game.

We waited. Nothing.

Truffles tried to dance with him, maybe he gets the hint.

Nothing.

She tried intimidation.

It didn’t look impressed.

We both tried to dance… how can you not love two sexy cows?

Didn’t work.

We gave up, got our tardy hunter and went our merry way, slaughtering the fauna of the Barrens and wondering what the hell were the developers thinking when they created the damn quests. Luckily, we’re three terror machines so the only problem we had was boredom and trying to keep track of what everyone needed. (Seriously, did they really have to ask us to bring 3 pieces of each mob on the map?)

(Of course, when Lucky finally decided to dance, I missed the screenshot.)

After the most boring walk in history, escorting a slow-ass elf to Ratchet, we hit 15 and went headfirst into RFC. Taragaman was vanquished and there was much rejoicing. We even convinced a pug to pose for our kill shot.

(Click for bigger version)

A couple of dungeon runs and a handful of quests do wonders, so before long we were hitting more milestones.

Sadly, it was getting late for our little cows, so we just posed for the camera, waved and went to sleep.

P.S. This is what happens when someone a 10-year old* rolls a tauren.

Truffles has a /moo macro. I think she tried to moo bosses to death a few times.
*We could try explaining to people that we’re not actually 10, but they wouldn’t believe us.

P.P.S. My convincing worked, so from now on the boyfriend is in charge with making our boss kills pretty. He refused to play with us, so at least he can make himself useful outside the game.

What noun, what recruiting, what bloggers? Well, Tam from Righteous Orbs had this idea: since we’re all WoW bloggers (or readers)… why don’t we actually play WoW together? Now we can, in <Single Abstract Noun>. Because of that small problem of oceans between continents and two different WoW clients, there’s actually two guilds: one on Argent Dawn-EU, made by Tam, and one on Argent Dawn-US, made by MissMedicina. The EU version already has a handful of players and it seems like they had fun last night. I could only pop by really really fast on a raid break, then I had to run just as fast when Vent started going “Jeeeen where are you?”.

My new baby is Avilion, a blood elf warlock who managed to hit level 2 (whoa) this morning before work. I wanted to roll a healer, but I’ve already have one of each class at various levels… and my other warlock was abandoned at 20, so I figured one more try can’t hurt.

I most likely won’t have time to play in the next few weeks (work crits me for 10k), but yay, sounds like fun. And I have the say the name is BRILLIANT. Especially considering my main’s guild name is also a single abstract noun… and so was my previous guild’s…

I don’t care much about the Lunar Festival (visited all the elders once, never again!), but Khi had a good idea: we bloggers can act like elders for a few days and bestow our knowledge on the noobs. (I use noob as an endearing term, not as in “OMFG u noob GTFO”).

My first brilliant idea was to write about general stuff for new players, but that’s been done already and I don’t think I have anything particularly interesting to say. I died a lot in my low levels, so I’m probably not the best example.

Then I wanted to write about acronyms… but it was pointed out to me that it’s been done, and much better than I could ever manage. See wowwiki and this WoW forums thread for a long, long list.

So I settled for a specific topic of the starter experience: money. Unless you’ve got a friend to help you out, you’ll soon realize that money is important, especially when you don’t have it.

Making money from drops/quest rewards
A few basics about item quality or color:
- grey items (poor quality) are mostly useless and can/should be sold to vendors. If you’re low-level (under level 10, let’s say), equip any grey item that’s better than what you’re currently wearing.
- white (common quality) items are either used in professions or can be worn/equipped at low levels. If you’re low level, use white items, they’ll generally be better than greys. Don’t buy white items from armor vendors, they’re not worth it.
- green items (uncommon quality) are usually useful for something; green armor has stats, for example. You’ll find them as mob drops or quest rewards.
- blue items (rare quality) are better than greens and they’re generally your best option gear-wise until you get high in level.
- purple items (epic quality) are rare and very good; most of them drop in level 60, 70 or 80 heroics and raids, and a select few are world drops (they can drop from any mob, anywhere).

You can read all about it in way, way more detail here.

Anyway, we’re not talking about gear, we’re talking about money. The golden rule is: Never throw anything away. Ever. Seriously. Sell everything you get, even grey items, every spider leg and bear bone.

In order to do that… you need to use golden rule 2: Get bigger bags.

Sadly, this won’t be very easy as a low-level, because even the cheapest vendor-sold bags have a quite steep price. I would suggest to gather the cloth that drops (linen, wool, silk etc) then find a tailor to craft bags for you. They won’t be very big to start with, but any addition to the 16-slot backpack is good. Also check quests: some of them reward bags – Digging Through the Ooze for example.

Continue reading Elder Jen’s tips for funding your leveling experience

This post has been in my head for over a year and was supposed to be called “Why I love my guild”. Everytime I decided to write it, some sort of drama would happen and make me not love my guild anymore. So it’s not going to be about a particular guild; I don’t get so attached anymore. Instead it will be about what I like most about WoW: the social aspect.

The background
Two or so years ago, my then-friend, current boyfriend gave me WoW Vanilla and told me to try it out. The sales pitch? “It’s like Yahoo Messenger with characters.” I gave in and installed it.

My first character

The first months sucked. I didn’t know anything, I was utterly lost and I hated the game. I was too scared to join a group, I only talked to the two people I knew in real life and who were helping me level, I was basically playing an RPG not an MMO. However, I slowly started to like it… and at level 47 I joined my boyfriend’s guild. I spent a month not saying one word in guild chat – they were raiders and I was a total noob; I’m ok with being dumb, but I don’t like strangers knowing it, so I kept to myself.

Level 70 hit, and after the high of getting my first max-level char I got to an all-time low: now what? I had only the vaguest idea about gear, no clue about enchants and gems, never thought of finding a blog for advice, and my DPS was horrible (not that I had Recount or anything). Then a kind soul stepped in, dragged me to Shattrath, hunted down enchanters and jewelcrafters and got me all set up. He was a tank and not known for being very friendly, but without him I’d have been absolutely dead. Despite being bad at a class that was already bad, my guild let me raid, boosted my ass in Kara, taught me what raiding was about – and I had a blast in the process.

Naked party before a SSC run

We raided T5 for a few good months… then drama ensued. I came home from vacation to half a guild gone and no chance of getting my Hand of Ad’al (I’m still bitter about that). After that split the guild wasn’t the same, but I stuck it out because most of the people were nice – some I could call friends. Slowly but surely, people started leaving; the management of the guild changed; I was an officer for a short time and I had the ugliest arguments in /o; it got to the point where I got angry even seeing certain people log in, so I left. A few social guilds later, I got back to raiding in the guild I’m in today… ironically (or fittingly?) created by a member of my first guild during one of the splits.

Despite all the drama, I never left the game and never considered a server change. It’s just pixels, but there’s real people behind those pixels, and too many of them are on my beloved Alonsus.

The now
One of the reasons I’ve always loved the internet was people. You can have good friends from your hometown and be perfectly happy, but I discovered that having friends with a different view on life is much more interesting. There’s the downside of not being able to go out with them every day… but I love being given reasons to travel.

So the best part of WoW, for me, is being part of an international guild (and server). I couldn’t imagine playing on a same-nationality server. My guildies and WoW friends come from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Korea, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Germany, Ukraine – almost every country in Europe and some beyond.

I’m the tree on the right

For a lover of travel and different cultures this is a small paradise, especially when I can find someone who allows me to pick their brain about cultural difference and languages. I love my Vent with a dozen different accents, I love listening to the Scottish guy when he – rarely – speaks, I practice my British English and I can actually understand most of it now, I spoke Spanish with the rare Madrid girl who rolled on our server, I got used to hearing Romanian accents, I had raid leaders from at least 5 different countries. I learned 2 sentences in Welsh which I promptly forgot, I learned that “hello” in Lithuanian sounds very dirty in Romanian, I learned to swear in Finnish, I replaced my “fucking” with “bloody” (but I still hate “mate” or – ew – “m8″ with a passion), I learned where some countries were on the map.

And I met the people behind the screen – a day in London, running after the Eurostar on the way back, a week in the Netherlands and Belgium, a couple of hours in the mall down the street, and a long weekend in Ireland the coming April. Everyone was nice, everyone had social skills, I drank lots of international beer and had a blast.

My friends probably don’t want their faces all over the internet, so here’s me and a random kitty from Amsterdam

I lost touch with some people, I kept in touch with others. The friend in Netherlands calls me while getting drunk with one of our Russian ex-guildies; I call a friend to Ireland to tell her my net is down and I can’t raid, we rant online about games and boyfriends and clothes and jobs; the friend in Portugal spends 2 hours with me while I’m trying to fix my computer; I bitch at the Korean living in London about PuGs, guilds and real life. Sometimes I see my boyfriend in Dalaran more than in real life, because a log on screen takes 1 minute and getting to his place takes 45. We can make WoW jokes about real things and laugh our asses off – we raid the fridge or quest to the supermarket or learn new cooking recipes, he says the stupid “grats” joke to the microwave and I ignore it for the tenth time.

Boosting my boyfriend’s newly dinged shaman. Draenei power!

Even the bad is useful. I learned that adults can act like children, and that teens can be very mature. The biggest asses I met in-game was in their late 20s, some of the best raid leaders I had weren’t even 20 yet. I saw people quitting guilds over stupid reasons, arguments about purple pixels and people forgetting some might have real lives. Lessons in human nature, let’s call them. Pugging taught me patience, expecting the worst and enjoying pleasant surprises and fun with total strangers.

The future
It’s easy to say that World of Warcraft or the internet, in general, kills social interaction. Wrong. They only kill social interaction if you let them. I would argue that WoW is actually a great way of meeting new people. Why would it be any different than getting to know someone through your local knitting club or through a penpal network?

So thank you to all my WoW friends – for drunken nights on Vent, for first kills, for boosting my alts, for traveling, for showing and telling me about your countries, for stealthing in front when you know I’ll follow and ninja pull on my healer, for knowing that I lose focus and need to be smacked across the head, for helping me with professions, gear, specs, glyphs and weird achievements, for analyzing grammar and vocabulary in dozens of different languages, for supermarket mammoths, for endless summons when I get lost and for letting me bitch at the world. See you tonight in game.

Cows are not everything I leveled lately. Thanks to Love is in the Air, Khrista got a bunch of free levels (well, I paid good gold for the bracelets, actually). Level 40 was in sight – epic mount, dual spec, all the goodies!

I went a-pugging again. I ran SM Cathedral over and over and over (boring, but lots of XP and flowers to pick). Most groups were fine, except for when I ran into a bunch of idiots on my realm. I don’t care to remember the details, but it ended with me leaving and an exchange of whispers and ignores.

Uldaman, on the other hand, was suprisingly easy. I was dreading it a bit, since it’s a dungeon I haven’t run very much on any char, and I manage to get lost even with maps. To my surprise, I got a group of nice, talkative people, who knew the way, didn’t mind the occasional wipes (they even said “It happens, don’t worry”… but they didn’t know we wiped because I was taking screenshots instead of healing, oops) and made the whole experience very enjoyable.

Bouncy tank!

Things seem to have changed since the last alts I leveled in LFG – there’s way more characters with BoA and most players seem to know what they’re doing. I can only be happy about that.

Totally slacking

In the end, all was well. We had…
- the ding…

- …the dual-spec…

- …and the tiger. A white tiger this time, not the dirty pink one in the screenie.

I had a moment of panic at level 39-40, because my only choices were SM Cathedral (/yawn), Uldaman (not hoping I’ll get as lucky the second time) and Maraudon (I’m not touching that place with a long pole), but now I got ZF in the Dungeon Finder, so yay!

Next up, Khrista learn to shadow and hopefully gets to level 50. On my brand new computer I built myself and almost broke but which should be working in a few days OMGPRETTYPIXELS.