RPG Transfer

The last time I made a run at World of Warcraft, I made my wife play along in the interest of creating something else we can do together. We made it to about level 40 and then Lord of the Rings launched. We gave that a try and she went back to WoW. I was hooked and so we went our seperate ways even though still sitting side by side in the computer room. After I switched to playing LotRO in a static group once a week, I lost interest in playing it solo the rest of the week so my thoughts turned back to WoW. We tried to have her now level 80 hunter power my level 40 hunter through some quests but it just was not that much fun, and I was not finding my hunter to be much fun anyway.

Flash forward a few patches and I asked her if she would be interested in giving the refer-a-friend program a shot. She’d have to start over but with triple XP we ought to get up to level 60 pretty fast. She was ok with the idea so we launched our attack, this now being my third account at this point. Blizzard loves people like me.

I turned to the addon community to see if there was something to help guide us somewhat as we do tend to wander off at times and lose track of where we are in the quest lines. I found one called TourGuide which allowed me to drop in Jame’s guides for the appropriate level. This turned out to be crucial to our enjoyment as we quickly outleveled every area before we finished the quests available.

I created a Warlock and she a Priest. Two classes neither of us had much experience with. Two months later we hit level 60 and got our flying mounts in Outland. We struggled with talents as well as glyphs. People say the game got easier, but there is still a lot of complication available in my opinion. If you don’t bother to hit the web to look everything up, you mostly guess your way through. Do I want this? Is this good or bad? Luckily most everything can be changed if you don’t like it so that helps.

I’ve got a bunch of gray Warlock quests at this point, not sure if they are worth doing. We tried to do one of her Priest quests but the dragon we had to kill was at the bottom of a very cool dungeon filled with creatures hell-bent on wiping us out. So now we are popping around in Outland and boy do having flying mounts help. No longer do we have to fight our way into the middle of a camp to get at the boss, now we can fly in and drop down on top of it.

Another issue that would normally come up is money, or lack of it. This was not a problem for us, as my wife just sent us gold from her level 80 whenever we needed. Otherwise, even just buying skills would have been impossible. I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through without the gold being handed to you.

Before hitting 61, we made sure to give away my bonus levels to a low level Druid she had on her account – mostly so she can watch him dance in cheetah form. She loves that. The leveling has slowed down dramatically, but it was not the brick wall I was expecting. Also, is there any cool looking cloth armor? I still look as silly at level 62 as I did at level 2. I must say though, Warlock is a very fascinating class. There are so many ways to play it and at times I feel extremely powerful. We take on groups of mobs our level with ease. I try to keep a soulstone on her all the time as she does tend to generate a lot of aggro now and then.

I’m going to have to buy Wrath at some point, but I’m waiting until something happens that makes me know why I need it. So far, I’ve had no need for any part of it.

To sum this whole thing up, I’ve kind of redicovered the joy of MMOs through my wife’s eyes. We are just doing what feels fun to us, not worrying about the perfect talent tree or which piece of armor is a “must-have”. Just plain old having fun, goofing off, and seeing what’s down those stairs. It has revived me from my MMO funk. You may have noticed a lack of posts from me lately (even less than normal) and now you know why. I’ve been playing a video game and having fun.

- Ethic