A New Beginning

Fresh from leaving Aion, I was eager to revisit an old favorite MMO haunt: World of Warcraft (1 Billion People Can't be Wrong!). I'd played the game when it was first released for a long while and left long before the Wrath of the Lich King was released.

Now many things would be fresh, exciting, and new. Best of all, friends of mine were playing and that, more than anything, will keep me in a game long after I've otherwise grown bored with it (I'm talkin' about YOU, City of Heroes!).

So this past week I created a gnome mage named Strev in the hopes of someday being big enough to run around with a good friend on the Whisperwind server. He's level 39, so I figured it'd take me a month or two to get up to speed. The big pain in WoW when it comes to leveling isn't the challenge the critters present (at least at lower levels), but rather the time it takes to run from point a to point b. Everything is kind of spread out, so questing, which generally gives decent xp, eats up a lot of time just jogging hither and yon.

While researching a good specialization for leveling, I discovered a leveling add-on. Basically, it's a third party interface (Blizzard -loves- these and made it easy for developers to hook into their program) that gives step by step recommendations for the order to do quests in the different zones for level ranges to optimize the time spent running around like an idiot. I'd be doing the quests anyway, but this made it a bit happier. The fact it ALSO puts an obvious arrow on screen pointing you towards your next target, along with distance in yards and estimated time of arrival based on your current speed is just gravy.

Over the years I've leveled an army of alts in the game, so I had a base familiarity with all of the starting zones, admittedly the human area much more so than the dwarven/gnomish one, but I dove into the game with more than a passing clue on how to get things done.

Upon reaching level 10, it was time to decide the 'career path' for my aspiring half-pint wizard. The forums recommended frost (control) over fire (raw damage) and arcane (wtf--weaksauce), so after a bit more reading, I agreed and dropped my first point into the frost tree. You can 'respec' when you feel like it by spending gold, so many people use frost to level up, then respec into different builds in endgame depending on how they prefer killing time: raiding or PvP primarily. Frost works on the general principal of 'slow it down while you nuke it into oblivion and kite as needed'.

Following the guides (and my heart when I felt like it), I breezed through the next few levels, clearing out swaths of content in 4 zones, ending at level 20 last night. My final act before teleporting 'home' and logging out was purchasing my first "horse": a mechanical ostrich that belches smoke from its tail feathers. This pleases me.