Even before the August in Review article was posted, I knew where our autumnal path would take us initially.
My daughter had been asking the previous week if we could go back and play World of Warcraft. It has probably been a good 18 months since either of us played it with any sort of dedication, and nearly a year since the last subscription lapsed. So, aside from a seven day venture into the game back in March, WoW hasn’t been on the menu for quite a while.
So I said that we could pick the game up again, but I insisted that we have a plan. So while I downloaded the client to her new iMac over the course of several evenings (our internet connection, still slow, is good for about 1GB an hour if nothing else is going on, and the WoW client is now about 22GB), we decided on the parameters for this outing. I especially wanted to focus on things we had not done before.
We decided to do a fresh start on a new server. That was a tough one as, unlike my time in LOTRO, which has been characterized by a series of restarts on new servers, with a new one hitting about every other year, I have played on the Eldre’Thalas in WoW since 2006. We have at least one character in our guild (a Chandigar alt, for those who know him) that hasn’t logged on in 6 years according to the status. The guild itself, Twilight Cadre, is a variation of our TorilMUD guild name, Shades of Twilight, because it was a collection of people from that guild which started it.
My daughter insisted that we roll up pandas. That was fine. I had only done the very briefest bit of the panda starting area way back when Mists of Pandaria launched. And we decided to go horde this time around, which was also good. I have not done any of the horde side of things since before Cataclysm launched. So that left us with pretty much new content to pursue up until level 60.
And we decided to stick to pandas only in our guild, to give them names based on Hawaiian cities, and to call our guild… after much debate… Kamaaina Discount. (WoW won’t allow Kama’aina.)
Finally, I added a goal for myself, which was to figure out pet battles, since that looked like something I might enjoy.
So by this past weekend we were all set to go. We rolled up on the Garona server. My daughter chose shaman as her first class, while I went with a hunter. While I declared the old hunter class, with all its now-removed warts, to be my favorite class, the current hunter class is only moderately interesting to me. I would have rolled a druid if they had been allowed under game lore. They are the most flexible class in game now, and an easy contender for my favorite in the current state of the game. I might have to sneak in a troll druid at some later date.
Lots of words about returning to WoW after the cut.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 