Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The Early Days

We started out playing Horde because the boys really liked Thrall in Warcraft III. Our first character was a female orc shaman on Fenris. We started her in Dec of 2006. My youngest named her Sampeaire (pronounced Sam-pee-AIR). We killed pigs for a while, when we could find them. It was really crowded. Eventually we got our first quest and killed more pigs.

Actually Mommy killed pigs while the boys cheered her on. When we got to the scorpids, the kids were a little scared. After all giant scorpions are much scarier than pigs. But then we figured out that they weren't much tougher than the pigs. Jim thought that the sticky ochre loot was hilarious. Tad was more interested in how the battles were going. Mom kept trying to figure out how to equip the little bits of gray armor that dropped.

Then came the vile familiars. We never died fighting them, but came close a few times. Tad still talks about the vile familiars. Eventually we got out of the starting zone, although we neglected to get our first totem and had to go back later for it. Our first discovery was that monsters in the "real world" hit much harder than in the starting zone. The first level 6 clattering scorpid almost killed us. Anyway we tottered along like that for a while, picking up quests, narrowly avoiding dying, killing things, exploring.

Sadly, the Fenris was really crowded then, and we'd have to wait and wait to play. So the boys and I started another character on the lowest population server we could find — Dath'Remar. We decided to start a Tauren Shaman. Tad named her Theothana. And things when much better this time. We knew how to equip stuff. We knew we should choose leather over cloth, although we didn't figure out about stats for a long time, but that's another story.

We got to Thunder Bluff and got completely lost. Today we love TB because it's so compact, and relatively uncrowded. We never get any lag there.

We made the long run to the crossroads. It took us forever to find Kranal Fiss. We ended up in Ashenvale the first time. But eventually we found him and started the quest chain to get our fire totem.

We ran our first instance, RFC, and picked need for everything, because "greed" is bad and "need" is good. Right? Tad was extremely excited as we went through RFC. Today when we run a instance, we almost always pick "pass".

We thought carefully about our talent points, read all the description thoughtfully, and then picked a few here and a few there.

We got all our totems.
We made a friend, an Aussie Tauren Druid.
We took up skinning and leatherworking.
We tried to spend no money, but to make everything.
We got up to level 36.

And then came the phone call.

I was finishing up some quests on my own while the boys were in school. I think in 1,000 Needles. The phone rings. I check the caller ID. Oh, it's my brother out in sunny California. So I answer it. And keep playing. Eventually I realize that I haven't been following what he's saying. So I apologize and explain that I've been playing a computer game called Warcraft. It's really fun, but kind of addicting.

My brother laughs. And laughs. And laughs. Then he tells me that while we've been talking, he's also been playing Warcraft. He and his boys (older than mine), have a level 50 something Tauren Shaman on Kilrogg.

Well I did the only sensible thing. I started a new character on Kilrogg. Another Tauren, this time a hunter. And I've never looked back. We called her Theothana, too.

Right away, my brother's character sent her a nice set of silk bags and a bit of cash. When our new hunter was ready, he ran her threw Wailing Caverns and all the good loot dropped for us on the first run, including the Vemonstrike bow and the Leggings of the Fang. I skinned up a bunch of perfect deviate scales and made a several deviate scale belts. These I gave to my brother. His boys wanted them to give to some twink friends. He also got ran Theothana through SFK and SM (Graveyard and Library).

So we kept going along. I discovered Thottbot and Allakhazam. I bought Joana's Horde levelling guide.

And then I discovered Big Red Kitty. Thank you, BRK, for finally showing me how to play a hunter. Theo repecced as BM. I'm going to do another post about playing a MM Hunter in the pre-BRK days.

No comments: