Finally at last after a few days of being unable to write for personal reasons, I have part two of my first experiences playing an MMORPG seriously. If interested part one can be found here. With that said and without further ado, here's part two.
As World of Warcraft was my first MMORPG there were a lot of things that I now know are pretty standard fare for MMORPGs that I didn't know at the time, such as large captial cities where players could socialize at, and do other things that they wouldn't find in other places. In World of Warcraft's case, use the auction house, use the flight hub that connected to basically everywhere else, and it was also the main area where most people purchased extra skills for their character at, there were a few other class trainers but only the Captial cities had them in all together at once, in a easy location to get to. Of course to house all of that, the city is very big, and that was my first realization of when I stepped into Stormwind.
When I went onto the Stormwind bridge and I heard the music change from the normal ambiance to a very human-like heroic theme I liked it immensely, that coupled with walking through giant statues of historic lore characters who I didn't really know at the time but I found out more about later on, and who were also apparently in past Warcraft games that I've never played, was just an unbelievable experience. Another thing that probably helped that was that I really liked playing the humans in Warcraft 3 and the architecture of Stormwind City. While it obviously looked much more impressive than a Town Hall in WC3, it still had the same feeling of it, on a much larger scale. In any case however, after I stopped enjoying the scenery I pretty much immediately got lost. Despite that I still enjoyed wandering around the city to even just find out where the exit was and finding out the city had places like “The Park” where it was very nature oriented to accommodate the Night Elves, to the Dwarven District which was considerably darker than other parts of the city and of course, made for the Dwarves and Gnomes. I ended up spending most of my time at the dwarven district when I eventually became a Engineer and Miner later on. Eventually however I got used to the map, and the districts of the city to easily find out where I needed to go, but getting lost the first time and basically stumbling on unique parts of the area was still one of the most memorable experiences of World of Warcraft for me.
Back to the actual gameplay, after making my way out of Elwynn Forest and doing the end quests of Elwynn such as Hogger, and Princess, I went over to Westfall. Much like Elwynn I was quickly astounded by the landscape and how different it was compared to being in a forest, honestly I much prefer drier places in reality and in-game so I was much more drawn to Westfall than being in a forest, and it was a pleasant surprise for me. The not so pleasant parts of it came to me quickly as well however, in that Westfall's enemies seemed abnormally hard for me, even killing something at the same level as me usually involved me having to eat some food to recover. Looking back at it now, I can't remember the exact cause of my weakness other than I was using a shield and a 1 handed sword but even now thinking about it, I think the damage should have evened out that way. There were more than a few parts of Westfall that presented this problem, the ones that come to mind are the Harvest Reapers on most farmlands, the Boars that did a ton of damage upon a charge, and the Gnolls who by themselves, weren't that hard to kill, but usually they in close proximity to another Gnoll meaning engaging them usually resulted in a 1 against 2 or more fight quickly, not to mention they also used ranged attacks, making it even harder to get them in a position to kill easily. All of that however was nothing compared to yet another aspect of MMORPGs that was standard but I didn't know about yet.
That leads us to the Deadmines, one of the most famous instances in World of Warcraft was my, a lot like many other people's, first instance in the game. It was here that I also came to the realization that MMORPGs were not just action oriented and they had to have a full group composition as well as full group in the first place. I was really excited when I first came across the barnhouse that housed the deadmines and went in it somewhat to explore, when I got down into the mines part I really didn't think it was that bad after I was able to kill a nonelite miner, so I got my friends such as Vedelken, and the Paladin who liked the RP, and we tried it out. Evidently with no offense to them of course , none of us actually knew how play in a group based MMORPG scenario, as we tried to do it with just us 3 instead of a full five that's far from the real problems that occurred however.
Due to my lack of knowledge perhaps or the fact that the Warrior class quest wasn't very clear, I never actually went ahead and did the Warrior class quest, and because of that I never got defensive stance, I didn't even know it was possible to obtain at my level. That of course led to big problems, while I did use a shield, my only real threat generation was heroic strike, and with neither of my accomplices knowing how to play their class well either, it was very hard to take down even the first few enemies in Deadmines. We did manage however, and while it felt like a near impossible task I was glad that we did, it felt impossible enough for me to hope that the Deadmines wasn't very long, and when we did get to the first boss Rhak'zor he of course, destroyed us. All of that was very demoralizing because we literally spent hours getting to him only to find out that we couldn't beat him. We ended up stopping our incursion there for awhile until we were a few levels higher then we came back, I believe we also came back with a full group this time. I was surprised and happy to see how easier things were even though I was still the Warrior with a shield and without defensive stance but I still managed to hold aggro enough to keep them off people and for us to do our job. It took us a long time but we did manage to proceed deep into the instance which amazed me in not only how difficult it was but also in it's environments. I really enjoyed going into goblin shredder area and having to fight goblins that were considerably harder than the Defias bandits that we previously killed, and moving onto the boss itself which I was really scared of aggroing constantly while we pulled the enemies back. That of course led to the boss fight with Sneed who was a lot more intimidating in appearance than he was in combat, I was surprised to find out how easy he died, and I was also happy to be able to complete a quest I found in Stormwind, while it was out of the way, I thought it was neat being able to have a quest that most people wouldn't find unless they also went to the Dwarven District beforehand, which I know isn't that rare to do before Deadmines but I still felt that way about it.
In any case, after downing Sneed we went into the foundry which I loved simply for it's ramp, it was also the part where I realized a lot of wipes could happen very easily if noone did something about the goblins who summon additional golems. The trip went fairly uneventfully from then on until we got to the hanger area where Van Cleef was creating his ship. I generally like all parts where we fight on wooden docks in any games, so this part was especially fun for me, from being on the docks in the first place to having abit of trouble with Mister Smite who was my first glimpse of a Tauren in World of Warcraft, so seeing that was neat in that regard as well as him being a fun boss overall. All of that led to of course fighting on the ship itself, while the pulls were abit glitchy and we did wipe more than once because of pulling enemies that were out of our line of sight but still in range, namely Captain Greenskin's group. Speaking of his group, they were actually fairly difficult to take down because we had a lack of CC, lack of all CC infact except for a fear which I quickly learned was bad to do in instances, but we did it anyway for the sake of surviving. After taking care of him we finally got to Van Cleef himself, he wasn't so easy with his summoned guards that he brought in making our survivability and mana management difficult, I can't remember the specifics but we did end up killing him which led us to the first blue drop that I liked in all of the instance, that was the Cruel Barb, and while I didn't win the roll, it did inspire me to run VC again even more at higher levels just to dual wield Cruel Barbs, and it was also leagues ahead of any items that I saw so far.
In summary, while I did do a lot of “noobish” things while first starting out with World of Warcraft they made me a better player and definitely a more knowledgeable one. When I first started out I didn't even know terms such as CC, DPS, Tank even meant and like I mentioned I also didn't know about the defensive stance that a Warrior could obtain , I did however pick those up after the ordeal, and also did the quest for my defensive stance. So, while the entire experience was a challenge to overcome, it was a very fun and memorable one, and while I did forget the specifics of my first Deadmines run such as who did what or how many times we wiped (which was a lot so I'll settle for vague quantity), I'll never forget how it was my first instance run ever.
That'll sum up the main thing I did want to write about when I started thinking about my first experiences in World of Warcraft, there are quite a few more I could write about but I will also be spreading out my subjects for now. However, I will eventually write about more of my experiences like these, and I hope you'll look forward to them.
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