Back into Azeroth, business as usual

(Disclaimer: I do apologize if I use any kind of WoW-related jargon or terminology in the post that is unknown to someone to does not play the game, I try to write these things as broadly as possible but sometimes it’s impossible to explain things without the proper names, usually these kinds of words are more game-related rather then WoW-related.)

 

Well it’s finally happened, I’m not exactly sure how it worked out this way, but now I seemed to have taken a break from Minecraft multiplayer and gone back into the so-called online crack addiction that is World of Warcraft, not that it’s ever been like that for me, but unsurprisingly coming back to the game after having a 5 month break hasn’t really overloaded my cognitive capacity. Though I do know the main reason for that is because I took a break from the game not too long after The Cataclysm expansion came out. This expansion was one of the most shall we say“planet shaking” (excuse the pun) of all of them, not so much for the introduction of new areas and content but for the changing of what was already there i.e. the old world (the first two original wow continents) has been changed completely, not to mention the changes to stats and various gameplay mechanics, so playing the expansion for a while (I did get a new character to level 50) then taking a long break and coming back, apart from a few content patches not much has changed, for me at least in contrast to someone who had taken a break before the latest expansion which would be quite an experience indeed.

World of Warcraft: this picture doesnt tell the half of it, and yes that is me as the human-looking bull

For those of you who don’t know (and yes there is actually people who don’t) World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) which basically means you play as a character in a fantasy world where everyone else is represented as a character as well and you do (for lack of a better word) stuff yes stuff. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what you do in a medieval fantasy world where it’s sure to be more outrageous then it actually is, although in some cases it may not be too far from the truth.

Here is me riding my "Mechano-hog" some kind of steampunk/medieval motorcycle.. underwater. It's true that the game has gotten kind of silly with content over the years

I must say that I feel a renewed vigour to play again, even though I know that I’m going to be going through relatively the same content with almost my entire long list of characters (making sure I alternate between areas with each character of course). One of the things is once again replacing your old armor and weapons with new ones that greatly outclass the old ones in stats even though your old armor was very good at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (not too mention all the gems, enchantments and armor patches you had on them). This kind of thing happened in the first expansion The Burning Crusade but did not happen so quickly in Wrath of the Lich King, Wrath was quite annoying for the fact that sometimes it was very hard to work out if a new piece of armor was better then the one you had on currently which ended up with me doing a lot of standing around going hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm and asking guildies their opinion until I just told myself to replace the damn thing. 

Group questing, this is a particular situation between two groups of the same faction wanting the same thing to complete a quest, awkward indeed

I now have 9 characters that I rotate around, the only class I have not played is a priest, and I can say that although I do have a couple of favourites namely two (Druid & Paladin) that I can’t decide which I like more, my greatest problem I have in WoW is that I can’t stick to one class, I always seem to be switching between them every time I gain ten or so level or play them for a reasonable amount of time before moving on to the next. The reason for this is one of the problems that wow has had and continues to have with a lot of people who have played the game is that wow is too repetitive, I had several friends who have tried the game and said the exact same thing. It’s true that most of the time when you are levelling your character you always have a spell rotation that you seem to do every time you face a new enemy unless you like to fight multiple enemies at once but even then you still have a routine of dealing with that situation. The other thing is the various quests in WoW i.e the things you do most in WOW especially when levelling can be at times quite repetitive, due to the recent expansion this has changed quite a bit, all of the old world quests have been revamped and are no longer quite as simple as they used to be but mostly still have the same pick of roughly 4 or 5 quest types i.e. kill this many of these things or those people, collect this many of these, escort this person to here, create this using a profession or any mixture of the these 4. It’s not necessarily bad that it’s like this way, it makes it relatively easier when your not going to be bombarded with some over complicated instructions on what to do (perish the thought) and a game like WoW which has so much content, making everything you do in every zone in the world unique would be a very hard if not impossible job indeed.

Yes, you can ride an alligator, with six legs....

 So I have to say I do still enjoy WOW, even from coming back from a long break I believe that a large part of the excitement that comes from the game is what you bring to it, I confess when it comes down to the nitty gritty of things, I’m not the best player and wasn’t exactly the best end-game raider in the guild and I also can’t stick to one character for long but I still have fun, and that’s the main thing. I will continue to play WoW, though I’m dreading how many more expansions Blizzard Entertainment have in mind. Well at least until the quite large release of my next topic...

Cya next time for The Old Republic! Thoughts and anticipation….

JD

I enjoy being a demon, even if it’s only for 30 seconds…