To bring this blog up to speed on where Tooee's at right now...
Last night I dinged 55. I plan to normally do more involved posts with funny clips of my adventures and actual quotes from players I've encountered. But since the idea to blog about my experiences in the pug world didn't occur to me until now, I'm going to do a quick ESPN-like highlight reel of leveling thus far.
0-20: Did most of this pre 3.3 and the new LFG tool so no real pug experience to speak of. But I will say that leveling a druid sucks until cat form and is excruciatingly painful until bear form.
20-30: My first random dungeon ever was BFD. It was the second time I'd ever been there and it sucked as much as I remembered. All that swimming just took forever to get anywhere. After that I had a mix of RFK and Gnomer. Gnomer was terrible as always but RFK was fun. The quality of players was pretty decent but these instances are virtually soloable so I probably wouldn't have noticed if some of them were on auto-follow the entire time.
30-40: Great mix of dungeons here. I love RFD and all the SMs. At some point I encountered a warrior who insisted on "helping me tank" which amounted to taunting random mobs off me and then losing threat back to me from a couple swipes. I also met a shaman who explained that we needed a plan for the final boss in Cath because "tons of adds will come when you aggro him". Clearly the last group he was in didn't clear the cathedral before pulling him.
40-50: Here we had a retarded order of instances. I started getting Maura: Orange, meaning killing the lasher boss when I was level 41 and the mobs were level 44-46. Then I got ZF when I was a higher level than the instance, then Purple Maura at some point followed by the princess part of Maura. Blizzard definitely needs to revisit what levels it assigns to these instances even though they're all easy even when bosses hit you with crushing blows.
50-55: BRD. Love it or hate it, it's big. At low 50s, I was getting assigned "Lower BRD" which required the group to kill this chick, taking all of 5-10 minutes. It was a pleasant surprise since I was so used to wandering around the gigantic labyrinth for hours back in the day. But at about 53 or 54 I started getting "Upper BRD" where you have to actually kill the emprorer in order to complete the "quest". It's not as bad as I remember but still annoying enough that I never want to requeue right after completing it. I'm doing a fair amount of questing in WPL right now to try to get to Outlad ASAP.
Supposedly I'll start getting DM soon which would be fun, but mostly I'm looking forward to Outland instances. Call me crazy, but I enjoy the short, straight forward nature of BC and WotLK.
I know this update is pretty boring, but I thought it would have felt weird to start talking about stuff at level 55 without at least a brief summary of how I got to that point. I anticipate the true excitement will come at 80 when I start gearing up in heroics and get shit for having fresh 80 gear. Pugs tend to be nicer, even if they're dumber at lower levels.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
A Druid Was Born
I've played WoW since December 2006 at various levels of hardcore-ness. My first character ever was a Troll Rogue who only made it to level 29 before I rerolled with a group of friends.
My first real main was a Troll ShadowPriest (Tuwei) during BC where I raided through SSC and TK, including killing Vashj pre 2.3 and Kael just after 2.3. We also cleared the first few bosses in Hyjal and accomplished ZA bear runs. It was a ton of fun, but all great things must come to an end. A couple weeks into T6 progression I took a break from raiding and from WoW. I didn't have the time to raid much anymore and playing casually during BC didn't appeal to me at all.
Not long after 2.4 was released, I reactivated my account and finished leveling a Blood Elf Paladin (Jasari) that I had sitting around 60ish. I knew I didn't have time to raid very much but figured it'd be fun to gear up a new character, particularly a tank and just play casually for a while. The new badge gear implemented in 2.4 made it entertaining enough to farm heroics, Kara, and ZA with my friend who played a holy priest.
With the launch of 3.0 and WotLK, my priest buddy and I joined a casual guild with similar interests as us. None of us really had the time to devote to 25man progression raiding but were able to take advantage of 10mans that were introduced with the new expansion. With a new and improved prot paladin as my main, I tanked for the guild as we quickily cleared Naxx, Sarth, and after some trouble downed Malygos. We were on the verge of killing Sarth 3D when Ulduar was released and stole our focus. Ulduar wasn't much of a problem for us either and we had quickily cleared it along with several hardmodes before the guild started to crumble. Right about the time 3.2 was released the guild had disentigrated and I again found myself bored of the game and took a leave of absence.
With the release of 3.3 I came back to the game with my characters spread across several servers. I had an 80 warlock off on Hakkar to play with my Holy Priest friend, who was now playing a Holy Paladin. My Paladin tank was over on Bleeding Hollow in what ended up as a failed attempt to revive our old BC guild, and my many alts were piled on Blackwing Lair where my home had been since the start of BC. Since I didn't have a lot of time to devote to raiding I decided to just do whatever felt like fun, which was playing my level 12 Druid.
So that brings us to today. I'm casually leveling a Tauren Feral Druid named Tooee, pronouced "2 E". It's a blast, especially with the new LFG tool introduced in 3.3. I'm doing about a 50/50 mix of questing and instancing. The fun part is instancing, and not just because running old and forgotten dungeons is kind of cool. The really entertaining part for me is dealing with the pugs. At low levels I've encountered everything from a player who is leveling their very first character and who "has never seen a druid tank before" to the alt of an elitist prick who "wants to try to solo this boss".
This blog will be about the adventures of pugging in the crazy world of warcraft.
My first real main was a Troll ShadowPriest (Tuwei) during BC where I raided through SSC and TK, including killing Vashj pre 2.3 and Kael just after 2.3. We also cleared the first few bosses in Hyjal and accomplished ZA bear runs. It was a ton of fun, but all great things must come to an end. A couple weeks into T6 progression I took a break from raiding and from WoW. I didn't have the time to raid much anymore and playing casually during BC didn't appeal to me at all.
Not long after 2.4 was released, I reactivated my account and finished leveling a Blood Elf Paladin (Jasari) that I had sitting around 60ish. I knew I didn't have time to raid very much but figured it'd be fun to gear up a new character, particularly a tank and just play casually for a while. The new badge gear implemented in 2.4 made it entertaining enough to farm heroics, Kara, and ZA with my friend who played a holy priest.
With the launch of 3.0 and WotLK, my priest buddy and I joined a casual guild with similar interests as us. None of us really had the time to devote to 25man progression raiding but were able to take advantage of 10mans that were introduced with the new expansion. With a new and improved prot paladin as my main, I tanked for the guild as we quickily cleared Naxx, Sarth, and after some trouble downed Malygos. We were on the verge of killing Sarth 3D when Ulduar was released and stole our focus. Ulduar wasn't much of a problem for us either and we had quickily cleared it along with several hardmodes before the guild started to crumble. Right about the time 3.2 was released the guild had disentigrated and I again found myself bored of the game and took a leave of absence.
With the release of 3.3 I came back to the game with my characters spread across several servers. I had an 80 warlock off on Hakkar to play with my Holy Priest friend, who was now playing a Holy Paladin. My Paladin tank was over on Bleeding Hollow in what ended up as a failed attempt to revive our old BC guild, and my many alts were piled on Blackwing Lair where my home had been since the start of BC. Since I didn't have a lot of time to devote to raiding I decided to just do whatever felt like fun, which was playing my level 12 Druid.
So that brings us to today. I'm casually leveling a Tauren Feral Druid named Tooee, pronouced "2 E". It's a blast, especially with the new LFG tool introduced in 3.3. I'm doing about a 50/50 mix of questing and instancing. The fun part is instancing, and not just because running old and forgotten dungeons is kind of cool. The really entertaining part for me is dealing with the pugs. At low levels I've encountered everything from a player who is leveling their very first character and who "has never seen a druid tank before" to the alt of an elitist prick who "wants to try to solo this boss".
This blog will be about the adventures of pugging in the crazy world of warcraft.
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