WoW, the early days

From my last post you will know that I was introduced to WoW by a group of friends from work…..


They told me what server they were on (Bronzebeard-EU) and what classes they all played, which at that time was 2 prot warriors and a holy pally, so even though I know nothing about WoW directly, I did know from my experience in the fantasy game genre that it made sense to me to play a damage dealer in order to be the most use to them…


So I started a character, that character was a human (purely because they were all human, so it made sense for me to be in the same starter zone) mage…and the name was chosen as “Lerbic”….Lerbic had been my 2nd character in MUME, back in those days on MUME, Lerbic was a dwarf warrior, but I couldn’t keep the, mages name, after all it was chosen as something silly because “I wouldn’t keep him”

I assume it’s the same for most people, but while levelling Lerbic up I died a LOT, and I mean a LOT….I know nothing of game mechanics, nothing of using websites to help me learn about them, it was all trial and error…and believe me, there was a lot of error

I was guildless until mid 20’s level I think, I remember being in Redridge Mountains when I got my guild invite to the same guild my friends were in….the guild shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but lets just say that by my standards of today they were Ultra, Ultra casual….I remember it being a big thing when people dinged 60…I remember stopping one friend in the corridor at work, shaking his hand and saying “well done” when he was the first to do it…and alts ? what were alts….it was almost TBC launch before anyone in the guild had a level 60 alt….
That guild was brilliant for the social aspect of the game, for a start it had a load of people I knew from real life in it, but also, the guild chat was great, full of jokes and banter, something I’ve never quite been able to replace in any other guilds I’ve been in since....
The quality of play ? Well, I didn’t know any better at the time, but I thought we were good, we had all the 5 mans down to easy farm status, and we even had the 45 min baron run down to about a 50% success rate, which means we certainly didn’t suck completely, that was a tough run when done at the correct gear level
Raiding though was a different story though, pre-tbc, despite having a membership of over 100 accounts (no joke) we never ever went in MC, and we struggled to even get 20 online at the same time to have regular runs to ZG and AQ20
The total raid kill count was 3 ZG bosses, and only one of those was a purely guild kill (snake boss), the other 2 we had help from a few friends from other guilds on the server.
But…those little attempts into raiding did one thing for me, they gave me a taste of what the large group side of the game might be like…and I wanted more…

By the time of TBC launch, I was an officer and raid leader in the guild, but despite my best efforts at getting any good progress into heroics and Kara, we got stuck after only Attumen and never made it further before me and the group of real life friends left
I just read that through and it sounds very bad, I’m aware that a lot of guilds got stuck for several weeks at Moroes, we didn’t just jump ship when it got difficult, there were also problems getting commitment, reliability, consistency of play standard, more than one raid a week etc etc…basically the guild was a social guild trying to raid, and the majority of the players just didn’t have the right mindset…and frankly, I don’t blame them, I never did. These people didn’t join a raid guild, they joined a social guild…it wasn’t that the guild was bad, far from it, it was simply that I’d changed in what I wanted from the game

So…..my friends and I found a casual raid guild on the server, who offered “access to the end game without the need for soul-less every day raiding”…sounds good….lets apply and see what happens…..

This has got long again, so I’ll continue on another post