My intro to WoW

I only started playing World of Warcraft so I could do something with my brother, as we had been in touch too rarely for far too long. My video game experience prior to WoW was limited to Baldur's Gate for a few years until a friend turned me on to Diablo II. I gave a shot at playing that on Battlenet a few times, but discovered that too many of the world's asshats were there (my introduction to ganking, although I didn't know that term for a few years). I started playing Battlefield 1942 at an internet gaming parlor, and there were a number of peole there who played WoW. I remembered my brother showing me Undercity in the game when I'd visited him some months before, so I go the the game so we could play together online - at least I'd know someone and he could show me what to do.

BUT I was SUCH a noob. More one that later.

I've been 'seriously' tanking since sometime early in the Burning Crusade expansion. I did some tanking during vanilla WoW around the mid 40s one time time in Zul Farrak. Luckily the group I was with really knew their stuff and I was an passable meatshield despite know damn little about what I was doing.

I hit level 60 with about 2-3 months to go before the Burning Crusades Expansion. I was till such a massive noob, but I had heard that if you wanted "the good gear" you needed to do the level 60 instances - Sunken Temple (although not techincally a lvl 60 instance, good gear could be gotten there), Strat, Scholo, LBRS and UBRS.

I had the experience of attempting to to tank exactly ONE Strat run. A 45 minute Baron run no less. I had no idea exactly what that entailed and even told the group that took me in as much. Turns out that a Strat Baron run was no place for a new tank. No one had time to to explain anything - hey, it's supposed to be a timed run, but what did I know. Anyway, I was semi-politely asked to leave so they could get a new tank who knew what he/she was doing. I doubt they ever finished. Forming groups in Vanilla was an extremely painful and time consuming affair and my experience with instances was that they were excruciating long as well. The only other instance run I recall doing in Vanilla after htting 60 was an UBRS run, and I recall that run specifically because I got some much needed shoulder upgrades off The Beast.

Lightforge Spaulders. Yes, pally shoulders. And yes, I went into Outland wearing those shoulders. As I was still very gun-shy about doing instances, I had them until sometime in level 61 or so.

I was, at the beginning of BC, still very much a noob. But a new co-worker played WoW and was just great about explaining thing like putting talents primarily into one talent tree to get better results; explained what AP was and why it was important...things like that. I changed my talents to a deep fury build instead of the hodge-podge mix I'd been using up to that point and found thing started improving for me greatly as I progressed through the game.

When you are trying to learn such an important role so late in in the evolution of the game - especially so close to the release of an expansion (I was at level 60 with only about 2 months til an BC)....well, it did not happen. People were too impatient. The general attitude I saw was one of "If you don't know how to do it already you suck, things like that. Not the best thing for someone who was rather withdrawn and in general did not care for people very much anyway. So I quested on my main, a warrior, and on my alts, put the things my friend had explained to me into practice and slowly started getting better while either doing quests with my brother or running around solo.

I really think as the game has evolved there are more people willing to teach and give others a chance to screw up as they learn. My hero is Daniel Howell, better know to the WoW community as BRK. His blog and videos on hunters were, and still are, amazing. I think I'm blogging in part because of him, as a way to POSSIBLY give something back to the WoW community and a way to dust off off my writing skills and share some experiences.