...join in and exploit the hell out of it.
Or at least, that's the kind of thinking that has gotten me onto a WoW PvP server that Pyrogamma and his compatriots are playing on.
Yeah, I know. PvP server. Boggles the mind. But what the hell, I was thinking to experience WoW from the perspective of the typical 'introducee to WoW by friend' and do some journalistic musings on it.
I played the WoW trial the wholesome newbie fashion up to a lvl 16 druid, at which point, I decided that I was going to at least get beyond lvl 20 before giving up... which meant I might as well buy the WoW battlechest I had been eyeing.
Since the battlechest offer came with a 2 month game card, that's essentially a zhevra mount for somebody right there. I was a little too soft-hearted to let it go to waste, by inputting the WoW codes on my existing trial account, so I opened it out to work colleagues, and Pyrogamma was the keenest one and all ready to escort me around and such.
Only caveat. PvP server. *sighs* Oh well, I figured an aging game with population at end-game and beyond meant less random gank squads anyway. And there's the bonus of coming in with a friend, with a guild network, full of lvl 80s who would be ready to avenge a lowbie in distress. So what the heck.
Besides, triple xp for whenever I could persuade Pyrogamma to log in an even level alt and stand 100 yards near to me for quest turn-ins was a little too tempting to get past the newbie zone hurdle. Again.
So he kindly made a tauren warrior to run my tauren druid around. In the vein of Zubon's writings and all those WoW duo'ers, we committed mass animal genocide in the name of quest turn-ins for Nature, the Earthmother and the Tauren people.
Most of it was uneventful. Xp return per mob was actually decent in a group, thanks to the triple xp bonus. Xp return on a quest was insanely good. There were a couple times where we aggro'ed everything in sight, and somehow remained standing at the end of it. That mostly reduced me to standing around conserving mana trying to keep the berserk warrior alive though. Memorable enough once or twice, but I'm not convinced that is a desirable playstyle for me.
Then there was the time he aggroed three spellcasting dwarves who healed each other. Plus a couple more diggers. Who would run off and get help when wounded. I remember very clearly my solo druid getting paroxyms trying to deal with them, so I stayed back really far, healed until I ran out of mana, watched him drop dead, and then turned around and legged it. :P
Generally fun. Didn't really have the heart to tell him that I kinda knew the basics, so he spent a while earnestly explaining about what Thunder Bluff looked like, how to navigate via guards, the various newbie towns for orcs/trolls and tauren (which I'd seen, thanks) and so on. Still, any bit of obvious detail will come in valuable post lvl 20, where I haven't ventured the least bit beyond Booty Bay and Stranglethorn Vale.
He also earnestly ran me through Ragefire Chasm on his lvl 80. I'll 'plevel' you, he offered.
*sighs*
Then again, beggars cannot be choosers, and there's no way I'm actually getting a real group to experience Ragefire Chasm properly, am I? Not when the bulk of the population is off doing heroics at lvl 80.
So what the heck. Why not. So I ended up playing 'bling gnome' for two rounds of RFC. Aka, following behind someone slaughtering everything in a Diablo-like vein, picking up treasure. The only difference is that I didn't have to poop out gold and/or share any of it.
Because ironically, as the only person getting escorted through the dungeon by a lvl 80, the equipment is only worth something to me, a teensy level 12. The green equipment drops are barely worth pocket fluff to any lvl 80, thanks to WoW's crazy expanding exponential loot/stat system.
I just feel a lot like sighing at WoW's game design. I know very well Pyrogamma is trying to be very generous and helpful, within the scope of the WoW game. A character performs much better in decked out gear than without. There is the tacit assumption that any decent player would be in this decked out gear - which is obtained from? Endless farming runs of one kind or another.
Of course, no one is going to group 'properly' over and over for rare drops. Not if there is an easier option of destroying the mobs completely with a lvl 80, and STILL getting the same drops, just faster.
So we end up with this introductory newbie experience to WoW - where the new player stands behind the glorious lvl 80 decimating mobs, picking up sparklies that the lvl 80 deigns to leave behind, soaking in whatever available xp there is, and not learning a single damned thing about the dungeon, the class, grouping tactics, or whatever.
I wonder what the Cataclysm will do for things like this. Or whether they'll bother to do anything, and see it as a 'feature.'
Well, it's my hope that I can somehow get the best of both worlds. I'm going to have to find some time alone by myself in WoW to slowly and peacefully run quests, explore areas and have my journeys of discovery that I came to WoW for - the leveling game, really, not the endless raid game.
And bloody hell, since I'm not interested in the mini-metagame of sitting around for hours, begging for teams to go wander into dungeons for the chance of lottery loot, or eliting my way into some uber-raid guild... I may as well leverage on my Pyrogamma network and get some form of tour around the lowbie dungeons, decent equipment to support my solo ventures, and in the future, possibly casual attempts at heroic dungeons or whatever.
We'll see. I'm gonna be playing Aion too, for the leveling story, at any rate, so we'll see where we end up tiring.
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