In the first article of this series we talked about the initial experience of jumping back into a game from 15 years ago. The arbiters of our society, perhaps even our universe, have been trying to determine whether is is just a nostalgia trip, or is the game objectively better than its current retail iteration.
I, to be honest with you, don’t know. Initially I wasn’t at all interested in WoW classic, you might have read that in my previous articles, but then I started getting more and more excited for it. I don’t know if it was the marketing or perhaps I was just running out of games to play. I would try the private servers, but never past level 2 or 3. It never felt permanent, there was always that anxiety of putting time into something and then seeing it go up in smoke.
This is actually a really interesting topic, the anxiety of an MMO shutting down and losing all of your progress, unlike single player games. I think it has held me back from trying a lot of MMORPG games out there the sense of stability kept WoW as my home MMO. But we can discuss that at a later point. This is more of a ‘note to self’ type of deal.
What I am trying to say is that once the expansions started rolling out for Vanilla WoW there was really no way or hope for that matter that we would end up playing the old game the way it came out originally. Which was a weird feeling, all the way up to Cataclysm at which point you either had your heart broken, or you enjoyed the new content, with the understanding that it’s just a game.
But then WoW Classic was announced and it felt like one of those stable things, that I could jump into and enjoy for a while. Not because I hated retail… I don’t it’s a great game, it has however, gotten away from me, both story wise and game-play wise. Its different enough for me to feel like a visitor in the world and not a resident. It wasn’t like that in the vanilla days, I felt that I, or my character were residents of the world. That feeling is still there today.
The above is just a recap of the article I wrote when I first jumped into the game, you can read it in full here.
In this one I wanted to talk about getting to level 10 in WoW Classic. Why is level 10 so important? I don’t know what the decision process was at Blizzard when working on the leveling progress, but level 10 is when your class really becomes your class. What do I mean by that? Well for example in my case, I rolled a hunter, my hunter doesn’t get his pet until level 10.
That means, I am basically mechanically a melee class, but I was designed to be a ranged class. It becomes very awkward to play that way. Most of my damage comes from being at range and firing my rifle or a bow, depending on the race, but because there is what is called a dead-zone for hunters, a distance at which your range weapon does not work, you end up having to melee the mobs. You have one skill on your hot bar for that, and it is not great, the damage on it is low and the cool-down feels too long to be viable. Because your leveling is heavily depends on how fast you can kill something, this becomes a major problem. Leveling as a hunter to level 10 was a hard and boring endeavor. You have weak armor and really bad damage… its a challenge. And probably one of the reasons I didn’t play a hunter when the game first came. Takes too long to get to the fun stuff.
This time around however I decided to stick with it, because I know hunters are a lot of fun once you do get your pet and you can go through whole camps of mobs no problem.
I stuck it out and got my pet. The hunter quest that you get at 10, is a bit weird and makes you run around for a little while, taming different types of animals as your pets, to show you I guess which type you wanted to be your pet. It didn’t seem incredibly helpful to me, but maybe if the quest giver shared with you what each type were good at, but then again they might have and I just missed it. I was in a hurry, I wanted to get my pet and I already knew what kind I wanted.
When you start up WoW for the first time you get a cinematic that opens up with a dwarf hunter in Ironforge mountains walking around in the snow with his companion the bear. I wanted to be like that dwarf hunter and I wanted a bear. When I played the game 15 years ago, I tamed the first bear I could find. I later learned that there is a cool polar bear you could get and that’s what I wanted this time around.
There are two polar bears in Ironforge area, one is a roaming rare, and another is a quest spawn. I went for the quest spawn, because it’s easier to find and has a pretty quick respawn if you were to fail. This bear was very tough to tame, I had to request help to get it done, and even with that, I managed to fail.
I want to go into detail about how that all went down, but I am kind of running out of room in this article(I am a huge fan of shorter posts, both as a writer and as a reader, so practicing what I preach), I will do a quick part 2 about how I got the bear and what my life has been since then. I will talk about where I chose to level after I hit 10, what it took to get there and what my impressions are so far that I have had a couple weeks of playing the game. Is it all just a nostalgia trip, or is this a time travel event that we all so desperately wanted to experience… Just kidding I don’t know the answer to that last one, that’s really for everyone else to decide for themselves.
See you in the next one!
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