I mentioned last week that I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again, and it’s been an enlightening process to start from scratch (I deleted my old character) on a new server. Now I know most people out there won’t care much for my ramblings on some silly MMORPG, but I’d like to share some of what I’ve learnt from this second round.

Warriors are useful in the end-game, but horrible to solo.

At first, because of my secret affair with Paladins from more D&D based games, I was drawn to the simple dynamic of being a warrior: being the cog around which the grouping machine is built. Unfortunately, in WOW at least, they are painful to level, because they do not exactly deal large amounts of damage over time (known in-game as DPS). Instead, the basic premise is standing there absorbing the damage until that slow mace clobbers the enemy into submission.

Another problem with this is you can’t really take on more than one enemy at once, so progress is very, very, very slow when you traversing the wild on your lonesome. Also, since you are so dependent on your armour and weaponry, more so than most other classes, you don’t really retain much money, though in my case this may be down to naivety more than anything else.

The upside of warriors, which I really enjoyed, is the of the tank in group situations and dungeons. The tank basically acts as the focal point of enemy attacks, drawing in all the damage and ‘aggro’. It’s a nice feeling, since you are absolutely essential to every dungeon crawl, and this boosts the social side of the game.

With a bit of dedication, making gold is a simple process

Professions, such as skinning and mining, where never something I took seriously in my first ‘iteration’¹, which explained why I was dirt poor by level 40, where you need 100 Gold, or G, to get a mount. This time round I took up skinning and herbalism, two so-called ‘Gathering’ professions, very early on, which means that by level 20 I had 35G already.

So to all people looking to start up a new character with the wish of making some money, take up two gathering skills and stick to them, since you will make a bundle in no time.

Druids are great for soloing.

Druids are great fun. Here’s my new character:

It’s basically like rolling several classes into one due to their ‘forms’. The human form allows you heal and cast offensive spells, the bear and dire bear forms let you act as Warrior, as it doubles your armour and strength, and the cat form lets you act as Rogue, have a very high DPS and combo points. In terms of grouping, this is a double-edged sword: on the plus side, you can try out many different roles in dungeons. However, this versatility also means that each individual pseudo-class doesn’t quite match with the class it’s copying, so specializing for end-game is not as organic as for those classes. Myself, I think I’ll head for either tanking, since now I can experience it without the downsides of being a warrior, or healing, since everyone likes healers!

Well, hope you found that at least mildly interesting.

1. The reason the keep saying this is because with my second real character is the same race as my first: Night Elf. So, so far, I’ve been levelling in similar places. [back]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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