No doubt many of us are closely following progression in heroic Icecrown Citadel. There are a lot of guilds gunning for the position for the best guild in the world.
Ahead of everybody else is Paragon from Lightnings Blade EU, and I hooked up with their very own moonkin Lappé for a little chat.
I started playing WoW when the US beta was in the late stages. I got a few days of play before the open beta ended, and then I waited a few weeks before the beta started in Europe. Back then, I was familiar with Anarchy Online, which was the first “real” MMORPG I had played – sure, I played a text based game called Nightmist, but that game wasn’t really “massive” and games such as Runescape is a lot further down in the food chain. Anarchy Online was a fun game, but very different from WoW, and despite all the time I had spent on that, it lost out rather quickly to WoW.
But the WoW five years ago is very different from the WoW we have today, both in the good aspects and the bad. My real life job has me analyzing and evaluating online memes, so my interest in WoW is not only for the game itself, but the society it creates. Lets take a walk down memory lane, as I express my rather biased, and perhaps, rather elitist views of the evolution of WoW.
Some commonly used terms, when comparing damage across classes, are “pures” versus “hybrids”, and some people think that there should be a noticable difference between these classes. A hybrid is a class that is able to cover more than one role in a raid – a druid can do damage, tank or heal.
A pure, naturally, is a class that can only furfill one role ever. Back in the days, a hybrid would be a “jack of all trades, master of none”, and was viewed as slightly behind the pure classes with the roles they offered. In Vanilla-WoW, druid tanks were nearly non-existant, and while they could be used as tanks in The Burning Crusade, they fell short on some fights, specifically those designed around warrior abilities.
But the whole problem with hybrids was that people asked “Why bring them when X can do better”? Why would we bring a shadowpriest when a mage can do more damage? Why use a feral druid to tank when a warrior does it better? People was annoyed by the fact that they weren’t “just as good” and was left out, or forced to get into another role.
I suppose it would be in order to start out the blog by giving a brief introduction to myself.
Before World of Warcraft, I had been playing Anarchy Online. Oh, those were the days. I snigger a bit whenever people talk about their WoW twinks, because Anarchy Online was actual, hardcore twinking. I played for about a year and a half, before World of Warcraft came and ruined everything.
I managed to get two hours of playtime on the US beta before the servers shut down. Later, when the Beta started in Europe, i had a few weeks of fun to actually test it out – on my female night elf hunter. Yeah, I am that kind of person too. Once the game came out in Europe, i decided that since 80% of WoW’s population was female nelf hunters, I would certainly not be one of those, and I rolled a gnome warlock instead.
Helios, my little gnome, was in retrospect a giant newbie for his small size. I sort of just pressed some buttons until things died. I managed to get him to level 55 before I ditched him and made an undead priest. As I got to level 60, i started doing some casual raiding as a healer – it’s not like I had much choice back then, right? Healing wasn’t intensely hard back in the days, because it usually involved clicking the macro for EZheal (a mod that would simply cast flash heal on the person with the lowest health), and everybody was doing this. Bosses was a bit more difficult, with pauses during the fight to regen mana, but it generally wasn’t very stressfull. I made it up to stare at The Twins in AQ40 and then The Burning Crusade came out – and broke the wonderfull addon.
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