Words of Warcraft: The Beginning
I'm fairly certain that when I bring up the fact that I am a avid fan of World of Warcraft, to folks outside of gaming and geekery, that I get more than my fair share of /eyerolls. It doesn't bother me. At this point, I'm used to it. Prior to my discovery of WoW, I had never played an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and to this day, I cannot find one that holds my attention quite like it. Whenever my friends start playing a new MMO, "is it like WoW?" is the first question that always comes to mind. Usually, the response to that question is "no, but you should try it, you might like it." This always ends in failure on my part. For the gamer inside me, there is nothing that beats Azeroth.
I was a Launch Day, vanilla, and n00biest of the n00bs player. Having just moved to Jacksonville, after being stationed here with the Navy, I fell in with a group of gamers (99% on the PC), who had been gaming together for years at a local lan center. From that group, we all rolled Alliance characters, initially, on Magtheridon and tried to start getting a foothold as a raiding guild. Unfortunately, being a launch day and PvP server, Magtheridon didn't suit our needs due to overpopulation and the frustration of being ganked when you were just trying to level. Approximately a year after WoW's launch, a few of our friends discussed re-rolling on the newest server that popped up during that given week. Staghelm became our new home from that day forward.
On our new server, we created a guild known as Shadows of the Eternal. We recruited a ton and had full 40 man raids through vanilla and Burning Crusade. At times, I was one of nine, full time raiding warriors. I would say that we fit into Staghelm quite nicely with friends spread over many of the main guilds that were raiding at the time. My friends discovered that the Guild Master of one of those guilds, Insanity Inc, was someone who they had played with, for years, on Star Wars Galaxies. The world of MMOs is quite small.
Eventually, I moved on from SotE and into other well known guilds such as Moonlight Shadow (who were also formed in the very early days of Staghelm) and Ignite, of which I am currently a member with both my shaman and priest. I raided with both my warrior and priest in MS, and just my priest, mainly, in Ignite. It was around the time that I was raiding with Ignite, after I had moved to Sicily, that I just had to call it quits for awhile. Sicily is 6 hours a head of the East Coast and 7 hours ahead of our Central Time Zone server. My crazy self believed that I could get home from work around 4:30 and get up to raid around 2 am. I know, right? Ridiculous. It didn't last long.
A few months went by of solo playing, pugging dungeons, and the like when a friend had found a weekend raiding guild for those of us who were stationed in Sicily. About eight or nine of us transferred a character over to Llane to participate in Wrath of the Lich King raids. It was a pretty solid guild and raid group; well worth having the raid option for the weekends when we weren't out gallivanting across the Sicilian countryside. I took my warrior over and she has been on that server ever since. With the high price of a server transfer, I have no clue if I'll ever have all my high level toons on the same server again.
I can't speak for anyone, other than myself, but I truly loved, and still love, Staghelm. I have met some lifelong friends and folks, who may not play the game anymore, but I still communicate with on a regular basis. I'm not sure if this is something just general to those who have played World of Warcraft as long as I have, or an all-around MMORPG kind of story. In any case, I am ever so grateful to have met so many fantastic people, watch their kids grow, and be able to connect on so many levels that all started with our mutual love of a video game.
As for characters, I started off with my paladin, Mysticka, on Magtheridon and healed, mostly, as that was the only viable role at the time. I did have a friend who was the first Grand Marshal Retribution Paladin on Magtheridon, but he had much more patience than I did. Upon the re-roll on Staghelm, which was way before server transfers were made available, I began playing my warrior, Mystickah (now known as ßellatrix). I started her off as Fury in vanilla and eventually, she evolved to swap between tanking and DPS. Tanking became especially important in Burning Crusade when our guild maintained two raid groups in Karazhan every week.
I started to stray from the warrior a bit and leveled a priest alt, Starbrite (now known as Thraycia). I rolled her as a dwarf because back then racial abilities were everything and our guild was low on priests that could Fear Ward. I leveled her up and I was able to take her in once in awhile, but not all that often. Eventually, I was able to start taking her on alt runs. She was straight healing, as I've never been a fan of Shadow. I played as Holy for a long time, before switching to Discipline and never switching back from it. I still am a big of of the priest Discipline specialization to this very day.
Of my top three highest level characters, my favorite would have to be my shaman. From the get go, I always wanted to play as a shaman, but everyone I knew was on Alliance and, at the time, the class was only available on the Horde side. Thank goodness for Burning Crusade and the addition of Draenei. It wasn't until these later expansions that I really started making the shaman my main focus. Currently, my favorite spec (Elemental) isn't even all that viable for raiding in Warlords of Draenor. I could do better as a healer currently, but unless I absolutely am needed to heal, I prefer DPS.
I think that was a pretty good summation considering that I just covered a good portion of the past ten years. In upcoming installments of Words of Warcraft, I plan to cover a myriad of topics from my love of the Warcraft novels to my epic companion pet collection. In addition to WoW, I do play both Hearthstone and Heroes of Storm, not so much Diablo or Starcraft. If you're interested in getting some play time, I'm always down, just send me a message over on the Contact page.
