I didn't start with Vanilla. I know that's practically heresy in some circles, but it's the truth. The expansion that actually pulled me into World of Warcraft and never let go was The Burning Crusade.
Picture where I was. Everybody I knew was already max level, already geared, already talking about a game I'd never touched. So I rolled a character and started the long grind to 60, through the same Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones that hadn't really been touched in a while by everyone else. That part wasn't glamorous. It was a slog, and plenty of people bounced off the old world before they ever saw the new stuff. But then you hit 60, stepped through the Dark Portal, and dropped into Outland. Hellfire Peninsula is not most people's idea of beautiful. Red dirt, broken rock, a sky the color of a bruise. I loved it. After all those hours in the old world, it felt like somewhere new, and new was exactly what I wanted.
Then came the thing TBC is remembered for most, at least for me. Flying mounts at 70. The first time you lift off in Netherstorm and realize you can just go anywhere, the whole game cracks open. Of course, you needed a ton of gold to buy it then, so that piece took a while too. There were also the two new races too, Blood Elves and Draenei, and half the server rolled one. I didn't. I stuck with my undead warlock, the character I'd started on and have mained ever since. The Blood Elf paladin didn't show up until Wrath, once the altoholism really got going.
I wasn't raiding Black Temple or anything close to it. I did a little Karazhan, mostly with a guild that had more patience than I deserved, and I'll get into why the high-end stuff was never for me another day this month. But TBC is where I learned the loop that's kept me here for seventeen years. Log in, chip away at something, fly somewhere new, log out a little more attached than when I started.
People argue endlessly about which expansion was the best. I won't pretend TBC was flawless or would even make my top three. The attunement grinds were brutal and I bounced off a couple of them completely. But it's the one that turned me into a WoW player instead of a guy who happened to own WoW, and you only get one of those.
That's it for now!
Cheers!
Joar
I also started in BC, and I never made it out of heroic dungeons. In fact, I very rarely made it THROUGH heroic dungeons, because my group of friends at the time though a five man party was a suggestion, not a requirement. Oh, how terrible we all were back then.
ReplyDeleteBy WotLK, I had moved on to actual raiding guilds, but damn, I still miss those noobs I played with at the beginning sometimes.
I was lucky enough to get to do some raiding, just because I'd found a couple of guilds that new what they were doing that would take me with them. And warlocks were useful for sacrificing one of their minions and spamming shadow bolt, if I recall. But yes, I miss those days too!
DeleteThe thing about TBC is that the changes that came with it also made vanilla a bit more coherent and playable.
ReplyDeleteWhile I dislike some of the design choices that Blizz made with TBC, which were transparently about trying to make those 10 levels in Outland last for two year by making everything a grind, it sure smoothed out the 1-60 game.
I wasn't around for Classic and never really tried the rereleased version, but I'd heard that it was smoother, even though it didn't feel that way to someone approaching the game for the first time.
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