Return to Warcraft

I’ve always quite liked my MMOs, although surprisingly when its come to fantasy RPGs I’ve tended to play more of the single player games in the form of the likes of Oblivion.

I had previously dabbled with World of Warcraft, but new seasons of The Guild always make me want to give it another go.  On top of that, other members of my Star Trek Online fleet are into it, so that pushed me to reinstall and resubscribe.  Not to mention, with millions of subscribers, its got to be worth a shot.

So having reinstalled, I immediately rolled a new Night Elf Hunter, just to rerun a couple of early tutorials to remind myself of the game.  That done and feeling suitably reminded of the basic game mechanics, I’ve now switched by to my original human mage character to try and just focus on him

I have to admit, playing the game is still pretty slow work.  When I’d last left the character I’d just moved to getting new quests in Westfall, and quickly found almost every spawn in the zone totally out of my league.  Since coming back I’ve been slowly picking my way through the quests, but its very slow and repetitive.   Most groups are only a level above me, but anything other than carefully isolating a single target and zapping them from a distance quickly results in death.

Which means, when most of my quests involve killing endless arrays of creatures trying to get a certain item to drop, it can get a bit tedious.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a ranged damage dealer.  I’m supposed to be squishy.  That I understand.  However, I can’t help but feel underpowered when any combination of 2 creatures will kill me within seconds and there’s pretty much nothing I can do to try and survive.  While I’m slowly making progress, I still can’t help but be slightly frustrated by the sheer amount of time I’ve spent dead and running back to my corpse.

I have to wonder if this is down to me.  I seem to have a reasonable combat strategy now, so my main deaths tend to come from another creature coming round a corner at the wrong moment, or sneaking up behind me while I’m distracted by what I’m attacking.  But I have to wonder if the Mage was maybe a poor choice for a starting character.

The minute you get in a team though, things improve immensely.  Granted I’ve not yet managed to get into a proper Guild or anything, but I did manage to team up with a fellow mage in Westfall and between us we started getting through the quests a lot faster.  We were still limited to only 1 or 2 targets at once but dealing twice the damage made a big difference to the pace.  I can really see how if I could get into a Guild, these early levels would start sailing past.

However, for now I’m still solo.  But I’m also not hating the game as much as it may sound.  Certainly at the moment its coming across a major time sink to get anywhere, but there’s still a lot that I like about the game and want to give a chance.

For example, there’s not just my main mage skills. I’m also working on my tailoring skills, which have let me quickly get extra bags for my inventory, as well as varying my character’s look to keep me amused.

There’s also the world itself. While the simple, cartoony graphics may put some people off, they’ve also allowed the developers to save on performance which means a lot of the world is seemless with no loading screens, which is really immersive. I’ve recently used the Griffin service for the first time to get quickly between locations and the flying system is fun to see in action, as you soar across the areas that would’ve taken some time to walk through.  From the point of view of an immersive world that’s fun to explore, World of Warcraft is great.

My main hope is that at somepoint I’ll exit the early levels of the game, and start getting to a point where I’m more comfortable with my character.  In City of Heroes for example, around the middle of the 20s, your character gets to a stage whereby they’re reasonably well kitted out with powers and enhancements and you start to genuinely feel like a superhero, and so I would hope something similar will click into place with Warcraft, wherein I’ll have not just a decent array of spells, but enough upgraded equipment that I can explore areas without getting into too much trouble as long as I’m reasonably careful.  I know, for example, that around level 20 I should get my first mount, which will greatly speed up travel, and that’s something I’m looking forward to.

So, for now I’ll continue to chip away at the quests, and see if some more meaningful ones start to come my way.  I’m enjoying exploring the world, so hopefully the quests will become more interesting, and I’ll start getting rewards that will make that exploring a little easier, without having to rely on constantly dying and running around as a ghost.