I started WoW midway through The Burning Crusade after a friend/roommate offered to buy me the game if I’d play. Prior to this, the idea of spending reoccurring money to keep playing a game seemed ridiculous. Although I enjoyed Warcraft 2 and 3, I thought, “why would I keep paying for one game when I could just buy a new one every few months with the money I’d be spending”? But, given that the initial cost was zero and the first month was free, it became a fairly no risk decision to give it a try. So I created my account, made a warrior, and was a terribly bad noob.
My recruiter was horde so naturally I followed suit. This is something I am eternal grateful for because who wants to be dirty alliance? (At first I wondered if bashing alliance could be bad for reader retention, insulting half of players and all… then I remembered Alliance can’t read – they only communicate through garbled letters and occasionally say “me luv u”.) My class choice was fairly split between Paladin and Warrior. I wanted a beastly, 2-handed axe wielding monster of damage output and eventually decided on an Orc Warrior. My first choice was ThornDrumheller after a character from one of my favorite book series, but it didn’t work out. I had recently watched 300 and took my next choice and named this fresh orc “Threehundred” on account of not being able to use numbers in a name. This was a first among a great many bad decisions that I made on my noobish trek through beginning WoW.
The warrior began (and still is actually) as a fury warrior. Without too much direction after the first few levels (and a couple of RFC runs when able) I eventually learned dual wield and promptly ran around with a dagger and a shield. In my defense, the dagger had the best damage I’d found at the time, and it just seemed to make sense that I’d live longer wearing the shield. He struggled all the way to level 26, eventually dual wielding daggers, and found himself in Hillsbrad. After 26 grueling levels, having to stop and drink repeatedly, I parked him in the Tauren Mill Inn and never played him again. Ok, so I did eventually, but that’s a later story. I liked the overall feel of the melee damage dealer but wanted self heals. Naturally, I moved onto my Paladin.
Back in TBC, you didn’t have to declare a talent tree ahead of time. You could sort of pick points as you went along. I sort of picked points that seemed immediately good regardless of the tree I was going down. I ended up mostly holy and the eventually had a proper holy spec. Of course, this was awful. I just didn’t know it yet. I quested about 40 levels in holy spec. This was a long, long grind. At some point real life got a little too busy and I ended up taking a long break from Wow. I think I was level 63 at the time. I never participated in any raids during this time. I did watch a friend of mine do kara and thought it looked pretty cool, but , level 63’s can’t raid.
Before taking my break, I also did a great deal of PVP both as holy and ret. I honestly probably would have hit max level during TBC instead of not getting there til later. Instead I left Paladin floundering in Outlands for a good several months, awaiting the day I’d return and bring it to greatness!…or at least max level.
