Thursday, January 24, 2008

Daily Grind WoW

I am not quite used to this blogging thing. In the future I'll be sure to start snapping some screen shots as I'm playing. To get me into the habit of the blog I'm committing to writing something daily during my afternoon break at work. Even if this is nothing but a quick, "Feelin' shitty!" I would like the blog to be daily Mon - Fri. Think of it as a late New Year's resolution. Let's begin:

I'm primarily playing World of Warcraft these days, coming back from a tour through several other MMOs (EQ2, FFXI, GW and LotRO) none of which quite had the hook for me that WoW did. I began leveling a Blood Elf Rogue Averaen with my girlfriend who is leveling a Blood Elf Paladin Willhem. We're both currently level 62, but as she often gets weekdays off from her retail job while I'm "slaving" away at the office I'm sure she's 63 by now.

We play horde side on the Daggerspine server where we're lucky enough to know several friends who are already level 70. Our band of adventurers is two groups of friends from RL that ran into each other early on in the release of WoW and play together in a pretty cohesive group now. There are probably 12 of us or so, with various degrees of interest in the game. Two of us are end-game raiders, my girlfriend and I who are still leveling and the rest filling into the casual raider slot.

Last night we took out Averaen and Willhem along with two of our 70 friends playing an Arms Warrior and a Holy Paladin and rolled down to The Underbog. Having two well geared 70s along the instance wasn't very challenging, but the experience was still flowing well. I did find myself regretting having our friends drag us through. I have completed 0 successful 5mans on my rogue without a level 70 along, and I'm getting eager to test Averaen against some powerful foes. It isn't too long until the level cap though, and I'll have plenty of chances then.

I was after a dagger from the last boss The Stalker's Fang which didn't drop unfortunately. Not a big deal, leveling gear is just a shiny bonus as the game is balanced to assume you don't have nice things.

All in all a solid night of play.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Introduction

Hello, my name is Vellon. Welcome to my blog. As the sub-text of my blog's title has revealed this is an MMORPG blog. Here at my blog we are committed to documenting in pointless detail the events surrounding my MMORPG hobby.

I don't often feel I am new to the MMORPG community, but viewing the experience present in the blogging community I feel like the new kid. To expound, my first encounter with an MMORPG was a MUD by the name of Aardwolf while I was in high school around the year 2000. I began playing FFXI shortly after its release and dabbled in the infamous Ragnarok Online. In 2004 World of Warcraft was released, I bought one of the last copies at my local store and became hooked.

Over the course of the following three point five years I put down and picked up WoW several times as I tested the MMO waters. I have played at different times EQ2, LotRO, FFXI Again, various asian free to play games and Guild Wars. None of these have had the delightful polish of WoW (and therefore never caught the girlfriend's attention for long) and now I find myself handing my MMO fund over to Blizzard again.

Tenuous plans exist between my room-mate and I to pick up and play through Guild Wars beginning with Nightfall. We plan to set aside a single night of the week from other responsibilities and use the time to plunge into Guild Wars. Both of us have dipped our toes into the game before and loved the complex skill system. Unfortunately neither of us have had the time to truly break into the game. Hopefully this blog will act as the added momentum for these plans to finally come to fruition.

This behavior of setting aside a specific night to play through a game (specifically Guild Wars) is patterned from the famous Van Hemlock my personal favorite MMO blogger. In his recent "schmooze-fest" he has informed his loving public that he will be setting aside blogging for a time while life demands his attention. His description of the motivations behind various MMO blogging led directly to me dusting off this Blogger account and beginning! So thanks to you Van Hemlock.