My World of Warcraft Experience - The Golden Age

The anticipation of the release of World of Warcraft was sky high. My sister was very much looking forward to the game and had it on pre-order. I vowed not to play it because I had just gotten done playing DAoC for multiple years and didn’t want to get hooked on another MMO. I was visiting my dad and sister at the time of the release, when I got there they had just gotten back from picking it up. After she installed it I watched her play it for about 15 minutes and thought to myself “****, now I have to buy this game”. What can I say, I couldn’t resist. I bought a cd-key online and used my sister’s CDs to install the game that night.

My sister created her first character on a PvE server called Kilrogg, so I decided to play on that server as well so we could group together. I always enjoyed stealth classes, coming from a RR9.5 Infiltrator in DAoC, I decided to go with a Rogue. I mostly took to casual leveling, not having any real motivation to hit max level soon. Eventually I closed in on 60 and joined a guild that had just started raiding in Molten Core. While I did miss PVP, coming from DAoC, I don’t regret spending a majority of my time playing WoW on a PVE server, as I met a lot of cool people on there. There were plenty of battles in Hillsbrad Foothills, before the honor system or battlegrounds were released. Large scale zergfests were definitely a lot of fun, stalking and ganking horde that wandered off from their groups was the norm for me at the time.

This was still very early on, around January or February of 2005. My very first raid in Molten Core consisted of about 5 different guilds joining together. It was definitely a new experience and I really enjoyed it, while we were able to clear the trash to Lucifron, we were unable to kill him after many attempts, damn that impending doom debuff. :P After that night, my guild decided not to raid anymore until we could recruit enough people to raid on our own. I decided to take a break from the game to play more Quake 3, as our guild became stagnant and I got bored.

Three months later –

One day I decided to start up WoW again after about 3 months on hiatus, I never cancelled my subscription and I was curious what was happening in the game. My guild gave me the boot due to inactivity but I was able to rejoin them. This is where the ‘golden age’ of WoW began for me. My guild was well into Molten Core working on Shazzrah. I joined their raid that night and had the most fun I’ve probably ever had in the game killing Molten Core bosses. It was truly an exciting time.

This is where WoW became serious business! I saw the pretty epics drop and the thought that I had a chance at getting them drew me more into the game then anything before. Successful raiding combined with active PVP through Warsong Gulch really had me hooked. I was pwning noobs in the Gulch with my broken bottle courtesy of Plugger Spazzring in Blackrock Depths. We were on Teamspeak all the time hanging out, PVP’ing, running instances and the like. Does anyone even use Teamspeak anymore? And why did they have to normalize weapon speed making my sweet Barman Shanker obsolete?

On the PVPing front, the good times were definitely before cross-server BGs were you could talk all kinds of trash to other guilds on the forums then challenge them to guild vs guild WSG matches. That was easily the most fun I had PVPing, when you REALLY wanted to beat the guild you hated in WSG. Screw cross-server BGs, screw arena, it was all about the guild vs guild WSG rivalry.

Progressing through Molten Core was definitely the height of my raiding experience, everything was fresh and the raiding experience was brand new. Killing Ragnaros for the first time certainly had an epic feeling to it. Everyone was freaking out yelling “SONS ARE COMING UP IN 15 SECONDS AGAIN WE HAVE TO KILL HIM NOW GOGOGO!!”. The elusive Perdition’s Blade dropped on our first kill and I had the DKP to get it. Hello 31/8/12 2-shot ganking! We continued to farm MC while waiting for Blackwing Lair.

Patch 1.6 is released along with Blackwing Lair! Yay! The repetitiveness of farming Molten Core was definitely there and having brand new content rejuvenated the raiding experience once again. I think my most exciting memories of BWL had to be killing Nefarian and watching one of our paladins solo Vaelastrasz during his **** block phase (1 hour of attempts a night before the gate closes). Our whole raid was dead with Vael at 1%, the lone Pally popped his bubble and managed to get the killing blow, talk about some excited nerds on vent! I think killing Vaelastrasz for the first time during that period trumped killing Nefarian because of the closeness and intensity of that fight. Nefarian wasn’t that hard after you got past the initiate zerging phase and our first kill on him was very anti-climactic.

With Blackwing Lair defeated and BWL on farm status, the supply farming began for the AQ40 gate, I remember watching as Medivh was absolutely destroying everyone else in progression on that front. Eventually it was our turn to bang the gong and open the gates. The opening of the gate was certainly a world event of epic proportions, with hundreds and hundreds gathering in Silithus to watch it, I remember the server crashing multiple times during that night, as I’m sure was the case on every server. My guild was the first guild to complete the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, our resident Asian farmer extraordinaire put in the most effort into completing it so we decided he would get to bang the gong and receive the legendary Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal mount.

The raiding of the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj began. Some guild mates and I rolled characters on a new PVP server and we were having more fun with that then raiding. We made it to the Twin Emperors encounter before we decided to quit raiding and play on the PVP server fulltime. Raiding just wasn’t what it use to be, maybe we were burned out from it, maybe AQ40 just wasn’t all that. We were however looking forward toward Naxxramas and intended on coming back for that.

Patch 1.11 is released along with Naxxramas! Yay! We decide to come back to raiding, at the time our guild was still farming AQ40 and I got to experience killing C’Thun with them which was a very challenging and fun as hell fight. I remember using the proximity mod and hearing it go BEEP BEEP BEEP when I got to close to someone! Good times indeed! Naxxramas did once again rejuvenate the raiding experience for me; the instance had a TON of content with some very unique and challenging encounters. I loved the way it was laid out. We slowly progressed and watched as Death N Taxes led the world in progression speed, we actually weren’t too far behind them and we were leading our server in progression which was nice. We managed to clear all wings up to The Four Horsemen, which really was one hell of a fight! My favorite encounter in Naxx had to be Heigan, I loved doing the dance and watching ½ the raid die. They always blamed it on lag but we knew they were all terribad. :P

At this point I had to take a leave of absence to finish my last semester of college. My experience with the game before BC was certainly the most exciting time for me, as I’m sure is the case with many other people. Sorry about the long winded post, I had about an hour to kill at work and oradol’s post brought out the WoW nostalgia from me. I could of gone into way more detail about each instance but I figured this post is long enough for now.