My Nerdiness Knows No Bounds

So I went to the bookstore yesterday to grab something for a friend, and while Iwas there I stumbled across one of the Warcraft novels. Now, I'm a self professed nerd, but I haven't read a book based on a video game since I was knee high to a grasshopper. And as for my age now, lets just say that the original 8-bit Nintendo was current when I was a youngin'. But, I'm jonesing bad for WoW, so I decided to buy one. I was hoping for one with alot of Thrall in it, but the only thing they had was The Last Guardian. A little Ally-centric for my tastes, but I guess there'd be no Horde without Medivh, and he did have sex with a half-orc.

If you hadn't already figured it out from my orc profile pic or the fact my first two toons were a UD and a Tauren, I'm a proud member of the Horde. In the beginning this was mostly because my two IRL friends that played were Horde (troll hunter and UD lock) and because I looked at the Ally races and thought "I can be a human, a short stocky human, a really short pudgy human, or a tall goofy human with pointy ears... boring." As time went on though, I began to prefer the Horde for both lore and gameplay reasons. Thrall is the man, anyone who says otherwise is a fool, and Saurfang is badass too. Cairne is another of my favorite lore characters, and from a lore standpoint, Tauren are my favorite race. Like any good warrior of the Horde, I am disturbed and worried about Thrall's choice of Garrosh as the new Warchief, but, we'll just have to wait for Cataclysm to see how it plays out.

Long intro, I know. Anyways, the book is ok so far, its a pretty light read, I'm about halfway through it. The part when Khadgar first meets orcs pisses me off though. Granted, they're under the demon blood rage and trying to kill him, but his description of them reads like Nazi propaganda about Jews or white supremacists bullshit about African Americans. I'll give you a full review when I'm done.

So, back to the tale of my path to altaholism. When we left off. I had begun my life as a Tauren druid. I started on US Whisperwind, a carebear server, because thats where my friends were, and I didn't know the difference. For the first 35 levels or so of my existence, things were great and magical. Everything was new and exciting in my noobishness, and nothing frustrated me. I had luckily decided to level as feral cause that seemed like the coolest part of being a druid, I didnt know at the time it was the de facto leveling spec. Eventually I caught up in levels to my friends, we did some instances and group questing, it was fun. But I played a lot more than they did and soon found the need to make more hardcore friends in game. I joined a very large leveling guild that was planning to become a raiding guild. I didn't know really what that meant, but I joined anyways. And thank god I did, cause I needed people to talk to for what came next. The dreaded level 40 mount gold grind. For those of you who go back to vanilla days, you may remember that making 100 gold for your mount in those days was no easy task. Now, had I been smart enough to have made my first toon have two gathering professions, I might have had an easier time of it, but I made mine a leatherworker, and barely knew how to use the AH for profit, so as it was I spent hours and hours for days on end killing earth elementals in the Badlands for the high valued vendor junk they dropped. Guild chat was the only thing that kept me sane. But, in the end, it was worth it. While my hunter friend was still walking on two legs, I was riding my shiny new kodo in style.

It was at this point I really started diverging from my IRL friends. By the time I got my mount, I was around 43, my lock friend around 41, and my hunter friend around 38. I've always been a hardcore gamer, and WoW only made it worse. Soon enough I was up to 50 and they were pretty much in the same place, so we couldn't do much together. I started playing with my guildies alot, running Sunken Temple, BRD, LBRS, etc. I was starting to gear up and inch towards 60. Then came my first big frustration in WoW. My guildies told me I was gonna have to respec to Resto and spend my time in raids decursing and doing the occasional back up healing. But I loved being a killer kitty and going RAWR! I loved tanking looking at my fat bear ass. But, they told me there was no place for feral druids in end game.

I hit 60 with much fanfare from the guild which eased the pain a bit. I stayed feral fora couple weeks to grind out some Argent Dawn and Cenarion Circle rep. By this point, my guild had ZG on farm status, but needed another decurser for MC, so they got me attuned and took me straight there. It took us an hour just to get to the first boss, and then I spent my time decursing. Over. And over. And over again. I was bored as hell. I did not want to be a healer, never mind an off healer. Why had no one told me druids were next to useless endgame? What was I to do? Find out in my next installment, my hands are getting sore from typing.