Levelling The Land, Revisited

[thessalian]

So, some of you may be wondering what I decided about the wonderful world of Warcrack. Some of you, on the other hand, already know, or have some idea.

One word: Gnoooooooome.

Well, also a Night Elf.

But mostly gnoooooome.

*ahem* So in case you hadn't worked it out, yes, I got World of Warcraft. There are things about it that I like better than FFXI. There are things about FFXI that I vastly preferred.

Ways In Which FFXI Is Vastly Superior to WoW
- City Maps. Or, more to the point, labelled fucking shops, okay? I do not see why I have to mouse over every single one of the chatty little fuckers just to find out where I can sell all the crap I've been collecting from beating toxic slime to death!
- Item Sales. To wit: the interface sucks arse. I ended up buying back a whole bunch of my crap by total accident at a premium and I am a little bit annoyed by this. FFXI at least had an intuitive interface.
- Aggro potential in mobs. Look, I get 'fast-paced game' or whatever the hell, but it's a little bit difficult to try to manage soloing when wherever you go, whatever you do, there's a whole pack of mobs who will gang up on you roaming around the place. I get that you're going to get attacked in these games. I do not see the fun potential in trying to complete a kill quest and getting dogpiled by a bunch of troggs or whatever the hell I was fighting.
- No acclimatisation time whatsoever. In FFXI, I spawned as little tiny Taru and got approached gently by some Mithra criminal and nudged. Gently. In a way that more or less said, "There's plot somewhere, if you want it, but it'll find you eventually; don't worry. Go out and nuke shit." In WoW? I find myself in the middle of a makeshift infirmary fighting ... well, members of my own race who had apparently gone nuts or something, I don't even know, but one thing was abundantly clear: "YOU HAVE SPAWNED DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF PLOT! ENJOY NOT HAVING A GODS-DAMNED CLUE!"
- The 'srs bzns' factor. For FFXI, it is easy to find free, comprehensive and very helpful guides to how to get started and similar. I went looking for those when I started WoW. Mostly I got adverts. Apparently, people want help with this game so badly that they're willing to pay for it. SRS BZNS. *headdesk* And the Brady guide is shit. So I feel like I'm floundering and I can't even turn to the internet for help without having to pay for it.

Ways In Which WoW is Vastly Superior To FFXI
- Windowed Play. In FFXI, it is against the Terms of Service to play a windowed mode, though there is a hack for it. Basically, if you try to swap between FFXI and something else (say, Firefox or AIM or something), your game will crash. Which means that if you happen to have forgotten to switch off Trillian and one of your friends who has a habit of 'talking' to your Away message to leave a comment for you to come back to later, AIM window pops up, and entire game crashes and burns. Cue the screaming, the flailing, and the coming back to find your entire party either pissed off beyond all recognition, or slain (and pissed off beyond all recognition).
- Background music. Seriously, the shit they play in FFXI is annoying.
- Griffons! Man, that beats the almighty shit out of chocobos.
- The whole 'walking back to your corpse' thing. Okay, this is a ... really weird thing, but provided you're not too far from a graveyard, it's useful to be able to amble back to your corpse and not have to start back up all the way from ... well, wherever your last save point was.
- Travel in general. There are towns and outposts and safe places. There are roads to them that are not crawling with evil. You can walk from point A to point B without having something big and ugly eat your face at lower levels! This is awesome!
- The new patch download system. I used to spend hours waiting for patches and updates and things to load and install before I could play the stupid game. Now, Warcrack has a system whereby this stuff can, beyond a certain point, be downloaded and installed while you're playing. I just ... that's just ten different shades of awesome.

Things I'm Not So Sure About Yet:
- Interface. It's a lot like DA, but without a pause button. I end up losing valuable beastie-killing time (not to mention HP) because I instinctively hit the space bar to pause and end up jumping instead. (Why is there a need to jump in this game anyway?) I also miss my macro keys.
- Character speech capability. I get a feeling that the catch-phrases when you click on a merchant or take your leave of one are going to get really old, really fast. And there's no Esc key fast-forward here.
- Graphics and layout. Some of it is phenomenally pretty. Some of it is as cheesy as anything. Some of it's both. I'm having a hard time deciding.

I don't think I'm going to get as invested in this game as I did in FFXI. Which is a good thing, because really my plans for Warcrack involve blundering around the place and beating on things when I'm in a mood, probably multi-tasking with chatting to people and possibly switching off the music entirely in favour of something a little more to my liking. But you never know; maybe I'll have more fun with it when I crawl out of the single-digit levels.

On the subject of levelling up, I've been working on a Seeking for my Cultist of Ecstasy over on Chicago. (Seeking, for those of you who don't know, is a process by which one's Mage gets the Boot To The Head of Enlightenment and is thus permitted to take a higher level of Arete, which means more raw magical ability.) For one reason or another, I've been working on said Seeking, from request to execution, since March. Now I'm at the crux of it, apparently, and have made my response to the ST and I can't find out whether I screwed it up or not until tomorrow. *whimper* Still, I guess this beats unholy hell out of waiting until June, or having to grab Jessiah at anywhere after 2am my time and not be able to think straight by the time we get to the crux of the matter. All the same, play-by-forums-private-message is always going to be a little agitating when something one is spending XP for actually rides on whether your answer makes sense and there's a (very understandable; poor sod must have been exhausted after the day he put in) delay in getting the response to that FPM. Apparently it'll likely be wrapped up by Saturday. Sometimes the Arete/Seeking/putting your character's power level and personal enlightenment into someone else's hands thing is really frustrating. (And has been since March. I admit it.)

I want a day off. Hell, I need a day off. Not 'I am too ill to be out of bed', not 'I have a doctor's appointment'; just ... I do not have to be anywhere and can sleep in guilt-free. Surely I can do that, right?

Comments

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

I spent my first few weeks playing WoW swearing enthusiastically at the interface. I'd forgotten about that until now. Obviously I got used to it after a while.

The search dropdown on the mini map makes shop hunting a bit less irritating. I have mine set to display repair shops and inns.

Assuming you're playing a gnome, you probably spawned close to where my demondwarf first showed up. Things do calm down a bit after the initial plotblast of doom.

WoWWiki is the site I've found most useful, although I've no idea how it compares with FFXI stuff. To begin with most of my advice came from friends who already played it.

One thing I like about WoW that it took me a while to warm to is the professions. It seemed pretty weird to me after playing Neverwinter Nights, Guild Wars and Dungeon Siege that my troll seemed to be spending as much time picking flowers as killing monsters. I've totally embraced it for the demondwarf though. My story for her is that she's a jeweller on an extended mining holiday, which occasionally necessitates killing monsters to get to the best ores and gems.

Jumping means you never have to walk around the fences to get into that field of evil pumpkins. :)

I think there's some way of setting your own macros. I've never bothered with it myself but I think it's in the interface menu.

Travel is indeed awesome. :) And I love being able to alt-tab out during a long flight and do something else until I land.

Merchant catchphrases aren't so bad once you're further from your starting area, as the voices and phrases are race specific and they aren't all the same.

If you need any advice, there seem to be plenty of us reading who can probably help out. Which server are you on?

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Search dropdown - oooooh, I didn't know you could do that. Awesome!

DoomPlot: It seems to have chilled a little, yes. Now that I apparently nuked CrazyAssGnomeOfStupid to death, I've wandered off as far as Ironforge now. (......Demondwarf? Warlock?)

WoWWiki: Yeah, that's about the only free source of info about the game I've found. FFXI had extensive blog guides to anything you could think of - crafting guides, campsite guides, quest guides, everything. Here, people are actively trying to make money off it. It gets on my nerves.

Professions: Eh, you get used to it. I got into crafting/profession stuff late in FFXI but had an awesome time with cooking. Plus I made a metric buttload of money.

Character backstory: I think my magegnome is one of those 'reluctant hero' types. Just a simple student of the arcane, world went nuts all around her, and ... yeah. HeroShit Ensues.

Evil Pumpkins: ......?!?!?

Server: ...Y'know, I have no idea. It picked one for me at random and I don't know how to look it up. But I suppose there's always changing the server, if I really must. Issue is ... to whose? Everyone I know is on a different server!

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

The search dropdown is also invaluable if you're doing mining or herb collecting, or if like me you can't spot a mailbox even if you're standing right in front of it.

The demondwarf is indeed a warlock. Usually accompanied by Jeff the voidwalker or Jessica the succubus. (I wish I could rename them properly.)

Professions: for making a metric buttload of money, I recommend mining. Even copper ore sells for obscene amounts in the auction house.

Evil pumpkins: there is indeed a quest where you're asked to destroy some rotten pumpkins, which turn out to be evil.

Server: on the screen where you select your character to log in with, look at the top right of the screen, above the 'change realm' button.

[doccy.livejournal.com]

I second that emoticon on WowWiki - it's pretty good, there are other guides out there but this is a good all-in-one-place-and-free thing :) One thing I had drilled into me - ALWAYS LOG OUT IN AN INN, or someplace where you're resting, like a major city. Rested XP is The Awesome :D

Also, the last time I played WoW was pre-cataclysm... So back then, it was mostly "Welcome to a field of snow, KILL ME SOME PIGGIES/WEIRD TROLL THINGS, none of which are aggro for a few levels".

(Also-also, from what I recall, many of the OMGMASSOFMOBS things were purely caused by someone getting too much aggro, then fleeing faster than the other folk around them).

[jedishadowolf.livejournal.com]

There are lots of blogs out there devoted to WoW but few related to the leveling experience. The best one for that however is Psynister's Notebook Also good for profession leveling guides is Almost Gaming. Hopefully those two will give you some good information. Also some more detailed (and some more silly) stuff can be found on WoWInsider. There are ads on those sites but none of the sites themselves cost anything. Also when you get hung up on quests, the best place to go is WoWHead. :)

[jedishadowolf.livejournal.com]

Also I fail at linking it seems since checking links took me back into LJ. Weird.
http://psynister.wordpress.com/ <--Psynister's Notebook
http://www.almostgaming.com/ <--Almost Gaming
http://wow.joystiq.com/ <---WoWInsider
http://www.wowhead.com/ <---WoWHead

[tyrell.livejournal.com]

And what's REALLY interesting is swapping to play a completely different class like a Protection-spec Paladin (all the armour. All of it. You will never die.) or Shaman (my personal favourite - amazing dual-wield damage, spells, healing, all of it).

I think the intro areas used to be very calm and slow, but they've brought the CRAZYPLOT intros in with Cataclysm. They did it first with the Deathknights intro (lvl55+) and people liked it.

[nakedblueninja.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you're having a bit of a bumpy ride! The gnome starting area was completely revamped when Cataclysm came out. At one point it was "go kill some wolves for some skins, then kill these troggs because they're making us mad, deliver a letter or three, then so in this tunnel to the larger world". Now it's, well... you just did it. Things get a little easier as you go along, as you get spells and things to help yourself out. What class are you playing? If you want some specific tips I've played a little of almost everything. And where are you? There's a chance you might be a little low for the zone you're in, Kharanos has areas for everything between 1-10.

[akari-hoshi.livejournal.com]

Try WoWwiki, Thotbot, WoW-Head or Alakzam. They've been a great help. Also, what server did you choose?