Ways I Have Died in World of Warcraft This Month

So, a few years ago, my colleague Alex (of Not Your Mama's Gamer fame) heard me mention that I liked the Mists of Pandaria trailer. (It kind of reminded me of what I wished a third Kung Fu Panda movie would be.)



Alex had played World of Warcraft a while back, but had fallen out of it for a while. I had never played it before, but needed some distraction from life blues. So, she resurrected one of her alts and invited me in. This meant two things: I was about to go all-in on something, because that's how I do, and also, both our characters got triple XP (that is, triple the experience points), which meant we leveled insanely fast. In addition, Alex led me into a lot of instances (AKA dungeon crawls), where the high-stakes team missions yielded a ton of gold and a ton of fight experience. In the end, we skipped over a number of quest paths because we had outclassed them in rapid time. Anyway, here is my first alt, VoleuseCK, who I named using a variation of an online handle I've had since I was fifteen.


Human. Rogue. Level 82.

We also dragged along some friends, and had fun making new characters so we could quest as, I kid you not, a pack of roving gnome monks. We also joined the realm of some fellow academics, thanks to the wonderful Professor Cynthia Haynes, who gave a talk about World of Warcraft and theorycraft at a lecture series at Purdue. It was a very hectic, very silly time, and eventually we all drifted back to our solo habits.

What I discovered, game-wise, is that I hate Player vs Player mode. Like, it's fun at first, until you get to about level 30 or so, and then discover there are level 80s (or whatever levels topped out at, back then) just floating over your quest turn-in points, ganking lower-level players for the fun of it. BAH. In any case, after experiencing this way too often, I made a bunch of alts on a Role-Playing server, which was friendlier. I also made many, many characters on two different Player vs. Environment servers, AKA normal servers. I just checked, and here's my count:

1. Madoran (PvE) - 11 characters
2. Azgalor (PvP) - 11 characters
3. Garrosh (PvE) - 10 characters
4. Argent Dawn (RP) - 8 characters

I made it a point to try all professions, all classes, and all races. I named them based on variations of TV shows that I watched (Avatar: the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra got a lot of play.) All gendered as female, though. It's amazing the level of insult I got, playing female on PvP servers. Like, awful. Like, yes, GamerGate is exactly how misogynistic many folks prefer and perform their gaming experiences. In any case, I've mostly been playing off and on, mostly remembering to log in when I get a note from Paypal that my monthly fee has been charged.

Right now, though, I'm in the midst of a deep dive. I've been focusing on one PvE character, and in the past month I've leveled her from 12 to 68. This is, well, A LOT.


Dwarf. Hunter. Level 68.

I was really proud, right around level 36 or so, that I had played through all my quests without dying once. And then a boss respawned behind me. Oops. I've still been doing remarkably well, and I think I'm at a point of expertise where I can do what I do, even if I'm not as obsessively compulsive about stats as many folks that play are. Anyway, here is a list of the ways I have died in World of Warcraft in the past month:

• Standing waiting for a boss to respawn (reappear after a previous player has killed them). Boss respawned behind me while I was fighting a different character, and then I was mobbed by skeletons. NOOOOO.
  
  
• Accidentally dismounted from a dragon while flying very high off the ground. SPLAT.
  
  
• Thought I had very ably killed a series of salamander things successfully, then noticed my life draining away slowly. Turns out the salamanders had set me on fire, so I guess they got the last laugh in the end?
  
  
• While running through a fetch quest in a cave, I found myself slowly losing life. The tiny NPC background characters were doing a little dance around me, so I figured they were attacking, but I couldn't figure out how to attack back. Eventually, I just jumped off a cliff to get out of there. I later realized, after watching the tiny NPCs mob bigger monsters, there must have been a bug in the system--I was being attacked by something, but I couldn't see it to retaliate.
  
  
• In the midst of rapidly killing several ravagers, I accidentally attacked a PvP player. The realms exist in the same "space," but PvE and PvP players don't normally interact. So I got flagged by as becoming PvP for five minutes, which I realized after two level 90s circled above me, paused, and then dove down and stabbed me many, many times.
  

In any case, I've got a roster of ten hunters that I will probably be playing for a while. I'll go back to rogue eventually--DPS (Damage Per Second) is my preferred mode of existence. Maybe I'll try leveling with some other class, though. Warrior, maybe? Or paladin? Everything except mage, because, I have found, I am 100% useless at playing mage.

Okay, back to WoW.