Hey everyone! I’m posting for you all to know that, yes, I am still very much alive.
But I got no soul.
Yeah, that’s right. I have no soul as of now. Nor do I have a life. Ever since I decided to pick up World of Warcraft sometime back in October, my soul has slowly been draining away into the empty void that is the addiction of a MMORPG.
These past four months, I have played that game almost every day. I have traversed the lands of Azeroth from the northern reaches of Kalimdor to the southernmost portion of Eastern Kingdoms. I left this realm and battled the Burning Legion in outland and am currently locked in combat with the Scourge of Northrend. My tale is that of death, sorrow, and destruction, but also the tale of life, healing, and accomplishment.
Yeah, huge fuckin’ nerd here. I played that game starting from a level 1 Night Elf Druid noob to a wise level 80 Tree. It certainly ate up my entire life. I spend hours on that game, for what, pixels? But those pixels mean a lot to me.
World of Warcraft is unique in that it is all about teamwork. There are three different ways you can contribute to the “team”.
- You can make sure every monster in the area is happy at smashing your face in, so that way the others don’t get hit; This is called tanking.
- You can do high amounts of damage to the monsters to make the battles quick and easy so that the next fight can be engaged; DPS (Damage per Second) is this role.
- Or you can keep everyone alive by intensely watching their Health meters and casting spells to get them back to 100%; healer is thy name.
Now, being a druid, I can fulfill all three of these roles. I can take the shape of a bear to have a huge increase to my armor and be able to withstand the damage, or I can take the shape of a sneaky feline to mangle and claw my opponent to death, or yet I can take the shape of a loving and caring tree, to better heal my fellow team mates to live another day.
The only class that can also do this is the Paladin, but PALADINS CAN’T BE KITTIES, SO WHERE IS THE FUN IN THAT?!?!
Anyway, moving on; I have become an addict of that game. It’s not the mathy nerdy things that got me addicted, no no. It’s the cooperation between the various roles that other classes play that got me. It’s the teamwork that is used to take down things many times stronger than you is what hooked me. Such cooperation within a game is outstanding, and coordination between different roles and classes increase the depth to the game even further. Now, the lore is nice, and I do like fantasy. In particular, I like the stories about the Night Elves, the Blood Elves, the Orcs, the Horde, and Arthas Menethil (think Anakin Skywalker). But I still feel that players fulfilling their role and doing so to help others is something that I have yet to come across in a game.
The reason why I chose to be a healer was because I felt that’s where I belonged. I can’t memorize rotations and priorities of abilities that Cat’s have to master. I’m an OK tank at best, but I find that I get nervous when other people are healing me (distrust from previous experiences), but when I’m healing, my ADD kicks in and I pay attention to every health bar, predicting when the next blow will come in and tossing around heal over time spells to help mitigate that.
Anyway, I hope I can start focusing on other things now that I have pretty much ‘beat the game’ (though technically, you can never beat it.). I might be posting to this more often, but beware, sometimes it will be about World of Warcraft rather than tech things that I used to talk about all the time. (I stopped following most tech stuff ever since Apple thought it was a good idea to put a mother fucking VIDEO camera into the iPod Nano’s.)