Lost in the Land of Azeroth
July 2, 2007
By John

I started off playing WOW this past May, as I have wanted to try this game out for years. It is a blast, but they focus way too much on group play, and, unfortunately, everyone I know who plays is either on the European servers or has a level 70 character and doesn't have the time to play with newbies. That leaves me at the mercy of complete strangers who love to steal loot from me as well as pull all of the monsters down on top of my group causing us all to die horrific deaths. Even when I was playing with Guild members, it was terrible. When I was a healer, the tanks would pull too many monsters, and when I was a tank, the healers would abandon healing me and run away if one single monster came to them. A tank, for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, is a character in the group who fights the monsters and prevents them from attacking the weaker players in the group who are supposed to be standing behind the tank while healing him and/or casting spells.

So what was a gamer like me to do? Simple. I got my girlfriend to play with me. After about a month of swearing at morons in my groups, April decided she needed to buy the game and start up a new character with me on a new server. She, being a Diablo 2 fanatic, loves the game and is now completely hooked on it. She rolled a Paladin, which she specialized in Holy talents because she wanted to be the group healer. I rolled a Warlock so I could have my pet be our tank, and I could use my magic curses to cause massive damage to our enemies' weak points.

At the beginning it was rough, as April was new to the game. She wasn't used to the gameplay, nor was she familiar with the area. In contrast, I have been playing WOW for around two months, so I was playing at a much faster pace. This resulted in me pulling her into areas that she was not ready for, which caused our horrific deaths as well as a great deal of animosity in our game room. Normally I would yell at a healer that failed to heal, but you just can't do that when you don't like to sleep on couches. Fortunately for my back, April has greatly improved since then and has become a great healer for our group. Now that we have gotten past level 10, I have my Voidwalker pet to be our tank and things have greatly improved for us.

So if you have someone that you can play WOW with, I would definitely recommend picking this game up and giving it a shot.