When we were young and noobish

Gnomeaggedon Noobaggedon over at Armeggedon’s Coming has fireball spammed all the mage bloggers with a request to share our noobish moments.

Ah, the days of our first characters.

Mine was a night elf warrior.

I ran into noob problems before I got to the first questgiver.

How the fuck do I move?

I had been playing another MMORPG prior to trying out WoW. In that MMORPG, all the movement was done by clicking. You want to go over there? Click! And it was a left-click!

My biggest fear before playing the game was that the movement was controlled by the keyboard, standard ASDW crap like in an FPS. I SUCK at FPS, mostly because of the keyboard controls. A friend had assured me that all the movement could be done with the mouse. He just never went into specifics on how to go about that.

So here I am, on a trial account, clicking like mad and going nowhere.

Movement NOOB

Thankfully, I had borrowed another friend’s disks to load the game and he had thoughtfully included the instruction manual. OK, problem solved.

I get a couple quests under my belt and get to the part where I have to go into some cave to kill some big, bad something. No problem!

A corpse run or 4 later…

I get randomly invited to a party.

Sure, I’m getting my ass handed to me by these little imps that shoot fire and roast me before I can get within range, some help would be nice.

We roll out, I think it was a hunter that joined with me, and we’re making some progress. We get some drops, there’s a chest with some greens, and my first introduction to the loot window.

What are the choices? There’s these little dice that say NEED and this little pile of gold coins that says GREED.

My perception of the loot choices was: Well, I don’t want to be greedy. That sounds bad. I don’t even know what these items are or what they are used for. I’m going to hit NEED and the game will decide if that item is something that my character needs and can use.

Loot NOOB

The hunter doesn’t say anything as I’m merrily NEEDing away on stuff and I’m getting more and more confused about why I’m getting all this neat stuff. What the hell am I going to do with it all?

We complete the quest and the other person goes afk in the inn.

I take the time to peruse the instruction manual for some help on the whole NEED/GREED thing.

Oops.

By this time, the other member of the party has logged out. But I kept their name so I could whisper an apology to them when I saw them again.

Except, I’m on a trial account. I can’t whisper anybody unless I’m on their friends list. After that supreme display of noobishness on my part, I’m pretty sure I am NOT on their friends list. Maybe their ignore list.

During all that, I had no idea how to communicate in a party, I only know that when I hit enter I get a chat frame. In the other MMORPG, you would select the tab of the channel you wanted to talk in before typing. Typing in Combat Log didn’t seem to do much.

Coomunication NOOB

I somehow finish up the beginning area and was tasked with taking a parcel of something or other to Darnassus.

Running, running, sticking to the path, running, pass the gates, leave the path and cut across a field, stop running. Well, keep running but no forward movement.

I have no clue how to move the camera so it takes me forever to realize that I’m caught up on a lamppost.

Who the hell puts a lamppost in the middle of a gawdamn field?

And why did it have to be directly in my way?

I didn’t know how to back up. I was stuck on that lamppost for a good 2-3 minutes while I’m trying to figure out how to go sideways just using the mouse.

That was hardly the last piece of scenery that would prove to be hazardous to me. If there was a post, a fence, a particularly thick clump of grass, a small rock, you could lay money on me being the one caught up on it.

Navigation NOOB

With a little help from my friends, I manage to make it into my late 30s. I’m feeling pretty good, I can solo a lot of stuff that’s level appropriate for me. I’m off the trial account, I can use the AH, the mail system, I can whisper people, and I know how to talk in party and guild!

Then comes the fateful invite to run SM.

I have no idea what an SM is. At least I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what I think it could mean…

I don’t know where this SM-thing is.

I don’t know these people. I don’t know how they even know I exist.

I haven’t done a lot of grouping since my fateful night in Teldrassil with the hunter and what little grouping I have done since was with friends.

They want me to tank.

I do know that I am an arms/fury spec and that prot is the tank spec. But I have a shield.

I tell them as much. Arms/fury. Have shield. Never tanked before. I don’t know what or where this SM is.

They say not to worry, you’re wearing mail, just equip the shield and use Thunderclap. We’ll summon you.

Summons accepted. New area discovered.

I figure out that SM is the Scarlet Monastery and that we’re going to be entering the Cathedral.

Great. Swap out my weapons for a sword and board and follow the crowd.

They insist that we use the in-game party chat. At this point, I’m still very leery of revealing my gender, especially to strangers that *obviously* know what they’re doing, so I tell them that my mic is broken, but I can listen.

I remember we had my warrior, a priest, a hunter, a shaman, and a jackass of some random class.

We go in and immediately I’m lost.

In my previous MMORPG, the tank DOES NOT pull. The party roles were 1 tank, 1-2 healers, PULLER, and 4-5 DPS (parties of 8). Someone in a ranged class was specifically assigned to pull the mobs to the group. That person was not the tank.

So I’m chilling, waiting for the hunter to do some pulling. The hunter is waiting for me to pull. The jackass is yelling for the pull. The priest is DCing. The shaman is screwing around.

The run was awful, even after the jackass left and they got a feral druid to tank. The hunter had no concept of threat or why he didn’t want it. The shaman was bouncing off the walls. The priest was still disconnecting. I was desperately trying to figure out what I should be doing in the chaos that might be helpful.

NOOBs all around. Except the druid, he was decent.

I did a fair amount of BGs on my warrior in the younger brackets, I was pretty well enamored with WSG. I didn’t have any PvP gear or a PvP spec, but I was going to get stomped by twinks anyway.

This was on an RP-PvE server. I was NEVER flagged by my own choice. When I wanted to PvP, I would go into a BG. I kept my little worlds rather separate. The few minutes that I was flagged upon leaving the BG was hardly of any consequence as I always stayed in town until it faded.

It was my habit, as this was an RP realm (NOOB*), to switch into “town clothes” when I entered a capital city. Nice shirt, styling pants, boots, a cape, and two sweet katana-style swords with this cool black, swirly design on the blade. Every girl’s crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed elf.

 

Super fly warrior out on the town

 

 

I finished up some capture-the-flag fun and zoned into Iron Forge. But I wanted to be in Storm Wind.

As you probably know, there are 2 methods of getting between the 2 cities: the tram and the gryphons.

I always took the gryphon unless I was escorting somebody.

Except that day. For no known reason, I hop onto the tram.

Onto the same car as the level ?? Forsaken rogue that’s waiting for some flagged nubcake like me to come along.

I wouldn’t have stood a chance even if I had been in full plate, but it was so much more insulting that he was able to cut through me with no damage mitigation at all. And got blood on my good clothes. I fucking got mugged on the tram.

Dumbass NOOB.

* I would like to clarify that I am not calling those that choose to play on an RP realm noobs. If it’s your cup of tea, you drink all you want. *I* was a noob for playing on an RP realm. A friend chose the realm, but I had no intention of typing out any sort of shit that my character was doing. I get my RP through good-old-fashioned table-top where we know that 99% of what goes on is OOC and we don’t care. Where are the Cheetos?!?!?!

More recently there was the failure to reset my secondary spec action bars after rearranging my primary bars and zoning into Arathi Basin with half my spells gone.

Or my first trip into Ulduar to fight XT and I got too far from my healer.

Opening a portal to Org instead of Dal and then opening the Dal portal directly on top of the Org one, without intending to create a portal roulette. If I had done it on purpose, it would have A) been hilarious and B) a portal to Stonard.

And there’s always the classic: teleporting myself to Dal instead of portalling the party.

I still have no clue what to do in AV other than following the zerg like a mindless lemming. I may be a perma-noob on this one.

Those are the noob moments that are burned into my brain, I’m sure there were more but they were so traumatic that I have blocked the memories.

Someone needs to pick up the noob-baton, don’t make me call you out!