Day 4 Blogging Challenge

Day 04 – Your best WoW memory

An oldie but for me, a goodie.

When my tabletop D&D group was breaking up we discovered that we were all playing WoW; ranging the experience gamut from only a handful of hours played to seriously raiding Sunwell.

The idea was born to replace our Wednesday night D&D shenanigans with a WoW night where we would all meet up and run instances together and do quests and such.

This was back before you could turn XP off so it was very challenging to keep a group of people within an acceptable level range while they still wanted to level professions and collect gear the rest of the week. So we would generally set a level cap for the week, try to be between 25 and 28 by next Wednesday so we can move on to X instance.

This was also back before you were automatically given access to level-appropriate flight path destinations – you had to run to each flight master to earn that destination.

And this was back when you didn’t get your first ground mount until 40.

(Insert uphill, in the snow, barefoot, and both ways sort of joke here.)

We were running into issues with people not getting the correct flight paths to get to the next instance we wanted to do (and you couldn’t mass summon and there was no queuing for a dungeon) so a lot of time was wasted on Wednesdays as the two people that had the correct flight point ran ahead to the dungeon summoning stone and then summoned the rest of the party. But then those people wanted the flight path so we would have to run back to the closest flight path and hope it was connected to something they already knew.

We spent far more time running around then we spent actually killing anything.

Tel had a bright idea and a bit of spare time to plan it out.

Since we were running around all the time anyway, why not just devote a night to it and get everyone all the flight paths we could?

So he plotted a course that would get us the most important paths to span the continents and get us where we would need to go.

I don’t remember what level we were and all my screen shots from that era have unfortunately gone to the recycle bin in the sky, but we had to have been under level 40. I think we did this around the time we were working on Blackfathom Deeps so we were most likely in our 20s.

We met up and stripped down to our guild tabards. Tel led the way as a string of nearly-naked characters (mostly blood elves) began their footrace across Azeroth to find flight paths.

Mind you, this was on a PvP server. We didn’t get much griefing although we did get lots of people following us around, asking what the hell we were doing. We even had higher level characters escort us for legs of our journey through hostile territory. This proved to be very useful as we could just about aggro an entire zone by setting foot in it.

I had a blast as our ragtag little parade wound its way through the different zones, always being chased by something fearsome with a character level of “skull,” and sections of the map opening up that we had no business seeing for another 30 levels.

We died. A lot. But it was also a lot of fun and made our next few months of questing so much easier.