Memory Lane: When I was a Newbie

Averna at Nerf This Druid has tagged me to follow in her pawsteps (root prints?) and reflect on some of my memories as a newbie druid/WoW Player. I think I had a bit of an edge in that I had played City of Heroes beforehand, and had played much D&D (both tabletop and the Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter type games), so I had at least some idea of what a druid was and I knew about item/class restrictions :)

My husband and I were each given copies of the game and time cards as a wedding present from some of our gamer buddies. Not your typical wedding gift, certainly, but they wanted us to come play with them, and we were a bit low on funds at the time (that whole newly-weds with lots of student loans dealie). They all had level 60 characters already, but rerolled some new characters so that we could level up as a group on Alliance. This aided my leveling as resto, since I was rarely ever alone :)

• I was given the guided tour of the world around level 8, when our friends picked me up from Darnassus and walked me all the way down to Elwynn Forest so that I could level with my husband. The Wetlands' crocolisks freaked me out, and I nearly jumped out of my skin each time one aggroed and came after me!


• When I found what emotes were in the game, I hand-wrote a list of my favorite emotes and taped it up next to my computer. Then my pet rats decided it would make great bedding.


• I wore spirit gear. "...of the Owl" seemed to be the most sensible choice of gear for a healer, I just had no idea that spirit at that time was completely, entirely, 90% worthless (even more so given that innervate was a 31-pt talent at the time). At least the others were usually tanking and killing for me, so it wasn't too big a problem to have nil stamina :)


• I put my first 2 talent points in the feral tree. I leveled all the way to 60 as resto, and didn't take those feral points out until I hit 60 and decided to finally respec to fix it!
  


• My first "tanking" job was at level 50ish for Sunken Temple. I was incredibly nervous, had no idea what I was doing, and we wiped so much that we decided to just have the hunter's pet be the tank instead. The instance went smoothly after that.
  


• I intentionally kept the black bucket-hat Engineer's Guild Headpeice over upgrades while leveling because it just looked cool.


• I refused to wear robes, because I couldn't see how a druid could manage to run around in the woods while tripping over the skirts. I got over it at level 60 when I got the Cenarion Vestements... go purples.
  


• I didn't learn how to take screenshots until I was well into my level 40s. My husband and I got exploratory and decided to swim north from the Hinterlands and clamber up into the mountains that now house the Ghostlands and Silvermoon (CLICK to see full thing, I'm being lazy and not cropping it!):

(my husband fell off the cliff and had to corpse-run through the Plaguelands to get back to civilization).

• The first time I saw hurricane, it was in Ironforge outside the bank. I thought it was awesome and asked how I could learn it. Their reply was to laugh, and they said that any good druid would never have hurricane, because it was the 31-pt talent in the balance tree, and no druid who wanted to raid would ever be balance (or feral). Ahh how times change!


• I had heard rumor from beta-players that druids had a critter form. I was very upset to find that I had not gained a critter form by level 60, because I thought it'd be awesome to run around as a rat and then kill people who dare try to attack me.


• I absolutely hated the idea of pvp, particularly after being camped by skull horde in Redridge. I started getting a bit bloodthirsty when our friends hopped on their 60s and came to help, and earned me some HKs... that character is now a Commander in rank, and Justicar. Rawr!
  

That's all I can remember for now, but those were good times!