{"id":1378,"date":"2011-01-13T21:22:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T05:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1378"},"modified":"2016-12-06T17:27:18","modified_gmt":"2016-12-07T01:27:18","slug":"wow-other-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1378","title":{"rendered":"WoW: Other people"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been spending a little more time with Pleasance. She’s level 10 now, which means it’s time to choose a major. At level 10, WoW<\/em> characters gain access to three class-specific areas of specialization with their own upgradeable skill trees (or “talent” trees, as they’re called here). For Warlocks, the three specializations are Affliction (mainly improving your damage-over-time and draining attacks), Demonology (making your summoned pet more effective), and Destruction (expensive but powerful direct-damage spells). After considerable consideration and googling, I’ve decided to invest my first talent point in Affliction. I do this partly because of the zero-downtime promise: drain attacks kill the enemy while healing you, and Warlocks can convert health into mana. (Mind you, I haven’t exactly had much downtime anyway. I assume it becomes more of a problem at higher levels, when you have more hit points to regain.)<\/p>\n

The other reason I choose Affliction is a claim I saw that damage-over-time is less than optimally useful for solo play (in which anything that survives your damage-over-time long enough to get the full use out of the spell is going to get a few hits on you in the process), but shines in the context of an adventuring party, where you become the specialist in steadily whittling down boss monsters (while someone else specializes in keeping them from killing you). I figure this might give me a push to start looking for group. So far, I’ve been soloing it.<\/p>\n

In fact, I haven’t been interacting with other players much at all. I have some friends that play WoW<\/em>, but they’re not on the same server as Pleasance. (This is another reason I was experimenting with other characters.) Only two interactions so far stand out, and one wasn’t really an interaction, but more like a parallel action: I was off questing in a remote area that apparently is only much useful for that purpose, and found another undead warlock, with a pet just like mine, pursuing exactly the same quests as me, fighting the same quest-mandated monsters. We didn’t speak at all, but I occasionally paused to watch him fight, standing ready to step in if he looked like he was in trouble. There was a little flutter of fellowship-feeling, at least on my side.<\/p>\n

The other was an annoyance. In the orc starting area, someone was trying to recruit strangers to become charter members of his new guild. I don’t know why. He didn’t explain what he was up to. He was certainly up to something: he clearly wasn’t interested in actually having a bunch of newbies in his guild, because he promised that we could quit immediately afterward. He even offered money at one point, but mostly he was trying to recruit through persistent pleading. I declined, because obviously annoying behavior shouldn’t be encouraged, but he kept thrusting his petition on me whenever I stood still. Note that I only ever stood still when I was trying to talk to an NPC about a quest. The guild petition would appear in a special sub-window, replacing whatever contents were there already, to wit, the details of the quest I was trying to begin or complete. I guess it’s possible that the petitioner didn’t realize this was happening, but he should have at least understood that repeatedly asking someone to sign something they’ve already refused to sign isn’t a very effective way to gather signatures.<\/p>\n

Still, that’s pretty mild stuff compared to my general experience with online gaming. I haven’t run into any real griefing yet, and no PKing at all. Which probably shows that I need to get out and meet people some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been spending a little more time with Pleasance. She’s level 10 now, which means it’s time to choose a major. At level 10, WoW characters gain access to three class-specific areas of specialization with their own upgradeable skill trees (or “talent” trees, as they’re called here). For Warlocks, the three specializations are Affliction (mainly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[452],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mmo","tag-world-of-warcraft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4748,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions\/4748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}