Adnil’s current level: 11

With the release of WoW’s expansion, The Burning Crusade, came 2 new races, a new continent for lvl 60+ and a new profession. I decided to give one of the new races a shot, the Alliance-sided Draenei. They are a peaceful race dedicated to preserving life in all its forms. They are remorseful when situations lead to violence and when any harm comes to a living creature. In an ironic twist of fate the Draenei came to Azeroth when they crash landed in Azuremyst Isle after fleeing Outland (the new continent), disrupting a large portion of life and infected some of its creatures.

This marks the first time I’ve paid some attention to the story in this game. If you’re familiar with the site you should know that I’m not the biggest fan of story in video games, but I don’t mind getting pulled into one. Many of the earlier missions are based around helping to cure or weed out infected creatures and learning more about what kind of damage the crash caused. Most of the time I’ve usually skimmed over the quest text and noted what I needed to kill and where they could be found. I find myself taking a little extra time to see what these people have to say.

Another WoW first for me is that I’m starting to really like Adnil, my Draenei character. Being a Shaman, most of his attacks are based on harnessing the power of the environment. He has healing powers and is learning fishing, mining and the new profession of jewel crafting. I’ve always used my other characters that I’ve created as pure killing machines, doing whatever they needed to to get on with their quests. Now I find myself healing those who have low health and helping out lower level characters if they become over encumbered by attacks. I’m also learning how to use his abilities efficiently to get the highest powered attacks in the shortest time taking up the least amount of mana. Overall I feel like I’m becoming a better player and that makes me want to use this particular character more.

One of the great things about Wow is that Blizzard allows people to create mods for the game that usually help out very specific tasks. For example you can have 5 different bags to carry loot that you pick up in your travels. Each bag has its own little window that pops up to see its contents. After a few hours of playing you quickly grow tired of having to open each window to sell things off to vendors. There’s a few different mods that can alleviate this by making it so all of your bags’ contents open up in a single, larger window. There are mods for many different aspects of the game, all intended to make playing the game a little more efficient so that you don’t get bogged down doing menial things. You can customize the hell out of the interface with many mods and some help you keep track of the auction house economy. My buddy uses a ton of mods that he started showing me last night and needless to say I spent a fair share of time going through my own today. The site I look to for my mods is WorldofWar.net.

There are various large cities that are kind of an “all-in-one” house such as Stormwind, Iron Forge and Darnassus. In these popular areas you can find every trainer of each class and profession, a bank, an inn and an auction house. A couple nights ago I stumbled upon Exodar, a beautiful, glowing underground city in Azuremyst Isle. I immediately tracked down the Shaman trainer and nearby found the new Jewel Crafting trainer. I immediately decided that this was what I wanted to do and quickly chose to take on Mining as my second profession (you can only have two). A few hours later I found myself with multitudes of copper ore and rough stone which I quickly started smelting and carving to increase my skill levels. You’d never think that making copper wire would be fun in a game, but this isn’t just any game, it’s WoW.

If you missed the first part you can read it here.