My fiance's toon on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, is a priest named Arakhn on the Terenas server who just recently reached level 70. He's at the top level, at the pinnacle of his powers, right? Time to either move onto the next MMORPG or maybe think about leveling up another archetype, right?
WRONG YOU MAGGOTS!
(Insert R. Lee "Now Drop and Give me 25" Ermey or Lou Gossett Jr. or your favorite drill sergeant voice of choice here)
This isn't just any MMORPG here, you nooblets. This is World of Warcraft. It's the United States Marine Corps of gaming. Hoorah! If you're one of us, you can look down your nose at everyone else. If, you're not, we are at least very fun to hate.
And reaching level 70? Phhftt. In this game, it means NOTHING, you maggot. This is the one MMORPG where hitting the top level merely gives you the right to bust your little butt even more just to get ready for the next war...er game expansion, Wrath of The Lich King, which may be out as early as (*shudder*) November. You Will Not Be Prepared!
Okay, exiting the Gunny voice now.
Poor Roy. He has so little time for gaming that he did this mostly solo and without a guild. In other words, he worked really hard for this. But is he done? ZOMG, no! He did this predominantly on the Shadow talent tree, with a little help from the Discipline tree mixed in. He had NO Holy talents, which is the Uber Healer of the game. Forget Pallies, Shamans (sorry Capt. Kirk) or Druids. Nothing comes close to keeping you from having a long run back to your corpse than a properly outfitted Holy Priest. I mean, seriously, they can heal WHILE THEY ARE DEAD! End of argument.
So, Roy dutifully paid his 45 gold to the cute Night Elf Priest Trainer in Darnassus to redo his talents. Made himself a Holy Priest (40 talent points), plus Discipline (21 points) and settled back to wait for all of the Instance and Raid invites.
He's still waiting. After two weeks of absolutely NO love, he came to me. Well, gaming is a living for me after all. And after I let him buy my little Mage, Indigeau, a Lovely Black Dress (very hot little number and such a bargain at just 200 gold...lol), I settled in to work.
The first thing we did was hit The Armory online, and we started hanging out in the main Auction Houses. He figured I just wanted to shop. Sigh. No, no, no! We were checking out EVERY Holy Priest build we could find to see what they had that he didn't have. After a relatively short while, it was painfully obvious.
The Uber Holy Priests had this much in common: healing bonuses of as much as 2,000+ points (Arakhn, pre-Veronica help, was around 750+ bonus healing); as much as 11,000+ total mana (In WoW, this is your priest energy or endurance level). They also had uber amounts of companion Spirit (also in WoW jargon, this is what helps you regenerate your Mana more quickly), and they were all completely decked out in Purple gear (In WoW, this is the Epic level armor, weaponry, trinkets, etc.) that come with the highest bonuses in those oh so essential Holy Priest areas such as +healing, Intellect and Spirit.)
The Second Tier priests were half to more than half Epic gear, filled out with what generally appeared to be the best level 70 Blue (Rare) gear for priests. No green gear (Uncommon...the hierarchy here is Purple-Epic, Blue-Rare, Green-Uncommon, and so forth. In WoW, green gear is so frowned upon by level 70s that you might get reported for spamming if you advertise any of it for sale on the Trade Channel.)
Roy had (gasp) less than 8,800 mana, had way too much Stamina, Strength and Agility AND (are you sitting down?) he still had Green level gear...a LOT of green level gear. Okay, HALF his gear was green. Even the one bit of Epic Gear he had was still low range epic for this class, the three-piece Soulcloth Embrace set. NOT the best Epic for priests, but it was a start. The rest were Blues, and not all level 70 Blues at that. Some were mid-sixties level stuff that he hadn't bothered replacing yet.
So, we've been slowly improving him. Arakhn makes a ton of gold just skinning and mining as he has both professions at the top level 375. (Like I said, this game is a time soak monster. You have to have a job in it. You COULD have TWO jobs--two primary professions--and still have more secondary jobs you can also build to 375, like fishing, cooking, first aid, etc. The level 70 quests are all good for collecting more gold fairly quickly, too.
So far, we have his heal bonus up to about 1,100 although, oddly enough, we've dropped his mana back from a nearly adequate 9,850 to 9,150. This is Roy/Arakhn's other problem in building a top flight Holy Priest. Sure, we've replaced all but three of the green items and gotten some very cool and appropriately priestly Purples, but the guy is still a microbiologist and helping research a book on the side. This means zip time for long instances, having to drop things at a second's notice to answer a question from an editor, and if there is ONE GAME where the crowds tend to be a bit youthful and removed from Real Life Responsibilities, it's World of Warcraft. That is one of the game's serious drawbacks. I actually left a dungeon mission because my little Julian was having a nightmare that woke him up. When I got back online after soothing him and reading him a story and getting him back to sleep, I ran into some of the guys on the instance. One of them actually said he DID NOT understand why my son's nightmare was more important than the game. Perma Ignore for that butthead.
Some guilds will actually insist that you fill out applications explaining in detail why they ought to accept you. Some guilds promise confidentiality. How sweet. They won't tell everyone if they think you are a joke toon.
What some people in this game do not realize is that it IS a game. None of this skillfully rendered universe actually exists, and most adults who play, like Roy and I, play it to ESCAPE all the RL stuff for awhile, like job applications. For a game guild. I asked one guy how many words he wrote for his guild application. He said he wrote 2,000 words and had to stop himself. Since I knew this guy was also applying for college, I asked him what was his longest application essay on why he ought to be accepted at a university. He said he stretched one to 900 words once. He saw nothing odd about this at all. Creepy.
Anyone who tends toward an obsessive compulsive personality complex that avoids real life interactions and real life responsibilities and relationships probably should NEVER play WoW. It can be so immersive that the game can take over.
Roy still has no time to instance or raid, and all of the uber 70 level gear comes as "bind when picked up." It is soulbound to whoever picks it up or wins the roll for it. Meaning that the game, which made a HUGE point of the fact that you can play as you wish and solo all the way up if you don't have time to group, is now insisting at the top level that you do all of these instances and quests and dungeons in order to get the gear you need. Not going to happen in this lifetime.
And for someone with little time to play, completing an event and losing the roll for the equipment you need gets old VERY fast. Any other priests in your group will be going after the same armor and weaponry. The Mage might roll for both, if the weapons or equipment have enough Intellect and Spirit attached. The Druid might compete for the weapons, if they carry enough stamina. You see his dilemma.
So, this morning, Roy was back to Plan B on his level 70 priest. Frack the heals. Frack being Holy. Besides, after putting himself through all this, he mostly feels like killing lots of things anyway. He's going back to being a Shadow Priest for the massive DPS he can dish out, and the Uber Gear he will go for is the kind he can get as his leisure, at his own pace. He's going for the gladiator gear and he's already worked out how much he needs. It is rather unreal how much he needs. I needed a fricking calculator to add it all up. To get all the gear he wants, he'll need just under 300,000 honor points total and 410 badges from various battlegrounds.
I'm suggesting he take a break from the game and think about it. By the time he earns all that, the Lich King expansion will be out, and all of that Uber expensive and time consuming Epic gear will be worth nothing more than a quick trip to the vendors for silvers and coppers on the massive amounts of gold and effort it took to get them. Then, the target will be the new Uber level 80 gear.
Like I said, this game is voracious in what it demands. No wonder it's the MMORPG you probably play too much.
Depth: Nothing compares. Capes are the least important piece of armor. There are 300 green or uncommon capes to choose from in the game, and that does count the poor capes (gray), or the common capes (white), or the rare capes (blue, as stated before) or the Epics. The time and care taken to render each of the regions on all three continents (yes, I said continents) is something to sit back and enjoy on its own. When you are in the desert in Tanaris, it feels like you are in the desert. When the sand storms begin, you can watch individual grains of sand blow past you. When you are in Un'Goro Crater, it feels like you've materialized in the Age of the Dinosaurs. And ya, that booming and ground shaking you feel is that one that looks a lot like a huge T-Rex looking for a snack.
PVP: Rich amounts even on the PVE servers with constant duels being fought everywhere. There are raids and Arena teams and and lots of other opportunities for Alliance vs. Horde battles. A favored pastime seems to be taking your new level 70 over into the newbie zones of the opposing faction and ganking everything in sight. You are safe from ganking on the PVP servers only in the major cities; you are on your own and a target everywhere else.
Role Playing: the biggest disappointment. The only RP even on the RP servers, which Blizzard virtually ignores in terms of policing behavior, is ERP or, more accurately, JERP, for Juvenile Erotic Role Playing and some even more truly sicko stuff than that. These were probably the kids who had the naked G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls around the house. True arrested development.
Story Line: Very original. Sure, there are elves and orcs, which hardly seems original, but get into it a bit, and you're see the thought put into the arcs: the Horde coerced into an alliance with the Burning Legion. The plague released to wipe out the humans of Lordaeron, the Elves losing their immortality and splitting into factions, one good, one evil, the Night and the Blood, trying in vain to recover their lost powers. It's good stuff, and because it is a story unto itself, it is virtually open ended, unline Star Wars, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings and even the upcoming Conan, where the stories have existed, with endings, for years with no new material. If they ever do a Narnia MMORPG, it will have the same problem.
Servers: A rather ridiculous number. There are more than 200 in the U.S. alone. I haven't even bothered to count them all. The bad news is, you may meet a lot of people who play WoW, but they will never be on your server. The good news is, you can pull a Leeroy Jenkins dozens and dozens of times and still find a place to play where no one knows what a sorry excuse for a Marine...er player you really are.