Project Lore

Also didn't expect a nose ring.

When I introduced my girlfriend to the classes of WoW, I had two guesses in the back of my mind, a druid or a hunter.  This may seem stereotypical of me (sorry to the bra burners out there, but it seems that many women like playing a nurturing role even in their high fantasy), but my assumption was based on my girlfriend. Although, the statistics did play a part.  I have known a few locks played by women, but the whole aligning with dark magic and demons just doesn't fit her. Despite the high probability of Lesley selecting a hunter, I honestly thought she would go with a druid.  This guess was based more on the knowing her part and less on the numbers and graphs I love so much.  She is a rather earthy person, doing her best to be one of Al Gore's minions, giving to Goodwill, hiking around the planet and things of that nature.  The keyword there is nature, she loves it.  Perhaps it was the "primal connection to the beasts of Azeroth" that drew her to the fold of ranged DPSers.  Now that I have dwelt on this further, I should have had a Shaman in the running. Race selection was a little less straight forward.  At first she was leaning towards rolling a Tauren rather than the short and stocky Dwarves.  Apparently the switch was influenced by me a bit.  My description of the Alliance versus the Horde possibly labeled one side as the "bad" guys and the other as "good" guys, although that was not my intent by any means.  In lieu of describing the factions at all, I should have just pointed her to Blizzard's description on Horde versus Alliance and the races.  That would have rendered any subconscious feelings I have about the "misunderstood" Horde moot. A little personal history, I wanted to roll Horde from the start, but all of my friends went Alliance...After being forced into my faction choice, I was then forced into my racial selection by my ex-girlfriend.  I had basically no choice when I entered WoW. T_T.  Lesley's perception of the Horde may have been swayed a bit, but I had little to do with her selection of a stocky female as her avatar! I am a bit baffled as to why she settled on a Dwarf, or even the Tauren for that matter.  She has had little experience with high fantasy (or, and possibly more accurately, never really cared for it) as evidenced by not knowing what an Orc (or Ork) was.  In conjunction with that, aside from viewing SolidSamm in action, Lesley knows nothing about Warcraft either. Despite my best efforts, there is a slim chance that I ruled out her playing a human.  When we first started discussing the whole prospect weeks ago, I mentioned how unimaginative selecting a Human as a race was to me.  Who knows if she took it to heart, or even remembered it though.  Night Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves may have been all that was open to her.  Draenei you say?  Space goats may have gotten ruled out for being such an oddity until Ms. iTZKooPA becomes more familiar with the universe and its lore.  Perhaps as an alt if we get that far. For reasons unknown to me, it ended up being a stout, female Dwarf hunter.  I highly doubt she looked over and analyzed the racial traits and figured that a Dwarven Hunter would get a small bonus.  I would love to be surprised by such a fact though! The whole process took more than an hour to complete, and at that point we packed it in and called it a night.  Lilyterran, the fierce dwarven hunter with generations of training, has yet to encounter a single quest, or even load the opening cinematic.  Now to walk the fine line of helping while not hand-holding...A battle for another day. Oh, and I forgot to sign her up via Recruit-a-Friend.  What an idiot I am!  Think Blizzard will let me beg my way into it?  And thanks for the tips, keep em coming!

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I don't know about you guys, but I have enough turkey left in the fridge to make open-face turkey sammies for a week. Coincidentally, that is the perfect meal to eat while you are slaving away at those XP bubbles or taking down your next heroic. Quick and easy to prepare, with little need to devour it in a timely manner. Damn, I am hungry now.

I knew it was going to be fairly difficult for me to get a lot of play time in during the holiday, so I came up with a different kind of Warcraft-based goal. Rather than do a mad push to level 80 (which, I did my best at anyways) or get trampled at Walmart, I decided to try and sign up that 11,000,001st subscriber to World of Warcraft.

My brother was my first target, seeing as he is a retired hardcore raider. The numerous Priest changes, a demonstration of the differences between vanilla WoW and Wrath with my Holy alt, and general curiosity drew him towards the dark side. After playing for a bit, and seemingly having fun, he put the laptop down and walked away muttering something like “QQ in the channels and guild drama is why I left in the first place.” Damn you new Barrens Chat!

My younger cousin (who can now out bench press me...) was my secondary target. He took up gaming during the GoldenEye days, and has played most big titles since then. The little punk is by no means a hardcore gamer, but he is certainly not casual either. One would think that World of Warcraft would be on his PC gaming rig, and it was! It turns out that he had joined an Azerothian race without consulting me. Sad fact is that his friends set him up, having him roll the opposing faction so they could corpse camp him for hours as he tried to level. He didn't make it past level 20 before his experience was ruined, and has sworn off the genre entirely. I'll have to work on him further.

At this point, my hopes were dashed and the family get togethers had all past. With no more targets I sat down with little old SolidSamm to work his way towards level 80 and noticed that I had caught the attention from one of the last people I would expect, my girlfriend. “Your guy is so little” she said. “Yes,” I replied, “but he can do big things.” I quickly ran off to find the biggest mob in Dragonblight and showed her how rogues like to do it.

Perhaps, just maybe, I can suck her in? Tips, tricks, strategies and secret potions are appreciated. How many of you managed to ding level 80 over the holiday break? Or did you have alternative goals like I did?

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