Saturday 28 August 2010

Which is the best way for someone to start in WOW

So after a year away from WOW my wife decided she wanted to play a game again that was a role playing game that had a bit of depth to it.
So after a lot of head scratching about login names and passwords we finally got her old account reactivated and she set off back into Azeroth with a new character.

Last time she tried out WOW we leveled together and to be honest it didn't work out that well. Being grouped together diluted our experience so we ran into level issues on quests rather rapidly. Also with me being an officer in my old guild I made the mistake of joining the guild with my leveling toon so hence got distracted by guild chat a lot. Over all her interest wained and the account was shut down when she got stalled at about level 12.
This time around we tried a different tact she chose her toon (a Draenei as I think they and the belfs have the more interesting starting zones for beginners being later additions to WOW) and set off in Azeroth. I basically pootled along on my main toon just be be around to give help when needed if she got stuck on anything.
Well it worked a lot better this time round her hunter is now level 16 after only 3 days and she is looking forward with anticipation to getting her first mount having carved a swath through the Draenei with her faithful bear.

This got me thinking for the lower levels of WOW is it really more beneficial to level up alone with advice on hand rather than leveling with someone who knows the game well? I think in our case with me being about all the time previously it took away that "shiny new feel" you get when you first step into the WOW universe. Also WOW does seem to be geared towards solo play at the lower levels to get a feel for the game.
Has anyone had better experiences of leveling together such as Recruit a Friend or have you found like me that the group part of the game really takes off when you have learned your toon by solo play and get into raids and guilds at a higher level?

I hope my wife does get her hunter a long way thins time as I am looking forwards to her experiencing raids and dungeons with the guild. Fingers crossed this time she will have a more fun experience making her own way in WOW rather than having hard bitten me in the background all the time.


Zetter

2 comments:

Feature said...

I had a similar experience when my husband decided to start playing WoW. We rolled two baby druids together and speeded through the quests as I knew exactly what to do and where to go. I thought I was being patient - waiting for his scrolling quest text to finish, letting him read the story etc.

Turns out he wasn't enjoying it much at all. Even though quest mobs were dropping like flies he wasn't having fun as he didn't feel he was contributing to the fights much. Since then he has levelled several characters on his own.

Now that he's comfortable with the game we actually have a lot more fun playing together. He has even branched out to tanking :D

Tessy said...

I remember when I started playing after the kids had persuaded me to try the game out. It was not fun at all when they told me how to play and how to do things, but once they left me alone to explore things on my own I really got into it.

Looking forward to meet your wife sometime online! :-)