Remembering my first time

Misleading title FTW! If I took a poll of WarCraft players and asked them if the character they play the most is the first character they played, I would guess that the result would be somewhere around 20%. The people on the forums are more devoted and exploratory than the common player and are more likely to be playing a 2nd or 3rd choice (or more). The ordinary player usually picks one character and runs with it, for better or worse.

My first character ever was a Tauren Warrior named Glue on Khadgar server. I got the game one weekend and started playing and didn't expect much. It turned out to be far more interesting than I expected, and the Barrens was a relaxing place to play and it made the whole game feel gigantic. I got him up to level 20, and then recruited a couple of RL friends to play the game and I re-rolled so we could all start together. We wanted to be able to group early on, so we limited our choices to Orcs and Trolls. One picked Orc Warrior, one picked Troll Hunter, and figuring that we might need a healer eventually, I picked a Troll Priest. This ended up being my first main, Kadoo.

Back in vanilla warriors were pretty durable, and could do some ok damage. Hunters were lol-easy to level (send out your pet, shoot the target once, wait, loot, repeat). Priests on the other hand - and holy priests especially, as I was specced - were the nexus point for everything that was difficult about leveling at the time. I wore cloth, so I took lots of damage. I could cast a shield on myself, but it only lasted for a few hits before it was broken down, and my DPS was a total joke. Using wands back then was almost impossible because they didn't autofire, you had to click on it each time you wanted it to cast. My offensive spells were limited and did terrible damage and ate up a lot of mana, so I was drinking after each pull. It took forever to level, and my friend the hunter was always complaining about how slow I was.

But the group situations almost made up for it. We found a couple to play with - another hunter and a mage - and the five of us did all of the 5-man dungeons together. I remember very clearly going into Blackrock Depths the first time as a level 48 priest (still lagging behind the DPSers in levels) and trying to heal our 5-man party through the mob pulls. Our warrior wasn't an expert (who was back then, really?) so occasionally the hunters would pull aggro and I would keep them alive until they could find the feign death buttons, and then the aggro would dump on to me. I was running everywhere, trying to fade and occasionally fear and toss heals and keep my ass alive on every pull. It was a nightmare, but it was fun at the same time. I died many many times and quickly memorized the ghost run from Thorium Point to Blackrock Mountain.

I might still be playing the character, but two things happened that shaped the way I play now. First, we had a bit of a zerg guild. We were inviting people left and right into the Orgrimmar Outcasts, and some of the people were really obnoxious. Eventually I got fed up with guild chat and started kicking people out. It was a real power-trippy moment, and I'm not proud of it, but when I logged in every day and these morons would beg me to heal them through things and then not be civil in guild chat, it eventually spilled over.

The second thing that happened was we had decided to pug with a couple of other guilds and go to Molten Core to clear some trash to farm materials for fire resist gear. I ended up being the only healer in a 40-man MC raid. If you've never played a healer before you don't understand that they tend to feel a little responsible for the health of the people they group with, and sometimes they even take it personally when someone dies. Well, I got to watch 40 health bars go from 100 to 0 and I spammed out as much healing as I could before the raid wiped. It was a horrible experience.

The realization set in that since I was an easy kill in PvP at the time, my only role was to heal other people while they did fun things and got the glory. Meanwhile the best I could hope for was to get better gear... to heal other people with... while they had even more fun. About a week later I deleted my priest and left the guild to play a mage. Some months later I asked a GM to undelete it, but I really didn't want to play it anymore. There was just no appreciation for healers, and they could barely even farm to get gold for repair bills because back then healing power was different than spell power and didn't help us kill things. It was awful. Anyone who says they long for the days of old vanilla WoW and the way things used to be: Shut the hell up. The game is much better now. I wouldn't wish the life of a vanilla WoW healer on anyone.

I still have that Troll Priest around somewhere, and he eventually made it to level 72, but he's associated with so much past pain that I never want to play him again. I might roll a priest again but I'll never go back to him. He represents the way the game used to be and the playstyle of vanilla WoW and I'm happy to put both him and it behind me.