World of Warcraft
After I finished my gaming career in Everquest 2 on 06/29/2005, I decided to try out the competition from Blizzard. Since you get a trial month with World of Warcraft, the risk was relatively low.
Compared to Everquest 2, the graphics of World of Warcraft don’t look particularly good, as they are “comic book” style (I’m calling it that now because it looks like a comic book compared to Everquest 2). However, the world of WoW looks significantly more alive despite the “comic” graphics. This is probably due to the map design itself. The Blizzard team was clearly more creative there.
Another advantage of WoW is the loading time within the map. There is practically none. Either it’s a gigantic map that Blizzard has designed there, or the system already loads it in the background, so you don’t notice anything when you switch. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Everquest 2. There, you constantly had to endure a loading screen when changing maps, which took up different amounts of time depending on the texture settings.
Of course, WoW only features the races that you already know from Warcraft. On the Alliance side, these are the humans, dwarves, gnomes and dark elves. On the Horde side there are Orcs, Tauren, Trolls and Undead.
The following characters were in my possession:
| Name | Race | Fighting class | Artisan class | Creation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alatariel | dark elf | Hunter (12) | Furriers and leather processors | 15.07.2005 |
| Brokkrder | Dwarf | Paladin (17) | Blacksmith and miner | 01.07.2005 |
| Miranda | Human | Mage (12) | Herbalist and alchemist | 19.07.2005 |
| Total | Ø 13,7 |
When creating the character, you had the choice for several servers. There was a distinction between PvP, normal and role-playing servers. In the normal and role-playing server there is also a PvP part, but this is limited to certain regions. While with the real PvP server PvP is possible everywhere. I chose the roleplay server “The Council of Dalaran” with my dwarf. However, I was a bit disappointed by the community. They did their roleplaying, but I also had negative experiences. There you fight with an opponent and then one comes running along and then waits until you are almost done and then knocks the opponent down. That’s not fun. Fortunately, this was completely eliminated in Everquest 2. There, you couldn’t attack enemies who were already involved in a fight.
The “Paladin” class was definitely very easy to play. You don’t do a lot of damage to the enemy, but since you could heal yourself, you lasted quite a long time and were able to defeat the enemy. I even managed to single-handedly take down a monster that was marked as elite. The level difference was only two levels. When I think of “Everquest 2”, I almost cry. There, I could usually only manage upgraded enemies when they were ten levels lower… In any case, the “Paladin” class is a good introduction to “World of Warcraft”.
As another class I chose the hunter. I didn’t like this one very much. He only really does damage with a bow. But when you’re on your own, you can’t fire a lot of arrows and have to go into close combat, and the hunter hardly does any damage there. From level 10 the hunter got an animal companion. Unfortunately, this one didn’t do too much damage and couldn’t hold the aggro of the enemies when I held the bow on it. Also this animal disappeared occasionally. But since you couldn’t conjure it up, but had to convert a normal enemy, the sudden disappearance was of course very annoying and gameplay robbing. Because of these frustrating experiences, I put the hunter aside at level 11 and created a mage.