After reading about the upcoming expansion, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try again.  I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online and Everquest II for the past year and thought it might be interesting to return to World of Warcraft just to see what it would be like.  Like any good game, every now and then a desire to play the game pops up and you find yourself reinstalling the game.

Thankfully, Blizzard allowed me to try before I buy.  My account hadn’t been used since some time in late 2006 and was eligible.  With my excitement fairly high about returning to a long lost love, I started the download.  At 6.5GB in size, I was in for a long night despite getting an average of somewhere around 400KB/s download speed.  The good news is that the game was installing as it was downloading so I estimated a two hour download and started working on other things while I waited.  I forgot about doing any sort of game research.

At 10pm, the download and installation procedure was completed.  I logged in and cranked up the video settings because my new computer should easily be able to handle World of Warcraft’s graphics.  Then it hit me, I have no UI Add ons.  The stock interface for the game is pretty ugly and I forgot that Blizzard never implemented movable windows of any sort into the game.  I can’t tell you how jarring it is to come into the game and not be able to drag a window around by dragging on the title bar.  Why Blizzard never implemented this into the stock UI is beyond me.  The first hour of my return was easily consumed by browsing curse.com for various UI enhancements.  Discord Unit Frames is gone as is the sublime healing mod that came with it.  xPerl and CT-Mod still exist and have been updated to the new 3.2 client.  I remember Atlas and Titan Panel were staples of my UI back then.  Titan Panel has been replaced by FuBar but without a compilation download to get all the essential modules.  Apparently, I need Heal Bot Continued or Vodhu as a Priest.  The experience was confusing and daunting for the returning player because not only did these need to be downloaded but I had to configure them.

After a bit more than an hour, I’m sitting with a barely usable UI and that’s when I started to get acquainted with my character, a level 70 Priest.  More confusion.  Glyphs?  What the hell are Glyphs??  Oh great, my talent tree is empty and most top end talents have changed.  Do I want to spec Holy, Discipline or Shadow?  Hell what’s changed in each of these specs?  Do I need to specialize into Shadow to level to 80?  There goes another hour looking all this stuff up.  I chose to spec Holy because that’s what I was before and it seemed to work for me.  Only this morning, did I learn that for some obscene amount of gold you could buy a dual talent capability where I could spec two trees worth and switch between them.  What are Glyphs again?

Eventually, I had to get to the point where I could go fight something.  There’s no way I could spend two hours downloading the game, one hour downloading UI add ons, another hour researching talent trees and another hour figuring out what I had in my inventory to not kill at least one mob.  Ogres above Shattrath would have to do and I almost died to my first one.  It’s going to take a bit of time to get reacquainted with all the spells that I have at my disposal.  I’m almost thinking that it would have been better to simply level a new character so that I could get used to the game again.  I have a hunter that’s level 61 and I don’t even want to think about what it would take to level her to 80 or the changes to pets.  Oh and what’s this vehicle system I keep seeing?  My return to World of Warcraft can only be described with one word, confusion.  I’m on Dalvengyr as Kressilac if anyone wants to help save a lost returning player.