This is a response to the Blog Azeroth Top 10 WoW Memories challenge, which they nicked from Tankspot.

Maybe I'm showing my age here, but my most impressive memories were not of specific dungeon runs, but of stages that my toon(s) and I went through. Everything blurs together for me! Also, Warpy's formative days were before The Burning Crusade came out.

1. Warpy's early explorations: They got him killed a lot, but I had fun! No idea what was around the next bend until I actually got there, unlike your modern player who levels according to a script. I did an earlier blog entry about these.

2. My first guild: Kul Tiras was about a week old and Warpy was level 14 and scurrying through Goldshire on some errand or another and received a random guild invite from the Council of Ragnarok, which I deemed him ready to accept. We were all brand new players and knew absolutely nothing about the game. Other than that, we had little in common except that we were leveling and enjoying ourselves! The dwarves taught me about fishing, and our GM was into PvP and regaled us with tales of his exploits. I had crazy ideas about using Warpy's abilities to advance the guild:

Warpy: "If two of you come with me, I can go to different places, and we can summon the whole guild to get the flight path!" Only Aliseas took me up on that one.

Once we tried (3 DPS) to run Deadmines. We didn't get to the instance, and I was really struggling because I hadn't figured out how to zoom in my camera.

Warpy: "Hey, if I give you all healthstones, you can use them to get hit points back."
Deatharrow: "No, hearthstones are soulbound."
Warpy: "It's a healthstone. Warlocks make them. Look!"
Deatharrow: [Trade cancelled]

As far as I know, we never ran a single instance as a guild, but guild chat was great. And we had a tabard that half of us couldn't afford!

3. My first sight of Horde: I was working on the Succubus quest chain, and had to get to the Barrens; knowing only that they were SE of Ashenvale. So I sent Warpy to eastern Ashenvale at level 20 and there were all these skull-level hostile Horde! I had no idea of the difference between a PvP and PvE server. I managed to aggro the guards at Splintertree Post and get Warpy killed yet again. I snuck around in the woods for a bit, but couldn't figure out how to ninja past the Mor'shan orcs.

4. Meeting NooYawk: Warpy was about level 30 by then, and NooYawk was asking reasonable questions in Hillsbrad to find quest-givers, quest objects, etc. Everyone howled "Go look it up on Thottbot", which he insisted was boring and impersonal. I answered what questions I could, having learned most of the answers the hard way myself. NooYawk turned out to be an older player like myself, liked fishing, exploring, and questing. We ended up helping each other with quests and information.

5. Farming UBRS keys: Eventually, I moved on a guild that was preparing for end-game, Aes Sedai. It had no website or Vent/Teamspeak though. As a warlock in WoW 1.10, I had a tough time getting groups for instances, as the guild only ran Strat and Scholo and had lots of mages with better DPS and better crowd control. So I leveled up doing solo quests mostly. We did have a GM with plans to gear us up who organized run after run through Lower Blackrock Spire, but Warpy was allowed to come to provide soulstones. I finally managed to persuade my guildies to accept healthstones! Each run would usually net us one needed gem on the average, so it took a few weeks before the first UBRS run.



6. Aes Sedai breaks up: Once we got UBRS on farm and had enough gear to start ZG, our best players, including the GM, left for real raiding guilds, you know, the ones that were in... Molten Core!!! It wasn't really a case of callousness on their part; there had been a lot of drama, which I mostly missed, and they went to different guilds because they'd had it with one another. I was not ready to raid or to move on at that point, so I did not look for a new guild. I'd made a lot of friends in Aes Sedai, and they were pretty much gone. I actually retired Warpy, and started leveling a rogue, who was invited to a new guild that NooYawk belonged to.

Sadly, that guild really was not getting ready to raid, and politics drove NooYawk out shortly after I joined. So I farmed dreadsteed mats, and watched guild chat, and never got to know anyone there. Just as I was farming the last of the gold for the dreadsteed mats, Warpy got an e-mail from <Unknown> with 25g attached. Nooyawk was quitting the game and deleting his toon, but first he'd sent 25 gold (a fortune before The Burning Crusade) to everyone on his friends list.

7) Getting Warpy's Dreadsteed: It took three months to farm the mats, and once they were done, I had no solo activity left for Warpy (no PvP). I could not get anyone to to run Dire Maul (I had never been there or to BRD), and I knew that once he got the dreadsteed, it was either take up raiding or retire Warpy permanently. I was able to join a PuG ZG with Eternal and enjoyed the raid, so I applied to another Real Raiding Guild (TM) that was advertising for warlocks and that some of my friends from Aes Sedai had gone too two months before. I explained in my app. that there were a few things I'd need to do before I'd be able to start raiding.

They accepted me, and I got to know them pretty quick because there were two events that happened the same week on Kul Tiras: Scourge Invasion (patch 1.12) and the Opening of the AQ Gates, which gave me an opportunity to group with a lot of my new guildies in a kind of casual setting. I advertised a DM: East run on their web site. A few folks signed up (notably Archy and Wrath) and we all collected our Dire Maul keys from a certain imprudent imp. Archie had to explain Banish to me, as I'd never used it before. I ended up running BRD, UBRS, and a number of other instances with those guys, and had to completely relearn how my character worked. Turns out Warpy had all kinds of crowd control potential that we never knew about in Aes Sedai. Daigan helped tank the last Dire Maul run, and Warpy got to run all around IF on my new dreadsteed.

8) Warpy's first "Real Raid": Eventually, I collected enough gear to attain the minimum 150 FR requirement, and learned enough about warlock-group skills that I felt ready to sign up for "real raids" in Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair. Before I could do that, there was a hue and cry in guild chat: "Must have one more warlock for BWL!" The top raiders had just done their first few wipes on Razorgore, and it was so far out of my league that I didn't know where the entrance was! However, there were no other spare warlocks about, and they had to have 40 toons. I'm sure I did very badly, and I got lost (Alz managed to rescue me). But the raid wasn't cancelled, and it gave folks a chance to practice the encounter. Molten Core and the rest seemed so easy after that one.

9) Getting Exalted with CE: In patch 2.0, it became much easier to earn rep with factions. But I'd done almost all of the quests before then, so Warpy had no exalted status with anyone. But we were running a lot of AQ20 by then and I'd finally won all of the bits of the Implements of Unspoken Names set. Warpy had respecced to felguard, and just needed that Kris of Unspoken Names. He was running Field Duty quests like crazy and was the scourge of the Twilight Prophet. We did one last AQ20 run, but people had gotten a little tired of raiding at that point, and that was the last one before The Burning Crusade. Warpy had about 20,300/21,000 Cenarion Circle rep.
at the end of the raid, so I just stayed up late had him haul silithyst until he'd finished. The next day, I log in with my shiny new gear:

Monaloca and Keriandrim: "Hey, let's go beat up more Abyssal Templars!"
Warpy: *sigh*

10) The Great Meltdown: The Real Raiding Guild (TM), unlike many of its kind, survived the coming of The Burning Crusade and prospered, conquering Karazhan and the heroics and getting deep into TKTE and SSC. However, drama reared its ugly head again and this time I was in the middle of it. At one point, I left the guild and returned, but things just got grimmer and grimmer, and I was playing Warpy less and less. I was looking around at other guilds, and had decided I'd have to transfer servers, but had no real contacts or leads at that point. I leveled my rogue to 70, and found I really enjoyed playing him.

I'd set up a Shadow Labs run with Cell, Kem's alt, a new guildie, and a PuGee, and we were having a good time getting feared about the room by Fel Overseers, when Cell whispered me a warning that guild chat was about to get a little distracting. There'd been so much nasty stuff said and done in various channels and on the website in the past few months that I wanted nothing to do with any of it. Well, several of the friends who'd persuaded me to rejoin the guild suddenly up and left just as we were killing the first boss (I don't remember if he dropped Jive's idol). Guild chat got pretty ugly at that point, with some pretty lousy things being said about the people who had left. All I could think was "It's over, it's finally over. I can leave now. Thank God."

Cell and Griphon invited me to the new guild that was forming. So just before we get to Grandmaster Vorpil, Cell and I left the old guild, much to the consternation and distress of the new fellow. Our former GM, who was beside himself at that point, ordered us off the vent server. It was really a nice run, meltdowns aside, with fun people; we got a ton of quests done and the Karazhan key fragment for my rogue.