Most of us WoW players with significant others dream of the day that our better half joins us in the world of Azeroth and decide to find out what all the hub-bub is all about. Sometimes this goes better than anticipated and the “noobie” becomes far more addicted to the game than the mentor, but often times the interest just isn’t there for the recruit. Nearing in on my 5th year in WoW the love-of-my-life slowly started showing interest in checking Azeroth out.
At first it was through the RaF program via a 10 day trial account, but real life got in the way for my wife to get a fair shake. We had both created human warlocks (vanilla wow horde races didn’t really appeal to my wife) on my sister’s former server of Whisperwind but we only reached level 8 in the limited time we had to game together before the trial expired. Not being able to “twink” out my wife’s toon with bags and gold hindered the enjoyment and it seemed that my wife was going to hold out for Diablo III, but there was just enough interest that there was a remote chance for my wife’s acclamation to WoW.
I decided to take that chance and run with it by picking up the WoW:Battlechest giving her a month to check it out, get twinked out with bags and gold, and more importantly create a blood elf ‘lock on my home server Cenarius.
This time I decided I’d play a complimentary class for a ‘lock and created a new paladin to “tank” for my wife. The change of scenery to the absolutely GORGEOUS Eversong Woods and blood elf architecture has definitely helped in holding my wife’s interest. It’s also far easier to introduce her to the game where my toon doesn’t risk dying from holding aggro as a clothie.
One problem did creep up on us as we started running into the problem of out-leveling quests and mobs in those areas. I’d often kill the mobs we needed far too quickly and my wife felt like she wasn’t participating and was just along for the ride. This was a dire problem indeed, and although I had wanted to complete the majority of quests, (especially since I hadn’t done most of them), we had to start abandoning quests and move into a more level-appropriate area to quest.
Fortunately this meant moving into the Ghostlands and upon the discovery of the cute green glowing mushrooms in the zone my wife really started to dig the game. Not only had she found a zone that she found visually appealing, but she was getting a chance to “play” as a warlock and cast more of her spells. We finished the weekend at level 20 and obtained our non-chocobo mounts. (Thank you Blizz for dropping the mount level requirements to 20!)
Now I already have a paladin sitting at level 30, so once we get up there I’ll be deleting the new paladin I created and pick up my old pally that I always meant to level as a tankadin. I’m still hopeful that my wife will become more interested in the game to the point that we give a level-appropriate dungeon a shot with a full party as I would like to learn to tank as a paladin from the ground-up and not when I hit 80 and don’t have a decent tanking set.
We will have to play that by ear as I don’t want her to become overwhelmed. There’s a lot of foreign concepts for my wife to learn as this is her first MMO ever. But so far I’ve been pretty impressed with how quickly she’s learned the basics without having a shred of MMO experience as I had when I first played WoW. I’m sure before long she’ll become interested in joining my main’s guild and feeling like she’s apart of the community. I’ll just have to convince her to start up a bank alt to keep in my bank guild so she can keep the access to that guild bank and move her warlock in Awry.
Nevik's Notebook 