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It’s time for a long overdue Egwene and Damer update!

The first bit of news, as you can see from the pumpkin headed screenshot, is we’re both still playing. When I first raised the idea to Egwene of us playing WoW together, we agreed on a trial run of about 10 days or so, and then we’d see if she still wanted to keep playing. I think she was pleasantly surprised at how much she enjoyed it though, and we’re currently level 20 and still going strong.

We started out in Dun Morogh at the Dwarven/Gnomish starting area. I had originally planned for us to quest together from the start, but decided after a bit that we’d each level to 5 separately so that Egwene would have a better opportunity to learn about the game. Watching her play really brought back memories of my first character in the game, and it also made me even more aware of how much there is to learn when you are first starting out. There’s a lot. Once you’ve been playing for a while, things start to seem like second nature and it’s easy to forget how newbish we all were at some point.

Once we both hit level 5, we headed out from Coldridge Valley and into Dun Morogh proper. We picked up all the quests in Kharanos and went out into the wilds to start on them. Having leveled many Gnomish and Dwarven alts through Dun Morogh, I can pretty much do the quests there on auto-pilot. Egwene, on the other hand, had obviously never done them before, and since I wanted her to be leading us, this provided for some long waits while she figured out where we needed to be going. Luckily, I am the most patient person in the entire history of time, so this wasn’t a big deal. At all.

After we finished up in Dun Morogh, I decided that instead of heading to Loch Modan, we’d go to Westfall for our teen levels. This was mostly so we could do the Defias questlines leading up to the Deadmines, but also because I like Westfall more. We made a short detour on the way to end Hogger’s reign of terror over Elwynn Forest.

He’s surprisingly easy with two people

Westfall

Heading to Westfall brought about a welcome change, which is to say that the game got harder. For the first 12 or 13 levels, the mobs we were killing went down so quick that Egwene usually didn’t have much of a chance to do anything (Yes, you read that correctly. A pally was killing things so fast that a mage didn’t have time to help. Oh, what a crazy world we live in from level 1 to 10.) Things started to get more difficult in the mid-teens though, and that was definitely a good thing.

So we quested our way through Westfall and into Redridge Mountains over the course of a few weeks. Right now, we’re still in Redridge but we’re probably about to finish up and head into Duskwood. We also did our first Deadmines trip last weekend and had a blast. It was a PUG, but turned out to be a darn good group and we made it through with only one wipe. (Which was not my fault. I totally did not stand so close to the ship at the end that I aggro’ed Captain Greenskin and his crew. It did not happen.)

A Pally and a Mage walk into a bar…

One thing that has definitely surprised me is how well our classes work together. When I chose a pally to her mage, I was thinking that we’d be at least a decent fit — I could try and tank for her while she handled the killing, and if things got ugly, then hopefully I could heal us out of trouble. However, things have gone much more smoothly than I would have thought and I’ve been quite surprised at how well our classes complement each other.

I’m able to directly add to her survivability with my Devotion Aura as well as protect her with Righteous Fury and Righteous Defense. Meanwhile, she gives me more mana with Arcane Intellect, takes care of crowd control, and quite handily fills the DPS role.

And on top of all that, I’ve got buffs out the wazoo! Right now I’m using BoM on me and BoW on her. I’ll have BoK in a few more levels and I’ll probably switch to that for both of us once we’re high enough for it to really help. Additionally, I’ll get Salvation at level 26 which will be great in case Egwene starts pulling aggro (which really hasn’t been a problem so far). If anyone is about to reroll with a partner and is looking for a couple of classes that work well together, I’d really recommend a pally and a mage. It’s a bit unconventional, and it might take you a bit to find a good groove with each other, but once you do I think you’ll be pretty happy with it.

I also want to mention how impressed I am with the changes that Blizzard has made to the paladin class. Having not played a pally in over a year, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Last time I played one, we didn’t have any kind of Taunt, we had very limited threat generating skills, and the itemization on gear was so-so at best. Now, we can tank just about as well as a warrior*, we can heal nearly as well as any other class, and we have a plethora of awesome buffs! I realize that I’m only level 20, and have no high level pally experience, but so far I have to say that I have little sympathy for the pally QQers. (I rarely have sympathy for any class QQers, but still…)

*If you don’t believe me, check out the “Illi-Done” news post here.

I’ll have more on us at level 20 up shortly, including some thoughts from Egwene and what kind of things we’re looking forward to doing soon.

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