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Here are some questions I asked Egwene recently to get her thoughts on hitting 20.

What were your first impressions of the game?

Initially, the main thing I remember was frustration. I didn’t know how to do anything. How to maneuver, how to interact with NPCs, how to interact with other players, where to go, what to do… nothing. It was quite frustrating to be in this new world and have to learn nearly everything from scratch.

However, I did start to enjoy things fairly quickly, within a few levels of starting out. Once I was able to start learning new Mage skills things started to get a lot more enjoyable. Also, being able to train in different professions has been a lot of fun too. Tailoring and Cooking are probably what hooked me for good and they are definitely my two favorite things to do in WoW.

(Ed. note: She really does enjoy those two professions. It’s a good thing that I don’t need to keep my cloth for bandages, because she might make things uncomfortable for me if I withheld any from her. It does make sense though, coming from a woman who asked for a sewing machine for our first Christmas together, and who also runs her own cooking blog.)

I’ve also enjoyed figuring out where I needed to go to quest. Perhaps some of the initial frustration came from simply having too much to learn. After I had some of it down, reading the quests and figuring out where to go became a fun challenge.

What have you liked about the game so far?

I really like that I’ve learned enough to be able to quest on my own. I feel a great sense of pride in the fact that I can go out on my own now and do things with out dying too much.

I’ve also found Wowhead to be a great help. I don’t want to wander around aimlessly trying to find the specific type of boar that I need to kill. I don’t find that too much fun. I want to get to the boars, kill them, and then move on to the next thing.

I definitely chose a good class for me to play when we started. I like being able to cast spells at mobs from far away and not have to run up to them to attack them. I also like seeing the different spells as I cast them. Sometimes I’ll cast certain spells just because they’re pretty.

(Ed. note: That’s totally true. Many of our conversations in combat go something like this:

Me: You don’t need to cast AoE spells if there’s only one mob.
Egwene: But I like how it looks. The fire comes up out of the ground and it’s really cool!
Me: … )

Also, did I mention Cooking and Tailoring?

What have you not liked about the game?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, there was a whole lot to learn when I started playing. I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing, because I now I love how much there is to do in WoW, but at the start, I would have appreciated fewer choices on what to do.

I’d also run into my first ninja by about level 7. That was frustrating. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. I was seriously ticked off about that. (Ed. note: Yeah, she was.) But most people I’ve met have been great. I’ve even helped out a couple newbies on my own!

How helpful have my guides been?

Incredibly helpful! If I hadn’t already promised to spend the rest of my life with you, the guides you’ve written would definitely have convinced me to do just that. (Ed. note: Possibly not her exact words, but that more or less covers the gist of her response.)

Any final thoughts?

Another thing I really enjoyed was our first Deadmines run. I realized it was going to be the first real test of my abilities, since no one was going to be able to watch out for me the whole time. I was very happy that it went so well.

I can also understand why you dropped Halo for WoW. (Ed. note: I played Halo 2 for about a year straight after it came out. Then I got WoW and never touched Halo again.) There’s so much more to do in WoW. If you’re bored with questing, go level your professions. If you’re maxed out on professions, go run some battlegrounds. If you’re tired of PvP, then go harass people in the trade channel. The possibilities are endless

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My Thoughts

I’ve already given my thoughts on what we’ve done so far, but I do have two things I want to share here.

First off, maybe two weeks after we started playing, I came downstairs one Saturday morning looking for some breakfast. At this point, I wasn’t too sure how much Egwene was enjoying things and I figured it was a coin flip as to whether we would continue or not. To my surprise, as I came into the den where her computer is, she was sitting there looking at Kaliban’s mage list, trying to find some better gear! I thought, “Hmm… we may have a convert on our hands.”

Also, somewhere around level 8, Egwene went and soloed one night while I played Adrenis. After about half an hour, she says, “Gah! I sure am dying a lot tonight!”

I said, “Yes, that’s because I’m not there to heal you.”

Silence…..

“Really? Had you been healing me that much? I never really look at my life bar to see.”

“Well, that might be part of the problem…”

“Oh…”

Looking Forward

I’m excited about several things as I think about us leveling higher. The first thing is getting Egwene into Stranglethorn Vale. WoW for me became a whole new experience when I started seeing Horde questing in the same areas I was in.

The second thing I’m looking forward to is doing some joint AoE grinding, which we’ll probably start around level 26. Although I didn’t plan for this specifically, both Mages and Paladins can AoE grind and having the two of them together is sure to be spectacular. We’ve certainly got a lot of options on how to go about it.

One way to go about it would be to let Egwene do all of the AoE’ing and attacking while I stay back, heal her and mop up any stragglers. That would definitely work, but it almost seems too easy. It might get a bit boring after a while.

I think the best method is probably going to entail me running into a pack of mobs, Consecrating, and then Egwene will unleash the frost fury via Blizzard. The only problem with that is that I might not survive long enough with a whole pack of mobs beating on me. We’ll experiment with different things and I’ll be sure and let you know what works best for us.

Have any of you readers done a duo AoE-grind? What worked for you?

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