I got into WoW around the start of Burning Crusade when a few old friends of mine travelled across to Italy from Australia to say hello to me and take advantage of my hospitality while they went skiing. Everyone brought along their own laptop, and one of the group was into WoW. We had all played D&D together in the past, and he convinced us all to give it a shot. Even though I was sceptical I ordered the WoW Battlechest on Amazon, as did a few others, and pretty soon we were spending less time skiing and more time sitting around the house yelling at each other from our computers as we died in Westfall.

But before my Battlechest arrived I spent some time checking out the game on my friend’s account. I rolled up, wait for it, you’re going to be shocked … a human warrior. I can’t remember his name but I think he was bald. Anyway, I was on my own in a relatively new realm, and I bumbled around having fun and trying to work things out. I had no knowledge of what specs to have, or what the different talent trees were for. I also had no idea of the holy trinity of the tank/healer/DPS roles in instances. Come to think of it, I didn’t really understand what instances were either. But I was having fun and I wasn’t bothering anybody.

I had got up to level 18 or so when a new found friend of a similar level and I decided to give The Deadmines a shot. He was a priest, so he could heal. I was a warrior, so I could bash things. And in we went. We worked our way up to the first ogre boss, the one that drops that nice blue hammer. I wanted that blue hammer. I had seen it before when I had done the instance with another group. My role had been DPS as far as I knew. I was most probably crap on that run, but they had seemed to like me and there wasn’t any recount to make them hate me.

Anyway, so we started to have a go at this boss, just the two of us. He was healing and I was getting the shit knocked out of me. And we died. So we rezzed, and ran back in to where we were, and we had another shot at it, but changing our tactics slightly. And we died again, but we did better this time. And back we came. This ogre must have been getting sick of the sight of us. We probably spent a good hour and a half trying to get him down. On our final attempt we got him to about 5% before the priest ran out of mana and we were cactus. So we decided to call it there. And we left the instance happy and in good spirits. Sure we hadn’t got the boss down. But we had tried, and we had had a great time.

Did I have the best spec for this situation? I think you know the answer to that one. Did my priest buddy? I highly doubt it. The next day the priest whispered me in game. He said that he had looked at his specs and had changed them around a bit so as to have more mana. I didn’t even know that you could do that. We looked at mine and decided to change a few of them as well. The priest had to lend me the gold as I only had some silvers to my name. And we went in there and we got him down on the first attempt. And I got the blue hammer, or whatever it was that he dropped. And we agreed that our performance had been most optimal. And a hell of a lot of fun.