Playing WoW With and Without Family

My brother and his kids are still chugging along on WoW and I put in the occasional few hours with them, but I still find playing with them incredibly dull.

Just last Monday Oui and I were helping my brother with some group quests in Icecrown and the results were not exactly what we had hoped for. Firstly, roll call:

• Ferag – 80 Fury Warrior (my brother)
• Tardin – 80 Shadow Priest (Me)
• Udmarge – 80 Discipline Priest (Oui)

Despite having Oui on his Horde toon, because none of his alliance toons were high enough, I wasn’t expecting any trouble, but my brother surprised us once more by dying about 3 seconds into each fight (I had been trying to heal him) after which Oui would pick them up and tank while I dps’ed.

So to summarise:

1. Warrior dies near-instantly
2. Discipline priest tanks
3. Shadow Priest DPS’s

I was the only person filling their traditional role!

I had hoped that after all this time my brother would improve and in some respects he has. His knowledge of all things WoW has certainly increased, but his coordination and response times are still in the shitter. Adding the fact he’s a keyboard turner should illustrate a total disaster. Keyboard turners aren’t all bad, I know one in particular who is quite good actually (hi Kim!), but combined with his slow response times and lack of situational awareness it’s a recipe for wiping many, many times.

I can’t bear to play with him for extended periods for fear I will kill myself even though I have to admit that I was probably exactly like him at one stage (except the keyboard turning, I haven’t keyboard turned since Doom). It all takes me back to when Oui first started playing.

We didn’t start off with two accounts. At first it had been Kevin who gave me his 10-day trial to give the game a show and I was hooked. My first character (a mage) was hell because I had a run-in-and-gun style of play that didn’t match the class and of course I had no bloody idea about playing a mage. That character died a quick death of deletion. To illustrate how much of a noob I was enjoy the following conversation:

Me: I can’t believe how big the world is!
Kevin: Yeah, it’s pretty big.
Me: How the hell am I gonna remember where everything is?
Kevin: I dunno…
Ben: I wish they had a map or something, it’d make things so much easier.
Kevin: What? Didn’t you read the manual?
Me: Umm, not yet…
Kevin: … press M

So yeah, I was a noob too. Unfortunately convincing Oui that the money I was spending on the game was a good idea wasn’t working so I knew the only way to avert disaster, ie avoid being told I can’t play anymore, was to convince him to play. That act itself took a few days but he eventually gave in and created a female human warlock names Sawasdee. Luckily he’d already play Lineage 2, which he’d been hooked on until dying one day and losing an epic weapon (you have a chance of losing gear/money when you die in Lineage 2), so I at least had a basis of knowledge upon which to build.

Of  course WoW hooked him and soon it became me telling him to get off the computer so I could play (by this time I had my hunter Freand who would later die in the great deletion of BC). We had many arguments back in those days over who’s turn it was to play, eventually leading to the decision that we had to not only get another account but also another computer.

To be continued…