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8 Years of World of Warcraft and Me

Written by Barry Villatoro

This post was originally supposed to be about the 8 year anniversary World of Warcraft video. A reader posted a link to it on another one of our WoW articles. No big deal, watch the video, write some info for the readers, then post. That is what was supposed to happen. After hitting play on the video below, that all changed for me.

When the original title theme for WoW started, I could feel the music start to tug on my heartstrings. It had been so long since I’ve heard the original theme, once I did so many, many great memories came back. Then I see Stormwind and Mulgore, then Night Elf buildings (I can’t believe I forgot the name of that town, south east of Auberdine. At least I remember that), oh how I loved Night Elves. These were excellent memories, then Ragnaros appeared and my raiding memories returned. Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair…. Blackwing Lair.  “You are NOT prepared!” No, I was not prepared for The Burning Crusade, WoW’s first expansion, nor Wrath of the Lich King, WoW’s second.

Logging into WoW gave me something that no other game had ever done in my lifetime, it gave me an entrance into an entire new world. Logging into WoW was nothing like starting a multiplayer match in Gears of War or Halo 3. When I logged into WoW early on, the wonder, mystery and exploration of the world seemed entirely endless. Having to run from one town to the next, meeting other actual players along the road, blew my mind. Rolling up to the Night Elf capital city Darnassus for the first time and seeing the Ancients of War had me thinking, “What else is out there?!” Then I took my first flight on a Hippogryph.

You see there are “flight paths” in WoW,  it’s like catching a plane. I figured I’d walk up to homedude Hippogryph keeper, pay him some money then appear at the end of the flight path. Nope, I got on the Hippogryph and watched as it flew me across the ocean to another land. I think this is when WoW first tightened its grip on me. After that it was WoW all day, everyday. I’d go to work thinking about WoW, come home and stay up all night playing it. I’d got to bed at 6 am, just to get up at 10 am and play for an hour before heading to work again. My WoW schedule wasn’t always crazy like this, I had to rest for raiding.

WoW’s grip tightened as I hit level 60 and found a raiding guild, which was easy as hell for me being a Druid (almost no one played Druids in Vanilla WoW). All of a sudden I had dozens of friends that would help me with any quest or request that I had. Four of them spent an entire day helping me get ready for my first raid, Molten Core. Reading the guild chat as forty of us headed for Molten Core and the excitement of the guild had me hooked. I knew I was in for something unique, special. I still remember fondly as the “War” theme started to play. We had reached Ragnaros the final boss of MC after four hours. This was no big deal for the guild as they had become known on the server for being the fastest (at the time) for taking down Rag. For me, I couldn’t have had any idea was I was about to go through.

The battle starts, our main tank Spartax, runs in and it was on.  Even with the forty man raids of vanilla WoW, one wrong move could lead to a “WTF?!”  See Druids were the only class that can resurrect a fallen player during a battle and that’s why I was there. With Rag having 10% life left I hear it, “Aet, battle rez Spartax!” Crap, our main tank went down and they asked for the noobie to save the raid, which I did. I was able to find Spartax’s body in the chaos, battle rez’d him and Rag dropped. The cheering over Vent started. I had never heard so many cheers, whistles and hell yeahs for a videogame before. It was like I was on a sports team that just won a championship. At that moment we were the heroes of Azeroth, we had defeated Lord Ragnaros and the server greeted us with hundreds of “Grats!” as we returned to Ironforge to celebrate our victory.

Real recording of an Onyxia raid gone wrong. Listen, it’s epic.

It was an odd thing to log into WoW. I would be greeted with good mornings, people asking me about my day and seeing what I had planned. Guildies were always down to help with quests, run battlegrounds, run dungeons or even to just mount up and ride through the world, to see what we could discover. We even found our way into a certain area of the world map that was not opened yet and finding a way in was against T.O.S. Five of us made it in and hung out there all night. Talking over Vent, dueling, shooting off fireworks, then doing the leap of faith off of the highest point in WoW at the time.

The amazing times with WoW became even better with the launch of The Burning Crusade. As the world expanded, the amount of friends I had on the server did as well, along with the amount of time I would spend playing it. My girlfriend at the time joined during The Burning Crusade, we would spend hours talking about items, weapons, dungeons, PvP specs and more. She began to love it as much as I did. During BC though, I faded from the raiding scene and went head first into the PvP scene, being that druids had changed and I was now a formidable opponent in battlegrounds. I became addicted to the feeling of completely overpowering another player. Sneaking up on a player and destroying them before they knew they were being attacked was the best, I loved it.

After a couple of years Wrath of the Lich King joined the scene. I had broken up with my girlfriend and changed the way I played WoW, again. Now all I wanted to do was go back to what I hated doing in vanilla WoW, heal. I prided myself on being the best healer in battlegrounds. I loved to see my name at the top at the end of a BG and to see that the next nearest healer was 500,000 points of healing behind me.

Not soon after that I started to date a new woman, the one that would become my now wife. I found myself wanting to go see her after I got off work, but also bummed because I wanted to go play more WoW. I could see my time starting to be pulled by both aspects of my life. Then came that time, when I new I would just have to let WoW go. Some people can play WoW a couple of hours a day, then log out. I could too for the most part, but there was those times where it was all I wanted to do. My wife didn’t care that I played WoW, nor would she care if I were to start playing it again. For the better though, I let WoW go and completely rekindled my love of console gaming. World of Warcraft will always hold a special place in my heart and I’m so grateful for the awesome teams at Blizzard that made it possible. I gave you so many hours of my life and you gave me just as much in return. I will always love you WoW.

About the author

Barry Villatoro

Twitter : @IamWeapon | Former citizen of Azeroth and Atreia | Favorite fighting game - DefJam: Fight for New York | Favorite RPG - FF6 | MMA | Sushi | ATV's |

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