Leveling through Northrend was slow but exciting – a definite improvement over Outland. Blizzard packed Northrend with quest content, which had both upsides and downsides. On the plus side, this offered plenty of variety for players leveling multiple alts, especially since heirloom gear made the process much faster. The downside, however, was that for casual players like me, it was easy to miss large parts of the story.
Previous: WoW Player Diary. Part 6. Ship to the North
Leveling in Northrend
I hit the level 80 cap after questing barely into the snowdrifts of the Storm Peaks, finishing only a handful of quests there and running a couple of dungeons. This meant many significant questlines remained unfinished on my main character. For instance, I missed most of Brann Bronzebeard’s adventures in the Storm Peaks, which culminated in him finding his brother Muradin (long thought lost during Arthas’s original Northrend campaign). The entire Icecrown zone remained untouched territory for me until the following summer.
Overall, leveling from 70 to 80 took me about two and a half months. Naturally, I was eager to start raiding, but that depended heavily on my guild situation.
Unfortunately, things weren’t going well with my guild at the time, the ‘Vindicators.’ We weren’t really a raiding guild – even our Karazhan runs back in TBC hadn’t been consistent, often requiring members to team up with players from other guilds. This became a problem when, back in September 2008 (before WotLK launched), some members attempted the TBC raid Zul’Aman.
I don’t know the full details, but it seems the attempt suffered from issues common in casual groups: some players were unprepared, the raid didn’t go well, and arguments erupted on the guild forum afterward. The end result was that several players left the guild, weakening us further.
By the end of January 2009, the guild’s activity hadn’t recovered. Attempts at organized heroic dungeon runs, let alone raids, seemed dim. After some thought, I decided it was time to find a new home.
The search didn’t take long. Within about a week, I joined ‘Travelers of Azeroth.’ Unlike the Vindicators, who had a dedicated roleplaying element (even maintaining it in secondary chat channels), Travelers of Azeroth were a more typical social guild. They weren’t focused on cutting-edge progression, but they were very friendly and active.
They ran heroic dungeons regularly and occasionally organized ‘fun runs’ into older raid content. It was with them that I finally got to experience classic raids like the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj and Molten Core for the first time.
While I had started preparing my character for raiding right after hitting level 80 (more on that later), finding this new, active guild in February 2009 felt like a fresh start. Coincidentally, February was also when I began writing my ‘Casual Gamer Blog.’
wowcasual.info
The late 2000s were an interesting time online. YouTube was gaining traction, but social networks were still relatively new. For many, online life still revolved around web portals, forums, platforms like LiveJournal, and individual, stand-alone blogs.
The idea to start my own World of Warcraft blog grew from two main factors. First, I already had experience, having run a standalone blog on WordPress and, before that, a page on the popular LiveInternet platform. Second, the escalating global financial crisis was hitting my main job hard, forcing me to look for side income. I decided to try my luck earning money online. (I’ll admit upfront, my success with monetization was fairly modest.)
When I mentioned starting a WoW blog to my online friends, they were skeptical. “Why a blog about WoW?” they asked. “Who needs another one? Everyone sticks with Goha.” ‘Goha’ referred to goha.ru, a long-standing and still active MMO portal with a very busy WoW forum section.
They had a point, but looking closer, the dedicated WoW blog scene wasn’t actually that crowded back then. I knew of only two others: one run by a player named Cepik, and another on mmohelper.ru run by NekDK (who later became well-known as Kuvaldych). That mmohelper site eventually grew into a popular WoW resource itself.
So, while Goha was popular, the space for dedicated WoW blogs felt relatively open. Plus, Goha suffered from the issues common to older online communities: it was dominated by veterans from various MMOs who weren’t always welcoming to newcomers. In fact, some of them were really toxic. I saw a need for a place where new players wouldn’t get called ‘noobs’ or mocked for asking basic questions.
There was also a clear demand for beginner-friendly guides. WoW had recently been localized into new languages, bringing in a wave of “new blood” who were likely overwhelmed by sites like Goha and formed a sort of “silent minority” there.
I saw plenty of examples of the kinds of guides people needed. I was already a regular visitor to sites like wowhead.com (which was starting to pull ahead of competitors like Thottbot as the go-to database) and wowinsider.com (which, along with mmo-champion.com, was a major source for news, analysis, and guides).
Therefore, ignoring my friends’ skepticism, I registered the domain wowcasual.info and asked a tech-savvy friend to help me set up WordPress on it. My first blog post went live on February 20th, 2009. The second followed on February 23rd – it was my very first guide, explaining how to choose the right server.
I’ll likely revisit the story of the blog and the wider MMO blogosphere later, but for now, I’ll just say this: I have never regretted starting it.
RuWoW and Epic Flights
In March 2009, my main character, Deckven, turned one year old. While I wasn’t planning on leaving my home server, Moonglade-EU, curiosity led me to check out the Russian WoW servers (RuWoW). To do this, I created a new dwarf hunter named ‘Gatekeeper’ on the Vechnaya Pesnya server.
Evensong was considered the unofficial RuWoW roleplaying server at the time, and for a long while after. I hoped to find a similar atmosphere to Moonglade there. Plus, I was interested to see the official Russian localization in action.
Seeing familiar places with Russian names, like ‘Стальгорн’ (Stal’gorn) for Ironforge, was interesting. The translations themselves didn’t bother me; mostly, they just amused me. What really stood out, though, were the character nicknames I encountered. Names like ‘Blondinko’ (Blondy), ‘Uzhzhass’ (Horror), ‘Zhopeed’ (Asseater), or ‘Kusairoubi’ (Biteandslash) gave me a bit of a cultural shock. I hadn’t seen English equivalents quite like these on Moonglade. Apparently, this was a known phenomenon; someone had even done a study on the prevalence of vulgar nicknames on RuWoW launch servers, analyzing which crude terms were most common.
Another surprise was the approach to guilds. While questing near Kharanos, someone randomly invited me to their guild with a simple message. It contrasted sharply with my experience joining Vindicators on Moonglade, which involved a whole roleplaying introduction. Here, it was just “Hey, wanna join?” Later, while at the Ironforge auction house, another player walked up and asked why I wasn’t in a guild, immediately offering suggestions. During my entire time on the EU server, I’d only received a spontaneous guild invite once, and that was after a successful dungeon run.
Overall, my impressions of the primary RuWoW roleplaying server were mixed. It felt like the roleplaying aspect of WoW, regardless of region, was already diminishing. This echoed an article I’d read on wowinsider.com back in summer 2008, which discussed how ‘numbers’ were increasingly dominating the game: optimal item stats, DPS/HPS meters, perfect ability rotations, various rating systems, and so on. Character progression was shifting heavily towards statistical optimization, making the ‘RPG’ label feel less relevant. While this focus on stats was undeniable, the game’s lore still held (and holds) a strong appeal for a large part of the community – but more on that later.
Perhaps the biggest personal goal for March was acquiring an epic flying mount. Back then, this cost a hefty 5,000 gold – a serious sum early in WotLK. Despite playing for a year and being reasonably frugal, I only had just over 2,000 gold saved up. My professions were still Mining and Skinning.
My first thought was farming ore. Current Northrend ore like Saronite was heavily contested, so I focused on farming Thorium in the old world instead. This worked reasonably well; Thorium Ore sold for about 4-5 gold per piece, demand was steady, and I could gather 50-60 pieces an hour.
Another strategy was farming gold and items from old dungeons. At level 80, even in basic gear, I could easily clear classic instances like Stratholme solo. A single run yielded around 50-60 gold directly from mobs, plus a good amount of Runecloth. Runecloth was still in demand (around 8-10 stacks per run, selling for 4-5 gold per stack) as players used it for reputation grinds, adding roughly another 50 gold per run. I even tried soloing parts of Vanilla raids; Molten Core was too tough, but I could clear some trash packs in Zul’Gurub up to the first boss.
Even after a dedicated week of farming, I still needed around 1,400 gold. I earned the rest using the same methods. As soon as I scraped together the 5,000 gold, I rushed to Shadowmoon Valley and purchased my epic gryphon. It was the first and only time in my WoW career I spent nearly every piece of gold I owned, but the upgrade was absolutely worth it. The speed boost made farming ore drastically faster and simply getting around Northrend much more convenient.
With the mount secured, my next priority was gearing up my toon for raids. The primary sources for better armor and weapons at the time were: running heroic 5-player dungeons (‘heroics’), earning reputation rewards, crafting items, and buying gear with Emblems of Heroism (badges dropped from heroic dungeon bosses).
Having a good guild also offered the possibility of joining runs of the initial WotLK raids (Tier 7) in their 10-player versions. WotLK offered these starting raids in two formats: 10-player (dropping item level 200 loot) and 25-player (dropping item level 213 loot), each with separate weekly lockouts. Furthermore, bosses also dropped Emblems of Valor, which could eventually be used to purchase raid-quality item tokens in Dalaran – an expensive but valuable option.
This gearing process took about three weeks and involved a significant gold investment as well – for example, buying a crafted weapon like the Nesingwary 4000 cost several hundred gold. By early April, however, I felt ready to tackle the first tier of WotLK raids.
Next: WoW Player Diary. Part 8. Secrets of Ulduar
