I was standing in Nethergarde Keep today and just sort of marveling what it would have been like to play this game in 2004 instead of Lineage 2.  I mean, WoW is clearly much, MUCH bigger.

In Lineage 2 during the same time, everything really revolved around a town and a zone.  The starter zones for orcs, dwarves, light elves, dark elves, and humans.  Then you move into the towns of Giran and Gludin.  Then off to Dion, Giran, and I think Oren was reachable on release.  There were no, sub-towns like WoW.   There were towns, and zones around the town.

WoW has the capital cities by race plus lots and LOTS of sub-town areas like Nethergarde Keep, Goldshire, Darkshire, Booty Ball, Lakesire, and on and on.

L2 zones were all more or less the same.  Plains areas, a few forests around Oren.  Wow has plains, deserts, flats, islands, jungles, dead zones, volcanoes, craters, swamps, you name it.  Npcs that do more than just stand there.

I had a lot of fun in L2, related to people I met, but man playing WoW instead back in the day would have really been something.

I put almost all points in shadow but I do miss healing.  I did a ZF group last night and we had a druid healer, but the tank would get frightfully low on hp so I would toss some shields.  Then on the gauntlet event, the healer died.  I was NOT doing that again so I dropped shadowform and kept the tank up.  The healer asked for a rez during combat and when I had no mana, so their awareness wasn’t very good.  But we got through everything even though I had to drop shadowform to heal a second time, and I got a blue neck piece and staff!

I then went and learned basically all my heals in case that happens again.  It’s too bad you don’t get another bar when you turn shadow; I can’t just flip bars like druids can.  I forgot so much skills cost to learn.  I had around 40g and had 11 at the end of that.  Whoops.  Good thing my mage can make gold fairly easily.

So I’ve leveled as fire from 1 to 60 but today I am respeccing to frost.  Fire is a thirsty, thirsty spec and on the advice of a friend I took improved scorch to help that. It did help but you have to watch stacks.  That’s not a problem, I kind of like that, but when I went to solo even level 40 dungeons and I got my ass kicked, I decided to go frost.  I need to be able to solo farm to make gold and fire can barely handle 2 level 45 elites in a row without going OOM.   I hope to switch back to it later at some point, since I really enjoy ignite lighting fools on fire. When it triggers and the mob or players bursts into flames, it’s so rewarding.

I played a bit of frost today and comparing the two specs isn’t really fair.  Frost has frostbolt, cone of cold, frost nova, and blizzard.  Right?  Fire has Fireball, Scorch, Flamestrike, Fire Blast and depending on talents, Pyroblast and Blast Wave.  Only, frost seems to hit just as hard with only frostbolt, and uses way less mana.  In fact, I am getting crits with JUST FROSTBOLT that rival regular hits with pyroblast, a skill that is a talent AND takes 6 freaking seconds to cast.  I was flabberghasted by that.

Now I will say that as Fire I only ran into two spots that had fire immune mobs.  That little spot in Arathi Highlands and the volano in Un’goro.  I have a feeling there are more water elementals than fire; a whole island of them in Stranglethorn Vale, ones in lakes like in Eastern Plaguelands, etc.

Lots and LOTS of mobs use fire, starting with the Defias Pillagers, pirates in Stranglethorn, etc.  I’ve only seen maybe 2 that used frost spells, and that wasn’t until 50+.  You don’t even see arcane until Eastern Plaguelands anyway.

In short, fire is more fun but frost is better, if just boring boring boring.

I find myself trying to be helpful on my fire mage but it doesn’t always turn out so well.  I was on my mount in Tanaris and I noticed a horde druid getting trained by a few mobs.  I dismounted, frost nova’d, and thought I’d blink myself out of there, being cleverly helpful.  Well I didn’t notice I was low on mana from recasting all my stuff so I used nova, the druid ran off happily and I got dazed and beat to death.

Then today I was in Western Plaguelands and noticed a douchebag horde frost mage starting an AOE pull.  I find it especially obnoxious to do in an open area with other players.  Anyway this person rounds up like 5 ghouls but they happened to aggro an Alliance paladin somewhat near by.  The guy watches the paladin get aggro, walks up, does nothing, then just runs off.  I bounced to the paladin, nova’d as one goes and yelled RUN.  Well, he doesn’t, he invites me to group and tries to fight them.  I had started to run but I came back to help and guess what.  We both died.  Sigh.

Oh and the warlock that laughed at me when spell batching caused me to overpull and almost die? Fuck you Necropost.  On the upside since the servers don’t have CRZ, or group finder, I will just note this name down and if they need anything ever, refuse them. HA.