Adventures in Beta: Draenei Shaman, Level 1-5
A couple weeks ago, I won a beta key. Pleased at getting to test out the expansion content, I happily waited for my key. And waited. And waited. Finally, on Wednesday, I received my World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Beta Key and installed the expansion. Then uninstalled the expansion. Then uninstalled my regular WoW, reinstalled it without patching, installed the Burning Crusade and patched that. I saved re-patching the live WoW for later, in case I began crying.
Finally, at 2:30 in the morning, I logged on and created my first character (my 60 main had yet to copy over.) Because I am lazy and want to see how the Horde and Alliance integrate their new classes, I chose to roll a draenei shaman. Also, I've never really tried to play a shaman or paladin, so it would be an experiment for me as well. I picked the "cute" draenei face, the Princess Leia buns that show off the the weird ear-tentacles draenei have, and some curly horns that looked slightly like racing stripes. And I was off!
The first thing I saw was a giant crashed ship, so I headed toward it in hopes of finding some cool quests. The new area looked something like a glowing version of Tirasfal Glades, and the first quest - "Thank God we survived, now go talk to this guy" - also seemed eerily reminiscent of about every other first quest I've done in this game.
I went to see one of the other crash survivors, who told me I needed 8 vials of moth blood to recharge the healing crystals. This seemed like a less than environmentally-friendly solution, but the ends justify the means when you've just crash-landed your ship onto a different planet.
The moths were pretty cute, but killing them got me 8 vials of their blood and one level. I returned to the draenei ship-watcher, tossed him the blood and got a leather belt in return. Woot. I also learned that Blizzard has a pop-up survey after every quest, which may be better at later levels but is pretty useless in the starting areas, when you complete a quest every two minutes. (Note: I later learned how to turn off the pop-up notifications.)
The ship-watcher told me to deliver the vials, but first I wandered off the beaten path and encountered a botanist who told me to kill some nuclear mutants. Awesome! I also discovered the mutilated bodies of my fellow draenei begging for death, which made me feel sort of bad for not delivering the vials. I did that next, and then used my "Gift of the Naaru" racial ability to heal the survivors. From now on, only quests of extraordinary coolness will be mentioned, to keep from boring everyone to death, but it is sort of neat that they teach you how to use your racial.
The basic story of the draenei starting area is that pretty much everything has been mutated or crazed by your ship's landing, so you either have to kill it or cure it. I killed some mutated roots, cured some owlbeasts and neutralized some crystals. Along the way, I discovered a somewhat sad graveyard and hit level 4.
I went to see my shaman trainer, who looked more like a Broken than one of the healthy, robust draenei I was playing. He explained that shamanism wasn't yet popular among the draenei and sent me to get my Call of Earth totem. I walked up to a glade in the northwest, where I found a giant, level 70 rock elemental. Behind him was a grove full of all different kinds of elementals fighting each other. This was my first "Wow, cool!" moment of the draenei area. I killed four of the rock elementals, took a chunk off of the big rock elemental, and returned to my trainer to receive my Stoneskin Totem and an explanation that the Broken and the draenei are working together to learn the ways of shamanism. My totem looked kind of like a glowing Moogle, and as a longtime Horde partisan, I felt a little sorry at this corruption of the majestic wooden totem.
I had hit level 5, so for my last quest of the night, I headed down south to find a missing scout. What I found was something I really didn't expect - blood elves! Yes, a blood elf camp had ambushed our scout and I had to kill them in retaliation. For Horde who are reading this, I must tell you: the blood elves look exactly as girly as you probably thought. I killed 10 garishly dressed elves and their leader, and returned their plans to the draenei commander, who had an unusually strong reaction to the elves (along the lines of "they must be removed from existence"), hinting that all was not necessarily good and pure with the draenei. I also got a short feature presentation from some other surviving draenei and was told to head to Azure Watch.
Next up: Azure Watch!
