Beyond Highly Improbable

The first post of this Blog was all about how I had finally gotten my wife to play World of Warcraft with me. Since then, we've enjoyed countless adventures in Azeroth and Outland, made many good friends through our guild, and progressed to content I had only really dreamed of seeing when I first rolled Elionene back in late March of 2007. All of these are things that I thought I'd never do.

When I first started playing Warcraft, I didn't have a lot of time to put into it. I played a few hours here and there, but I was newly married, and we had just moved to Boston, so I was rarely ever able to put large chunks of time into the game. My little night elf hunter slowly but surely made her way to the mid 40s over a few months. I think I made it to level 70 in January of 2008 after 20 days played or so. That was a feat for me since I was a really casual player. During those months I had of course gone over all of the cool equipment and gear I could get in the top raids and things, but it didn't take long to realize the time investment that those raids needed just wasn't going to happen for me.

I wasn't too concerned. I'm on an RP server and the raid progression is slow there anyway. Moon Guard had only been around since The Burning Crusade came out, and it was well known for fostering a healthy role playing community that wasn't so hell bent on "beating" the game. A couple months before turning 70, I had lucked into finding a role play guild, Veritas, that was also eager to run dungeons and instances, things that I was beginning to appreciate but never had much time to do.

I fell into a routine of getting up before work and early on Saturdays before my wife was awake, using that time to play and level, and if I could find anyone, run an instance. I would post notices on the guild boards, but not many people wanted to run Blood Furnace with me at 6 in the morning. But then through an interesting set of circumstances, I met some people while doing Skettis dailies early in the morning. They were new to the server, and we helped each other get that silly prisoner out of tree tops a few times. Not too much later, I find they had joined their alts to Veritas, and as it turns out, they were from across the Atlantic which meant that 6 AM was more like 11 AM. Boom. I have a steady group of people to run dungeons with.

Before I know it, I'm leading a group of five people through Steamvault every Saturday morning for Cenarion Expedition reputation. Me? Leading a weekly dungeon crawl? Ha! We affectionately called our group the Crack of Dawn, and we still run together, though we've moved on to other dungeons. And that's because most of us that needed the CE rep got to exalted. And now my Night Elf is riding around on a freaking Hippogryph. I love the way that Night Elves look on these, especially for the lore of Warcraft. Makes me a little sad when I see horde on them.

Soon after starting the Sat. morning run. I got my wife to play with me. And now WoW has become our premium form of entertainment. She and I are both active in the guild. She just got her main, Lal, to 70 and decked out in Primal Moon Cloth and the Whitemend set. She's more than ready to heal Karazhan. Oh yeah! I'm in Karazhan too with Elionene! And Lal is set to join us in the near future. We may even do Gruul's soon, which would be my first official 25 person raid.

If you've read any of the blog before this post, you've read a lot of these things as they happened. It's just awesome to me that I didn't expect to ever come as far as I have. At one point, I wasn't sure if playing for an hour or two a week was worth it, but circumstances change and now we play all the time. So what's left to do?

Well, for a long time, I've wanted to play every class, and every race as well. There are still zones I've barely stepped foot in, and loads of quests I've never done. It seems daunting to think I'll ever achieve that goal, but then again, I didn't think I'd ever see anything beyond a 5 person instance either. Or that I could convince my wife to play with me, and she LIKES it. So it might take awhile, but I'm looking forward to the challenge knowing that anything is possible.