Pixel Perception and You

...last time we found big Inno spending some time making items for little hordie Inno. So little hordie Inno was transferred to the current server where I reside and has some really useful BoA gear. There's a lot of history to little Inno but I'll only bore you with a minor history lesson. Little Inno is the first toon that I ever played. Things looked so much different back then. I was a new player to WoW and little Inno was a green orc named Innoculate. I did a little bit of PvP and other fun activities. I was so lost to the game. I went online and read many articles about how questing was not as good as grinding to get XP to level therefore I spent time either running to instance portals or grinding on mobs. My friends chose to change servers and factions and asked me to come along. I told them that I didn't really want to play Alliance but I'd give it a try after I completed my current goal of getting my wolf mount. I struggled the next few levels earning gold (grinding mobs for rocks if I recall correctly) to get to level 40 and buy my first mount. Ding level 40 and I've reached my goal. Finally I was able to buy my first mount. I rode recklessly through the woods with the wind on my head (I think my orc was bald or only had a plug or two of hair therefore no "wind in my hair statement). Nice, this is fun. Well I did tell my friends that I'd go over to their new server and start a new account with them.

So I rolled this nightelf rogue and came up with a super original name of Innoculate. Again I started off like I knew how to play and was grinding mobs and doing the occasional instance...blah blah blah, so seven level 80s later there is this looming Cataclysm of summer and some new expansion which are causing blahs to take over my outlook on WoW but along with this comes fond memories of my first toon. I look up my original toon and decide to bring it to my new home. I spend some money to bring Innoculate over to my current server...

...Little hordie Inno suffered some sort of transportation malfunction and is now known as Innoculated and has annoyingly bouncy bloodelf ears.... Armed with a pocketful of nostalgia I log onto little Inno and start pulling in my BoA items. Holy pixels, what the hell is this gear that I'm wearing and why do I have some cloth gear in my bags?

Good thing I did send that BoA stuff over. Okay so I'm playing around, looking for where I should be instancing as a hordie and decide that I'll queue for a battleground while I get my bearings. Okay I'm in Arathi Basin and it's different. I'm on the other side but I can do this. Random /bg chat comes up "lol! noob! lolz @ normal mount". Huh? Okay, what's that mean? Following the group and I'm wondering why everyone is pulling so far away from me... Oh, now I get it I'm the lolz noob. It seems that I'd forgotten that my epic accomplishment those many years ago was to just get a normal run of the mill mount at level 40. I even remember complaining about how much that used to suck. Good news is that today I can easily go buy a new mount without grinding for months to afford the pixels to purchase faster pixels. Strike One.

Now I've got a revved up super fast pink chicken of doom (SF-COD) that bounces around so much it makes the floppy bloodelf ears bearable. I'm very happy to have that SF-COD and here's why. #1 I'm a guy. #2 I'm totally lost. #3 I can't ask for directions and #4 I really hate the 40-50 leveling range. I think that I blank out sections of time when any of my toons had to do this range. My only time not hating it was when I changed off runs with a friend running instances over and over swapping 70s or 80s with our lowbies (Svenn is not that friend, he has some sort of aversion to running instances that aren't at level...well I think he'll run Grayce, but I can't complain about him maintaining some sort of marital harmony). So I end up running around not knowing where my next big quest hub should be for a day or so. While I'm running around like a blue chicken with my head cut off I queue up as DPS (obviously) and try a few randoms. I'm so lost that I get the opportunity to run more than one instance. I'm Inno the rogue and I know how to play my rogue, this should be good. Well I get to run Mara colored runs (btw if you die it's a pain to make your way back if you're me...it's not that I don't know where I'm going, but when everything looks grayish white it's hard to determine if you're going down the purple or orange entrance).

As I stated I know how to play my class but that didn't help out much as the other players did not want to listen to each other nor did they wish to get along. Tanks in healing gear, healers in tanking gear, dps in no gear it was all super exciting stuff. I encountered a few groups that put a little faith back in humanity, but only a little as most groups were a quick run to get the random dungeon "quest" finished so they can get that bag of loot at the end. I did encounter a very funny group at a higher level and will post that pic here as there was some sort of CoT time-warp thing that happened. Regardless of whether the few randoms were good players or not I was miffed. Not at the players as I only have myself to blame if I hang out with people that are making me miserable...but at my rogue tool-kit.
I'm up in the air on whether I think it's a good idea to play another toon of the same class as you've already leveled. A plus side is that you know what you're doing (unless you're a raidtard, but I haven't encountered tons of those at this level...they might have 80s but that can't pull the same silly antics). You can control your character and you are very familiar with the ins and outs of your class. The down side is that I DO know my character class...at level 80...not so much at level 40. I have the fisher-price tool belt of tools to use right now. They're not what I'm used to. I get annoyed when something isn't working as I expected since I KNOW what it's supposed to do. Wrong! What do you mean there's not a silence effect to my garrote? Why am I even stealthing then? I'm just a Sinister Strike button masher (I'm still recovering from bear tanking carpal tunnel). I might need to Vanish if I somehow jump threat (it's difficult at times to quickly change targets to focus on what the tank is hitting, but I do try. I refuse to do a tankonlyfocustargetstartattacksinisterstrike macro. Well that and the fact that I did mention that I hate this level range and I wasn't all that excited about the gear that I had from my former newbie rogue days. (Quick note: Speaking of gear, it's very OP to go into an instance at proper level with a group that's in some sort of BoA gear. It feels like cheating too, but I approve anyway). I am begining to wonder if I should have even picked this toon back up. Maybe I should have just kept the fond memories. Oh well I'll continue trying to find quest hubs somewhere around. I think there might be something in Feralas or some such place....