Wendy the Explorer

Here’s something Wendy didn’t really talk about much, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. Wendy had many, as she called them, guilty pleasures. One such guilty pleasure was playing World of Warcraft. Now if you’re not familiar with the game, it is an MMORPG, which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Now, before I continue I want to share the very funny story of how she started playing the game.

One day back in early 2007 Joshua came home from school and told us he would be installing and playing this game called World of Warcraft. Now we had heard some bad stuff about it on the news so we were like, “Ummm, no, not until we check it out you’re not!” It turns out the game came with two guest passes and so Josh gave those to us and we proceeded to install the game on our respective computers to check it out. We’d heard that pedophiles and scammers were taking advantage of kids in the game so we were naturally concerned.

The game took quite some time to install and then when it was done it had a bunch of updates to install as well, so by the time dinner was done and the game had been installed it was bed time for the boys, so we told Josh we would let him know in the morning if he could install and play this online game. First I called a friend in NY to ask him what characters we should pick in the game and he said, based on some questions, that we would probably be best with Night Elves and that Wendy should create a priest and I should create a druid. So that’s what we did.

Then we started playing the game in the Night Elf starting area and Wendy had some technical difficulties with the graphics since she had an older laptop. So it was probably close to midnight before we really got into the game. The next morning Josh came out of his bedroom to get ready for school and found Wendy and I still playing the game. He was like, “Well I hope you’re going to let me install it now!” and we told him he could play it when he got home. Wendy and I got the kids to school and took a nap since we’d been up all night checking out this online game.

We ended up playing it a little each day after school/work and dinner. Josh helped us find our way around and our old friend from NY helped out some too. That friend who said Wendy should create a priest based it on her being a nurturing, caring mom and assumed she’d want to be a healer. A holy priest. However Wendy did not like healing at all. One day she saw a priest battling in PvP (Player versus Player) and asked what his spec was. Turns out he was a shadow priest. She immediately changed her spec to a shadow priest named, Morganlefey. Here she is standing on a tower in Storwind, the human capital city.

Morganlefey, Wendy’s main character in World of Warcraft

When we first played we tried joining a guild in the game and playing with other people. But over time we found many of the players in the game to be annoying and immature, even if they were our age. They also expected Wendy to heal because she was a priest. When she didn’t want to, they didn’t want her to run dungeons or raids with them. So Wendy decided to go solo. She created her very own guild called, The Golden Girls and put her characters into that guild. Morganlefey (Level 100) was Wendy’s main character. Here she is standing in the Celestial Court on the Timeless Isle, one of her favorite spots. She had also reached max level with her character and created a castle (Level 3 Garrison) in the current expansion, Warlords of Draenor. See the screenshots below.

Celestial Court on the Timeless Isle from Mists of Pandaria

Wendy’s Level 3 Garrison (Castle) from Warlords of Draenor

Wendy liked to go exploring. She didn’t care about dungeons and raids and hated PvP. She just wanted to explore the massive virtual world and see what she could find. Once in a while she would get in over her head and ask for assistance from me or one of the boys. However over time the boys stopped playing and eventually so did I. But Wendy liked the ability to just be able to go in and tackle some quests and quit at any time, something you couldn’t do if you were in a raid or dungeon group.

Wendy also had some alternate characters (called alts) such as Belladonnà, a level 92 Human Destruction Warlock, shown below with her Imp (demon), Wiknuk.

Belladonnà in Goldshire, Elwyn Forest

She also had a level 90 Gnome Arcane Mage named, Bellalunà. Speaking of Mages, check out the commercial Blizzard did with Vern Troyer (Mini Me).

Level 90 Gnome Arcane Mage Bellalunà in Gnomeregon

Wendy also created a Night Elf Beast Mastery Hunter named Tigera, shown below with her trusty hunting Fox, Mapuche.

Tigera, Wendy’s Level 92 Night Elf Beast Mastery Hunter with Fox Mapuche

Wendy liked to try out different races and classes in the game and another alt she created was Arielessia, a Level 90, Draenei Elemental Shaman. Check out the William Shatner Shaman commercial here.

Arielessia in The Exodar

At some point Wendy got interested in my druid as they can take multiple forms and they’re adept at being healers, tanks or DPS (damage), so she created Lunaea, a Level 90 Night Elf Balance Druid. Yep, she didn’t care for the feral druid stuff, she preferred casters. She preferred ranged DPS over melee DPS.

Lunaea in Nagrand from The Burning Crusade

When the expansion, Mists of Pandaria came out Wendy and I both created Pandaren Monks to play together. These were the only characters since we first started playing that we decided to play together and we made it through the MoP expansion with them. Here’s Wendy’s Level 90 Pandaren Windwalker Monk, Punkybear (mine was named Pookybear).

Punkybear (and Pookybear, left) in Pandaria

She had many alts, but these were the main ones she played. She was also quite good at making gold not only in the game via quests, etc, but by selling on the Auction House. To do this she created an alt to handle all the gold and banking. This alt was called, Augolden (some of you may get that) and was a Dwarf Paladin.

Augolden in The Great Forge, Ironforge

And finally, for those of you wondering (who know the game), yes, Wendy did create a Horde character named Zelene, an Orc Rogue. But she hadn’t played her as much since I stopped playing as I used to help her level that character with a Tauren Warrior Tank I had (I think I deleted it at some point).

Zelene in Orgrimmar

We had fun times and lots of memories in World of Warcraft and Wendy was playing it right up until she was no longer able to. There was a time when all four of us played together as a family and had each other’s backs in the game. We also had a few friends and colleagues that once played too. So since World of Warcraft was such a big part of Wendy’s gaming time I thought I would share some of her experiences here. Her favorite WoW Machinima video was the one below. She dedicated it to me because of the type of work I do. The song is by Jonathan Coulton. I hope you enjoyed this blog entry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=132jC0tZRJg