I tried a Draenai today and deleted the character at level 7. Tried a night elf something-or-other and deleted her at level 5. I didn’t like the sounds, the atmosphere, the attitude . . . but mostly I’m totally clueless. If it’s not fun, why bother? I’m having loads of fun with my gnome. I started a mage. She’s pretty hard to keep alive. I’ll keep her a while. At some point I have to learn how to quest without the support of a pet.

My first character is a gnome warlock and my current biggest problem in playing, other than general blindness (includes colorblindness), is how to target more quickly and accurately. Because I’m colorblind I often can’t see the cues that signal what is targeted which can lead to the wrong thing being spelled or pulling things in I didn’t mean to target followed by frantic casting to stay alive.

At this point I’ve got a bunch of new spells to learn. I’ve done some changes that are making my fighting more effective. I use immolate (second spell I got), then while they’re running at me I use the life-force draw. That gets them to me so I don’t end up having to loot a corpse in the middle of bad guys. With my pet set to not engage until the target hits me (or him), the pet steps in, whacks him and turns him away from me. I then hit the blow ’em up spell, then if they aren’t already dead I do the life-draw again and the blow ’em up again. It works great even on tough things. We (pet and I) did the group quest giant gnoll on our own using this technique and it worked awesomely well on the first try, no death involved. I occasionally lose my pet but it’s always when I draw from a spot too close to another bad guy who jump in to “help” and I can usually finish them off and not die, then regen my pet and go after another. If I get low on health I make sure I move to where I can regen without being in hostile territory so my regen is less risky.

Learning, still learning.

My son sent me disks for WoW and I spent two days installing them.  Now it’s doing an optimization update download, it’s about 30% done on my 2.5mb connection and it’s been at it since 7:30 this morning. It’s a DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS update. At this rate, there’s no way I’ll be ready to play by tonight. And the total bitch is, it’s taking up so much bandwidth I can’t play EQ or watch Netflix or a movie on Amazon. I’m up and about doing other things and my wrist is hurting like mad as a result. I cannot just sit, I have to do SOMETHING.

Not life and death, but mega frustrating. I’m eating HD Mint Chip ice cream in self defense. Pathetic.