The Echo Isles - introduction

ow hai 2 u.

Ever since my good friend Ercles started his WoW blog I've kinda wanted to get back into teh blawgingz. I'll try and get a few subjects that's been brewing out of the way fairly soon and then update with more experiences and news as I gear my shaman and pewpew with my mage.

The name of the blog comes from my favorite race of the Warcraft universe, the trolls. The Darkspear tribe was saved from murlocs by Thrall and his orc companions, and has ever since been a part of the new Horde. In an act of severe cultural imperalism, the Darkspear were forced to stop cannibalizing each other, to become more 'civilized'. Anyway, they are supposed to live on the Echo Isles, off the cost of Durotar. However, in game, you kill the trolls on those islands and the only real Horde troll presence is in Sen'Jin village. The Darkspear are supposed to be rare and they remain fairly so (the least played race together with dwarfs*, coincidently the coolest race of the Alliance), however I don't understand how people can resist the male troll model or the patios accent.

Thus, when I started the game, it was obvious which race I would choose. Since I love hybrids and was told shammies were, and I also love shammies and the head hunters from lore and Warcraft 3, that was no hard choice either, and Togtok saw the light of day. I figured I wanted a character that could do a little bit of everything to try out what I would want in a pure, although I thought about creating an orc warrior too, cause grunts are cool. Apperantly, shaman is the least played class also, and I always love feeling like I'm a unique snowflake.

I embraced WoW fairly late, mainly because I didn't have anyone to play with, but when some peeps from a pen and paper roleplaying forum decided to start, I went with them and my account was created in the autumn of 2006, i.e., before The Burning Crusade. I never got to level 60 before it's release however, and never really saw any of the vanilla content on my own.

I wanted an alt to play while Togtok was gaining rested status, and I figured that mages are also cool. Forsaken or Darkspear Trolls (remember when we didn't have belfs? Glory days...)? Easy choice since I don't particularly fancy the whole gloomy-emo theme of the undead. Thus Vorla saw the light of day. Back then arcane wasn't a "real" spec, and flinging fire balls is boring, so I opted for the more control related AoE build and Vorla stayed frost and kept up with the rogues well into Naxx-10 content before respeccing arcane.

When Burning Crusade hit, the people I originally started playing with kicked off a belf group. I thought this sounded fun enough, and for quite some time we played every wednesday night. We made it to somewhere around 35 together before it sort of fell apart due to various reasons, but my belf hunter (all the other classes except rogue were taken) is currently 43 and the others have taken up the wednesday night gaming and are currently somewhere around 72-73. The reason I write about this is that the guild never really was up to par with fielding Karazhan runs in the day, and I wanted to raid and see content. So, I raided with Vorla in another guild and kept doing that until summer struck. Steamwheedle Cartel being a low-pop server really died. To make matters worse, the guild I was raiding with had some minor drama and simply wasn't working that well. No guild on the server matched us either, people were doing T5/T6 content, struggling in Kara or were simply full on mages. So, I decided to migrate.

The highest populated RP server was Argent Dawn, so that's where my hunt started. I applied for Absolution, which seemed like a guild that would fit me, and three days later I was accepted (the guild masters first comment was "Nice kit :)" which made me fairly confident) and paid for a character transfer.

Today, I remain in Absolution and has done so for 11 days short of a year. I was recently appointed officer together with a warlock (Brr! Mage's sworn enemies!) to deal with the ranged department, and I do the occasional raid leading. I won't be musing much about that though, since there's usually nothing fun to write about anyway. A few weeks back I transferred Togtok to Argent Dawn with the intent to level him to 80 and start gearing him as a healer alt. A few days back he dinged for the last time and the Heroic grind started. I got the healy mace off of Nexus yesterday and also managed to heal my first Naxx-10 run, all in all fun and something I look forward to doing again.

The main characters that this blog will be about is thus Vorla, level 80 arcane/FFB mage, and Togtok, level 80 restoration/enhancement shaman. Sometimes I'll write about my alts (I've been wanting a tanking alt and will probably level a paladin. Slowly.) but I am by no means an altoholic.

Welcome to da Echo Isles, mon!

* http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php