OK, no.  I lie.  This post is actually about the less-well-known WoW:

My wife has been trying to get me to play WoW for several months now, and what she ACTUALLY wound up convincing me to do was to re-up my subscription to EQ2, where I found that the Daybreak devs had spent the last couple of years making a much more friendly game than I remembered from my last round on the Norrathian treadmill.

So I’ve spent the last couple of months playing EQ2, and I realized that I’d pretty much gotten to the point where I was just playing to see the numbers on the character sheet get bigger and I needed a change of pace.

So, I decided to try WoW again, for more-or-less the first time since 2004, when I managed to level a gnome warlock up into her 40s before going back to the EQ1 masochism tango.  I say “more or less” because I’ve actually logged on twice in the last 12 years, both on free weekends, and both times I have logged on to that gnome warlock, looked around for someone with a ! over their head, clicked on that person and lost interest almost immediately in WHY I was being asked to go kill 10 representative samples of the local wildlife.

So, THIS time, I decided to a) make a new character and b) engage with the “story” for only long enough to get to level 15, where I could start running instanced dungeons.

I decided to make a Priest, which is WoW’s best pet class.  Unlike Warlocks, who need reagents and mana to summon pets, I just press the “I” key, hit the queue button, and the game finds me four pets to run me through a dungeon.

It’s been working out pretty well:

…and all in a little under 12 hours of play, which is practically a sprint by MMO standards.

I am benefiting somewhat from the sheer number of other characters who are decked head-to-toe in heirloom gear, WoW’s “here, you’re level 100, have some cool twink gear for your alts” gear.  It makes dungeons go a lot faster when everyone is wearing gear well beyond what the dungeons were tuned for and of course it means that I have less competition for priest loot.

How long will I play?  I’m not honestly sure.  I love the push-button nature of grouping.  We’ll see if that novelty can hold once I get to the point where I’ve seen all of the dungeons and am just logging in to make the numbers on the character sheet get bigger.