Level 5 – Falconwing Square.
A bit of an extension of what I was saying the other day, about realising how big the world was. Eventually you finish everything you can do on Sunstrider Isle and you get a quest sending you down to another quest-giver standing between the island and a bridge leading to Dawning Lane, a big road-type thing that joins it onto Silvermoon City. You’re told that the last person to attempt the journey was murdered by the Wretched (those blood elves who’ve gone feral because of their lack of magic: Mr. Fel-Rel-Stupidly-Difficult-To-Spell-Name the Banished is the leader of the Wretched on Sunstrider Isle) and that’s it’s a dangerous road to take because they’re perfectly happy to kill you and try and steal your magic. (Presumably this wouldn’t be a worry for rogues.) Then you retrieve the package the murdered outrunner was carrying and take it on to Falconwing Square where you take it to the Inn and get introduced to concepts like hearthstones, rested XP and professions (all again new on me.)
You have to remember that between level 1 and level 6 I had died approximately 8003 times. It wasn’t until I asked my friend why that little man wearing red armour had appeared on my screen that he realised how bad I was at what I was doing and decided to keep an eye on me. So I accept the quest and the giver says ‘I’m not going to lie to you; the path to Falconwing Square can be extremely dangerous if you leave the safety of Dawning Lane. Do you feel up to the task, Farfalla?’
Of course I accept, but having recently been told by a friend truly amazed by my noobness that I probably wanted to take things like mob levels and quest text a bit more seriously, or alternatively just run around naked and save myself the repair bills, I’m a bit more concerned about playing competently now. So I proceeded down Dawning Lane.
What you can see in the screenshot is Farfalla at the north-west end of the road, which then runs to the south-east. The buildings on either side are an Elvish town a bit like the ones in Sunstrider Isle but they’ve all been taken over by the Wretched who are swarming everywhere, and there are these huge robot things patrolling round too. Not good, and of course the quest text is extremely serious business, so I decide I’d better be careful. It takes me about five minutes to traverse the route because I insist on going down the dead centre of the path, so I’d be at least risk of pulling. The squiggly plants on the grassy island you can see on the picture caused me much headache because I couldn’t get over them – I eventually had to quickly make a little detour to the right-hand side and then immediately switched back into the middle when I was past. On the positive side of things, I reassured myself, I would be hidden by the plant from the mobs on the other side, so they wouldn’t be able to see me.
This makes it onto my blog because I look back really fondly on knowing almost nothing about WoW and just doing what seemed to make most sense at the time. 
~Farf
Bal’a dash, malanore!
Or greetings, traveler! Dorky as that may perhaps be.
Welcome to my blog. Perhaps a little explanation is in order. I’m a fairly regular girl from the UK, but one thing that makes me stand out amongst my friends is my love of gaming. My friends don’t game, and they don’t understand why I do. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for two and a half years now, from the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. I made a character on my server the first day I picked up the game, a Sin’dorei priest named Farfalla, and since then I’ve barely put her down, going from utter newbie who couldn’t even make her character turn around and run, to a hardcore raider as a holy priest in the Sunwell pre-3.0, flirted with RP on another server, and then to a casual raider, first as shadow and then holy again, in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
I haven’t only become a (fairly) skilled priest during my time in this game. I’ve made some really good friends, friendships that endure outside of Azeroth, and had some really good times. I’ve laughed with friends in Vent, screamed until my throat was hoarse the first time we downed Illidan as a guild, endured the agonising 1% wipes on Kalecgos and Brutallus, banged my head against the wall until I survived in PvP, felt the strange, disorienting feeling of having guilds full of friends fall apart. I’ve farmed countless minipets and mounts, way before the Achievement system was implemented and even more obsessively after. I even met my boyfriend in Azeroth, and we’ve now been living together for a year. I’ve changed as a person, for the better, in all kinds of ways, some of which would have happened anyway as I went from an adolescent to an adult, and some of which happened as a result of my experiences in WoW.
I’ve done some really stupid stuff too. I’ve got too deep into the game and messed up my university course because of it. I’ve been that emo dramaqueen girl that you all know on your server, the one who logs onto the game for attention. I’ve cared about what happens in-game to the extent that what happened outside of it became far less important, and hurt my family and friends in the process. All of these stupid things I’ve done have also helped me grow.
So what is the reason for this blog? Partly I’d like my friends and family to see what it is I enjoy about gaming. But another reason is that today, Blizzard announced their third expansion to the game. Titled World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, it’s going to change the game world as we know it, ripping apart the continents of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and changing the face of Azeroth permanently. And while I’m giddily excited about this prospect, it also occured to me that the places where some of my best in-game memories were formed are going to disappear forever. I want to record those places and memories, before they disappear.
So, here we are. 80 levels to develop my character to full strength, so 80 posts to chronicle Farfalla’s journey in-game.
For the Horde! Anar’alah!
~Farfalla
