So, like I said in my last post, I thought it was the rogue's life for me. Well, I changed my mind. To be honest, it wasn't the class that I expected to end up playing and I was always thinking in the back of my mind: "cleric!". But I didn't want to roll a cleric / priest right off the bat until I got used to WoW's interface and game concepts. By the time I got my rogue to level 8, I felt that I had figured things out enough to consider rerolling.

At first, I rerolled as a Dranei. But that ended up not appealing to me. While they look good in cloth, at least from the front and waist-up. The whole hooves and tail things still bothered me. I also considered human or night elf, but as a cleric in past games, I've never been afraid of getting hit. And the night elves look like one good whack would break them in two. So I went back and chose a dwarf for my priest. He wears cloth armor, but he looks like someone who can take a beating and keep healing.

Soloing as a priest in WoW is a dream compared to doing it as a cleric in EQ1. Blizzard is not afraid of letting the priest class do a little DPS, which allows you to solo moderately well while you wait for a group. In fact, even through level 15, I have yet to participate in any sort of pickup group.

Of course, up until level 12-14, you're still missing a lot of priestly talents that would be useful in a group. So I haven't felt like I was really ready to group yet. Between learning my way around WoW, learning my spells, learning the pace of battles and getting familiar with the UI, I wasn't sure that I wanted to subject another player to my mistakes yet. And I've made some doozies. I've left at least one set of bones in every zone that I've been in so far, but the corpse runs have been extremely easy.

Well, except for when I managed to wander into the Badlands and died. I was in such a bad place that I paid the Spirit Keeper to resurrect me at the graveyard. Except that said graveyard was currently camped by a level 20+ flying buzzard thingy so I immediately died again. But after it flew away, I resurrected again and use my hearthstone thingy to go back to an inn.

Levelling got a bit slow at levels 10-11 though. The mobs were tearing me up a lot more and I was having trouble finishing quests. Fortunately, I was able to find enough mobs that were a level below me that could be killed and skinned. So, with a little bit of luck and perseverance, I ended up with a few stacks of light leather that could be sold in the auction house (AH) for a modest sum. That was enough to buy me a few bags and a few pieces of equipment. I also managed to find a wand that dropped off of a trash mob which lets me do damage without using mana.

Here's one of the things that WoW gets right over EQ1/EQ2. Decent drops off of regular mobs. In the few days that I've been playing, I've seen decent gear drop off of common mobs at a fairly decent clip. While there's still some trash loot that drops (no-name armor bits with nothing special) there have been some nice pieces that sell well in the AH. I looked at my money purse last night and saw that I've broken the 2gp mark (plus I've probably already spent over 1gp in the AH, buying gear).