Welcome to the second episode of know your guildie. This month we’ll gaze towards the stars, where the Draenei’s came from. On board their spaceship was a shaman, whom I met up with in the middle of Dalaran. His name? Shamatic!

The first question that came to mind was when this particular shaman started on the shamanistic path that has led him all the way through Azeroth, back to his homeland, and now to Northrend, to help out people, that’s not his own.
“I started playing wow in September 2006! First off before 2005 which was during my secondary school days, I pretty much never had played a MMO game and very little PC games in general. My fellow school friend Dwayne (Aka Genfist or Slientblade as his now called) introduced me to a MMO game called “Guild Wars”. Eventually I picked up my own copy of it and started playing with him online. It was pretty addictive and I ended up having five characters at lvl 20 (that was the highest lvl at the time), as my first MMO it was a good starter aswell. Although after a while Genfist started playing another MMO game called “World of Warcraft” that he constantly mentioned during and after school, saying “It’s even better than GW’s”.  One day, I actually went to Genfists house after school and played around with his lvl 54 Paladin in Darnasus – I think it was. After seeing how big the cities where and how you could actually ride mounts in the game (you couldn’t do that in Guild Wars), it interested me enough to go and create a Trial account.”

I’m amazed on how much this being likes to talk, and I try to keep up with my notes, while he just keeps talking. Guess that’s what a long space trip does to you. Anyway, because I’ve done my research I know for a fact that this shaman haven’t always been on the shamanistic path. So of course I have to dig further into this.
“When I finally finished installing WoW and all the patches which took me a few hours (Seems like nothing has changed since then xD) it was already midnight. I was getting tired so I thought I’d just log into the game for a bit with this newly made trial account.
In Guild wars I enjoyed classes that could do both healing and damage at the same time. Genfist told me that a Priest might be a good choice for me then, especially if I specced it “Shadow”. When I was at the character screen I originally was looking at making a undead priest, but seeing as Genfist was playing Alliance side I came across a equally cool race called “Night elves” that could also be priests.  As I said earlier it was midnight and I was getting pretty tired, so the first name that popped into my head was “Neversleep” (I thought it was quite appropriate at the time lol).
So Neversleep, a Night elf Priest was my first character in WOW. Although when TBC came out I eventually made a Draenei  Shaman called “Shamatic” that I lvled up as my second 70 character. I found myself enjoying/playing my Shaman alot more and I ended up making him my main character when Arisen was just starting to raid Serpent Shrine Cavern (SSC).”

The shaman joyfully tells me about his experiences in this world, and since I’m in my good mood, I let him go on:
“I’d have to say I enjoy my Shaman the most. Majority of my time is spent on him than any other character I have. Which is probably why I have a higher achievement score than most of you altoholics in this guild :P.
I enjoy my Shaman the most simply because of the play style of the class. I love classes that I can both heal and dps as and the Shaman class lives up to that and more in my opinion.”

Alright, time for me to stop the ever talking shaman and ask him some more questions – after all, I am the interviewer. There’s plenty of people who need help in Azeroth, but are there anything in particular you enjoy the most?
“There are a lot of things I like about wow but if you were to ask me to sum it up in one word, I’d say “Variety”. There are just so many things you can do in this game that you just can’t do in console games or even other MMO’s. I think the multiplayer in MMO games like WOW is amazing, there’s so many people you can choose to play with and there from lots of different countries.”

The reason we are having this conversation is because of the involvement in Arisen. When and why was Arisen chosen?
“I joined Arisen towards the end of Vanilla (a few months before Burning crusade came out). Both I and Genfist used to play on Darksorrow-EU, it was where we started our characters. When I was lvling up my priest, Genfist moved server to Hakkar-EU to join a Raiding guild. Darksorrow was full of Swedish and Danish players, despite most of the server speaking English, a lot of the good guilds Alliance Side would often require you to speak either Swedish or Danish depending on the guild.”
Being Danish myself I feel a bit offended, but I’m trying to hide this face, since Draenei’s are a bit larger than the average human :S
“When I was getting towards lvl 60, Gen was telling me about his new raiding guild “Arisen”. My guild on Darksorrow went bust after a merge with another guild, which was a shame since it was the first proper guild I was in and Guild chat was ALWAYS active. I got bored of being alone after becoming guildless and decided to move to Hakkar to play with Gen. After I got there I made a application to Arisen and hoped I would get into the same guild as him.
I waited about a week and a half for a reply (You lazy bastards xD), then one day I just turned up to one of Arisen’s outdoor raids, which was “Ysondre” and started raid healing outside of the raid group. A member called “Rose” noticed my help and tossed me a Raid invite and told the other officers to get their fingers out of there asses and invite me, which they did.
Now here I am :P”

Again I’m offended. I’m not a lazy bastard. I’m briefly thinking about stopping the interview, but then realize that I wasn’t that active an officer myself back in the days, so I let it go and continue. 4 years of WoW must’ve given a lot of experiences, but are there anything particular that comes to mind, that’s worth mentioning?
“To be honest, most of my favourite moments have happened within Arisen.  Like Downing a new boss for the first time or randomly doing stupid crap in game.
Although I have to say, one of my favourite moments in game was when I was levelling my priest around lvl 25. I was in the barrens one day (don’t ask me why because I don’t know either lol) and I was being chased by two Horde characters that were the same lvl as me. Back then you couldn’t get riding mounts until you reached lvl 40. So I was being chased on foot, I ran from the cross roads all the way down towards “Razorfen Kraul”. In the distance I saw a large Dwarven encampment just before RFK and made a dash towards it. I went deep into the building, knowing it would take the Horde quite a while to kill all the friendly dwarves before getting to me. My hearthstone was on Cooldown still, so I had no way to escape for now.
The Horde managed to clear the first lot of mobs and were heading towards the room I was in at this time. I thought I was going to be killed by them for sure but in my last attempt at avoiding them I used the ever useful “Shadowmeld” and stood still in that room. Funny enough both the Horde ran straight through my body without even seeing me, both of them started to clear the other room of dwarves while I quickly ran back out of the encampment and escaped the thousand needles. I was later laughing so hard at their failure :P”

While he blabbers along about horde failures my mind drift away and I start to think of some lyric from a song. “It’s the end of the world as we know” my brain sings, and I realize that the R:E:M song actually fits pretty well on the Azerothian universe. Cataclysm WILL change the world as we know it. So what is your take on the up coming expansion?
“I like what I see so far, despite it still being in Alpha stage. When I watched last year’s Blizzcon, I especially enjoyed the developer panels for Cata. I do have to say though; I think some of the announcements were pretty strange. Like making Worgen a playable race. Although after they brought the Draenei, who had very little story as “Broken” into wow, I reckon they can pretty much make anything a playable race. Seeing how they had to write a lot of new lore to support Draenei, but I thought it turned out pretty well to be honest.
The other weird changes are the announcements of some new class combos. Some probably should have been here from the start and others I think are just plain wrong. Orc mages? Gnome priests? Dwarf mages? And Tauren Paladins of all races…….please.”

What’s wrong with a holy cow?

“I look forward to playing in the old Azeroth zones again, especially after seeing some of the screenshots of the updated zones. Hyjal I’m looking forward to the most since we haven’t ever seen what it looks like in game, despite it being a zone in wow since the beginning.
I’m also looking forward to things that blizzard haven’t even been clear on yet as well, like Shamans in pvp. As someone who loves to do PVP when I can, I’d like to know if shamans will finally be “in-line” with some of the other classes since at the moment we have next to no defences or “oh-shit” buttons.
The lore is another thing, like the murder of Cairne Bloodhoof, how the Worgen are tied to the Night elves, Rise of Garrosh, Malfurion Stormrages return and also Med’an who is suppose to be the saviour of Azeroth with his Human, Draenei and Orc heritage, suppose to be the reason why Thrall has taken absence from the Horde.
So I’m looking forward to quite a bit, as you can see!”

Alright alright, enough of all the in game nonsense! Who the hell is this talkative person behind the Draenei mask?
“My real name is William and I’m currently Eighteen years old!”

Sweet eighteen, a young man like you must have loads of hobbies then!
“Haha, the question should have probably been “What hobbies did you have before WOW?”
One of my hobbies is modifying game consoles. Before I started playing MMO’s, I was a main poster of a forum called GBA-TMW. There I used to spend my time posting “How to” guides, or just helping random people who wished to mod there consoles and spending my time on the IRC channel there with all the other avid users and moderators.
Also like most other people my age I tend to be a fan of watching Anime and reading Manga. I even go to the Anime conventions that are hosted at London excel once a year with a few of my real life friends!”

You obviously have met Genfist in real life, but what about some of the other nutters in Arisen?
“I have met Genfist and Dramier in real life, but that’s simply because we went to school together for five years. Asides from my friends, I haven’t met guildies or anyone that I’ve met exclusively on World of Warcraft before.”
So the big question remains. Do you actually want to meet anyone of us?
“I’d like to meet alot of the core people from Arisen, Alot of you guys are from different countries though and travelling at this point in time, isn’t really an option for me.  So having some of you on Facebook and msn will suffice for me, for now :D”

That nearly concludes this months guildie – but in the end Shamatic is telling a bit about some of the useful mods a shaman must have – ah, what the heck, even though you aren’t on the shamanistic path, you can give them a go too!
“As a experienced WOW gamer I use quite a few add-ons nowadays, but the two I have used from as far as I can remember is Atlas loot and CT map mod (For coordinates). CT map mod in conjunction with Thottbot is what I used to use before the days of the quest helper add-ons that recently came into fashion this expansion.

I use add-ons for many different things and some that would just provide no benefit to others, but I can recommend;
Prat – Chat add-on that lets you customize your chat text a bit more as well as let you copy and paste whispers and even Links (that’s always useful :P)
X-pearl – gives you way sexier party bars and the ability to customize them a bit more than the default UI ones. I mainly like it because it gives you 3D portraits of your character and your party members, rather than the crappy blizzard race artwork.
Atlas loot – Probably the most useful add-on there is, although it can be a pain having to update it more than other add-ons. It lets you view/link all loot that drops from instances and tells you from which boss it drops. It also has a very good profession tab, which tells you the mats to craft items and the skill at which you can learn how to make them.
And of course the Arisen essentials like Deadly boss mods for boss encounter timers and CT raid Assist!”

Teddy Says:

Neversleep \o/

On May 13th, 2010 at 10:59 am

Beni Says:

EIGHTTEEN YEARS OLD!? WTF!?

On May 14th, 2010 at 1:28 pm

Nolwenn Says:

Omg hes handling all those golden balls with only 2 fingers :o

On May 14th, 2010 at 4:33 pm

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