Honest to goodness newbie

Honest to goodness newbie

So I ventured back to Breeland the past couple of days to catch up on the prologue to the epic quest that I have been conveniently avoiding, right? I get a quest to go kill a bad dude named Jagger Jack and poison the sheep corpses he feeds his wolves off of. I run to the ruins where this guy is chillin and start poisoning sheep corpses when this dude asks me to help him out. So I join his group and he has a level 8 with him, which is incredibly low for the area we were in.

So we run off and take down Jack without much sweat and all of a sudden the level 8 starts dropping like mad in health . . . of course, he has aggro’d a TON of mobs. Well, being the good minstrel I am (as opposed to “smart” minstrel) I toss him a heal. This transfers the hate of 6 or so mobs on to me who decide to both hit me with metal objects and poke me with pointy arrows. I try to heal myself but the interrupt rate with any more than 3 is ridiculous . . . even if they are green or gray to me. I die. Mr. level 8 dies. And wouldn’t you know it, the other dude is like . . . heh, I just soloed like 5 of those guys I ROCK. Nerf Champions.

So Mr. level 8 then asks, what’s agro mean? Well looky here! An honest to goodness MMO newbie. The other guy and I start to explain that it means the bad guys in the area got “aggressive” to him and even more so because he was such a low level. He explains that, yes, this was in fact his first MMO.

It’s interesting to note that this phenomenon is always going to happen. Not everyone that plays LOTRO is going to have years of EQ and WoW experience . . . there will be a rare few who are, in fact, fresh out of the game console scene. In my mind, this is why these games are always going to survive. People are going to be fascinated over and over with the MMO world and find the things we all found a few years ago in these games.

I actually do have fond memories of EQ. Every once in a while I’ll get a flash back of being on orc hill in Greater Faydark (which by the way is going to be redone . . . the next expansion is going to renovate it) or in various dungeons that we use to hunt and smile. I remember my first raids and Kael Drakkel and the Halls of Testing with fondness. Taking down Dozekar will always be there in the back of my mind. It was fun.