Hello! My name is Robin Baird, and I’ll be writing the World of Warcraft Column every other week. Since I’ve mostly written about other MMOs on MMORPG, I thought it would be a good idea to give everyone a brief outline of my history in WoW so you can better understand the perspective I have on the game and where I come from on things. Let’s step into the time machine.
I started playing WoW in February of 2005. For most of Vanilla, I was only interested in participating in PvP and only really leveled up when my level was blocking me from ranking up. I refused to level up from level 59 to 60 for a while because I was enjoying the 50-59 bracket too much. After a while though, I got burned out on PvP because it got to the point where I had to play every waking second to have a chance of ranking up. The strain of this killed my PvP guild, but the upside is it led me to raiding. The downside is I’ve never been able to get back into PvP as I had been.
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Raiding became my main focus through the rest of Vanilla, BC, Wrath, and Cata. I’ve more often than not been an officer in the guilds I was in, and most of the time I have been a class officer and raid leader. I’ve also filled the role of GM a couple of times. I’ve switched up my main a few times as well, going from a Warrior in Vanilla and BC, a Priest for Wrath and Cata, a Monk for WoD, and a Druid for Legion and BfA. I’ve played all the roles though tanking and melee DPS are overall my favorite. Except of course for Shadow, Shadow was a blast in Wrath and Cata.
After a while, the strain of raiding and always having to be super prepared all the time finally got to me, and it’s what led to me taking time off from the game when MoP came around. When I decided I missed raiding and wanted to get back into it, I briefly went to start up in a mythic raiding guild. However, I quickly realized I didn’t have the time or drive to raid at that level anymore. Thankfully I was able to find a casual guild full of fun people which allowed me to play the content I still wanted to do but in a much less time-consuming way.
It also might seem weird, but as far as lore goes, I wasn’t all that into it at all until Mists of Pandaria. Now the astute among you is probably wondering how I got into the lore during an expansion I wasn’t playing. Going into MoP, I was planning on playing, and Tides of War was the first WoW book I ever read. From that book sparked further interest in all the things and I started reading the book avidly. My issue with MoP had less to do with issues in the story and just more to do where I was with the game itself. The way the overarching themes were handled in MoP was some of the best concepts there’s ever been put forth in the game. Of course, this is a whole topic I could get into on its own, so I’ll leave it there for now. Suffice it to say; MoP helped convert me from someone who only paid attention to the story which was in the game directly to someone who wanted to see all of the lore.
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So that’s the quick lowdown on me but what does this all mean for this column? Well, I tend to cover a wide variety of things because my interests, even in WoW, tends to run the gamut from lore to raiding and Mythic +. Although, I won’t talk about the cutting-edge raiding scene much since I’m not directly involved with that. Also, I don’t do pet battles, so that’s unlikely to come up as well. But outside of those caveats, I’m open to most anything. If there’s anything you’d like to see as a topic, please let me know, and if it’s feasible for me I’ll add it to my list.
