10 years of WoW 2014 - 2024: A personal journey - Mists of Pandaria
We joined World of Warcraft pretty late as a friend group during the Mists of Pandaria expansion. My brother had already been playing since Cataclysm and had completed Heroic Lei Shen as well as some other notable raids like Firelands before MoP was released. We all started playing during the Siege of Orgrimmar content drought, which was good enough for me because I had no idea what was even going on. I started by leveling a rogue and absolutely hated every second of it. The second I got that character to level 55, I instantly made a Death Knight (DK) and never looked back.
I loved and mained that character during MoP, Warlords of Draenor, and about half of Legion. I was a tank with my brother and have some of my best memories about tanking during Siege of Orgrimmar and the amazing bosses of that raid. Garrosh and his voice lines will forever be burned into my head, along with the feeling I got when we got Garrosh 25m Heroic Ahead of the Curve for the first time. It really made me reflect on not just my gaming career, but myself as a person and how much I've grown and seen since then. When I killed Garrosh for the first time, I had just graduated high school less than three months prior. Here I am again, killing Garrosh all these years later after having gone through life. It’s strange to think of the younger me sitting in the living room of my mom's house, sitting on a church pew we used as chairs for our dining room, with my brother as we downed Garrosh that very first time. Now, I’m sitting in the home I share with my soon-to-be wife and her family, after having owned a restaurant and moved on to find more stable work.
It’s crazy to think WoW has been there the whole time for me, my friends, and my family as a constant source of joy. It’s strange that I can put major events of my life in terms of what WoW expansions were out at the time. I guess that’s just how it goes.
I’m writing this in July 2024 during the MoP Remix event, and it’s absolutely amazing to be able to relive these raids and bosses and have them be relevant once again. Mists really had some of the coolest environments and some of the coolest bosses I had ever seen at that point. I’m so happy to have experienced MoP the way I did and to get to relive it with the most recent event. Although, you can only do Siege so many times before you can’t do it anymore, haha. I was so excited for Warlords of Draenor... yeah.