how many months?

I guess I should explain why I call this blog "Months Without a Shower."

For a time, I was deep into the realm we call World of Warcraft. I played as an Undead Warlock, a class known back in early 2005 for being extremely squishy, weak, and easy to destroy 1v1 PvP ImO. I had waited a long, long time for this game. I remember the excitement I felt the day I found out it had been released. I took an extra long break from work to drive into the city and pick up my pre-ordered copy, and I stayed up all night leveling what I knew would turn out to become a God amongst men.

Ayedee, my warlock, was my main. My alts never made it past level 20. I had no patience for leveling another character, I simply wanted to make my warlock godly. The race to level 60, the maximum level at the time, was little more than a slight challenge for me, and I was elated to finally begin trying out the end-game dungeons to try and get my Dreadmist equipment. My character had incredible luck, it turned out. Most characters will attempt to beat dungeons many, many times before they win a roll on their class equipment. I got 7 of the 8 pieces of the set within 3 days. This was not from me trying to do it over and over again, this was because for some reason every time I went into a dungeon, I came out with a piece of my set. Old-school WoW players know what I'm talking about, and why this was lucky for me. Fuckin Scholo.

My new gear, my destruction build, and my warlock class that nobody wanted to play were the reasons I got into my guild. It was one of the top three raiding guilds on my server, ended up becoming one of the top horde raiding guilds in the US of A. I applied on a whim, and was accepted almost instantly. This became my entrance into the world of true end-game World of Warcraft.

It began with Molten Core every night for weeks, then evolved into Blackwing Lair. Player versus Environment action had its perks: badass equipment, a running crew, and most importantly for me, opportunities for other things to do in the game. This was how I got into Player versus Player (PvP).

Again, old-school WoW players know scores upon scores of info about the way PvP used to be. I was at a disadvantage simply because I was a warlock. Weak, squishy, and easy to read. All warlocks from my day knew to do was cast fear and spam shadowbolt, which was simply not a viable thing to do in anything besides large scale PvP. The second disadvantage was that I was a caster. In 2005 WoW PvP, casters were often frowned upon as the ultimate goal of PvP was to become High Warlord and get a crazy weapon. The caster weapons were crap. In comparison to a lot of the weapons my guild was finding in the end-game instances, about equal and not worth the effort.

So why did I take the PvP plunge and decide to shoot for High Warlord? Dunno. I was bored. I had a lot of free time on my hands as I had just gotten fired and still had a buttload of money saved from my 401k. So I did it.

In 2005, to achieve the desired rank of High Warlord, you had to PvP every single day of the week for 18 hours a day. There was no room for slacking off because you weren't fighting against a goal, you were fighting to beat every single player on the server. If you didn't get within the top ranks of the server for that week, it was basically like tacking on another two weeks of PvP to the end of your already busy schedule.

All in all, getting top ranks every week, High Warlord is achievable after about 3 months.

So that's what I did. I PvP'd every day of every week for three months straight. Not once did I shower. And in the end, I achieved my goal of becoming High Warlord on December 26, 2005. A week after that I quit playing wow, and haven't played seriously since. So what was the point?

The memories of those three months still make me smile to this day. For a while, I was a god. Forget the fact that I was playing a caster, or an underpowered class. People looked up to me, they saw my skills and it gave them hope that maybe they could win too, damn class restrictions to hell. They saw what I was doing and thought that maybe one day, they could do it too. They watched me play and it gave them hope.

I completely changed my life after World of Warcraft. I moved to a different city, started going back to school, and started getting my life back on track. An old friend of mine who had played WoW with me came to visit me one night and we went out for drinks. I'll never forget what he told me.

It had been months after I had quit playing. He was in Ogrimmar, the main city for the horde. One person asked in general chat who the best warlock on the server was.

Ayedee, was the reply.