Researching WoW for a novel

[JTStoll]

Hey all,

I'm currently working on a fantasy book involving a main character who plays WoW. He's a high level Paladin who gets his hands on a magic weapon IRL and has to save the world.

I plan to have a couple scenes that take place in game, and I need some help to make the scenes believable. See... I've never actually played WoW. A bit of a fling with Everquest back in the day is as close as I've gotten. Please don't hurt me!

Anyways, I'm looking for some help in outlining these scenes. For copyright reasons, I may not use too many specific WoW characters and levels, but I want to get a better idea of what WoW is like.

Here's the scenario I'm working on: You're a level-capped DPS Paladin playing on a school night. You're not doing an intensive raid. You're just playing for a few hours. What are you doing?

I want the scene to look something like this:

The character, Neil, is leading a group of people in some kind of fight. Things go bad for the group, and they run away, but nobody dies, because Neil is an amazing leader... in WoW. But it's a close call. While this is happening, he's thinking about how in a recent IRL battle, he was completely helpless and felt like a loser. That's the fun of the scene (and his character in general): He's amazing at this game, but real life is hard.

If you help, I'd love to send you a free eBook copy of the first book in the series (already published). Big contributors also will get a special thanks in book 2.

Thanks! I appreciate the help.

[manypillars]

The idea of things going bad in a fight and everyone running away and all living because Neil is an amazing leader doesn't make much sense in the context of WoW.

There are few consequences to dying- you don't delevel, you don't rot, no one can loot your body. You run back to the instance entrance, pay some gold for repairs, and you refresh your food buff. Most PvE boss fights shut you in the room to prevent you from running away and are usually designed to prevent players from resetting them (because you don't want that to accidentally happen mid-fight), and things going bad usually means people die at the wrong time, that key people die and you can't recover or that you failed a mechanic and people died to it. You might rez whoever died and pity buff them if you can, you might have a hunter or lock pet tank, you might ping pong the boss between two hunters, you might have everyone blow every cool down. If your raid leader calls for it, you stand in the fire and die faster.

Your frequent death is a fact of WoW at end game. That characters may and do die isn't a cause for tension, and that they lived isn't a cause for relief.

[SylviaDragon]

hmm. well that sounds like it would be some kind of pvp (player vrs player) situation. I think your best bet would be to have a world PvP encounter. since player vrs player combat on a pvp server means anyone from the other faction can attack you (although you are protected in some zones) so you can have this encounter take place just about anywhere and it can be started by just about anything. perhaps the Paladin is in a guild and one of his friends is trying to quest at low levels but a level capped player showed up and keeps killing him and his quest NPCs. (this is often how most world pvp starts) Your paladins come in to chase the guy off but the enemy player has backup so the Paladin has to call in friends or guild members to even the odds.
The nice thing about using this kind of encounter is that you can easily set things up the way you want them to in terms of what the location looks like since world pvp can happen just about anywhere. (Although major cities tend to make things less important since city guards can beat up the player for you) also some locations in wow allow you to fly while others do not. this can lead to aerial advantages such as easy escape/ambush or you can even land on a vantage point and attack from up there- but if you die on a wall or a mountain there is no way to get back to your body without taking rez sickness. (an option that will resurrect you at a graveyard, damaging your gear and causing you to do next to no damage for 10 min, meaning game over for you.)

Things to know about combat:
In pvp players tend to want to target and cc (stun or interrupt the casts) of healers.
There is no mounted combat but if you drop out of combat, mounting makes for a quick retreat.
You can line of sight caster classes by standing behind certain things
Death will not cause you to lose anything accept armor durability and force you to run back to your corpse from a graveyard.
The more often you die, the longer you must wait to resurrect. Up to 2 min. (but in battleground is 30 seconds, in dugneons.raids you just have to walk back in to the raid and in arenas once you are dead you stay dead untill the game is done.)
Players have cooldowns (cds) these are special spells that they can only use once every 1/2/3/5 min
World pvp fights usually end by causing the other team to run away, take rez sickness, kill them so often that they can no longer rez fast enough to keep their team alive.. or you just crush them with crazy numbers.
Many players would use some sort of voice chat instead of typing stuff out.
The other team can never understand you since there is an in game language barrier blizz put in place.

There are other encounters you could use as well if world pvp doesn’t sound good but it’s the most flexible number and strategy wise.
you can do rated battlegrounds where you can fight other teams (usualy 10 v 10) in different types of games. Most of these being capture the flag style games. (look up Arathi basin, warsong gulch, silvershard mines, Battle for Gilneas, eye of the storm and Temple of Kotmogu if you need an idea of how these games look/play)
these games require good communication and on the spot leadership that demands flexibility. There is also a lot of tug of war style fights where you often find yourself having to advance, retreat, loop around, and attack again. This is all done in a set location you can’t leave, but there is a decent amount of space to run around in so its not cramped.

Arenas could deal with 3v3 or 5v5 groups if you want something small but you can’t run away since its set in a much smaller location. There is lots of strategy involved in it but things happen so fast that it’s hard for just one person to lead a group. Everyone has to know what they are doing and communicate their intentions.

You could fight world bosses if you want to have the option to run away. But these are open world 40 man raids so…yeah.
You could also say he was running a heroic 5 man dungeon with his friends. A common pastime that involves having to use crowd control and memorize boss abilities. if the players are freshly level capped these dungeons could be challenging for them. but once again you can’t actually run away from anything in a dungeon because mobs will chase you in there until you die, unless you are so close to the entrance that you can escape through the portal.

in all but the first two examples, getting killed usually is not a big deal in wow. just a minor annoyance. but in pvp players take death very seriously since they hate looking bad in front of the enemy team and unlike in pve (player vrs environment) where a monster will just reset if you die, things keep happening on the enemy team while you are dead in pvp. they can eat through npcs, low levels and your friends while you are taking that dirt nap, so running away can be important but also a blow to the ego unless you come back and beat them.

[Kanadei]

If you help, I'd love to send you a free eBook copy of the first book in the series (already published). Big contributors also will get a special thanks in book 2.

What is the first book called? And by "published", do you mean "self-published"? Because this sounds like a pretty derivative and under-wrought idea for a book.

[JTStoll]

manypillars,

Thanks for the great info. That would be my old Everquest experiencing wanting to care about death, heh.

SylviaDragon,

I appreciate the post. I do like the idea of a PvP encounter for this, actually. I think that could work well. I could see the scene looking something like this:

Neil and his friends are in enemy territory doing some PvP. A group ambushes them. Things are going bad for a while.

Due to Neil's expert leadership, the pwn the other group.

I think that'd work great for this scene. Later in the series, I do plan to have Neil leading a major raid, which I'll do some separate research for, so it'd be nice to offset the PvE with some PvP.

Kanadei,

The title of the first book (and the series) is The Rift. I'm self published and loving it.