A week two all ready Warcraft has suck its claws deep into my life like a wild Hippogryph tearing into an unsuspecting troll. As mentioned last week I intend to update once a week for the first four weeks of my return to the game to, hopefully, offer some insights for non-WoW players. They intention isn't to dissuade or encourage people to play, just to journal my perceptions of the game coming back to it after a long absense. If you have any suggestions or queries for me feel free to send me an email, hit the comments below or the forums and say hi.

My main character is a Night Elf Rogue and while he’s terrific to use on a PvP server where you can attack or be attacked at any time by someone on the other faction, it has to be said that Rogue’s are not any where near as flashy or exciting as some of the other classes but for sneaking up on people and laying them out when they're recovering after a fight or speaking to a quest giver, it's both evil and satisfying. My job in raids and instances is to stand in the shadows, wait for our warrior or paladin to get a monsters attention, then lay in with the slicing and dicing. I can’t summon demons, or use my pet to attack enemies or open portals to other places and sometimes its a bit depressing only turning invisible as your single party trick. But that’s what alts are for.

With currently ten races across two factions, each with their own starting area and attributes, plus ten classes to choose from there’s a lot of options to take when creating your Warcraft character. People create alts for a number of reasons, to ‘twink’ them up for PVP play, to complement their main character and provide them with materials, to use as a mule or like me because they want to experience as much of the game as possible. Given the amount of variety on offer it’s far too easy to become an alt-oholic, creating new characters all the time rather than levelling your existing characters. I’ve spent the last week logging a lot of time with my new alts, a Draenai Paladin and a Blood Elf Warlock, the two new races that were introduced with the Burning Crusade expansion. They’re starting areas are both very cool, the Blood Elves in their magical city and the Draenai at the crash site of their dimensional ship. The Draenai ‘capital’ is Exodar and it’s big, bigger possibly than the Dwarf capitol Iron Forge, and looks amazing. I’m also pretty partial to the Draenai because they look a lot like Hellboy. They’re taller than most races, blue skinned with hoofed feet and tails, they’re hair options include a number of tentacles and ridged foreheads like Klingons. Not many seem to share my affection as I had trouble finding people to party with to knock of the early quests in the Draenai starting area, but in the Blood Elves starting area there were people every where and I’ve all ready taken my Blood Elf Warlock up to 17. I’ll play both alts here and there until they get their mounts, then refocus on getting my Night Elf Rogue to end game content.

My beloved Rogue Nagamaki is currently at level 48 and while there’s a lot of quests around the place its slow going to move up the ranks. There isn’t much that happens with Rogues from here to level 60 either so I’m exploring a lot and finding new places. I’ve also been shopping around for a Guild but its not that easy to find one that meets my needs. Ideally you should be able to find a guild that caters to both leveling players and end game content players with a large membership base and plenty of support for people working on leveling up their professions. On my ‘to do’ list is to head to Stormwind or Ironforge where most groups congregate and ask around about a good guild for people levelling like me. Joining a Guild also means you've got people to chat to and ask for help, particularly if you get pinned down by some overzealous gankers and need to call in reinforcements.

There's always something cool to see or do in Azeroth, I bumped into a Dwarf Hunter on a dock while waiting for a boat, an end game character with armour that looked like the sword from Soul Calibur, complete with weird roving eyeball. He took the time to show off his mounts he’d collected in Northrend, the area in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. One of them was a huge war mammoth with seats for passengers on the side. Gonna have to see about getting myself one of those when/if I get the expansion, it's good motivation catching a glimpse of people who are far ahead of you in the game. Two weeks in and two weeks to go before I decide whether or not to keep playing. But so far I’m still enjoying it and looking forward to what’s ahead for my characters.