World of Warcraft.

Hi! My name is Tiffany and I play World of Warcraft! For those of you who are unfamiliar with WoW: it is a MMORPG -Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or something like that. I'm not 100% on the initialization.

Basically, there are two factions: Horde and Alliance, each with their own races. I play Horde. I have a plethora of characters aka toons, although only 3 are currently at max level, 2 of which are raiding.
My main guild actually just started raiding last week. It is a small guild, currently consisting of me, my boyfriend, six other friends. You need 10 minimum to raid and we want our guild to grow and be a friendly, larger social place so we are currently recruiting! We just nabbed 2 more great players and hope to expand even more.

The first raid in this expansion, Mists of Pandaria, is known as Moshu'gan Vaults. Here is a screenshot of us downing the second boss, Feng the Accursed!

Pretty schnazzy for only the first week of raiding and with pugs! :)

Some terms you may see pop up when I talk about WoW are: 

• PUG/pug/pugs - Pick Up Group - this means the person is not in our guild and we just "picked them up" for this raid/dungeon. We may never talk to them again, they may never talk to us again, or they may be awesome and join our guild later, but for right now they are a pug!
• DPS and HPS - damage per second and healing per second. When raiding, it is fairly important that both of these numbers are high on the meters. You need to kill stuff and someone needs to keep you alive! 
• UI - User Interface - I'll probably do a post on this later as I mess with my UI constantly trying to find just the right configuration that isn't too cluttered on my screen. 
• Raiding - I used to think this was PVP (another term! Next bullet) warfare! Raiding, however, refers to dungeons requiring at least 10 people with bosses and monsters whose health is really really high and who drop better loot (gear). 
• PVP - player versus player - we have BGs (Battlegrounds) and Arenas. Arenas are smaller PVP battles 2v2, 3v3, 5v5. BGs can range from 15v15 to 40v40. Each BG has a different objective: capture the flag, defend a base, gather resources, etc., but they all have one thing in common: Horde vs. Alliance, kill kill kill!
• PVE - player versus environment - this includes questing, dungeons (5 mans), and scenarios. Most of WoW can be termed PVE. You are doing daily quests killing NPCs (non-player characters), gathering stuff, crafting stuff, etc. 

Mists of Pandaria is the newest expansion and came out in late September of this year. I wasn't going to play anymore, but my boyfriend was so eager to play and got me excited about playing again! LOL The new race this expansion is the Pandaren, a panda-like humanoid. Pandarens start off neutral, but then you have to choose if you will be Horde or Alliance, very early on, around level 10. Once you choose, you're stuck. 

I am in two guilds this time around and raiding on two different toons. The previous picture was with my #1 guild, for whom I am playing a pandaren Mistweaver Monk. The Mistweaver specialization means that I am a healer! My job is to heal up my fellow players as they take damage. 

In my second guild, I play a troll shadow priest, which is known as a rDPS. The "r" stands for ranged. Some classes are ranged, meaning we can deal damage from afar. Others are melee (mDPS) meaning that they have to be within hitting distance. 

In this second guild, I am part of one of the three raid groups. Our group has been raiding for a few weeks now and we are now into the second raid, Heart of Fear. We downed the first boss our first night in! He was a really big bug and really just had to die. :P 

Suck Less' Imperial Vizier Zor'lok kill. 12-8-12

WoW is a lot of fun and offers a variety of different playing styles. You would first choose the type of realm you would like to play on. There are PVE realms, PVP realms, RP (role playing) realms, and PVP RP realms. From there you choose a race and faction, and then the class. Alliance has humans, dwarves, draenei (alien race), worgen (werewolf-esque), gnomes, and night elves. Horde has orcs, trolls, goblins, tauren (cow-like creatures), undead (zombies-esque), and blood elves. Both factions have pandaren.

The classes are varied and different. There are hunters, mages, warlocks, priests, warriors, death knights, shamans, paladins, rogues, druids, and the newest class, monks! If a WoW players talks about hybrid classes, they are referring to classes that can have different specializations such as tank/dps/heals. Hybrid classes are druids, monks, and paladins. Warriors and death knights are kinda hybrid as they can be tanks or dps, but they do not have healing abilities. Shamans and priests are also "kinda" hybrid as they can choose to either DPS or heal. Pure DPS classes are hunters, mages, warlocks, and rogues.

If you think you might like to give World of Warcraft a try, you can make an account and play for free up to level 20. They do have some restrictions like not being able to whisper people you're not friends with, no trade, gold cap, etc. but it would give you a great feel to the game, etc.

Well, enough talk about my nerdcraft...time for bed!