Level 10 Protection Warrior

Some time in the fall of 2006 my girlfriend (now wife) and her sister started playing World of Warcraft. I had actively avoided the game during the hype at its release. In no small part this was due to the cartoony graphics. I had played all the Blizzard games up to that point, with StarCraft being my favorite, but I figured a game with childish graphics like this clearly must be aimed at children.

One evening I created an orc warrior on my girlfriends account. I was stuck for the rest of the night, and the very next day I bought the game. I spent a few moments looking for information on the different classes in the game, and found out that warriors were in high demand for group content. That sounded pretty good to me! After telling two of my friends that I started playing World of Warcraft, they were immediately on board. Thus we had our five man team. Caninen as Holy Priest, Lyonea and Dingus as Rogues, and Leffe and me as Warriors, Arms and Protection respectively. We had no way of knowing that four of us would become hardcore raiders, and three of us would become officers of the best guild on the server.

My oldest screenshot. Level 18 orc tank in The Sepulcher.

This was thirteen years ago and information about the game was very sparse. None of the plethora of sources that are available today existed back then. Youtube existed, but besides some PvP show-off videos, there was hardly anything about World of Warcraft. You basically had to resort to Thottbot and a few forum posts. I managed to find some kind of tank guide on one of those obscure forums. Little did I know that it was aimed towards end-game raiding, so I started working towards that final tank build from the very beginning, getting my first Protection Talent at level 10.