By the start of 2007, I had about 5 months of WoW under my belt. I had one character at max level (60) and had several other low level alts, all of them in the guild called Order of Odin. Patch 2.0.1 had been released and we were about 2 and a half weeks away from the Burning Crusade being released. At this point I was mostly playing alts and going on guild runs through Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire, Blackrock Depths, Stratholme and Scholomance.
At this point I was playing WoW my second custom built computer, which I put together in April 2002. It was powered by an AMD Athlon 1700 processor, 512 MB of memory, nVidia GeForce 3 Ti 500 with a whooping 160GB hard drive. My monitor was an insanely heavy CRT with a top resolution of 1024x768. WoW actually ran pretty decently. It wasn't until later in Burning Crusade and when I started raiding that it really started showing its age.
January 1, 2007 - A few minutes after midnight. After watching the ball drop in New York with my family, I returned to my computer and logged in to see the festivities. There were fireworks and booze in Stormwind. And dancing druid-bears. Even though they never really change I try to see the fireworks in WoW every year. I took this on my priest, who was about level 20 at the time. Lenaya was named for a character on Stargate SG-1, Linea, the Destroyer of Worlds. Sounded cool for a Shadow Priest.
January 4, 2007 - Questing in Duskwood with Baraccus and Kaidn. Besides being surprised by the sudden rain, at first I though Kaidn's mage shield was repelling it.
January 4, 2007 - In the Wetlands. When the moon hits your eye.... Even the sky in WoW looks great.
January 5, 2007 - Clothie buddies!! With me being a tailor and both of us using cloth gear, Baraccus and I had matching gear for a while.
January 7, 2007 - Here I'm being shown a "trick" for getting to the end of Blackrock Depths. I think we needed to get someone the Molten Core attunement quest or the Black Forge. After Lord Incendius, we jumped down on to a ledge by the lava, ran a little ways and got to this part. At level 60 the lava actually hurt. So Balford, the priest shielded us, we ran out into the lava towards that island. Half-way across he refreshed our shields. Once we got to the island there were a few fire elementals to fight and then we swam through a tiny bit more lava to emerge on a ledge on the opposite side of the cavern. Tricksy, tricksy.
January 9, 2007 - Patch 2.0.3 - "The Burning Crusade" was released. The expansion itself would be released in one more week.
January 11, 2007 - The original end of the Missing Diplomat questline. Remember when King Wrynn was missing? Here's Lady Jaina Proudmore and her entourage - Pained and Archmage Tervosh.
January 12, 2007 - Raid Quest! There used to be a few quests in the world that actually required a raid to complete. This semi-random group is in the Eastern Plaguelands to slay Nathanos Blightcaller. It wasn't until I rolled a Horde character that I learned how funny this guy is.
January 13, 2007 - The Dark Portal is open! Burning Crusade launch is mere days away, but already tons of demons and pouring through the Dark Portal. The Argent Dawn had a camp established there and upon completing a quest to kill a mere 6 Felguards, I was awarded with one of, if not the rarest tabards in the game. Tabard of the Protector.
January 13, 2007 - Whoops. Oh well, quest done. While this was going on, Highlord Kruul was running around Azeroth surprising people with a quick death. As you can see in this YouTube video, he was quite thorough.
January 17, 2007 - A day after the release of The Burning Crusade. My first steps through the Dark Portal. And the sense of awe and wonder that followed. To this day, I still enjoy taking a new toon through the Dark Portal that first time. That feeling of arriving on a different work is pretty awesome.
January 17, 2007 - The dreaded Fel Reaver. Loud, tall and will stomp you into tho dirt if you're not looking. I saw more than a few people die to this horrible monstrosity.
January 18, 2007 - At some point Baraccus had jokingly told me he couldn't wait to kill a Blood Elf Paladin. I assumed it'd be days before we saw any in the open world. Instead it was just one day. This person must've been up all night.
January 19, 2007 - Using the /who command, a lot of people were watching to see who the first level 70 on the server would be. Keep in mind there were no achievements back then. It was Drec, a Night Elf Hunter, barely two days in. He was also the first level 80 on Destromath in Wrath of the Lich King.
January 20, 2007 - After most of my friends left Order of Odin to form Paragon, I found myself questing more and more with different people, namely Helwyr and Tatiana. Helwyr had a "Read = Dead" philosophy. So I knew when questing with him if we saw any Horde, we'd be tearing them up and getting some good honor.
January 20, 2007 - The servers weren't perfectly stable after Burning Crusade came out. Destromath went down for a few hours, so a few of us from Paragon created new Blood Elves on the Maelstrom server. I think we got as far as level 12 before the server came back up. I thought about making this my "Horde" server. Back then you couldn't have Horde and Alliance characters on the same PvP server. Since Maelstrom was a RP-PVP server, I decided to start my real Horde characters on Exodar instead.
January 24, 2007 - Infernals! Run!!!
January 25, 2007 - Seems I ran into Forged Alliance people quite often before actually joining the guild.
February 20, 2007 - One month in to Burning Crusade and I'm only level 65? Man, I sure took it easy back then. I was taking my time and also playing alts a lot. In this shot I'm doing a quest - grouped with Forged Alliance again - in Terokkar Forest.
February 20, 2007 - Aannnd the quest broke. Here we are re-starting it. Second try was the charm I think. Sometimes it broke so bad you'd need either a GM to fix it or a server restart.
February 26, 2007 - Master Sergeant Thandrenn, Killer of Stuff sporting the wonderfully matching Fel Iron Plate set. Carefully crafted by Carlean, a fellow warrior in Order of Odin.
February 28, 2007 - Though not officially a member of Paragon, I still ran with them often. Including this guild group we formed to attack the Horde town Crossroads in the Barrens.
February 28, 2007 - We rode in like the heroes of old, ready to slay all those who would stand against the mighty warriors of Paragon.
February 28, 2007 - And ended up looking like King Arthur and his knights in Monty Python. Good times were had though!
March 1, 2007 - The Lunar Festival in The Park in Stormwind. Remember The Park? Oh hey, I'm still not 70!?
March 13, 2007 - Level 70 finally. Almost 2 months after Burning Crusade came out. As with when I hit level 60, I tried to find a decent enough looking place for a good screenshot. I was not counting on this dead mob's corpse to photobomb me though.
April 1, 2007 - I love awesome guild names. Also he's a level 1 gnome, naked, in a level 60 zone. Surprised every mob in the zone wasn't converging on him.
April 3, 2007 - There used to be a cave in Southern Winterspring in Darkwhisper Gorge with a portal beyond a locked gate. I assume this portal had something to do with Mount Hyjal or the Emerald Dream or something. So far as I know it was never opened and was removed when Cataclysm was developed.
April 5, 2007 - Karazhan, being the first raid in BC, was a pretty happening place. And on a PvP server, there was often big fights between Horde and Alliance there. Back then there was no mass summons. Warlocks didn't have a summoning stone and could not summon inside an instance. Groups had to meet up at the stone or ride there by ground mount from Darkshire or Stonard. So many skeletons.
April 7, 2007 - At some point Baraccus and I created Alliance alts on the Kirin Tor server to get away from the drama happening in Order of Odin. Upon completing the major quest lines in Bloodmyst Isle, Draenei are rewarded with all the quest NPCs they helped showing up and congratulating them. Pretty epic.
April 16, 2007 - Call the gryphons! Early on there weren't many choices for mounts. And since at the time all mounts and non-combat pets were items that took up bag space, most people only grabbed one. Apparently the Snowy Gryphon was popular. It was what I went with too!
April 18, 2007 - In the Ruins of Mathystra in Darkshore, there used to be a translucent Ghost Saber that would only spawn after you looted a random number of Cat Figurines scattered around the ruins. A few minutes after it spawned it would die. It took a while for me to get it to spawn.
April 21, 2007 - The famous Reginald Windsor questline. An epic series of quests that uncovered a major secret in Stormwind City. I'm sad that quests like that don't exist anymore. Here I'm on the final stage.
April 21, 2007 - Aannnddd it turns out she's a dragon.
April 21, 2007 - Rest in Peace Reginald Windsor. We'll remember him well. He was avenged by the mighty Bolvar Fordragon.
April 21, 2007 - One of the last stages in the questline to complete the key for Upper Blackrock Spire. Remember when you needed a key for that?
April 22, 2007 - There was a gnome in that big demon dog thing!?
April 28, 2007 - Ysondre, one of the Dragons of Nightmare that used to spawn at the portals in Duskwood, Hinterlands, Feralas and Ashenvale.
May 19, 2007 - Thandrenn and Baraccus questing together again at level 70. With dead blood elves at our feet. A week or two prior to this I finally left Order of Odin and re-joined the rest of my friends in Paragon. I wanted to raid and run dungeons with my friends more. Most of the people I played with in Order of Odin - Scrog, Helwyr, Tatiana, Robear, etc. - weren't playing much anymore. There was a select group of guildies that were pushing to try to get into raiding, but I was not part of that. So with a "So long and thanks for the fish", I left Order of Odin and became a member of Paragon.
May 22, 2007 - Patch 2.1 - "The Black Temple" was released. Best trailer ever.
June 7, 2007 - It was around this time that I decided to make a serious effort to try the Horde side out. In the months prior I had created a few new Alliance alts on the Exodar server. I deleted them all - along with a few other really low (like below level 5) toons I wasn't going to ever play on other servers. I didn't do any research, but I liked the name of the server, so Exodar became my first Horde server. Here's Rebecka and her faithful dragonhawk, Rollhacks. This was the first time I used the name Rollhacks for my Hunter's pet.
June 13, 2007 - Lady Sylvanas Windrunner. Our Dark Lady. The Banshee Queen. She was much less intimidating before they gave her a custom model in the Lich King expansion.
June 19, 2007 - Reindeer Parade in Stormwind in June? Well, why not?
June 25, 2007 - All hail Thandrenn, the new King of the Ogres!!!
July 13, 2007 - I don't recall if this place had a name. It was basically the same model as the temple of the moon in Darnassus, but it was all broken down and overrun and in Azshara. It was removed when they re-did Azshara in the Cataclysm expansion.
July 14, 2007 - Not enough questlines involving this NPC.
July 14, 2007 - Seriously.
July 14, 2007 - Run for the hills! Wait! We're already in the hills!
Around May of 2007, shortly after Patch 2.1.0 was released, I took over development of one of my favorite WoW addons. AtlasQuest was started at some point in 2006 by a German player named Asurn. He stopped working on it around the time The Burning Crusade expansion came out. A fan updated it for Burning Crusade and then another fan updated it again but by the time Patch 2.1 came out, it hadn't been updated for months.
Having a tiny bit of experience with some scripting languages I was able to figure out enough to work with it. I cleaned up some of the code and with some translating help (since the author was German, many of the code comments were also in German), added the missing quests and information and released my own update on August 7, 2007. I still maintain the addon and to date have published 46 releases. Alas, I never properly learned enough LUA coding to do a complete re-write of the code, so at the moment it is an addon that was coded during WoW Classic and has been half-assedly updated over the years. But it still works and is downloaded 6000 times a month, so it must still be useful to some people.
With the amount of screenshots I selected for 2007 I decided to split it into two posts. Around the end of June and July I became introduced to the guild Forged Alliance as Paragon crumbled and eventually disbanded. That will be covered more in depth in Part 2.
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