So I joined sometime during BC, back when shamans could be tanks for dungeons and leveling took months. I’m not really sure when, exactly, because nothing from endgame really mattered all that much.
I do know that I hit level 55 on my priest the night Wrath dropped, along with my buddy, who was maining a Fury warrior. We rolled Death Knights and he switched to that as his main for a while, but I went back to the priest because he’s completely feckless without a pocket healer.
But my first character, after much consternation, was an Orc hunter. I knew nothing about WoW or its lore or its mechanics, and had spent a lot of time playing Dungeons & Dragons Online back when it was actually subscription-based. I originally planned to play “a Dwarf priest with a gun” but priests couldn’t use guns, and even though a priest could be an engineer and use bombs, I wanted to play something with a rifle, because that wasn’t something that DDO’s high fantasy setting supported. Also, all my friends who had convinced me to try WoW played Horde. So I rolled my Orc hunter.
I immediately (well, at level 5) ran all the way across the Barrens, getting killed by thunder lizards and angry hyenas, in order to buy a rifle. I’m not sure if there was anyone that sold them in Orgrimmar at that point, but Bloodhoof Village in Mulgore had a vendor, which my buddy (who’d just rolled a Tauren warrior, who was to be the same one I leveled my priest alongside) found while doing his own intro quests. So I ran over there, got the flight point, and we both ran all the way back to Razor Hill, dying to Quilboar a couple of times because he couldn’t fly back to Orgrimmar.
But I had my rifle, and got my hunter high enough to start mucking about in the Barrens properly, mining copper and making the blunderbusses that were an item you needed for a later quest in Ashenvale. I sold them on the Auction House in order to make enough money for my first mount.
I dinked around with some other classes, making a Blood Elf mage and a Troll priest that I only by chance happened to be logged onto during Brewfest when a high-level friend of ours offered to run us through Wailing Caverns. My hunter was higher level and wouldn’t have benefitted much, so my buddy (still on his Tauren) and I got smashed at Brewfest before walking all the way to Wailing Caverns completely drunk. Making the older version of the jump across the chasm was really interesting when your screen is blurred and the FOV is readjusted and you can’t run straight, let me tell you.
It was then that I really fell back into love with healing. I played a cleric and a bard in DDO, and really liked the healing playstyle. Even though we had a high-level friend running us through everything, we couldn’t see things very well because we’d gotten smashed and we kept accidentally pulling things. My buddy would helpfully hit them in the face to keep them from killing me, while I healed him to keep them from killing him. We leveled all the way to 80 that way, him facepulling usually too many things and me healing him because if he died, I would be quickly next. I switched to the priest and left the hunter in his 30s for a while, and though I later race-changed the priest to an undead when I was doing a lot of PvP in Wrath, I still have both him and my hunter. I started preferring my shaman during late Wrath and he’s now my main, but I had a great time on my “first” characters.