Knifey, the Mid-level Rogue
Knifey has been running around the familiar lands of Westfall, Redridge Mountains, and Duskwood, trying his best to gain as much experience as needed to catch up with my friends. With some excellent help from Azrail on how to stab effectively I was able to knife my way through level after level. A run through Gnomeregan, whilst too low even to pick up the quests, nabbed me a neat sword as well, boosting my DPS considerably. Armed with some sharp stabbing tools and knowledge on how to use them I found myself being most capable, and my experience helped me adapt to different mobs and skills. For everything else, there's Auctioneer.
With Knifey starting on an entirely new server to me there are no relatives, or alts if you like, available to send some big bags or a few gold to get me started. I could say that this made things a bit tricky, but no more so than any other player and the world should accommodate new characters so that there aren't frustrations with lacking money for training or necessary items. It's nice not to have to worry about this kind of thing, and to be able to buy necessary equipment upgrades without having to forgo training as well. So I have been taking advantage of being awake whilst the world sleeps, because of differing time zones, and snapping up bargains for PROFIT.
My guild leader was quite surprised when I said I had 100 gold to spare to open the guild bank and traded her for it. Frankly, I misremembered what she had said and thought I needed to get 500 gold to start the bank up, which was why I was being ruthless. Still, it allowed me to spare the money and still have enough left to keep playing the market. My mount at level 40, some 8 levels away now, is assured, and just yesterday I upgraded my weapons to a 19 DPS sword and dagger set for a measly 4 gold for the pair. I'm doing well.
Meanwhile, in the actual world, I occasionally get challenged to a duel. I don't know what it is about duelling, but many people seem to think that not being afk is implicit consent to start a duel. Personally, I want more permission sought than simply having the duel flag drop down from above before I agree to fight some random stranger. A quick whisper asking if I want to duel may even get agreement, but just challenging me automatically makes me lose interest, but that's just the way I am. I try not to take it personally, and I hope the anonymous duellists don't either.
What I find amazing however is when someone tries to start an obviously imbalanced duel, where the character challenged is clearly no match. For example, if there is a large discrepancy in levels. I don't understand how someone would even want to duel someone twenty levels below them, because it's such an arbitrary difference imposed by game mechanics and shows in no way a difference in skill or power between players. But some level 51 warrior challenged Knifey when I was just 31. 'Do you think I'm an idiot?', I asked, wondering what the hell he was even trying to prove. I ignored him when he asked for 'just one' and went on killing the quest mobs I was after. Except he wouldn't let me. He kept challenging me and just to encourage me he ran around tagging all the quest mobs, trivial for him to kill with his extra levels, so that I had nothing to kill and had to duel him. Or so he thought. I used the time waiting for the mobs to respawn not to duel him but to put him on my ignore list and report him for harassment. I try not to be petty, but mob-stealing just because I won't duel someone twenty levels above me is being a report-worthy dick. After that, I stealthed on, targeted a mob I didn't care about and, as I suspected, dick-man used target-of-target to attack him, trying to grief me further, at which point I found my real target and continued to do my quest. He got bored with not annoying me and wandered off, thankfully, and a GM may have had a word with him later.
On the better side of friendliness, I previously had met up randomly with a dwarf priest in Raven Hill Cemetery where we teamed up to kick some righteous undead buttocks, with his shadow powers and my stuns stopping them from even touching us half the time. We even took down Mor'Ladim, the level 32 elite, without much fuss, just the two of us. That was fun, as was our encore of killing Eliza, the bride of The Embalmer. Another day, I killed Morbent Fel with my friends, who seemed a bit easier without any cohorts to help him out.