In my return to Asheron’s Call, I got to thinking about the times I had in the olden days of AC. I thought of the old blog I used to keep of my adventuring in AC. The blog was titled “The Life & Times of Razak.” It didn’t have its own domain, I used a directory of a site previous to that called WyldPlanet.com.
The significance of this particular site was many. It was not my first website by far. It was however my first blog-like site where I would post weekly about what was going on around me. Yes at the time this was very specific to AC, but it still was the first site that I had made the attempt.
What was, to me, a little more important was that the site was also about my first character named Razak. This has been my primary name since that point in time, but before this point I had always gone by Kazar (yes kind of bad at naming but I do prefer Razak).
In thinking about the site, I went and found a backup of the site. It was weird looking at what I had made. It definitely represented the timeframe for gaming sites I think. Just like I’m sure this site shows off the timeline of the internet now. I read through all of these blog posts that I made and decided that I wanted to re-post some of them on this site.
What I thought I’d do is just post a few of the better ones. Some of them didn’t work well I think largely because they were very time-sensitive (one post was all about some connectivity issues Turbine had after a patch), and others were just bad. So maybe once a week, I’ll copy the pages over here, and I’ll try to move pictures over as well with it and post it here as a new post. After about a week or two of being on the site, I will the change the date back to the original date of the post, as I would like it in the original timeframe, but I wanted it to be featured on the site.
After a bit, I also wanted to post a new post in the same sort of aspect as the original posts about my return back to Asheron’s Call with my Razak character. The interesting thing about that is that during the end days of my play, I didn’t even play with Razak, I played a character I called Xalan.
I’m not entirely sure why I dropped Razak. I think part of the issue was that I felt like everyone else with him. A lot of melee players used Sword, and most melee also had life, creature and item just like Razak had. The character was very stereotypical of the game and I always liked being a little different and I liked pushing the boundaries of the game.
At the time, many had trained in magic defense, but many didn’t. It wasn’t a very widely used skill. I looked around at all the magic using players and saw that Turbine was starting to make a lot of magic-wielding monsters to combat them and I thought the timing was right to make a character that specialized in Magic Defense. In addition, Turbine had just added a patch that would give characters with high Strength and Endurance more natural resitances.
And so I made a character that had higher than usual endurance, magic defense, melee defense, axe and arcane lore spec’d. It was a very abnormal character, just what I was looking for, and because I was bored of grinding out yet another character I stuck him in an xp chain to help him level faster. In the end I had a character that was much bigger and much better than I think a lot of other characters of the same level, but in it, I lost my namesake for a short time, Razak.