Wowed while playing WoW

I played World of Warcraft for the first time last night.  Okay, let me be clearer, I’ve been playing WoW for about two years now.  I have a pretty high geared level 80 mage (Zapperz on Rexxar) so I have logged my time.  (Actually too much time if you ask my wife.  I have promised her I will only play the game one or two nights a week.  Really, honey I will.  I promise.)  Back to my WoW experience: when I started playing I already had a two year old iMac with only a gig of memory.   If I didn’t want any lag I had to pretty much run at 800×600 with most of the effects turned off or to low.

When that old Mac died I rejoiced and upgraded to a 21″ 2.66Ghz dual core with 2GB of memory.  It had a nice 1680×1050 screen with 256 MB of VRAM so it was an improvement.  Still I didn’t think it was that much of an improvement to really ramp up my WoW settings.   I buffed them some but would always experience a slow down during raiding when there was a lot of action on the screen.  So I still played at a lower resolution with effects set to mid-levelish.

Last week I convinced my wife that having a new 27″ iMac would really help me with my work.  I won’t go into great detail but when you are a writer the more information you can have on the screen the better.  Yesterday my new iMac arrived.  Though I promised my wife I got the new computer for work not WoW I couldn’t resist checking out the game on the gorgeous 2560×1440 screen with 512 MB of VRAM.  I opened up WoW and immediately changed Video to Max and changed the effect setting to Ultra and played fullscreen.  Suddenly it was as if I was transported to Pandora, an entire new world opened up to me.  The world of Azeroth was alive with textures and colors and shadows that I didn’t know existed.  Just walking around hunting a bit of meat to cook was a pleasure.

The changes aren’t just aesthetic though.  Having a bigger screen and greater resolution and detail actually allows me to perform better (except of course when I start ogling how cool the instances look).  I jumped into an Onxyia’s Lair raid and not only was the place far more striking than before, but I was also able to see Onyxia more clearly that I could avoid her breath.   In fact the wide screen gave me a great view of my total surroundings.  Being more aware of what was around me really peaked my performance and helped keep me alive and out of trouble.  I actually topped out the DPS charts, something I don’t normally do.  (I am getting a bit older and slower.)

The new iMac comes with the Magic Mouse and for the most part it’s great I really like the feel and performance, but there are times when things get a little dicey and my fingers get too excited. It’s easy to either use the scroll feature to zoom in or out too far.  The zooming can be really annoying when you are surrounded by mobs.  Oh, another little hitch is the new wireless keyboard. While being slick it has smaller cursor keys, which take a little time to get use to when darting around.

Outside of those little glitches, the new iMac has made WoW a whole new experience for me.  If you get a chance to upgrade I highly recommend it.  The only real downside is now I will miss WoW even more on the days I don’t play.