Don’t Make Me Get My Main!

There’s a hilarious video that goes with this post. Go ahead and watch it. I’ll wait…

..back? Ok. On with the post.

I’ve never had a main character. My characters are all alts. The closest any of them come to a main is probably Rubeola, my death knight. But that’s only because I’ve spent more time on her gear and achievements than any of my other characters. Veleni, my paladin, might be a close second.

Or, looked at another way, perhaps my very first character is my main. She’s a rogue named Phyloem that I rolled before BC. She’s the first character I got to 60, which was the level cap at the time. Unfortunately, Phyloem sits in Honor Hold in Outland at level 61. I’ve not played her in months. And I doubt I will.

I also have well-played characters on the horde side. Daemonica, my paladin, and Orgaria my warlock, both have some serious play time. And more recently I’ve played Ceridwyn, my hunter, quite a bit.

You might have noticed that I have a lot of female alts. I’ve never really had a problem with playing female characters from the standpoint of interacting with other players. But because my characters are female and I’m male, I definitely do not consider any of them to be me. I like to think of them as partners in a story building exercise. I could partner with male characters, of course, but for some reason I just like to hang out with women more than men. Call it a personal failing of mine.

It has occurred to me that if I want a “main” character, I probably need to identify myself more closely with that character than I do any of my current characters. As such, my main character would probably need to be male. That’s one of the reasons I rolled a male Draenei shaman. I thought perhaps he could become me in the game. Unfortunately, all though I’m enjoying playing him, I still don’t identify with him as if he were me.

I do have one character that I identify with pretty closely: Albyl, my mage. Albyl is an engineer, which is what I suspect I would be if I were in the game. He also looks surprisingly like me. I had an absolute blast leveling Albyl to 70 in BC, but I just haven’t been able to get excited about leveling him to 80 in WotLK. Which is why he’s been stuck at level 73 for months.

So where exactly does that leave me? I’m not sure, but I suspect I’m going to keep flitting from one character to another without ever really considering any of them my main character.

Things may change in Cataclysm, however, because I have a feeling I was always destined to be a Goblin.

Is It Too Easy?

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the Argent Tournament with Rubeola farming Champion Seals to buy heirloom items. I now have four: two cloth armor pieces, a staff, and a trinket. And I’m working to buy even more. For my trouble, I’m finding leveling my new shaman to be a breeze. He’s sailing through the content with hardly any trouble from the mobs. He’s yet to be in even a close fight (except, of course, in PVP, which is a completely different story). And the +20% to experience gains is just wonderful. Baruk is not even half way through the Bloodmyst Isle quests and he’s almost level 20.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if it all isn’t too easy. I don’t mind, really, having an easy time leveling up to 80. I do want to hit 80 as quick as I can so I can start doing end-game stuff with my guild. But it does occur to me that I don’t really know what its like to level up an elemental shaman from scratch, with no help from heirloom items and gold. I’ve leveled enhancement before, and I think that’s probably the best way to level. But I have a theory that elemental is also completely viable and I’d kind of like to test that theory.

So, I think I’m going to level a second shaman. I happen to have a level 1 shaman on a different server. I was going to use her as a bank toon (yes “her”) for a death knight I rolled on a friends server. This is a server that I have no history with, so if I level a shaman from scratch, she’ll be completely on her own. No help from heirloom items or gold or anything (well, I could cheat and send gold from my death knight, but I think I won’t for this particular experiment).

The plan, then, is to see Baruk hit 20 and get his mount. And then I’m going to switch over to my other shaman (I can’t even remember her name at the moment) and start leveling her so I can see the difference. I may decide that leveling elemental without help is just too painful. Or, I may find that it is just as much fun. I’m hoping it’s the later, and if it is, I’m going to try alternating leveling the two shaman.

A side-effect of this plan is that I’ll finally be leveling a toon on my friend’s server, which is something I’ve been threatening to do for weeks without success.

Low-Level Battlegrounds

The plan is to level my shaman through a combination of questing and battlegrounds. Now that he’s in his teens, he’s eligible for Warsong Gultch. So I’ve been trying to run WSG every now and then in hopes of accomplishing the daily PVP. I’ve yet to be in a winning game, unfortunately. But I have learned a bit about low-level battlegrounds.

I entered my first low-level WSG at level 11. Pretty low for the bracket, of course. But I thought my heirloom items might help me out a bit. They didn’t. I was killed repeatedly. Especially when people noticed I was attempting to heal. That made me a big target.

My first thought when entering my first WSG was how funny we all looked running to the enemy base to get the flag. I’m used to games in the 70s and at 80, where everybody has a mount. In the 10-19 bracket, however, nobody has a mount (of course), and the only people who have a speed advantage are people with some kind of special speed ability (like sprint), or druids and shaman (travel form and ghost wolf). Of course, at level 11, I didn’t have ghost wolf yet, so I was still hoofing it, so to speak (that joke is funnier when said about a Tauren). I seriously wondered if the game was going to end before any of us got as far as the enemy flag.

We did make it to the flag, but we weren’t able to return it. We were completely overwhelmed by the much better organized horde players. And that tends to be my experience in all of the games I’ve entered since. I’ve basically decided that from now on I’m only going to enter BGs when I’m in the upper half of my level bracket. Baruk is now level 17, so I don’t mind hitting up a WSG every now and then. I’m definitely living longer now, and with ghost wolf, I’m even able to contribute. In my most recent game, I even managed to return the flag once. Unfortunately, I think that was the only time we did return the flag in that particular game.

Truth be told, WSG is not really my favorite battleground. I don’t know why, but I’m partial to Arathi Basin. I just think we have more room to maneuver, and in general, it’s just more fun. I also like a good Alterac Valley, of course. But my favorite battleground is probably Wintergrasp. Baruk has a few levels to go before he’s going to get to try WG, though.

“I’ve Done All The Quests…”

I think my favorite feature of WoW’s armory pages is the ability to see how many quests people have done in various zones. The feature isn’t very useful for pre-BC zones because all you can see is the number of quests completed in either Kalimdore or Eastern Kingdoms. Not a lot of granularity. But for Outland and Northrend, the breakdown is by individual zones. So I can look up how many quests a person has done in, say, Howling Fjord.

Why is this cool? Because then, when somebody, either on the forums or even in my guild, says that they have “done all the quests” in a particular zone, I can check the armory to see if they are correct. Usually they aren’t. In fact, usually they have yet to do even half the quests in the zone.

Recently a guildie was asking where to quest next. He claimed he’d done all the quests in Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, Grizzly Hills, Dragonblight, and Zul’Drak, and he was wondering where to quest next at level 75. Level 75? I’m usually hitting 75 in Dragonblight before I’ve even touched Grizzly Hills or Zul’Drak. I took a look at his armory pages and sure enough, he still had plenty of quests left to do in all of those zones.

I don’t think people are lying when they say they’ve finished all the quests in a zone. I just think they are missing breadcrumb quests and questing hubs along the way and they truly think they are finished with a zone when they move on to the next zone. My strategy is to stay in a zone until I’ve gotten the achievement for it. I also check the achievement for a zone regularly as I’m questing in it so that I know how many quests I have left to do.

The only zone I’ve yet to finish on any character is Icecrown. I did make an attempt to finish things up in Icecrown on Rubeola, and her achievement for Icecrown shows she’s gotten to 122/140 quests. Only 18 quests to go. Unfortunately, to finish up, I think I need to do several group quests. If they were 2 or 3 person group quests, I’d try soloing them. But these are 5 person group quests. I may attempt them anyway at some point. But for now, I think Rubeola is stuck not quite completing all the zones in Northrend.

And Now I’m Leveling A Shaman

Leveling the shaman has begun. And, as you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve passed along the heirloom items that Eolyan had been using. I haven’t quested enough yet to really feel the difference, but I’m sure the difference will be obvious. What surprised me a little was how much damage the staff does. Eolyan almost never hits things with the staff (and at level 73, her skill in staff is still too low to hit her target with any regularity). But Baruk hits things with gusto and a resounding “whack”. Things are dying quite quickly.

Lest I give you the wrong idea, let me assure you that Baruk isn’t running around killing things with his staff. He uses Lightning Bolt and Earth Shock at every opportunity. But I’d also like Baruk to conserve his mana, so I do usually finish fights with one or two smacks with the staff.

The big question facing me now is professions. I’m tentatively going with inscription/herbalism. I don’t have a scribe on this (or any other server) and I really want to see what it’s like to level one. To be honest, I’ve tried before to level inscription, but I’ve always convinced myself I should really be leveling something else. This time, however, I think I may be able to stick with it.

And if I do manage to stick with inscription, I can try making millions of gold the goblin way.

 

Shamanistic Rage

Meet Baruk, a newly rolled Draenei shaman. Note that everything about him is subject to change, including his gender. Everything, that is, except his class.

In other words, I’m thinking about leveling a shaman. I’ve been thinking of leveling a shaman for some time. Actually, I have leveled a horde shaman. He’s a Tauren shaman who is currently sitting at level 55. I leveled him enhancement. This time around, I’m thinking about going elemental and then dual-specing restoration at level 40. But more about that later.

So, why a shaman? Or, more appropriately, why now? It has to do with raiding. I’ve been getting to do a bit of raiding with my guild of late and it is a blast. I’m raiding with Rubeola, my death knight. I raid with her as unholy dps and I am, on average, having success with it. Rubeola’s gear is crap, but even so, I’m managing to hold my own among the other dps in the raid. I feel like I’m making a contribution, which is my primary concern. I’d feel pretty awful if I weren’t contributing.

And yet, last night, I began to question just how much a DK brought to a raid. My understanding is that DKs make excellent tanks, so if I were tanking, it would be quite obvious that I was making an important contribution. But as dps, what am I really contributing? And then, a couple of times during our fights, somebody bemoaned the lack of any shaman in the raid. In one fight, against Patchwerk (yes, we’re noobs just getting started on Naxx), we wiped when he was down to about 5%, and somebody pointed out that if we’d had a shaman, we could have gotten Heroism, and that would have probably made the difference. And then, against Grobbulus, somebody pointed out how useful a cleansing totem would have been.

I have some selfish reasons to want to go shaman as well. First, I really want a class that can heal. I know I like to heal. Healing on Veleni, my paladin, is fun, and I’m keen to try other kinds of healers. But even more selfish is the fact that because there are so few people playing a shaman, at least in my guild, the competition for gear would be greatly reduced. Is that evil?

My original plan was to wait until 3.3 came out, with the new looking-for-dungeon tool, and then try leveling a character (like a shaman) from scratch through a combination of dungeons, questing, and battlegrounds. But now I’ve jumped the gun and created the character. Will I continue leveling my druid until 3.3 comes out? Or, will my curiosity get the better of me and I’ll find myself drifting over to play the shaman? Time will tell.

One problem I’m going to have, if I start leveling the shaman now, is that I’ve got the wrong heirloom items. I’ve purchased cloth items thinking that I could pass them on to my other clothies, (warlock, priest, and maybe even mage). I feel a little odd using cloth with a druid, but cloth on a shaman seems really whacked. On the other hand, in the very early levels, I can’t imagine it will make much difference. Heck, new characters usually don’t even have shoulders, so the heirloom shoulders are just bonus armor. And while the shaman is leveling with cloth, Rubeola and Veleni can be doing AT dailies to earn enough seals to get the chain items. I believe the two armor items are 60 seals each, and Rubeola and Veleni can each earn 7 seals a day with just a very minimum amount of effort. So it would really be less than 10 days (assuming I could get them both working on it at the same time) before I had both items.

As for the dual-spec idea at 40, I’m thinking that that lets me both heal and dps in instances. What I’d really like to do, if I can push myself to do it, is what Pikestaff did with her druid, which was level up primarily by healing instances. Seems like that’s the way to go to really learn how to heal properly. At least in instances. Raid healing is different, of course, but it seems like I’d at least have the mechanics down by that point.

The one thing that concerns me a bit with this plan is the amount of effort I’ve already put into my druid. And, to be honest, I’m having a lot of fun playing the druid. It wouldn’t be unreasonable at all to imagine leveling the druid to 80 and then taking her into raids. Druids are also quite useful in raids. And they can both heal and dps. And, heck, they can even tank, if I wanted to do that (which I don’t think I do).

And yet, I can hear the shaman calling to me…

Fly Like An Eagle

I splurged and bought artisan riding and epic flight form for my druid. My plan had been to have my druid save up the gold and buy it herself. But I certainly had enough gold scattered around my various characters. And “bang for the buck” was telling me that I would have more fun spending the gold right now for epic flight than I would saving the gold for something else.

And what a difference epic flight form makes. The new 150% speed of regular flight form is pretty good. But 280% is so much better. My druid is currently questing in Borean Tundra and she can now fly from one point to another so quickly that I don’t even need to mess with air taxis. And “birdie form”, as I like to call it, is such a blast. What makes it so cool is that it is an instant cast, as opposed to the 1.5 second cast for mounts. My only regret is that I can’t become a bird in battlegrounds. That would be so cool.

Pro Tip: make sure to buy expert and artisan riding skill from the flight trainer in Hellfire Peninsula (Honor Hold for Alliance and Thrallmar for Horde). You get a discount based on your own faction rep. For me, that amounted to a 15% discount for a saving of 750g. For some reason, the trainers in Northrend don’t honor that discount, so you end up paying full price.

Bang For The Buck

I’m not a big fan of the expression “bang for the buck,” but I’ve come to the conclusion that it describes my decision-making process in WoW very well. I’m always going for the most fun (bang) I can get for my time (bucks). My recent heirloom purchases are a good example of this. I had always imagined I would buy an Argent Hippogryph with my Argent Tournament champion seals, but when it came time to spend the seals, I went for heirloom items instead. The hippogryph would have been cool, but I’m simply going to get way more enjoyment out of the heirlooms.

I think “bang for the buck” also helps explain why I like leveling toons so much. I find it very difficult to stick with a character once I’ve got her to the level cap. I’ve done a bit of raiding, and I’ve entered an instance or two. But progress is slow (by progress, I’m talking about improving my character so she can enter more challenging instances and raids). A new character, however, makes amazing progress in the same amount of time. I especially enjoy the first twenty to thirty levels of a character, because it is usually in the those early levels that a character’s class comes most into focus. By the last twenty levels, however, a character’s class is usually well defined. There are still new spells to learn, of course, but they don’t seem to have the same impact as the early spells do.

“Bang for the buck” also helps explain, I think, why I am not leveling Ceridwyn at the moment. I’ve had a lot of fun getting her to 77 and I do want to see her all the way to 80, but what makes my alliance toons more fun, at least right now, is hanging out with the guild they belong to. I’ve put most of my alliance toons in the same guild, and hanging out in guild chat lets me keep my ears open for opportunities to run instances and such with my guildmates. Ceridwyn isn’t in a guild and, to be honest, I don’t relish the idea of trying to get her into one. So although I still enjoy playing Ceridwyn, I’m getting more “bang for the buck” on my alliance toons.

What I Did

You’ll remember a couple posts back I faced a dilemma. I had enough Champion Seals to buy BoA heirlooms, but I wasn’t sure what to buy. Last week, I finally decided to level my druid with a combination of BGs and questing. If you think that meant buying the +int +sp leather BoA heirloom items with my seals, you’d be wrong. I further decided to do something a bit different. I purchased the cloth heirloom items instead. My thinking was that the difference between the cloth pieces and the leather pieces was really just a couple hundred armor, and by purchasing cloth, I’d be able to pass them on to my warlock and priest later on. I even have a mage I might want to finish leveling someday.

After several days of leveling my druid I can safely say I made the right decision. The real advantage of the heirloom items is the boost to experience gains, and the difference in leveling speed is quite noticeable. I’ve been leveling as balance and as such I usually keep the mobs from getting to me anyway. So the loss of a bit of armor hasn’t really been all that noticeable. In battlegrounds I’ve been switching to restoration to heal, and while the extra armor leather would provide might be nice, I’m thinking it would only mean a few extra seconds of life.

As I level my druid, I’m continuing to do AT dailies with Rubeola in order to save up seals for more heirloom items. And just yesterday I managed to get Veleni the Crusader title as well, so she can help out with seals. Today, after another round of dailies, Veleni had 95 seals, which was enough to buy the BoA staff. The staff should be usable by the druid, and later, the warlock and priest. The next item I want to save up for is the trinket that restores mana. I’m thinking that would be great to have for either a balance druid or a priest. It isn’t so great for a warlock, though, as they don’t have any mana issues at all.

By the way, leveling as balance is a blast. To be fair, my druid was already level 70 when I switched her to balance. I’d leveled her as feral up until now. I’m curios, though, what it would be like to level a druid from scratch as balance. I have a baby horde druid who is approximately level 20. I’m tempted to level him as balance as an experiment. If I do, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

What A Long Strange Trip

As you can see from the above screen shot, Rubeola is now the proud owner of one Violet Proto-Drake. Which means that the Sinister Squashling, which I was convinced would never drop, did finally drop. And it’s kind of an interesting story. I had just finished putting out fires and smashing pumpkins in Goldshire and was turning in the two associated dailies when my wife started talking to me. Lately she’s been a bit peeved with me for not paying attention to her (especially when playing WoW), so I was attempting (and basically failing) to pay attention this time. At the same time, I was receiving and looting the reward for the HH pumpkin I helped smash. And I wasn’t really paying any attention to that either, but I did notice some blue text appear in my chat log. I assumed it was another Hallowed Helm, which I’d already looted. Twice. But there was something odd about it, and I completely took my attention away from what my wife was saying to have a look. Much to my surprise, what I had wasn’t the Helm, but the Squashling. I was momentarily stunned. My wife, of course, was getting annoyed that I had completely stopped paying attention to her. I tried to explain the significance of getting the Squashling and the fact that it culminated a real year’s worth of work. I explained how cool the reward was. Oddly, she was not impressed.

But what makes the story interesting, to me at least, is that, first, I was absolutely convinced the Squashling was never going to drop, and, second, it would only drop when I wasn’t thinking about it. But how could I not think about it? Every trick-or-treat (and I was averaging about eight a day), every Headless Horseman kill, and every smashed pumpkin daily, had me holding my breath hoping this would be the one where the Squashling would finally drop. I just couldn’t imagine not thinking about it. And yet, that’s exactly what happened. The one time my wife had my attention was the time it dropped. I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence. *grin*

And that brings the long, strange trip to an end. I have to admit that there were quite a few events that I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to finish. Many events required groups to accomplish and I was quite worried I wouldn’t be able to find a group. Or, that I would just be too timid to ask for help. Somehow, though, it all worked out and I managed to complete everything in time to get the reward.

Even though I managed to have the Squashling drop for me, I still don’t think it’s a good achievement to include in the Hallow’s End meta achievement. I don’t mind that there are achievements that depend on random drops. A Mask For All Occasions, for example, is one achievement that requires a lot of luck to complete. It seems likely that few people could complete it in one Hallow’s End (although I actually came close; I think I only need 5 more masks). But I think a meta achievement like What A Long Strange Trip has a certain expectation that it can be achieved in one year given a reasonable effort. And having the entire thing boil down to the drop of one item (different people needed different things, by the way; some people had a lot of trouble with toothpicks, for example, but I saw hundreds of those) just seems, well, cruel.

By the way, the Squashling is a cutey. I guess I should provide a screen shot of him as well. Looking closer, I see that he even kind of looks a bit like Rubeola.