A Moment to Think

So, although I don't feel that my writing is very good, my last post actually got me thinking. Why do people decide to make a certain character first? In my opinion, I think many people that play wow started out a first character, and never got him very far. In all likelihood, I think they stopped well before the level cap. I know that was the case with me the first time that I played. In the two times that I returned, the first character that I made has been the main one I played until I stopped, or in this case up to this point. But without fail, I know that I have always made multiple characters once the first one is set up and going well.

Normally when I do so, I have multiple reasons for it. Firstly, I am a fan of casters, so normally I will make a character to do that roll, despite having yet to get one all the way to the cap and play them in the end game. But this time, I had different reasons for almost every character that I made after my first, and for all the ones that I have leveled to the cap, I have a different reason.

Firstly, my second character to reach the cap was my hunter. I made he, I think, because the first character that I originally made was a hunter. As I said, the first character doesn't normally make it far, and he was soon replaced by a priest who I took all the way to 60 in the original game. I felt that leveling him up would be as sort of homage to my first character. That and I had recently recruited a friend and needed a character to level along side him. He decided to make a druid first, and we complemented each other well. He was able to dps, heal, or tank, and I had a pet to tank while I did damage.

My second character that I plan on reaching 80 as soon as possible is my druid. I talk a lot about him in here mostly because that is where I'm spending much of my time in game at the moment. I wanted to start him for the purpose of healing, after watching my friend excel at the roll on his druid. As I have previously stated, I am not a fan of the strong but slow single heals that the paladin has, it makes me feel useless. I wanted a character that would be able to help keep everyone, including the tank to some extent, alive for the fight. So far, I have not deviated from the goal to make him a healer at the end of the game, and as such have already bought him dual specialization. He will probably stay feral on his secondary spec to level and solo when he reaches the end of the game, but his primary spec and purpose is to heal.

I know that this was quite a long winded post, but it did have a central idea to it. Mainly, why did you make the first character that you made? How about subsequent ones? Did you have a goal that you were working towards, or was it what you felt like at the time? Are you one of those people that rerolled multiple times along with the "flavour of the month"?

The Main

So, I've been writing primarily about my Druid, one of my alts. I guess I should put something about my main, since for me to have an alt, it means that I have one main character too. Anyway, this time around my main character has been a Blood Elf Paladin. I know, not too thrilling, and to be honest I don't remember if there was a specific reason that I rolled that first. But he has turned out well at the end game. I have him primarily Prot spec, and am one of the better tanks in my little guild. We have cleared, as a guild, mostly every raid, and are working our way slowly through ICC. Now that the attempts have been removed from 10 man mode, we will probably start working on Putricide, assuming that we can down Rot Face again this next week.

I also have a level 80 Hunter that I have geared up to be ready for mostly any raid. He has mostly emblem gear, with a couple of pieces from ToC and other easier raids. My goal is to have a Tank, Healer, and DPS at least decently geared at the end of the game. I know that Paladins can do all three, but I am not a fan of Ret DPS for the most part, having started out as that, and although my off spec is currently Holy I don't like healing as a Pally. I have done it when the raid needed me to, such as on KT or some early Ulduar stuff, but I am not great at group healing, so I feel fairly useless when the whole raid takes damage and I am mostly there getting beaten out by any other heal class. I even am not great compared to other Holy Paladins, as I had the opportunity to heal in a raid with another one at one point, and was being beaten easily, sitting at around 2/3 of his healing done.

Anyway, I don't really have much more to say, since this was mostly just to introduce my idea for how I wanted my end game to look, as well as give a brief overview of what kind of experience I have. Ideally, I will be able to finish filling my end game ranks well before the end of March, so that I can gear up my Druid for Restoration before I get too distracted by other things. I feel very much that people get different perspectives on the game from different spots, and from different classes. As a Paladin main, I won't see the fights the same way that a Druid will, from a tank, heal, or DPS spec. And they won't see it the same way as a Hunter or a Mage might. That is why I wanted to have 3 different classes doing different rolls at the end game, for as broad a perspective as possible.

Leveling The Druid

So, the leveling continues. I had several days off recently and have been giving my druid a lot of attention in an attempt to catch up to my friend. So far, I have narrowed the gap to 8 levels as of the last time I was able to check. If I can keep up my pace, I should be able to catch up to him around the beginning of Northrend.

I am just shy of heading to Outland now, and have found a massive source of leveling. I read many places after a patch a while ago that leveling using Alterac Valley was the best way to go, but mostly thought they were the pvp buffs. It turns out that they are likely correct. I had been struggling to level after having quite a successful first day run at it, gaining 4 levels with minimal effort. The second day, though I managed that pace again, it took much more effort. To top it off, the instances were not interesting me, namely randoming BRD and no one having a key. In addition, the Plaguelands were slightly beyond my level at the time, or at least after completing a few of the quests there they were.

So I queued up for AV, since it is the holiday weekend for it. 7 games later, I had gained 3 levels in 2 hours. A massive increase compared to the previous day's efforts. Part of those levels was 2 elite quests I managed to solo, in addition to the first several quests that I obtained for AV, but that still seems to make it a decent hour per level.

My plan to level in Outland is to queue up for AV and the LFD system as a healer, then quest while I wait for one or the other to pop up. If I can maintain that pace, I should be shooting through the levels with minimal resistance. Although, I am planning a small break from questing when I get to 65 to level my inscription up to the point where I can do Northrend Research, so that I can get as many glyphs as quickly as possible. I will post another update about my progress leveling in outland, to see if the pace is maintained or slowed when you get in the higher levels.

Alt Professions

I enjoy the idea of being mostly self reliant in the game. I have a couple of friends that I know from real life, but I don't like to rely on them too much. I start to feel guilty if I am continually going to them to get things crafted. So to further my self sufficient goal, as well as to bring some more utility to my little group of friends, I am leveling 3 professions, more or less in parallel. My low level druid has Herbalism and Inscription. I had wanted to level inscription but did not want to have to buy all the herbs on the way up, as I know at certain levels they become rather expensive. Meanwhile, my higher level mage was going to skill up alchemy, so as to take advantage of transmutations. The problem here, is that I can either spend twice the time gathering herbs as I level herbalism, or buy them off the auction house, emptying much of my bank account.

Well, I have devised a third alternative. I do not claim credit for it, as I first read it over at the greedy goblin, but it is an interesting idea. My mage has developed a bit of a bank account by selling netherweave bags for several gold profit per bag. Since I didn't want to be spending upwards of 15 to 20 gold for a stack of herbs to level alchemy on this character, I decided to buy the herbs to level inscription on the other character instead. This wouldn't make for any difference of price, except for the fact that many northrend herbs are cheaper, and when milled and turned into ink, can then be traded down to any lower level ink. So, over the last couple of weeks, I have gathered around 120 to 140 stacks of herbs, which I will ship over to a friend of mine to mill and turn into ink.

Not sure if I saved much money or not, but I'm fairly certain that I did. Plus, I'll soon have 2 crafting professions up to a level where I can start selling their goods on the auction house, or start saving them to make future goods.

Lowbie Druid

My current low level alt of choice is a Druid. I've never played a druid before, so it is a mostly new experience. Only mostly new, as the druid seems to be a mesh of several other classes put into one. I like the versatility that it brings to soloing, as I've been able to do some quests that I know that I would not have been able to on many other classes. I rolled him specifically to heal during raids when I get him to 80. My main is a paladin, but I have thus far not been a fan of healing on him during raids.

I haven't played a healer since Vanilla Wow, when I had a priest that I got to the cap at the time. I never got him into raiding, mostly as I didn't have the time to commit to him, but I do remember being able to heal every single instance from 1 to 60 in shadow spec. Thus far, playing my druid low level hasn't changed my view on the early instance, as I am healing them while I'm specced feral. The one thing that I'm noticing, and I'm not sure if this is because I have gained experience playing the game since back when, or the many general nerfs that have gone out since then, but it seems much easier to heal through most of the instance than I remember. Many points throughout the instance now, I find myself shifting to cat form to do some additional damage, as the healing required is very minimal. On the flip side, there are times when, and I'm not sure if it is my current lack of druid skill, the tank, or just the encounter, but I find myself barely able to keep up with incoming damage on the tank. Mind, this is still at around level 30, so maybe this will all change once I get to the mid 50s and up.

So far, having played a paladin and a hunter up to 80, I think this has a strong possibility of being my third 80, as I'm enjoying leveling him a lot. I still have a mage sitting at 60, but I sent her staff to the druid for healing, as well as only having 2 BoA trinkets that are currently sitting on the druid. I don't really want to keep switching the gear back and forth, so I'm probably going to stick to leveling my druid for the mean time. Though I may make a push and bring the mage up to 65 to work on maxxing out her professions, but that's a topic for another post.

In Game Auciton House Available... Out of Game?

So, recently announced was Blizzard's decision to make the Auction House available outside of the game world, through the use of mobile devices. Many others have already written about the topic already, and I feel my view falling in line with what seems to be the majority. Most seem to be waiting to see more of Blizzard's idea before taking a firm stand one way or the other on it. I keep swaying from one side to another as I look at it from different points of view, though...

First, this is something that I've thought would be interesting to see for a while now. I have a lot of downtime in my life, so being able to jump on the auction house for a quick snatch or posting might be interesting. While on the bus or on break at work being able to jump on the market and make a few sales, or get some materials so that when you log on at home you can get right to crafting/playing would be great!

On the other hand, this has the potential to be the beginning of the slippery part of the slope for RMT... From my perspective, nothing that Blizzard has included for RMT so far has been particularly unfair to anyone. For some extra money, you can change your name, faction, race, or even server. For $10, you can buy one of two non-combat pets. Although the pets contribute to the pet achievements, those achievements were attainable without resorting to spending real world money. My opinion on this kind of thing is that as long as it isn't making the game unbalanced to other players, there was no real problem with them. The issue with making the auction house available to people on a mobile device for a premium, no matter what the premium ends up being, is that those that pay it will have an advantage over any other player that does not pay it.

I feel that, without knowing the rest of the details that they are planning, this does not look like something that I would support. No matter the game, it has always seemed unfair to me to allow the money of a player to give them an advantage in game. If wow starts down this path, I would not be surprised to see it wind up offering gold, levels, or even items to people for a couple of dollars...

Edit:
Healertrek does a better job at saying exactly what I was thinking than I did...

And so it begins...

So, I have been sitting here for the last 20 minutes wondering if this is for me. I have never really been good at keeping up with plans that I have. But since this ties in nicely to a large portion of my free time I figure that this one may be different. Anyhoo, enough about me for now, on to the point of this blog.


I have been lurking around on blogger for a while now, reading different blogs, most related to making wow money, but branching off from there to wow in general. At first, this sparked the idea that I thought about starting a blog to document my journey from "rags" to riches in wow. Since that idea, I have seen several blogs which have done just that, and even the poorest one is doing it more than twice as effectively as I am thus far. Therefore, I believe that it is not worth wasting my time, nor the space on the internet, finite as it is, with a blog that doesn't contribute anything.

I have sat on the idea of a blog for a while now, since I decided that a gold making one was not my cup of tea. But a recent post on one of the blogs that I followed gave me the spark to start this one up finally. Wow seemed a bit of a broad topic, as there are many other sites to visit to get more specific information on wow. So I sat down to think of what type of wow player I am, since that should be the topic I feel most comfortable writing about. After a surprisingly short time, I came up with the answer.

Therefore, I figure that, for now, this blog will be written from the perspective of a casual wow addict. Although I don't have a schedule or even additional post material prepared, I am confident that I will be able to keep this moderately up to date for now. I expect to post about any topic that can and will cross my mind from alts at the beginning of the game, to my mains at the end game content, with everything in between being touched on at one point or another. I hope that this blog will be as entertaining for anyone that reads it as it is for me to write.