Casual Huntering

Archive for the ‘Alts’ Category

Well, until last  year I’ve been a single player gamer. I’ve played my hunter to the most part. But this last year I’ve gotten into alts more and more.  Mind you I started doing that for several reasons.

1. When I started playing, randoms didn’t exist, so you only had so much you could do by yourself at max level. I’ve never been one of those characters who sat around Ironforge looking to join a PuG.
2. I started making friends all over the place on twitter. One way to spend more time with these guys was to roll toons on their servers and join their guilds. I did that for quite a while, but I didn’t get my toons leveled very high. I didn’t do a whole lot with other people to be honest.  That was before Real ID came out. Now I can talk to them while playing on my home server.
3. Of course I often rolled toons that were there just to support my main character (Aoirselvar). That’s why my level 60 priest was named “Aoirbank”. I kept rolling new bank alts when I decided to play one of them. I also rolled my DK as a farming toon, and gave her mining and skinning (eventually I got rid of skinning for jewelcrafting). The druid had alchemy in order to someday to make my hunter flasks. In the beginning it was more like all of my alts were employees for my hunter.

Now I’m into rolling and playing toons to experience a different aspect of the game. I don’t just want to do dps anymore.

I want to heal, I want to tank.

I want it all.

I’m still scared to death to do tanking or healing in PUGs, but I think it would be fun play the game with these new roles. I just need to buck up.

However, I’m still a hunter before anything else, but I’m getting distracted with all of these other classes. I can’t promise that my hunter will be the first character I have that reaches level 85.

The only problem is that when you start playing with many classes you don’t hone in your skills.

As my brother asked me, “Are you going to be one of those guys that have tons of 80s, but doesn’t know how to play any of them?”

And yes, at this point, I honestly don’t know how to play many of these classes in PvP or PvE situations (Especially the druid and shaman; these were the characters that were granted tons of levels. I don’t even know what spell options I have for them). So, I’ll be a noob for a good long while, but I don’t mind. Gives me something to do.

Why do you roll alts? What do you do with your alts?

I got a chance to play with my older brother last Friday. We ran a couple of beginning outland instances with him, his wife, my wife, and myself. We had a blast. It’s been a really long time since we’ve done anything in the game together. You see my brother had stopped playing WoW around last April. I didn’t think he’d ever get into the game again and it was kind of a sore spot for him and myself whenever WoW related issues slipped into our conversation. Pretty soon we just avoided the topic altogether.

At the time he was getting frustrated in the game. He originally started playing so he could spend time with some of his friends. (He got me and my brothers into the game as well). But his friends main goal was raiding, which is fine, but it made my brother feel like he had to raid in order to spend time with his friends. I think he liked raiding so that wasn’t a big deal at first, but his life is even busier than mine. I only have 3 kids, none of which are in school yet. He has 5 kids, with his oldest being 12 years old, youngest a newborn. (I just realized that I wrote a post about him quitting awhile ago http://casualhuntering.com/?p=282)

Keeping up with his friends to be able to raid with them was turning into a bit of a joke I guess. He felt that he was always playing catch up. He was always behind in dps with his mage and he didn’t have time to get the gear he needed. During Wrath of the Lich King he started getting frustrated with leveling as well. Being on a PvP server will do that to you, especially when some random @sshat rogue decides to camp on you. So, his main never made it past level 73. He was frustrated with the game and he was starting to feel like it was a waste of his time, time that could be spent doing something else to help out his family. Well, of course we could be doing something more productive with our time, I don’t think any of us would argue with that, but it took out something that we liked todo together.

The funny thing was that he’d spend a lot of time playing console games so it wasn’t like he turned all of the time into something hugely productive. I admit that I was pretty bummed about him quitting WoW. It was something we could talk about, something we had in common. After that we didn’t talk much. Our interests don’t exactly coincide outside of the game. (I guess it sad that I use warcraft to have something to connect me with my brother, but its better than nothing). My wife really enjoyed playing with his wife (she was the one who got Kydra to play, not me). We really enjoyed doing 5 mans together. So, when they stopped playing (since my brother’s accounts were not active), our wives stopped playing. Of course young children also had a hand in putting that to an end at the time.

So, when I heard my brother reactivated his accounts I got really excited. We ran with my dk as the tank, my wife’s level 59 dk, my brother level 66 priest, and my sister-in-law’s 65 warlock. Great fun was had by all. And hopefully we’ll be able to do it again real soon. I think we’re going to be making a weekly event out of it. It’s a nice way to spend time together, because it’s really hard to get away to hang out when we have children running around everywhere. This way we can get our kids to bed and then play and chat via vent.

So, I’m much happier with the game these days. Good times.

Alright, I finally hit an accomplishment that many people will think isn’t much, but it was totally a big deal for me. I got my second character to level 80.

The funny thing is that my second character is a death knight. Shouldn’t they be the easiest class to level to 80??? Yes, I’m afraid so. So, how long did it take me to get the toon to level 80 though? Well, I rolled her the night Wrath of the Lich King came out, when everybody else was rolling death knights as well. So, it’s been over a year. I remember the death knight starting area being crazier than hell. My wife and I rolled death knights at the same time and went through the death knight begin area together.

Now my wife and I ended up parting ways at level 58. I really wanted to level this death knight. I know my wife is still a little mad at me about that. Well, we do have a pair of death knights that we are leveling on the Feathermoon server at least. Originally, the death knight was going to be my farming toon. So, I leveling mining and skinning on her. By the way, leveling mining can be a pain in the @ss! It took a good deal of time to level that high enough just to take it to the outlands. Since then I’ve enjoyed playing the death knight so much I’ll probably try to get her geared enough to do some raiding, and maybe someday I’ll try to learn how to tank with her.

Well, with my attention deficit problem it has taken awhile to get my first death knight finally leveled all the way. In the mean time, I’ve taken four other death knights through the beginning area to level 58. I don’t keep rolling death knights cause I love the class (I do actually love the class don’t get me wrong), but mostly because whenever you go to a new server, well you ought to roll a death knight. It’s the quickest way to make money and get established.

So, how long did it take to level the dk? When I checked the /played feature it said I’d played this character for 6 days and 13 hours. That’s nothing compared to my hunter, but its still a freakin’ lot of time to be playing a game. My next highest leveled alt is only level 36, my druid on Deathwing. Now getting the druid to level 80 will be much more of an accomplishment. Of course I think just the fact that when I leveled my hunter it was still back in the day before Blizzard increased the speed at which you could level. I tell you, by golly, back in the day the grind from level 40 to level 60 was really bad. And leveling in the outlands took a lot longer as well. So, in my opinion leveling a toon in vanilla WoW was much more an accomplishment than it is now. Leveling from 70 to 80 still takes a good long while, but much easier and more fun with LFG. I would quest while sitting in the queue and then I’d jump into a group and take out an instance somewhere. Keep going if they would or jump back to questing. It’s the ultimate help while leveling. You get good gear while getting a ton of XP.

Well, there you have it, I’m probably one of the most casual guys in the game you’ll know, of course the very fact that I’m writing a blog means that I’m probably not quite that casual, but now I have my second 80. Well, neither of them are geared very well, so I’m still rather pathetic.

Have you noticed that your work ethic and personality bleed into your playing style? I certainly have. I’m not saying I have a very poor work ethic, I don’t, I work just as hard as the next guy, I think. Well, okay, sometimes I can get lazy and when the game starts to look like work then I start to want to do something else. Also, I swear I’m ADHD, I swear it. I can’t focus on one thing for more than two minutes or so. That’s why generally I don’t have super long elaborate blog entries about one thing or another. Generally have a couple of paragraphs my brain is off somewhere else. Of course that’s not always true, but seriously.

I can’t seem to stay focused on one thing in the game anymore. I tend to sit down at the computer and think, “Hmmm, what do I want to do this morning?” and without fail I’ll do something random when I should be focusing on getting my hunter better gear or leveling one of my key alts. What do I do instead? I create a new character somewhere random. I believe I’m up to 31 characters across 8 servers. Now, I only care about 4 of those servers, but still, I’m spreading myself pretty thin. I know it would probably be better to focus on maybe only 4 characters. But right now I’d say that I’ve been working on 12 different toons. At least I never have to worry about running out of rest XP, cause there’s always someone that I can play with that has an ample supply.

So, what’s the problem with that? Well, I’m slow. Come on, I have a turtle for a pet! I work slowly, mostly because I have a limited amount of playing time. I play for an hour or two before I go to work and one night a week I’ll get on and do a raid with my guildies. Once or twice a week my wife and I will work one one of our 4 different couples in the game (we tend to try to give them names of famous couples, but that’s another blog post altogether). So, I’m limited in game play. I’d probably be just fine if I only focused on my Hunter and my DK, but I swear it’s addictive to be an altoholic. You find yourself rolling new toons all the time, sometimes with legitimate reasons, sometimes just because you thought it was a cool idea. I swear I’m going to have to go to a 12 steps program for this. But at least I know I’ll be in good company (looks at Anea).

I use to consider myself a bit of an altoholic. I only have one more spot left available to roll a character on my home server. I have several other alts spread throughout many different servers, but the highest level alt is my DK, level 71. Does that really count when you get to skip 55 levels though? My second highest alt? A level 31 shaman.

Technically, it looks kind of like I’m huge into playing alts, but deep down inside, I’m not really. I always go back to my dwarf hunter. There is always something else to do on my main, achievements, fun engineering stuff, new pets, new mounts, dailies, dailies, more dailies, raiding, etc etc. Did I happen to mention dailies?

I was only able to level some of those alts so far because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of my wife when we were leveling our toons from 70 to 80. But now we have the option of turning our XP off. So, I wonder if I’ll ever play on an alt again. Well, I guess that’s not true. I get on my bank alt every day.

I’m not sure if my other toons will see the light of day. I have several toons that I would love to see reach level 80, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do it. It has been dreadful going back to having no mount or having a fatboy mount. I think I stopped playing my druid when I was in the middle of Ashenvale because it took so freaking long to get anywhere. But now with that last patch I could go buy her a mount.

So, now I have to conclude that I’m a one toon player at heart who only has empty ambitions of leveling alts. Ambitions that are ignored and pushed aside.

What is the point of speed leveling anyway? I just read this blog post: "ISU vs Wrath vs Twentyfifthnovember" at Arms and Fury blog. The TwentyfifthNovember guild going through the PvE content as fast as humanly (possibly inhumanly) possible seems silly and a waste of time for me. As for me, I may use questhelper, but only so I don't get so frustrated that I quit questing (which consequently is what I do for much of my leveling up to 70 with Aoirselvar). But I've been trying to enjoy the story line this time and actually read the quests. It takes a little time and sometimes the NPC gets annoyed and walks away (which then annoys me, I mean come one I'm trying to listen to the guy), but its so worth it. Of course I'm finding myself wanting to play on a RP realm more and more, but not willing to leave my guild and pay lots of money to transfer.

So, what's the point of speed leveling through all of this new content? If this game starts to feel like a job then its time to go find something else to do, like watch TV or something. I mean come on, why add the stress of getting to level 80 in 4 days (while the rest of your life goes to h3ll). Just relax and enjoy the game.