Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘Alts’

So, as of today I’m done with the recruit-a-friend time I had linked with my buddy. I got a lot of leveling done. I’ve been able to get my warlock from 10 to 60, my priest from level 31 to 60, my druid from 41 to 60, my shaman from 31 to 51, my rogue from 10 to 29 and a brand new pally to level 16. I’m sure many people out there could get more done with RAF, but with the amount of time I have, I think that’s a pretty good accomplishment.

Well, as you can see I’ve been focusing a lot on my alts, particularly the alts on the Deathwing server, neglecting all other servers pretty much. Of course, the way this is going I might transfer a toon to one of these servers (a PvE server – I’m so sick of world PvP!). I am planning on transferring the druid over to my wife’s account. It was hers to begin with before she got her own account. She left it there about level 19 or so. Time to give the druid back (that way I can play with her with my priest or warlock).

I’ve been so focused on RAF, not doing anything else (except for midsummer fire festival), that now I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I’m still sworn off of raiding till Cataclysm. I’m a little burned out on leveling (particularly questing). I haven’t done BGs or dungeons while leveling with RAF (even though dungeons with RAF is absolutely amazing I’ve heard), I haven’t done this because the queue for these before 7am is ridiculous. We tried to do a BG and after waiting for more than an hour we gave up. So, maybe now that we’re a little higher level the queues might be done.

Honestly, I kind of want to try something completely different. I downloaded Starcraft 2 recently which could be a great break till Cataclysm comes out. I’ve also thought about trying some of the free trials in some of the other MMOs. I don’t plan on leaving WoW any time soon. I’ve invested too much time in my characters to leave Azeroth for a few years … at least a few years. I played SC2 this morning for a little bit. I didn’t get a chance to play very long, but I realized that it won’t be taking over my time with WoW. It’ll cut it down quite a bit though.

By the way, if you can get a chance to do Recruit-a-friend I would highly suggest it. The XP gains are amazing, the other tools (like summoning) are also fabulous. I especially love my 2 seated rocket (it looks like jet skis if you ride it on top of the water – very fun!). My brother actually created a second account just to level some toons. He plans on abandoning the account once he’s done. Of course you’d have to have the ability to duel box if you did that, and that’s another subject altogether.

What are y’all doing with your down time before Cataclysm? Are you taking a break? Are you getting into some other game?

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’m kind of caught in a conundrum as to what to do with my gaming time these days. I know we still have a little bit of time before Cataclysm comes out, but essentially we have a gear reset coming our way.  Do I focus on my level 80 characters and get them better geared? Do I focus on level my alts? Should I just turn the game off and get out more? Decision decisions decisions.

It was one of my goals to have at least 3 level 80 characters when the expansion came out. So far I got my level 80 hunter and my level 80 deathknight. New project is my druid (or actually my wife’s druid who was left on my account when we created a new account and such). Right now the druid is level 38 with very little rest XP stored up. How would my time be better spent with the few hours I play in the morning? I’ve been kind of doing whatever random fancy pops in my head, which means I’m not getting a whole lot accomplished. My brother keeps telling me how easy it is to get geared up for raiding these days. I agree with him, it would probably be easier if I did a lot more randoms, more than I’m doing now.

My little brother has a different perspective in the game than I do. I think sometimes he forgets that I have 3 kids and I have extremely limited time to get on a play. I get an hour in the morning and once or twice a week at night (should sound reasonable I’m sure). There is no way I’ll ever keep up with him. He’s single, he’s one of our best/top raiders, and he has a lot more time on his hands than I do. Plus he’s all about raiding and getting through content, which is fine, but he doesn’t understand that there are other motivations out there. He kind of scoffs at the obsession with the holiday events that my wife and I have. He definitely thinks RP is silly (as does most of my guild on Deathwing). And he thought my mount collecting habits were a little weird as well (except the rare mounts, he loves the more rare mounts).

Well, what are you guys going to do before the expansion hits? Are you going to keep raiding? Are you going to turn your focus on Alts? Are you going to take a hiatus and play Starcraft 2? I’m trying to decide what to do here in this game that we call warcraft.

Okay, so I’ll be frankly honest with you all. If we don’t have Tuesday maintenance server down time, I don’t and won’t post as much for that week. I love writing on here, but I also love playing the game. I use that down time on Tuesday mornings to write a little something something about the game. Otherwise, I’m playing. I gives me something to do related to the game at least you know.

Man, there probably should be more down time (even though I would be very upset about it). I might get more accomplished with my life. dishes, feeding the dog (wait, I don’t have a dog), exercising (well, I do exercise, but it takes great motivation, that of which has been failing me lately), etc. I don’t know…

So, I went raiding on Tuesday with my guild thinking I would be the bomb with my hunter, much better geared than ever before. Or at least I thought I’d do better, but no. My dps was pathetic, maybe worse. I know part of the problem is (as mentioned before) my focus in the game. I’m not super focused on getting my dps up to uber levels with my hunter. My younger brother has been bugging me about it. He wants me to go sit in front of the target dummies and practice my shot rotation and such. I will eventually but I can’t get myself to do it, not when there is so much else to do!! Of course part of the problem was also the fact that I was super tired and I kept dozing off. Not very good for dps when you just sit there like a bump on a log.

Besides lack of sleep, the main thing that has gotten me bogged down lately are holiday achievements. I’ve decided, now that Eliahna (my DK) is level 80, I want to get her started on the road to a pretty 310% speed violet protodrake as well.  And… I still have holidays to do on my hunter. So, I have double duty when it comes to this. At least we are on really easy holidays even if they require a bit of work. I just need to drag my sorry butt to all the elders all over the greater Azeroth. No PvP achievements at all in these holidays so we’re doing good. I’m dreading the up and coming Children’s week holiday. I love the holiday, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get all of those battleground achievements. I probably should start practicing now, on my hunter, my dk, and my wife’s mage.

So, I should be playing randoms to get frost emblems; instead, I’m running around trying to complete holiday achievements. Thus neither of my end level characters are improving their abilities.

Even if the holiday was over though, I’d probably just be running around on alts or something. I can’t stay focused very well. (Which is why I’m writing the post right now instead of working like I should. )

So, I want to dual spec my deathknight to be a frost dual wielding tank for 5 man instances with family and guildies, and a unholy dps for 5 man pugs and farming. I’ve been tanking all of these really difficult instances, like the underbog, and hellfire peninsula instances. Well, okay, maybe not quite so difficult, but its been fun to play with my brother and his wife, even if my character isn’t yet getting anything out of it.

I really want to also level my kitty druid. Right now she’s sitting at level 36, and she’s been ignored due to holiday stuffs and whatnot. But I really would like to get her to level 80 before the expansion comes out as well.

Rutabaga

Sorry, I’m jumping all over the place on this post today. Randomness at its best, I guess that’s how my brain works and when you get a quick post about what’s on my mind, that’s what you get. Sorry about that.

So, I’ve been ignoring my druid, and I really would like to get back to my other Deathknights (on Duratan US and Earthen Ring US). I’m still trying to work up their professions, which seems like its taking … forever! Especially when one of them have a crafting profession. I’m really guilty about putting those off forever, but not this time, we’re going to level them before we enter the outlands with these characters by golly.

Man, it seems like I had a lot of other things to say. Maybe I need to think on it for a moment.

I’m finally getting back into raiding with my hunter. Its been awhile since I’ve done much. I got the alt bug (altitis) back in November and its been difficult to focus on any alt for more than 5 seconds which you could read about on a recent blog post Alts and ADHD.

So, I’m not exactly going gun ho or anything. I’m only raiding once a week on our “gearing up” raid night. We’ve been running 10 man ToC on Tuesdays for those who aren’t quite ready to go to ICC. My dps is slowly increasing as I’m learning the fights and improving my gear. I was very happy this last Tuesday to finally get a gun. I’ll admit that I haven’t had a gun on my dwarf hunter since Burning Crusade. I know I know, it’s sad. I’ve been told that my dwarf probably should cut off his beard because of the shame (especially with the dwarven racial gun crit bonus). In my defense, I’ve seemed to have the worse luck in this regard.

In the last couple of weeks I have replaced a lot of gear, my shoulders, bracers, a low low trinket, range weapon, melee weapon, and head piece. I know I could do it probably a little quicker if I exclusively focused on the hunter. Probably should do more daily randoms, but I don’t. I still got the alt bug (not to mention the holiday bug, or worse yet… the alt holiday bug – that’s where you have to do the holidays with your alts as well.) I’ve been trying to get my death knight the “Love is in the Air” meta achievement on her way to getting a 310% speed violet protodrake as well. She has a little farther to go than Aoirselvar does. I guess there is just too many things I want to do with the very limited time I have to do it.

So, I’m slowly becoming more and more useful to my raiding team. My gear is at the moment in disarray. I just picked up a new trinket with hellova lot of hit on it. Also haven’t gemmed or enchanted any of my new gear that I got this week yet. Oh, and I need a scope for my gun (yay!!). Too much to do. But at least each week my dps is getting better (I won’t admit my dps as to not shame and embarrass myself – maybe later).

This is I guess what I would consider an “update” post, letting you know what’s going on in my neck of the woods. I’ll try to keep these to a minimal, I don’t know if you care to know what I’m doing or not. But then again you are here reading this on my blog so maybe you do. I have some more informative posts in the works. I’ll make sure when I do such things that I either have first hand knowledge or that I at least do my research.

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).

Okay, I know its February now and I should have already made this post. I’m already a month behind. Well, if I would have made the post before this last weekend it would have disappeared. You see we backed up the blog early this month to move it over, but then we had some difficulties moving (mostly because I’m a noob when it comes to the technical stuff), but we figured it out! So, I’ve been waiting to post my Azerathian new year resolutions, so here goes.

• Level at least 2 more characters to max level before the expansion.
  • This should be so hard to get, I think… I have my DK at level 79.66 right now so we should just be about there in a little bit if I can stay focused.
• Finish the “What a crazy year” achievement and get my violet 310% speech proto drake on Aoirselvar.
  • On a side note, I want to get started working on this for my DK as well.
• Get my Dwarf Hunter raid worthy
  • I admit it, I’ve lapsed on this in the last couple of months. I know this should be easy if I focus, but every time I sit down to the computer I get side tracked by one squirrel or another.
• Learn how to tank on my DK and feral druid
  • I have not problem trying this out, my only problem is that I don’t wand the LFG to be my first attempt at it. So, I’m going to have to talk some patient guildies into letting me try this out, oh and my druid is only level 35 anyway, so it’ll just be swipe heaven I’m told.
• Learn to heal on my druid (hopefully duel spec sometime) and priest
  • Okay, so I’ve been wanting to try out other aspects of the game. I realized that the days of me being a one character player are over.
• Tank something I’m not suppose to with my turtle.
  • I’ve been obsessed with pet tanking since 3.0 and no one ever takes me seriously. I guess I can’t hardly blame them, but I think non-hunters don’t understand what a good tenacity pet can accomplish. Once we were trying to do the Brewfest holiday boss and we didn’t have a tank, not a big deal, it’s a pretty easy fight actually. So, I tell my boomkin brother that I’ll tank and he told me, “Okay, but you watch, I’m guaranteed to pull aggro off your tank cause I do super massive DPS.” I shrugged in return. He thought I was stupid and only was letting me do this cause it was an easy easy fight. So, at the end when he didn’t even come close to my turtle’s threat he was a little surprised.
• Write at least weekly with quality and at least somewhat useful posts here on this blog.
  • On a side note, I’m also determined about being better to not let this blog, twitter, forums, or another blog from affecting my work performance. I’ve been guilty of that in the past and I’m going to try to keep this to a minimum when I’m at work. Now I’m not saying I’m going to never do anything WoW related at work, I know that I can’t keep that promise.
• Obtain the 100 mount achievement
  • Do I dare put this as a goal for the year when I’ve become an altoholic? I don’t know, but this has been a fun thing for me on Aoirselvar, so far I think I’m up to like 75 or so.

At least that’s some of the stuff that I want to get accomplished. Well, see how the year goes, but writing it down I think helps you stay focused, something I have a problem with that I’ll have to write about on a different day.

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.