Decisions, decisions…

So I just got some awesome news last night!

Back in December, I had a ‘moment of clarity’ and decided that I needed to cut WoW out of my life. I had tried this before and had always come back. So this time, I ‘figured’ that if I deleted all my characters, that would make coming back much less attractive since I would have to level all over again.

Long story short…it didn’t work. Worst of all, I now wanted desperately to play my old alliance characters but was forced to re-level. I had lost 2 level 70s and 2 level 60+ characters and the rest were all in their 30-40s. The thought of having to level them all over again was painful but I was willing to do it specifically because of the server and guild I had joined.

Anyway, someone in the guild suggested that I try getting the characters restored. I didn’t know this was even possible, and after reading a little online, I had little hope since it was over 6 months ago. But I figured it was worth a shot.

Anyways, if you didn’t guess, I got my characters restored!!

Now, as part of my attempt to prevent future play, I had basically vendored everything my characters were wearing and gave the gold to my ‘at-the-time guild’. So when my characters were restored, they were all basically naked. The GMs gave me 350g each for the 70s and about 180g or so for each of the 60+ chars to help re-gear. I promptly transfered over 3 of my characters to the new server I was on and that brings us to the big issue now.

I basically have 2 level 70s (priest and druid) and a level 62 mage. All three are basically wearing AH greens and I have no idea where to go from here. I can’t even make up my mind what I want to spec. I started out feral for the druid and shadow for the priest, and then respecced the priest to be disc. Now I’m debating whether I want the druid to stay feral or switch to balance, or switch to resto and re-switch the priest to shadow.

Ugh, so many choices. Not to mention that I need to then decide how to re-gear all my new characters. This might not be so bad if I had only 1 character to re-gear, but 3?!?! It’s like the ultimate altoholic dream/nightmare!

Hello, my name is…

Altoholic

My name is John, and I’m an altoholic. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my ADD (or ADHD) nature in general. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since its Open Beta (some time in 04 I think). I started with a dwarf paladin, got to level 16,  and ‘quit’ the game, citing a need to concentrate more on work and other things. I think that ‘quit’ lasted about 3 days.

It’s now about 4 years later (almost) and I’ve played every class to at least level 26. I’ve had 5 characters total at max level (priest, mage, warrior, druid, paladin, ) and every class over 50 except shamans and rogues. I’ve hit the 50 character cross server limit multiple times and had to delete old characters that never made it past level 10.

Anyone who has played WoW knows that there are 9 different classes (priest, paladin, mage, warlock, warrior, shaman, rogue, hunter, druid) and 10 races (human, dwarf, night elf, gnome, draenei, orc, troll, tauren, undead, blood elf). Although each race has a special racial ability, there really isn’t too much game impacting difference between the various race/class combinations.

So why then do I keep making new characters?

Time.

You see, at max level (or even just close to max level) you reach a point where you can’t go much further without setting aside a good 2-3 hour chunk of time to do it. That’s where the second part of the blog name comes in.

I’m a dad (and husband) so most of my time belongs to other people. I’m either working, or playing with our baby and spending time with the wife, or occasionally trying to hit the gym. This means that if I’m lucky, I get about an hour, maybe 1 and a half hours, to play. On occasion I can get 2-3 hours but just as often I get 30 minutes.

What this translates to is having lots of time to level up characters, but almost no time to do anything with those characters once I reach max level. So once I hit max level, I have nothing to do but pvp (which I hate primarily because I suck at it and all my classes usually take some form of group support) or roll up another character and do it all over again. Sure I’ve occasionally joined a group to do some higher end content, but something always comes up. So I either leave the group midway through, pissing off everyone in the group and ruining my ‘groupability’ reputation, or I press on through with the group and piss off the wife. I don’t know about you, but I gotta live with the wife so you can guess which option I normally opt for

Now, even with the playtime restrictions I have, I should have probably reached max level with every class available. The problem is that I’ve had to switch servers and factions a couple times due to some real-life friend rolling up a character on another server, etc. So in actuality, I’ve had 3 priests, 2 druids, 3 warriors, etc.

So what does all this mean? Why should you care? Why are you even bothering to add this blog to your already long list of blogs you read every day? Well hopefully my writing along is enough to captivate and entertain. If not though, then hopefully my altoholism has given me the knowledge to help YOU level, no matter what race/class you are playing.

What I don’t have, or will likely ever have, is a firm grasp of end game mechanics. Sure I’ve done some higher end content, but Kara is the farthest I’ve gone (pre-bc the furthest we got was aq40). So I may have some useful info for gearing up to and possibly including Kara, but if you’re looking for things to help you beyond that, I am probably not your best option. I enjoy the theorycrafting articles out there, imagining how crazy it must be past Kara into T5 and T6 content, but that’s about where it ends for me.

So if you’re levelling a character and want to read up some tips, or even just want to read about my wanderings and random character changings, then welcome to the blog!