Friday, November 10, 2006

Finding a virtual identity

My first level 60 character was a troll warrior, specialized as tank. I tanked my way through Stratholme, Scholomance, and the other dungeons, up to General Drakkisath in UBRS, and it was fun. Then it became increasingly obvious that we were often blocked due to lack of healers, I leveled up my undead priest, and from then my whole raiding career was done with the priest.

My guild raids every night, and I try to participate 2 to 3 times a week. And as there aren't all that many level 60 raid dungeons below BWL, I know them all inside out by now, and start getting a bit bored. So I tried to reactivate my warrior. But the guild has a lot of warriors, and understandably they wouldn't let a badly equipped alt tank. So I had to respec to dps warrior, 18/33/0 arms/fury, dual-wielding flurry. I tried that spec in solo and PvP, and it dishes out quite a good amount of damage. And then I waited for an opportunity to go raiding with my warrior.

Last night the opportunity came, a Zul'Gurub raid which due to lack of rogues could use more dps warriors. We killed the bat boss, the snake boss, the spider boss, no problem. But I absolutely hated it. Playing that dps warrior in a raid just wasn't fun to me. Then some RL stuff came up, and I left the raid. I don't think I'll ever raid with that character again, at least not as dps warrior. Dps warrior is just not me, not my style.

I think the main reason I don't like dealing damage in a raid is that there is no simple feedback on how you are faring. As a healer it is pretty obvious whether your healing target is alive or dead. As a tank you always know whether you are keeping aggro or not. But as a damage dealer you are one of many, and you can't vary your tactics and see what works and what doesn't work. Even an addon like Damagemeters can only give you a total score. A secondary reason for not liking my dps warrior job is that it requires too much running around. As a priest you just stand and heal. As a tank you should have the mob firmly rooted on one spot. But as melee damage dealer you need to run after your targets all the time, which is not something I enjoy.

This is a valuable lesson. Because while I have 3 characters leveled up to 60, and a bunch of lesser levels, I don't see myself leveling them all up to 70. Not only would that take too much time, it would also sooner or later require spending all the money for riding skill 225 for each of them. Only my undead priest has 150 skill, and I think I'll have a good chance of having enough money for the normal flying mount and required riding skill when I need it. For the others I would first have to spend money on the epic ground mount, effectively doubling the cost. I'm not sure I still want to spend all that time on alts. That is the one disadvantage of expanding the game: the longer the game is, the less alts you can bring to the top.

So I found my virtual identify as a priest, and will spend most of the time after the expansion comes out to level up that priest, and then go raiding with him. My warrior will only level up once the priest hits 70, and will mainly be used for his herbalism and alchemy tradeskills. If I go visiting dungeons with my warrior, I'll turn him back into a protection spec'd tank. I might also make a new character, a blood elf mage, because I always wanted to play a mage, and having a new race for it increases the interest. But I have no idea how high I'll get with that one. Because whether I will still be playing World of Warcraft in a year, I don't know. It depends of so many things, but currently my interest is declining. You can't play the same game forever.

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