I played my new paladin for 1 day = 24 hours now, and it's time to review how it went. In this day I made it to level 18, which is not the highest that it could have been, but not bad either. If I was slow, it was because I also got to over 100 in mining, and to 136 in smithing.
Basically I was playing two games at once, the leveling game, and the economic game. Not twinking is fun, as long as nobody else has a twink. When a server is new, smithing is a really fun tradeskill, which equips you with armor and weapons better than you are likely to get as quest rewards, and can even earn you some money. When the server gets older, people switch to blue dungeon loot, which is better than crafted stuff, and the tradeskill becomes useless. At the high end, smithing a sword costs 20 arcanite bars, which together with the rare gems you also need cost over 800 gold, for a sword whose equivalent you can buy for less than half that, or get from a dungeon. But at level 18 I'm proudly running around mostly in self-made armor and weapons, all of which is better than the stuff I see on other people of my level. And dwarves look a lot better in metal armor than trolls do, trolls just don't have the good shape for mail and plate armor. :)
I like playing the paladin, because it is a good mix of my two favorite play styles, tank and healer. The paladin gets a lot of "get out of jail free" spells, like his famous bubble or the Lay on Hands which can heal himself fully instantly even when out of mana. Add the good smithed weapon which kind of solves the low dps problem, and I'm quite happy with my pally's soloing capabilities. I rarely die when soloing, because I can survive nasty surprises. On the negative side I have troubles getting into a group. Seems paladins are not wanted in groups, I had somebody shouting for a tank and healer, and it turned out that he didn't consider paladin to be either. I can see his point, my armor is good, but my taunting is bad, and my healing spell is slow and inefficient. Being hard to hurt is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for being a tank; you also need to be able to keep the monsters attention on you.
Playing on a new server on the weekend after it went live was interesting. But it also revealed serious problems with Blizzard's hardware. After a few days, lots of Alliance players are level 20 and want to get the good loot from the Deadmines. And the instance server for the Deadmines simply couldn't handle that, and crashed several times, each time being out of service for hours. Blizzard really should change the architecture of the instance servers to be able to handle more people, MC is already not very stable, and when the expansion comes with new level 60+ dungeons, we will see instance server crashes again.
The new server also has its bad sides. Especially the human zones are terribly overcrowded, leading to lots of people trying to kill each others kills. Fortunately dwarves and gnomes are less popular races, and there wasn't so much of a problem there. Up to now most people I met have level 60 characters on other servers, and just like me are looking for a new experience. I wonder how many will stay. Me, I don't know yet. I'll play the paladin for a while to get better aquainted with the class. But unfortunately my memory is too good, I still remember most of the Alliance quests, so this isn't a totally new experience. And if I continue to have problems getting into a group as paladin, I won't play that class very long.
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