Warcraft - Obligation Free

I've been playing WoW infrequently lately, so when I do log on, I don't "have time" to do my garrison chores on all my alts or make sure I go get all my seals for the week on my 100s. I don't want to sit in queue for LFR for my runes and looking for heroic raid pugs is usually too much of a pain to even consider as an option. Instead, I just do whatever I feel like.

ooOoOoO I'm the ghost of Thunder Bluff!

It feels odd.

Hallelujah Heirlooms

With 6.1 we saw a revamp of the heirloom system - MMOC has a short little video about it if you haven't seen it yet, or you can read the screencap summary below!

Previously, before Warlords, heirlooms were datamined to be available to purchased with gold at release, but they scrapped that and they were unable to be purchased at all for quite awhile, except with darkmoon faire tickets, with the promise of a future new heirloom system. I wrote a bit about my baseless theories on the impacts of removal of the valor point system, like months ago, but it looks like heirlooms are just about the only things that are able to be purchased with gold, and apexis crystals are the 'new valor points'.

On The Other Side

ugh these are all YOUR friends

I primarily play horde, but I've attempted to level alliance characters before. I never had one at max until Mists, which was encouraged by the [Double Agent] achievement.

Even though my brother and I started playing World of Warcraft at the same time, we started out playing opposite factions on different servers. I tried to level an alliance character on his server but only got to level 44 before completely losing interest.

The Underdog Strife

I started playing World of Warcraft as a hunter during Vanilla. I began my first MMO adventure by experiencing what it was like to be passed over for groups because of the class I played. Hunters didn't have the best reputation and that's something that really hasn't entirely gone away - it isn't as prevalent as it was, but "huntard" started back in my day.

Basically, if you didn't know, Blizzard literally gave Hunters an enrage dispel in order to make them an attractive option to bring to raids. I was of course in a guild that was all right bringing me and other hunters to dungeons and raids. Strat and Scholo being 10 mans and UBRS being 15 man made it easy to bring hunters along, even though we were "useless and stole other classes' gear". This, along with my own natural perfectionist personality, drove me to be as knowledgeable and skilled as possible so that people would be happy to bring me along to dungeons instead of that mage or rogue.

Living with Altoholism

who's that pokemon?

There are a lot of ways to enjoy the experience of having alternative characters. Some people have just one or two alts that they dedicate a lot of love into, or they have tons of alts that they all tend to have a decent gear level. Some people can never manage to get an alt to max level, while others have more max level characters than I could even feasibly imagine leveling up.

Then there's me. I love leveling alts, but here's the thing - if I don't delete the alt before it hits max level, I'll gear it up for a week, farm it a transmog outfit, and move onto something else. It may be a little odd to level up alts just to delete them later, but I really enjoy the leveling experience with some classes, especially tanking low level dungeons.

As for the ones who were lucky enough to make it to max level before they got deleted, I log onto them periodically, but I can't figure out which one alt I really want to focus on. I thought it was my warlock, but not being able to heal or tank is frustrating.

I've had max level alts throughout every expansion, but usually not this many. Once I felt comfortable to start leveling alts during Mists, I leveled up my shaman, then my priest, then I leveled a warlock, which I had been trying to do for a long time. I really enjoyed the priest and warlock and those were my primary alts.

Then I leveled my hunter, then I leveled my paladin, then I leveled my warrior... and none of them really had an opportunity to flourish. Somewhere along the line I leveled up another druid - an alliance druid, primarily for [Double Agent], though also because I had never truly experienced the alliance side of leveling.

It's pretty weird playing a game for so long and then entering a city where you can't find the auction house, but moving on. I used my Warlords boost on a rogue, learned how to play him, ran LFR three times and now I just mail it all my lockboxes. I leveled a monk to 85 and couldn't bear to do Pandaria again, and now I have an 85 death knight with the same issue.