Saturday, January 21, 2012

20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day One

I was blog-crawling the other day, and somehow I ended up at the Dwarven Battle Medic. Looking through his previous posts, I stumbled on the 20 Days of...challenge, originally presented by Saga of Spellbound over a year ago.

The idea seems fun, so I'm gonna try it. Given that my posting has slowed to about once a month, this'll serve as a goad to get the creative juices flowing.

Who am I?
I'd have to say my first toon is Bloodshrike, a Troll Hunter on Demon Soul. I was wooed into playing WoW by a friend at work, after years of resisting. Not because I didn't think I'd like it, quite the opposite. When I play a game, I stay for the long haul. But, after 7 years of playing Diablo II, developing variant builds for classes (Crushplosive archers for all class types), and posting on the forums, it was time for a change. From the first moment I logged in, I was enthralled. The ability to look up, down, around....which happened a lot, often unintentionally, as I had changed the controls to have my mouse used for movement, which I was used to on Diablo II. But once I figured that out, I was off and questing. I avoided the AH at first, but got used to it after a while, and my 4th alt Banesidhe actually funded a lot of my professions, using gold gained from selling enchanting mats to buy mats for engineering/blacksmithing.

Bloodshrike has been my nom de guerre for a while now, ever since reading the Westmark novels by Lloyd Alexander, and feeling curious about the name "Shrike." The blood got tacked on to the front of it, and I've been Bloodshrike while playing Half-life, Halo, Diablo, and now WoW.

Blood is certainly my achievement whore, but I hesitate on calling any of the toons I play my "main." I don't RP, I don't identify strongly with any one toon, I just like playing them all. I've got at least 3 or more (cough, hunters) of each class, and enjoy them equally.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

On Leveling

1-18-12

The Grumpy Elf has some very thought-provoking posts up on his blog, A New Leveling Model and Is the Leveling Model Dated in particular caught my eye. I do like a lot of what he's advocating, but I'd like to offer a caveat (well, two actually).

Talents - One of the reasons for gradually unlocking spells and abilities is to let new players get accustomed to them. I don't know about you, but I use more than 4 abilities when playing. Hell, I have more than 20 abilities usually mapped to my left hand, and those are the ones that I consider using regularly, or at least in specific situations that pop up fairly often. Granted, I have an odd setup, using 1-6, Q-T, A-G,Z-B, hitting all of them with my left hand, with a bunch of them having Alt functions macro bound to them. My right hand is used for movement and target selection with the mouse.
Dumping all the spells available to an 85 on a fresh new player would be overwhelming, especially if they used the default WASD setup that Blizzard gives them. "I'm supposed to use ALL of these spells? How am I supposed to hit them if my left hand is stuck hitting those 4 keys??? Bugger this, I'm gonna go play Farmville instead!"

Altoholics - I have 30 toons that I am un-concentrated on leveling, at a veryyy relaxed pace. I would like to offer an extension of the Grumpy Elf's thoughts, in that quests/reputations credit should be account wide if this new model goes through. I've got 8 85's, and have only done the Tol Barad dailies to completion on 6 of them. Since all your toons would be level 85, gear would not be over-powered, so there would no reason for currency that one toon has acquired not to be used by others. For example, the Crocolisk daily in Tol Barad is slightly irritating for me to do, since I want to skin the damn things for Savage Leather. But my priest Burizadokyan(JC/Alch) and warlock Bonescourge (Scribe/Eng) can't do that, and it wouldn't be feasible to log out, and log back in with my skinner. Since my rogue Thrillkiller is my skinner, and has done everything I want to do in Tol Barad, why not allow him to gain Tol Barad Commendations, and let Bone or Bur spend them? You could have an account wide reputation level, but you'd still have to put in the time to do dailies on at least one toon for the currency. You could do the dailies on more than one toon if wanted/needed, but...speaking from experience, that wears you down and burns you out.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. Cheers!