The Altaholic's Dilema

With Burning Crusade, it wasn't a dilema for me, though I'm sure it was for many altaholics, but when Lich King came out, it was hard to decide if I wanted to play with a shiny new DK but have to go through the familiar Outland again, or take my 70 huntard and jump straight into Northrend. I decided on the former as you know, but its a tough call. I'm sure alot of my fellows had the same decision to make then, or for BC, whether to jump on your 60 and head through the portal, or make a new belf pally or draenei shammy. And with Cataclysm on the horizon, I'll face the dilema again... to jump on Faeyth and take to the skies of ravaged Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, or to head to Kezan with my goblin. Yes kids, you can be sure my altaholism isn't cured, I will be making a goblin.

So, my journey with Golbez.. right off the bat, you can tell Blizzard has really changed the game again. The Lich King, who would become the expansion's final raid boss, is there to give you your first quest. You're level 55 yet have no talent points, and you've got some pretty impressive green gear as starting equipment. You know all your weapon skills at max level, and already have a high level in first aid. My only complaint is still you can't pick trade skills to have leveled up to an appropriate skill, and have to go muck about in low level areas or spend a ton of gold on the AH to level some up.

Then I start doing the quests. The first thing that amazes me is the area I'm in keeps changing as I complete quests. Yet, other people must still be doing the quests I've done already, yet I don't see other players fighting invisible mobs. I didn't know about the new phasing technology and how it worked at this point, but I was dazzled by whatever Blizz had used to pull this off.

I also really enjoyed the lore... I've always enjoyed my clashes with the Scarlet Crusade. Scarlet Monastary was probably my favorite instances in the old world, for a variety of reasons. It's design of four separate and short wings was great (why couldn't WC have been like that?), some of the gear you got there was some of the most longlived gear in pre-BC days that would not be replaced for a good 10-15 levels (only rivaled by some of the leather gear from WC and the cloth from SFK), and it was also a good training ground. I feel like SM was where I really learned to play alot of my classes well in group scenarios. It was one of the first instances that presented a challenge, where more than luck and brute strength were required, you couldn't just blunder throug it, you needed stategy. It's probably the instance I've run the most, between hunting for gear for my clothies in Cath and Library, and for my melee classes in Armory, and running it solo on my 60s for the copius amounts of silk and mageweave. So seeing my old Scarlet friends and murdering them in vast quantities was fun.

And then, finally the grand concusion in the EPL (one of my favorite zones) was epic. Seeing my favorite in game human (Tirion Fordring) be all bad ass was awesome Sadly, after this was done, I found myself level 58 or 59, and had to trudge off, yet again, to the Outland....

P.S.: Finished Day of the Dragon today, I got into it finally. Even though it portrayed the Horde in a very negative light (all the orcs, trolls, and goblins in it are dicks) and sngs the praise of the humans to no end, it was good with Cataclysm on the way to get some more insight into Deathwing and the rest of the Aspects. Also read Chris Metzen's short story Of Blood and Honor. My only complaint was that it was too short. It had my previously stated favorite human being awesome, the rest of the humans being racist dicks, showed more of the honor and intelligence and bravery of orcs, and even had a Thrall cameo. All in all, a good read. Next on my reading list, Arthas: Rise of the Lich King. I'm excited because the same author who did Lord of the Clans, my favorite WoW story thus far, did this one too.

Captain of the Red Wings

So 2008 found me sidetracked from the project by console games. First, it was Grand Theft Auto IV. I spent a month or more playing this pretty heavily, with WoW thrown in here and there. Then I got back to it, and had gotten Claude, Faeyth, Renoh, Barrett, and Tifah up to 60, with the other three in the works. However, I started realizing how close Lich King was, and decided I wanted to have whichever of my toons I wanted to level t0 80 first sitting ready at 70 when it hit. I decided that I enjoyed the ease of warlock leveling, so Renoh would be my choice. With only weeks until the release, I began working on leveling him to 70. However, something happened that'd derail me once again. My roommate brought home a copy of Fallout 3. I was hooked in. Damnit. It got so bad I didn't even buy WotLK until a couple weeks after it was released, and the dream of having 9 70s at launch went unfulfilled. But, I did get it, and decided that since I didn't have my warlock ready, I'd just jump into my death knight, and so, the tenth of my alts, Golbez the forsaken Death Knight, was born. And then my jaw dropped as I started doing the amazing quests in the DK starting area. Blizzard had REALLY outdone themselves. I like it so much that whenever my server goes down these days, I roll a new DK on a new server and just dick around for a bit with it. This was a very differen class to play, with very dfferent mechanics... it took some getting used to..

Multiple Personality Disorder

I finished Lord of the Clans a few days ago, it was amazing. I love how well they "humanized" the orcs, made them really strong, honorable, respectable characters. I'm now working on Day of the Dragon, but, I'm having trouble getting into it... Kirin Tor and elves... blah.

So weeks go by, and I get all of the gang up to 30. My plan at this point was to cycle through all of them again to 50, and when that was done, cycle through to 70. However, as I went back to Faeyth the paladin, I realized the problem... I had totally forgotten to play her. I started thinking about how to fix this problem going forward. I decided I'd pair everyone up, and do two toons at a time all the way to 70, then move on to the next pair. So, Claude and Faeyth became the first pair.

Quick aside about the gang... not all of them were original. Originally I had a slightly different line up, most got changed before I got started, with the exception of Cid and Tifah who I did a paid recustomization on. When I heard about death knights coming in WotLK I knew I wanted to make him a forsaken named Golbez. That meant breaking from my original all Final Fantasy VII naming scheme. So I deleted my troll priest named Aeris and made a blood elf priest named Terra, and my undead warlock named Valentine became the blood elf warlock Renoh. I always had a female orc named Tifah, but originally she was a shaman, and my warrior was a male orc named Highwind. However (much later, after WotLK came out) I decided I REALLY wanted a male orc shaman who looked like Thrall. So, I recustomized my warrior into a female named Tifah, and my shaman into a male named Cid.

Anywho, I estimated it would take me about 7 months to get all my toons up to 70 at this point (from 30), if I were playing an average of 6 hours a day. A lot of days I didn't get to play that much but I'd make up for it with usually at least one marathon session a week. At the time, it was looking like WotLK was about 8 or 9 months away, so I had a little wiggle room.

Unfortunately for the project, 2008 ended up being a really good year for console games I wanted to play....

The Real Work Begins

So here I am, with one level 70 hunter, and 8 level 1 alts. What to do? Well, I decided the best thing to do to start would be to get them all up to level 10 or so (basically, finish up Durotar/Mulgore/Tirisfal/Eversong) so that they can all start building up significant rested bonuses. I started with Faeyth, my lovely pale skinned and black haired blood elf paladin. I had really wanted to play a paladin forever, but hadn't the stomach to go ally for it. I was disappointed to learn, lorewise, the belfs were stealing the "Light" from a captive naruu. But, I can get over it. I ran through Eversong, got myself up to level 10, did my class quest for the rez spell, got her to the inn in Ghostlands, and sadly put Faeyth on the shelf.

I followed suit with the other 7, tasting just a bit of each class for 10 levels, and logging out in Ghostlands. This was my first time playing some of them... mage, warlock, rogue. Once I was done, I decided I'd do each toon for 20 levels (up to 30), so I'd have a little time to get used to the classes before switching things up for another class. This took significantly more time. 1-10 is very quick. 10-30 is a bit longer, and multiply it by 8 and it gets real long. I began to realize after the second toon (rogue I think, Claude) I got to 30 just how long this was gonna take.

The Menagarie

Even though I was a belf, at least I was on the orcs side, and this was an orc world. Sure, the draenei lived here a long times, but its not their world, doesn't have their character. This time I wouldn't be bothering with instances at all. I reported to my orc superiors in Thrallmar, and set to work. Before too long I found something that would make me replace Phoenix as my trusty pet... a two headed carrior bird! I named it Bahamut and continued on my way. In Zangarmarsh I was tempted to tame some of the wacky things there, but most seemed pretty useless as actual pets.
In Terrokar I replaced Bahamut with Neo Bahamut, the white model of the two headed carrion bird. I also tamed a warp stalker to play around with. Nagrand came wthout much new to tame, but then in Blade's Edge I found the ravagers who palette swap everytime you call them. Too cool so Ihad to give them a try. I ended up liking their mechanics, especially for DPS or PVP but for leveling my carrion bird was still king. Soon enough I made it to Netherstorm, and dinged 70. And so Yuffee's journey was at an end (for now), and I had to decide what to do next.

EDIT: I finished The Last Guardian a couple days ago and have started on The Lord of the Clans. I must say I've been surprised at how much I've enjoyed them, and how well written they are. I'm not saying these are great works of literature, but most of my previous experience with books or movies based off video games or RPGs have been pretty horrid. I've really enjoyed learning more about Garona and Medivh (two pretty important people in lore I didn't know much about) and of course I'm loving reading about Thrall.

I'm on the Hunt I'm After Noobs

I'll admit I've always had a soft spot in my heart for hunters. Partly because my good friend who introduced me to the game played a hunter, but I think mostly because of pets. Warlock pets are nice and all, but you only get a certain few. You get much more choices in the hunter world, and better yet, you get to name them. My first hunter didn't get to play with different pets too much. He was a WSG twink, and boars were king in WSG, at least the way I played it (an argument could be made for cats with fast attack speed, back before they normalized it). Now, this was before all the talent tree for pets things, so things were a bit different, but I played with lots of different pets. My first was one of the cats from the belf starting area. Cats are pretty, and I like them for looks, but, I've never been impressed with their functionality. I tried a bat in ghostlands, but soon went back to a cat. When I made it to the greater world outside Belfland, I picked up a boar for familiarity, but experimented with raptors, crabs, wolves, and some others. I enjoyed switching it up, but, I needed to find a pet to level with that I really liked. Finally, I tried a carrion bird, and found out that their screech ability was like aggro super glue. And they had pretty well rounded attributes so they weren't a weak defense pet like cats. Perfect. Well... not quite perfect... they are ugly.

After a bit of research I found that owls had the same ability and were much cooler looking. However, none could be found low level in Horde or neutral area. In fact, the only low level owls were in Teldrassil. Great. Suicide run. So here I am, level 25 or so, and I need to run my ass all the way across Ashenvale, through Darkshore, get on an ally boat, sneak through the filthy nelf capital city, and steal one of their birds. Crap. Upside? Took my boar with me, and killed ALOT of ally noobs on my way. Did I die a few times getting through Darnassus? Well, yeah. But when I got my beautiful owl (named Phoenix) who would accompany me for most of the next 35+ levels, it was all worth it. With my pet choice out of the way, I could get to the business of powerleveling my way through Azeroth... Hillsbrad, Ashenvale, Thousand Needles, Arathi, Dustwallow, STV, Tanaris, Feralas, Desolace, Swamp of Sorrows, Un'goro, the Plaguelands... all of these melted by quickly with trusty Phoenix in tow. Soon I was finding my way back to the Dark Portal, and made my first visit to Outland wearing the right colors.

There's No Place Like Orgrimmar

It felt good to be home. Where orcs are men and blood elves are women. Where we tell Chuck Norris jokes instead of Hogger jokes. Where we laugh at your sissy Light and call upon the mighty elemental spirits to smite our pink skinned enemies.

So, I had my daunting "project" to begin. The question was where to start? I decided the best thing to do would be to power level one of my toons to 70, so I could have a capped toon to be able to gather things or come kill gankers for my lowbies while I was leveling. And as most good WoW players know, hunters are the fastest power levelers. So, I bought myself a copy of Joana's Leveling Guide (btw, unless you're looking to literally set a speed run record, don't pay, get Jame's Leveling Guide for free) and set to getting Yuffee to the cap.

Here was my first experience in the blood elf starting area. Yes, I know, belfs get alot of flak from both Ally's (as if they're anyone to talk with nelfs) and old school Horde like myself. I however am not a belf hater. Having ONE "pretty" humanish looking race in a faction of badasses spices things up a little. Not to mention in the days of Burning Crusade, belfs were kinda evil, pretty though they may be. And yeah, it looks a bit odd for an old school Horde like me to have half of his toons be belfs, but hey, I was going off a theme. And trust me, if we had had Tauren paladins back then, that would have been my main.

Now, I got through the 1-10 zone and moved into the Ghostlands, one of Blizzards masterpieces in quest flow design. This zone, on all future characters, would replace the Barrens or Silverpine as the place to level 10-20, regardless of race. The zone was compact and yet teeming with quests, and the quest rewards were vastly superior to the ones got in other 10-20 zones (even the new draenei 10-20). But soon enough the Ghostlands were done and Yuffee translocated to UC to join the greater Horde world. A zepplin later I was pledging my fealty to the Warchief, and went forward to claim my goal, in the place I belonged, in service of the Horde. LOK'TAR OGAR!