A Day in the Past: The TBC Story

While I started as feral and fought tooth and claw to succeed and have my ability be recognized, at the end of Vanilla, a friend convinced me to go balance.

just add moonfire

He wanted to play my character late at night in WSG (don't tell Blizzard), so I let him. He raved about how amazing balance was in PvP and sent me many screencaps of impressive scoreboards. I think he was just a very good PvPer, but he did get me exalted with the Warsong Outriders, so there's that.

Because I was "stuck" as balance, I got adjusted to it, to the point where I realized, hey, I kinda like this. I stayed balance into TBC where I kept it while leveling and for the first three or four months.

In terms of socially being a subhuman low life hybrid spec, I definitely took a step backward. Feral got a lot better in TBC, while already ahead of balance in the first place. If I had stayed feral, I'd have achieved being a "real spec" a lot sooner, but as I've said before, I never back down from being an underdog.

Simcraft Is a Tool, Not a Farseer

Simulationcraft is an amazing tool when used properly, but a large number of people don't seem to understand that it's not an infallible truth. I love what you are able to use simcraft for - stat weights and other research - but the general playerbase tends to look at simcraft charts and, basically, lose their minds.

We've seen these simcraft results pop up every time there's a new raid tier or general class rebalance. Here's one of the more recent ones, they are just more or less bar graphs showing everyone's theoretical max DPS. They are put together with each dps class in the most possible similar standards - in a no adds, patchwerk type fight - and with various bars for the same class depending on variations of specs, like fury with either one-handers or two-handers.

The End is Nigh!

If you have doomsday prophecys for your class or spec for warlords release, you're not alone - all I have heard from friends and guildmates has been that their class is going to be useless come the expac.

Our tanks are not looking favorably at the tank squish and jokingly - or maybe not jokingly - said that tanks would be unecessary in warlords and raid groups would just be dps ping ponging aggro back and forth with a few healers.

How to Learn How to Learn to Play

World of Warcraft is remarkably popular. It's actually pretty surprising sometimes when I search for something without using any warcraft terms and I find exactly what I'm looking for. I mean, searching "auctioneer" brings up the Warcraft mod before it brings up anything about actual auctions.

So many people use Google to find answers to their Warcraft questions that sometimes it knows what I'm looking for and puts it in an information box at the top of the screen. Heck, there are more results for "World of Warcraft" than there are for "kittens".

combine searches for best results

Among all the websites, news articles, and forum posts, you'll find a lot of websites that just aren't that great. There are sites that try to tell you what gear you should get, how you should gem and enchant, or how to play your class - but can be incomplete, outdated, or just plain incorrect. There are guides and resources available that are very useful, while there are other websites that are entirely unreliable.

Class Swapping Dos and Don'ts

When expansions are on the horizon, we look at our favorite classes and at everything that will be changing about our game. A lot of people make decisions about whether they will be changing specs, changing classes, or whether they will be quitting or returning to the game. The difficult part about this is that we never really know how the game will be until we actually play it.

I'm not saying I'm not guilty of jumping to conclusions along with everyone else, but I try to take a step back and just relax. I'm used to my specc being revamped - balance has been mechanically overhauled every expansion since patch 1.12. The changes to talents in mists and removal of the use of a lot of my spells was dramatic. However, the ability pruning and some other coming warlords changes will be the biggest change I've dealt with in all these years so far. It's hard not to think about it, and it's hard not to be upset about it. I'm also not saying the disapproval and skepticism is not okay - it's just that we won't really know how things are going to go down until we experience it.

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.