I'll take them myself, Cover me!

Yeah OK the title has nothing to do with the following post... but I couldn't think of a title because I decided to try something new and wrote a post while at work. I had the post all set up but was missing the title... my daughter was watching Star Wars and Darth Vadar was in the fighter and had just said "I'll take them myself, Cover me!" so that is the title.

I was reading a post over at AA talking about why it is that Zan is into alts, I have to say that it mirrors my own reasons pretty closely. Zan mentioned and I’ve talked about before, the fact that playing multiple classes helps you as a leader. You know what kind of gear people need, what rotations they should be using or what unique abilities can help during a fight. For instance during Onyxia I taught one of our hunters to use Chimera shot to disarm the big adds. She didn’t even know that chimera shot could be used as a disarm!

The other thing Zan talked about was solo play when it comes to alts. Growing up I learned to entertain myself as a child… no get your head out of the gutter that’s not what I meant! I mean playing with… ok that doesn’t work either.

The point is growing up we had one computer. This meant single player games were all I grew up on. We also didn’t get games regularly which meant I had to find ways to replay games to make them entertaining. I’ve played the original half life from start to finish probably 30 times growing up and warcraft 2 was the same way not to mention starcraft.

I never had a strong enough internet connection to do much of anything online with any game. In fact it wasn’t until after I was married that I played my first MMO… Runescape. My brother got me into playing this game and as much as I made fun of him for it at the start… I really got into the game. I only really played one character in Runescape, but that was because I didn’t need to play anything else. There were no varying classes so I can learn everything… and I did exactly that. I was nearly 100 when I quit playing with many of the skills in the 90’s.

Even though Runescape was an MMO I played it nearly entirely solo. I played runescape for 2 years I think before starting to play Guild Wars. Guild Wars was cool because you could combine classes… but each class was still unique that I ended up buying extra slots so that I had one of all the 10 classes the game had to offer. I found during this process that I couldn’t focus on a single character because there was no real need to. You could complete the entire game without ever having to group with another human yet all of the content was group based.

I didn’t like how Guild Wars was instance based and really missed the open world environment of Runescape… but the graphical difference made it impossible to play any browser based game again. I also hated the fact that you couldn’t jump in either game…

My best friend got me into playing WoW and I rolled a druid… the class that could do everything. I discovered a community that didn’t exist in the other games and once I joined a raiding guild was hooked. Life at 70 though outside of raiding was pretty boring (wasn’t even daily quests at that point). The issue was that I had soloed my way mostly to 70 and now everything that was remotely challenging required groups. So when I felt like getting out on my own I turned to leveling up alts. Having an unguilded alt was a great way to escape from drama and just feel free of the burdens of the endgame.

I love soloing or at least attempting to solo group quests. Always have. It’s a challenge and you have to adapt and use abilities that you normally wouldn’t in order to survive. Can I solo this elite that I killed on my hunter solo on my priest? Ouch guess not! How bout on a mage?

I do the same thing even at 80 with various elites around icecrown. What is the hardest thing I can kill with the different classes? Pretty much all of them can kill the big monstrosity guy but so far only my paladin has been able to solo the riders.

Anyway enough rambling for now cya!

What's with the name?

When I first started playing WoW I rolled a druid named Artorin and leveled him to 70 (I started after BC came out). Artorin leveled as Feral and I started my raiding career as a Bear tank. The guild that I was in had just started raiding in Kara around the time I hit 70 and by the time I was geared up enough to off tank they had downed curator for the first time.

This was around August or September I believe and the guild that I was in was a small guild at the time. So we alternated players letting the lesser geared players clear the first half, while the better geared cleared the second half the next day. This worked well till we had enough players to have 2 10 mans. This of course led directly into trying to get enough members for 25 mans. I was part of our guilds first High King and Gruul guild but within a few weeks after that the Guild Leaders (husband and wife) got frustrated with the slow progress and decided to flat out quit the game.

In the wake of my first guild splitting apart I decided that I would try other things then just tanking. So I tried healing a bit. First as a feral spec with healing gear to eventually going full tree. I then became fascinated with being a balance druid and set off on the painful task of gathering spell damage gear since during this time spell damage and healing were entirely different stats. So for the next few months I switched back and forth between different specs whenever it struck my fancy and really enjoyed the variety that playing a hybrid gave me.

My search for knowledge led me to Blogs such as thebigbearbutt.com, graymatterwow.blogspot.com/, and Resto4life who has since given up blogging.

My main was undoubtledly Artorin during all of BC and it was simple to post on blogs going by my Druid's name. But then WotLK came out. I decided that I didn't want to level my druid first so choosing between my other 70's at the time (priest, paladin, hunter), I went with my hunter to level first to 80. Posting on Big Red Kitty and other sites left me questioning what name should I be using? After all Artorin is a druid and I was mainly playing a hunter at the time... but was the hunter my main?

To complicate things further I leveled my priest up shortly after and almost completely stopped playing my hunter. Then my shaman hit 80.... and then my paladin... each time my interest in the one before faded a little. So who am I? What class do I play? What is my main? All these questions drove me to creating this blog as a sanity check and a single identity. Though I play many classes I play them all as a unit. Not one being greater then the next or having alts for the sole purpose of grinding materials.

With my ADD (attention defecit disorder)being what it is I play the class I find interesting at the time. I LOVE maximizing every toons potential and playing to the best of my abilities. My abilities and love though can't be contained in a single class... so I must play them all.