Leveling Alts, Grinding Rep & Keeping the Game "Fresh"

As I have previously mentioned, I have played World of Warcraft since release. How, you may ask, do I keep from getting tired of the game? WoW remains a sort of social network for me even when I don't feel like playing, but I am also constantly seeking various ways to keep from getting burned out on it all. While finding reasons to keep me playing WoW is somewhat of a counter-productive activity (if anything I should be looking for reasons to quit and get a hobby that doesn't involve extended hours on my posterior), I continue to do so through many outlets.

The most obvious, of course, is alt-itis. If you've never heard of this syndrome, it simply describes the need to level many, many alternate characters. I currently have 3 level 70s and 2 other characters that will be 70 soon. I am plagued by the issue of no longer having any character slots, because I need at least one bank mule on horde and one bank mule on alliance. On the other hand, I have two characters that I will probably end up deleting, but haven't, because I want to keep their names. There's also the possibility that I'll move my horde to a completely different server, but I'll talk about that some other day. While alt-itis is sometimes described as having so many alts at various levels that you don't have a main or don't get any toons to level 70, I'm not really in that situation. I just keep leveling more characters up as far as I can go and then I decide if I want to keep playing the class at end game, etc. A lot of times if I am not digging a class by level 30, I will delete it. I've deleted and re-made a warlock at least 5 times. I actually made a priest once and deleted it at the record low of level 8. I would really like a healer priest toon but I can't imagine going through leveling it unless I did it entirely with someone else dpsing. No smite spam for me, thanks.

Since the leveling pace in Azeroth has been improved it is much more feasible to level a character to 60, and also to grind reputation from Azerothian factions. Note, however, that unless you make a concious effort to get exalted with a faction (doing as many of their quests as you can and turning in cloth, etc) you still won't get it by default except with your race's faction. I learned this the hard way and am now stuck with an ugly Elekk on my draenei mage unless I choose to waste runecloth, go back and do noob quests or pvp for some other mount that everyone else is using too. The problem is that once you get to around the 30s level, many questgivers will not be part of the main alliance factions but of a neutral one or have no faction at all. You'll be doing a lot of quests for the Steamwheedle Cartel in places like Stranglethorn Vale, Tanaris, Un'goro Crater and now Dustwallow Marsh. At that point you have to look around carefully to pick out quests for a specific alliance faction. Especially with the leveling boost, before you know it you'll be in Outland and still only halfway to exalted with one other alliance faction. The only way to remedy that is to go back to Azeroth and turn in cloth or do old quests. And who wants to do that?

On that note, a widely-known and hated time killer is the grinding of reptuation with the many various factions in WoW. Burning Crusade released dozens of new factions for us to grind ourselves into zombies attaining reputation for and many of those factions you can grind without the aid of friends. A perfect thing to do while waiting for friends to log on! The good news is that daily quests have made reputation grinds a little more tolerable, as you don't feel like you're at the beginning of a road that never seems to end when you have a set of goals every single day. Of course, after a few days you will start to loathe some of these quests and maybe even decide to only do certain ones, but the bottom line is you're still getting some rep and it isn't all from farming 10 million Encrypted Twilight Texts (Memorieeees!). Also, for rep grinds based on non-BOP drops, you have the option of picking whatever toon you have is the least boring to farm with. I find that farming with my hunter is a big time saver so I used her to farm up a Captured Firefly in Zangarmarsh with success. She was also questing in Zangarmarsh at the time, so it was a good way to get exp. (It doesn't hurt that a stack of those Fractured Carapaces sells pretty well to the vendors, too.) Anyway, if you hate rep grinds, Blizzard adds more and more of them to the game all of the time, but you can get reputation through so many activities, it isn't quite as bad to gain as it once was. Personally, I enjoy questing a lot, so I think daily quests were one of the best additions to the game. Additionally, you make a lot of money doing these quests; not just from the rewards but from drops you get along the way. It's easier to make money now. I used to feel reliant on playing the Auction House to make gold and now you never have to go there if you don't want to. Just do your dailies as much as you can and eventually you'll have the money you need for your mount or Blade of Wizardry or whatever it is you need. Epic flying mount? Worth every penny spent. Time is money and it pays for itself. If you have a 70 without epic flying then you may as well work on getting it. You can thank me later!

I am a person who is very into variety. Trying new and different things makes me happy. I feel accomplished when I complete something of this nature, so I am always struggling to keep WoW from becoming repetitive. It's particularly difficult on my main because she is exalted with pretty much every faction she wants to be exalted with, has epic flying and great gear (that is at this point very difficult to upgrade because of guild progression and general lack of DKP in comparison to other people who share the same T5+ armor parts), and I basically only raid with her lately or log on to do something helpful for friends. The good news is I have plenty of time to level alts and try out different classes to see how I like them. Now, if only I could fix the problem of running out of character slots!

Welcome to Warcrack Blog

Hello, World!

I've decided that since I am hopelessly addicted to the World of Warcraft, and love to talk about it, that I'd whip up a blog where I can go on and on about my goings-on in WoW and not have people grow tired of it. :)

As an intro, my main is Riven, a level 70 Night Elf Druid on Silver Hand. I've played Riven since public beta and day one of launch so I've spent most of my time playing a druid. I leveled as a really horrible balance spec (back when Hurricane was our leet 31 pt talent!) and then switched to resto. I played and raided as restoration for about a year and went feral later on. Since I went full feral, I have never switched back to restoration or balance (but sometimes I get an itch to try out tree form.) Back when I healed full-time, life was all about Healing Touch rank 4 and piling on the +heal gear. Now it is.. quite different, and everything is about HoTs. I think the change they made to restoration was for the better and it makes druids both unique and powerful healers.

Ah, if only I had two druids. Alas, my greatest passion is the bane of many players' existance; cat form! I realize fully that many people hate those pesky cat form druids that jump around and try to dps or beat you up in battlegrounds when they should be healing you or baking you pie. While cat form doesn't have the same utility of other core melee dps classes, that doesn't mean we can't become as powerful with a lot of hard work and dedication. And for me, that's what playing a cat form druid is all about. I try to break the mold and be the best I can be at pve damage dealing, but I realize that's only a 3rd (or less) of the druid class and I do what I can to not let my other abilities get rusty. I'm required to do more offtanking than anything else when it comes to 25 man raids, and in PVP you can bet I spend time in every form using every ability I've got with perhaps the exception of Soothe Animal and Teleport: Moonglade. I do not particularly enjoy tanking but it is just something that is necessary to progress in the game as there really are not many people specced for tanking these days. (As least, that is how it seems!) Everyone wants to dps, and can you blame them? DPS is far more fun than tanking to me and I think healing probably comes in second.

Riven's guild history is fairly compact. My first guild was The Order of Fenrir, which I created for me and some friends. After that was Afterlight and then The Valiant; both of which were guilds I raided in. As I write this entry we are currently working on our Mt. Hyjal and Black Temple attunement and beating our heads against a brick wall trying to beat Kael'thas. (Edit: Kael died about a week after I wrote this post or something. Woot.) I can't wait to look back on this entry after we've killed the guy and moved on. I don't remember a fight so frustrating to learn since.. ever. Well, maybe Nefarion, back in the day. :)

While I aimed to make a primarily druid-centric blog, since I have so many alts I enjoy playing I figure I should just say it is a general WoW blog for now as I would like to post about other classes as well.

Some of my alts (all on Silver Hand) are:

Asteri - 68 Draenei Mage (Fire) (Edit: Now level 70 and rockin'!)
Asutra - 70 Troll Rogue (Assasination)
Minwaela - 68 Night Elf Hunter (Beast Mastery)
Terafiti - 70 Tauren Shaman (Enhancement)

.. and a little clump of lower leveled toons here and there.

So I'll be talking about my alts and their specs and professions and such in the future. The more stuff I cover the more interesting this little blog venture will be, so stay tuned!