Cry Havoc » Cataclysm

April 12th, 2011 by Romy

The first character I created in WoW was my warrior, Sunny. Normally when playing fantasy role playing games before WoW came around, I tended towards magic users of various types, but I decided to try something different. I enjoyed Sunny just fine, but after investing several hours and getting her up to level 10 or so, I decided it was time to revert to my old habits and so I created my second toon Romy, a mage.

I’m not sure if it was because I was back in familiar territory with a magic user or if it was because I was hitting the point where I more or less understood the basics of the game, but Romy quickly became my “main” character. It was weeks before I switched back to pay Sunny again.

When the Christmas after launch rolled around, I was sufficiently into the game that I had installed it on my laptop so I could play while visiting at my mom & sister’s house. I also wanted to show the game to my sister, as she had always enjoyed computer games. In fact, that year’s gift from me to her was a copy of Doom 3, which had recently hit stores.

After she ripped through Doom 3 in record time, she needed something new to play and so she picked up WoW. Romy was already almost level 40 and Sunny was around level 20, so I created a new paladin, Alfred, to use when playing together with my sister’s new toon. My sister and I played the game together often enough that before long, Alfred was my secondary toon and Sunny got stuck in third place.

Things stayed that way until all three toons had hit level 60. After that, I wasn’t sure which direction to go with Alfred. At that time, the Paladin class was much different than today. Paladin DPS was horrible, they were the least effective healing class, and they could only tank if the damage classes were VERY careful about their aggro. They were somewhat in demand but in most cases, their raiding role was to be a utility healer, group buffer, and maybe occasional off-tank. The real problem for Alfred was that there were usually plenty of main-character paladins waiting to take a raid slot.

Tanks, on the other hand, were always in demand and in those days a damage-oriented Warrior was the exception. I discovered that Sunny was often in demand to tank guild instance runs, and when other sufficient DPS classes were available, to serve as backup tank on raids. Before long she had jumped back into being my second place toon. Ok, maybe tied for second.

At least through the Burning Crusade content, I was reasonably diligent about keeping Sunny and Alfred reasonably close to Romy’s level. Romy always reached the level cap first and started raiding, but Alfred and Sunny would hit the same point reasonably soon afterwards and then would do instance runs and do whatever raid content was open to them.

When the Wrath Of The Lich King expansion came out, things were different. My long-time guild Cry Havoc had more or less started to implode, and many of the more hardcore players had left, and many others had either stopped playing altogether or had moved to the Horde side or even to other servers. When the expansion hit, there was no concerted guild-wide effort to level up and start working on the new raid content together as there had been for the Burning Crusade expansion. Those of us still playing mostly did it solo.

Romy was level 75 and I was still playing through the new content when other things going on in my life demanded my attention and I cut back on how much I was playing. For roughly 6 months or so, I played the game much, much less than I had been. I played for perhaps just a hour or two every 2 or 3 weeks instead of a few hours almost every day. Also, when I did play, I often worked at leveling some of my lower-level toons instead of working on getting Romy up to level 80.

When I started playing more regularly again, months later, Romy was still at level 75 and my main focus was hitting level 80. At that point, Sunny and Alfred were both still at level 70 and hadn’t been played for more than a few minutes since WOTLK had come out.

Almost immediately after getting Romy to level 80, I was asked to join a new guild called Overcome, by the GM, a former member of Cry Havoc. At that point, I was in catch-up mode since most players had hit 80 months earlier. As a result, it was quite awhile before I worried about any other toon besides Romy.

Eventually, I did work on Sunny and Alfred a bit, getting them to level 72 and 73, respectively, but then I more or less just concentrated on Romy and didn’t play the other toons at all.

Until a few weeks ago, that is. Romy had been at level 85 for a few months and was reasonably geared, so I decided to get Sunny and Alfred up to speed as well.

First to get some attention was Sunny, then at level 72. After getting her up to level 81 and started on Cataclysm content, I realized Sunny was a bit undergeared. She had only done a few instances since level 72 and had never done any raiding at level 80 so she was still in a mix of green and blue items, along with a few level 70 epics that still hadn’t been replaced. The obvious solution would normally be to do some dungeon grinding for better gear, but Sunny’s gear wasn’t even good enough to allow her to queue for random dungeons!

A trip to the auction house helped upgrade a few slots, but as I was contemplating how much I would have to spend to make further upgrades, I decided that I would work on Alfred for awhile. Alfred is a blacksmith and the thought was that he could make some gear that Sunny could use until she started getting some dungeon upgrades. But first i had to level him up enough to get some useful blacksmithing patterns. Like Sunny, I had not really played Alfred since the first month or two of the WOTLK era and at level 73 his blacksmithing had a ways to go.

Currently the plan is to take Alfred up to 80 or 81 and then go back to Sunny. From that point I’ll alternate between them every level or so in order to take best advantage of their “Rested” status. After that, who knows? I may work on my hunter, Starchaser, or maybe on my baby Worgen warlock Ailsandre.

Burning Crusade, Cataclysm, Romy

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