Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Sometimes you just need a WoW break, whether it's a day, a week, a month, or even longer. And though stepping away from your gaming friends can be tough, coming back can be even tougher. Have you missed a patch? Several patches? An entire expansion? The game world around you may have changed, your class may have changed, your friends may have advanced past you, your guild may have disbanded. You may find yourself starting anew, and while sometimes that's just what you need to keep the game fresh, sometimes it's just a hassle you don't want. (Trust me, I'm speaking from experience as someone who took a couple of years off.)

So tell us, have you ever taken a WoW vacation? For how long? And how did you deal with getting back into the game when you returned?

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The people you play with make up the heart and soul of your World of Warcraft experience. They'll make the game a delight you keep coming back to or a misery you can't escape soon enough. What this comes down to is that who you're guilded with makes or breaks your game experience. A bad guild or, worse, a good guild that's falling apart will make you rush offline to a good book or a favorite TV show rather than spending your idle time in Azeroth. Of course, it's not always straightforward to find the right guild for you -- it's all too easy to have mismatched goals or schedules that turn what may have seemed to be a great group of players into a guild nightmare.

When I'm in need of a guild, I tend to follow my friends around, which always seems like a good formula but doesn't always work out. But it's hardly the only way: all you have to do is be unguilded to get numerous (unsolicited) guild invitations and the guild recruitment forum is always brimming with new guilds LFM. So, just how do you go about picking that perfect guild?

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One of the nice things about Tolkien's expansive universe -- both the one he created and the ones expanded upon by others -- is the rich, beautiful music. Whether it's a plate-tossing tune or an orcish battle chant, the world of Tolkien is rife with music. Even Game of Thrones has more than a few ditties, even if you need to be a little creative to find them. But we don't have that some musical background in WoW.

Don't get me wrong: WoW has some fantastic theme music. Between the Arkenstone-penned backgrounds or thematic zone music, Azeroth has plenty of musical ambiance. But it doesn't have a lot of songs with lyrics, or folk tunes, or those little sing-along moments that make a world so vibrant. You have to reach for filk or machinima to get much of that. And sure, there's the Chieftans but that's not quite the same as "music of the world."

The game references music, though. It's out there. So, I ask you, dear breakfast readers, to put fingers to keyboards and try out your Azerothian muse. What's the music you would add to game? Is it just battle chants? What about something with a nice flute? What would the music of Azeroth sound like?

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Happy Father's Day! In honor of the day I have a question for you: what would your father play in WoW? A rogue? A hunter? What race would he choose, and which spec would he favor? Some of you may recall I asked a similar question last month on Mother's Day, so now it's time for us to give our dads the same treatment.

I myself have always thought my father would roll as a blood elf frost mage. The mage because he was a bit of a trickster and I imagine he'd get a kick out of spells like Blink and Polymorph. An elf because he always enjoyed the wise and collected demeanor of the elves in Lord of the Rings. And frost because he'd prefer PvP over PvE, and frost offers so much control and utility for that.

As for my step father ... I've never so much as seen him touch a video game beyond Solitaire, so maybe he'd just play Hearthstone. Who knows?

What about your fathers?

Home is where you hang your hat -– so when you're not raiding or PvPing or whatever your thing is and you've hung said hat on a hook, where might said hook be located? Do you head to a utilitarian hub like Stormwind to breeze through your in-game business, or have you chosen a spot farther off the beaten path to while away the moments between queues or before raid time?

For many players, home base is less about an in-game hangout than it is the place where they indulge in their secondary interest. When these players aren't actively grouped, they're playing the auction house, casually leveling archaeology, or working their way through dailies or another goal. Home is where the personal activity is.

Other players kick back in a spot that's become more like a traditional home for their characters. Instead of filling every last minute with activity, they'll cool their heels in Stormwind while they chat in general or trade chat. Or they'll make their home in another city, puttering about and making small talk in guild chat while they wait for their queue to pop.

Are you an efficient exemplar of perpetual motion every moment you're in Azeroth, or is there a place your character heads to hang out? Where's your off-duty hangout?

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If you've been playing World of Warcraft since it launched in 2004, that's eight years of subscription fees, expansion pack purchases, and character transfers -- not to mention the cost of tshirts, vanity pets, BlizzCon tickets, and any other swag you might have picked up along the way. And while we don't pay much a month, it definitely adds up -- ka-king! -- to the tune of $179.88 a year if you pay month to month. And, while I definitely think I've gotten my money's worth, the amount I've spent on WoW over the years adds up to a frankly embarrassing sum.

And instead of sharing that figure with you, I'm going to segue into today's Breakfast Topic: just how much have you spent on WoW since you started playing? And, in the end, has it been worth it?

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There are lots of things I wonder about the World of Warcraft. Like why can't I be a gnome druid? (Come on, with a kitten form and a bear cub form everyone would be playing one.) Why can't I be a gnome hunter? (Who could ride tamed pets.) Why can't I be a gnome paladin? (Gnomes can already be warriors and priests, so why not combine them?) How can gnomes and goblins jump so high? (This one I don't mind so much, because it's hilarious to see gnomes jumping their own height.) If you're seeing a theme here, well, okay, let's try some questions that are in no way related to gnomes: why can't I fly on Quel'Danas? (Answer: why are you on Quel'Danas?) Why are tamed devilsaurs so much smaller than actual devilsaurs? (Hunter trickery!)

Okay, I admit, there may be practical gameplay reasons for all of these things -- but, come on, Blizzard, can't you see the beauty of gnome druids? At any rate, dear readers, whether you're gnome obsessed or not, you surely have your own strange, unanswered WoW questions: so share them! Do you think your unanswered gameplay questions will ever become gameplay fact?

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We mentioned them last night while covering the surprises of patch 5.4, so now I roll around to you this morning. Did you see virtual realms coming? Do you like or hate them? Are they a cool way to avoid forcing players to worry about name changes and server moves or are they just a half step that needs to go further?

Personally I'm really interested because with this, the day comes ever closer that I could pug any raid with any friend I have of the same faction. It's a change I never expected to see, and one I'm very interested in watching. If this eventually leads to, say, one North American virtual realm for all players, I might be okay with that.

But enough about me. This is about you. What do you think? Let us know, we're keen to hear it. Patch 5.4 definitely isn't afraid to shake up the status quo so far.

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When it comes to our avatars, some of us are better than others at handling anthropomorphism. I don't personally have anything against the non-humanoid races, but I find I don't ultimately bond with a character that looks like a bear or a cow or a wolf. These characters end up feeling like cartoon game pieces that I move around on the game world rather than "my girls," even if "my girl" is undead or has gigantic tusks or a tail. Unbridled fantasy elements? I'm totally down with that. But big, furry critters feel like caricatures that I just can't take seriously -- and if I'm not taking my character seriously, I'm not taking the rest of the game seriously, either.

Are you comfortable reaching outside the humanoid comfort zone by playing goat-people and walking cows? Or do you need a character that's plausibly humanoid?

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Plugging into a level 25 guild after a period of solo leveling is like being loaded into a slingshot and catapulted into a candy shop of delight. More XP! More rep! More speed! More travel! Suddenly, basic game business turns EZ mode. Who wouldn't want that? Last year saw adjustments to guild leveling that made it easier to push a guild up to level 25. The changes helped boost many guilds up to the level cap, allowing their members to reap the benefits of guild membership.

The question is ... now what? Should there be something more to enjoying guild benefits once you've reached the top? Once members have helped the guild reach the level cap and pushed their individual guild reputation to exalted to earn the available rewards, is there enough incentive to keep contributing? Should there be additional benefits for consistently active players? What might those rewards look like?

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Reader Morncreek just recently informed me in the comments of the results of last week's Community Blog Topic that heirlooms were cross-faction as long as the characters are on the same server. Mind blown. This may be common knowledge, but I had absolutely no clue. You can't send cash or even just text, but you can send any Bind on Account item. In my defense, all of my Alliance characters are on different servers from my Horde characters, but still.

In another case of embarrassing ignorance, it took a couple of years for me to discover that you could eat food and drink drinks at the same time. Though I've played since open beta, it wasn't until the tooltip started showing up on loading screens that I found that out. Yay tooltips!

What about you? Did you know about BoA items being cross-faction, but not cross-server? Is there anything in WoW that you've discovered over your playtime that made you facepalm? Fess up!

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Surprise! I'm not into battling pets -– and I don't really understand why not. When vanity pets first started picking up steam in WoW, I scoffed at them. Eventually, though, I encountered the One Pet, the Captured Firefly, that captured my heart. That prompted me to begin collecting, but I never made it to the highest achievement rung at the time before I realized that as long as I had my little firefly friend out and about, I was quite content. Still, I always assumed I'd enjoy capturing and caging pets, if not the actual minigame of pet battling, and I eagerly anticipated the release of pet battles.

Nope, not doing it for me. The itch to catch 'em all remains dormant. I continue on my merry way with my firefly, and I'm happy as can be. Nobody who knows me well understands why I'm not animatedly capturing and caging my way across Azeroth, but it just doesn't click for me.

Is there something you eagerly anticipated in WoW that didn't turn out to float your boat? What do you suppose made it fall short of your expectations?

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What's in a name? Only your character's identity from here onward! Without a doubt, finding the perfect name for a character is the toughest part of character creation. More than once I've created a character, carefully customized the face and looks just how I liked them, and was then stymied by the blinking cursor in the name box. (And, occasionally, I've timed out while trying to think of a perfect name that's untaken after my first choice wasn't available, meaning I had to go back and start again with customization.)

But my trouble figuring out names just means I've all the more respect for those characters with particularly clever names -- those of you who not only managed to think up a clever name but also claim it before anyone else did. So, dish, fellow Azerothians: what's your cleverest character name?

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Picking the right professions for a character is always a bit of a puzzle, or at least it is for me. Do I want to make gold in the short term with a pair of gathering professions or do I want to craft gear for myself that will be useful as I level -- and maybe even at end game? If I pick up a profession now, who's to say it will still be what I want after I've leveled up? And do I even want the hassle of leveling up professions? And, even if I do want to go to the trouble for primary professions, what about secondary professions? Do I really want to level up fishing again?

Of course, I inevitably come to the conclusion that leveling the professions as I level up is easier than leveling them later, but my profession choice is always pretty haphazard. (Except for fishing. I have leveled fishing enough for a lifetime.) Though there are, surely, better ways to pick professions, my selection inevitably boils down to what sounds good to me at moment I hit level 5, regardless of what may be good further down the line.

But surely you, dear readers, have better sense than I. How do you go about picking the right professions for a new character?

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Looking back on the days of vanilla WoW, we had a lot of patches -- and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. Original WoW went to patch 1.12 before Burning Crusade hit the scene. Since then, we've seen fewer patches between expansions -- 4 patches during BC, 3 patches during Wrath, 3 patches during Cataclysm, and, to date, 3 patches during Mists. But with the speed at which Blizzard is rolling out new content lately, I think it's safe to say that we can expect Mists to beat the average number of patches before we get another expansion... but is that too many patches?

More frequent patches could mean we're hard-pressed to keep up with all the new shiny toys presented to us... or they could mean plenty of content to keep us busy and interested. But what do you think? Are patches coming too quickly these days? Or are they just frequent enough to keep you interested? Or are patches still arriving too slowly for your tastes?