Posts with tag Alt

A lot of us here at WoW Insider have been playing WoW for a long time -- and we suspect most of you have, too. A long enough time that parts of the game are, dare we say, boring. So while doing our dailies (again) or grinding an alt through a zone we've done half a dozen times before we admit, we're usually multitasking. Sometimes we'll have a movie or television show on, and others we might be reading email or catching up on RSS feeds in another window. It's not that we don't still love the game -- it's just how we stay sane while leveling our dozenth alt.

So, fellow WoW players, we pose this question: what else are you doing while you play WoW? Do you have a favorite television show to put on? A much-loved playlist? Twitter or Facebook in another window?

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Leveling in World of Warcraft is a rite of passage that we all must go through in order to reach max level where we can play with our friends. Though for alt-a-holics -- and I'm starting to think I may be one of them -- leveling is the whole point of the game. But whether you're leveling for the first time or the hundredth, whether you're speeding through or taking time to enjoy the scenery, chances are you have your own way of going about things.

So when you're on the leveling treadmill, what's your choice? For my part, I tend to quest through zones -- especially if they're zones I haven't been through before. But if I'm stuck in zones that I've been through before, perhaps many times before, things get awfully tedious, thus ending my life potential alt-a-holism. But do you quest, dungeon, subsist on dailies and rested XP, or something else entirely? Let us know, so we may commiserate about the leveling treadmill together!

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Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

Now is the perfect time to work on that alt you've been keeping locked away, sad and lonely for so long in his little alt box. You've got time now, right? Deathwing is long dead, and things are pretty chill. I even heard there's a new island out there to explore one of these days, most hopefully in July or August, which would be pretty cool.

Ironically, when I'm leveling most of my alts from an early level, I don't enable most of my addons. What's the point? Group and raid content that requires any addons is far off in the future, the number of abilities I have at the time doesn't reflect the button matrices that I've built for level 85, and there is practically no similarity to playstyle. So I turn off my addons, save some very crucial ones.

If you're looking to go addon-light for your next alt, I've got some addons that you're going to want to keep around because they make your life a thousand times easier. WoW's UI has gotten a lot better in recent years, but it still isn't perfect. These addons bring it a little closer to that perfection.

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

With the Raid Finder coming in patch 4.3, many new players will be storming their way through the halls of Blackwing Descent, the Bastion of Twilight, and the fiery plains of Ragnaros' domain. Cataclysm raid encounters have bestowed upon players a new mechanic that will show up during some of the encounters, most notably Atramedes' sound bar, Cho'gall's corruption bar, feathers on Alysrazor, Rhyolith's turning bar, and the concentration bar on the heroic Majordomo Staghelm fight. This new interface element can function in many different ways based on the fight it is being used, but all fall under the same category: PlayerPowerBarAlt.

PlayerPowerBarAlt has been a thorn in many player's sides, especially since the default settings for this raid-centric UI element falls squarely in the wrong place -- usually underneath your action bars, unit frames, or whatever you've put right above the default action bar location. Players have been asking me since Cataclysm's launch how to move and manipulate that bar, so here's a dedicated column to just that topic.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

I'll never forget that first month after Wrath went live and the endless requests from guild members to invite their death knight alts into the guild. The second anyone rolled a DK, they wanted to bring that toon into the roster to be part of the social experience as we all explored what the new expansion had to offer. I couldn't blame them. It is painful to be cut off from your guild during such an exciting time.

As it turns out, the DK influx was only a small taste of what the Shattering has wrought. Now it's troll druids, tauren paladins, and undead hunters springing out of the woodwork, or dwarf shaman and gnome priests for Alliance guilds. Even this, however, is just the rumblings before the earthquake. In one week, a deluge of goblins and worgens will engulf our rosters.

How can we manage this alt invasion? Let's take a look!

This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

Back in the dark ages of history, in vanilla World of Warcraft, I rolled a rogue. This was before battlegrounds, when dishonorable kills were a fear and world PvP was a rush, when men were men, mages sheeped for fun and warlocks ... well, let's just say that warlocks have a reputation that they've earned.

World of Warcraft was my first MMO, after coming from persistent worlds hosted by Neverwinter Nights. I played a rogue there, too, steeped in Dungeons & Dragons rules and the like. World of Warcraft was both nothing like and exactly like my roguish experiences before -- a sneak who dealt devastating damage with small weapons, no matter whether the target was gnome or giant, fearsome orc or fiery dragon.

In the midst of a Westfall investigation (tasked by SI:7 to infiltrate a tower), I noticed a few growing complaints in guild chat: "We have seven rogues in the guild but only one priest; would someone please roll a priest?" I told them I would, sent my rogue back to the character select screen, and rolled the character that would take up the entirety of my vanilla experience.

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As a prot paladin, I've learned my place in the world (of Warcraft). True, that place is usually face-deep in the crotch of some monster, but that's beside the point. When I'm tanking, I know I'm here to do one thing and one thing only: to piss off bad guys so they'll leave you alone. Strapping on my shield and a mace keeps me in a Zen-like comfort zone where everything seems to just come naturally.

Like many others, though, I've found myself looking for more to do as Cataclysm lurches ever closer. After all, there are only so many things to get beaten by each week. This has left me joining a growing percentage of players in a less-than-exclusive club: "Hi, I'm Brian, and I'm an altoholic."

Most classes I've tried have felt fairly natural. I've leveled my DK and priest with no problems and have really been enjoying the early levels of both my mage and warlock (which, as you'd imagine, leaves me with quite an internal struggle). There's one class, however, that has managed to bewilder me at every turn. A class that, for whatever reason, seems so counterintuitive to me that It's taken me over a year and a half to hit level 27. My friends, I am -- cue dramatic music -- the worst hunter in the world.

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Here's the thing: I've been a mage from day one, when I first started playing WoW a good two years ago. I always liked being a mage in Dungeons & Dragons, so I figured I would like being a mage in WoW. I was right. In fact, I love being a glass cannon. (OK, I don't love the glass part so much, but I really dig the cannon part.) I'm not a great mage; age and fingers that were broken by judo or baseball have slowed me some. Still, I am a good mage. I hold my own, doing anywhere from 7-12k DPS depending on buffs and what I am watching on TV.

The thing is, as much as I love being a mage, making my own food and teleporting all around, I hate taking forever to queue. I also started thinking, "Hey, there must be more to simulated life than just standing back and blasting things." I decided to try a new character. Not having the patience to level a character from 1 to 80, I figured I'd go the death knight route. After all, DKs are mage-killers; they are the anti-mage. So after two years of being nothing but a ranged DPS machine, I rolled a DK.

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Everyone has at least one alt in WoW. It may be the bank alt you send all your items to while questing away from a capital city. Some of us have one of every class, or multiple alts on different realms to play with friends on a different server. Cataclysm is going to change the way we play our alts forever, though. We will have goblins named with every variation of "Gringotts" used as bank alts. People will name their worgen after Twilight characters or make names that mocks Twilight.

But the two new races aren't the only things happening come Cataclysm. We are getting new race/class combos. Roleplayers will have new characters they can roleplay or add the new class/race combo into their character's story. While Blizzard has yet to give us gnome paladins, our little friends can now be healers, which gives us the chance to take 24 of our gnome friends and knock on Deathwing's front door.

You've raided Icecrown Citadel and killed Arthas. You've got a ranked arena team. Your gear score and achievement score both push 6,000. You're officially elite. Then one day that level 15 gnome rogue you rolled two years ago on a whim starts to call your name. She's got pink pig-tails and the cutest little laugh. Before you know it your little gnome is questing in Outland. Soon you're in Northrend. All of a sudden you're running heroics, and raiding. Now your little gnome is just as leet as your old main.

Back long ago I started a druid for the sole purpose of making leather kits for my guild. At the time I didn't realize that since my main was an enchanter, I made myself redundant because leather kits overwrite enchantments -- but I must have liked my druid. As I leveled that enchanter, a mage, my druid was never far behind. Now both toons are level 80, geared, and at the top of their professions. I honestly don't know which one of them is my main and which is my alt. The only difference is, as a healer, the druid has more utility in raids and heroics.

Have you ever switched mains? What would cause you to switch? Guild needs? Personal preferences? Switching classes? With paid server and faction transfers, a lot of the old reasons for switching toons have gone by the wayside. We want to hear your main switching stories.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works.

Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that not all warriors are level 80. Quite a few of them are alts currently grinding their way through Dun Morogh or The Barrens or Silverpine or Bloodmyst Isle. So while I do plan on going forward with my fresh 80 guides for arms, fury and prot, I'm going to alternate them with an experiment I started this week, which was to level an orc warrior from scratch and see how far I get with her. (I have almost no female toons, so I figured I'd give a she-orc a try.)

Yes, that's right, I rolled another warrior. In my defense, this week I've been really sick and exhausted, so what better use of my feverish time than to quest through The Barrens again? Look, the intervention didn't work, what makes you think your looking at the screen like that will stop me? Anyway, onward to discuss levels 1-20 as a warrior.

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

With all the talk lately about starting new characters once the Cataclysm arrives, it struck me that most roleplayers already have more than one, including myself. Like most players, I started with one, a night elf druid, and focused on playing that exclusively for quite some time. It didn't really occur to me that I would even want to play more than one.

Then, I began to notice that other people played more than one character, even within the same small group of friends. I had one friend in particular who had mastered the art of roleplaying multiple characters. She never said anything out of character to anyone in our group, and it took me ages to even realize that her characters were ally played by the same person in the first place. Each one had its own personality, and each had a different relationship with all our mutual friends.

Knowing her made something click inside my mind, and I began to see other possibilities for myself too, other sorts of characters I could play with different weaknesses, strengths, and entirely different stories to tell. As my roleplaying experience grew, I began to feel as though one character couldn't contain all the ideas I had jumbling about in my head, so... I started another one, then another, and ... another. Little did I know all the pitfalls I could run into with so many characters, nor the quirky little tricks that could become possible with multiple characters, a small group of friends, and a bit of creativity.

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

As you know, the Cataclysm is going to bring major changes to the whole world of Azeroth. There will only be 5 new zones for leveling above 80 and one new zone for each new race -- the rest of the work they're doing involves changing the old zones, bringing them up to the standards of zones in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, adding new quests that are more appropriate to the current timeline, and completely rebuilding the areas that just didn't work so well.

You are also probably aware that this is a much-needed improvement. The 1 - 60 leveling process (except for the draenei or blood elf starting areas) has long been fraught with serious flaws. Going through it the first time wasn't so bad, since exploring everything felt so new, but doing it the third and fourth times meant sheer boredom. I remember many times going to a zone, completing many or all of the quests there, and leaving without ever feeling as though I had really "been" there. Except for a few real gems, quests mostly involved spending a lot of time running long distances in order to kill more nameless bad guys -- they felt more like pest control than adventure. Just being there seemed to remove me from the story of Azeroth, and dump me in some other world where there was nothing important happening. Vast stretches of land on the Azeroth map meant absolutely nothing to me as a roleplayer: no character, no story, no meaning.

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