Posts with tag reroll

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

A lot of players took a few swings to get their characters right. You might find that that first mage you rolled doesn't really synch with your desire to stab an Ogre with that sword. That Human might have been a bit bland for a game where you could be a goat with face tentacles from space, or a walking slab of USDA-approved beef. I know several people who started playing at the bequest of their friends, made a character, leveled it for a while, only to get the message: "I'm sorry, but your friends are on another server!" It can be a bit jarring, especially if you've leveled into the 40s or 50s when a sizable time investment has been made, but perhaps not enough to justify paying for a server or faction transfer. Mistaken class choices can only be rerolled.

I lucked out. My friend who got me into WoW told me exactly which server and faction to start on before I downloaded the trial account. I picked a Human paladin because I loved paladins in Diablo 2 and started on my voyage. The ability to tank fed into my natural tendency to melee things, and sword and shield has always been my favorite aesthetic weapon choice. Others in my guild were less fortunate. Our mage, who played a paladin in beta, rolled a paladin on live servers, only to find that it was completely different than the class he fell in love with in the beta test. He traipsed through a rogue, priest, and hunter before he got around to maining his mage. Our Draenei enhance shaman started out as a Blood Elf paladin who didn't make it past level 40.

How about you? Is your main your first toon?

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So I've talked recently about life as an RPer, and how we seem to interact with our characters just a bit differently. Sometimes, whether we like it or not, a certain character and their back story just grab hold and won't let go, and we find ourselves coming back again and again, just to see where the story leads.

Of course, sometimes the character goes just the opposite way, and no matter what you do, your stories fall flat and you don't feel enthusiastic about logging on. It may be because you can't stand the character's personality anymore, it may be because your normal group of friends has hit an RP rut or even taken a break for a while themselves, it may be a variety of other things. Recently, Anna of Too Many Annas wrote a pretty awesome article about how to refresh a flagging RP character using 5 Rs: Relax and Rest, Reintegrate, Refresh the Character, Retcon, and Reroll/Reskin.

What's sort of cool about this list is that you can even apply a lot of the principles to characters in general, even if you're a non-RPer. Anna's covered the RP angle pretty well, so I'll mostly focus on this other angle.

I probably should've mentioned this in my Breakfast Topic yesterday, which asked about your favorite noob moments, but my brother-in-law had a major one with his very first character. Playing a Druid, he eventually found himself in Moonglade. Not the best person with directions, he actually got lost in Nighthaven, unable to find his way out. He even tried to kill his Tauren by drowning in a Moonwell. Didn't work. In frustration, he deleted his toon and rerolled another Druid.

My cousin had a similar experience when, at Level 12, we pointed out that his horns were white while the rest of his Tauren was black. He immediately logged off, and met up with us an hour later with an all-black Tauren with the same name. Speaking of names, my wife leveled a Priest but decided at some point that she didn't like the name and rerolled. These were the days before paid character customization, of course.

I suppose we all have different reasons to reroll. Before the days of PvE-to-PvP transfers, a bunch of us decided to start from scratch and reroll on a PvP server because we couldn't progress on our original one. As painful as that was at the time (we all had a couple of Level 60 toons already), it turned out to be a great decision as we ended up being able to experience the endgame. Have you ever felt the need to reroll, or start from scratch? Not quite the same as leveling an alt, but to start fresh entirely. With paid server transfers and character customization, I'm certain the need is less urgent, but for those of you who started anew, what were your reasons?

Arrowd of the US Cairne server has a question: How do you keep leveling without getting bored, abandoning a character, or rerolling? She says that she's had around 14 characters, and she's never managed to stick with one past about level 45. She always gets bored, and she wonders if there is a way to avoid it.

Now as I've mentioned before, I've leveled a lot of characters myself, and have a few 70s, but even I can sometimes get a little bit tired of the grind, and sometimes even I need to make up goals to keep myself focused. Sometimes I even need it for my level 70s if I'm running low on gold or raiding supplies. In that way, I can definitely feel where she's coming from, but I do (usually) manage to keep myself motivated.

Sometimes, for me, the Motivation is pretty simple. For example, on that Shaman I'm leveling, what keeps me going is the prospect of getting some sweet Dual Wield action going. I'm actually having a lot of fun with her, so I don't need to focus on it too hard, but the idea of imagining her with 2 axes enchanted with Windfury is a mental picture that is too awesome to put into words. I mean, we're talking cover of a Dragonforce album awesome.

So now I turn the question over to the rest of you. Whether it be leveling on a lowbie or grinding on a 70, how do you keep yourself motivation when the going gets tough and you get tired out? Is it the promise of a new skill? A new piece of gear? What keeps you charged up and logged in?

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

I sometimes envy those two-headed ogres. Imagine if you could fill out your tax forms and play Warcraft at the same time. Hmm, has anyone actually done that? This week's e-mail comes from a pair of players who want to start a guild as co-leaders. Can a guild survive with two GL's running the show?

I have a question or two I'd like to ask you, oh great guild master guru. My friends (RL) are all going to reroll on another server because most of them are new, while I have two 70's already. My friends count a total of around 6, maybe a 7th if he decides to join us on retail instead of private servers. We will start a guild of course and one of my friends (who has a 70 already) and I will be the guild masters. I will be the raid leader and such and he will be the PvP leader. We came to this agreement mutually and have decided that we will be each other's counsel. A small system of checks and balances, if you will. Our main reason for choosing ourselves is because of our extensive experience and we get along together, not to mention work like a well-oiled machine in almost all situations. While this will be our first time actually leading the guild, we have both been officers in several different types of guilds and we have sort of an inkling as to what we need to do.

My question is: Is this bipartisan (excuse the loose word usage) leadership a good idea? And could you give us some tips on starting/leading a guild? Just the vital things! :D

While I'm referencing threads on the European forums, this situation is no less common on US realms. Some players out in the World of Warcraft are simply chronic rerollers. They love the environment of a new realm -- a fresh economy, plenty of other people to level up with, and that thrilling race to level 70. And since Blizzard hasn't released any new realms (for players on US or EU realms) since the release of The Burning Crusade in January, players of this sort are really getting a bit antsy.

Blizzard, for its part, is holding to its stance that they'll release new realms when overall population requires it -- but until then, the best you're going to get is low population recommended realms. Vaneras thoroughly explains the situation for us: the fact that people enjoy playing on brand new realms just isn't a compelling reason for Blizzard to create new realms when existing realms have plenty of room to grow.

But what's the solution? Vaneras tell us that merging existing low-population servers in order to be able to open new realms isn't going to happen. (And I can understand why -- merging realms and then rolling out new realms is a lot of work by Blizzard's tech team, and essentially serves no purpose.) Vaneras suggests that you could get yourself organized and ready for new guilds on new realms, but that's probably little comfort. Some posters suggest a rerollers' realm of sorts -- a realm that resets every few months to offer players wanting an authentic rerolling experience a chance to race to 70 on a regular basis, without the need for any new realms. But what do you think? Do we need new realms? Is the fun of playing on a new realm enough of a reason for Blizzard to regularly deploy them -- even if they'll wind up ghost towns down the road, when players abandon them for other fresh realms?

Reading through the forums I have seen several posts about people wanting to reroll characters, and this confuses me. I am an altaholic myself, and I spend my time spread between 9 characters, the 10^th being our guild bank alt. I might even say I have more alts than that, considering the two I created for It came from the Blog. What this means is that when I log in, I choose a character to play based on how I am feeling at the time. Sometimes I feel priestly, sometimes I feel the need to rage against the world.

But back to the concept of rerolling. Rerolling a character, as I understand it, entails completely deleting the character you have been working with in order to start anew. I have had friends that did this, one in particular that deleted his hunter in favor of a priest, only to regret the decision later. I asked him why he didn't just leave the character since you have 10 slots to work with. The only reply I got was a /shrug.

Some people call them "nerfs." Some people call them "balance." (And usually this is exactly proportional to how the change impacts your own class.) But however you want to phrase it, gameplay in World of Warcraft changes -- and it doesn't always change for to the benefit of your playstyle. So how do you keep yourself playing when you seem to have hit the bottom of the nerfing/balancing cycle? Reroll? Play alts? Explore areas you've ignored in the past? Tell us, why do you keep playing?