Alt appreciation

I am an altoholic. I have at least tried to play all classes and aside from tanking, have played nearly all of the available specs. I love my alts, and my play schedule for a given day often depends on scrolling through character screens and choosing whoever appeals to me at the moment.

Laeleiweyn of World of Lae has begun an alt appreciation project, with prompts to wax lyrical upon a particular class each week. This sounds like my kind of thing!

This week's class is the Death Knight. I have one, Nachtmystium.

I started Nacht as soon as I had another character at level 55, so very soon after I began playing. I had heard that DKs were super overpowered and I wanted to see what that was like (I was playing a rogue at the time). Needless to say, Nacht wasn't OP in my hands. She died a lot in Hellfire Peninsula, and after being repeatedly slaughtered by naga in Zangarmarsh, I gave up.

At the end of Cata, I decided to try the DK again. Armed with some actual knowledge of how to play the DK from various web resources, I race changed Nacht from worgen to tauren for a fresh start and began anew.

Oh my, so much fun! Armed with heirlooms and a frost spec that I semi-understood, I began by killing everything in Nagrand. She did damage! She wore plate! She had good self-heals! A couple of levels down I knew I was going to make it to level 85 this time.

Right before Mists of Pandaria, Nacht made it to level 85 and even ran a few heroic dungeons. At this point I was seriously considering taking her into Pandaria first and making her my main toon.

Eventually though I went with my enhancement shaman, who is still my main today. I didn't get back to Nacht until a few months ago, right after the 33% nerf to Pandaria leveling XP. She made it through the leveling content pretty effortlessly and did very well in heroic dungeons. She's up to ToES LFR now but I've kind of burnt out on playing her again. Maybe it's because I can't seem to upgrade her 450 ilvl weapon, but her deeps in LFR are pretty pathetic. It could also be because I just can't seem to get the hang of the rune system; I just mash buttons and generally feel like I'm flailing away. Of all of the classes, this feeling of not understanding the basic mechanics is the worst with my death knight.

What do I like about death knights? I like the lore, the unique skin and hair colors, the concept of being a face-smashing necromancer, and the survivability while leveling (once I actually figured out a rotation). What do I not like? The incomprehensible (to me) rune system and the apparent loss of self-healing efficacy at level 90 (does Death Siphon not work at all at max level? Or am I doing it wrong?).

I still run Nacht through LFR now and then, but then quickly return to another toon. As much as I like her as a tauren, I may try race changing her. Sometimes that's what I need to rekindle my interest in a class.

As summer draws to a close...

Chibi Maker!

...I finally feel the motivation to start posting again! My ridiculous altoholism has abated somewhat as I've realized that 1) I really want to complete this expansion's content at least once while it's current and 2) that's really only doable on one toon. So while I'm still playing many alts, I've become a bit more focused in the past few weeks.

That one toon has been Wapsi, the defected-to-the-Alliance enhancement shaman. I have to say, as much as I liked her tauren form, dranei sure do look snazzy in their gear. I've finally gotten into running the ToT LFR regularly, and Wapsi is missing only the chest piece from the tier set, which I think looks fantastic. I love the Shado-Pan Assault eyeball belt too!

So where to start... basically, I really want to get the legendary cape on one toon, and since Wapsi had progressed the farthest in the legendary questline, I went with her. The first thing she needed to do was win a couple of PVP battles. No problem, right? Uh, no. Apparently Silvershard Mines is awfully hard for Alliance to win. But after 24 battles spread across 4 or 5 days, she finally got her win. While in the PVP mindset, I started doing the PVP quests for the Kirin Tor Offensive. Let me say right off the bat that the main reason for this is so she can use her honor points to buy PVP fist weapons from past seasons. The second reason is that these quests are so much quicker and easier to do than the PVE ones. I don't really care for the Isle of Thunder, and being able to grab quests, complete them all in one place, and turn them in in a half hour was the only way I could grind Kirin Tor Offensive rep and get my dinosaur.

And this is now my favorite mount aside from...

The Shado-Pan tigers...

Or the Golden Lotus cranes..

Or the August Celestials thundering cloud serpent....you get the point. While waiting for all of those LFR queues so she can collect Secrets of the Empire for Wrathion, she has been farming her way to exalted with all of the original Pandaria factions. She's exalted with the Klaaxi too, but is still saving money for the scorpion mount, in part by farming up ore and transmuting it to living steel which she can sell on the auction house for as much as 600 gold each.

I've been trying to get all of Wapsi's business (LFR, farming, auction house) done by Friday of each week. Then I'm free to play alts, most of whom have had the ulterior motive of working on Loremaster while they level.

Gallore has also defected to the Alliance, and I was pretty motivated to get her to 90 so she could collect some Pandaria pets. She doesn't have any rares yet, but I've wanted a Klaaxi scorpion since I first saw one so I'm pretty happy. In the process of leveling, Gallore finished the quests in Kun-Lai summit as my final zone for Pandaria Loremaster. I found finishing Kun-Lai to be as painful as some of the Outland zones or Vash'jir. Sooo very loooong, I was very happy to finish and know that I would never have to do all of those quests again.

Speaking of Outlands and painful questing, Petrusian finished Terrokkar Forest and is now off to Northrend. That was an awful zone full of quests sending Petrus all over the place and back, but not quite as bad as...

...Nagrand! I dusted off Goetia, my first level 90 toon, as she had made the most progress here of all of my toons. I also had leveled her to 87 in Pandaria and didn't like dying constantly, so it seemed it would be more pleasant to just queue her up for dungeons while she finished up questing in low level zones. First things first though, since I am on a faction mount kick, she spent a couple of days finishing her Sha'tari Skyguard rep so she could get all of the nether ray mounts- I have wanted these since I first began playing, they are in my opinion some of the coolest mounts in the game!

She also had a little transporter accident and, uh, she's now a blood elf. And I had to change her name to Goesha because I moved her to another server. Somehow though it seems more appropriate for a sneaky backstabbing rogue to be a snooty blonde girl.

So that's about it for my summer in WoW- I've logged onto other characters here and there for an LFR or a bit of transmoggery, but that's it. So some random pictures of those below, who knows, but next week I might be playing one of them again!