WoW Journal - 25-April-2005

After some server troubles caused by excessive PvP on Friday, the servers were holding up reasonably well over the weekend, with just the occasional lag spike. So on Sunday evening I downloaded and installed CensusPlus, the utility I had previously used when I still had Cosmos installed to count how many players are online. Sunday evening at 9 pm there were 616 Horde players online, of which 69 (11%) were level 60. At the same time on the Alliance side there were 1308 players online, of which 89 (6%) were level 60. So the numbers have gone up by about 25% since my last census, but the same trends still apply: Alliance outnumbers Horde 2:1, but Horde has the higher percentage of high-level players. Or in other words, the hardcore players are more or less evenly distributed over the sides, while the casual players prefer Alliance.

Raslebol is still level 52. I did a guild group to Uldaman with him on Sunday, but as the first half of that instance was grey to him, he didn't gain all that many xp. But it was fun, and the second half was hard enough, me being the highest level in the group. We got wiped out three times, but fortunately we had a shaman with self-resurrect with us, and only needed to run to our corpses once, when the self-rez was still on cooldown. The final fight of Uldaman is always interesting, you wake up a gigantic stone statue, which you have to fight. And the stone giant awakens other, smaller statues. Then you have to decide whether you fight the small ones, or whether you concentrate on the giant. Last time I did it, we had two high-level rogues, and taking out the giant quickly was the better tactics. This time we had two warriors and three healers, shaman, druid, and priest, in which case you need to go for the slower variant, and kill the small statues first. We learned that by trial and error, that was one of the wipeouts. :)

At level 52, and in view of the speed that I'm still leveling, I'm slowly asking myself the question of what to do when I reach level 60. Well, this weekend showed that I didn't like raids, so the classical level 60 career as repeated raider doesn't appeal to me. Which leaves starting a new character as the alternative. I already have a level 11 undead warlock alt, which was foreseen for that role. But recently I have run repeatedly into situations where a guild group wasn't forming, because we couldn't find a healer. And nobody ever said "We can't start this group, we don't have a warlock." Plus, I'm not really a big fan of combat pets, and the soulstone management with the warlock seems to be a pain.

So I decided that my next major character would be a healer. Druid is out, because I already played one to level 41 on the US servers, and rather try something new. Shaman would be a possibility, but after talking with guild mates it seems that shamans are weak healers, but good melee fighters. Which leaves the healer class that the least people play, but the most people would like to have in their group, the priest. Few people play it, because the priest has only cloth armor, and not the best damage spells, which makes him hard to solo. But I was told that if I put all talent points into Shadow, the priest becomes soloable enough. And as that will be the second character, he will be twinked to the max, which should further increase his soloability.

Thus was born Kyroc, the undead priest, and I leveled him to level 8. The idea is to bring him up to the low teens, because of the rest bonus. Having 1.5 levels rest bonus on a level 1 character is not really all that great, below 10 the levels just fly by anyway. Better to level fast until the pace slows down a bit, and then have the rest bonus at those levels. Kyroc is going to be tailor / enchanter in his crafting career. Again a choice which is made easier by him being the second character. I did a short trip, half an hour, through Ragefire Chasm with Raslebol, ignoring the worms and elementals, and just killing the humanoids. That netted me 159 linen cloth and several green items to disenchant for Kyroc, as well as some stuff to twink him with.

I hope this works out well, I'm still a bit sceptic about the priest class. I'm used to play pure tanks, pure healers, and tank/healer hybrids. The WoW priest could theoretically be specced as pure healer, but then he would be a pain to solo. So he will be a shadow priest, with the option of respeccing at higher level for guild groups. But that means he is a healer / damage dealer hybrid, and I need to get used to that. Totally different tactics than my warrior. Which is good, the idea is to play something new. And as undead I'll level him in zones where I haven't done quests before, like Silverpine Forest. Who said the game would be over at 60?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link