This expansion has given me simultaneously more to do with my army of characters and less reason to do any of it - but the latter isn't Blizzard's fault. It doesn't even really have anything to do with the expansion itself; it has more to do with Cataclysm, the previous expansion, but even that isn't the whole story.
I really enjoy the story of Mists. Maybe it helps that I've never seen Kung Fu Panda? There was a lot of stupid bitching about the idea of an expansion featuring the pandaren race and adding the monk class, at least, and maybe my wise decision to not see terrible animated comedy movies helped ensure that I wasn't offended by the very notion of these ideas, let alone the two of them combined.
As I said, I liked the story. The Horde and Alliance clash in a sea battle that leaves both fleets wrecked on the shores of Pandaria, no longer hidden by supernatural mists that kept it isolated for thousands of years. Over the course of subsequent major patches, the Alliance has banded together and, from my point of view, learned the right lessons from the unique mystical features of Pandaria, while the Horde has fractured at the driving point of Warchief Garrosh Hellscream's lust for power. Now he's the Big Bad both factions have besieged the capital city of the Horde to depose, because the second truth of WoW (after "Blizzard will always try to push Alliance vs. Horde") is "everyone has to be able to raid the same guys so we might as well have the factions more or less team up to do it".
(Sure, we'll have rival groups trying to outdo the other and even gunship fights to see who gets first crack at the loot piñata (oh, wait, the Gunship fight in Icecrown Citadel was the loot piñata), but ultimately no-one wants the Big Bad to win so there will always be room for a begrudging partnership of convenience.)
Enough of the general, now for the specific. I have played a human fire mage as my main character since my very first day in the game, when I was operating on D&D logic and assumed that, if I let a wolf bite me, my wizard would die immediately. He became an engineer during The Burning Crusade when Blizzard let engineers build helicopters, and that's remained immutable ever since as well.
The thing is, I'm definitely an altoholic. This is my character list on my main server right now:
Despite everything I've achieved in the game so far, there's still a fair bit to do. Sure, Ascanius is already exalted with every faction of Pandaria that offers daily quests, a master of all the different ways of cooking introduced in this expansion, possessed of all the new Engineering recipes, proud restorer of every new Pandarian archeological artifact, et cetera et cetera. But look at all those alts! Okay, there's no way I'm going to repeat the feats of my main character with each of them, but most of them have some cool stuff I can do. Catilina is a blacksmith slowly putting together the materials to make some cool-looking weapons for everyone. Fulvia is a tailor and enchanter slowly acquiring the reputation necessary to learn really useful patterns and the cloth needed for them. Mithridates is a scribe slowly collecting the new Darkmoon Faire card sets, which will eventually result in trinkets, I think?
But the key word there is slowly. Part of the problem is that the most worthwhile things to do with your profession are always balanced by the time and effort needed to acquire them, with the assumption seemingly being that people will only bother with this for their main characters. I don't disagree - I don't need to put together epic sets of gear for my alts, because I rarely even run scenarios or dungeons with them, let alone raid.
And yet . . .
I acknowledge that I'm an unusual player. Back in Wrath of the Lich King I knew that some of my friends talked their housemates or partners into levelling their characters for them, because they just couldn't stand questing. But I love it. I won't go through every zone on my alts as completely as I do on Ascanius, but every single one of those level 90s you see (and the monk) was levelled through questing, not through grinding out experience in PvP (which I don't do) or dungeons (which I rarely bother with while levelling). I enjoy the experience of playing each character, doing the same zones and the same quests in those zones but seeing how the gameplay changes when I'm on my shadow priest as opposed to my enhancement shaman, or even playing my protection paladin as compared to my blood death knight (both protection and blood being tank specialisations).
That experience is part of it . . . but another part of it is feeling like I'm accomplishing something, even if the goal is modest. I won't usually bother to run a dungeon on any of my alts, because I've done that dungeon on my main character and the only reason to go back is to earn gear; if I'm going to try to earn gear, why not put that time into my main character? However, in addition to the different experience of playing a different class (and sometimes race makes a difference; every Alliance race is represented in that list of my characters, even night elves), what they also have that distinguishes them from Ascanius is their professions. He can't be a tailor and an engineer and a blacksmith and an alchemist, not all at once; his being exalted with the August Celestials doesn't help Fulvia get the pattern for the Royal Satchel. He can't buy Catilina the blacksmithing patterns from the Klaxxi, and he certainly can't make the armour and weapons from them.
So I play my alts once they hit maximum level so that I can achieve things through their professions, which brings me back to not only the problem of everything taking forever (it takes 12 days to make the special cloth used to make that Royal Satchel) but also the disappointment that I'm only able to help myself (and occasionally my wife).
Back in Wrath of the Lich King, our guild was able to field a full 10-player raid and take down the Big Bad Lich King all by ourselves. In Cataclysm, there was an epidemic of burnout; some of my friends raced to the new level cap and then got bored waiting for the rest of us to catch up, while players like me took our time to level and enjoy the storylines and zones. I didn't even think about hopping into dungeons until I'd already fully quested through all five of the new zones of the expansion, and by the time I was halfway through running the dungeons enough to gear up for heroic dungeons too many key players had simply quit the game.
This kind of burnout is natural, doubly so because of the specific conditions - Wrath's final raid content patch was released more than a year before the next expansion debuted, and while we needed a lot of that time to get to the point where we could kill the Big Bad, there were months and months after that where we, as a guild, had almost nothing to do (excepting a brief period when we set about killing a very stupid dragon with the exact same name as our guild leader). No surprise that some of us were raring to get back into raiding as soon as possible, while others were just happy to have new zones to explore and new things to do, full stop.
I just know that if I felt like it was going to help me do more than just equip my alts with cooler-looking gear, or give myself a little more bag space on my main character, I could easily be motivated to play those alts in a more serious way. Now of course it's no surprise that I could get more out of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game if I had more people to play with, but at the same time it's not really my choice. I can't find new people to play with and leave behind the guild . . . I'm so close to being able to steal guild leadership, if my wife stays unsubscribed for long enough!
So in the end I will continue plodding away at the little things each character can do, and cross my fingers that my friends get excited by the next expansion for the game and come back some time in 2014. At least I have the Raid Finder experience; it may feel like a big, uncoordinated dungeon, but at least I might get a chance to burn the shit out of Garrosh Hellscream, that fucker.
I really enjoy the story of Mists. Maybe it helps that I've never seen Kung Fu Panda? There was a lot of stupid bitching about the idea of an expansion featuring the pandaren race and adding the monk class, at least, and maybe my wise decision to not see terrible animated comedy movies helped ensure that I wasn't offended by the very notion of these ideas, let alone the two of them combined.
As I said, I liked the story. The Horde and Alliance clash in a sea battle that leaves both fleets wrecked on the shores of Pandaria, no longer hidden by supernatural mists that kept it isolated for thousands of years. Over the course of subsequent major patches, the Alliance has banded together and, from my point of view, learned the right lessons from the unique mystical features of Pandaria, while the Horde has fractured at the driving point of Warchief Garrosh Hellscream's lust for power. Now he's the Big Bad both factions have besieged the capital city of the Horde to depose, because the second truth of WoW (after "Blizzard will always try to push Alliance vs. Horde") is "everyone has to be able to raid the same guys so we might as well have the factions more or less team up to do it".
(Sure, we'll have rival groups trying to outdo the other and even gunship fights to see who gets first crack at the loot piñata (oh, wait, the Gunship fight in Icecrown Citadel was the loot piñata), but ultimately no-one wants the Big Bad to win so there will always be room for a begrudging partnership of convenience.)
Enough of the general, now for the specific. I have played a human fire mage as my main character since my very first day in the game, when I was operating on D&D logic and assumed that, if I let a wolf bite me, my wizard would die immediately. He became an engineer during The Burning Crusade when Blizzard let engineers build helicopters, and that's remained immutable ever since as well.
The thing is, I'm definitely an altoholic. This is my character list on my main server right now:
(The only reason why Shihou isn't already 90 is because I'm playing him with my wife's mage, and she's fixated on Final Fantasy XIV right now.)
Despite everything I've achieved in the game so far, there's still a fair bit to do. Sure, Ascanius is already exalted with every faction of Pandaria that offers daily quests, a master of all the different ways of cooking introduced in this expansion, possessed of all the new Engineering recipes, proud restorer of every new Pandarian archeological artifact, et cetera et cetera. But look at all those alts! Okay, there's no way I'm going to repeat the feats of my main character with each of them, but most of them have some cool stuff I can do. Catilina is a blacksmith slowly putting together the materials to make some cool-looking weapons for everyone. Fulvia is a tailor and enchanter slowly acquiring the reputation necessary to learn really useful patterns and the cloth needed for them. Mithridates is a scribe slowly collecting the new Darkmoon Faire card sets, which will eventually result in trinkets, I think?
But the key word there is slowly. Part of the problem is that the most worthwhile things to do with your profession are always balanced by the time and effort needed to acquire them, with the assumption seemingly being that people will only bother with this for their main characters. I don't disagree - I don't need to put together epic sets of gear for my alts, because I rarely even run scenarios or dungeons with them, let alone raid.
And yet . . .
I acknowledge that I'm an unusual player. Back in Wrath of the Lich King I knew that some of my friends talked their housemates or partners into levelling their characters for them, because they just couldn't stand questing. But I love it. I won't go through every zone on my alts as completely as I do on Ascanius, but every single one of those level 90s you see (and the monk) was levelled through questing, not through grinding out experience in PvP (which I don't do) or dungeons (which I rarely bother with while levelling). I enjoy the experience of playing each character, doing the same zones and the same quests in those zones but seeing how the gameplay changes when I'm on my shadow priest as opposed to my enhancement shaman, or even playing my protection paladin as compared to my blood death knight (both protection and blood being tank specialisations).
That experience is part of it . . . but another part of it is feeling like I'm accomplishing something, even if the goal is modest. I won't usually bother to run a dungeon on any of my alts, because I've done that dungeon on my main character and the only reason to go back is to earn gear; if I'm going to try to earn gear, why not put that time into my main character? However, in addition to the different experience of playing a different class (and sometimes race makes a difference; every Alliance race is represented in that list of my characters, even night elves), what they also have that distinguishes them from Ascanius is their professions. He can't be a tailor and an engineer and a blacksmith and an alchemist, not all at once; his being exalted with the August Celestials doesn't help Fulvia get the pattern for the Royal Satchel. He can't buy Catilina the blacksmithing patterns from the Klaxxi, and he certainly can't make the armour and weapons from them.
So I play my alts once they hit maximum level so that I can achieve things through their professions, which brings me back to not only the problem of everything taking forever (it takes 12 days to make the special cloth used to make that Royal Satchel) but also the disappointment that I'm only able to help myself (and occasionally my wife).
Back in Wrath of the Lich King, our guild was able to field a full 10-player raid and take down the Big Bad Lich King all by ourselves. In Cataclysm, there was an epidemic of burnout; some of my friends raced to the new level cap and then got bored waiting for the rest of us to catch up, while players like me took our time to level and enjoy the storylines and zones. I didn't even think about hopping into dungeons until I'd already fully quested through all five of the new zones of the expansion, and by the time I was halfway through running the dungeons enough to gear up for heroic dungeons too many key players had simply quit the game.
This kind of burnout is natural, doubly so because of the specific conditions - Wrath's final raid content patch was released more than a year before the next expansion debuted, and while we needed a lot of that time to get to the point where we could kill the Big Bad, there were months and months after that where we, as a guild, had almost nothing to do (excepting a brief period when we set about killing a very stupid dragon with the exact same name as our guild leader). No surprise that some of us were raring to get back into raiding as soon as possible, while others were just happy to have new zones to explore and new things to do, full stop.
I just know that if I felt like it was going to help me do more than just equip my alts with cooler-looking gear, or give myself a little more bag space on my main character, I could easily be motivated to play those alts in a more serious way. Now of course it's no surprise that I could get more out of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game if I had more people to play with, but at the same time it's not really my choice. I can't find new people to play with and leave behind the guild . . . I'm so close to being able to steal guild leadership, if my wife stays unsubscribed for long enough!
So in the end I will continue plodding away at the little things each character can do, and cross my fingers that my friends get excited by the next expansion for the game and come back some time in 2014. At least I have the Raid Finder experience; it may feel like a big, uncoordinated dungeon, but at least I might get a chance to burn the shit out of Garrosh Hellscream, that fucker.
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