On Altoholism...

Over the last few weeks I've been wrestling between my desire to do something different than just the "Monkey DPS" of a raiding Hunter and my compulsion to help my friends in CD during a time when most of our regular Hunters are becoming, well, less regular. Ideally I'd like to be able to play an alternative character whilst having the ability to assist CD in its progress on an ad-hoc basis.

Sadly, much as I love playing Stormpaw, he doesn't allow me to do this, since he's not only on a different faction, but a different server to CD. Earthen Ring is a flakey piece of crap as servers go, and there's always massive queues at peak raiding times. Even if I was able to recieve word that Wulf was needed, transferring from Storm to him would involve sitting in a server queue for anything up to fifteen minutes. Not ideal for me or for CD.

So obviously, I needed an Alliance alt on Earthen Ring. I first tought about my Night Elf priest, Delanthir, who is currently sitting at lvl 25 in Stormwind disenchanting whatever goods I send his way and selling the proceeds to fund Wulf's raiding. I pretty much dismissed that idea because, powerful as a Shadow Priest can be, I hated solo-levelling one. They have neither the survivability or burst damage to take down powerful mobs solo, particularly if other mobs add. As with most casters, as soon as they run out of mana, they're dead.

I briefly considered another Druid, but I dismissed it for two reasons:

1. The Night Elf starting zone is one of the dullest and most isolated zones in the game. The only way to get to the other Alliance zones is a long run through a level 20+ zone which manages to combine the worst aspects of being dangerous and interminably dull.

2. I really wanted to try a different play style.

In the end, I settled on the one healing class I hadn't tried and rolled a Human Paladin called Greysun*. I started him last night and got him up to level six before Wulf was called in to take down the Brother/Sister team of Onyxia and Nefarian. Paladins seem to be pretty fun, at the moment, and in raids, their role is the polar opposite of the Hunter. Whilst the Hunter is a ranged damage class, all DPS and little utility, Paladins are a melee support class, all utility and little DPS. :)

*I originally wanted to call him "Grayson" in a tacet reference to Dick Grayson, one of my favourite comic book characters. Grayson was taken or forbidden however, so I settled for the phonetic equivalent. I am geek, hear me roar!