Attack of the Killer Alts!

Well, I haven't been playing Wulf that much recently, although I've managed to get on a couple of raids with mate's groups, and my current spec seems to be performing admirably under those circumstances. I'm going to concentrate this post on my two alternate characters who have been taking up most of my playing time right now.

Stormpaw's gone through some changes recently. Up until the patch, he was focussed on the Feral talent tree, dealing damage through his animal forms. It's great for soloing, but since Storm doesn't really use his feral forms that much when grouped with others, I decided to change his set-up. Initially I split his talents pretty evenly between the Balance (offensive spellcasting) and Restoration (healing spells) trees, which worked pretty well in groups, but Gave him some problems whilst soloing. That in mind, I ended up respeccing him to focus more on the Balance tree. The end result, he now has the ability to shapeshift into a Battle Chicken (well, ok, it's technically called Moonkin, but it looks like a frigging battle chicken!).

In this form Storm becomes more physically robust, able to take a pounding, but sacrifices his ability to cast healing spells. He also tends to draw a lot more aggro than a lot of other offensive casters, which means I won't be using it much in groups (no problem, I'll end up healing in most groups anyway). He also tends to run out of mana very quickly, although there are ways around this that he'll be exploiting.

I've also been levelling Delanthir, my elven priest. He's only level 28 at the moment, but I'm finding his ability to grind XP almost as smooth as my Hunter's, thanks to a slightly unorthodox talent spec reccomended by some friends. I doubt he'll hit lvl 60 before the expansion, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

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!