Wipus Frequentus

It strikes me that there's two main kinds of WoW players when it comes to picking characters and playing with them. Actually, there are three, but I'll leave Strangepork out of this cause I love him so very much and want to give him all my gold and spend days worshipping the ground he walks on.

One the one hand you have those who settle on a character and play them almost exclusively as their 'main' for years. While this player may actually change their main, it's a major decision that's not taken lightly and there's never any question that they'll suddenly swap back or change again. It's not that they don't have alts, it's just that they're never seriously considered as anything other than a temporary dalliance with a bit of strange (not him), rather than the dedicated relationship they have with their main.

Then you have those who play one character for some time, then switch to another, then switch to another. There's always several alts - usually more than one account can feasibly hold - and they never seem to settle on any particular character.

I am quite comfortably a card-carrying member of the second group.

The thing that gets me about this is that both types of people are highly predictable. In our guild we have obvious examples of both groups. Dairy (Dark*) would be the most obvious character-swapper. Angie (Narcissa) and Tezz (Doomsteak) have stuck with those characters since Vanilla, although neither are their first characters. Those who have multiple mains just don't get attached to any one character.

I can only talk from my perspective. I started off with my trusty Orc Warrior, Gunther, on the first day of release (OH GOD THE SERVERS THEY BURN). I played Gunther for a while, even raiding when I never expected to do that, given that I considered it to be an ultra-nerdy and punishing form of the game, which wasn't too far off in those days! I then needed a break from playing the same character, and levelled my Shaman, Woetra, who was a female Troll back then. We also had our comedy rogue alt guild - Sisters Against Paladins - where we all had female undead rogues. Mine was "Rooj", because people are idiots.

It wasn't until The Burning Crusade that the alt bug really hit me. In fact I guess you could say it hit in the pre-expansion patch. Woetra was used as a healbot for instances because that was all a Shaman was good for, and when the patch arrived I suddenly had things like Earth Shield to play with. PVP was completely different, with AB being particularly fun as I was nigh-invulnerable and could hold points virtually by myself.

So for TBC I chose to stick with the Shaman and had my hybrid resto/elemental spec that I took from 60 all the way into Karazhan, before they nerfed it hard. I levelled a Blood Elf Hunter on the side, and that was the next character to hit 70. After getting bored of healing, I switched the Shaman to full elemental and carried on happily until boredom struck some time through Serpentshrine Cavern.

After a little break from the game, I came back and tried to make the hunter my priority. I had fun with it but never seriously considered switching to it "full time", and all the while I had many low-level alts. I'd also been given a friend's account with his 40-something Rogue on it, so that got levelled to 70 as well for PVP purposes. When WOTLK hit, I had to make a decision and went for the hunter, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster. I hated levelling and my early days as an 80, because I wasn't levelling with the rest of the guild and was not an option for raiding, so I spent most of my time grinding dailies. 

Not raiding meant that I had no worries about quitting the game for a while, and when I came back I resolved to level up another character instead. So Disir the female Blood Elf Paladin came into being and I raced her up to 80 and enjoyed myself along the way. The big change was deciding to try tanking, something which I'd found to be a stressful nightmare back on the Warrior in vanilla (and seeing Grind's button-mashing at LANs didn't fill me with joy either!) but turned out to be a great way of experiencing content. Tanking was something completely different to what I'd been doing for the past few years and it was almost like playing a different game; this also coincided with the new Random Dungeon Finder which suddenly made regular instancing a reality instead of a pipedream. With Zorr and his twins instancing alongside me, I had a great couple of months and managed to gear up quicker than at any point in my WoW history.

Since then, I've levelled and decently geared a Frost Death Knight (Meltankos), and I've gotten the Rogue to 80 as well. Characters have been renamed and re-raced, and I've never been comfortable sticking to just one. The Paladin was a lot of fun but ultimately the tanking and DPSing involved pressing a sequence of buttons which pretty much never changed whatever the situation. The DK was a more reactive playstyle and as a DPS character is still the most fun 80 I have. I've got a battery of alts heading towards 80 (Warrior 74, Shaman 78, Warlock 72, Druid 68) and I hope to get them all done before Cataclysm hits.

So, the point of this giant first blog? It's simply this: I cannot read the changes for Cataclysm and patch 4.0 without wanting to play pretty much every character. I do not know what I'll be playing as a main in Cata, but I really want to avoid the trap of not being able to raid because I can't make my mind up. So when 4.0 hits, I will be playing as many as possible and trying to settle on a particular one. I'll also do another blog detailing the changes we can expect and why they make me so enthusiastic about the expansion, when at the start I wasn't even remotely bothered by it. I envy those who can stick to one character without getting bored, but I do think having such a great experience of other classes helps me as a player understand the game and help other people.

And once 4.0 is "done" and the expansion is imminent, I will probably put up a poll detailing my final choices. The guild might well get to decide what I end up playing!