Altitis

[Bolty]

If you're here chances are you've already got it.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

Altitis? What's that? Oh yeah, my 12 characters on Stormrage and Terenas...

The problem I'm having is with focus.  Arethor is finally getting pretty old at 42 but he's starting to lose his luster compared to the shiny new alts begging for attention.  He's sat more than he's adventured recently and I think it's due to a few hurdles.

1. Slow leveling/questing: Levels and quests are beginning to take a lot longer to complete.  Quest-time seems to be increasing exponentially while soloing for each consecutive quest.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

This is indeed a fact of the game, and it's a result of the increase in monster power relative to their level that Blizzard implemented fairly late in beta because they felt they had to balance mobs a bit higher. This was because players, having a huge range of skills to use by that time and being more familiar with their characters, would need more challenge, and that's true. But it also makes soloing take longer. The fact remains that grouping up is much more enjoyable, and I've found that two-player groups for non-instance questing are the MOST enjoyable way to play the game by far. Two players doesn't add a lot of overhead (long bio-breaks needed for everyone, communication issues) and you can each cover the other's back.

2. The world is becoming too large:  I'm one who's liked to hunker down in a zone for a number of levels trying to complete all the quests in the zone before moving on.  I've found this to become increasingly less efficient as quests are regularly ferrying me to somewhere on the opposite end of the world.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

Unfortunately you'll need to shed yourself of the "hunker down" attitude, because it just gets "worse" as you get older - the quests in the 50's will make you a steady world traveler. You will at most get 3-4 quests that you can do in a particular spot at a time with few exceptions. You'll find yourself plotting out your travel routes around the globe in order to get the most done per unit of time and minimize the travelling.

3. Travel time: The time to get between continents and different zones is just entirely too frustrating to me most of the time.  This time is significantly reduced with the use of my mount and a hearth stone set to Menethil, but the distance between like-level zones and quest-related areas is a bit broad at times.  I understand Blizzard's reasoning but at times it gets to me.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

What gets to me isn't so much the travel time, but the silly restrictions on flight paths. Take the Alliance for example - WHY is there no Gadgetzan to Feralas flight path? WHY is there no Ironforge to Plaguelands (West OR East) flightpath? WHY is there no Stormwind to Burning Steppes flight path? And so on and so on. It's pure extra tedium to do flight-path-hopping that is completely unnecessary. Sure, give me the travel time - I can do something else while I'm in the air - but don't make me have to hop around on indirect flights.

5. Variety: I believe that variety is the spice of life and with how different each of the classes are I regularly find myself wanting to play "X" class because I feel like doing "Y"  Example: I want to play my Priest because I feel like being a healbot for a while.  or  I want to play my Rogue because I'm feeling like a DPS Monkey.  This causes me to swap characters fairly regularly too.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

I hear you there! I took my Priest to 60 because I just really love that class, but now that she's there I want to do something different. Jumping on with my Rogue is like a blast of cold air - WOAH! I can KILL THINGS FAST! :) I enjoy playing my 31 Warrior because after being the healer for so long, I love taking the opposite end of the spectrum and being the tank. Etc. I just can't handle playing the same character in the same instances over and over and over, drives me nuts.

I don't see alts as a bad thing at all, in fact I encourage them.  They're the only way to fully experience the game. But right now i'm feeling like I'm stuck in neutral.  It feels like I'm making no progress.  Am I to be forever stuck in Mid-game?[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

Well, once you have a char of each class set up, which I gather you do, you should really work on building them up. Think of them as your "army." The really nice thing about having so many characters is that once you get them all up into instance-running levels, you'll have someone ready for almost any instance of the game at any time - and when someone shouts "anyone want to do X," you're ready! I'm trying to get to that point myself.

So hold off making new chars, and build up that legion. There are some serious advantages to having lots of alts, at least one of each class, some of which you already touched on:

1) Extreme variety. Play your Flavor of the Day whenever you want, get your fix, and then move on to another. The game stays fresh, and you avoid the "gee, what do I do now" level-capped doldrums. This is enhanced by playing both Horde AND Alliance, so you see all the quests on one side that you missed on the other. Add to that the fact that there's no way you could have done all the quests with one char, so you can go to areas you kind of skipped over on other chars.

2) Rest state. This is pretty big, actually. For any particular character I happen to be playing, 10 others (cause one's level capped) are gaining rest state. I *LOVE* rest state, and the difference between playing in normal mode and rest mode is staggering. You earn DOUBLE the exp for monster kills in rest state mode, and when playing in rest state the game's levels seem to zip by. Ding, level. Ding, level. "Woah, that was fast," you'll think.

Add to this that the higher your character level, the more effective rest state is and the even LARGER impact it has. This is because as you gain in level, the number of kills needed per experience "bubble" grows. If you have 20 bubbles of rest state experience, that will last significantly longer at level 50 than level 20. I know that by the time I'd get to level 58-59, even those 2 1/2 bubbles of rest state gained by stopping at an inn overnight would carry me for the first 1 1/2 to 2 hours of gaming the next night! That's a *lot* of extra experience gain, and it shows by making the game seem like less of a grind. If going out and doing a collection quest winds up giving you 3 bubbles of exp instead of 1 1/2 from the monsters alone, you'll feel like you're accomplishing something.

Once you have enough characters, you can easily go a full 10 days between playing sessions of any particular one character. You'll be playing under rest state almost *all* of the time unless you really focus on one of your chars for a while, especially as they all get higher in level.

3) Cross-tradeskills. Most every profession will require goods used/made by another profession at some point, and, well, no need to hit the auction house or ask around for them, if your alt army can make them.

4) Being a better player. Knowing how each class is played will make you a *much* better overall player than someone who's only experienced 2 or 3 classes. So much discussion on these boards lately has centered on how the tanks and healers operate in a party, and that's because there's so many players have not played the classes involved and need to know how to work with them. Nothing beats in-game experience. :)

5) When it's all said and done, you'll have many more gaming choices than the one or two char player who has played their 60's for so long that they're sick of it all. I figure that, even at my sometimes ridiculous leveling rate, it would take me 3 1/2 to 4 YEARS to get 12 characters to level 60. Not that I realistically plan on doing that, but theoretically it's possible. In the end, I'll have lots of great chars to play, and I won't have burned out on the game as some are already who have been playing their capped players for so long that it's become pure tedium. Plus, with your char levels spread out, you'll have played with many more players than just the 60's crowd could offer. Some Lurkers won't have a level 60 until a full year or more has gone by, and you'd be forced to wait for them to play with them? Nah.

My big problem with all my alts is that I now feel like every minute I'm playing my capped Priest is a minute I COULD be using leveling up my alts. So I feel even LESS desire to play my 60 now than I would if I had just 2 or 3 chars. That's no fun to some of the new-60's I've been playing with all this time as we "climbed the ladder," but such is the way of things for me, I guess. The only time I want to play my 60 now is to do a quest of some kind, so no zerg-fest raids of the high-end instances for me!

I'm going to try and be a minimalist as far as addons go from now on.[right][snapback]71594[/snapback][/right]

Broken record mode - I can't keep recommending CTMod enough. Small memory footprint, you can download only the parts of it you want, and doesn't blow your install up on each patch. Well coded software with no bloat, and does all the major things people want out of a mod. Cosmos was the first major mod out for WoW, so it's the most popular - but CTMod is being used more and more by the elite players, and there's a good reason for it.

-Bolty