Let the Alting Begin

At a certain point...I don't remember exactly when...I got tired of paying exorbitant fees for enchants to my gear. My logic at that time went something like this...if I create another character who's an enchanter, I can provide my own enchants for myself and make lots of gold at the same time! This was, by the way, back in the days when you didn't get a mount till level 40, and it cost 100 gold, minus a 10% discount for being Honored, minus a 10% discount if you were a Sergeant, which was really tough to get at level 40. So, call it 100 minus 10%. Anyway, 90 gold was a LOT of gold. A hella lot, in fact, without daily quests to grind. But I'd pretty much already come to terms with the fact that leatherworking was never going to make me rich (though I had discovered the green armor trick, which made a few gold in the day).

So, I created a warlock (still couldn't get past the mindset that I kill stuff at range hiding behind a pet) who would be my enchanter. What to pick as my second profession? Tailoring, of course...no gathering profession is required for enchanting, since the main ingredient for enchants is gotten through disenchanting stuff, and cloth drops off of just about every humanoid, and hey, the stuff you make through tailoring can be disenchanted for more raw materials for enchanting. It's, like, a win-win, or at least an almost win-almost win, situation!

The part about enchanting my own stuff didn't come true till fairly recently, of course, and the part about making lots of gold with enchanting never really did come true, probably because everybody else on the server at that time was thinking, "Hey, if I create an enchanter, I can make lots of gold!" One of the most important rules I've learned for making gold without grinding dailies is that you have to do what everybody else isn't doing. If you've ever tried to skill up an alt's professions, you know what I mean. The lesser raw materials will go from super cheap to super expensive and back within a couple days' time, just based on who's doing what. Some degree of price manipulation is possible, and I've made plenty of gold buying stuff cheap and selling it right away at a moderate price. Really, though, where you're going to make gold at the Auction House is in looking at whatever else nobody is putting up for auction and being the sole supplier for that time. For example, I've sold stacks of fel iron, the old cruddy stuff from Burning Crusade, for 30-40 gold just because nobody else was selling it...usually, on my server, that stuff will barely fetch 10-20 gold a stack.

But I get ahead of myself.

An altoholic was born.

Most of my alts are for utility, but some I've really gotten into. For example, the 'lock is fundamentally the same type of character as the hunter, but the mechanics are different in lots of ways, presenting challenges that were really quite enjoyable. The choice of pets was fun at first, at least till I realized that, up until the last expansion, it really was a Best Practice for locks to run with voidwalker (I couldn't do the felguard, since I chose destro) when alone, or imp when in a group, and succubus on very rare occasions when the group wanted crappy crowd control. Note that the reason for my caveat was that one of the last patches was supposed to have made the "other" lock pets more useful. I don't believe 'em. Then again, I rarely bring my lock out any more, so what do I know?

Utility, though, was the name of the game (heh...and you thought the name of the game was WoW). I was really into raiding, but potions were eating up my budget, so I made an herbalist/alchemist. As I still hadn't gotten the whole branch-out-into-other-roles thing, I made this alt a mage. Then I created a miner/blacksmith, not that I needed a blacksmith, but because the only other blacksmith of note in the guild had just converted to jewelcrafting instead. He was a warrior, because...well, warriors are blacksmiths, right? And blacksmiths are warriors. Everybody who's done role playing for any length of time knows that. It wasn't till I got him pretty far up in skill that I realized how insanely expensive it was to skill up a blacksmith. And while all my characters have started out kinda boring to level, the warrior has stayed at 10.5 on the 1 to 10 scale of Boringness, but I kept him anyway.

There I was...one main, three alts plus a bank alt (for the uninitiated, a bank alt is a character, usually kept at level 1, whose purpose is to run between the mailbox, the bank, and the auction house, and keep/store/sell all the crap that the other characters get/make/earn). Of course, I'd also created a druid, despite the fact that I had absolutely no fun running Mulgore, but he was stuck fairly permanently, it appeared, at level 13. I'd also noticed how cool engineering could be...hey, a box of arrows, how clever! Keep in mind that at this point arrows would only stack in 200's, and a quiver could hold just about enough arrows to, if you started full, get you through a raiding night with a few left over, barely escaping the embarrassment that was being The Hunter Without Ammo, so a case of arrows was really a pretty cool thing. I started a rogue miner/engineer...but got bored with her too, so she was looking at being permanently at 14. Till I deleted her, anyway, to make room for...my DK!

This got me along pretty well until Wrath hit. Death Knights! Woo hoo! OK, I'll admit it, I made a death knight the same night that everybody ELSE on the server also made a death knight. We all fought over the same stupid quest mobs till I got tired of it and went back to leveling to 80. Didn't touch my DK again for months.

Leveling to 80 took a little bit of effort...not huge; leveling has never been really difficult in WoW. But it still took time, so I was pretty busy getting my hunter, my lock, and my mage up to 80. By this point, I'd pretty much decided that the mage would replace the hunter as my "main," a term that is pretty useless outside of raiding. But my hunter hadn't gotten to raid much, there being a bunch of hunters in the group, and I'd discovered that playing an arcane mage is fun! Not easy, really; it's one of the more challenging class/spec combinations to get right, but despite that, or more because of it, it's an awful lot of fun.

About that time my druid was brought back from the discard pile. The new profession, inscription, was looking to be quite a moneymaker (boy, was I wrong) and tauren druids are natural herbalists anyway, so he trained inscription and leveled all the way up to 80. I admit, the druid became more fun to play once he got the ability to change from a bear to a kitty to a bird and back; I'd say he's probably been the easiest character to play, with relative straightforward mechanics. Bear tanking: hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Cat DPSing: make 'em bleed, then hit 'em, then hit 'em again. Tree healing: HoT, HoT, HoT!

There. That's my guide to druiding. Please send me all the dollars it's worth, kthxbai.

Finally went back to my DK. Note that DKs are handicapped by their late start. At 58, leaving the starting area, you have zero profession skill points, very little experience with the character's mechanics, some blue armor that's really not worth much of a crap, and the ability to "discover" entire regions by flying directly into them, much like in this real life thing that we're playing WoW to avoid. You have enough Talent points to fill up an entire section of the talent tree, yet nobody at the time knew what any of the sections did. The logic went something like this...use blood for DPS and frost for tanking. Unless you use unholy for DPS. Took Blizz a few patches to tweak the skills right (hey, you didn't really believe that was what beta testing was for, did you?) and the "experts" a while longer to really come to any type of consensus on what the different trees did. There's still sites out there that show you talent builds with talents in the wrong spot on the tree, in fact. But...more on my DK experiences later.

Professions for my DK were a pretty obvious choice. At the time, she was pretty much just a fun character to play around with, and DKs are known for being tough little cookies, so I figured a gatherer was a great choice...mining and skinning. Only problem with that was that I had to zone hop for a while, searching for both animals to skin and mining nodes to...um, mine...that weren't too high for my puny skill level, since THAT had to start at 1 (thank you, Blizz!). Most DKs I knew went straight for 80 and then worried about professions, but I figured if I was gonna have to level up in Outlands, might as well skin the animals I killed and mine the nodes I went by right then. Glad I did, in fact.

That left me with one little problem...two, actually. Specifically, engineering and jewelcrafting. I'd noticed that jewelcrafting was the enchanting of the new world; lots and lots of gold being made. I also got tired of buying jewels, and had two miners to provide ore and jewels anyway, so I made a priestess who would be my engineer and jewelcrafter.

So...now I have a hunter skinner/leatherworker, a mage herbalist/alchemist, a druid herbalist/inscriber, a warlock tailor/enchanter, a warrior miner/blacksmith, a priest jewelcrafter/engineer, a death knight skinner/miner, and a priest auction house mule. Five of them are 80's already, with two others on the way, and no real skill in playing/gearing any of them. That story comes later.