Why now? | Alts Ahoy All of a sudden Nasirah enjoys playing a shaman where it was boring before. In this post, she muses on why her mind has changed.
How to annoy NPC's - Keep Clicking on them! | Pugnacious Priest Amusing detective work shows what happens when you annoy an NPC, including quotes on what they'll do to you if you don't stop. To bad you can't back-talk them too.
There's a ton of asking going on around this site lately -- between "Ask a Lore Nerd" and "Ask a Beta Tester," you guys are asking more questions than a two-year old who just learned what "why" means. But this column, Ask WoW Insider, is the O.G. of Ask columns here on the site, and unlike all of the other Ask columns, we put the question back to you readers. Chippen of EU Doomhammer sent in this great question this week:
We are having a discussion in our guild whether alts have priority on loot before guild members and we do have different views on this. Some say that an alt is an alt, and need to wait to be geared up, while others can't really see the problem. What is a main and what is an alt?
I suppose a main is the...well...I don't know. The first character I created? Or is it the character I play the most? Or is it the character I want to play the most and also enjoying playing the most? When does an alt become a main, and is it possible to swap between the two?
If you're asking me, I'd say it's definitely possible to switch mains (I've done it a few times) -- your main is currently the character that's getting the majority of your playtime, and the one where loot matters the most to you. Some guilds ask you to declare a main, so that they can make a clear distinction for passing out loot, while other guilds just have players switch alts depending only on what situations require what.
So let's show up those other Ask columns and give this great, open-ended question out to you, our dear readers: what is a main and what is an alt? And what's the difference between the two?
If you've got a question for our readers to be posted right here in the original Ask column, be sure to send it along to ask@wowinsider.com. And there's lots more Ask WoW Insider, including this question on abusing the /roll, and how to make friends and influence raiders on a new server.
Natalie is stepping in to help out V'Ming on Blood Pact this week.
Leveling alts seems to be a popular way for some folks to pass the time they wait for Wrath to hit. After reading what people love about playing a 'lock, perhaps you're toying with the idea of crossing over to the dark side to join us. So, for this week's Blood Pact, we'll explain the things you should know about starting a warlock if you're coming from the perspective of having a level 70 main from a different class.
Think of a warlock as the bastard child of a mage and a hunter: high damage-producing, squishy casters with pets. If your main is one of these classes, you'll feel right at home with ranged damage, casting, mana management, and pets. On the other hand, any class that relies solely on melee or provides a primary healing function for a group is so not similar to a warlock. The polar opposite of a warlock is either the protection warrior or the holy paladin.
Here's how to change your mindset based on what your main's class or group function is.
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
When World of Warcraft launched, a guild was a chat channel, a tabard, and some very basic UI features like ranks and the message of the day. It's nearly four years later, and very little thus far has been added to the game to help guilds. So far we've gotten one major feature: guild banks. It was almost absurd that banks weren't part of the feature set for guilds when the game went live, and the hoops guilds jumped through to stash and distribute their important items were equally absurd. So while banks were a welcome addition, I wouldn't call their implementation a step forward so much as a step to catch up with what's adequate.
Now we're getting calendars -- yet another essential feature that should have been part of the UI since Day 1. I don't want to sound unappreciative. I'm hopeful that this feature will be sound enough to use and I'll be thrilled if we can dump Guild Event Manager or Group Calendar for something that's built into the software (with a grateful farewell /salute to the makers of those mods!).
But in terms of running a guild using in-game features, we're still in bare-bones territory here. Is it possible that Blizzard has more surprises up their sleeve for officers in Wrath? Here's what I'd love to see them implement:
I deleted four toons today. I know that Wrath of the Lich King is quite a ways off, but I wanted to be prepared. First of all, I wanted to ensure I had a character slot free for my Death Knight. Although I'm not sure I'll be leveling it all the way to 80, considering the jump start at Level 55, it's a much better leveling grind than the alts I deleted, the highest of which was a Level 40 Shaman. I sold all my Soulbound items, mailed all not-so-junk items to my wife's toons, and promptly hit the 'delete' button.
Deleting my toons wasn't as hard as I imagined it to be, the hardest part was getting rid of all the items I'd accumulated. I did this primarily as a way of cleaning house... after all, I hadn't been playing with my alts all that much and one or two were mere bank toons. I haven't deleted my Level 42 Tauren Hunter and Level 28 Blood Elf Rogue because I'm still considering leveling them (unlikely). Of course, what I'm really hoping for is for Blizzard to finally allow PvE to PvP transfers just so I can finally bring my Level 60 Hunter and Rogue over to my server. With two toons leveled to 70 on a PvP server, I think I've paid my dues. Whether or not that happens, I'll probably end up deleting those two toons anyway.
So there, I'm making space for my Death Knight. I needed more character space because I'm reserving some character names. When Wrath is finally released, there'll be a mad rush for cool Death Knight names and I don't want to be stuck with a lame one. In a way, I'm streamlining my character inventory the way Blizzard's cleaning up the game in the expansion. I guess conditioning my mind for a Death Knight has allowed me to remorselessly excise my alts. Are you doing anything drastic to prepare for Wrath?
I should be more specific: why is this hard for me? Because for lots of people, leveling a hunter is the easiest thing in the world, to hear them tell it. It's a super easy class that has high DPS and a tanking pet to keep it alive. I should be blowing through the levels.
Instead, I've just recently managed to get my draenei hunter, who I created back when TBC launched, to level twenty eight. In the time since I've created this character I leveled my original warrior to 70, created a new draenei warrior and leveled him to 70, and leveled a draenei shaman to 70, plus went back and leveled two horde (warrior and shaman) to 70 and created a BE paladin and got him to 65. I leveled a paladin to 65 faster than I could level a hunter to 28! What is this, bizarro world? My orc and night elf warriors both hit 70 and I created them more or less as alts to play with RL friends on different servers, which means they get played once a month at most, and yet, here is my hunter, a year into the expansion (over a year, in fact) and I am just now heading into the 30's. And to be honest the only reason I even cared enough to level him this much was because I wanted to get him a mount.
Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week, we look at the issues around taking other characters to raids.
Whether you're currently raiding Karazhan or Sunwell, you've likely run into the alt issue. You spend night after night playing the same character, pressing the same buttons in the same environments, and reach a point where you don't need loot from certain instances and are bored stiff of taking your main there. Yet there's that level 70 alt that could do with some drops, and playing it will also bring a new dimension to liven up an old instance.
It's not usually as simple as just playing another character for the night, though. There are a number of issues that raid leaders and guilds run into when the concept of alts coming to raids rears its head, which this column will look at.
Today is the 50th post of Totem Talk on this site. I haven't written all of them... I started out as the warrior columnist for WoW Insider (by the way, if you're wondering, yes the warrior column will be tomorrow, sorry for juggling everything) and only took over the shaman column because Robin Torres, our predecessor and the first person to give you a shaman column here, was unable to continue writing it. I snapped up the chance to take over, because the shaman class was the one that effectively saved World of Warcraft for me. (I promise, next week we'll continue our gear guide series, but this week I'm inclined to wax philosophical about shamans.)
It's not a secret that I play a lot of warriors, and tank a lot. For the longest time, my pattern was fairly simple: start a warrior alt to play with friends on a new server, blaze to 60 ahead of them as I am an expert on leveling a warrior, start getting bored waiting for them to catch up and end up going back to my original warrior because I have a reputation as a tank and get recruited to do it. I would tank for a while (in one notorious case, 'a while' was 'from Molten Core to Naxxramas) while waiting for my RL friends to catch up to max level so we could start running instances.
It got old. I enjoyed the tanking, but I hated the waiting. I'm not terribly patient. In one notorious instance I actually rolled another warrior, caught him up to them as they leveled, then leveled him to 60, meaning that I had two max level warriors rotting on Kilrogg. It got ridiculous. During all this time, I finally met folks who were playing horde side, and started a new toon to hang out with them on Malfurion. Yes, it was a warrior.
But a funny thing happened on the way to 60 on him. On a whim, I started an orc shaman. And I hated it.
I have four level 70 characters that I've decided to level to 80, my two horde 70's (tauren warrior, orc shaman) and my draenei warrior and shaman. (I may or may not level my human warrior, and if I get my BE paladin to 70 by then, he'll be in the running to go the distance as well.) As a result, I'm playing catch up with them... making sure their professions are maxed, trying to make sure they have if not great gear than the best gear possible (I know it will be replaced, but doing those initial quests in the new zones is always easier with better gear), supplies of netherweave for when the new first aid comes out, that kind of thing. I was caught unaware the last time we had an expansion as far as what was needed to make things easier, I don't intend to be so caught again.
I have a lot of alts. Not as many as some, but more than most. I have five level 70s, two characters over 50, and two others that sort of float around depending on what I feel like playing that week. Needless to say, I'm pretty sick of the lower level content. I've done it so many times by now that I'll be very, very happy when I never need to see it again.
Until Blizzard decides to let us take a character straight from level 1 to level 70, I'm pretty much stuck going through that content. I enjoy learning to play new characters, but I don't think just grinding out quests does that for you. I would really like a 70 of each class so I can learn how to play them in dungeons and eventually the lower tier raids like Karazhan. Since I can't skip all of that content I've done endlessly already, I try to make my trip to 70 as easy as possible.
It was when I started levelling my Frost Mage that I realized just how far I will go to speed up those early levels. About 5 minutes after I rolled that Mage, I equipped her with a set of pre-enchanted gear that gave her just under 100 Frost Damage, and roughly an extra 400 hit points. I was basically invincible, and I loved it. It was expensive, but so worth it to blaze through those first few levels. Taking out moonkin in two Frostbolts was strangely soothing.
That's the most money I've put into a brand new character so far, but I would probably do it again in the future just to bypass that really early stuff. My question for all of you is: What's the most you've put into a twink that fresh, just for levelling and not stomping WSG?
I am a terrible leveler. I started playing back in January 2007, and in all that time have managed to produce a single 70. Admittedly, I think she's a very good 70 and she stays busy, but you would think that nearly 1 1/2 years would be a sufficient period of time to level another class to the endgame. Guess not.
Lately I've been trying to fix this and have gone back to leveling a few alts. While talking to a friend last night about his propensity for leveling alts at the approximate speed of an SR-71, it occurred to me that I have two warriors, only one of whom has leveled quickly. The other just can't seem to fill up the XP bar. Obviously there's no class difference to cite as a possible reason, so I started thinking about what affects the leveling speed of an alt, and why I've got so many unsuccessful ones littering the character selection screen:
It's been almost a full year since I last saw this brought up, and we still haven't seen anything from Blizzard on it. Eric over on WoW LJ brings up the issue of tracking alts within a guild. As we found out last time, most people just use guild notes (or helpful addons) to keep track of whose alt is whose inside a guild, and it works OK -- assuming people are up front about when they're logging in on another toon.
But still, it seems like an official interface would work much better. And especially considering that Blizzard is actually going to start encouraging alts as a part of the gameplay (you have to have a character at least 55 on the account to start up a Death Knight, and there are rumors that alts will benefit from reputation grinds as well), it seems like they might be interested in making the connection between characters on the account a little more obvious.
And as we said last time, there are benefits to the guild as well -- you never know when that lowbie leveling through Westfall might actually have a Death Knight ready to tank for you. I'm still not sure about marking alts in the Armory, but if you join up to a guild, I'd think guilds should have the right to know, officially, who's an alt of whom.
So Zach posted one of my favorite recent articles about making sure your bank toon looks stylish while it's taking care of your business, and I was amazed when I read the comments to see that a few people were wondering what the whole point of a bank alt was at all.
I have to admit that I was once like them. Why should I give up one of my precious character spaces for some dude who will just sit around Thunder Bluff or Ironforge and do nothing but store stuff that I should just be using or auctioning anyway? Of course, now that I have a bank alt, I'm pretty happy with the concept. If you're someone who hasn't made one yet, I'll tell you why I think you'd be happy with one too after the break.
It's an exciting time to be playing WoW, what with the WoTLK alpha information leaking out (Thanks for risking your eternal soul to break the NDA, anonymous screenshotter!) and 2.4 being pretty much a roaring success. By now, I'm sure everyone has settled in and is making plans for WoTLK, figuring out which zone they'll go to first, maybe setting aside a bit of money from all those dailies to powerlevel a trade skill.
So, I was thinking the other day of one more thing I was planning: switching mains. We've discussed the art of switching mains a bit before, but there's always a lot of hassles to it: there's the concern that you'll fall behind your friends, the concern that your gear won't be good enough, the concern that you'll have to grind your reputation up for certain keys and essential reputation rewards all over again.
A new expansion is just the ticket for getting rid of most of those problems. As long as your character is max level at the start of WoTLK, they can catch up on gear pretty quickly just from level 71 greens and quest rewards. Everyone's starting out grinding all the new WoTLK reputation grinds, so no worries that you're behind on those either. Despite being on a relatively "new" character, you'll be able to join your friends in Utgarde Keep right away.
So the reasons not to switch mains mostly manage to resolve themselves when a new expansion hits, and the question becomes, do you want to switch mains, and why?
"I have five level 70s, therefore I'm good at the game!" This comment, or others that express a similar sentiment, is often heard in-game, on forums and here on WoW Insider.
Having multiple characters of different classes exposes you to many more facets of the game. An alt-o-holic, with multiple alts, enjoy a range of gameplay that is indisputably wider than someone who plays just one or two characters. While leveling content is largely the same, the classes are designed by Blizzard to be as different from each other as possible. Running through The Barrens on a Priest is a very different experience from running through the same zone with say, a Druid.
However, does sheer breadth of gameplay experience translate to a "better" player of WoW? Understanding how other classes work is definitely an advantage when you're playing in a group or raid, but is it fair to dismiss the "specialist" player who, through choice or simply lack of time, plays only a single toon?
In other words, does breadth of experience trump depth of knowledge as far as playing the game is concerned?
There's a ton of asking going on around this site lately -- between 
If you've got a question for our readers to be posted right here in the original Ask column, be sure to send it along to ask@wowinsider.com. And there's lots more 
Natalie is stepping in to help out 
I have a lot of alts. Not as many as some, but more than most. I have five level 70s, two characters over 50, and two others that sort of float around depending on what I feel like playing that week. Needless to say, I'm pretty sick of the 
It's been almost a full year since 
So Zach posted one of my favorite recent articles about 
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