"Make haste slowly" is a Latin phrase that's been around since antiquity*. I was first exposed to it back when I was reading Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars --which is also referenced in the Wikipedia entry-- basically referencing Augustus' dislike of rash commanders. So a George Patton would probably not been on Augustus' favorites list.
Basically, the point of the phrase is to balance out the extremes of caution and aggression when pursuing a task. Choose a middle path, if you will.
If waffling somewhere in the middle is an ideal, I think I've achieved that while playing on the WoW 20th Anniversary server.
Given that Card is from a (relatively) poor upbringing and that I tend to play in a "gold poor" manner, her clothing right now kind of fits. |
What I've done is configure my leveling to first get everybody to L10 then progress increments of five levels at a time. (Yes, even the Shaman, who is not on the loading screen above.) So, right now I'm progressing everybody to L15, although in a kind of haphazard manner.***
Really? I have to bust my ass to go all the way to Orgrimmar to train skinning? I mean, have you seen the sheer number of animals around here? |
I think I found my problem; too many alehouses and taverns for this guy. |
Shenanigans like this little breakdown from the TBC Classic servers didn't exactly help. |
That being said, my brain has been taking some time to adjust to completely different playstyles.
I don't know how people who play a ton of alts do it, but it frequently takes me about 10 minutes of active gameplay before I get back into a full understanding of how to play a class. I have caught myself on numerous occasions switching from playing, say, a Paladin to a Priest only to discover about a half an hour later that I've not been throwing a Power Word: Shield on myself before engaging a mob. It may not sound like much of a gameplay issue until you realize that PW:S is there to keep you from dying when mobs attack you. Another example is switching to a class with a pet --such as a Hunter or Warlock-- and forgetting to, oh, let the pet go in first and get a hit or two in before you start attacking. The whole "let your pet build up aggro first" thing.
What gets me is that people seem to play far more alts quite effectively on Retail, which is a more complex game --attack rotation-wise-- than Classic.****** I know that some players such as Kayrliene with a metric ton of alts are an outlier, but I've seen so many bloggers over the years bring up various alts in Retail that I know it's far more popular there than I'd expect. The problem I have an issue wrapping my head around is that I'm struggling to keep a more basic game such as Classic straight, so how do Retail players keep them their stable of alts all straight while playing? Or is it just a question of all the classes having similar abilities, in Retail, so just aligning your bars so that the similar abilities all are in the same location (such as big AoE damage on Button 6, and a shield on Button 10) so you are "close enough" while playing to keep things straight.
Of course, long time Retail players probably are so used to playing various classes that it's kind of deeply ingrained into their gameplay. If you've been playing a dozen classes for over a decade, you've internalized the gameplay to such a degree that you never really noticed it until someone points it out to you.
***
All this is pure speculation, because I've got my hands full as it is trying to figure out all of these classes I've never played before. At least I've got enough time to figure them out, and since there are some classes I'm never planning on grouping up for (such as a Warrior, because people would simply assume I'm going to tank things), I don't have to worry about being perfect.
*According to Wikipedia --yeah yeah, I know, not necessarily that accurate in general-- the original Greek is σπεῦδε βραδέως speũde bradéōs. I didn't know that and always assumed it was Latin until this research, so I kept the common nomenclature as "Latin" above.
**If you played old school D&D --such as 1e AD&D-- the amount of XP to level between classes is vastly different. The idea is that some classes were much more powerful at higher level than others, so the amount of time it took to level that extra powerful class (Magic-Users, for example) was much longer. I believe that TSR/Wizards of the Coast got rid of that in the designing of D&D 3.0 in the late 90s, so you don't see that artificial XP tweaking much anymore.
***Right now I expect to try to hold this entire stable together as I level, but I can also see where in the near future there begins to be a bit of separation of some of the toons from the main pack. My guess is that once I hit L25 or L30 I'll begin to break out 4-5 toons to focus on while leveling. Still, the overall goal of getting the stable to L60 over the course of a year is doable for now.
****For example, the Hunter progresses much faster than a Warrior.
*****Except for my Questing Buddy, who did what she could to help me out, and I provided emotional support for her dealing with the leveling process in what was for her a new guild with new people to play with.
******I guess here is where I'd also bring out from the archives one of the rotations from FFXIV to show it's not just Retail WoW that has complex rotations...
EtA: Corrected grammar.
That is actually one of my peeves with Retail, FFIV and SWTOR. The rotations are complicated enough that if you are out of practice with a given class you are hopelessly bad with it until you get you sea legs back. It's also always a bit unclear what the best way to set up hotbars on a class with compolicated rotations is.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in SWTOR when I bop back and forth between alts that are essentially mirror images of eachother (classes that have pretty much the exact same abilities, just with different names and attack animations), I often find that I have set their hotbars up slightly to majorly differently. Of course maybe that just measn my methods fo setting them up are irresponsibly haphazard ;-)
The only upside to complex rotations is that if they are super complex, just figuring out new ones becomes somewhat of a game info itself. For example, when I was last playing in FFXIV I used to plan out Black Mage rotations in my head as I was falling asleep and then try them the next time I played.