Festina Lente

"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.*** 

While the leveling pace has slowed significantly since I started --from L1-L5 taking about 20-30 minutes and L5-L10 about 1-1.5 hours-- there are a few interesting notes that I've come across. Even without getting their full toolkit, I can see some classes progressing faster than others**** which has thrown me for a bit of a loop when I look up and discover one class is at L12 while another is struggling to get to L11. 

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?

Some of that discrepancy is how a class plays. A class that can avoid fighting a lot of mobs all the time won't be generating XP at the same rate that other classes do; in a game based around completing quests and fighting mobs for XP, if the mobs aren't there or are avoidable that's simply XP that won't be obtained. I discovered that issue when first leveling a Rogue back in Mists, as her stealth ability meant she could simply avoid a lot of crap when questing, but unlike a tabletop RPG the game doesn't reward you with XP for your ingenuity. As a consequence, if you want to keep the leveling pace going, you have to race through quests faster than other classes. 

I'm not willing to do that, so I'll likely move at the pace of the slowest leveling toon.

I think I found my problem; too many
alehouses and taverns for this guy.

Before you point out the obvious, yes, I could use boosting or dungeon running to get my XP up on those slow classes, but that's not my playstyle. I've already heard of people using the Spellcleave strat in instances --4 Mages and a Healer-- to rip through dungeons in Classic Fresh the same way that people used that strategy for farming trash mobs in the Sunwell raid, but I look at that as less of a leveling tool and more of a gold farming one. 

There's also the matter of grouping up, and I am quite aware that my friends would be happy to do so, but I also know that they want to go much faster than I do, so... No. That's just a recipe for frustration on my part. I know that most of them simply don't understand why I don't want help in the same way that I gave them help, but I have tried to explain that the temptation to powerlevel is too great if I'm focusing on one toon. I even explained my so-called Bataan Death March leveling a Shaman to L60 --mostly solo-- doing a pace of three levels a day while still working a full-time job and being a husband and father, but I don't think they really got it.*****

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 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.

EtA: Corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.