A Bit of a Shakeup

Having a week off was good for the soul, and as a consequence I've decided to make a few changes in my current stable of toons for Operation Spread the Love.

Hoots was named after Hoots the Owl from the
children's television show Sesame Street. Here's
a link to a clip of Hoots with John Legend. I think
I ought to work on a backstory for a bit, just to make
Hoots' name a nickname due to her obsession with owls.
This listing was as of February 2, 2025.

I'd originally intended to get all of the toons to at least L30 before I would begin to put in some separation, but I've decided to leave two toons behind at L20: the Shaman and the Warrior.

The decision to leave the Shaman is kind of self-explanatory: there was just too much mental baggage dealing with a Shaman, even 3.5 years after TBC Classic. I'm still going to keep that Shaman around in case I want to revisit it sometime in the future, and I'll hold onto the name Briganaa as well, but I doubt I'll be leveling a Shaman anytime soon.

As for the Warrior, it was a struggle for me to actually want to play one. I'm used to having a full mana bar or energy bar to work with and have it gradually get depleted, but the Warrior plays in exactly the opposite manner: you have to build up rage before you can expend it on various abilities. I've frequently found myself struggling to get enough rage going for me to actually, you know, DO something interesting. And if I can't get that rage up, the Warrior doesn't really feel fun to play. 

Maybe it's a matter of not getting high enough in levels to make a Warrior fun, but to me it certainly doesn't check any of those "fun" boxes on my "things to do" checklist. Warriors may be extremely popular to play because they're so overpowered in Vanilla Classic's raid scene, but I wasn't ever planning on taking this toon into any group content. There's too much pressure to tank in that scenario, and I wasn't going to deal with that.

So going forward I'm focusing on 8 toons instead of 10. I don't expect my leveling to speed up very much, given that the leveling curve itself is flattening out significantly, and I'm also planning on leveling professions along the way. I've never really leveled Leatherworking as part of my actual leveling process itself, because Briganaa was my Leatherworker and I only began working on that after she got to L70. I simply couldn't focus on professions until after I got to max level for the raid. Same thing goes for Blacksmithing; I've leveled it typically after a toon got to max level (in both Retail and Classic), so any bonuses from making my own armor kind of went out the window.

Tailoring, on the other hand, I've done numerous times, so I know how to fit that into my leveling process and take advantage of inherent bonuses available to a cloth wearing profession. Leveling a profession along the way also has the advantage of slowing down my own leveling process, because I have to divert attention to collecting materials necessary to keep my gear up to date, in as much the same way that a Rogue will work on opening lockboxes to level their Lockpicking skill.

***

Okay, that's out of the way. How's everybody else doing?

Uh... Well... I think my Questing Buddy's raid issues got straightened out, because she's had a few weeks' worth of pleasant raiding in Molten Core. Now, her issue is getting a Healing weapon that she doesn't have to fight all the other healers for in raid, so she's set her sights on PvP gear by getting to a high enough PvP ranking. I can only shake my head, because if it's not one goal, it's another. In her defense, she is significantly younger than me (still technically under 40!) so I salute her drive and focus. Me, I couldn't do that anymore, but she apparently can. I think she's also been listening to the audiobook version of Onyx Storm, the new Rebecca Yarros book, which apparently has yet ANOTHER cliff hanger ending. I guess for my sanity's sake, I'm going to hold off reading the series until it's finished, something I learned the hard way by reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time back in the 90s.*

As for the rest of the gang, all except for two have a toon at max level. Of the two, one still raids regularly on the Classic Era servers (hence the reason why she doesn't have a max level toon) and the other is busy with other non-WoW things, so she doesn't have a lot of time to get on and play. 

Of the players in my friend group, I am the farthest behind, which suits me fine. I think they've finally given up trying to talk me into accepting boosts, but even if they haven't, having 8 toons means I can let them run me through a dungeon and then I can park that toon for a week or more while I level something else. 

***

For a Sid Meier's Civilization fan, I'm simply not interested in Civ VII that is coming out right now. I'm happy that Christopher Tin came back to compose more music for the soundtrack, but I play Civ IV almost every other day, and I really don't have any interest in moving on to something new at this time. What I have seen of Civ 7 is that it is a lot more tactical and wargamer-ish than previous installations of the game; fine for some people, but for a grand strategy type of game that Civ once was, it isn't for me. If I want more wargame in my Civ style game, there's Rome: Total War or Medieval: Total War 2 to whet my appetite.

Anyway, that's where Redbeard's WoW Classic Anniversary is currently at.

*I never finished reading The Wheel of Time, as I threw up my hands and gave up on the series after A Crown of Swords. I bought The Path of Daggers, but when I sat down to read it, I just couldn't. I was tired of Robert Jordan never really moving the plot along and simply adding more and more complexity without getting anywhere. Apparently I wasn't the only RJ fan who jumped off the bandwagon during this time, but we were more than offset by an influx of new fans.