How did I play thee, let me count the ways

(Reader beware, this post makes no effort to explicit WoW-specific terms and only exists to elucidate, quite exactly, what it was I personally did or accomplished within the game.)

To begin with, I never made it to the Sunwell but I made it through nearly everything else on one toon or another. I have the maximum number (10) allowable toons for single server. It was rolling the last one -- a cute level six troll shaman because I wanted a third healer, which pretty much sums up the "crazy" if you know the game -- was what prompted me to quit. My two mains are both healers with be.imba gear scores solidly into Sunwell readiness. Though admittedly the priest's score dropped just out of range after I began experimenting with the pre-Wrath patch talent trees, respec'ing her to full 56/5/0 Discipline which prompted me to regem and enchant a bunch of abandoned epics from the bank so she could hit 17% unbuffed +crit (I highly recommend the approach for 10-man or main tank healing because that Penance spell is a blast and very overpowered when backed up with reliable crit).

The majority of my endgame activities were confined to weekly badge farming Kara runs, running dailies, and taking the druid tree on ZA speed runs -- the priest was uber but nothing keeps a 'lock up and running quite like a tree. (Sadly, we fell short by scant minutes every time and never did see the bear mount drop.) I can't say I pvp'd a lot -- it makes me tense -- but I did enough to pick up a few of the more exceptional epics, including the ranking-independent arena gloves. My guild was too small (at the time, I think it's doubled in the last month oddly) at the time to fill up 25-man raids which is the only reason our cadre of extremely well-geared and well-played toons never regularly raided the high-end content. But the smallness forced us to PUG all that content (successfully I might add), forging alliances and server-friendships with dozens of other guilds and isolated strong players.

The fact that I play Horde-side on a low population PVE-RP server has a lot to do with our guild's successful record raiding with PUGs. Demographically speaking, RP servers tend to boast larger populations of adults seeking to avoid the immature babble and ganking endemic to PVP servers while playing Horde-side isolates you from the worst of the ERP idiocy exhibited by the Tolkien-wannabe Alliance elf lovers. PVE servers, being far easier to level on than PVP servers, also tend to attract both a greater percentage of players interested in getting quickly to endgame content and a greater number of "grown ups" with jobs, families and real lives that make the endless interruption of needless attacks unmanageable on a restricted playing schedule. A larger population of "adults" (I put that in quotes because if WoW has taught me anything it's that maturity in no way correlates with age) means there are a larger number of small real-life-friend guilds populated with players who take their gaming seriously: they put effort and mental acuity into gear, skills, stats, strategy and teamwork. And maybe most importantly they tend to be less horrific to listen to over voice chat (a pre-requisite of 25-man raiding and the one aspect of the game I most truly dislike).

Keeping two healer mains supplied with gold, consumables and all the mats for ridiculously expensive healing enchants is an enormous pain. The resto druid might be effectively unkillable (have you ever watched two duel?), but they are s l o w. So I rolled a hunter to be the family farmer because hunters are absurdly easy to level up. Then I got into a fight with my boyfriend who thinks hunters are despicable, so I rolled a warlock to spite him (which is completely dumb even inside a gaming context). But I can't just power level my characters, I get sidetracked by the game. I decided the hunter needed a rare pet, so around level 45 I took her into the Alliance starting zone to pick up a Draenei cat, which I then tediously ground up 24 levels or so (again, this was before the recent patch automatically leveled a pet to within 5 levels of the owner) gaining a few levels for the toon in the process. Having to co-level two pets with the nerfed pre-60 leveling XP meant that the hunter had to actively avoid questing in order not to outlevel the pets. When she hit 70 and I wanted to max out my stable slots I first went around training every pet skill (back when you had to do this kind of thing) from every region and level in the game just to cover my bases.

As crazy as the hunter saga was (keep in mind I only wanted a farming toon, so there was literally no point to my pet obsessions), the 'lock ended up being worse for me. Rolled as a loner with no need for instancing, I decided early on that she needed a kodo mount instead of the warlock horse which would necessitate finding a group to run DM. So when she hit 60, I ran around backfilling low level quests for TB rep which triggered my OCD. She has the Ambassador title now and somehow hit 64 without once questing in the Outlands.

Then there are the four bank alts. The main bank alt is a level one shaman I ran straight from the starter zone into Thunder Bluff. The shaman handles the bulk of the auctioning for the four high-level toons but storage is at premium, so I converted an abandoned lvl 22 warrior into overflow and long-term storage (can't just delete snowballs). The low-population of our server seems to wreak havoc on the Auction House, so I rolled two alliance bank alts in order to traffic lower-priced goods from one side to the other. I seeded a level 1 gnome with 400 gold by way of a level 14 shaman who swam all the way to neutral AH in Booty Bay. I ultimately never did use them to profit from the cross-faction AH, but that didn't stop me from logging in the gnome to play the Alliance AH. The gnome doubled her gold in about a month and it's fun to hop her back and forth from the mailbox.

Though I never invested in bags or bank space for the Alliance alts, the rest of the seven Horde toons have 18-slot bags across the board, with larger profession-specific or 20-slot bags where appropriate. That alone took about a week or more running dailies on all the 70s to gather enough the cloth and green gear for druid to disenchant to supply the priest. And of course the hunter had to collect the stupid spider thread because the healers kill too slowly. My toon family takes its crafting seriously. Maxed out crafting skills all around (including fishing), though only the enchanter aims for any sort of completeness in the recipe department. My capacity for grinding is seemingly endless, so although she has all the farmable BOE and enchants, she still lacks a handful of the more exotic BOP instance-specific recipes. While she has all the outlands rep enchants, she doesn't have any Timbermaw (I was still a noob back then and killed too many mobs in that tunnel until they Hated me and I never really recovered from that) or the final Thorium enchant, but she's Honored with Zandalar for those 'chants thanks to a half a dozen horrible PUG runs through ZG and a few weeks of 3-man'ing the fish boss in a failed attempt to get the turtle polymorph drop for some mage friends.

Because the Zandalar enchanting oils are still unique and situationally useful even in the Outlands, the druid regularly tags along Strat runs in order to disenchant the blue gear required by the recipes -- either running with my boyfriend's pali who solos the place for oddly valuable runecloth or with a fury warrior friend (now Arms) who's obsessed with the Baron mount. Subsequently, the druid is the proud owner of one dance-inducing Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and a mere thousand points shy of Exalted with Argent Dawn -- all despite having begun playing after the Burning Crusade and never once running those instances at level. (Though in her defense she ran everything else at level because I raised her before the 2.3 leveling nerf -- it's far easier to level as resto, which I stupidly did, by burning rest XP on an instance run.)

As if all that isn't enough to paint an accurate picture of how I played, I'll toss out some more tidbits. The three 70s all have epic flying -- the priest has a ray, the druid has flight form and the hunter has a generic gryphon because she, seemingly alone in my toon family madness, eschews rep grinding. All four of the over-60s have maxed fishing (before the 3.0 patch equalized spellpower the healers went through an enormous number of Golden Fishsticks), but only the druid has Mr Pinchy -- which, according to my Fishing Buddy addon, only required fishing up a scant 2983 objects to find. Then the priest wanted a non-combat vanity pet to match her epic mooncloth gear so she farmed up Exalted rep with Sporeggar for the baby sporeling.

The Sporeggar rep actually came in handy when I decided I needed a high level alchemist and had the priest drop her maxed out mining in favor of elixir mastery (healers are elixir junkies). In order to supply the new alchemist, the druid dropped her maxed skinning in favor of herbing, which is an absolute dream profession in epic flight form. The druid's skinning was useless anyway as it was simply a holdover from her leatherworking days, a skill she dropped just shy of Mastery because the guild didn't have an enchanter at the time. I quit just as inscription opened up, never had a blacksmith and the mage's engineering is still stuck at 300 because she's only 40-something, but the worst craft-grind I've played through was getting the 'lock out of the aquamarine stage of jewelcrafting -- I swear that trivialized both enchanting and the endless drum-making the hunter went through to max out her leatherworking.

Aside from the Fishing Buddy addon, most of my mods are pretty standard. Auctioneer, of course, Omen for threat, Recount for stats (it helps prioritize who to keep alive if you have some sense of a raid's top DPS contributors), Cartographer, Gatherer, Quest Helper for the babies. Grid is my preferred raid frame mod, so much so that I finally took a foray into LUA and rewrote the Lifebloom extension for that mod after it broke with the 3.0 patch. Oh, and Outfitter. The priest and the druid were respec'ing about twice a week (funded by the ever-efficient hunter's gold) and you have to keep the gear-per-spec mayhem straight somehow. The druid of course has three complete sets of epic gear for each form, not that she's ever been a terribly adept feral damage dealer. The priest had two entirely distinct sets of gear, one for healing and for damage, but the recent spellpower changes muddied the waters a tad. Now she simply has combinations for different healing situations (long term mana-intensive endgame raiding and a high-crit, large mana pool for the shorter fights of Kara, ZA and heroic badge farming). The hunter is only half-epic'd (Kara-ready by the old standards) and doesn't raid so she only carries around one set of gear (but don't think the bank isn't storing a ton of high agility gear in case she ever respecs Survival). The warlock, being only mid-60, is still in a combination of green and blue gear and I plan to restrain myself from crafting her any epic purples simply because I think it'd be interesting to see how difficult it is to progress from 70 to 71 without ever running an outland instance.

Hah. Did you see that? I have "plans," plans for future play. This brings us to an interesting point doesn't it? All that psychotic effort expended and for what? Simply to abandon the family with all their obscure achievements, hard-earned crafting skills, rare vanity pets, convoluted banking systems, fancy titles (Champion of the Naaru anyone?) and multiple gear sets? I mean, these toons don't play themselves.

It's difficult to say. I can't play the way I used to play, I know that much. Whether I'm capable of playing in some less obsessive way is not an endeavor I'm willing to risk undertaking at the moment. The toons can all take a good long nap for now. I mean, think of all the bonus rest XP they'll have if I ever wake them up.