Thursday, February 01, 2007

Altism

Kinless coined (to my knowledge) the term 'Altism' in a recent post of his. I think the term is appropriate, and I think I'm suffering from it as well. I'm just not in a hurry to get to 70. Sakuran is still sitting at 62, though she'll likely hit 63 tonight. I've certainly spent more time on my alts since my last post.

Repentant - 40 Priest
I managed to finally ding 40 with Repentant. I'd stopped soloing with him at 38 so I could have available to group with guild mates. Last week weekend we did a partial Uldaman run and worked on the elites in Stomgaurd. Dinged 40 halfway through there and promptly fell in love with Shadow Form. It certainly is nice to be able to farm with a rogue and a cat-form druid, keep everyone's health up with VE and compete with the rogue for top DPS. Having read about the rediculous amount of DPS Shadow Priests are putting out in endgame content I'm fairly certain that Repentant will never spec out of shadow. Oh, and I bought a horse. Is it just me, or are human mounts just 'meh'?

Laic - 51 Hunter
Haven't dinged on him in a while, but have started the Marhsall Windsor chain in BS and will eventually get in BRD for some fun. The more I play him, the less I like his build. He's currently 0/11/31, and I'm just not liking it. Don't get wrong, I love Wyvern Sting and Counterattack, but I'm not sure those two abilities justify the 29 other points I'm putting in the tree. Who knows...

It's interesting with the new BC items that are out there, I really find myself anticipating level 58. See, Laic will not be spending any time in the old end-game content, like Sakuran did. He'll ding 58 and say goodbye to Azeroth. I curious to see how much more of a difference replacing my gear will make with Laic. Sakuran replaced almost everything within two levels of hitting Hellfire Peninsula. I imagine Laic will just have a blast.

Sakuran -62 Rogue
I respecced Sakuran, again. I kept my primary tree pretty much the same, just swapped minor trees. She's now 0/11/42 which is the only build I've ever tried without points in Assassination. Lightning Reflexes is a fairly unpopular talent, but let me tell you why I picked it. Improved Gouge is nice for solo PvP, but I don't do that. I play on a PvE server and decline duos, only PvP I see is the BG's and perhaps a little arena at 70. In those venues it's unlikely that my gouge will last that long anyways as there's 9-39 other people out there who could be hitting my target. Improved Sinister Strike is great if you're using Sinister Strike. I actually spent some time wondering if it would make sense to drop two points there and forsake Hemo. My conclusion is that without 3/3 Aggression, Sinister Strike just doesn't do enough more damage to be worth while. I love having Riposte back, it's arguably my favorite talent point in the combat tree. Best damage per energy of any rogue attack plus the disarm.

With the additional 5% parry and 5% dodge, I'm looking at 45% mitigation before my armor kicks in. With Ghostly Strike I can increase that to 60% for 7 seconds out of every 20. With Evasion and Prep that can increase by 50% for 30 seconds.

My target build of 5/13/43 will put Vanish, Sprint, and Evasion on 3 minute cooldowns and Blind on a 1.5 minute cooldown. I think that the sheer amount of utility I will bring to the table will allow me to dictate the pace of most any fight I find myself in, PvE or PvP.

4 comments:

Whiffle said...

I have this theory (it's shared by many) that your main toon is, by it's very nature, an extension of yourself ... or at the very least, a projection of how one would WANT to be perceived(this depends on the situation, of course).

Some have a main and play that main almost exclusively.

I like you and and Kinless share this trait of Altism.

Question is, if having (and playing) a main almost exclusively can be seen as one's projection ... does that mean "suffering" from Altism mean we have many sides to ourselves we wish to express? Meaning more succinctly, are we schizophrenic WoW players?

Or is it just as simple a fact as that we want to experience WoW from all sides .. hehe.

s4dfish said...

Heh, interesting theory. And perhaps valid. I play one of the most solo friendly classes (rogue), my highest level alt is the most solo friendly class (hunter), and my third highest class could be one of the most group friendly classes if I hadn't specced him the way I did (shadow priest).

In RL I'm very introverted and am not very social. It is interesting that in class choice my toons seem to reflect that...

Kinless said...

Yowza.

In real life I'm deemed pretty quiet and introverted as well. Well liked, humorous, but quiet.

And some of the more extroverted personalities I know, a former guild master, our raid leader, and my friend here, concentrate almost exclusively on single characters.

That really is an interesting supposition here.

We're not deep, strong, and narrow currents, but rather shallower, milder, and yet wider rivers.

We are sublime curries to their Texas Chili Cookoff spice.

We've got alts.

/kek

s4dfish said...

"We are sublime curries to their Texas Chili Cookoff spice."

Okay, this made me LOL in RL.