January 23, 2015

What do you Do if your Class isn’t Fun Anymore?

WoWScrnShot_111614_165034Back when I first started playing EverQuest, I only had one character. I adored my enchanter, and never dreamed that I would want to play anything else. In EverQuest 2, I also started out with one character. Eventually as time ran on and I started raiding, the needs of my raid guild came first, and I swapped over to a new character. Their needs (of course) changed over time, and I decided I was flexible enough to keep up with that, so my one main character soon became 5, and I swapped between them all. There was even a time where I was dual boxing on raids and playing two characters at once. Those were hectic times, and I quickly burned out.

Since that time, I have rarely (if ever) settled on just one character. I have over 20 characters in EverQuest 2, around 10 in World of Warcraft, 4 in WildStar, and multiples in pretty much every single MMO I have ever played, including but not limited to Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Fable, Rift, The Secret World, and Wurm Online. On one hand I quite like having a great selection of characters to play; on the other hand though, it’s very stressful (and expensive) to keep so many alts around. The decision of “who should I play tonight” is never a straightforward answer. There are so many variables that come into play it’s like an entire game on its own.

Now the point of this post. When WoD released, I started playing my priest as my ‘main’ character. It has been a character I’ve stuck with the ‘most’ if there was such thing. I had no desire to play any alts at all, and I found that a relief. Now that I’ve been level 100 for some time, I’m not sure I actually enjoy the class as much as other classes that I have played (like my shaman, I love my shaman). I’m not sure if it’s because I dislike the changes that have come to healers overall, or if there’s just something about my priest in specific that I no longer find appealing. So what do you do when this happens? Do you tough it out and continue to play that ‘main’ character of yours, or do you decide not to waste another minute, and start working on a more-favourable alt? For now I’ve decided to work on an alt of mine and see if I enjoy playing them any more than I did the priest. The downside to that is that my priest had so many more achievements than my other characters, it seems almost a shame to have to “start over” – even though I do realize that achievements are account wide. It’s not quite the same for me.