Back 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.
I’ve got to say, don’t turn to shamans for fun in WoD. The Shaman toolkit is a mess. Our healing throughput is fine, but it’s really boring. Just a few spells account for most of the HPS. It’s not as extreme as PW:S on a disc priest, but pretty close. Totems were reduced to near-irrelevance with the expansion. So basically what you do in raids is spend several GCDs prepping a big chain heal cast then filling with a bit of single target heals while chain is on cool down. Repeat until dragon dies.
I’m not sure there’s a healing class that’s fun for me in this expansion, to be honest. They all feel half-baked right now.
I feel the pain on this. I played balance druid for years as my main but the class rotation kept getting more and more straight-jacketed by the eclipse mechanic, I didn’t play that character at all in Mists. I played shaman as my main for that expansion instead. If I were to ever come back to the game I don’t know what I’d play as even shaman is a poor shadow of what it once was, maybe I’d main paladin instead. It is sad to leave characters on the shelf like that but sometimes it’s not you at fault but the game’s…