It ain't easy

Altoholism isn't something to laugh at folks. Sure, we may not be the absolute best players, but there is a big difference between playing one or two characters all the time and switching between 5 or more. In my case it's 9, soon to be 10, although the Hordies haven't been getting much love recently.

See, when you switch characters you may be switching to one you haven't played in a while. Maybe you had been working on one particular character for a while, or maybe you just switched to one that had been at the bottom of the rotation for a while. Either way, you will find yourself having to relearn to play that character all over again.

My most recent experience with this was on my hunter running around killing things in Silithus. I'm used to melee characters and just hacking away at things, then going back to town and repairing my equipment. It wasn't until I was in the middle of a fight and I had stopped shooting that I realized I was out of ammo.

Now if I regularly played a hunter and was in the habit of checking my ammo every time I was in town, this probably wouldn't have happened. Luckily the mob was almost dead and it didn't take long for my pet to finish it off, plus I was right next to town so a quick visit to the vendor solved my problem.

The point is, it's not always little things like forgetting to buy ammo, or runes of teleportation, etc. It's forgetting about skills that you don't use often, but then would have come in handy in that last fight, except that you didn't remember until after making the corpse run. Sure you get more experience with all the classes, but you it's no the same as if that was the only character you played.

I guess it's a trade-off. On the one hand you can be extremely good at playing your class of choice, but maybe not so knowledgeable about other classes. On the other hand you can have good knowledge of all the classes, but you probably won't be at the same skill level on them as the players that don't play alts.

Luckily for me, to solo through content you really don't need to know everything about your character. I find what works and stick with it, and then if something arises where a skill I forgot I had could have gotten me out of a bad situation, I file that away and hope I remember it later if it happens again.

I really don't think I could stick to this game if I had to only choose one class. In the beginning I was a rogue, and it was fun at first, but I started to get antsy about trying other classes. It's not that rogues aren't fun to play, but they can't throw fireballs, or tame pets, or turn into bears.

I had to try them out for myself, and while some may think it got out of hand, I think I'm where I want to be. I have one character of each class, half Alliance, half Horde. Some of them aren't as advanced as others, but I will just continue to work on them.

There is still a lot I want to do in this game, and some of it is specific to a certain class, but may require a certain skill or level to complete. So I will keep leveling everyone and hopefully accomplish those goals if I don't burn out first.

Oh, and soon I will have a bunch of achievements to do as well. They always find new ways of keeping people addicted.