Last night, after a couple of nights of diligent and agonizingly slow questing and an obnoxious number of deaths, Kimona, my Blood Elf Priest, finally dinged 20. She got her Inner Focus and her Blue Hawkstrider and a whole raft of new spells that I’m probably not going to be learning how to use any time soon. Kimona essentially SuicideKing-ed her place in my complex and ever-shifting questing priority queue to get from 16 to 20 NOW, before I spent any more time dallying with the Alliance; with Cataclysm and the option to have Tauren Priests on the horizon, she probably won’t see any more non-Banking, non-Holiday play time unless I get really bored some day.
Along with Kimona’s “Level 20” acheivement, I would have also unlocked the “Master of the Classes: Level 20” account-wide acheivement… if the fabled account-wide acheivements actually existed. Now that I’ve acheived my goal of getting at least character of every class to Level 20, I can go back to the Dark Side SAN and work on another of my WoW goals: getting at least one character of every race to Level 20.
Does that make me a Generalist on the Generalist — Specialist Continuum Lissanna posted about the other day?
I’m not so sure. I know I fall somewhere in the middle, but I’m not sure even I could say which end of the continuum I truly favor.
On the one hand, I love the richness and variety that WoW offers, and I want to Try It ALL!
I want to experience all the races, all the classes, all the professions, all the zones.
When I first started playing WoW, during the summer after BC came out, I thought that with ten races and nine classes, I could very neatly try everything — all the races and all the classes — and only have to double up one class. I matched what I understood of the character of each race with what I understood of the character of each class.
Since I already had a Tauren Shaman, my Druid would have to be a Night Elf.
Since Undead and Warlocks were both evil, my Undead should be a Warlock and my Warlock should be Undead.
A Blood Elf, with their affinity and addiction to the arcane, was the perfect choice for a Mage.
A Dwarf would be a great Paladin.
A Draenei would be a good Priest.
Which left a Troll or an Orc to be a Hunter, and Rogue or Warrior for the Gnomes and Humans.
I forget, now, which class I’d decided to double up.
Then I totally fell in love with the Tauren and Thunder Bluff, and that was the end of my tidy little list. Some time later, I also became enchanted with the Blood Elves and Silvermoon. I was tickled that with only those two races — Tauren and Blood Elf — I could play every class in the game, with only one class overlapping*, something that no other combination of same-faction races could do.
*(Hunter; since every race can be a DK, that class “didn’t count”)
But I still wanted to play a character of every race at least through their racial starting zones — which, after getting the first mount was dropped to Level 20, would also be the point where they’d get the slow version of their racial mount, even better!
My characters between them have all the professions except Jewelcrafting. The character who was doing JC decided to drop it in favor of Engineering for the RP value of Tiger Eye Goggles, aka glasses, and though I do want to have a JC again, I haven’t decided yet which existing character it should be.
On the other hand, when it comes to raiding or pursuing achievements, I focus almost exclusively on one character, Kamalia, my first and still best-loved toon. Kamalia was my only 80 for a very, very long time, and even though I now have another 80 who is in 4/5 T9 from running Heroics (and who has gone to a handful of Raid-of-the-Week PuGs), as I look to get back into regular raiding (very soon, I hope!) it’s going to be Kamalia who will be looking for a raiding spot. There was a time that Bear Tank Husband was running VoA and Ulduar in both 10 and 25 man sizes with three characters every week. I only have enough energy and attention span for raiding to do it on one character: Kamalia. While I’ve been on hiatus from raiding for the past few months, of my two characters who can get Frost Badges, it’s only been with Kamalia that I’ve made any great effort to get them. With a few exceptions, it’s only Kamalia who pursues achievements. Only Kamalia collects pets, only Kamalia collects mounts, only Kamalia collects tabards, only Kamalia is serious about cooking and fishing, only Kamalia really cares about reputations, only Kamalia will be Loremaster.
A few weeks ago, before I started this blog, Big Bear Butt asked, “are you stuck on a particular class?” It seems to me that focusing on the same class over and over again is another way of being a Specialist. By playing with different races, which have diffferent starting zones and racial abilities — and for Hunters, different availability of starting pets — and by perhaps playing with a different spec every time you roll a new character of your favored class, you get to be a Specialist in all the nuances of that particular class.
Because I have a character of every class in the game already using just Tauren and Blood Elves, as I think about what class to play for all the other races, knowing that most of these characters will never make it past Level 20, my decision mostly comes down to
a) during the leveling process pure DPS classes kill things faster than healing-capable classes,
b) I prefer doing ranged DPS rather than melee DPS because I still can’t quite get my head around the whole moving-with-the-mouse idea, and
c) what classes were fun?
Thus, I find myself choosing the same two classes over and over:
Hunter for those races that have Hunters but not Mages (Dwarf, Night Elf, Orc)
Mage for those races that have Mages but not Hunters (Human, Gnome, Undead)
Two non-Blood Elf races have both Hunters and Mages, the Draenei and the Trolls. My Draenei was originally slated to be a Mage, until I decided that my “flagship” character for SAN had really ought to be a Shaman, to better represent my raiding Main. My Troll was originally slated to be a Shaman, until I decided that I’d rather wait on rolling a Troll until Cataclysm, when I can make a Feral kitty/bear Troll Druid to complement my existing balance/resto Tauren Druid.
Perhaps it might be most precise to say that I’m a Generalist who has one Specialist character?