Laeleiweyn of World of Lae has kicked off a series of Alt Appreciation weeks to “celebrate all the classes!”
This week, it’s the Shamans‘ turn in the spotlight.
Once upon a time, in early Cataclysm, I thought to myself that if I love Shamans so much, I should do the same thing with Shamans as I have done with Mages, and have a Shaman of each race that can take up that class.
And so to Kamalia the Tauren Shaman, my beloved first and main character, and Keshona the Orc Shaman, rolled in mid-to-late Wrath to re-play the totem quests before they changed, I added Kilauea the Troll Shaman, Kryztalya the Draenei Shaman, Kermione the Goblin Shaman, and Kjerstin the Dwarf Shaman.
I had so very many alts and new alts at that time, though, that I soon started to feel severe alt fatigue. I just didn’t even want to think about leveling so many characters, so I deleted the Troll and the Draenei and the Goblin, along with a number of other characters who I didn’t have any interest in playing anymore. The Orc lasted several months longer, for sentimental reasons — I’d made a story connection between her and my Orc Mage as daughter and mother — but really, her purpose for creation had long been fulfilled. I eventually re-rolled the Troll, as I am rather fond of the concept of a lava-slinging Troll Elemental Shaman named after the great Hawai’ian volcano, but she hasn’t even gotten off the Echo Isles yet. Goblin and Shaman, however, didn’t really gel for me. The Draenei was not my first attempt at a Draenei Shaman; somehow the combination of Draenei and Shaman never quite felt comfortable to me (no offense to my friends who love their Draenei Shaman). I was really excited, though, to play a Dwarf Shaman. That combination of race and class seemed to make a lot of sense to me, especially when the origin of Dwarf Shamans from the Wildhammer clan was explained. So Kjerstin got to stick around.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’d really like to complete the Double Agent achievement someday — and I’d like to do it “the right way”, leveling an Alliance character from the beginning. I’ve decided that I want my max-level Alliance character to be a class & role I’m thoroughly comfortable playing in max-level group content — that is to say, a Resto Shaman. I’m also more interested in Dwarf-related lore than in some of the other Alliance races. Thus, Kjerstin is now outfitted in heirlooms and waiting patiently for me to bring the Double Agent project off the back burner.
I hoped this week to play her at least enough to get from 27 to 30 and pick up dual-spec. Between my internet being disconnected for half the week, leveling with another character for my next Dress Up! post that I haven’t quite finished, and our out-of-the-house plans for tomorrow afternoon & evening, however, it’s not likely to happen. *sigh*
Kamalia remembers dinging 50 in the middle of a Sunken Temple run very vividly because it meant that she finally had enough talent points to get all the way to the bottom of the Resto tree and learn Earth Shield. She was already running dungeons as a healer, though I think BTH might still have been in his short-lived moonkin phase. She’d been running with this wierd self-concocted build with talent points scattered somewhat willy-nilly across all three trees. Once she could get Earth Shield, she went Resto and never looked back — though she was very, very glad when dual-spec arrived and she could now do questing as Elemental. Being a caster comes more naturally to me than being melee does, so for a long time, I wasn’t particularly interested in playing an Enhancement Shaman. In the past year, I’ve decided that I would like to try it, so I switched mini-Kam’s questing spec from Elemental to Enhancement. Now if I could only convince her to get on the boat to Pandaria, then I could actually learn how to use it!
Meanwhile, Kamalia is still collecting Titan Runestones. Her progress has been slow because I’ve only felt like running Pinnacle of Storms in Throne of Thunder and Vale of Eternal Sorrows in Siege of Orgrimmar — and I haven’t been doing them every week, either. Even though each week that passes will make finding a group to do the battling the Celestials part more difficult, I’m struggling to muster up the motivation to LFR. I didn’t run any Throne of Thunder LFR at all until all four wings were open, so perhaps next week, when the last wing of Siege of Orgrimmar opens to LFR, I will start feeling like LFRing again. Part of my lack of motivation to run Siege of Orgrimmar LFR is that I haven’t felt like spending enough time on the Timeless Isle with Kamalia to grind out the 50 Epoch Stones just to get the first Vision in Time quest… and yet I don’t want to go into the Orgrimmar part of Siege without it.
