Or: Why I’m playing a shaman.
It’s always best to start with introductions.
I’ve been playing WoW for a little over four years, during which time I’ve gone through 3 “mains” and leveled an embarrassing number of alts. When I first bought the game, a fair number of my friends were leveling on Zul’Jin, so, naturally, I made a character there–that is to say, I leveled a slew of characters to teh early teens before getting bored and restarting, eventually settling on a Night Elf Hunter. I really enjoyed the leveling part of the game, but there wasn’t much to do at 60 back then, particularly if your guild had only a handful of active players and a pretty random assortment of classes. Couple that with the fact that Hunters were pretty much the least popular class for instances at the time, and you can guess why I’d reroll a priest.
Playing a priest got me invited to a lot more groups than hunter, and I eventually caught the attention of a guild who was working through Zul’Gurub. I ran ZG with them a couple times, and eventually left my guild of real life friends to go raiding. I could write a number of posts about my experiences raiding, but for now, I’ll just say that in the space of roughly seven months, we went from clearing half of ZG to fighting Nef in BWL before the stress of a hardcore raiding schedule finally caught up with me and I left. One of my friends got me an invite to a more laid back raiding guild, who was about halfway through AQ40. I ran a couple of raids with them, but this was only a couple months before the Burning Crusade was coming out, and my crappy work schedule, coupled with the number of players who were taking break from raiding meant that I was never really an active member.
After the release of the expansion, however, I was one of the few priests left in the guild, and I found myself running Kara. Unfortunately, my guild was a victim of the transition from 10-man to 25-man raids. We didn’t have the numbers or class balance to transition from Kara to Gruul’s Lair, and the guild ended up dissolving. Luckily for me, my real life friends were still playing, and their guild had grown and become more active, in part because Blizzard had been adding more content for people who didn’t raid.
For a while, I kept instancing with my priest. I worked on rep, finished off tailoring, leveled the slew of alts I had lying around, and made a shaman. I wasn’t really planning on replacing my priest, I had just always playing shaman (I had leveled two to the early 30’s before the expansion before deleting them for more space for my alliance alts), and since no one else in my guild was leveling one, I figured I’d get one to 70, if only to say I did it. My guild was heavy on priests at the time, however, and many of our early Kara runs had four of ‘em. Which is awesome for CC, but not great for gearing people up quickly, and so I started taking my shaman on runs in part because it meant having virtually no completion for gear.
Over time, though, I’ve come to realize that shaman is a lot more interesting than priest. Being able to go from melee dps to healer is enough to get my attention, to say nothing of the utility that totems bring, or how awesome earth shield is, or how happy I am to finally be able to use a shield after playing a clothie.
