I’m starting to understand how to leverage my alts to each other’s benefit, but an hour with a friend I met online who took me on a spree through Westfall (and who mined and crafted some nice new armor for my warrior) convinced me that there are limits to soloing a bunch of new characcters all at once. It really helps to have a whole range of characters, high levels who can make great gear and lower levels who can contribute raw resources. Plus the secondary professions, like cooking and fishing, are almost a waste to have on more than one alt, because you have to tediously train each one up – far better to let one alt be the cook, another be the fisher, and then just mail stuff back and forth. But even so, you end up with far more provisions than you can actually use – and though I tried, there’s not much market for spider kabobs at the auction house.
The Guild system makes more sense now. You can freely reallocate resources like raw materials, finished products, and food between high and low level chars with ease. However, the guilds my two main chars belong to are large faceless orgs whose chat boxes are full of useless chatter. The ideal guild would be one where i know everyone and whose membership is fairly small, tailored for heling people discover the game. I’d love to start one, but am wondering how many of you all would be interested in joining?
Here’s the basic charter of the guild i have in mind:
– invite-only, not public. new members approved by 2/3rds vote after we get the initial roster going. Cap on total membership at 2 dozen.
– all members are automatically highest rank in the guild – no “privates”. That way everyone has access to everything.
– set aside a night for battlefield play, plus have regular dungeon runs. Try to really sample the world and see the coolest stuff rather than focus on just grinding levels, money and equipment.
this would basically be a way for us to easily get new alts going and enrich our experience of the game overall. Most of us are Alliance but id like to create the identical sort of guild for the Horde side too (I have one horde character so far, Aelasha the female blood elf paladin, also on Staghelm).
Anyway, none of this is set in stone – I want your feedback. What do you all think? Whats your idea of the perfect guild? Or are you pretty much happy where you are and don’t see the need?
I think you’re a bit alt-crazy, actually. It works well for low levels like you’re exploring, but people spend far more time at level 80 than they ever did at 1-79. And once you’re at 80 doing heroics and raids with guildies, its hard enough to focus on one or two class or specs. I mean, I’m a good bear tank (the main tank for my guild), and I’m learning how to dps as a moonkin, but the low level warlock I’m leveling up slowly is nothing more than a distraction for when I get bored.
You’ll probably find that getting other people to join your guild that you actually like is harder than you expect, and getting rid of bad ones is easier than placing high hurdles for entry. And your idea sort of requires getting a bunch of people to go to the server of your choice.
Anyway if you’re ever on Dath’remar, send Kahg a whisper.
I’m in the oldest Horde guild on Uther, Legacy of Pain. Over the years it’s evolved from a friends and family guild to a high-end raiding guild to a low-end raiding guild that’s friendly to non-raiders. We have about two and a half dozen players and almost 200 toons. We had a mass exodus of high-end raiders at the start of Wrath of the Lich King because they felt the guild wasn’t progressing fast enough. Things change over time.
I agree with Jeffrey that you might not want to limit your options too much. You might not want to cap your membership, because later on you’ll have difficulties finding enough players to do some endgame content… for example, 25-man raids like Naxxramas. I’m not a raider myself, but I see the difficulties the guild leadership has when trying to find stable people to run with. People’s schedules vary so wildly that you might not be able to have more than 5 or 6 players on at a time.
Yeah, it’s easy to think of reasons to need alts. I started out with:
– A main (Sven, no longer with us)
– A leatherworker (Chisa, who took over)
– A tailor (Discountbags, the idea was to make money selling bags on auction house)
– A miner for the Eastern Kingdom (Kuu)
– An herbalist for the Eastern Kingdom (Ingrid)
– A miner for Kalimdor (Hyuga)
– An herbalist for Kalimdor (Akutso)
– A banker (Svensdottir)
As time went on, I found things I liked and things I didn’t like and the night elves took over (I run out of enthusiasm for the human stuff around the middle of Redridge and I’ve never been able to work up enthusiasm for the dwarf stuff).
I suspect you’ll also find things you like and don’t like and (since there is only a finite amount of time you can devote to the game) you’ll settle down on a small handful of characters.
As far as a guild goes, I’m one of those “casual” players. WoW has pretty much taken the place of plunking down in front of the TV for the evening; my idea of a good time is a quiet evening killing skinnables and surfing the web. In other words, all that annoying chatter on the guild chat channel is precisely the sort of thing that I’m looking for a guild. I’ve been with Knights Who Say Ni since aught five; I enjoy hanging out with folks that can put together a good string of Monty Python quotes to match any situation.
My wife is a more serious player. She raids and is involved in PvP. She’s also never happy with whatever guild she’s in and hops around a lot. I suspect the one is the cause of the other.
Huh. I hadnt realized the obvious in retrospect fact that you need to be on eth same server to have a guild. that basically blows my plan out of the water right there. ah well.
I guess its still too early in my progress for me to really understand what the needs are for non-newbies 🙂 I am finding that the alts helps maintain my interest; Aabde has been on a big run of late getting to 15 and touring the various locales (especially for that Dry Run quest to collect various alcoholic drinks). I’ve put Zzamba on hold but I’ll get back to him. I did get Gganda and Aelasha up to level six and out of the playpens, too – I’ll probably keep Gganda as a professional alt and not bother leveling him much beyond where he is now, because I am doing Loch Modan with aabde and dont want to repeat. Aelasha, being Horde, will fill in the gap nicely.
I’ve been invited to do deadmines every time i log on, of late. still havent yet because the munchkin refuses to sleep at night so i need to go AFK a lot. Hopefully i’ll get a chance to do it soon.
Too many alts can be a problem, especially if they’re all in the same level range, because after level 30 or so, the number of zones you level in is reduced by quite a bit. There’s only 3-4 zones for the entire level 30-40 range, 3-4 for 40-50, and you’ll likely go through all of them to some extent or another. (Sometimes not all of them. I’ve skipped Desolace more than once…)
And a lot of those areas are both Horde and Alliance, so you can’t get a “new” experience by swapping sides for a few days; the quests in Gadgetzan or Booty Bay are the same for everyone.
Fundamentally, the big problem with concentrating too much on crafting at low levels is that you’ll spend a lot of time getting low-level ingredients that a higher-leveled character could gather en masse with ease. At lower levels you’re scraping for a few gold here and there; my tank regularly rakes in more than 100g a play session, even without me TRYING to make money. (I do run an awful lot of quests, heh.)
All that said, they’re going to make it a little easier in the next major content patch (probably 2-3 months away, maybe less)… cheaper mounts available at lower levels to speed your traveling time. And it’s very quick, leveling these days, since they’ve buffed up the experience rewards for quests.
Guilds turn out to be less about trading goods (the auction house and trade chat manages for that!) as they are for making sure friends can stay in touch so that they can go do stuff together. At the highest level, there’s raiding, but even at lower levels there’s still dungeons and suchlike. You can also create your own chat channels, so even if your friends are in different guilds, you can still talk while doing stuff. And a lot of people in my guilds use Teamspeak or Ventrilo for casual chatting in the evening as they play…
I don’t mind playing on alts, but I still prefer my warrior. Mmm, heavy armor…
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