Author Archives: Donny Rokk
The Boost to 100
I snapped. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the most logical explanation I can come up with. I mean, why else would I throw everything away and just start over?
It all started, well, yesterday. My intent was to log in to WoW and get my chores done (don’t fool yourself, just because garrison gold missions got lobotomized doesn’t mean there aren’t still chores to do). But when I got to the character select screen, I saw it.
That damn 100. My boost. It twisted a dagger in my brain.
I’d posted numerous polls on Twitter, trying to come up with a class to use the boost on. I wanted to go Death Knight because, well, can you really have too many? In Legion that answer is yes (grinding artifacts on multiple characters will be a full time job) but in WoD? Hells no.
The more significant question was the one I always toss around. Why? Why boost another character? What was I going to do with this toon? Add him to the pile? Things had changed with the nerf to garrison treasure missions. No longer was it a benefit to have multiple characters racking up gold because, well, now there was no longer that option. Now, if you wanted those six or seven characters to make gold you had to do more than just click a few buttons. You had to USE them to DO something. That took time out of my day. Time I wasn’t willing to spend.
I was already questioning why I was going through the motions. On my Alliance server, I had a few hundred thousand gold socked away. On my Horde server, I had just over one million gold. I wasn’t raiding. I wasn’t doing anything but logging in, making gold, and logging off.
I think that’s when things went south on me.
Legion was coming out at the end of the month. Demon Hunters were going to be playable in about a week, but Legion was the goal. Was it too late in WoD to use the boost? What could I get done in a month?
I decided to find out.
I got a Tauren DK to 60 on a brand new server with no support classes. No sugar mama. Just the Big Bull, and a quickly rolled up AH toon. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have picked a PVP server if I wanted to make the most of my ability to farm things for gold. Oh well.
Like I said, I got him to 60, gave him professions, and boosted him. My seventeenth Level 100 character.
And now, he will be my sole focus until Legion. No dailies on my other characters. One toon. One server. One focus. My one Horde army.
Let’s see what happens.
How To Play Any Class
… well, almost.
With the coming of a new expansion, Blizzard decided (as they like to do) that they were going to tweak a few classes. Only in this case, “a few” meant “all”, and “tweak” meant “turning several of them inside out”. In a couple of cases (Survival Hunter and Outlaw Rogue), they changed them to the point that they were unrecognizable from the original class. Talents in general got reworked, major glyphs were wiped from existence, and players were sent back to the drawing board, scratching their heads.
It’s a situation that can be intimidating for casual players. They want to start playing their class again, but more importantly they just don’t want to suck. Be it a LFR raid or running in a dungeon group, no one likes being that one player on Recount who, given the numbers they’re putting up, is clearly playing the game using their feet.
Ask one of these people who seem to be using their in-game abilities by shouting at their keyboard what the problem is. If you get any response at all, you’ll probably hear “I don’t take it too seriously. I just play for fun.” What this means is that they don’t want to look up optimal rotations, or any rotation for that matter. They won’t look at Icy Veins or Wowhead or Ask Mr Robot, or any website at all that might come off as intimidating to them.
This solution may seem too complicated for the uber casual, but I assure you that it isn’t. This is one of those cases where the reward far exceeds the effort. What the Hell am I talking about? I’m referring, of course, to the enhanced version of Gnome Sequencer.
What this addon does is runs through a rotational macro for a certain class. It might not get you to top the charts, but at the very least it’ll keep you functional. I used the old version of Gnome Sequencer when I leveled my Mage from 1 to 100 and ran him through LFR. I’d never played a Mage before, but I found myself doing just fine on the charts despite not being able to name even three of my abilities.
Some people may call this “cheating”. Far from it. I would rather have someone who didn’t have a hot clue what they were doing using this addon, than having them fumble through the “right” way like a chimp manhandling a brand new rock.
Kephas does a great job explaining the addon, from installation to application. Check it out, download it HERE and hopefully you find yourself a productive member of your LFR.
Rokk Talk 