Before coming back to World of Warcraft, I had to come to terms with some hard realizations. One of which was that I was not going to have the playtime I had before I left WoW. My free time isn’t quite as free as it used to be these days. That meant I wasn’t going to have time to play around with a bunch of alts. I wasn’t going to be hopping between realms to play different factions, in different guilds. The focus would be on one or two characters, on one server. Time optimization was key here.

My first step was to decide which realm I was going to play on. Earthen Ring was the easiest choice, since I could rejoin the Alea Iacta Est guild and community. I also decided that I was going to have to change my playstyle and get involved with the guild a bit more than I had previously. Social interaction would have to keep me involved in the game, both in and out of WoW, if this was going to work. From what I’d been able to pick up from podcasts, there hadn’t been anything really new going on in Mists of Pandaria during the year I had been away. It was going to have to be more than the pixels that would keep me interested.

Step two was to decide which characters would be the focus of my love and affection. Since I first started playing WoW all those years ago, my interest had shifted from Hunter, to Warrior, to Death Knight. I was still down with the DKs, and given that when I left WoW my DK’s outnumbered Hunters, I decided that Death Knight would be my primary class.

Now, which DK character would get called up to the Big Leagues? I settled on an orc DK on Kul Tiras because, unlike the DK already on Earthen Ring, he was already level capped. He also had maxed out his primary professions, and many of his secondary professions. His gear was adequate, and his transmog set was pretty sweet. I guess when it came down to it, numbers and stats aside, I picked him because he looked cool. So superficial.

This brought up a new dilemma. Where was I going to transfer my non-90 DK? When I left WoW a year ago, only one Death Knight was allowed per server. This meant I was going to have to transfer one DK off Earthen Ring, then transfer another one ONTO Earthen Ring. Fifty bones! Just for a snappy dresser! Vanity can be so expensive!

Then it hit me. I knew there’d been a few changes since I’d left WoW. One DK per server had seemed pretty silly, and we’re talking about a class that was now two expansions old here. Maybe Blizzard had come to their senses and lifted the prohibition. A quick Google search later, and I found that they had, ironically about a week or so after I left the game.

Figures.

So my new DK main was transferred to Earthen Ring. A name change later, some shuffling of the roster, and Herculano had found a new home, and I had found a new main.

Then I made another DK on the server, just because I could.