Starting from scratch. Naked is scratch, right?

I blame Gimli.

No, I’m not talking about the bastard brother of some hobbit. Gimli is a very Icelandic down in Manitoba (that be in Canada for all you non-Canuckleheads).

I happened to find myself driving through Gimli one day, and as I was leaving down I saw a big ol’ sign on the side of the road. It said “Odin Green”. A good name for property in a Viking town.

“Sounds like a football player’s name,” I thought to myself. Next thing I knew, I was saying the name Leeroy Jenkins-style.  “OOOOODIN… GREEEEEN!”

As I drove home, the name stuck in my head. That’d be a good name for a WoW character. Probably a Warrior, given the Viking-esque image I had in my head everytime I said OOOOODIN… GREEEEEN. But another toon? Another warrior?

I let the idea slide.

Then the whole raiding thing happened and I was hit with another idea. Since raiding was something new for me, why not go all new with it?

I’m a casual player, but I’m not a terrible player. I do my research and find things and ways to not suck. I’m not min-maxing, but I’d rather be a functional part of a group rather than the anchor. I’ve got tools to keep me in the fight.

Why not put that to the test?

So that’s when the idea came to me – take a brand new character, a class I’d never played before, and go from killing rats at Level One to killing Archimode at Level One Hundred.

It felt like it worked on a few levels. It got me out of Draenor for awhile. It had me playing a character I didn’t have multiples of. New style, new format, new everything.

I’d only played a cloth class once. I took a warlock to level 30 and ended up deleting him. But I’d never played a Mage before. I heard they weren’t that tough to roll with, so I decided I’d go for it. I’d take a Human Mage from the starting zone of Stormwind to the end raid on Draenor.

Naming him was easier than deciding on what class to choose.