Could You Make it on Your Own?*

Say you're leveling an alt on a server where you already have a high level toon. Does everyone send gold to the lowbie?

When I started my priest, I did have my 80 Naomi (Violet) send her 100 gold to buy some bags and get started leveling enchanting. When Naomi (Lilac) reached 40, some cash for dual speccing came her way. Money well spent, indeed - I'd been leveling as shadow but wanted to heal, and she still switches between specs frequently.

But I never liked sending gold to a lower level character. I want them to make it on their own. I feel differently about crafted items though, and I have no qualms about sending gems in the mail from my jewelcrafter whenever my priest gets a new piece of gear with sockets.

At the moment I'm faced with the dilemma of the cold weather flying book. Certainly Violet (the 80 pally) could buy it for Lilac, but I don't think she will. I didn't actually know about the book until quite recently. To paraphrase a comment (on Wowhead maybe) that really stuck with me: there is a lot of detail in Northrend that Blizz put a good deal of effort into creating. You miss out on some of the scenery by flying precisely to where you need to be to do a quest.

I'm trying to do different quest lines my second time through, and I don't want to miss out. As some replies to the original comment pointed out, you do gain a different appreciation of zones when you see them from the air. Without a doubt I have a better grasp on the geography of some areas of Outland because I flew around them instead of walking. It's easier to see the big picture from a hundred feet up. But I figure I'll have plenty of time to come back and fly around when I get to doing Loremaster of Northrend.

What it boils down to for me is weighing the benefit of the expense against my desire for each toon to be self sufficient. Decent bags and dual speccing had enough of an impact on my enjoyment of the game that I went ahead and sent the gold. But Lilac's on her own for cold weather flying.

*This line from The Calling's Wherever You Will Go has popped into my head whenever I thought about this post!

Mixing it Up

With the release of Cataclysm somewhere on the horizon, a lot of WoW bloggers have been advocating finding new ways to play. Giving PvP or some RP a shot might help beat the pre-expansion blues, they say. For better or worse, I have a pretty high tolerance for repetition. I can eat the same thing for lunch for years, and I believe Naomiviolet, my pally, gained more than one level in her 70’s from only the Kalu’ak dailies and the Dalaran cooking and fishing dailies. Personality quirks aside, my play-style is also somewhat to blame there – some days my only chance to log in is while I’m eating breakfast before work. I’m not going to get very far exploring new areas or quests in 15 or 20 minutes, but I sure can crank out those dailies for my very own Pengu.

A month or two ago, something got me started reading blogs with an RP bent, it might have been the All the World’s a Stage column over at wow.com. With pen and paper, I wrote a couple of very short fic’s about my priest and found it rather entertaining. Still, I was completely unprepared for the blast I had yesterday writing about her ideal way to spend a hot, hot midsummer day. I’d done some general brainstorming the day before, but I still needed to think about where exactly she would go and just what she’d bring with her.

It was so fun to wander through the night elf lowbie area (not having any night elves, I hadn’t been there before), to swim around looking for just the right spot, and to line up just the right screenshots. I don’t play on a PvP server, so it’s not as if I normally worry about getting ganked constantly. Even so, it was amazingly calming to just play and not be on a quest, or trying to level this or that, or keeping four other people alive in an instance. Of course, I did choose a relaxing locale, but its affect on me-the-player was so unexpected!

I didn’t think I needed a change, but it looks like “they” were right after all.

A Trip to the Lake

(In response to Anna's prompt Friday Five-Hundred: Midsummer Sun. And, hello!)

A sweltering summer day sends Naomi off to pack a picnic basket and head to Lake Al’meth in Teldrassil. Arriving before the strongest heat of the day, she spends the morning swimming in the forest lake and following the flighty wisps as they dash about.

Freshly baked bread, slices of dwarven mild, and some smoked sagefish make the perfect lunch to be had beneath one of the huge trees near the lake. From her shady resting place, Naomi fishes away the afternoon, sipping on a blend of Rumsey’s Rum, wintersbite, and mint – an Azerothian mojito. Since a warm drink just wouldn’t do, she always keeps a small dagger, icy chill enchanted, in the bottom of her picnic basket.

When the sun starts to sink beneath the green and violet leaves of the trees, the priest builds a campfire to roast her freshly caught smallfish. For dessert, she digs out a slice of homemade cherry pie from the picnic basket. Content, she leans back and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, twilight has fallen and she knows that she can stay no longer. The blissful day over, a shadow of melancholy briefly passes over her heart upon reflecting that she spent it in solitude. A whistle brings her sweet elekk, Jingles, back from where he’d been frolicking along the shore. Together they begin the journey home.