I'm all a-flutter...

Wow. I haven't even really started explaining the project, and I get a comment from my official Hunter Role Model, BRK. I've got to make sure I've earned it, I suppose.

So here is the part where I explain a little history behind my project, now that you've gotten to know me and we're all cozy.

I've always loved my alts, and no matter what class I've played as a main, I've always had several on the ol' back burner. After playing WoW for about a year and a half, I started to absorb some interesting positions that are taken on alts. Being the interesting and handsome blogger that I am, I will list them.

1. Pick a main, and stick with it. Alts are a waste of time; time you could be spending grinding/farming/raiding/getting loot on your main. They distract you and break your rhythm, and make it harder to get back in the groove, so to speak, with your main.
2. Alts are fun! They are a great way to unwind, especially when you have a main who the guild relies on, or who has a crucial raiding position, or who is a paladin and everyone knows they can't farm worth garbage and I only need two more Primal Fires for my FR set and god please make it stop (ok maybe I've been in that position, sue me).
3. Create Alts! Learning to play other classes enhances your ability to play your main, whatever its class. It allows you to see how game mechanics work from different perspectives and so the better you are at each class enhances your play with other classes.

The first opinion I see very often coming from hardcore raiders. They have a point, in that if you are supposed to play a hunter and your alt is a priest, you don't want to be fighting Aran and have instinctive moves towards your heal button...and oops, that's distracting shot, and you've pulled aggro, and you suck and people hate you and you die. It happens. It also does cut into time that could be otherwise spent more productively. For myself, if I'm worrying too much about economy of time, then I have ceased to play a game and begun playing a work simulator. No thanks.

The second view is very common, and I myself have played alts for this reason countless times. Alts can be a great way to blow off steam if you are just sick of getting beat down by Horde, or by Fel Reavers, or because if you have to run Arcatraz one more time for that lamp with my priest friend I will seriously lose it. (Just kidding Jinkes, I will help you run as many times as you want until you get it :D).

The final view is something that I developed after raiding more seriously with Zeph, and learning more about the game mechanics side of WoW. Around the time when I was doing MC for the first time, and I was asking things like "How much aggro do I generate with Cleanse?" and "Why do people make so much fun of ret pallies?" Some of the theory I found uninteresting (ever listened to three rogues fight about how to spend their tenth talent point for ten minutes? I have). Some of it is fascinating, and useful to boot (I knew about Fade, but hadn't known that you gain back all your lost aggro after it goes away or until you cast a spell).

Anyway, I started to think about how I play my paladin, and how the way other people play their classes in groups affects my effectiveness in the group, the success of the group, and the strategy on both the indivudual and group levels. And being the hands-on kind of guy I am, I decided to actually put some of these things into practice as I played the various alts I've created.

And let me tell you, it was like having a light switch flipped.

Zeph was getting easier to tank with (yes she's prot). Zafir needed to learn how to chain-trap. Zwift, god bless her, could put out dps but really needed some tanking gear as well. Maybe this is all frighteningly obvious, but I found that I just understood more about who was doing what and why in groups.

So that brings me to the Project. To reiterate, I've created nine horde characters. I pulled class-race combinations out of a hat, allowed myself one veto (I really wanted my hunter to be a belf for some reason), and by taking one race/sex combo out of the pot (orc females just don't sit right with me), to make everything even, I had my list. My friend Abby went through the same process. Then to make it officially anal-retentive, I mixed each of our lists so that we'd have class duos that were also completely random (other than sharing a starting zone). I agonized a bit over what to name all the characters (a minor obsession of mine, maybe I'll adress that later), and then we were good to go.

Up next: Day 1 - A story of a hunter and a paladin