On Flexibility, Emotional Attachment and Mister Spock. With Ice Cream!

"Thus, flexibility, as displayed by water, is a sign of life. Rigidity, its opposite, is an indicator of death." - Anthony Lawlor, A Home For The Soul

Those of you who follow this blog closely and spend just a little too much time obsessing over it (and you know who you are) may have noticed that there has been a distinct lack of Paladin related posts around here recently. In fact, looking back at my archives the last post that talked about Paladins specifically was way back in July.

There is a good reason for this: I'm not raiding with my Paladin any longer.


A DISCLAIMER

You know, I started this post with the best of intentions: A short, to-the-point post about what I've been up to in WoW and why I'm not posting about or playing my Paladin. Half-way through it turned into something completely different. I guess you and I will both find out what the hell I'm talking about when we get to the end because I have no idea where this is going any more than you do. Maybe there will be Ice Cream and Whisky. Goodness, that would be nice, wouldn't it?


SHAMAN: The new Battle Medic? At least this one's actually a Dwarf.

With Dragon Soul on the PTR, I was approached by our Guild Master who asked me a question that took me by surprise: Would I be willing to switch my raiding main in order to help with raid healing? It turns out that our guild is so full of main-spec Holy Paladins that it is a little bit like a large, overfilled doughnut—taking a bite of which will get Holy Paladin goop all over your shirt. And that shit is hard to get out.

In the interests of trying to avoid a 10-man raid with three Holy Paladin healers—which would strain just about anybody's tolerance for egocentrics in a raid, I imagine—I switched my Raiding Main to my (then) newly 85 Restoration Shaman.

My GM's reasoning was pretty straightforward: Dragon Soul looked to be a very raid healing intensive series of fights and even with the strength of the 4.3 Holy Radiance changes it seemed as if our normal Paladin/Paladin/Priest setup wouldn't be ideal. This was made especially clear when we found that some of the fights would require only two healers, and neither Paladin had a DPS off-spec. My Shaman provided my GM with a different option.

So, the week before Dragon Soul opened I was running through Firelands, healing on my Shaman. I admit, it felt odd at first. Even though I had levelled her completely through dungeons I was woefully unprepared to take her on a raid. My understanding of the subtleties of the class were at a very basic level, my UI was not set up properly and her gear was, shall we say, eclectic; an odd mix of items cobbled together from every possible source and not powerful enough to even qualify her for the new Looking For Raid feature.

She's nicely geared now, although there are still some problem spots due to some very bad loot luck in Dragon Soul. I'm not sure why, but in our raids the only Tier Token that ever drops is Vanquisher tokens—we literally had a new Death Knight alt get his 4 piece in a single night, and the only reason he got each token was because all the other Vanquisher eligible players already had theirs. Meanwhile, I, along with a lot of other people in my raid group, are organizing strange voodoo rituals to influence the gods to drop something—anything that we can use. Now, I know that no one really cares about other people's loot problems, but that night made me want to roll a Druid just so I could actually get a drop.

THE SPOCK PRINCIPLE: The Needs of the Many, blah blah blah

Imagine, if you will, a dwarf lying on a brown leather couch, a worried expression showing through his beard and his armour poking holes in the leather and setting it smouldering because the shoulder piece is on fire, which for some inexplicable reason is perfectly normal. Next to him, seated at a comfortable armchair is a bald man with a white goatee neatly trimmed into a point and a notepad on his lap. He leans over towards the dwarf, and in a thick German accent asks, "Und how doez ziz make you feel?"

A long time ago I wrote an article entitled What Makes a Main?, in which it I talked about the emotional connection to a character as the fundamental element that determines which character would be a person's "Main Character". While that criteria certainly wouldn't apply to everyone (there are people who change their mains constantly due to many different factors, for instance), but it is absolutely true of me. My Holy Paladin is my main because I am emotionally invested in him, both in terms of character as well as the play-style and mythos of the Paladin. My Paladin just feels right.

So when Mylindara asked me to switch for the good of the raid, I felt a little conflicted. From a dispassionate point of view he made a lot of sense because even while temporarily undergeared, my Shaman brought something to the raid that we were lacking. Emotionally, however, my main is still my Paladin, and is the character that I am most interested in playing and progressing. Not only that, but I enjoy healing on the Paladin more than the Shaman.

So the real question that I, or anyone in a similar situation must ask themselves is: When does the needs of the group trump the desires of the individual? Should we always be selfless in order to help the group, or is it alright to say "No" so we can play the game the way we want to? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one when the ultimate goal of the game is individual entertainment? What would Spock do?


FLEXIBILITY: When is it okay to take one for the team?

I think the answer greatly depends on what type of player a person is. I believe that there are two extremes to this question where the answer is obvious and unchanging, and then there is a vast grey area in between where a large percentage of the player base sits.

The Activity-Centric people amongst us will look at this question as absurd because min-maxing every aspect of an encounter is fundamental to their play-style. Changing their character to bring that one extra buff or cooldown to the raid in order to gain any advantage—regardless of how small—is far more important than the attachment to a certain character or class. For them the emotional need is to progress at a personal level, and which character they do it on is only a secondary consideration; a tool used to achieve the desired end.

"Please don't shoot me"

The other extreme is the Character-Centric people. These folks form an incredibly strong emotional attachment to their characters, and asking them to switch their Main Character—or even to change their character's hair-style—is like asking them to shoot a puppy. It'll break their heart and the aftermath will be very messy to clean up. Not to mention that I like puppies, and well, shooting them is just wrong. I mean, look at those eyes.

The vast majority of us, I think, fall somewhere in the middle. I have always considered myself more of the activity-centric type, but again, if I am to be truly honest with all of you, I tend to let myself get attached to my characters quite a bit and was a little bit annoyed when I was asked to not bring my preferred character to the main raids. There is a constant battle raging between the two sides when I'm making the decisions as to what to play.

In the end I made the change and the raid team is the better for it, I think. We have a good core of raiding healers now, with a lot more flexibility than we would have had otherwise. I may not be playing the character I would like, but the decision was right because the activity, in this case, was more important than my personal need to play the character.

And I suppose that's the fundamental answer to the question of when it's okay to make a personal sacrifice for the team, and the answer is a lot more simple than the length of this post would suggest. Simply put, if the goal is more important than which character accomplishes it, make the change and be happy about it.

Now, as I'm writing this I'm thinking to myself, "Damn, you've really outdone yourself in stating the blindingly obvious. Should we do a section talking about the different ways water is wet? Way to spend 1400 words talking drivel, dumbass".

It is a pretty straight-forward concept, but I think that everyone is going to approach it differently and everyone is going to have a different reaction to being asked to change the way they like to play the game. It all depends on the balance between the activity and the character within a person.

For me, the activity of seeing our raid progress smoothly won the day over my own desires to play the Paladin. So for now at least, the Battle Medic is a Shaman.

Have you ever been asked to play a class or role that you didn't prefer so your group could move forward? How would you react? What sort of balance to you have?


OH MY GAWD, WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THIS POST AGAIN?

Oh yes, Ice Cream and Whisky. Excellent.

There ya go. Ice Cream and Whisky all in one.
It doesn't get much better than that.

Scribblings of the Clueless Noob

"There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life." - Henry David Thoreau

Earlier this month I wrote a rather long essay on the feelings of burn-out that I've been dealing with lately in which I offered ten different things to do to combat them. For those of you with the fortitude to actually read through all 3300 words, I congratulate you; that post was a monster.

Like many people, I don't always follow my own advice. As I was writing that post and thinking about the different things I could do to clear my head and find a happy place with WoW again, I realized that at the time I wasn't really doing any of them. Oh sure, I was playing a different game and taking a bit of a break—which was what the post was all about, after all—but the other things I talked about were merely theoretical. So I figured that I should put a few of those ideas into practice and see what happened.


SCRIBBLING ON THE CAVE WALL

I'm not sure anyone has noticed but I have been on a bit of a posting renaissance lately. This post marks the fourth post in January, two more than I managed in the whole of October, and I still have two more posts that I would like to get done this month. It seems as if my brain has a WoW infection and has been using my fingers to vomit all over my blog. Gross.

I started out this year with the idea of getting Battle Medic back to where I'd like it to be by posting smaller posts more frequently. Ideally I'd like to get back to doing about ten to twelve posts per month, so the frequency is better but still not where I would like it. The length, on the other hand, I've failed utterly and completely. So far in 2012 (not including this post), I have written over 5700 words and seem completely incapable of keeping a post under 1000. I guess we'll see how this one turns out, although with the amount of things that seems to get added in as I go I'm not hopeful—I'm already at 400!

Either way, writing about WoW is a wonderfully self-sustaining process.  I've got more to write about WoW because I've been writing about WoW, which in turn makes me more interested in WoW and makes it easier to write about WoW. It's a positive feedback loop that has done wonders in making me feel better.


LOOK AT ME! I'M THE CLUELESS NOOB AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DPS CHART

Virtually every second of my WoW experience at maximum level has been spent healing. My first max-level character was a healing priest, the main that I ended Wrath with was my Holy Paladin and now, as Cataclysm draws to a close I've added a Resto Shaman to the mix as well. I love healing, and I have no plans to stop doing it any time soon, but in retrospect, my entire WoW career has been extraordinarily one-dimensional.

Oh sure, I've fooled around with other roles. I even managed to get my warrior tank into a couple of raids back in Wrath—an experiment that ended rather badly, I might add. Retribution, likewise, was used for levelling and then discarded upon reaching level 85. My Paladin has been unable to kill anything efficiently by himself ever since. I am the guy that always hears, "Oh, Fannon's on so we've got a healer" when he logs into Mumble. Simply put, healing has been the absolute focus of my attention for a long time now. And even as experienced as I am I still find it challenging and realized there is a lot for me to learn and improve upon.

However, doing the same thing for two years can get a bit monotonous. Imagine eating the same sandwich for lunch everyday for two years; I don't think you'd end up looking forward to the noon hour if that same damned ham on pumpernickel with yellow mustard was the only option. I think at least some of the reason that I was feeling burnt-out in the first place was because every time I was in a group setting I was doing the same thing that I always did.

And so I decided to do something completely different—for me, at least. I dusted off my badly geared, poorly understood Enhancement off-spec on my Shaman and took it for a spin in some dungeons and the raid finder.

Oh my, what a different world. As a healer, I have the luxury to say away from the boss where it's relatively quiet and I can play undisturbed. Not possible in melee range. It's wonderfully chaotic; at times the sheer amount of spell effects that are going off completely obscure both the mob I'm hitting and my character.  It feels odd trusting the health of the party to someone else, and I get damned nervous when my health dips. But then I realize that I'm only DPS, so I'm expendable, which makes me giggle to myself and want to hit the boss even harder.

I suck at it though. Yes, I am that noob at the bottom of the DPS meters in that heroic you're doing. Yes, I am in your dungeon group wearing that gear, horrible as it is. You'd better believe that I'm the one standing in fire or accidentally pulling mobs or doing any one of a hundred things that would make me pull my hair out if I were healing me. Yup, that's me.

And yes, I'm laughing the whole time I'm doing it. Sorry.

But I'm really enjoying whacking things with my giant beer steins. I'm enjoying the new challenge and the new responsibilities (or lack thereof) that come with dealing damage. It's given me something completely different to look forward to when I log into the game.

I'm still raiding as a healer, and it will always be my first, passionate love. But, if I can encourage infidelity to the game itself, why not cheat on my preferred role, too?

After all, unlike real life, in the gaming world, monogamy isn't good for the soul.

This post weighs in at 1029 words (not including the opening quote or this postscript). Close enough to call this one a win for brevity.

This Week in Raiding: Dragon Soul First Impressions

Alrighty, now that the 50,000 Words project is done (and so help me if I see another screenshot again...) I can get back to writing about the game that I've been photographing for the past month. I would hate for Battle Medic to be known as just a screenshot blog.

There will be no screenshots in this post. I think I'm imaged out for a while.

As everyone knows, Patch 4.3 dropped Tuesday. Between a cranky computer that chose a horrible time to have a software glitch, a cranky baby that was overtired and dealing with a cold, and a cranky wife dealing with said baby, I didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to run the new content. I did manage to run End Time twice, once on my Paladin and once on my Shaman. End Time was a lot easier than I was expecting; very straightforward mechanics and what felt like low damage. I didn't really feel pushed all that much on either of my healers. End Time, at least, feels a lot easier than the Zandalari heroics and I am okay with that.

Last night Mountain Top went into the new raid instance Dragon Soul on Normal Mode for the first time. Our realm already has a number of 8/8 guilds, which made me optimistic that we would be able to get through it without too much trouble. From what I've heard, Dragon Soul is a lot easier than Firelands was, so long as the raid can manage the various different mechanics.

Without extensive preparation we managed to get three bosses down before we wiped to the Real Life boss. We spent about an hour and a half in a brand new, never-before-seen raid instance and yet still managed to easily one-shot Morchok and Yor'Sajh the Unchallenging Unsleeping. In addition, Zon'ozz fell after three or four pulls once we got the ball rolling, so to speak.

That's kinda nuts, really.

I really like the new 5-mans; they are short, well paced, absolutely stunning to look at and have the right amount of trash, I think. The boss encounters are easy enough to explain to a random group, and the entire dungeons can be completed quickly enough that they can be farmed without too much hassle. Which is what they are for, after all.

A raid, on the other hand, has to last. There is absolutely no reason that bosses should be killed on the first pull on the first attempt in the first week of a new raid - at least not by the non-hardcore crowd. Hell, some guilds have already 9-manned Morchok.

Now, as a disclaimer, we haven't pulled 5 of the bosses yet, so this may be premature, but I'm really worried that Normal Mode Dragon Soul is going to be easy enough that we'll blow through it in a week or two. And if this raid can be cleared by casual raiding guilds like Mountain Top so quickly, then unless the Heroic Modes are brutally, butt-clenchingly hard, the next five or six months until Mists of Pandaria comes out are going to be boring as hell. How long until we're through Heroic Modes and thinking, "What now?"

Mountain Top has never been a Heroic Mode guild - we have trouble getting the same people together each week and even more trouble getting a decent amount of time to raid. Five hours a week is about all we can manage on a good week, and quite often we're struggling to get more than two or three. With those time constraints, Heroic Modes always seemed out of reach. Now, however, with Dragon Soul it seems like Blizzard has lowered the bar for a guild like ours to get into them.

End game content in WoW has always been gobbled up extremely fast by the top-end guilds, and short of extremely restrictive gating mechanics (releasing the raid slowly over time, as they did with Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel) that's never going to change. Now, it seems as if Blizzard wants everyone to burn through the content just as quickly. I think this is a mistake.

When the Firelands were nerfed, I brought up the idea of the Tourist, which was received with a bit of controversy. Personally, I thought that the Looking For Raid difficulty level was going to be tailored for those people who couldn't or wouldn't run normal raids and just wanted to see the content to experience the story, but now it feels as if the Normal Modes are going that way as well.

Tonight we go back into Dragon Soul to see the remaining encounters for the first time. I would be very disappointed if we don't end this week at least 6/8, and wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Deathwing falls. Really, the only sticking point is how much time we'll have before we have a raider needs to leave in order to deal with the far more difficult fights with girlfriends, wives, babies and work.

It will be interesting to see where the numbers are in a few weeks. Will there be far more Guilds at 8/8 than Blizzard was expecting? And if Guilds do burn through the content as quickly as I suspect that they will, what is that going to do to the subscriber retention between now and Mists? Or, with the advent of the Yearly Subscription Pass does Blizzard even give a crap anymore, since the bribe of a pretty My Little Pony means that people aren't going anywhere and Blizzard has a free ride until the next expansion.

Time will tell, I guess.

I will say this, though, on a more positive note: I am enjoying the new content. Aside from the ease, I think the mechanics of the new bosses are quite cool, the scenery is beyond gorgeous and the sheer amount of lore that is stuffed into the raid and new heroic dungeons is amazing and engaging. I will be writing a lot more about the good things that Blizzard has given us in the coming days, I'm sure.

Catching Up

"The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings." - Lewis Carroll

Unless this is your first visit to Battle Medic (and if so, welcome!), you are aware that the month of April was dominated by the 20 Days of WoW Challenge. I wasn't really able to do much posting on topics other than the challenge itself, so I figured that it might be nice to pull up a chair, pour ourselves a drink and catch up on what's been going on.


LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE CHALLENGE

"Reading the quotes you chose for the beginnings of these posts is awesome sprinkles on a cupcake of win." - Glorwynn of Heavy Wool Bandage via Twitter

Of all the comments and reactions that my 20 Days of... blogathon generated, the one quoted above is my absolute favourite.

I learned many things during the last month while I tackled the Challenge. I learned that I like writing and posting everyday. And even though I didn't accomplish my goal of posting each and every day, I like the feeling of frequent posts. I have never in my life written as much or as often as I did last month. It was a lot harder than I thought to consistently churn out quality content, even when the topics were set ahead of time. Overall, however, I am extremely happy with how the Challenge went.

There are several posts that I am unsatified with (Day 7 and Day 19 were fairly lackluster efforts), but there are many more posts that I am very proud of: Day 5, talking about the books of Azeroth. Day 15 surprised me since the post ended up having nothing to do with WoW at all, but reads well and felt really good to write. The post on Day 17 is special because I had a lot of fun doing the images of Southshore and Loch Modan for it.

I also realized that I really enjoy writing the little in-character fiction pieces that I included in Day 20: Denouement, and the older post Pushing a Boulder Uphill. It is a completely different style of writing; one that is quite compelling and something that I want to explore further. I am very pleased with how Denouement turned out, even though I wish I would have given it one final edit before hitting the publish button - I think the prose could be a bit tighter.

The 20 Days of WoW Challenge also taught me that I have a long way to go in terms of engaging my readers and generating more interaction through the comments. I was blown away by the reader response to these posts when it came to pageviews - I averaged about 120 pageviews per day, not including people using readers - but those views didn't translate into comments. It's something that I would like to improve on, but am not entirely sure how.


THIS WEEK MONTH IN RAIDING

After several weeks of working on it to the exclusion of everything else, Shadowgarde finally managed to down Cho'gall a couple of times, bringing us to 9 of 12 bosses down in normal progression. Cho'gall still refuses to drop Holy Paladin gear, however, which puts him on my naughty list.

I find it amazing that once I got comfortable with what I needed to do and when I needed to do it, the fight becomes quite easy. The trick for me as the Paladin assigned to the tanks was to learn to anticipate the moments during the add phases that the Cho'gall tank would be taking extreme damage and to time the use of cooldowns accordingly. As well, convincing the Add Tank to stay within Line-of-Sight so that my Beacon of Light could heal him helped tremendously.

Unfortunately, we've had a bit of a setback in raid attendance. Our two tanks and several of our regular raiders have gone AWOL since Easter, leaving us scrambling for alternatives. We've been doing fine; we're still managing to get our farm bosses down without too much fuss, but our progression work on Nefarian has completely ground to a halt. And with Patch 4.2 looming on the horizon and with it the imminent appearance of the next raiding tier, time is running out to accomplish my 12/12 goal.


LOWBIE ADVENTURES IN TANKING

What does it mean when there are a dozen mobs running all over the place, spells flying every-which-way, so many things going on that I can't even begin to keep track of them all, and through it all somebody is constantly punching me in the face?

Oh yes, it must mean that I'm tanking.

I took Fannon 2.0 into the Scarlet Monastery Library last night to get the last experience points needed to finally ding level 40. In the process I dipped my foot into tanking for the first time since the Elemental Invasions that preceded Cataclysm, and for the first time ever on a Paladin.

Now, firstly, I was a full five levels above the next highest in the group and going into the SM Library at the very last level that I was eligible to do so in the Dungeon Finder, so I expected it to be a complete faceroll. I wasn't disappointed, either. We steamrolled the dungeon, and I was doing double the DPS of the next highest person - again, not unexpected given the level discrepancy.

I mention it because even given all that, Tanking is just as chaotic and insane as I remember. Trying to keep track of where the mobs are, who they're attacking and still keep up a threat/DPS rotation was a lot of work, whereas healing the same dungeon on my lowbie Shaman, Thallie, was a snorefest.

We succeeded and completed the dungeon without any casualties, or really even any real scares, even when I pulled Arcanist Doan somewhat prematurely. But the lesson learned here is that I need to do a lot of work before I can call myself an accomplished Tank. It gives me a new appreciation for what those meat-shields go through every raid.

On the other hand, my main's Protection off-spec (which arguably has better gear than my main spec), is a lot of fun to play doing dailies on Tol Barad.


THE FAST AND FURIOUS FOURTEEN LEVELS... WITH BUNNIES

The wife and Dwarfling went to visit family for six days over the Easter holidays, which allowed me the unprecedented opportunity to binge on WoW like I haven't done in months. And while I spent a fair bit of time raiding and instancing on my main, I also dedicated a great deal of time to my young, dungeoneering Shaman.

When we last left Thallie she still had the Level 30 achievement banner hanging off of her, and when the Easter weekend started that's just where she remained. Twenty-four hours after my wife left for her trip and dozens of random dungeon runs later, however, Thallie was sitting at a very pretty level 40. All told I probably spent about Eight or Nine hours running dungeon after dungeon and having an absolute blast.

Scarlet Monastery Library, Armory and Cathedral, Razorfen Kraul, Maraudon, Dire Maul Warpwood Quarter, and Uldaman were all knocked down in exceptionally short order.

In the process I was fortunate to run into a couple of extremely good groups of people. On two separate occasions the random groups were fun and chatty and above all competent, and so stayed together for multiple instances. As fast and anonymous as the Dungeon Finder can tend to make instance runs, it's still a wonderful feeling when you run across that great group that is a lot of fun to play with. It's a pity that it doesn't happen very often.

Aside from the dungeons, though, I also decided to get Thallie her first title. Noblegarden has been my favourite WoW holiday ever since I did it for the first time on my priest, and "The Noble" is probably my favourite title as well. I ended up gaining about two levels just from doing the holiday quests and the few quests required to get the boat needed to cross Thousand Needles so I could do [Desert Rose] and [Hard Boiled].

Bunnies! Bunnies, it must be bunnies!

The tricky part of the Noblegarden meta achievement for me was finding an Orc female, which apparently are as rare as a Blood Elf with a mullet on my server. I even tried running Battlegrounds to see if I could find one there (which ended up getting me another 2 levels). I ended up riding to Orgrimmar (Water Walking for the win) and using Far Sight (also, FTW) to spy on the entrance to see if I could spot one. It took me two evenings of searching, but I eventually found that green, fanged goddess, stuck bunny ears on her and got my achievement. The Hordies that were outside Orgrimmar only killed me a little.

They were rather short-sighted considering Thallie is a relatively rare Dwarf Female, and was also wearing the Elegant Dress - perfect for their holiday achievement needs.

Oh well... say hello to Thallie the Noble, level 44.
 
 

Gettin' Jiggy with the Shammies

Oh god, that title isn't dating me at all.  I was considering some variation of ShamWoW, but slapped myself and moved on in the nick of time.

Over the past two weeks since the arrival of the Dwarfling, I have been getting the Alt-itch.  You know the one; it's the itch you get when your main is geared up enough that nothing but raiding drops will help and you're looking for something else to do.  This feeling actually comes at a good time, since as I expected my play time has become much more restricted than before and I don't have as much time as I'd like to devote to heroics or extra raids.  I hear that they're working on an ointment to cure this, but it's not ready yet and all you can do as of now is to scratch it.

So this past Sunday, I asked the Twitterati which alt I should focus on:  The Dwarf Shaman or a Druid.  The replies were mixed.  It didn't get all that ugly, but do you ever get the feeling that if you put one hundred Druid players in the same room with one hundred Shaman players that eventually a no-holds-barred knife fight would break out?  We healers are a passionate bunch, aren't we?

In the end, to nobody's surprise, the Dwarf Shammie won the day.  You have read the title of this blog, right?

Thallie, looking badass in her mismatched heirloom gear.

This is Thallie, my newest and cutest dwarven battle medic.  She was created as soon as 4.03 dropped and the world changed, but has been languishing a little bit as I have been leveling and gearing my Paladin.  I took up the call of the elements and spent a little time leveling her on Sunday.

Oh, and just because I'm a little nuts, I've decided to level her as restoration.

The original plan was to level her through dungeons as a healer.  As an unrepentant Wrath Baby, I did not get the chance to see a lot of these dungeons at the level they were meant to be seen; either I soloed them at max level or was run through them by guildies while leveling.  The desire to see these dungeons and run through them as they were meant to be seen is very strong and would be a fun way to level.

The major drawback of leveling through dungeons and the thing that is really bugging me is that I am going to miss all of the lovely new quests that Blizzard has created for us.  I really enjoyed the changes to Dun Morogh  and Loch Modan and I am really torn about missing a large chunk of the rest of the zones.  The experience gains in dungeons are amazing and even with a mix of questing and dungeon running I'll end up out-leveling the zones extremely quickly.  I've run her through three dungeons now, pretty much doing levels 14 through 21 without questing at all and in doing so I completely outleveled Loch Modan and had to dump most of the quests and move to Duskwood (also as recommended by my Twitter peeps).

Riding into Darkshire took me back, however, since I was immediately ganked by a party of level 85 asshats burning down the town.  I've never understood what makes that fun, honestly.

Anyway, the low level dungeons are a lot of fun, even though there is not a great deal of healing required in them.  During the Wailing Caverns run that I did on Sunday I spent more time dealing damage than I did healing, letting Earth Shield do most of the healing work.  I had never been in that instance before, so it felt really good to see some "new" dungeon content.

By the way I am really a terrible DPSer.  Just plain awful.  "Please, Mr. Tank, take some damage so that I don't look like I'm being completely carried through this dungeon!"

I think in the end I'm going to end up doing a vast majority of dungeon leveling where I can squeeze in the time to do it.  The questing will naturally come when I either don't have time to do an instance, or while I'm waiting for the dungeon finder to get a group together for me.  But I just have to accept that with this plan I am not going to get the full story that is being told in each of the zones.  The lore nerd in me cries as the prospect, but that's the price for quick leveling, I suppose.

How do you level your Alts?  Do you prefer LFD leveling or questing?  Or are Alts something that you don't have time for?

I would like to give a special shout-out to Mylindara of  the Crimson Blades guild on Sargeras for helping me out with the screenshot featured in this post.  I was stuck at work with no access to the wow armory and he was good enough to grab it for me.  Check out his blog Cleansing Waters at http://mylindara.crimsonblades.info/.