Sometimes I say to myself, “Self, I just don’t have enough to do while playing WoW. Raiding on my main, gearing my tank, leveling all my alts on my main server, and keeping up with their professions just doesn’t seem to be enough.”* Luckily for me, I have the perfect solution:
Leveling more alts.
Alliance alts, Horde alts, DK alts (it’s a very large subset of my alts, I must admit), all leveling on different servers, with varying amounts of gold. And at first I did this the old fashioned way. You know, by questing. Hoping that someone on the server might be brave enough to form a team, and after a few hours of doing that, actually run a dungeon or two. But most of the time, it was questing (and killing, as many quests involve killing things). It was hard for me, as I am not the best at killing things (“I’m a heala, mon, not a killa”), especially when I spec half of my toons into healing specs, and expect them to kill things (guess what – they don’t). Overall, a painful process, when one is playing by one’s self.
But then the Looking For Dungeon tool came around.
And it was glorious.
Gone were the days of waiting for hours for a dungeon run. Hit the random and off you go, to those oft-forgotten dungeons of yore (that I forgot were so long, in quite a few cases). Many of my toons began to level with LFD almost exclusively; it was easy enough to pop on and hit the button, whirl about a dungeon for a bit, and then go back to whatever I was doing before (which is mainly avoiding doing housework or wedding planning, or attempting to stay up later than I should).
But while the LFD system was (and still is) decidedly fun, there was still something missing… something I realized when I read Pugging Pally.
Yes, Vidyala had epitomized what should be done with the the LFD system – level a toon all the way to 80 only in dungeons.
It was a beautiful goal, and a blog was an excellent way to share it. We got to read about the trials and tribulations as she healed her way through the dungeons on the way to 80, and see all sorts of interesting tidbits on her way there too (like how many drinks she drank – healers are total lushes!)
It was so awe inspiring, that I said to myself “Self – you gotta do this!”
Now, I told myself that before I even started to blog. So I said to myself, “Self, you gotta start blogging if you’re going to have a Paladin that Pugs, ’cause these things aren’t official without documentation, dunchaknow!”
And I agreed with myself that having a blog would be a good idea, and then I filed the idea under “Things I Probably Should Try Doing” in my brain and left it alone for a few months. It probably would have stayed there, too, had SAN not started up. Because in those early days of SAN, there was a lot of conversation in guild chat. And all of those bloggers talking and discussing really made me want to start up my own blog. And you know what? I did start my own blog! You’re reading it right now. And with the starting of the blog, the Pugging Pally idea moved up to the “Yeah, You Should Do This Sometime Maybe” file in my brain.
But first there had to be preparations! The first step was deciding if I was going to put the Pugging Pally posts in a separate blog or in this blog. I thought it would be a little too derivative if I made it into a separate blog, especially when I had a nice blog just sitting around here, twiddling its thumbs and wondering when I was going to post in it. Secondly, I had to decide what race this Paladin would be, and on what server it would live. Fortunately, I always had a hidden desire to make a male draenei paladin (seems like a fairly normal gender/race/class pairing, but sometimes you just have to have the little guilty pleasure of making one of those). And the server was easy enough to pick – SAN had recently started up, so whatever better place to roll a little alliance toon that I was going to blog about than on Argent Dawn.
And so Mishalom, the manly Draenei Paladin, was born. Who then had to level the ‘boring way’ up to 15, as you can’t do Random Dungeons until then. But as I leveled him, I considered what the rules for my version of Vidyala’ Pugging Pally would be. You may find the ‘final’ draft below.
The Rules of Pally of the Pugs
These are the basic ‘commandments’ for myself while pugging on my Paladin:
- Thou shalt only level in Random LFD
- Thou shalt only queue as a healer
- Thou shalt never complete any quests to level once thou art of thine 15th season, unless said quests are for thine class
- Thou shalt avoid killing mobs outside of Dungeons
- Thou shalt never abandon thine comrades in a dungeon unless thou hath ‘a good reason’
- Thou shalt record interesting information about thineself after each LFD running session
- Thou shalt record a statement saying that thou art using the idea from the Pugging Pally blog in thine future posts, that hath the qualities of the following statement: Mishalom, Pally of the Pugs, is trying to get to the WoW level cap using only the LFD tool in WoW! This idea is based off of the original Pugging Pally, Vidyala!
The general gist of the rules, as you ‘hast’ read, is that I want to level solely as a paladin healer, and only while in dungeons. I know that Vidyala started as a healer, but occasionally dipped into dps (and tanking, I think) roles. Since the queue times are different depending on your role, I thought I’d just stick with one, to see how it goes (future project ideas include leveling solely as a tank or dps). In addition, Vidyala broke down and went questing at least once during her trip to 80 (I think that was because the dungeons were getting pretty slow in between, and she wanted to quickly level her alt to 80 so she could do end-game things), and I want to avoid doing that and keep Mishalom leveling strictly with dungeon experience only (so no dungeon quests either!). Since he’s on a server where I don’t participate in end-game (yet), I don’t think I’ll be too impatient to level him. And since I have tons of alts, I can just switch to a different one if I feel like questing, or just not doing dungeons.
I am allowing myself some leeway with getting experience from exploring, though, as I’m hoping to keep up my mining skill a bit. But I should be high enough in level in the zones I go in to not kill many, if any, beasties. And of course, I reserve the right to break any of these rules, though I will let you know if and when I do!***
Note: I was originally going to not allow for me to do any more quests once I was past 15, but level 15 is when paladins get the questline to learn how to rez folks, which I thought was rather important. I decided to give myself a little leeway when it came to class quests.
Now, I was originally going to show off Mishalom right here, right now, but then I decided to do a time honored blogging tradition, which is, to say, stretching out your ideas upon as many different posts as possible. Therefore, in my next installment of Pally of the Pugs, you’ll meet the man himself, Mishalom, and get to know a little bit about him and his stats. (Plus I expect the nest post to be a little image heavy, and adding images always complicates things).
Until then!
-Misha
*Actually it is enough, but I apparently have in-game ADD.**
** The SA would argue that I have out-of-game ADD too, but I don’t think that’s – Ooo, shiny!
***Actually, I already started “The Pally of the Pugs” Project, but I just haven’t blogged about it yet. So I already know I broke one of these rules, since I’m writing the rules after starting the project! You’ll have to wait to see which one, but I think it’s one of the least important ones, so I’m only feel slightly guilty for breaking it.
EDIT: Please note that this project has had a name change due to a friend of Vidyala pointing out that the name (of the project) was too close to Vidyala’s blog name, which could lead to confusion, something I had not considered before. (See the comments below for more details).
Me, Myself... And All Of Them 