Who could refuse a vacation of undetermined duration to such a lovely location?
Getting a second WoW account is by far the best WoW-related decision Rekrsiv and I made this year. Being the altoholic that I am, my server was full of characters and I was considering deleting a couple just to make room for new alts. Now, I get 22 character slots on my server, which is great, but also a problem. I have so many characters now that I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not possible to keep up with all of them. Every day I stare at my character screen, log on a toon, check emails, auctions, profession cooldowns, the farm, and then I switch to another toon and start all over again. This takes some time, time that I could be spending actually leveling characters or farming, or playing with my son or doing chores around the house. Don’t get me wrong, I think the mail/cooldowns/auction shuffle is actually quite fun, but having a limited amount of time to play this game, I have to try and focus on what I enjoy the most, and that would be actually being out in the world, farming mats, killing monsters and exploring the lands.
So until WoD goes live, I decided to properly “store” some of my characters.
What do I mean by storing? There are some toons I don’t plan on doing anything with any time soon. No dungeons, no farming of any sort. I will prepare them for the next expansion as if MoP was effectively over. That way, if I don’t log on these characters for months because I’m too busy with my other alts, I know when I take them out of storage when Warlords of Draenor comes live, they’ll be ready to step on Draenor at a moment’s notice.
The characters I plan on storing until the next expansion all qualify to a set of criterias, which are:
Character is max level;
Character is done with reputations for the moment (MoP or otherwise);
Character hasn’t seriously been played in at least a month; *
Character’s professions are maxed out (even the secondary ones!) **
* When I say “seriously played”, what I mean is I haven’t even logged on that toon for an extended period of time. If I use a character for a daily cooldown, it won’t be stored as long as I need the cooldown to be used.
**The only exceptions to this criteria is fishing. If the skill is very low, I’ll wait and level this when we get new fishies on Draenor. It makes little sense to farm a gazillion fishes I won’t need anymore, so might as well wait for the new ones I will most likely need to max cooking in WoD. If need be, tailoring and leatherworking can remain at 575 since the WoD leathers and bolts should take care of the last 25 points. (Assuming we get Leather scraps on Draenor.)
Once I chose which characters I want to store, and I’m done with their professions, there is more that needs to be done. Here is the plan:
Empty bags/bank of everything that can be auctionned/vendored/disenchanted;
Put as much transmog pieces in void storage as possible;
Gear everyone with as many Timeless Gear pieces as possible;
Make sure everyone has a fonctionnal dps spec and appropriate gear and glyphs;
Make sure everyone with a gathering profession has an Orcish a Gnomish Army Knife(GAK) in their bags;
All bags must be as empty as possible (leave hearthstone, GAK, fishing pole/hat, bandages, health pots only);
Clear everyone’s quest log.
Optional: Consider maybe getting professions bags where required. (enchanting bags, herbalism bag, mining bag etc.)
I may have to revise this whenever a new big patch hits the server, but we’ll see. (Surely I forgot stuff that might be relevant to this particular project, so if you think of anything, please let me know.) As you can see, this project of mine is no small task. So far, I plan on storing at least six of my characters (and that’s only on the horde side) and since my banks and bags are a mess, I suspect it’ll take me a couple of days/weeks to sort everything out. But the point is to keep busy while we wait for something to happen, isn’t it?
- Edited Orcish Army Knife (OAK) for Gnomish Army Knife (GAK) – January 5th 2014.