Retiring a Warrior

About two and a half years. That is how long I have been playing World of Warcraft.

Up until a few weeks ago my main has been my first character, a warrior. That warrior is now unofficially retired. It is too bad that most of my fun BOP items are attached to that character. Rare pets, Goblin Gumbo, Picnic Basket, TCG tabards, Brewfest and Summer garments, Headless Horseman helm...etc, I am going to miss those items for a while.

I have not only chosen a new character, but I am also playing on a new server with some real life friends. Most of us have mains on other servers but decided to get together. At least one of those guys is still raiding on our old server, I sometimes jump on my old main and chat with him when I get bored on the new server.

While I will miss my main's BOP items and some of the friends I've made on the old Day One server, I am happy as a peach with my current main, a Night Elf hunter.

The problem with my warrior is that I never really played her well. I ran across a signature quote on the World of Warcraft forums about a year ago that sums things up very well. I don't remember the exact words but it goes something like this: In all of the RPG games I have ever played, warriors have always been the best fighters and defenders, who knew that Blizzard would fix that?

Granted, Wrath of the Lich King has made warriors far more playable, but I feel that up until now I've been thoroughly abused. For over two years I stood by and tried to survive the onslaught of a single mob while other classes danced around me while burning down scores of mobs. By the time I made it to level 70 I finally realized that a different set of gear would help my dps but by then I had to rely on groups. At that point you only get to roll on your current spec or you get barbequed for ninjaing. I remember trying to get into a group for Shadow Lab once, there was gear in there that I needed. The group invited me and let me run all the way there (not sure why they didn't bother to summon me) and when I got there they dropped me from group because I didn't have enough blue gear.

Eventually I did get geared up and found myself in a raid guild. It was fun but it was a lot of work for me due to the completely different playstyle I had to learn. The jump from solo/5-mans to raid is a long one. Fortunately I'm not afraid to ask noob questions and with time I learned to tank properly. They were a nice bunch of guildies.

I never got over the pain of being a warrior though. Farming was an atrocious chore. I finally got some arena weapons with honor points and farming became much easier. Wrath of the Lich King fixed that by only allowing top rated teams access to arena weapons. And with all of the new changes I had to learn how to tank all over again.

No thank you.

So, I've taken on the bane of Warcraft characters and I don't even care. It's easy to play, easy to level. I can take on 3-4 mobs at my level or single mobs 4-6 levels over me. Why on earth would I WANT to go back to a warrior?