Some alt musings

Now that I've reached Grulnak's major goal of being Naxx ready, and the slow process of incremental upgrades continues, my thoughts naturally turn to my numerous alts. Although I'm very happy with my shaman - especially as Northrend gear looks so much better than the spaceship glows of much of Outland - and reputation grinds and achievements somewhat temper the desire to turn to a new character, I am going to need a few alts I think.

Posts from Kinless on his number of alts per expansion, and from drug with his views on the pros and drawbacks of alts have had me pondering this for a while. I came to the conclusion that from my various characters I want to have -

• A casual raider - to see (hopefully) all the content in WotLK while it's still current.
• A tank - I used to really love tanking, except for on the runs when I hated it
• A scout - by which I mean someone who can go places they're not wanted and see things that are tricky to get at in some way. Noteably the high end raids and enemy faction cities (although I can always hope onto an alt for the latter!)
• A hero - not necessarily a hero in the traditional sense, but just a character that's more identifiable from my pen-and-paper roleplaying background.

Grulnak's doing very nicely in the former role, although it remains to be seen how far my casual-ish guild can do in terms of the full scope of WotLK content, but we seem to be a good deal further up the curve than we were with Burning Crusade.

On the scout front a priest seems to be better in this role than a rogue, thanks to Mind Vision. It's tricky to find your way around an unfamiliar instance within the confines of the spell, but you do so at zero risk. A druid can potentially fulfill both the scout and tank roles, although druids (quite reasonably) really do miss some of the rogue skills such as Distract. I often feel when in an instance with a rogue that I'd love to be in their shoes, although in practical terms this may not match reality. As a healer you are generally the last to move, and the tank leads - for example in Karazhan I never saw Moroes' room while it was still populated, the tank would go ahead and bring targets back to us waiting on the stairs and we'd not move forward until the room was partly cleared. On the reality front though rogues rarely scout ahead, not least because the possibility of triggering some event such as a gauntlet means the group sticks fairly closely together.

For a hero I'd probably pick a human paladin, a (dwarf?) rogue or a night elf hunter (although in my mind a hunter wouldn't be a pet class), or perhaps a dwarf warrior. All proper fantasy archetypes, unlike most of my Horde characters.