Sandwich Rations

(( Another post in the Val-and-Ovi series, picking up from Pilgrim's Bounty: The Invitation. ))

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The disadvantage to dragging my heels on things like, say, writing out the Lighthammers at the Wrathgate story is -- well, in the end, the game itself moves on, and while characters on their own may not have continuity issues, when your characters are interacting with other characters, continuity in an MMO becomes a whole pile of confusing glitchy problems.

So at the moment I feel like I've got two choices:

* Retcon, retcon, retcon: Write out the Wrathgate story as I've always wanted to have it happen, and accept the fact that it fails several continuity checks. Rework anything I've written that contradicts it, and start RPing the Lighthammers as they'd be after the Wrathgate right now.

* Move the timeline: Wrathgate has happened, the Lighthammers made it through okay, and shift the Lighthammer events from Wrathgate to the opening of Icecrown Citadel.

Much as I loved the idea of setting it at Wrathgate, I think the continuity problems are going to bother me too much to do it there and then, and I think the major events of the Lighthammer storyline can be picked up and moved. Which means I should probably go ahead and let them both get their Wrathgate achievement, and this time around, stop dragging my heels.

(( First in a series of short glimpses of Ovistine and Valinar around the holiday season... ))

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I've been meaning to respond to the WTT:RP post about Pilgrim's Bounty, and what our characters are thinking about all week, but am only just now getting to it. Oh, well -- the day's appropriate! For those of you celebrating, Happy Thanksgiving!

Recapping the quest text for Pilgrim's Bounty:

Won't you celebrate Pilgrim's Bounty with us, <name>? It's a time for reflecting on your journeys and your good fortune, sharing plentiful food and stories with friends.

Teuthida is grateful to have such strong and generous and wonderful friends -- with particular /hugs and /squees to Alishe, Alonora, Prydion, Israia, and of course Valyrie, who is a bit puzzled at the many, many pies Teu has been baking, but not so puzzled she won't eat them! The one thing that's giving Teu pause these days is that she's been feeling like her "job" -- and adventuring really has become a job for her -- keeps her away from Valyrie and Shattrath a lot more than she'd like. She misses spending time at home, at the orphanage, and she especially misses getting to sing and read to the tiny baby draenei. You may be hearing a loud ticking sound these days if you're standing too close to Teu, and it ain't a gyrochromaton.

Nancie finally got in touch with Ovistine and demanded requested Ovistine join her, Geoffar, Brandur, and the Ironhammer parents in Ironforge for Pilgrim's Bounty. Nancie is grateful that her family is still in one piece -- her father, a retired mountaineer, still spends a lot of time fishing at Loch Modan, and her mother's still working at the forge, turning out battle hammers, blades, and making the occasional pair of mithril spurs. Her brother has a good job training paladins at the Mystic Ward. Ovistine is, more or less, safe. Nancie and Geoffar have a hard, struggling job out at Wintergarde, but they're managing. (And this is where I apologize for being slightly out of phase -- ha! -- with most people, because Wrathgate still hasn't happened for the Lighthammers. Sigh.)

Ovistine has returned from Darnassus, and this year she's incredibly grateful that, despite all the trials and tribulations the Boomsticks have been going through, they've got Homrend back and things look safer now than they have for a while. She's trying to focus on that, and not the way it feels to be cut off from the Light, because that's something she just can't deal with right now. She is also grateful for a certain elf, whom she's planning to invite to Pilgrim's Bounty with the Ironhammers. ("An' may the Light have mercy on his ears.")

Agness is grateful for her wonderful husband, her warm, comfy house in Northshire ("Kobold-Free For 13 days!"), her yarn stash, her new friends at the Shadoweave Knitting Circle, and the fact that Bizpit seems to have been too preoccupied with sulking lately to show up very often or chew on much of her yarn. She's not sure where little demons go for Pilgrim's Bounty, but hopefully he'll stay out of trouble.

I'm guessing that sometime today Agness is going to ding 80. That'll make four: Teuthida (shaman: resto/elemental), Nancie (paladin: prot), Ovistine (priest: shadow/OOC disc) and Agness (warlock: affliction). I might maybe like casters better than melee. <_<

When Lich King was on its way, I was really determined not to play my alts. I wanted One True Character, and I'd decided that, because I liked the shaman class so much, it was going to be Teuthida. I was tired of gearing up alts, I was tired of chasing down rep for multiple classes -- I was really very, very ready to just have one character I played and not have to worry about the leveling, the gearing, the instancing, the rep grinding, and so on.

It hadn't occurred to me, really, because rep grinding is still such a pain, but the major objections I had to alting are now gone. If I want to be exalted with all the factions, it doesn't take instancing -- it just takes doing dailies, so all it really takes is time. I'm not terribly interested in raiding with anybody but Teu and, you know, Ovi, because I just want to be playing Ovi, period. I just want Nancie geared up well enough to handle heroics, and crafting handles the bulk of that. I really don't care about gear for most of the rest of my alts -- Agness and Lyja and Lil' Teu are more there to enjoy the leveling experience and do some crafting work for me than anything else. (Lyja is 71 and a 450 elixir master alchemist; Lil' Teu is 68 and a 405 transmute master alchemist. Agness is my scribe. I spend a lot of time on my alts herbing!)

So while I do have a list of things I'd like to do for each character, none of them have much urgency or require a big time commitment -- something that really felt different back in BC.

As for RP, due to both time commitment issues and my skittishness doing major RP in-game, the RP is usually either off-the-cuff, mainly with Valinar's alts, or written -- which means there's time for everybody, and certainly time for everyone to have an active life in my head. ^_^ Some alts will always get more RP time than others, but I'm amused to note that an alt who probably won't see much play time at 80 (Agness) is turning out to be one of my more active RP muses. I suspect it's the interaction between Agness and Vaelen, which amuses me to no end. (I think I also like having a drama-free couple to play with. They don't fight, they don't have angst, they aren't going to split up, and Vaelen will probably never figure out what's going on with that imp.) But beyond that, there's a bit of a parallel going on between Agness and Ovi that I had completely failed to notice before: they're both former Light-users who are both going through an uncomfortable time as they adjust to living without the Light.

I need to make more time for writing!

(( Ovistine's gone missing after recent events with the Boomsticks -- or rather, she's not missing, precisely, she's just not trying very hard to be found. Investigations from Valinar and Nancie have turned up nothing, so Nancie calls up an old friend of Ovi's to see if she's heard anything... ))

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In which an attempt to reach her innermost self has the expected repercussions, much to Agness's dismay.

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I officially have more capped characters than I have since vanilla. ^_^ (I had four by the time Burning Crusade came out -- Agnesdea, Ovistine, Trisia and Nancie; I had two when Lich King came out -- Teuthida and Ovistine.) Now there's Teu, Nancie, and -- *fanfare!* -- Ovistine.

Dinging 80 comes with such a high price tag. 300g got dropped at the priest trainer! I'm also in the process of picking up materials for Jeeves and my Wormhole Generator. (Mining. So much mining. So very, very much mining.) And Ovi would love an epic gyrocopter of her very own. At least she already has dual-spec; Nancie's still waiting on that.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and race-change Trisia (my previous mage, L63, herbalist/alchemist-in-training) to be the new Li'l Teu. Not only will I pick up five levels, I'll get free 150 riding (well, that used to be more meaningful than it is now...) and access to my hoard of caster heirlooms. At that point, it'll be time to say goodbye to the second account. I never actually upgraded that account to LK, either, so frankly, a race change is cheaper than doing that -- at least at this point.

I have been secretly playing Ovi up the last few levels as, um, shadow. It turns out shadow is ridiculously fun; I won't mind having a shadow-oriented Ovistine around a bit in the upcoming months. In fact, it's kinda nice to have realized that, because it means instead of having a character that makes me think "but... I've got an endgame healer", instead I end up thinking, "Well, hey! A shadow priest! You don't see many of those around nowadays." Whether that'll end up being useful in the long run or not, I'm honestly not sure, but I'd love to get her some playtime soon. I find myself terribly tempted to try PvPing with her, too.

Hey, speaking of dwarf shamans! Were we speaking of dwarf shamans? Oh, who am I kidding; I'm always speaking of dwarf shamans these days. Did anyone else notice that the Earthen in Loken's Lackeys and The Earthen Oath are, kinda, dwarf shamans? Well, they're Earthen, but they have shaman-esque abilities: Lava Burst, Earth Shield, Earth Shock. Maybe another way of discovering a dwarf's innate shamanism has to do with exploring their ties to earth (the element, rather), and not just "well, Wildhammer dwarves are closer to nature, so it just makes sense". (Not that there's anything wrong with Wildhammer dwarves, mind you!)

At the risk of making myself /boggle, I gave a look to the /played time on my three most-played characters.

Teuthida (L80, raiding main): 62 days, 20 at L80.
Ovistine (L75, RP main, main up until late in BC): 67 days
Nancie (L80, current favorite for soloing): 19 days, 1 day at L80.

(A small note: I was deeply relieved to see that Ovistine's /played still outnumbers Teu's. I can still hang onto the idea that Ovi is my main if her /played total is higher, right? Right?)

This doesn't take into account my original main, my other half-dozen alts, or any other characters I've played up to 20-ish and deleted. All told, that's more than 3552 hours, and a little under half a year spent doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft since December 26, 2004. And if anything, I'm more interested in playing than ever -- lately I've been really interested in crafting, getting some of my alts up to 450 in their respective professions and mining a ton of Saronite for Valinar's blacksmith, Vaelen. I have also been doing some crazy things, mostly involving RP gear ("Today's project: soloing the Slave Pens for a drop off Quagmirran."). Nancie's treks into Scholo and Strat are over for now (exalted with the Dawn!), so it looks like I'm back to leveling and dailies.

Having something a little different to do can really energize me, and I think that's important to keeping the game fresh for me. I don't mind the bank space I'm using for Nancie's RP gear, or the time I spent in Scholo and Strat trying to grind rep (omgwow SO MUCH RUNECLOTH). I am not quite prepared to go hunting Alliance rep with her, but I know when I'm bored of leveling and dailies again, I have other goals. Ovistine needs to go tromping across the world so I can pick up her Explorer achievements. Nancie will probably want to pick up the rest of her Lightforge set and finish converting it into Soulforge. Someday Agness will finish leveling up her Inscription. Having become a heck of a lot more interested in the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn of late, I want to go replay those starting DK levels (and I have just the DK character in mind with which to do it).

I should really make a list.

Thanks to last night's RP, this is the image that greeted me on login this morning:

Ovistine Lighthammer in full 8/8 Virtuous, wielding Benediction.

I had a definite "WHOA" moment on seeing that. I'm so glad I kept that armor and that weapon! Talk about your blast from the past...