Now, as my gnome gets to a higher level, I start to think about what kind of alt I would like to make in the future, because I know I will want to start at least one more character before Cataclysm hits. But what class would it be? Let’s go through them all.

Main thoughts here are that I would rather not play a class now if I want to make that class of a race that isn’t available yet, or if there are major changes that will make the class more fun to play later.

Much of this also hinges on how awesome the worgen females end up being. I vaguely remember seeing some concept art for them at Blizzcon, but I haven’t been able to find that image online since. I hope they unveil the models and animations for them soon.

Also, I have little interest in playing a goblin, though I probably will anyway (and love it) the next time I’m on Horde side, because a part of me always wanted to try being a cute goblin girl with pigtails.

Priest: I would love to play a priest again, but the new races able to be priests are all great. Even if I don’t like the female worgen casting animations (I don’t like the male ones, and a wolf in a dress just makes me think of Little Red Riding Hood) it would be pretty awesome to be a gnome priest, and I love the idea of playing a tauren priest the next time I’m on Horde side.

Mage: My highest level mage so far was a level 55 undead fire mage named Mordio (if you’ve played Tales of Vesperia, you’ll understand the name) and mages are not one of my favorite classes, though I’m determined that the next mage I make will be the one to reach the level cap. That being said, I would prefer if said mage were a dwarf girl, and dwarves cannot yet be mages. Also, intellect -> spellpower is going to make gear decisions a lot easier.

Warlock: Warlocks don’t have any particularly new races except for Worgen, which have the above “wolf in a dress” issue. However, I really don’t want to play one until the soul shard changes in Cataclysm.

Let’s move on to the leather-wearing classes, then!

Druid: I will NOT make another Nelf druid. Worgen druid all the way. Or possibly even better, troll druid is one of the combinations I’m trying to decide between if I end up on Horde side.

Rogue: Now here’s an interesting one. Like warlocks, rogues don’t have any new races except for worgen. Remaking my dwarf rogue (or even just transferring her and continuing to level her on Argent Dawn) might be quite fun. I am somewhat interested in seeing how subtlety is to play now that they’ve buffed daggers like crazy. But then I remember worgen, and get a mental image of stealthing around as a human, then shifting into a wolfperson at the same moment I ambush them from the shadows, becoming a fury of teeth and claws, then once my opponent is down, I calmly lick the blood from my claws and turn back into an unassuming human girl again. As you can see, this has a good number of RP possibilities.

How about mail? No, that doesn’t really work either.

Hunter: I refuse to play another hunter until they get rid of that stupid mana mechanic. The last few times I tried playing a hunter, I was annoyed by the fact that my pet couldn’t hold aggro from me if I did anything other than autoshot, and I’m forced to spec beast mastery for leveling in hopes that if my pet does more damage, it might be able to hold a mob’s attention for more than two shots without giving it a 5-second headstart first. Either that or the fact that if I want to do anything other than autoshot, I run out of mana in two or three pulls and practically require an addon to tell me “hey, you’re out of mana, switch into Viper! Hey, your mana is full, switch back to Hawk!” every 45 seconds. The constant chiming to remind me of things gets really annoying. Eventually I got sick of both of these issues and just stayed in Viper all the time while soloing, so that I could cause LESS damage (threat) while pressing MORE buttons and not running out of mana all the time. That, and I want to make a human hunter.

Shaman: I love shamans, and I love draenei, but I’m all about giving those dwarven girls more opportunities in life, at least until Thanksgiving comes around and I get a bunch of whispers because I’m apparently the only dwarven female rogue on the server. And I already have a level 71+ draenei shaman, I don’t like leveling the same race/class combination more than once. This is going to be a problem for me the next time I want to level a draenei character, because my class options for things I have not yet leveled to 70+ as draenei are quite limited. I think all I have left are warrior and mage.

Okay, let’s move on to plate, then.

Warrior is out because I’m playing one right now.

Death Knight: I feel the same way about this as I do about rogues. No new races except worgen, and no particularly redesigned mechanics, though I am rather interested in trying out a dual-wield frost build again now that it’s been buffed once more. I always did like that build when I started my first DK. There’s just something special about combo attacks building up to giant AoE crits. I’d consider this a runner-up for now, though I’m still holding out to see how awesome a worgen DK would look. I do have a night elf DK sitting on Argent Dawn who’s fresh out of the starting area, if I happen to feel like leveling one at some point.

Which leaves me with… a Paladin. This is the strongest of my possibilities, since worgen cannot be paladins. The only new race paladins get is tauren, and though I do 100% intend to make one of those on my next switch back to Horde side, for the moment it looks like we will be remaining on Alliance when Cataclysm hits, so there’s no reason to wait and make my paladin later if I can just make one now.

Now my only question is, what race shall it be? I’ve already had a high-level draenei paladin, and I intend to use this new paladin to compare tanking between warrior and paladin (though more immediately, to get the healing fix that I’ve been craving since I started playing a warrior), and draenei females look pretty silly with shields. That narrows it down to dwarf and human. My whole “give dwarven girls more opportunities in life” idea seems to make this choice obvious.

In summary, alt planning is…

Right now:

• Possibly a new Dwarven Rogue.
• Maybe continue leveling my Night Elf Death Knight.
• Definitely make a Dwarven Paladin.

After Cataclysm (Alliance):

• Worgen or Gnome Priest.
• Dwarf Mage.
• Worgen or Gnome Warlock.
• Worgen Druid.
• Human Hunter.
• Dwarven Shaman.

After Cataclysm (Horde):

• Tauren Paladin.
• Troll Druid.
• Tauren Priest.

Now I must think of good names for all of them.

So my gnome is currently level 37, and has a little over 1500 gold. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, since the market for copper and bronze has crashed terribly. The bronze bars that used to sell for a little over a gold get cheaper every day, they’re less than half that now, and tin ore sells for more so I’m better off just auctioning what I find rather than smelting it. I’m not gonna argue, it certainly saves me some time.

At least iron is still really valuable, though I often sell that as ore as well. I made a tidy 15g yesterday when I noticed one stack of iron bars was about half the price of all the others, so I bought it and immediately put it up for slightly lower than all the others, and it sold within a few hours. I love easy profit like that.

But to make up for the lost smelting profits, my inscription has been catching up, and is now earning a sizeable income. I’ve been posting my glyphs (only a single copy at a time of each glyph that’s currently at or above 4 gold) for the lowest 12 hour duration, because I know it won’t take long for people to undercut me, and then they’re not going to sell at all for the remaining duration.

The reason I mention this is, that despite having enough gold to do so, I don’t think I will be getting dual spec.

Thanks to finding an enhancement shaman I pugged with who happened to play on the same server (and describes my tanking as “awesome”), I now have someone on my friends list. She whispers me from time to time asking if I want to run any random dungeons, and since she can also heal, they go by pretty quickly. She pulled me in to Cathedral when I was only 35 (Mograine was still red to me, but I did my best to tank him anyway — “dodge! 6 damage (glancing)! parry!”) and that finished the quest I had for a nice new sword to replace the blue axe I’ve been using since Deadmines.

Soon after, I queued for RFD to finish the quest I had there for another sword with identical speed and DPS but with Attack Power instead of Whale stats. But hey, they’re basically the same, so I should hold on to that second sword for when I dual spec at 40, so I can go Fury for soloing, right? So I equipped the AP sword and tossed the other one in my bags.

I was killing skeletons outside of Duskwood (in this character’s current quest to get Loremaster on SOMETHING before the expansion hits) when I got bored and decided to queue for a random battleground. Well, it turns out that the random daily battleground feature only works for level 80 people, but that’s okay, I hate Warsong Gulch anyway, so I queued for AB and got in almost immediately. I was standing on my mount near the gate, trying to decide if I would rather wear my AP sword or my stam sword, when it suddenly hit me.

LIKE OMG YOU GUYS I CAN TOTALLY WEAR BOTH OF THEM AND I DON’T HAVE TO BE FURY SPECCED.

I equipped one of the two swords in my offhand (*gasp* INSTEAD OF MY SHIELD ohno what’s going on here I’m supposed to be prot) and proceeded to have a blast charging at people on their mounts and gnawing on their ankles (hamstring has a whole new meaning when you’re a gnome warrior) and stunning them with that Hammer of Justice ripoff I have from my prot talents and then charging off to the next battle.

So when I got out of the battleground (we won, of course) I felt really smart and really dumb at the same time, as I continued about my quests, but this time, with more dual-wield. Though I’d imagine I’ll go back to using my shield once I hit 40, because Shield Slam is just that awesome. The things I’m killing die pretty fast anyway, and I’ve always got so much rage that I don’t know what to do with it. And once I hit 50, I’ll get Warbringer and I won’t even need to solo in Battle Stance any more (soloing as a warrior without having Charge makes me a sad panda).

I mean, it might be kinda fun to switch out to a different spec from time to time, to learn about a different playstyle, but I don’t feel that it’s completely *necessary*. I rather enjoy tanking, and if I can both tank and solo, why do I need to be able to DPS? The random LFG only sent me to an instance as DPS once, and the only reason my damage was so low is that I was still building up my weapon skill for most of the fights. (Sorry!)

Maybe when I get to 80, I’ll pick up a DPS offspec so that I can run heroics for better tanking gear, but at 40? My DPS is fine as prot, and I think that using the spec while soloing helps me remember where my abilities are for when I’m tanking. Having a second spec would probably just confuse me at this point. Until then, I’ll continue saving up my gold so that I can get epic flying training as soon as I hit 70.

This just proves to myself that I CAN earn enough money to get dual spec on a server that I have no other characters or heirlooms to help me (I made a DK to play with the SAN folks, but I never mailed the gold she has to my warrior), but that spending said money on said feature is pointless at this level.

So Best Friend and I watched two episodes of Next Generation tonight, as we always do after work, but today’s episodes were different. They made us think we’d somehow missed an entire season and started watching episodes in the middle of the 5th season tonight instead of the middle of the 4th season where we were supposed to be.

In the first episode, we followed Data around as he went about his day, helping to plan the wedding between a laughably stereotypical Japanese woman named Keiko (who Data has worked with for “a very long time” and knows very well, despite the fact that we’ve NEVER seen her before) and transporter chief O’Brien, who before now was a minor character who generally only had speaking parts so that he could say “yes, that person did transport down to the planet!” How the two of them were very madly in love, despite the fact that we’d never heard a word about any of this before their wedding, which apparently Data was so much a part of that he was taking the role of the father of the bride!

Leaves me to wonder “who is this person? Why is her wedding to a minor character suddenly a major plot point? Why can’t her own father be at her wedding?” and none of these things are explained.

Oh and there are Romulans. We knew of their existence, but they didn’t show up too often.

In the second episode, we’re faced with a rogue captain who is endangering our recent peace treaty with the Cardassians. Who? Putting myself in the place of someone who’s only seen the original series and the episodes thus far of Next Generation, I’ve never heard of the Cardassians. Apparently, we’ve been at war with them for a “very long time” and we signed the peace treaty a year ago. So… in the first and second seasons of Next Generation, the Federation was at war with the Cardassians? And the flagship was off exploring rather than helping in the war? I’m so confused.

Oh yeah, and O’Brien was a major character in this episode again. Honestly, when did he become important? He was never important before. In this episode, we got to laugh at him and his wife doing stereotypical things, like she eats seaweed for breakfast (like all Japanese people, right?) and he makes a face and says he’d rather have a nice potato casserole (you know, because he’s IRISH and Irish people eat nothing but potatoes).

Wait! I remember hearing that Deep Space 9 started at some point during Next Generation, so maybe their pilot episode was right before the one with Data, and it explained some of the background going on here! That must be it. Man, now we’ve gotta download those DS9 episodes and get a list of air dates so we can make sure we’re watching them in order.

Except that then I went and looked up a list of air dates, and it just proceeded to confuse me even further. Episode 85 of Next Generation titled “Data’s Day” original airdate: January 7th, 1991. Episode 1 of Deep Space 9 original airdate: January 3rd… 1993.

This really makes me feel like they were starting to write the scripts for DS9 and all of a sudden somebody was like “Crap! O’Brien is a major character in these scripts! And he’s married to a completely new character named Keiko! And they’re fighting these people called the Cardassians! Our viewers aren’t going to be able to follow this at all! We have to change Next Generation right away so that people will be used to these things by the time we show the pilot episode!”

I’m just confused. I feel like I’ve somehow missed a huge chunk of the story, but all of the information I’m seeing is telling me everything is fine. One moment, we’re concerned about Klingon-Federation relations, the next moment we’ve retroactively been at war and then signed a peace treaty with an empire we’ve never heard of before. And someone who was unimportant somehow finds a way to make himself a major figure in every episode just so that it won’t be weird later.

So I was sitting in the Stormwind bank on Monday night, minding my own business, just going between the auction house and the bank so that I could make some more glyphs and try to sell them. All of a sudden, the following whisper conversation happens (I took screenshots, but sadly they are in the bank, and overlayed over the light stone background and people’s names and are hard to read, but trust that this is exactly word for word):

Somebody: I WIIL KICK YOUR FACE OFFF AND EAT YOU RAW YOU FAG
Me: Who are you?
Somebody: ME I AM ME
Me: That’s really specific. This is pretty random. I don’t remember pissing anyone off recently. Sure you have the right person?
Somebody: OH WOOPS RONG DUDE SPRRY LITTLE HOBBIT
Me: lmao no problem =)
Somebody: YEAH AHAHAHAHAHA HOW COME ALL MY LETTERS ARE BIGGER?
Me: Either you’re being funny, or you don’t know how to turn off caps lock.
Somebody: SORRY I HAVE NOT BEEN ON THIS COMPUTER NOT FOR THAT LONG
Somebody: SO HOW DO I STOP IT
Me: It’s the button to the left of the A key.
Somebody: AH CLLED caps lock wow hey look dey small yyes
Me: =)
Somebody: yyayayayayayayayayayaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Somebody: thanks to you little hobbit i can hs a child yay

I have no idea what just happened. I decided recently that if someone acts like a 5 year old, that I should assume they are one and treat them as such. It seems to have worked out pretty well for me this time.

As you can see from my Raptr widget on the sidebar, I have barely touched Star Trek Online this month (I think my tracker shorted out on the 8th, I swear I’ve played more recently than the 28th of last month). It makes me feel bad, but I have made the decision to cancel my subscription. I have come to the conclusion that it is mainly because of a lack of a variety of options.

Like I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, there seems to be little to do in STO that doesn’t involve shooting Klingons. The game is beautiful, but from a long-term perspective, everything looks the same.

If my current mission is a space battle, well, sometimes there will be a planet there, sometimes there won’t. Sometimes there will be an asteroid belt, sometimes there won’t. Sometimes the nebula surrounding the place will be green, sometimes it will be purple. But for the most part, the scenery doesn’t change that much. It’s SPACE. It’s pretty space, and it’s often different colored space, but there’s only so long you can look at stars without it all starting to blend together as the same exact setting.

The ships I’m fighting are different from each other, but I fight each one in pretty much the same way. It’s a white circle with orange or green lines coming out from it (and occasionally orange blips) and I’m also a white circle with orange AND green lines (and occasionally orange blips) and my job is to fly straight at the enemy circle and fire some orange blips at it, and then circle it and shoot my two colors of lines at it, and occasionally dip my orientation to shoot more blips. Occasionally I’ll fire off a blue line or a Really Awesome Vortex, or I’ll pop a cooldown that makes parts of my ship glow orange for a few seconds. But for the most part, I face every battle in exactly the same way. They might be Klingons, they might be Gorn, they might be something else, but there isn’t really much difference other than the names and models of the enemy ships.

If my current mission is a ground mission, it consists of either “hey, there are some things here you need to scan with your tricorder, but there are groups of Klingons in the way, so shoot them,” or “hey, there are groups of Klingons here, they look suspicious, so shoot them.” And every time, I deal with it the same way (since even when there aren’t story objects to scan with my tricorder, there are always anomalies). Send out away team to surround the enemy group. There are usually two or three dudes in each group who have shields, so I take them down first. Tell group to focus on that guy in the back who’s summoning those annoying targs/saurian gorn things. (Were they so uncreative that they made the same exact enemy type for the Klingons and the Gorn and just reskinned the pigs as lizards? Because they act exactly the same.)

Very VERY rarely there is a mission that consists of “hey, there are some things here you need to scan with your tricorder (but you’re perfectly safe since there aren’t any Klingons here that you need to shoot)” but I think one of the main issues here is that if I don’t FEEL like doing combat missions, I can’t even choose to do the non-combat ones instead. All of them are random. I don’t know what kind of mission I’m going to be asked to do until I’ve started it. I might zone into the next randomized mission in the star cluster, it says “Klingon patrols defeated 0/4″ and I groan to myself and think “aw man, not again!”

Over the years, I gradually come to understand further reasons why I like WoW so much. This is a good example. Constant change of scenery. If I get bored with the swampy Wetlands, I can go do quests in the rocky Redridge Mountains. A wide variety of different graphics. Each enemy I fight has different animations, different sound effects. Some are casters that I can interrupt. Some are ranged mobs that I can’t easily pull as a group. Some of them tend to travel in packs, but run away when they get low on health, so I have to slow them down before they can pull more.

Even within the same zone, there’s a wide variety of settings. Take Redridge for example, since I was finishing up old quests there last night. There are quests that send me off to the south to fight gnolls and dragon whelps, in a pretty heavily forested area. There are quests that send me off to the north, to fight orcs near the steep rocky cliffs, and there are even quests that send me into caves, and to old abandoned castles. There are quests to send me to the bottom of the lake, fighting murlocs who run away from me faster than I can swim while also trying to navigate slowly in three dimensions without drowning. And this is all in a single zone, within a few levels of each other.

The quests are specifically designed to bring me to a certain area and then take me away from it again just before I get bored of it, giving me a constant change of scenery. And most importantly (I think) is that I can choose which of these places I want to go to. If I don’t feel like swimming, I can look at my quest log and think “no, I don’t really feel like swimming, I think I’d rather go to a cave right now” and go there. I don’t hit a button that says “I want to do a quest” and it says “okay, swimming time!” and I go “aw man, not again!” Even with the random dungeon finder, I have a pretty good idea of what dungeons it’ll send me to, and if it’s been sending me to the same one a lot lately, I can just check that one off of the list and it’ll send me somewhere else.

And in addition to this, there are plenty of activities in WoW that don’t involve killing things.

Did I mention the fishing? I think I did, last time.

I can browse the auction house and try to find some good deals, maybe make some money with my tradeskills. Oh well, I can’t do that in STO, because there isn’t any crafting (and what excuse for crafting there is requires me to travel to the far side of a zone I’m still not actually high enough level to quest in yet). The auction house is limited to 20 items, and because everyone who plays is on the same server, supply of every item is up so high that prices are driven so low that I won’t earn enough above vendor cost to be worth the price. The auction interface really isn’t helping here — attempting to undercut the other people doesn’t work when the ones who are looking to buy things at the cheapest rate can’t even find which listings are cheaper.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that having all of the players on the same server is GREAT for playing with your friends, but TERRIBLE for the in-game economy. Maybe someday, someone will find an answer to this problem.

We watched an episode of Next Generation tonight, and in part of it, Riker was trapped in an underground Romulan base, trying to escape, but it turns out the whole thing was an incredibly realistic hologram and there were never any Romulans there at all, the kid controlling the holographic projector was just lonely and wanted to create a convincing reality so that Riker wouldn’t leave. Why can’t we have twists like that in STO? Why must every mission be “we’re at war with the Klingons, and hey, there are Klingons here, so shoot them”?