It’s been a while, dear reader, so let me start this off with a very important piece of advice for you all. If you, say, are a Nelf who has started developing a real Warsong Gultch addiction and you want to hide in the Horde’s flag room and wait for backup, dismiss your pet before shadowmelding. Nothing says, “I am a huge noob and I’m standing right here!” like an unattended tiny green elf.
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I have never been big on leveling alts. Oh sure, I have them — a level 70 mage and a 73 enhancement shaman — but in my heart there can only be one character, and that is Liore. I created Liore the minute WoW Vanilla finished installing, many years ago now. Liore was a name I made up for my half-elf paladin in Everquest (which I only played for a short period of time), and I picked priest because a friend played a cleric in EQ and reported back that everyone wanted to have a healer around but no one wanted to play them. Clearly, a healer was the way to go.
In Vanilla I leveled a gnome mage in fairly good time. This was back when +heal was just +heal, and raid healers sporting the finest epics in the game did about as much damage as a pillow. I wanted a tailor and blaster who could nuke her way through anything, and Thursday was created. She ran a little Zul’Gurub and got decked out in really nice blues.
In TBC I rolled a shaman. Who didn’t? Lunedi started off as just a way to see the new quests, but then near the end of TBC resto shaman became the 900 pound gorillas of raid healing. Frustrated with my lovely Liore, I leveled up Lunedi so I’d have an alternate healing class in case Blizzard broke priests forever. She ran a little SSC and Hyjal, and got decked out in some pretty nifty epics.
So here we are in Lich King, and.. I have barely played my alts. I felt a little bad about abandoning them, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I would play them at all.
I am delightfully happy with holy priests and raid healing at the moment. If I want to quest or grind gold or kill things, I’ll switch to shadow spec and melt faces with glee. The Argent Tournament and profession dailies are still high on my priority list, much more so than leveling Lunedi.
But more than anything else, Achievements killed my desire to level alts. There is ALWAYS some achievement I could be working on. Free time? Cook stuff on the way to getting Chef. Knock off those last few Northrend heroics for my red protodrake. (Watch Him Die is still really stupid, even in Ulduar-25 gear.) Grind Kurenai rep for a few different reasons. Go clear Mauradon by myself. There are a million different achievements I could work on, and most will end with a flashy graphic and bit of noise after an hour or two. Somehow getting Thursday to 71 just doesn’t seem as .. neat.
I’m sure eventually I’ll be ready to club in heads again or light mobs on fire. It might be fun to go back to Naxx on a different character and get some gear. That time is not now, though, and I don’t see it coming for a while.
Interesting you mentioned Watch Him Die, as that's one of the only tough ones I've gotten. I did that with myself (tank paladin), a prot warrior, a resto druid, and an arms warrior. I pulled all three of the add groups myself with AS, taunt, and exorcism, then ran all the way back to the instance portal. As they caught up with me, I hit holy wrath for the stun. I then tried to survive as long as possible, busting every cooldown I had, while the rest of the group zerged the boss. They actually killed him right after I died, but I still got the achievement (don't release!). Of course, the adds wiped everyone after I went down due to the disorient/wrap/poison crap, but it worked.