Guest Post: Boomkin… er… Resto… er… Boomkin?… er… Resto? LFG

I was trying to catch up on my blog reading today, which has gotten woefully behind, and saw Bell’s request for some guest blogging to get her through the holidays. There are several druid blogs in my rotation of things to read, and I’ve thought of starting one myself, but thought… meh… who has the time? Look at poor Bell always juggling a bazillion things and lamenting her lack of time in her blog. But one blog entry I thought I might be able to pull off, and help out a blogger who I very much enjoy in the process.

So here’s my story about why I’m not level 80.

Syll, my main toon (whazzup, Duskwood?), is about 300,000 xp from level 80. 300,000 xp. That’s… what… 2 hours of playtime, max? And last night I could have done it. I could have finished it up, seen my achievement blasted through guild chat, whooped it all up. I mean, everything was in line in the universe for this to happen. My husband had actually FALLEN ASLEEP and wouldn’t have even noticed if I was playing late into the evening. I was well-fed, but had some holiday snacks on standby (peanut brittle ftw!). Kids were bathed and tucked in and settled into that perfectly peaceful rhythm of the almost-snore of youth. I had rested xp all the way to 80. I settled into my computer chair and played… for half an hour. I then turned my computer off and went to watch the latest offering Netflix had sent my way.

Why, gentle reader, you may ask? A fine question. The reason is I can’t choose between Boomkin and Resto and, until I reach 80, I don’t have to.

A little history may be in order here. Syll was my first WOW toon, and for a long, long, looooong time, he was my only WOW toon. I picked a druid because it was inconceivable to me how someone could NOT play a druid based upon their abilities and flexibility. And I wanted to heal. It’s just part of who I am. So poor Sylly was a healer from the moment he hit Azerothian soil. Not that he minded. It took him months to realize that every friend he made quickly out leveled him… he was happy making new ones. He was content to bore every mob he ever met to death, merrily popping HOTs on himself along the way. He didn’t KNOW the pure exhilaration of nuking 5 things into the ground at once. He didn’t KNOW that corpse runs could be occurrences only experienced due to moments of sheer stupidity on the part of his operator, but took them as a matter of course if more than, say 2-3 mobs at his level decided to take a bite out of his butt. He was straight Resto from level 1-70.
Tree all the way. He ended up a T5-T6 raider in the end, with a full complement of sweet badge/raid epics and a plus heals number (remember those?) that was always welcome wherever he went. He had his own style for rolling out HOTs and tossing innervates and such around that was a joy to behold. And he was happy… until…

Until I leveled a mage. It’s true. I broke down and rolled an alt. I never intended for her to be played. She was actually created at the behest of a guildie as part of an off-color joke. I leveled her, slowly at first. She almost died off at about level 40. Anyone who’s leveled a mage to, say, 50 knows why. But I began to love her. It was so much FUN to have huge amounts of unbridled whoopass at my disposal. I feverishly worked to get her to 70 before the expansion, and poor Syll only got to come out for raids and to farm mats for raiding. I still loved him, but why would someone want to do dailies on a tree when they could do them with an ice mage???

Then word came of the expansion, and in a fit of misery and despair at the thought of Syll wading through ten levels of quests at a snail's pace, I got an idea. Picture me here rubbing my hands together and looking like the Grinch when he got HIS wonderful, awful idea of how to keep Christmas from coming. I could level Syll BOOMKIN! (Feverish light in my eyes). Switch him over into a gleefully fat, goofily wonderful owl beast just to speed up the leveling process, to take out some of the agony of crawling through quest content. (Mad cackles). My guildies wouldn’t be ready to raid for weeks anyway, I reasoned, so they won’t need Sylly’s uber leet heals; they’d never miss them. And I’d switch back to Resto as soon as I dinged 80.

Which is why I haven’t dinged 80, of course. Because being a Boomkin is SO MUCH FUN! Holy Cats (as Bricco would say)! I’ve been running around Northrend just nuking everything to the GROUND! Running ORANGE QUESTS without thinking twice about it. Dancing with everyone, everywhere, at the drop of a hat because… lol… well you’ve seen the Boomkin dance, right? I’m having a blast!

Now, I know full well that this unchecked DPS will come to an end soon. Syll is a healer at heart. Hell, I never even took Healbot off my interface, so for 10 levels I’ve still been tracking everyone’s health everywhere I go, and hopping in to help out the healers in a pinch. I like the support role that a healer plays. And I still have Aannie, my mage, who is waiting patiently at level 71 for me to take her out of park and let her reduce all of Northrend to tiny bits. Also, my guild recruited me as a healer, and I get great satisfaction out of being part of our healing corps. But, for one more day, I’m still lingering at 79, like Wendy flying off to face pirates and Indians with Peter Pan before having to grow up and leave the nursery. Maybe two more days. Yes, definitely two more days… or perhaps three...