My Draenie shaman is no more. As I had pretty much decided when they announced faction changes, I took the plunge and faction changed her so she could be a part of my horde pirate family. The hardest part of the endeavor was saying goodbye to the friends I have Alliance-side, accumulated over the past almost four years. I still have my druid on the server, but honestly, I mostly logged on this lady to do Jewelcrafting dailies and say hello to folks. Moving her to the horde cements my transition for them, and for me. I will try to chip away at them over time to get them to come play with us horde-side…this means YOU Milch and Thar and El and Jay!!
The overall process was easy enough, though it took me some extra time due to not being aware that read mail in my box would be an issue. Once it was safely deleted, my faction change went through within a couple of hours, and the server move within minutes after that. And thus, on Saturday morning, I was on a zeppelin to Northrend. I had almost all of the Northrend horde FPs, minus Gundrak and one of the Argent Crusade quest hubs. I retained my achievements for number of quests completed but my running tally halved itself. Good thing I am not pursuing loremaster! The contents of my bags all switched over without incident, except for my mechano hog. A GM ticket and a 24-hour wait were all it took, however, for that to be resolved so my SP could be riding in style.
My alliance characters, with so many years under their belts and a wide assortment of professions across them as well, are more prosperous than my hordies. And I had stashed a variety of cloth items for my not-yet-leveled up alts (who may never be leveled at this point.) So I made sure to consolidate all the goodies on my shaman to bring them with me. An especially fortuitous score was the Tome of Polymorph Turtle, on the AH for 350g. I have probably lost rolls on that thing a half dozen times over the course of my many ZG fishing boss summons.
It’s been 8 months since I played my shaman for more than a few minutes time. Thus it took me a while to get back into the swing of things. For one thing, I hadn’t healed on her since I was on my wee laptop and see I will need to install grid or some unit frames to not lose my mind doing that. I am getting her DPS well sorted, tho somehow she only had healing gear — except for the heroic CoS pants. Her sorry state of gear is due in large part to the fact that she and my druid swapped in and out, boss-by-boss for our tiny 10-man guild’s Naxx runs at the beginning of the year.
But even if I am DPSing ToC primarily in healing gear, and white-knuckle healing through the other heroics, it’s nice to actually have the opportunity to get her out and about and playing again. I’ve really missed playing her. And it’s nice to have my pocket JC available whenever needed. It has been strange for me to only have 1 level cap character for the past 6 months horde-side. Ever since vanilla, I’ve always had a stable of alts to choose from — so i could be a swiss-army knife for whatever activity our friends and guildies were up for. It feels great to have that flexibility again.
My verdict? Well worth the money.
Next up: getting the mage to 80!
P.S. I took the shaman for one last chopper joy ride with her main squeeze right before I transferred:
<3 that Wrenzil.