From Out Of The Mothballs.

My first end game character was Shawndra, a troll warrior, which makes it fitting that I chose that as my blogging moniker. She was arms for part of the 60 end game, fury for the part just before the Burning Crusade expansion and for the grind to 70. At 70, Shawndra went protection, to help her guild experience Karazhan. She ran Karazhan enough to get her to exalted with the Violet Eye twice before she was put aside to gear up Carlotta, the hunter, and Delgada, my current main character. When Wrath of the Lich King was introduced, Delgada picked up and moved to Northrend, as did Carlotta, Maura, and Shawndra. Delgada made her way to 80, giving some time to Carlotta when it suited her. Shawndra and Maura have been, except for rare occasions, mothballed.

Yesterday Shawndra stepped out of the closet and pulled out her talent tree. She spent her points heavily in fury, all the way to Titan's Grip, and allowed Rowena to log in and send her some money and a new two handed sword, then stepped back into Dalaran, equipped her sword, repaired her gear, and hearthed to the Borean Tundra for some questing. Morgond, a good friend and guild mate, exclaimed,"I thought you killed Shawndra!" To which she replied, " Not dead, just stored away. " It is now time to bring her back.

Our guild has seasons. Seasons of raiding, seasons of arenas and battlegrounds, and seasons of trying out other games. It would seem that the guild is taking a PvP turn right now, and so, as a PvE girl, I have to have a project. Sure, if I get an invite to go run Strand of the Ancients or any other battleground, I'll hang out with the guild for a while. But I'm not great at split second decision making when I game. I sit there as someone pounds on me with a "duh" sort of expression, trying to figure out what I can do. I usually come up with the least creative solution, and get pounded into the dirt. That is why I PvE. Game controlled mobs don't run over to me unless I invade their space, so I have time to calculate, to set up a strategy. If I do accidentally invade their space, their attacks aren't generally creative, and so give me time to gather my wits and start attacking sensibly.

So, the project I needed was sitting there in mothballs, just waiting for me to bring her back out. Shawndra is now level 73, with a good start on 74. It is kind of fun to not be hitting ranged targets again, to get down and dirty and clobber things with my big old axe and sword. I'm not sure if I will eventually move her talents to protection when she is old enough, as tanking can be stressful, for me, and it seems to be all about multi target tanking these days. For now, we will be content to kill things faster, taking short breaks to clean our weapons and mend our wounds before we push on.

This could be fun!