Hello! I have no spoons to speak of today so meet my Mage. No, not my main Mage. This is my alt. Actually she was almost my main, but that was a very long time ago. You see, I started out playing World of Warcraft Horde-side, but I always felt much more at home with the Alliance and longed to main a Night Elf.¹

By the end of Cataclysm, a Twitter mutual was setting up a casual Alliance guild on a little PVE server. This was great! I could finally follow my dreams and be one of the Alliance, escape my PVP server, and I’d have more friends to play alongside and chat with. So I made myself a little Draenei Mage, a class I’d always wanted to play but for some reason never got around to levelling. Er… right yes, she wasn’t a Night Elf. I had my Night Elf Death Knight, Soupdragon, who satisfied that need in me.² But I had discovered a new love during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion when I created my namesake on a friend’s server. Jaedia the Draenei Hunter, who I mained for perhaps a month or two. But I fell in love with the race. They are so pretty, the waggle as they walked was cute as heck, and I just.. I loved them. So for a while there, I made a lot of Draenei.

Anyway. I levelled this Mage, found I loved the community of this guild and wanted to stick around here. I was happy to play this Mage, but somebody offered to pay to transfer over my Death Knight I believe? So I played her until I was able to afford to bring over my Priest and my Hunter.³ My Priest actually began her life as a Human, as I felt it less of a jarring change from Blood Elf, my Hunter, however, was immediately Draenei, and the Priest went that way eventually also. Both are now Night Elves so you could consider my original desire to play a Night Elf complete, despite my maining a Human Mage.

I almost switched mains to this Mage at one point in Pandaria as we had more than enough Priests but no Mages, though in the end I didn’t. I can’t recall why now, but she ended up being relegated to dusty alt status and I’m fairly sure I simply deleted her after a few expansions of not playing her, plus she was on an old server I had no desire to play on any more and I’d levelled up a new Mage I’d started maining, so it felt pointless taking up a character space on my account with her.

But with Warbands I found her back on my list. Sat right at the bottom alongside 4 or 5 other alts from this old server I had definitely deleted. And you know what? I don’t mind it. It’s quite nice to have a secondary Mage, in this day and age of World of Warcraft I’ve already got one of each class, so I’m down to making a second or a third of something if I want a new alts for whatever reason. I’m not a huge fan of maining as a Human though every time I think about race changing, I look at that £19 price tag and think “Is Human really so bad? Do I really need to be a Void Elf?” and ultimately talk myself out of it. This way, I can mess around with other builds and explore other races⁴ and perhaps have an extra character to run through for particular legacy raid drops!

This girl pictured? She’s currently specced into Fire, where I main Frost, and I have a lot of fun running around the Visions of Azeroth event with my friend last night levelling up these little characters, even if we did start having issues with lacking gear!

I don’t know if she’ll be a big part of my roster in the future, truth be told. There’s only so much time, so many games and other things to do, and I have many, many alts. But It sure is fun to head down memory lane from time to time, and giving a new lease of life to old characters thought lost.

1. I still do not to this day, though I suppose my Shadow Priest would have been a Night Elf from possibly late Warlords, or perhaps some time in Legion? I forget exactly, but I stopped maining her with the release of Shadowlands [↩]
2. I don’t mean for this to sound oddly sexual, I am so sorry. I’m awful with words today… [↩]
3. These 3 characters, by the way, have stuck with me throughout moves and are still considered “main alts” on my current server. [↩]
4. It’s super handy for unlocking the Heritage quests, too [↩]