Everyone's talking about having Paladins/Shamans for their respective factions and getting all excited over them, etc. I'm wondering how that's going to work though. How do you decide who gives up playing their main for weeks and weeks to level up a new character while the rest of your guild is heading to 70? Most people are excited by being able to raid and whatnot when they hit 70, but I don't think they realize they won't have their new class along with them.

Are guildies that are re-rolling going to get any special help? Expensive enchants on twink gear came to mind for me along with power-questing and whatnot, but that really cuts into your own leveling time :(. I've considered re-rolling to a BE Paladin, but I take a look at my Priest and see how much time I've put into that character and I really don't think I could bring myself to re-roll.

My guild is focused on raiding and ability is just as important, if not more so than friendship for us, so anyone who changes class is put back on trial. Being great at one class doesnt make someone automatically great at another class. Its especially true when you have people changing roles, like from a healer to dps.

Anyone who changes to a shaman or paladin (or any class really) main should do so because they want to play that class and are genuinly interested. We've had bad experiences in the past where someone leveled a character "for the guild" because we needed one. At the time we very strongly warned them not to change roles unless thats what they genuinly wanted, not to do it just for the guild as the guild would be ok either way. 6 months down the track, they didn't like the class anymore and out come the "i did it for the guild" and "I didnt want to play this class" complaints. People should only ever play a class because they want to, long term is just hurts the guild more when that person isnt happy.

I believe that for anyone changing to Shaman main we are giving them preference at trials, assuming they level fast enough, but not a guaranteed spot.

"Good luck, have fun?"

Guild bank supplied a few blue boes and promises to reserve obsidian shards for the more serious peple but mainly its up to them to arrange what they need. I know a couple have done instance runs for greens and I have made a few twink weapons(blacksmith) recently.

But the guild view is not all of you will make it to 70 but if you dont your welcome as your old main.

Nothing formal.

I know that I don't play nearly enough hours to rush a new Shaman up to 70, so I'm just volunteering some instance rushes and stuff to help out the people who do (and who make a serious effort at it).

The problem I see with this point of view is that you will need the missing class to be competitive at the high end of raiding. There are some abilities and buffs that those classes offer that are simply too good to pass up - we all know what they are from the endless "your faction is overpowered" whinefests. And unlike other classes you cannot simply recruit shortages away because there isn't anybody to recruit.

We actually have all of our shoe-in Shaman spots filled by people who want to swap classes from overpopulated ones. I believe we have a Warlock, Rogue, and Hunter rerolling Resto, Enh, and Elemental respectively (although the hunter fully intends to level his BM, 8/8 T2 hunter to 70 as well). In fact, the Hunter and Rogue came out and said, almost immediately upon the Draenei class announcements, that they wanted to roll up Shaman and raid with those instead of their current mains. I don't know what concrete assistance we'll be providing during their leveling, aside from instance runs for leveling, gearing up, and whatnot, but I'm fairly certain that we don't intend to raid without having Shaman available for our groups.

Twink gear for leveling a shaman...most everything enchanted with more in the bank. Its not hard, you still have a month to go.

Yeah, that's a pain. I'm going paladin- because I want to- and I'm hoping to at least arrive at 70 in time for early raids (even if I'm half in level 64 greens of the owl, BOK is BOK and Salv is Salv), but if I don't get there by the time the guild is generally ready to proceed then at least it's not the end of the world.

I think it would behoove guilds generally to encourage their pally and shaman wannabes- Horde guilds and paladins moreso than Alliance and shaman, I'm still not convinced that shamans provide anything hugely unique and irreplaceable which is one reason I'm changing mains- and provide them with assistance. Reverting people to trials because they're re-rolling into a class you have 0 members of seems pretty daft to me.

We're allowing a one time guild wide reroll for anyone interested with no concerns for class balance or immediate skill. Some of our people are miserable in their current classes but have kept playing the better geared toon for the guild for weeks or months. We've got a few people swapping to old race 60's that are decently geared from months of love and affection, a few folks dead serious about rerolling new race (looks like a hunter and 2-3 shaman), and one or two considering a recently pushed to 60 old-race.

While I'm as big on skill as the next guy, there's a lot of room for learning your class in a competitive and friendly learning environment, especially when you have what so few people have had in the last year- time. Jumping into BWL/AQ40/Naxx on a new green toon that you just got to 60? You're missing a lot of the learning curve with the people around you. When there's 4-5 of you all leveling from 60 and trying to figgure out where the new skills come into play it's more like a learning group than a straight up mentorship- get it in 2 days or your out.

Honestly without having spent the weeks/months leveling Bekah to 60 with a bunch of other priests and learning MC+ with the guild (rather than being shoved through af arm guild) I don't think I'd be half as good of a priest. You can't beat learning experience.

So ya. Opened up a thread on our forums. Anyone tagged before TBC is free to change their class as long as they announce their intent before hand so we can recruit appropriately. IF they're rerolling they have to be making a dedicated effort to level quickly.

We figure it will even out fairly well. Our players are smart and less likely to roll flavor of the month. We'll get to 70 relatively fast, bu we won't be breaking records. Nothing specific is organized for the rerollers, but I expect they'll get a certain amount of power leveling/instance running.

I think our only plan is to taunt them endlessly.




Actually, we don't have a plan. One guy is rerolling, two old members are coming back as shamans, and we'll just take it from there. I'm sure we can run any preliminary raid instances without them.

I will reroll a paladin with bc because I'm tired of playing my priest. I have collected maybe 15 different blue and epic weapons, all enchanted with fiery weapon and some blue armor stuff from the ah. Aswell as some wool, mageweave and runecloth and some purchasable questitems, which hopefully save me a lot of time. So far I have payed that all by myself, maybe I would have get help from the guild, but I wanted to do that alone. I also want to try out a leveling guide to hopefully speed up things.
In fact I stopped raiding with my priest maybe a month ago and want to use the remaining time until bc with goldfarming and perhaps I can find some more items at the ah. There are no concrete plans in the guild, how to help the new paladins. The only thing which is clear, is that they will be ported to an "old" starting area at the very beginning of the leveling process, to escape the overcrowed bloodelf starting zone. At the moment there are only 3 paladin rerollers (including me) in the guild, out of 120+ accounts, but there are some people who are unsure about rerolling at the moment (mainly mages, I wonder where that comes from). I could imagine there will be some sort of help, maybe with instance runs and such things. Like someone in this thread said, a paladin is very valuable for a horde raid and blessings are not affected by your equipment, so I expect people will be eager to have a paladin in the raid.
Well I just want to use the leveling guide and hope to reach the high levels really fast, thats maybe problematic because of reallife-issues at this time. All in all I'm very excited in playing a paladin. I always loved to play a supporting class, I have played a shaman and a priest, but both of them don't give me the feeling of a truly good supporter, hopefully this will change with the paladin.

In my guild, we have about 5-6 people who already have 60's of every class...I'm sure they'll be making Draenai shamans to tool around with, but I don't know of anyone of our raid team that is seriously making the switch. I personally thought about it, but to be honest, the thought of an Alliance Shaman just makes me a sad panda. Orc Shaman ftw.

My thought is this....the first Horde 70 Paladin in the guild and the first 70 Allaince Shaman in your guild is going to get ALL of the Pally/Shammy loot on runs until more show up and that should be incentive enough. We also use an open bid null system so they'll also be getting all of the class specific items for minimum bids allowing them more DKP for cross-class items as well.

A few months into the expansion that'll sort itself out and as long as you are a top tier guild on your server you'll get the 70s early. If you are a feeder guild you'll probably end up losing yours to one of the top tier guilds as they'll still most likely be short. Six months after the expansion I'm sure we'll have more Horde Pally and Ally Shammy than we know what to do with just because it was new and everyone wanted one.

We expect everyone in the guild to hit 70 within 30 days after the expansion release except for the people that reroll, they need to hit 60 by then and 70 in 60 days. If they aren't sure they're going to love/stick with the new Pally we're recommending they level the a character they want to raid on to 70 first and then get the Pally up later (with the 10 man instances we'll be able to do a ton of alt/mostly successful pug runs for the people that are active to want to gear up multiple characters).

As soon as you do priority gearing, levelling assistance, etc you put the guild at risk of a giant morale hit. If that person that got all the help leaves you -- where does that leave you? How many guilds have had their progression totally halted becuase they lost their MT? We firmly believe the strength of the guild is all of our members and that nobody deserves special treatment, it just sets you up for animosity and a potential major morale hit if that person ever leaves.

I think this is a problem that solves itself.

Horde guilds will want Blessings and Judgement of Wisdom.
Alliance guilds will be pleasantly surprised with Chain Heal and then Earth shield or Unleashed Rage and bloodlust is just wild.

The smaller raids will complicate issues some but these classes both provide very potent buffs and guilds would be silly to not make room in raids for them. The first month or two it might be tough to get people to fill the roles but there is plenty of time.

The officers just asked the guild a few weeks/months ago who was possibly thinking of rolling a Shaman. Two people have now said they were switching 'officially', some are still considering it.

As far as I know, the people who have committed to the change already have items and gold set aside to level and I know the guild will power-level them through the lower instances.

I think everyone will atleast roll an alt Shaman and the rest of the rerollers will pop out then.

Hmm.. I've found this couldn't be more untrue. Nearly every player I've every been around that has been truly "awesome" has been great at whatever class they play. My brother went from being an amazing raid healer, got bored, and became our top DPS rogue while wearing mostly Darkmantle. While this doesn't say much about the other rogues, it says something about him. A friend of mine went from playing our top DPS mage, to being probably one of the best tanks I've ever seen. I've seen tons of examples of changes like these. I've seen rogues who don't even have a warrior alt log on a warrior's account so that we had 8 warriors and kill the four horsemen.

Also, this game is about people whether you admit it or not. If you were raiding with 40 strangers every night, it wouldn't make any difference how fast you cleared <Insert Raid Instance Here>. Believe me. I server transferred and while everyone I played with was amazing and great, it just wasn't the same as playing with the people I had played with for the past ~2 years. I don't see why you'd go so far as to "put someone back on trial." If anything, that would make me (assuming I was one of these players who was pretty good who wanted to reroll) take my talents elsewhere. WoW is a very simple game. I am 100% confident that I could be just as good as any other player at this game in about 3 days of learning spells/abilities, at least in PvE. To assume that someone who is rerolling is going to be awful at another class just seems like a blatant lack of respect for that person, and if anyone I considered my friend did that to me, I would be disgusted.

Granted, I'm guildless, but I may be starting up my own thing soon (new job new hours etc), but when I do start my own thing up, my friends who want to play a different class will have everyone in my guild's blessing.

For us, we have a few folks who have been seriously interested in playing a shaman and even have a few horde shaman alts on other servers. They're likely going to level their current main to 70 with everyone else and then bum rush a shaman to 70 in a week or two.

I hope people would be able to play things they would like to because eventually they'll just stop playing if they're stuck in a role they don't like or want to fill.

I don't think you need a formal plan.

It is quite helpful to store up some leather/mail gear for the rerollers and of course 2H weapons. Minor speed enchant to boots is a huge time saver.

The best way to level is to just do all the quests (get a quest guide if needed), and help the rerollers in instances to get a few good drops and assist in the the instance quests.

At 48, you should be able to tap level (let the 48 hit the mobs first, then allow the high level to kill all the mobs).

I heard a rumor a while ago that ZF is a great means for powerleveling. The basic idea was to have a pally mount, agro every single mob in the instance, and bring them all back to the entrance. The pally would attempt to cluster the mobs with consecrate and divine shield. Three mages would then burn all the mobs down, while the lowbie would sit there and earn tons of xp. I think you could do something similar with SM with just a mage and priest. Anyway the idea was to get the lowbie to 48 as quickly as possible so he could start the tag game while other dps classes killed the mob for full xp to him.

The person that mentioned this strat got 1-60 in a Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun long weekend. Feasible? I know I have powerleveled characters from 48-60 in a weekend just by doing the tag and kill method (cauldron runs mmmm).

Does this really work? Perhaps it was an issue with the level gap, but it seemed to me that if the higher level character did all the damage they would 'steal' xp from the kill?

They steal xp prior to 48. Prior to 2.0, if the char was 48, and did 1 dmg to a mob only, that char would get full xp.

I believe this may have been changed in 2.0 to 52. I know that the 48 full xp will not work with a lvl 70 powerleveler (I think its 54?).

It works, however I don't recall how much xp if any is taken from the 48, but it is a viable method of power leveling.