World of Warcraft Level 70 Holy Paladin

 I know, I know just from looking at the title you are probably thinking.  This guys is just now getting level 70, well I guess rolling a Holy Paladin will do that to you.  I have to say I really enjoy playing World of Warcraft Classic the Burning Crusade, and playing a Holy Paladin has given me a lot of things to think about.  

As some of you may know World of Warcraft Classic The Burning Crusade has been out since June 1st of this year.  Which means that I have been playing it since then.  The day that I am writing this blog post is November 12, 2021.  That means that I have been playing for about 5 months now.  That means that it has taken me 5 months to go from level 60 to level 70, and to be honest at the time of writing this post I'm not quite 70, I'm 69.8.  I'm so close.  I figure that I'll probably finish this post and play some and then post it.  But here are somethings that I have learned along the way.  I hope that you enjoy this because I really will enjoy writing about it.  

I really play World of Warcraft for a couple of reasons.  One I have been playing since I was 10 or 11.  I think that my brother got the game a couple of months after it came out and I have been playing it since then.  Back in those days though we had to share an account, and we had to take turns playing, so playing World of Warcraft brings some sense of nostalgia to me.  Obviously the game has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot as well.  There have been 7 expansions to the retail version of the game, and the rerelease of Classic WoW and the rerelease of the Burning Crusade, and since those beginning days I have grown a lot as well.  I have gone through school since then, and not just high school but college and my Master Degree as well.  I have lived in 5 different cities, and have gone through 3 or 4 different jobs.  Oh along with a mission in there as well.  I guess it's safe to say that the game and I are pretty different from when we started this journey together.  

Here is what I would like to share though that I have learned from playing a Holy Paladin from 60 to 70 in The Burning Crusade.  It is a grind so often.  Haha can I leave it at that.  No of course not.  It is a grind in so many meanings of the word.  For those of you who might not know what a Holy Paladin is I'll give a brief explanation.  A Holy Paladin is a warrior of light.  Meaning that he is a religious warrior basically.  All of his powers come from Holiness if that makes sense.  A regular Warrior just beats people over the head with their axe or their sword a Paladin uses spells of light and holiness to beat his opponents into submission.  Haha I'm not entirely sure of all the lore.  I'm not sure what religion they even attest to, but it's some religion in Azeroth.  They are given their power because of their holiness.  Anyways a Holy Paladin in particular is a Paladin that is focused on healing and its main purpose is to heal the group.  Let me explain that little piece as well.  World of Warcraft is an MMORPG.  Which means that it is a Multi Massive Online Role Play Game.  Which means there are different roles that are required as you play through the game.  When playing through the game the player comes across dungeons or scenarios which are called instances.  These instances have to be overcome through a group of players mainly 5 people need to come together to overcome these opponents.  The 5 people are comprised of a Tank which will take all the damage from everyone else,  a Healer which should heal or cast spells of light that will help keep all the other players health a good levels, and 3 DPS players.  DPS stands for Damage Per Second.  While the take is taking all the blows from the bad guys in these instances the 3 DPS players are to use all their spells and abilities to kill the opponent as fast as they can.  

Hopefully that all makes sense.  I may go back and rewrite some of that, or have a different blog post explaining more of World of Warcraft and the different mechanics that are played through in the game.  But for now I want to explain why it's so difficult to level a Holy Paladin and why I did it and how it has gone for me so far.  

Ok so the reason why it's so hard to level a Holy Paladin is because of the fact that they don't do a lot of damage per second.  They are made to heal and they are good at healing.  They don't have many spells that do much damage.  They can stay alive forever and take any kind of beating but they can't kill things very quickly which means it takes longer to quest, and takes longer to level if you are leveling solely.  

That's where the dungeons come into play.  My Dad my Uncle and myself have been playing together every Thursday night for a couple of months now just running dungeons.  A lot of weeks this is all that I play.  When I first showed up in Outland I had done 2 quests and they got me into the Ramparts and into the Blood Furnace.  That got me almost 2 levels.  I was 61 or 62 just from doing those simple things.  Dungeons died off for a little bit and so did my leveling.  I soon realized I could quest and kill things for 1 or 2 hours and that would equal the amount of experience of about 30 minutes in a dungeon.  It was kind of crazy, when I realized this I knew that I needed to get back into more dungeons so we picked up more dungeons.   As I continued healing and continued doing well at it my confidence grew.  I don't know if you realize this but this might be a good little piece of wisdom.  The more you do something the better you get at it, and the more you do something the less the mistakes matter.  Just look at it from the perspective of playing World of Warcraft if I had healed one dungeon and we had wiped that's 100% of the dungeons that we had wiped on, however if I had run 100 dungeons and we had wiped on 1 that is 1%.  The more you do the more those little mistakes don't matter, and the better you become.  As you play more you realize that the one time you wiped and it was your fault no one really cares or even remembers.  

 This is also true in work as well. I remember when I was first starting my career I realized that I had made a mistake.  I didn't really want to tell anyone about it because I didn't want them to know that I had messed up, so I did all that I could to fix it and make it right and eventually sent it out.  It came back to bite but and what I realize from that is especially at the beginning you are going to mess up, but if you just sit on it that will make it worse, if you ask questions and fix the problem, and maybe get some help from someone else you will be a lot better off.  People expect there to be some mistakes, the mistakes don't matter what matters is what you do about the mistake and how you handle it.  That was a really good piece of advice from World of Warcraft.  

Anyways back to World of Warcraft and my leveling experience, so as I was saying the main way that I have leveled is through dungeons on Thursday nights.  Though a couple of weeks ago I realize that I was 67 and a half and I could just feel it.  I could just feel that I was so close to level 70.  The weekend was coming up and I set a crazy crazy goal of getting level 70 over the weekend.  That Friday night I got to 68.  I knew that I had all days Saturday except for some chores that I had to do to work on leveling.  I put a lot of time in.  One thing I realized, there isn't a lot of groups going on in the morning, running dungeons and what not.  What I had to do was quest, so I made the crazy decision and I went and respected to Retribution Paladin.  The reason why I did this was 2 fold, one it's a lot easier to level if you are a damage person, you are able to kill things faster, which makes leveling a lot faster, and 2 I had been working on a quest the night before with a guy that I had ran dungeons with before and he was saying it might not be a bad idea.  I figured it didn't cost that much, so why not go for it.  

When I switched over I realized that it was a huge mistake.  The problem was yes I had the damage now but my gear did not keep me alive.  I had spent all this time accumulating gear for Holy and now it didn't work nearly as well for Retribution.  It was rough, I died many times.  Anyways, during this time I did some quests with my Uncle and that helped me a lot, he could only play for an hour or 2 after that I was really on my own.  After questions and dying quit a bit I went back and respected as Holy.  Once I had done that it felt a lot better.  Around this time also I had started looking for groups that would help me with dungeon.  I was able to get into one and went through it very quickly.  After that though I wasn't feeling much for dungeons so I just quested the rest of the night.  I reached level 69 at about 10:00 PM that night.  I think that I had played for 10 hours that day, and I was tired, I didn't get to level 70 like I had hoped but I was a lot further along then if I hadn't set that goal.  

The lesson that I learned from this is that even if you don't accomplish your goal if you really set your mind to it you will be so much better off then if you hadn't, because setting goals is about making us stretch to achieve something that we hadn't before.  It's a vision that we have for ourselves.  

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  I have enjoyed writing it, maybe I'll write more like this about my video game adventures, and maybe even some real life adventures.  

Till then say classy and have a great day.