Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. For a while now I've been trying to main one character. Just the warlock. Park the alts, funnel everything into the one guy, actually finish something on a single toon instead of spreading myself across fifty-two of them. If you read the altoholic confession post earlier this month, you already know why that sentence is almost funny coming from me. I'm the guy who physically cannot leave the alts alone. I finished the last expansion with 52 max-level characters, and I mean that as a confession, not a brag. Fifty-two. And that's the guy who's now, nineteen years in, trying to run an experiment in monogamy.
The warlock is Joar. He's the undead one I've played since Burning Crusade, the character I sign every blog post with, and if I was ever going to pick one to go all-in on, it was always going to be him. Dark magic, a race that's already dead, the whole aesthetic fits me. So the plan was simple on paper. Make Joar the project. Gear him through Delves and renown, keep him current, and for once in my life have a single character that's actually done rather than nine that are all 80% there.
I even reshuffled the professions to do it. I wrote a whole post about that a while back. I dropped tailoring and enchanting and picked up mining and herbalism instead, which sounds backwards, ditching the crafting to go collect ore and flowers. But it's the right call for how I actually play now. Gathering you can do casually, in the gaps, while you're already out doing something else. Crafting the modern way is its own project, a grind that wants real attention I'd rather spend on the character himself. So I traded the professions that demand a session for the ones I can do half-asleep on a flying mount, and it felt weirdly freeing, like cleaning out a closet.
And the modern game actually supports this, which is the part that surprised me. Delves mean I can gear Joar up solo, on a weeknight, no raid schedule, no nineteen other people. Renown ticks up just by playing. Warbands, the account-wide stuff they added, means even the little I do earn elsewhere flows back to him. The game finally built the tools for a one-character life, right at the moment I decided to try living one. Good timing, for once.
Now here's the honest part, because these posts don't do clean victory laps. It's not working perfectly. I want to tell you I parked the alts and never looked back, that the reformed altoholic found peace with a single toon. Not quite. I still catch myself. A new patch drops and I feel the old itch to play something different, or I log in tired and end up puttering on an alt "just for a minute" and lose an evening to it. The plan is more of a strong lean than an iron rule. I'd say I'm maybe 80% loyal to Joar, which for me is a staggering number, and 20% still exactly the guy I've always been.
But the lean is real, and it's the most focused I've been on one character since maybe Wrath. When you stop spreading yourself thin, the one character you're pouring into actually gets somewhere. Joar is geared. Joar is current. Joar is, for the first time in a long time, a finished thought instead of one of fifty-two unfinished ones. And that feels good in a way the alt army never quite did, because the alt army was always about starting and this is about arriving.
Why now, this late? Same reason a lot of things are simplifying for me lately. I've got less patience for spreading myself thin, in the game and out of it. Doing one thing well is starting to beat doing fifty-two things halfway. The warlock plan is a small version of a bigger lesson I keep running into.
Will I stick to it? Probably 80% of the time. For an altoholic, that's basically a wedding vow.
Cheers,
Joar
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