Despite my better judgement, I've decided to join a small, slowly growing movement in World of Warcraft; the Ironman Challenge.
The basic premise of the traditional WoW Ironman is that you level from 1 to 85 without ever learning any talents, tradeskills or equipping any items that are better than white (common) in quality.
The most important part of the Ironman criteria being that your character cannot ever be killed.
Needless to say this makes things significantly more difficult.
I'm always complaining that WoW is too easy, so I decided to see for myself how different it would be if it was actually as hard and unforgiving as I would sometimes like it to be.
While the traditional WoW Ironman is already incredibly painful, I just wouldn't feel like myself unless I added some of my own stipulations:
My criteria is as follows:
- Character can never be killed.
- Character cannot complete any quests.
- Character cannot receive any items or money from any source.
Now, at first glance this doesn't seem to be too different than the normal Ironman challenge, but when you realize that without money I can't use mounts, take flight paths - I can't even repair my equipement. In fact as I write this I have no idea what I'm going to do when my starter axe finally breaks.
I can however make use of class specialization and talents, one of the few things in Azeroth that are completely free. The obvious caveat being that most talents rely on class skills that I don't have, so I have to spec creatively.
The life of a WoW ascetic is probably not for everyone, but I am committed.
Who knows, maybe sleeping under the stars, starving myself and running for dear life every couple of days will lead me to some sort of MMO apiphany, or maybe I'm just going to waste a lot of time.
Either way, if you want to keep track, here is Sevalak.
