When Patch 1.1 went live, my Rogue got all his soul points refunded. Ugh. My Warrior did as well.

I love that Trion makes a point of letting us rebuild when they make significant changes to a soul, but I’d like it even more if they gave us a chance to take one last look at our old build before we got wiped, because I can *never* remember exactly how I had my points spent!

See, I’m not a min-maxer. Planning out a character sucks all the fun out of a game for me. I live for the rat pellet reward of the Ding and when I already know exactly how I’m going to spend my points, it takes the fun out of the process. Suddenly leveling becomes a chore intended to unlock the points I need to follow my plan. That sounds like my day job all of a sudden. (And absolutely no offense intended towards people who study skill trees and work out ideal rotations and things of that nature…we all have our own personal set of activities that are fun for us.)

So I wing it and have fun. But after the last patch I decided to be… responsible? Instead of winging it, I maxed out my Bard points so I could do some healing, and spent the rest in my Nightblade. At level 17 that meant 5 points for the Night Blade, 17 into Bard.

Now I’m a responsible adult who runs his group buffs and spams Cadence to heal 5 other members of the raid. I guess people like having me around and I don’t die. I feel like my Rogue is more ‘efficient’ than he used to be.

But I’m bored as hell. In groups I basically spam 2-3 abilities over and over, sticking in a Motif now and then. Last night, for the first time, doing massive invasions started feeling a bit like a chore.

And I realized I’d fallen into the trap of playing my game the way others think I should play it. I think a numbers person would approve of my build so far, but I’m not a numbers person. Well, I am…I mean I write code for a living. But when I’m playing a game I’m not about the numbers, I’m about the emotions. About seat-of-my-pants adventuring.

I’ll probably keep this build for when a group I’m in for more than 2 minutes needs extra healing, but I need to buy a 2nd role and spent points in a way that’s fun for me, even if ‘hardcore’ players look down their nose at me.

I need to roll an alt as a gatherer…I’m really thinking, just for grins, of making him totally random. Pick a class randomly, pick my souls randomly, assign the points to souls randomly. I think it’d be fun to see how hard such a character would be to play…