Ironman!

Recently I've been thinking I should stop 'following' Tobold's blog. I hate it when someone is wrong on the internet and I've found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the assumptions he makes about the way some people play games. I wish I had better things to do with my time than get annoyed on the internet...

And then he comes out with an informative post like this one about playing World of Warcraft in 'Ironman' mode and it makes me happy I'm still reading. I doubt I'd have stumbled across something like this on my own but now that it's been pointed out to me I'm very intrigued.

The basic idea is you start a new character at level 1 and play the game without putting on magical gear, without taking a specialization, without professions, without enchantments or glyphs or potions. You never group, you never do dungeons, you never participate in pvp.  You don't use any of the ways to speed up leveling like recruit a friend or being in a high level guild. And perhaps most importantly you never die.

Now, I love challenges (as evidenced by playing with only one thief in Final Fantasy). For the most part I do them for the fun of doing them. But in this case there's actually a leaderboard and such built for the challenge. They're pulling data out of the armory to check and see if people are 'cheating' or not. It's obviously not perfect (I would imagine you could get buffs, for example, and make sure to toggle them off before you log out and never get caught) but it does a pretty good job. Hearing about this makes me want to take Blizzard up on their 7 days free offer and give it a spin. If I did, what would I want to play? There are a few different metrics to look at, I think, in order to figure out which class would have the best chance of success.

• Scaling - Normally you want skills that scale well with your stats. Here where you're not going to get any stats at all from any source you want skills that just have high base numbers. I don't know how WoW has managed to keep things balanced recently but thinking back to the past things like hunter pets and mage pyroblast/arcane missiles are things that started off huge but didn't scale properly to be good at end game. You're going to want the starting off huge here!
• Emergency Buttons - If you die once you're done so having ways to escape from a deadly situation is really important. You don't want a random elite patrolling on top of you and wiping you out! Hunters seem to be kings here with feign death, disengage, traps, slows, and a pet. Warlocks have a worse pet, healthstone, and some ok crowd control. Rogues get vanish, blind, and sprint. Mages get blink, frost nova, and invis. Druids get a bad sprint? Paladins might have bubble/hearth? Warriors get to die...
• Sustainability - How many fights can you go without having to eat/drink to full? I have a big fear that someone like a mage is going to see this number actually fall below 1. Your mana pool is going to be so small and your spells are going to do so little damage that I really wonder if you'll be able to kill a single monster. On the flip side you have the hunter which doesn't use mana and which has a pet to absorb hits. 
• Gear Availability - You're allowed to wear white and grey items. Is there a good enough distribution of weapons in particular as you level up to stay geared? Rogues for example use energy and have a lot of  great cooldowns but if you can't find a weapon for a large level span you probably have no hope.

The WoWIronman site has stats for what other people have been trying and how successful they've been so far. Hunters are the only class currently alive beyond level 65. Only one non-hunter has made it beyond 70 (a warlock that died at level 78). Almost 10% of all characters that have tried the challenge have been night elf hunters (night elves get a second feign death type ability). Hunters feel like the strictly best option to me since they seem likely to be the best at scaling, emergencies, and sustainability. Assuming they have decent weapons (a quick search shows a gap between level 20 and 60 which might be rough) they should do fine. So if my goal is to have the best chance at making it far then hunter seems obvious. But maybe I'd be happier doing something harder and aiming for the best of that class instead of trying to make it all the way to 85? The highest level dead rogue is only 69, for example.