The Unplanned Character of BFA

When the World was only a couple of weeks old I picked up the last copy Avalon had in my city, got home, installed it, and found out my friends had started on no less than 3 different servers. So I plonked down characters on 3 realms (Arathor and Daggerspine horde, Burning Blade alliance) and kinda struggled to keep up with anyone. Ironially another friend picked the game up a few weeks later, and started on Emerald Dream alliance. And I made this paladin called Dominator and used a phrase from the book series Black Company that I whispered to names I thought was her (her phone battery had run out so I couldnt reach her, I think was the reason), and it rowrked. And as the only time in WoW history, we were pretty much the same level all the way from 1 to 60. I kinda regretted the name by level 20, and wasnt overly fond of the class in vanilla with the 5 minute buffs and whatnot, but since said friend played druid that only had combat res on a 30 minute timer or whatever it was, having a paladin to do the normal resses, offheal, offtank, have buffs and whatever felt pretty usefull at the time. For doing group content at least. So it stuck, in spite of name annoyance and class grievances. At max level in vanilla the whole "this character is usefull" showed up a lot, in spite of me trying to play other stuff like tank, mage and resto druid - it always came back to whatever guild I was in wanted me to play Dominator for some reason or other. So it was the first character I had that got the dead in a river treatment; he ended vanilla naked in a river in stranglethorn with nought to his name.

So obviously when The Burning Crusade I decided to main him as healer with the paladin changes. Did some raiding in the guilds Sedition, Memento and Twilight Gambit/Hope. And pretty much played him as main from then until the prepatch of Legion in Warlords. Mostly as healer in casual battlegrounds/arenas. But sometimes the guild I was in from the end of Burning Crusade until spring 2019 (and still have alts in), The Fighting Mongooses (shouldnt it be Mongeese? /end quote) lured me into raiding, challenge mode dungeons or some other pve stuff because there was a great need (ie they missed on person), where I played retribution. In Legion he barely hit max level and did one timewalk set, that was about it. So didnt really think I was gonna do anything on him again.

Enter resubbing again after I had burned out on initial expansion in spring 2019, where I played some here and there, mostly leveling alts, and this was one of them. At some point I randomly did a mythic plus with one of the people that was in the leveling circle in vanilla and that I played a bit with again in Twilight Gambit, someone named Kalthalos. And they had spots open, so rejoined a guild I left over a decade ago, that ironically had turned into something pretty close to The Fighting Mongooses (that had no died it's final death). And even if it techincally hasnt been a main this expansion, I have somehow managed to clock in far more hours on it than any other character at max level. Which is a bit odd, considering I have a massive two screenshots of him from this entire expansion.

I have essentially done two things with Dominator in BFA; I did the tail end of the Battle for Dazar Alor on him. Which was my first non-guilt-tripped raiding since Zul'Aman with Fighting Mongooses in TBC. It didnt go too well, so I switched main in the eyes of the guild for later seasons, but I have done a massive amount of mythic plus on him, but since it's mostly a life of "we need a tank for weekly chest" his RIO hasn't been the best of my characters a single season. So the curse of "we need you to play Dom for xyz reasons" have somehow remained from vanilla to this day. There is a curse in being usefull.

Notice how there are 9 dps, and I am not in top 7 :) And most likely not in top 9 either... The usual life of tanking m+ was generally just better.

Season 4 on alliance has been the peak of no healers around. For half a year when raiding was still going on, I needed to bring my dps main the hunter Spiritblight to get weekly chest, so Urzien here tanked and Saraelya had to bring druid to heal, then I had to tank, Urzien heal to Saraelya could get chest on main aswell. And since we needed to 15s for max chest, and we normally couldnt time 15s at the start to do a 16 to get 15s next week or something, it usually took 4 keys to get us all set up. Which normally took 2 nights with the scheduling, and kinda forced a certain group of people to play. Which left some people out of the group consistently, which was unfortunate. And reminded me how much it sucked in vanilla that the guild could only have a couple of tanks, while there was always a shortage for dungeons. Why am I playing PVE again?

Oh right, because the laste time someone wanted to do arena it was times like these, that I didnt play Dom during...

Much like Viator, I am going to leave Dominator to gather dust at the start of Shadowlands, and only bring him out to get sign up with the Night Fae and possibly do more degenerate gameplay of trying for RNG legendaries I am not getting on main.

And most likely end up putting the most hours into him like every other expansion so far anyway.