I Choo-Choo-Choose You! Picking a Class (Part 1 - The Pretenders)

What is up, dogs! After all the failures and hopefully learning a few things about reducing bad luck, it was time to take one final stab at a hardcore 80 toon. The first step was to pick a class. I considered them all (with the exception of a Death Knight, as the goal of this project was to make it as challenging as possible, and I wanted to gain 79 levels without dying, not 24). Here are some brief thoughts on the viability of each class attempting the hardcore 80, as well as what I ultimately picked (note: of course, I'm going to be making a lot of generalizations about class capabilities here). Over the next few posts, the classes will be presented in order from what I would think would be the hardest to hit hardcore 80 with, up to the easiest, as well as the class I decided on.

9. Warrior


The warrior can take a beating, but has extremely limited escapability and must rely on professions like herbalism to heal with, until significantly advanced in progression. Adds or pathers (or even simply too big of a pull) can lead to a death with very few escape options being available, especially at early levels. Even more than the mage and priest, the warrior is lacking a 'get out of jail free' card for overpulling, and the odds are very severely stacked against the warrior that he'll manage to make 20,000 consecutive pulls properly. No self heal, no falling defense, and no DC insurance makes it seem that a hardcore 80 warrior would be nearly impossible to pull off.

8. Mage


The main benefit would be slow fall to avert falling deaths, but surprise adds are bad news for a class that only has blink and a few shield spells to mitigate 3 mobs punching him in the face. A frost spec or arcane/slow spec would seem to be effective at controlled pulls, and the mage can hulk-smash pretty much anything on a controlled pull before the target gets into melee range. Counterspell combined with the mage's high single-target ranged DPS make caster mobs look as silly as Britney Spears attempting to read a book. The BIG downside is that a mage can get vaporized pretty quickly on an uncontrolled pull or from a surprise add. While frost nova and blink are good for getting away from trouble, they aren't that great at getting completely OUT of trouble. Primarily, lack of physical durability makes the mage, in my opinion, a poor choice for the hardcore 80.

7. Priest


Like the mage, levitate eliminates the nefarious effects of the gravity monster. Unfortunately, the priest is functionally wearing a paper hospital gown for armor. The weakness for the priest is similar to the mage, a lack of ability to take a boot to the head and come out with all their teeth in the original position. While lacking the escapability of the mage (psychic scream frequently delays the inevitable, and occasionally makes the eventual pummeling even more gory), the priest does have the benefit of being able to self-heal from the beginning of the game. Difficulty with straight-up combat and the fact that a DC with a mob on your aggro table means you're dead before you can log back makes me think you'd be safer trying to duplicate the Peacecraft achievement than trying to go 1 to 80 without dying.