How do you approach playing alts in MMOs?

It’s kind of a running joke that I have a lot of Warriors in World of Warcraft, but the fact is, I’ve always just enjoyed that class the most out of any that the game offers. And while I do have alts that are Death Knights, Paladins, Shamans, and so on, I would estimate that of my 50 or so characters, a solid 36 of them are Warriors of varying levels. And the reason for this is manifold, but one reason is that over the years, the leveling has gotten a lot better — getting to level 60 on a Warrior back in vanilla WoW was brutal, and yet I did it on several Alliance and Horde characters just because I liked the way they looked in plate.

But nowadays, Warriors level like a dream — comparing 2004/2005 Warrior leveling to leveling since Legion and it’s night and day different, with Shadowlands being so much more flexible that I’m kind of constantly falling in love with low level Warriors over and over again. Sometimes I roll a new Warrior, level it to 20 or so, and then just let it lie fallow for when I’m bored and want a project, or even delete it knowing I’ll roll another and start all over again sometime. So for me, my army of alt Warriors aren’t meant for endgame play — they’re purely for exploring what it feels like to level the class nowadays.

And that brings me to wonder how and why you level alts in your favorite MMOs. What brings you to roll up a new character instead of playing the one you already have? Is it the fun of trying a new class? A new race? Are you interested in seeing how the mechanics have changed? Do you like having multiple options for tanking, healing or DPSing in your raids or Mythic+ groups? How do you go about deciding what alt to play, or even whether to play one at all?