Nogamara

Curiously for all the time I’ve been playing WoW (10-13 years since 2005) and all the time I’ve been writing here (since 2009) I’ve never actually written a post about a WoW expansion announcement. I did it for other games.

Sure, sometimes there are mentions of the upcoming expansion, but always when it’s already in the Alpha, or Beta, or in prep for the launch – but never when it was announced. Looking at my RSS feeds, it’s all over the place and quite a few people seem cautiously optimistic or even more positive, that’s good.

As I wrote in a comment on Belghast’s blog… I don’t even remember when (or if) I was ever hyped up for an expansion. My (maybe realistic) guess is that I was excited for TBC (as the game was still new to me at < 2 years and it was the first expansion) and WotLK (because I want to say TBC+WotLK were my peak of WoW enthusiasm). Cata and MoP I’m not so sure anymore and then I stopped. WoD was meh in prospect and meh in hindsight and I only played one month. Legion seemed ok but I still vanished after around 3 months. Not sure how I would count BfA,I wasn’t expecting it I think, I wasn’t really hyped, but I ended up a playing a lot, it was a bad time at work and then the pandemic hit. I was absolutely looking forwards to Shadowlands, but not because of what was announced, just that it would be a new expansion and I could level up and raid at the start.

I think I enjoyed most of the expansions in their own way, but only after I had actually played them. I know I’m easily excited about things on a small scale, but usually not one to eagerly anticipate anything that will launch in the future. To me it wouldn’t matter if they announced ANY info on a new expansion just a month before. I guess I would actually prefer that because then I could decide short-term if I would invest my time in a few weeks in the future. Maybe I’m just overall bad with long-time planning.

So, three long paragraphs and nothing about the actual expansions? As Preach put it so nicely, “there’s nothing I hate about it”, which is always a good first smoke test. I’m not a fan of ranged classes in general, so the Evokers are nothing I am specifically looking forward to. If it’s ingame I will try it out and level one, simple as that. Then I will tell if I liked it. The professions revamp sounds nice, the question is whether they will pull it off. Talent trees? Dunno, I’ve always been a “use optimal cookie cutter for raid” person and for alts I’m just questing with I mostly use a “good” spec and adjust single talents to my liking, usually anything with travel speed (or sometimes survivability) over damage. The dragon-riding looks fun and I hope there won’t be any weird borrowed power, that’s about it. My optimistic prediction for a launch would be Christmas 2022, but maybe February 2023, not later. (Shadowlands Alpha begun early April and it launched in that year.)

Also those big reveal presentations are not for me. I started to watch it and had to switch it off after a bit and just looked at the MMO-Champ updates because it was just so scripted and cringe worthy.

As I wrote a while ago I’m in the process of leveling all my Horde toons to 60, 7 are done now, one is at 56, and 4 are missing. I wanted to start the Mage today (one of the 50s) to get the ball rolling on catching some daily random dungeons.

The problem was just that his gear was so shit that I couldn’t even queue for a random Shadowlands dungeon, and the XP rewards (and probably wait time) of the BfA ones weren’t worth it. Easy fix – go to the AH and buy a few pieces. The thing is just that Aggramar is a really low-pop server, close to being dead. Every piece of Level 50 cloth gear was 2-3k gold. For something I’d replace in an hour or three. So what I did instead was log all of 8 toons I had leveled and cleaned out their bags and banks and finally all that gear they accumulated while leveling. And lo and behold, there were actually just enough pieces to get him to iLvl 81 or something and I could queue. Then also checked the other toons, but both the Priest and the Demon Hunter were actually at 80 or 81 and for the Druid I just had to find a weapon. Still really annoying. I leveled these to 120 (now 50) the normal way in one of the earlier patches, so not even 8.0 – it must have been 8.1. And their gear level is too low to queue for a 9.0 dungeon. I’ve done so many of them now and the chance is actually 50/50 that you will have 60s running their friends through or raid-geared toons that just blast through normal. You can actually 3 man them, because often enough someone dies, doesn’t get a rez, and they just continue. Like today in Mists of Tirna Scythe where the 60 tank just pulled half the instance, people died in the unavoidable AoE, I wasn’t quick enough and didn’t get the quest done. Thanks, asshats. It’s been a while since I added people to the ignore list (in hopes to not get matched up again) but today was the day.

Anyway, I also sold a metric ton of old food and I’m thinking of cleaning out my banks now. I’ve been happy to fund my last 2 months of WoW with WoW tokens and if I can get rid of the stuff in the banks on the faction/server where I’ve not played in earnest in a while doing that – all the better.

Week 5 had us clear the first 8 on Sunday, then 2 more on Tuesday and then a few bad tries on the Jailer.

This week we cleared from Anduin up to the Jailer and wiped there 5 times on Sunday – no great try but some good ones.
Last night we did some weird skipping and did the Tier bosses, Pantheon, Lihuvim, and Halondrus. Then we used another id, killed Guardian, reset, used the teleport to the Jailer and killed him. Then we oneshot Guardian on Heroic.

I have honestly track of the raid id shenanigans and I suppose we’re mostly going Heroic soon, just need another Anduin kill for the skip.

It has been a little slow (we cleared Sanctum in week 4, after extending), but it’s a fun tier. Just the age old “my damage sucks”, although I got my Tier legs today, so I have a 2 piece set bonus now.

When I said I was “done” with Zereth Mortis two weeks ago, I still had some slots with item level lower than 252, so there were still upgrades to be had – this opportunity for backup gear has now been made irrelevant because the +12 M+ I mentioned gave me nice 272 bracers. I’m still wearing 5 pieces of 252 ZM gear though, 2 Legendaries, 1 M+ drop, 6 drops from Sepulcher (one of them a Tier piece) out of 26 bosses killed and 3x Great Vault (is that a good or bad ratio?), and 2 Sanctum drops, one of them even Non-Heroic 233. Never got a better trinket, which is a little sad.

Last night I spent my last cypher drop currency items (whatever name they have) and got the achievement to have researched everything in the Cypher of the First Ones. Well done Blizzard, I subscribed on March 2nd and I finished it on March 30th without excessive grinding, I was basically doing my round of dailies and World Quests dutifully every day, sometimes staying a few more minutes, but nothing I would call actually grinding. And I have 2 days spare that I could’ve taken off – so if you sub for a month then you can do it, which I think is a fair grind. I am not sure though if those items ever dropped in the raid and I’d have to retroactively calculate how much rep I got in the raid, so maybe you’d need to spend more than 29 days to get to Revered + Cypher done, but I guess I’m too lazy for that. It worked for me and I’m not even unsubbing.

So what’s left now is the grind to Exalted and killing those last 5-6 Rare Mobs I’ve never seen so far, then checking the achievements tab if there’s anything else to do, otherwise I might be slowly shifting to doing the dailies on my Ele Shammy now as long as they’re not annoying me and let the Rep on my main pile up while raiding and killing bosses.

On my old server I’ve been very slowly leveling 5 Horde toons from 50 to 60 at the same time. Log in, queue for random dungeon, do some Threads of Fate stuff like quests or WQs while waiting for the pop (usually 5-10 minutes), then run the dungeon (which often also only takes 10-15 minutes because there are so many 60s running their friends through or doing it for gold maybe?) and then sometimes finish the quest I started, sometimes just directly log out again. Takes about 60-90 minutes per day and gives me more than half a level five times (some days I skip one or more toons when they are not well-rested). Once this batch is done I can rotate in another four of them, we’ll see how long I am in the mood. I also shouldn’t forget buying the 40 Renown catchup item before starting like I did with the first two. After that there’d still be my four Allied Race toons but the main priority is to get one per class to 60 on the Horde side.

So yeah, kinda busy in WoW and riding the wave as long as I am having fun.