Nogamara

Second raid post this week, yay. As I wrote here, we got 3 bosses in Castle Nathria down on Friday (can’t even say “the first three” because the numbering is weird this tier), went back on Sunday to wipe on Kael’thas for 3h (14x), then on Monday we took down Lady Inerva Darkvein on the first try, then wiped once on Artificer Xy’mox before a kill and then continued to wipe on Kael’thas for a bit (4x) until we got that done as well. Just enough time for a single try on Council. Very good first week, even if it was Normal only. Also we didn’t notice anything about the supposed “bosses dropping too much loot”, I was happy to get one item.

I only noticed after that first night that I still had the wrong (leveling) spec and switched around some stuff, but I’m not sure if my damage improved a lot. Today we should’ve gotten a +5% damage buff for Fury Warriors, this should help a bit as well. Also going to have a look at the Great Vault now, which should have 2 items for me to choose from.

Finally I needed a break from group activities last night and did some Torghast, this time as Protection. It was so easy compared to Fury it’s not even fun. Bit slow though, but I managed to do Layer 3 and Layer 4 without a single death.

In other news, my Ele/Resto Shammy is also Level 60, need to do some normal dungeons for gear or heroics with the guild, and maybe tank some more Heroics until I feel able to do Mythic.

I hadn’t raided since MoP but this expansion (actually at the end of BfA) I formed the plan to raid again. Sadly my old home, my Horde guild had been dead for years, but the Alliance guild I’d been having an alt in for over 10 years is alive and kicking and they were raiding Normal and Heroic modes every expansion, as far as I know. So this time around I wanted to join for real.

So I actually wanted to give 100% and did all my preparation. Got my legendary legs on Thursday, got to item level 179-180, enchanted most of my stuff, got weapon oil, stat food, and flasks sorted and read up on tactics. Even finished half of the grind to be able to craft Shadestones for the new Cauldron.

My drop luck wasn’t the greatest, my off hand sword dropped on dungeon number 29 (Heroic Necrotic Wake and the main hand dropped the same day on dungeon number 30 (Mythic 0 Necrotic Wake), not counting normal dungeons, and since then I accumulated a few more 184 epics, but not nearly enough.

Before the raid I managed to get to this number of dungeon clears (Hc +M0): De Other Side 1+1, Halls of Atonement 3+2, Mists of Tirna Scithe 7+2, Plaguefall 0+3, Sanguine Depths 0+1, Spires of Ascension 0+3, Necrotic Wake 8+3, Theater of Pain 0+2, so 19 + 17, with 17 of 24 possible M0 clears, but I didn’t complain once I got my 2 weapons.

And last night on Friday we actually did it. We went to Castle Nathria and raided. No big deal for them, but for me it was. I was kinda surprised we oneshot Shriekwing. Then we killed Huntsman Altimor on the second try. Then we went to the Hungering Destroyer and brought him down on the third fourth try. Lady Inerva Darkvein proved to be a tough cookie though and after 7 wipes we called it a night, but I think we had her below 10% once already, so I’m confident there. This week has 2 more raid nights so I’m eager to see what will happen. I even got a single drop, a massive upgrade. Actually a lot more than I had hoped. Three bosses down on the first night, one close, and I only made one mistake, sadly a single misclick that nearly wiped the raid :/

One thing I wasn’t so happy about was my damage, I guess I need to really fix something with my rotation and active time on the boss, this seems a lot harder than playing the Rogue, despite the kinda good mobility.

So while I had the plan to only focus on my main and not do a lot of alting… I found that I needed a little EVE break and when playing so much on my main, doing daily callings, adventures, dungeons.. I need some diversion and I had some time, so I did start to level a few alts.

Most importantly, it’s also Darkmoon Faire this week, and to unlock the new profession tier you need to do the Maw intro quest. And that already pushes you to 51 if you were rested (never forget, once a new expansion is live, log in all your max-level toons once to start accumulating rested XP again). So my Hunter and Shaman finished Bastion already (both 53 now), the Paladin, Rogue and Death Knight have done the Maw intro quest (all 51 now), and on my Demon Hunter I wanted to try the “Threads of Fate” thing that lets you skip the main story, pick a covenant and level how you like. She’s 54 now and I have finished Revendreth (I picked Venthyr) but it’s not as enjoyable as I had hoped, so I guess I won’t do that again in the foreseeable future. The Hunter was actually just a little diversion when I needed a break, the DH was mostly the same, but I might pick the Shaman as my main alt, we don’t have too many of those and I could try healing again – not a fan of Holy Paladins otherwise I would’ve chosen my Paladin as main alt.

So I’m actually actively ignoring my Horde toons now – and also the Priest, Mage, Warlock, Monk, and Druid on Alliance – none of them have crafting professions, and only the Druid has 2 main professions at all. Casters and Monk, so yeah, my priorities in what constitutes fun classes is pretty clear (although Warlock isn’t so bad), but Mage and Priest rank at the bottom and Monk ranks as the worst Melee class.

Today was Sunday and because I didn’t want to run my 13 Horde + other server alts through the Maw intro, so I just hopped over to DMF on them quickly and grabbed some old profession points where needed. Quick win and not too much time wasted.

And finally I did what I had postponed for a long, long time. I’ve never been happy with my Male Pandaren Druid, so I changed him to a Female Pandaren today (thank you Blizzard for finally making this a gold cost) and then I also changed my Undead Death Knight to be Female because I’d never been 100% happy with him either, and the new transmog options are pretty awesome. And my Mage is already a Male Undead, so what’s the point in having two of them if I’m not a big fan?

As my original plan for Shadowlands was to raid again after all these years, I’m not completely sure how much effort is needed so maybe I’m erring on the side of too much preparation, but I guess it won’t hurt as long as I don’t burn out before the raid even unlocks.

The first week of the expansion is wrapping up and I reached max level, I did quite a few heroics and joined 2 nights of Mythic 0 with the guild (missed one). The problem is that my iLevel is still really bad, 3 slots with 184 Mythic 0 gear, one extra piece on the same slot, having replaced 3 171 items in these slots and really bad weapons – so I guess see myself running Mists of Tirna Scithe and Necrotic Wake every day until I have at least 2 171 2 hand weapons and replace at least some of my 5 other sub-171 slots. For the amount of heroics I ran this week the yield seems bad, but maybe I’m complaining too much and all my guildies just ran even more of them.

As was expected, damage isn’t really great at the moment, but there are several factors, low item level, no enchants, Fury doesn’t seem to be in a great place overall at the moment compared to other classes and specs, and also the player hasn’t actually tried to do top DPS in many years, so I’m pretty sure my rotation isn’t optimal and I’m missing things. I plan to setup at least 2 more WeakAuras, but I think my cooldown usage might actually be better than years ago, where I forget them a lot.

At least I did my callings (Emissary quest successor) every day since hitting 60, did at least collect parts of the Soul Ash from Torghast, and did some other things I was supposed to do in the first week. I even tried to get Sorrrowbane, but that quest is really annoying as you have one shot every time the WQ is up and even if you do everything correctly you can still be unlucky and have other people grab the items before you.

So yes, I’ve been playing a lot of WoW this week, ignoring the launch night but getting in the minute I stopped working all other days. I got to 60 on Thursday, then continued with the main story and chose a covenant, yesterday (Friday) I did some dungeons, first a random normal, then a few normal ones in a guild group and then a Heroic, which went fine. My iLevel is now 152 (started at ~145 before the dungeons) some of the 4 guildies were already in the 150 range.

Overall, I’m loving the expansion so far. I liked all 4 zones overall and had a lot of fun with the story lines. Some were better than others, but overall really happy. My main gripe is that I can’t mount in parts of Oribos and at the Heart of the Forest, so not too bad overall. Again there are quite a few mechanics that are new to this expansion, although some are just old ones with a twist. I also just ran my Demon Hunter through the Maw intro quest line, I think I could use a 2nd Herbalist right now, one that I can just park in one of the 4 zones.

Here’s a complete rundown how long I needed to level, apparently I was slow. But I read every single quest completely without rushing (except a 5min stint where dinner was ready and I absolutely had to finish this for fear of being logged out in the wrong spot :/).

51	1:20
52	1:20
53	1:20
54	1:18
55	1:18
56	1:40
57	1:45
58	1:45
59	2:01
60	1:33

Not 100% sure they add up to 15h 15mins, but I only had exact screenshots for most of them, so could be off a minute or three here and there.

So early last night I actually brought myself to camp a few world bosses in Icecrown and collect most of the transmog set on my Rogue, then at midnight I was too tired and went to bed.

But today after work I logged in (no problems) and started. I needed exactly 4h for 50-53, then 1h 18 for 54 and again 1h 18 for 55. That’s where I stand now, Bastion is finished and I think I’m 50-70% through Maldraxxus. I have no idea how people made it in 8-9h, but I’ve been diligently reading all the quest text and even picked a few flowers on the way. The quest flow is good, I didn’t have any major problems, just a few tiny things. Pretty good so far. Despite being in old 8.2 gear (half epic, half blue) I only died twice, and I probably could’ve avoided those as well.

It’s been fun so far although I didn’t really get a bit of the story in Bastion, either I missed some key part of information or they’re deliberately letting us in the dark or whatever. But some things didn’t make sense to me.

# EPIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Why is this not a meme yet? (Overall I don’t have anything against the subtitles, but I should look if I can switch them off.)

When I summarized my BfA journey in this post I a) wrote “too late” when I meant “too soon” and b) was pessimistic about reaching my goal. Also I kind of didn’t reach it because Level 120 was gone, but now I actually finished it by having at least one character per class, per faction – at Level 50, in BfA, before Shadowlands launched. (Although it feels a little bit like cheating because leveling is so much faster now.)

My Worgen Shadow Priest flew through Level 31 to 40 in MoP, then 40 to 50 in BfA. So that’s 27 characters at Level 50, 4 Rogues, 3 Warriors, 2 of each other class.

So now only the minor goal of all the allied races is unachievable, because it’s only 2 days left.

Oh, and I bought Shadowlands and cleared out the quest log on my new main, a female Night Elf Fury Warrior. Fury doesn’t seem great at the moment but I didn’t want to go Rogue again, especially on the Alliance side, without my main and I like Warriors. Also my guild’s composition checks out nicely like this, and I have an offspec that’s not DPS.

For the first time in forever I made the resolve to focus on my main and my main only. I will allow myself to casually level another toon if I lose the drive to play, but I probably won’t have enough time anyway – but I will not race to the top, I will not gear an alt, or start a third alt. For the immediate future that is, I guess until we have started raiding.

While I wrote that I’m not so keen on playing right now in my last WoW post, I actually logged in because I was curious how fast leveling goes.

Then I promptly forgot to look into the mail and made a few levels without the 16% experience buff, doh. So my Mechagnome Warlock is now 42, up from 37 and my Worgen Priest (where I didn’t forget the xp buff) went from 31 to 34 with a single random dungeon + 2 quests. Gameplay is unexciting, I don’t feel too weak or too overpowered, roughly the same as before. Warlock was in Gorgrond, Priest in Townlong Steppes.

Having all the talents reset was a little annoying, as usual, but I went with the left-side default route as it’s just casual leveling and I’m absolutely not in the mood to look up builds right now. We’ll see if I actually manage to push those 2 to 50 and at least claim moral victory of my goal.

Addon compatibility is surprisingly good, just my favourite experience addon is defunct and a few others, but nothing important. While I had planned to go for a reset again when the expansion hits (which means just unit frames + bars + chat addon and maybe a top bar) maybe I’ll just slim down my list instead of actually starting fresh…

There was a quite annoying bug that plagued quite a few people in guild two nights ago, where you couldn’t switch characters and sometimes had to alt-f4, culminating in “successfully logged off a toon but everything is black and no characters visible”, but it might have solved itself again…

My general plans for Shadowlands are still:

• cancel SWTOR – DONE
• buy Shadowlands – TODO
• level my Night Elf Warrior as Fury
• raid with my Alliance guild