WoW

So, if we exclude the raiding post I wrote just now, that were an interesting 2.5 weeks since I last posted.

Not only did I raid twice, I also managed to get 5 more characters to 80, their item levels are kinda mad. Two at 596-599, three at 586-590, and two more at 570, so from last week and our standards that would be seven raid-ready characters.
Gearing is kinda nice with Delves, the weekly quests giving sensible gear, and a bit of LFR luck, also already grabbing stuff from the Great Vault.

But yeah, of course it didn’t come for free. It took some time, and unfortunately I spent most of the time sick at home, even during my vacation, and the weather wasn’t great anyway.

But Tier 8 Delves are really kinda nice, if you can solo or duo them. For a bountiful one that’s one piece of 603 gear and two of them yield one 616 in the Vault. Tier 7 are 597/610 and if you’re not feeling up to it on a fresher char, a Tier 5 with 584/600 isn’t bad either. I’m just a little worried about the longevity of the fun. But for now, they’re so much better than Torghast.

We did get 13 people together after all for the first raid last Sunday, although our Priest had a power outage right after invites (power outages are kinda rare here in Germany).

So we did manage to kill the first 5 bosses without a lot of resistance (one wipe on boss 3 and 5) but had to switch one person to healing for the first fight (our Priest rejoined when power came back after the first one).

On Tuesday we had 13 again, killed the sixth boss on the second pull and then wiped 14 times on the seventh boss, oof. Apparently Dragonflight raids were easier, or we were missing some key players.

Oh, and I decided to go with Assassination and it kinda worked out (got my 4pc Tier Set last night as well) but my damage doesn’t feel great. Some of it surely is lack of practice but especially on that last fight with 2 bosses and adds I wished for my Fury Warrior, I bet I could have done a lot more there.

With the launch around 2 weeks ago I managed to slowly (or not so slowly) level 3 characters to 80 now: Fury Warrior, Assassination Rogue, and Elemental Shaman. Started with a Demonology Warlock at 71.

We’re not starting to raid this week, but only in about 10 days, and we seem to have around 15 people interested, that’s good. We decided to go with “570+ iLvl for Normal” which should be easily doable even for the people just starting to level now. We’ve done a couple Heroics via dungeon finder and in guild, most are too easy, some bosses have really odd mechanics. Let’s see how M0 will work out.

I’m done with all the Sojourner quest achievements, the exploration ones, many rares, all the flying glyphs and it’s been oddly quick to progress this far,

And I’m undecided between Assassination and Fury.

OK, so this might be a bit of a weird post. I’m on vacation this week, came back from a trip on Tuesday. On Wednesday I bought TWW, grabbed a small patch, started leveling (not the whole day), did the same today and… I’m level 80. Totally didn’t write down the times for the levels, just played a bit. It was quick, relatively fun, and that’s it.

The big problem is that the guild still seems a bit dead. Hardly 5 people online (on day 3 after an expansion launch), the other guild we’re raiding with looks a bit better but not by much. We had around 3-4 Level 80s before me, but one has just silently left the guild. Also a bit weird, but who knows.

I mean, M+ and Raids don’t start for another 2-3 weeks or so, but still, this sucks. I see 15 characters in guild over Level 70. When DF launched we raided with 20-23 from our guild alone, reaching 30 at times. I see one of our tanks (out of guild) at 78, one healer at 80, one more at 72, and that’s it.

WoW’s “The War Within” pre-patch (or pre-expansion) event isn’t too different from some other events they’ve done in the past, with enough dedication it allowed you to level a character or two quickly.

The problem is that this one is completely ridiculous. Like yes, I know they’ve repeatedly hinted in the direction of “the real game begins at max level”, but even as a relatively quick and proficient leveler I’ve had enough fun to keep myself occupied. First it was at least one character per class at max level, then it was one per faction per class. I managed that in Shadowlands and in Dragonflight I was happy with just all of them on Alliance and a handful on Horde.

Anyway, just today I spent about (or slightly less than) 4 hours in the event and managed to level a Paladin, a Hunter, a Priest, and a Monk to 70. Yes, I know about Pandaria Remix and that it also allowed to push new characters quickly, I’m not mad at people who did not have all classes and needed to catch up, I’m annoyed that I’d be stupid to ignore the event and not just spend 1h of not very challenging game play to level one character to 70.

Yes, sometimes it became repetitive but from 13 classes I usually enjoyed played 10 or so and then just got 3 done for the sake of it. Now I still need to do this event cycle about four times.

And they also disabled currency transfer *again* so I can’t even buy the mounts. Hopefully I won’t forget to check before this ends, or I need to grind 2 toons from 10k to 20k currency instead of just moving it around. Sigh.

So we’re in the prepatch phase before the newest (to be released yet) WoW expansion The War Within. I’m not really excited or hyped, but kinda looking forward to raiding with my guild again, so many of them (including me) have been offline for the last 2 months, so let’s hope it just organically happens.

I still had this 6x Druid in Remix: Mists of Pandaria to level to 70 (and spend my Bronze) and today I did just that. With the latest changes to XP it took me less than an hour. From what I understood leveling in Retail should also be a lot quicker now, that’s good for everyone, right?

Maybe not. For many years one of my goals was to have a single character per class at the maximum level in the course of the expansion, explained in great detail on the MMOs & Me page. Remix: MoP has already put the first dents in this “goal” (if we assume that at the end of that all the characters, including the 70s of course, will just be normal ones) and then you don’t even need that route. I mean, it’s cool for people who really just want to do endgame activities but for me just grinding gear has always felt a bit pointless. Levels are kinda forever (a wild level squish appears), like, you are not being set back in your progress more than anyone else. New expansion, and now you’re still at the old maximum level, then you level and you are at max level again. That’s fine. What I never liked was being at max level but with suddenly terrible gear. Just a personal problem and not very objective, but that’s how it is.

But with no raid tier I didn’t play Season 4 of Dragonflight at all. Zero M+, zero raid bosses, I think.

Also Dragonflight was the first expansion in a while where I didn’t really bother with the second faction, as I am writing this my highest Horde toons are 70 Warrior, 69 Shaman (after logging in I noticed I was at 69 and 105% and still had to do 1 Archaeology dig to ding…), 67 Rogue, and 63 Warlock, not counting the Remix Druid. That’s a terrible quota out of 13 classes. At least I got all done on Alliance, but not a single intra-faction duplicate this time either. Wow. I’ll see if I get at least the aforementioned 6xs to 70, but not sure if there will be more. Kind of sad about this but after all it will be my 4th expansion where I main Alliance, maybe even 5th, but Legion was murky.

So, let’s see how quick leveling in TWW will really be and if “getting one to max level” will still hold any value for myself, or if it’s so quick that it might devolve into a very boring check list item for me.

I’d completely missed this MoP “Timerunners” thing until some friends told me about it when I met them. It sounded kinda fun (especially the “leveling quick” part) and I’ve given it a spin. 3 hours, Level 20 (not that quick, but ok) and fun enough. Very Diablo-like, to be honest.