WoW

Been a while since I posted an update on leveling progress (main server).

• 120:
  • Orc Rogue, iLvl 389
  • Orc Shaman, iLvl 311
  • Troll Warrior, iLvl 311
  • Dwarf Paladin, iLvl 393
  • Worgen Druid, iLvl 352
  • Night Elf Warrior, iLvl 361
  • Night Elf Demon Hunter, iLvl 332
• 110+
  • Orc Hunter, 111
  • Blood Elf Warlock, 111
  • Human Rogue, 112
• 100+
  • Blood Elf Priest, 104
  • Tauren Druid, 102
  • Undead Mage, 102
  • Blood Elf Paladin, 101
  • Undead Death Knight, 101
• 99-
  • Pandaren Monk, 92
  • Dwarf Shaman, 91
  • Dwarf Hunter, 80
  • Worgen Priest, 73
  • Draenei Death Knight, 61
  • Mag’har Orc Rogue, 29

Just finished: NE Warrior and DH to 120

Focusing currently on the 29 Orc Rogue in small 30-60min doses, started the BE Priest (Shadow is not very fun right now) and the Human Rogue.

Recent progression: Dwarf Hunter 60-80, Dwarf Shaman 80-91, created the Draenei DK.

Plans in the near future: BE Warlock

Thought about how I stand in regard to attaining the Heritage Armor for all races, once it comes out. So I made a list, I seem to love lists for MMOs.

• Horde:
  • Orcs: done, 2 at 120
  • Trolls: done, 1 at 120
  • Tauren: nearly done, 1 at 103
  • Undead: ohoh. 1 DK at 102 and a 102 Mage that was boosted to 60 by Refer a Friend, iirc. It’s been a while.
  • Blood Elves: done, 1 at 111, 2 at 102, don’t remember boosting
  • Goblin: ok-ish, 1 at 86
• Both
  • Pandaren: ok-ish, 1 at 92
• Alliance
  • Humans: done, 1 at 112
  • Night Elves: done, 1 at 120, don’t remember boosting
  • Dwarves: ok-ish, 1 at 91, 1 at 80, don’t remember boosting
  • Gnomes: ok-ish, 1 at 90, don’t remember boosting
  • Draenei: nope, 1 at 20, 1 DK
  • Worgen: unclear, 1 at 73, don’t remember boosting and one 120 (boosted to 110)
• Allied Races
  • Mag’har Orcs: 1 at 28
  • Highmountain: 1 at 20
  • Nightborne: unlocked, no char
  • Zandalari: unlocked, no char
  • Dark Iron Dwarves: unlocked, no char
  • Kul Tiran Humans: 1 at 22
  • Lightforged Draenei: not unlocked
  • Void Elves: not unlocked

So if we tally this up:

• 5 races done
• 1 race done in a few hours
• 5 races in the 7x-9x bracket (few more hours)
• 7 races (potentially) at 20-28
• 2 races not started
• 2 races not unlocked

I’d say this kind of sucks for someone who was already kind of spreading races around, has 15 chars at 110+ (and 3 more at 90+) and played the game for 10 years. All just because they introduced rewards for something arbitrary 13-14 years after launch. I know it’s silly but I feel reminded of when they introduced achievements and we got credited for all sorts of stuff, unless you were doing a lot of PvP and all the Battleground data wasn’t there. Sure, rank 11 with 0 WSGs won…

Just checked all my blog posts and some chars. Apparently I did have a Level 90 boost at some point in Legion and I don’t remember using it. But I only have a Level 100 boost on my account. Either that one got upgraded or I must have used it, but on who? I can mostly rule out my Horde toons on my main server. Right now the info points to “Level 90 boost got upgraded” as I blogged about boosting my Dwarf Pally to 100, not 90, and the reputations also point to that.

Addendum: If going off this MMO-Champion post which reads “Players with maximum-level (120) blood elves or dwarves who are Exalted with their faction” then I might not be so much out of luck, because then Undead und Worgen would just be the reputation (in addition to Legion+BfA leveling), for Draenei the DK would be eligible (if it ever reaches 120). But some of the “done” and “nearly done” above need to be changed. Guess I’ll have to wait for some confirmation and then change the above.

Came out of work a little sooner today so I had time to finish the Suramar Insurrection quest line and unlock the Nightborne. Not yet sure what I’ll play though.

Then I also managed to finish the Kul Tiran Humans quest line (what a bunch of useless running around) and created a Mage. Waiting for rested XP to build up now though.

Then I ground out the missing 500 rep to Zandalari Trolls Exalted, now just the quest is missing and then I unlocked 6 out of 8 Allied Races, just the 2 Argus Alliance factions are missing.

Finally my Night Elf Warrior managed to get the last level in Tiragarde Sound and is now Level 120, the 5th character in BfA to reach max level.

Apparently at some point the reputation gain for Suramar dailies was bumped because I didn’t really have to do much to get my missing 7k rep. So today I finished Good Suramaritan and logged out to look at the Allied Races character creation screen…

… only to notice that I need to do the Insurrection quest line. Meh. So much for this unlocking thing.

At least Broken Isles Pathfinder, Part One is done. For Part Two I need “Explore Broken Shore”, this should be easy once I’ll actually go there and then there’s “Armies of Legionfall” which might be some daily/WQ grind. We’ll see…

Battle for Azeroth Pathfinder, Part One is also done, so let’s see when they’ll roll out the requirements for Part Two

I’ve been working on my NE Warrior the last few days, even being able to help more guildies who needed normal dungeons for their profession quests to fill up the ranks and so of course I ran out of rested XP after a while, sitting at 115.

So what do you do in that case? Go out and enjoy the spring? Didn’t really work due to feeling horrible and not being able to stand up (sitting was fine, phew). So first I pushed my Dwarf Hunter from 70 to 75 in Icecrown until I had used up the rested XP. When that was done all too quickly, I bought some 90->110 AGI Leather Heirloom upgrades and moved my Human Rogue to Highmountain. I was kinda surprised how fast that went. 102 -> 107 in like 3h, and still some rested XP left.

Oh, and the Orc Shammy is 120 for a few days, but I’m not really in the mood to grind out gear, so I’m just slowly doing a few WQs with good gear upgrades and might do some Honorbound rep to continue the War Campaign.

For some reason I always enjoy the sped up “last expansion” a lot more than the current content after the n-th time. On Warrior and Rogue I’m totally enjoying myself in Legion, which I finished on 7 chars when it was current. Now I’m done with BfA content on 4 (working on 5th)…

Plans for the near future? Rogue to 110, Warrior to 120, then… not sure. Maybe 2nd Druid to 110.

I was lamenting on Twitter a bit that leveling in BfA for the 2nd time (Horde) and 3rd time (Alliance) wasn’t sparking a lot of joy for me so maybe I should stray from the well trodden path of Drustvar -> Tiragarde -> Stormsong and Vol’dun -> Zuldazar -> Nazmir or mix it up somehow, but I didn’t get a lot of feedback.
After Joar (master of alts) told me there were now 120 Heirlooms in game (which I had totally missed) I went on a buying spree (compared to my usual hoarding) and upgraded a set of 90 Plate Heirlooms to 120. Head/Shoulders/Chest/Legs/Ring/Cloak – that’s 6 items. 3 Upgrades each, priced at 1000g, 2000g, and 5000g. So that’s 48k. Ouch.
On the upside, my freshly transferred Night Elf Warrior flew through Level 112 and is now 113.5 after a quick dungeon run for some profession quest for a guildmate. On equipping I was a little unhappy because the Heirlooms are only iLvl 223ish and I had already acquired 2 280 Azerite pieces. But +50% XP is probably worth it.
Also I at least thought about if this makes sense first, but I have quite some Plate wearers (and none at 120 yet) that will benefit from this gear:

• 112 NE Warrior
• 111 Troll Warrior
• 101 BE Paladin
• 100 UD Death Knight
• 55 Draenei? Death Knight (planned)

It’s a bit of a shame I already leveled one Plate wearer, 2 Leather wearers and most of one Mail wearer. Then again the Heirlooms weren’t ingame, but I could’ve sped up the NE Warrior’s journey from 101 to 110. Ah well, we’ll see how this works out and if I’ll buy another set. I think I have just enough gold to justify the other 3x32k (without ring and cloak).

I’m not 100% sure when I got my first drop of bindings. Not in classic for sure. Maybe we started running MC for fun at 80, but it really doesn’t matter if it was 2008 or 2012 – I’ve been running MC on and off on several toons to collect my Tier 1 sets and like 3 weeks ago I finally got the second bindings on the same character that could use them – so I started collecting Arcane Crystals and Arcanite Bars and transmuting. I spent too much money, of course and didn’t really think about the fact I can’t transmog it. It doesn’t matter – I think it’s money well spent (certainly better as an achievement than the Yak with the transmog NPC on it…) and I have it now and I’m happy, and I can say it took roughly 10 years 😛

Yesterday and today I took the time and got some things done I had on my todo list for a while:

• Finish the Tide of Vengeance War Campaign on Horde
• Ran The Eye to complete a Tier 5 transmog set (it worked!)
• Finish Blood Gate & Zandalar Forever
• First Exalted rep: 7th Legion
• Put more 110 characters through the BfA intro, to the Golden Seal
• Finally get a transmog for the Alliance Druid
• Wrap up Darkmoon Faire profession quests on all 13 toons at Level 100+
• Ran all three wings of Dazar’alor in the Raid Finder

Yep, vacation and staying at home helps get shit done in MMOs 🙂

In general I’m pretty happy with Battle for Azeroth, no, really. On January 7th I resubbed and I’m pretty sure I’m continuing for a third month in a week. For someone who played from 2006 to 2014 with no break longer than a couple of months and then stopped completely, only coming back for the expansions that sounds kind of good.
I do have some goals, after all. Mostly hitting Exalted with the 4 factions needed for the new races and seeing the whole story from both sides, but a few more…
There are a few annoyances though:
First of all, if I’m not interested in gear there’s no real draw to continue playing my second char per faction. I’m at iLvl ~330 – did Stromgarde once and don’t see a real point in grinding gear and rep now.
Also I’ve hit iLvl 382 with my best geared character and I don’t seem to be able to progress without doing Mythics – and while I can live with 5mans, I hate timed runs.
Vulpera are not a playable race.
Also grinding out some old Draenor Garrison achievements is just so painful. So much luck involved even though you’re trying chance daily.
Same goes for the Order Hall in theory, but it seems to be less annoying.

As I tend to claim, I’ve not forgotten WoW, I’ve actually been busy doing things. Not just letting my minions run missions… (still not sure if this was a good idea to keep from the garrison…)
I didn’t really count, but during Love is in the Air I used 8 characters at 110+ and ran the dungeon for the mount. I think I did that for like 10 days, maybe 6, maybe 11. I’m kinda glad it’s over now but I would have loved to get the mount.
I also finally finished the 5th class hall campaign (having that achievement at 4/5 kinda annoyed me every time I looked at it). I think it was only 10 quests on the hunter, whereas the Warlock would’ve needed a dungeon run (in Legion, haha) and then more like 20 quests – so the choice was easy. I was reminded how much I loved some of those class hall campaigns overall though… So I’m kinda eager to see how much sense it makes to do them on the chars where I didn’t do them (Druid, Mage, Priest, DK, Monk.. I guess?) Whereas I started (got a toon to 110) but never finished (as seen by the lack of achievement) on Paladin and Warlock – and the 5 I completed now (Rogue, Demon Hunter, Shaman, Warrior) –  this makes 12 classes… so the math checks out.
I’m also still trying to finish the naval mission stuff and grabbing herbs from the Garrison to buy the transmog items with Draenic Seeds – but I think that’s the only thing I will do for WoD content at the moment…
I can also scale back my running of MC, BWL and Onyxia a bit because this Sunday my Paladin Tier 2 Helm finally dropped! Ok, it’s the Onyxia Level 80 version but the devs had mercy and this completes the set – good enough for me. This week I did 3 MC runs and 4 Ony runs, zero BWL. I guess I can go to at most 3 MC, 3 Ony and 1 BWL from now on. But only the Paladin T2 made me run stuff every week…