With a week and a half off work and the kids monopolizing the PS4, I settled in for Entirely Too Much WoW. I'd long scraped every last crumb of content out of BfA, so I made a goal to do all the things in the last two expansions I'd missed. When Legion first came out I blazed through the WoD content to get to it, mostly unintentionally-- the levels came fast and there was never much drive to go back to complete it. Then I left Legion before the first major content drop, so I was never able to finish the Suramar plotline or see ANY of the "Invasion" stuff that came in much later.
This led to three major goals running simultaneously:
- Level up Spindizzy
- get flying in Draenor to make Spindizzy's life easier.
- get flying in Legion, because that would be FUN
The first is the simplest to explain-- I wound up skipping Draenor entirely with Spindizzy due to going a bit insane with pet battles. In a week I had leveled her from 90 to 99 solely from battling various critters in Panadalanda, leveling up dozens of pets during the Pet Battle bonus xp event. For clarification the -pets- got 3x experience, not me, but it was still easy enough to take a pet from level 1 to 25 in about 12 fights. Pet battles don't benefit from rested xp, but Spindizzy was still netting 10-11k per fight. At some point my account passed the 1k battle mark and an achievement was made. Ended that noise on a happy note, picking up the "Safari Hat" prize for battling 40 trainers.
Mind you, a LOT of the trainers I beat would take me past 39 out of 40. Turns out the last one is for the opposite faction, so the achievement was technically earned by a level 1 Orc Huntress named "Stupidsafari" who sadly was deleted less than 15 mintues after her birth. Completing this gave a safari hat toy that, when worn, grants another 10% pet xp.
Flying-- yeesh. Where to begin? Each expansion requires you to finish "Pathfinder" meta-achievements, which require things like "doing all of the quests, explore all of the land, grind reputation, and do other things specific to the expansion".
Legion was broken down into 2 parts. Part 1 I would have finished back when the expansion was new except they hadn't released the last line of quests (which lead up to a raid) by the time I quit. That was simple enough to polish off, but part two-- get revered with a new faction, explore a bunch more areas... go. see. do. Long story short, I finished it up early New Year's Eve and can now ride the skies LIKE GOD INTENDED ME TO.
Once you get sick to damn death of BfA (and you will quickly), I REALLY, REALLY recommend going back and finishing Legion. The Nightborne Elves' plotline in Suramar is interesting enough on its own, but the real star of the show is all of the Space Goat Lore. You command a spaceship (sort of) and invade the demon's home planet of Argus all the while learning all the things about the Draenei they really should have told us back in The Burning Crusade. It's the sort of stuff that would make Bruce drown in a pool of his own saliva.
Ran a few transmog raids between quest chains. In doing so, my guild also found that one does not simply faceroll mythic Legion raids. Clearing Nighthold took 8 geared people paying attention to mechanics, which was a pleasant surprise. All in all, it has been as fun as BfA is not.
Now, Draenor.... Draenor, Draenor, Draenor. That has been an absolute -slog-. Flying requires: full explorations, quests, a dozen different garrison missions, revered rep with 3 factions you can't even start earning until you build a shipyard, and finding a hundred or so treasures hidden on the landscape. Yeesh. The Draenor Loremaster held me up for about a week due to the final quest in Nagrand ("And Justice for Thrall!") being bugged. I finally figured out if I stripped down nearly naked to lower my item level a couple hundred points and punch the bad guys to death with my fishing pole I could keep the fights from bugging out. This strategy would serve me well in numerous dungeons where achievements can be missed because one insta-cast arcane explosion does more damage than the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun.
I'm probably in the minority, but I found the garrison stuff really enjoyable, but the whole shipyard/naval missions are utterly worthless unless you like achievements. That's ok-- because who has two thumbs and LOVES ACHIEVEMENTS?!!? The Strev "sidequest" for a while has been "earn at least 30 account achievement points a day". It's getting to the point where there is little low-hanging fruit, but pursuing these has been both fun and scratched an exploration itch, as they've taken me to some pretty interesting places to do some pretty stupid things. The best from this past week was "kick 100 eggs into lava" to get one called [That Was Entirely Unnecessary], which pretty much sums up my playstyle.
Otherwise, every day for the past two weeks about an hour got devoted solely to grinding Draenor reputations, the last thing I needed for flight. It's a pretty set routine: Flap over to Tanaan. Do a few dailies that force you to run all over the zone to complete, get me an inch closer to revered with two different factions. Although I'd been working these for less than two weeks but it felt like months.
It all paid off last night when I got the last points I needed for both reps and "slipped free the surly bonds of Draenor and touched the face of God."
Then I flew around like an idiot for an hour just because I could.
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