Legion and a monthly subscription should do it.
The one thing I’ve been finding annoying is the rate at which you get xp. Understandable from one point of view ofc (as most players probably want to get to where the action is as fast as possible nowadays). But I would really, REALLY love a “slow xp potion” to take the rate of xp gain down to a level where one can live a little in the zones one passes through, smell the roses. I tried the “experience off altogether” spell from the guy in Stormwind, but it screwed with my quest progression so I had to turn xp back on again.
There’s a brilliant mod called “Immersion” that totally changes the way you interact with quests, in that it breaks up the dialogue into little steps that you have to take a little bit of time to read (there’s another addon called Storyline, that has a similar schtick to GW2’s dialogues, but Immersion is a bit more snazzy looking). When you do this, and allow yourself to be forced to read the actual quests through relatively slowly, you find they’re actually very well written (for this kind of thing, it’s hardly Dostoevsky ofc :) ) and interesting enough to make you feel like you’ve got an in-game purpose.
The Draenei starter zones are absolutely enchanting btw - particularly the music, it’s got quite a magical feeling to it, but with a slight technological edge. All the music, and all the sound in the game (that I’ve heard so far), is just top notch.
I was thinking sadly of Vanguard the other day, and how all the design pieces were in place for that game to be just as immersive as WoW in a slightly more realistic graphics style - VAST world, full of rich character, etc. That game had some real class in its design too, it just fell down badly on implementation - terrible problems at launch, you needed computers that hadn’t been invented yet to make it even playable, etc. But that was also a game you could just wander around in and feel like you were in another world. Had Vanguard had the same slick responsiveness and technical sophistication as WoW, even if it was just playable on the top end computers of the day, it could have really achieved something great. But at the time of launch, it was a slideshow even on top end rigs, you had to whack the graphics down so much to make it playable that it fell far short of its potential.
Sorry I’m babbling on about WoW at this late stage in the game. I realized it was a great game when I first tried it years ago (TBC), but I was chasing after other shiny gaming objects at the time, and never fully got into it. I’m bloody hooked now!
Please keep babbling.
I like the idea of that Immersion mod. What other mods does a new player need? I have not yet resubscribed but I am still thinking of it and one of the things holding me back is not knowing which mods are “must haves” when I enter a dungeon, raid or sell something at the AH.
I went through the Worgen starting zone last night (1-10) and found it to be a wonderful piece of story-telling. It may very well be the best WoW starting zone as the quests are interesting, the lore is great and the ambiance is spot-on. I am getting lag spikes from time to time though.
Blizzard is not making the cost of entry easy though. $65 to get started and see the latest content seems to be quite high. If I decide to make the leap I want to be sure that I am prepared to get the most out of it.
It’s roughly the cost of a new AAA title, so I guess it just depends on how much time you think you’d play it in a month. If you are familiar with WoW, and decent at it, I’d say that Legion itself has about 40 hours of content before you are really just into the grinding treadmill of “repeat this every day/week to slowly RNG your way into better gear” territory.
That being said, I do find myself consistently impressed with just how well designed the game is on so many levels, and how polished the gameplay is. It’s a lot of fun, I just can’t get too on board with weekly raiding or doing battlegrounds over and over again like I could when I was younger, so I burn out in about a month with it. Still, I always have great fun for that month and don’t regret coming back.
For dungeons and raids all that’s really required would be a boss mod (Deadly Boss Mods is the most popular last I heard, but there are alternatives) and maybe a meter like Recount or Skada for the picker raid groups. There are some other possible enhancements, especially for raid healing, but that’s more of a hardcore thing. For top tier auctioning there are mods like Auctioneer.
The must have add ons for me:
Deadly Boss
Recount
GTFO
Some sort of a sell all your gray items at once mod.
I also like Titan Panel for the time to level, and overall repair percentage.
I started in August when Legion first came out, and I think I’ve finally shaken it. My guild was doing mythic progression pretty hard the whole expansion which was fun at first, but just became a second job by now. Mythic KJ in Tomb of Sargeras just didn’t look fun to me at all, which helped get the orc off my back! For the most part I liked the expansion with one caveat: The Legendary system was horrible. Absolutely horrible. Which legendary items you have can make or break top tier DPS by a pretty big factor, and you get them one at a time over several weeks, and there are like a dozen. So when starting a new Legion character you can get extremely unlucky and get 5 bad legendaries in a row (like I did) over a 3 month period of time and be bottom of the barrel DPS (in a progression guild). Really don’t like that design.
What sucked the fun for me was the AP grind. I lost all interest once I had to unlock tiers.
I will go through at some point and level my alts though.
Or just never have any drop, as had been the case for me as of when I quit this time around. And I played for months too.
The AP grind was a bit of a drag, but that’s pretty much totally unlocked now. As long as you have one character fully levelled on AK, you can insta-level all of your other characters.
Can someone translate? AK? AP?
That’s the problem. I’m not even close to fully unlocked.
You advance your artifact weapon by accumulating Artifact Power, and can research Artifact Knowledge that multiplies all subsequent Artifact Power sources.
That sounds complicated. I have no idea what it means but it sounds complicated.
Not really. It’s basically just a currency that you get from random drops.
The WoW forum post I linked to a few posts above has a great set of recommendations based on a combination of utility and light CPU usage, and by contrast also tells you the most popular addons as well.
For example, according to the poster’s investigations, although Deadly Boss Mods is the most widely-used boss mod, the next-biggest alternative, BigWigs, is less resource intensive.
Or, while Weak Auras is a fantastically modifiable system with lots of support from players who have made profiles that you can get off the shelf from Wago, Aura Frames is less resource intensive and actually easier to use (it just doesn’t have a lot of pre-made profiles that folks have made over the years that you can get off the shelf on Wago).
Or while Vuhdo is another fantastic system with great support from people who’ve made profiles that you can get off the shelf from Wago, Grid2 plus Clique, or even just Blizzard raid frames plus Clique, is far less resource intensive.
Etc.
That’s what this guy claims to have found through testing at any rate, and I can confirm that I gained around 7 or so fps from replacing my suite of “usual suspects” with the alternatives. As he says, if you have a beast of a comp, it won’t matter much, and the big name addons are big name for good reasons - it’s just interesting to see the differences.
Well, they thought of you too! The AK grind has been shortened from like 4 days per level to 3h and 36m per level. This is, as the devs say, because:
I’m confused. Does this mean 3.51 hours per tier now?
Yes sir, that’s what it means exactly.
Oh crap. I purchased Legion and for the first time in 4 expansions I am back in WoW.