World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

Games
201

I had the same experience in the maw, where I hit level 4 and had to leave with quests unfinished because, well, I would die. That sucked. Also not being allowed to mount suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

I enjoyed Torghast quite a lot, but I can’t see myself continuing to enjoy it for months. It’s not evergreen content, and that is what it’s designed to be.

Shrug. The endgame stuff blows compared to previous expansions but I didn’t enjoy it there either, so maybe it just isn’t for me.

202

Outside of getting the soul ash when completing a layer once a week, is there anything you get in Torghast? I think you can find companions in there, but not sure what else. I guess you are just supposed to keep beating your head against the next layer until you solve it?

203

Oh, is the soul ash only a once-weekly reward? Dang, I knew Blizzard would Blizzard it. Supposedly, it’s a source for various cosmetics, but that’s just something I read in passing somewhere.

Blizzard keeps adding all these options for different ways to play, but then they arbitrarily tell you you can only do THIS much of each of those things in one day/week. I wish they would just take away all the gating and see what happens.

204

They’d see a small subset of hardcores grinding to get stuff within two weeks, and be done with the expansion and all the alternate leveling things within a month or two with no timing lockouts.

205

It would be a shit show. The hardcore raiders would poopsock everything, and almost all the content would be trivialized. They would one-shot the raids. Blizzard would over-tune things to compensate.

Meanwhile everyone else would be pissed and we’d have even more “I have a job, I can only play for a few hours, it’s not faaiiiiiir that they could get ahead.”

That said, I think the best system they had were the Badges back in wrath. Run content; get badges. So, if everything gives a small amount of what I need, at least I have choices. I don’t know how much of this is in SL.

206

I’m quite satisfied and having fun too! Despite opting out of Shadowlands and playing contrarian.

On my mage I got to level 30 in Draenor and decided to disable XP to try the dungeons and complete some more quests. At first I was HORRIFIED when I saw a message on screen that said with XP disabled I cannot join a party. But apparently they changed or fixed it, because the dungeon finder works (I even found enraged discussions on the forums, because a patch disabled xp for all party members, so if you happened to join a dungeon with someone who had disabled xp you’d end up with no xp as well). So I’m not quite sure how this works now, or if there are separate queues, but I ran three instances successfully with xp disabled, with everything else working properly.

I’m pleased because the difficulty is set well, at least when playing a mage. I’ve found some challenging quests, normal quests out there in the world. One had an encounter in three phases, with no possibility to rest in between. I actually had to develop a strategy and optimize a rotation. I died 4-5 times before succeeding (the three dungeons I run were overall easier!). The garrison gives one timed skill that is quite powerful, so when I hit challenging content I avoid it, and use it to speed up the more standard quests.

At level 30 there’s also flying enabled, so I get to play the leveling experience with access to flying. And that makes it quite faster despite that content wasn’t designed for it.

So I found a niche to play the way I want. The best thing would be giving the option of a custom sliding bar: from 1% to 100%. 100% is the current leveling speed, and you could push down to whatever value you want, in the case you prefer slower leveling through old content. Without the need to disable xp completely.

I’m even considering buying SL later, and plan characters around the content. One locked at 49 for old content, one at 50 for some other things, one alt to go through each expansion I haven’t played… Bringing the mage to 35 would unlock all the instances, so it could work as a temporary plateau.

I suspect some things are in limbo, though. I heard that for example in Legion there was an artifact to level, but it was removed, so now you have pieces of the content that don’t retain the purpose and function they had. I have the same impression with Draenor. I have this settlement and followers and missions… But I don’t know if they have any purpose anymore. It all seems self serving. I send these followers in missions, and they level up… to go into harder missions. What’s even the goal? The only output right now seems to invest resources to obtain some crafting recipes.

Anyway, if I didn’t disable xp I’d be close to level 40, and I’m not even done with the first zone in Draenor, out of 5.

207

Holy shit, HRose said something positive about WoW. 2020 is the weirdest timeline.

I wrapped Bastion this morning. I am taking the slow route through. Each expansion I lie to myself that this expansion I will take the endgame more seriously, but I don’t ever do that.

Still leveling on Alliance. I did get into a better guild on Horde side, but Area 52’s queues are still insane: 2 hours last night. My plan now is to get my Alliance toon to 60 (only 53 now). By then, the A52 queues will be shorter, I hope.

208

I saw that Blizzard is offering free transfers off of the super populated servers right now so that’s an option if you’re stuck on one. Doesn’t seem bad at all on the Thunderlord group we’re on (our server is Azshara though).

209

I on A52 and can move off it. Thinking of going back to an RP server like WRA.

210

Holy cow, quite a distribution on your server!

image

211

Yeah. I am most likely just going to wait for it to die down.

212

Wait 41 to 21k isn’t right is it? Where did that come from?

213

The 21k sounds right not. Even last night there were still hour long queues.

214

I am enjoying myself so far. I relatively took my time and hit 60 in a couple of days. I like the mechanics much more than the quagmire and guild killing end of BFA. We are a pretty good heroic raiding guild for many years, but everyone stopped playing at the end of the last expansion. People are back now, even some folks that skipped the entire last expansion.

215

I’m not sure I understand myself. My “mean “character is about 56 1/2 now and I just completed the Maldraxxus storyline quests. And I haven’t had any real problems leveling. It seems pretty smooth so far. But when I have just a little bit to play I have found myself logging onto my alts that are in the 30s. One of them is leveling through warlords and the other one through Legion. Maybe it’s because I did not experience that content when it first came out so it’s all new to me but for some reason the leveling feels more relaxing when I’m doing it with these lower-level guys. Maybe it’s the variety that appeals to me, trying a new class let you fill around with a bunch of different abilitities.

I’m sure I will hit 60 soon… Soonish… Eventually.

216

This site has a couple hundred more Alliance in A52 than the other one I checked.

https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us

217

I feel that way partly because I want my 54 to get to 60 as soon as possible but my other alts i’m not so stressed about leveling so its more enjoyable and relaxing. I “thought” I would level a new warrior to 50 but ended up wasting more money boosting him…I hate boosting but I also have played this game for about a million hours and just cant imagine playing more hours than I have to for all the alts I want to try. I’m sure I will play another month or so and then shelve it again for another year. I mean, Cyberpunk is coming out…I cant not buy that one too.

218

I created a warlock to try out the new exiles reach bits, and then sent him off to the outlands to experience Burning Crusade. I can’t remember if anything was changed out there after BC, but it is bringing back memories from playing the content all those years ago. I sent my 46 mage off to Northrend to finish leveling in the WotLK content. I was surprised at how populated the zones were with people working on through the content. There were enough in Hellfire Peninsula that it was taking some effort to complete a couple quests due to the mobs being dead instantly.

My Pally is about halfway to 56 doing leveling with threads of fate. There are couple of the faction quests that are grindy, but it could also be that I just haven’t found the bit that allows you to power through them really quickly like some of the others have. I’m of the sparring with the aspirants one in Bastion, and one I did in the endmire in Revendreth as well. One thing with threads of fate, I would probably hold off on depositing anima with the covenant until you hit 60. I guess I will find out if it counts towards the initial 1000 goal when I hit 60 with my paladin, but I’m guessing it will not.

219

I’m confused, going to change realm in WoW says moonrunner is high population, but both wowprogress.com and wowrealmpopulation.com show it being pretty low.

Edit: Ah, there are specific requirements on a character being counted it looks like the following on wowprogress

  • Population - amount of unique players that meet any of the two conditions:
  • has a level 110 character that killed something in Tier 24 Heroic Mode
  • has a level 110 character in a guild that killed something in Tier 24 Heroic Mode
220

When do I pick my faction? I turned 60 and am working through the last faction area, Revendeth. I don’t really mind doing some quests, but most just give me gold that I don’t seem to need anyway. I want to go to Torghast. Is there a shortcut?