It was my youngest’s birthday party this weekend.  I have a serious baking kick and birthdays are a ton of fun to try out new things.  This run was a Minions cake.  It was a 3 layer cake and while it was cooling, the birthday girl decided to munch on it.  So I was missing about ¼ of that cake and had to make due with some quickly made Rice Crispies mix.  I had some pre-made fondant set aside but given the size of the cake, I needed to make more.   And I had a wedding to attend the day before, and we ended up hosting folks afterwards.

That’s a lot of yellow.

Long story short, I had a lot of work to do, barely any time to do it, stayed up til about 1AM Saturday and woke up early Sunday to finish.  Everything turned out great and my daughter was really happy.  And that does make it worthwhile.  Need to catch up on some sleep now.

Alts

My monk is still specced Brewmaster, making nearly every quest fairly straightforward as tanks don’t die.  The exception are the group quests, where I do need a healer.  Given that the majority of those quests have benefits I don’t require, I tend to skip them.  So I really only have 4-5 quests per day to run, enough for the emissary chest and maybe an extra one.  The rest of the time is spent moving forward the Suramar quest line – with an end goal of completing the achievement to eventually unlock flying.

So, that means that I can tinker a bit with alts.  And tinker is all it feels like.

Let’s say that World Quests are the “final” end game for Legion, which I think most can agree with.  To get there, you need level 110, and friendly with all 5 factions, the last of which only unlocks at level 110.  With rested experience and a casual play, you will likely hit 110 after 2 zones.  Still need to do the 2 others though, for the faction.  That’s about 10 hours of play, or so.  Even alts that collect/craft have to put in a fair chunk of time, given that progress with them is quest based and zone locked.

And that doesn’t cover the faction-based dungeon unlocks either.

As it is now, aside from gold, there is nothing Legion-specific that is shared between characters on an account.  That means that the time invested in one character would need to be repeated with every other alt.

Focusing on a single character is a smart move, giving some investment and uniqueness to the game.  I think this is a good approach for multi-role classes (mages, warlocks, hunters, rogues excepted) – specifically around the queue times for pure DPS classes.  As a Monk, I can heal, tank or DPS.  It’s a major, if not massive, shift from Legion’s “park it in the garrison” mentality.  I had 2 alts that barely stepped out and ended up in full epic gear.  Change is hard for some, harder still when the change is so jarring.

Accessibility

Blizz has mentioned that as the game progresses, more alt-friendly options will be made present, through catch-up mechanisms.  Artifact research will be sped up from the current 5 day wait.  I’m sure that there will be reputation commendations coming shortly as well, so that the next run up will be faster.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the unlocks (like dungeons) would eventually be account-wide as well.

The first raid hasn’t even unlocked yet, so a full discussion about alts is somewhat premature.  I guess we’ll see what 7.1 brings to the table in the short future.