I haven’t paid a monthly sub to WoW since month #2 of WoD.  The WoW tokens have been easy enough to acquire to meet my needs.  (There’s a post on opportunity cost on that topic later).  With the recent patch changing the leveling game, I decided to dip the toe back in.

Can I say how poor WoW is at welcoming old players?  Or maybe it’s just all MMOs. Guild is gone, can’t understand trade chat, there are quest markers everywhere.  One of the nice things of FF14 is that that main quest line (MSQ I think it’s called) has a different icon, and there’s only ever one.  Long story short, it took about an hour for me to figure things out again on my Monk.  Then another hour of clean up.  Usually at the end of an expansion I just drop every quest item and sell my entire bag contents.  This is not one of those times and I’m sure as rain that there are items in there that I need.

Goals

My original goal was to level up some of my alts.  Monk, DH, Rogue, and Paladin are all 110.  Druid, Hunter, and Shaman are all over 100.  That leaves a DK, Mage, and Warlock that are between 60 and 100.  Then my slow friends the Warrior, and Priest under level 20.  I will have you notice that the classes with the most amount of roles are the ones I tend to play the most, with the exception of the Rogue who dates back to server start date.

The Warrior was a small test before my last time off.  I wanted to give a shot to the one class that I have never been able to bite into.  I can clearly recall it killing everything it touched in a single stroke, feeling more like a cheap Diablo clone.  After 1 session I was done.  Priest has never worked for me either.  I’ve preferred the Warlock approach to damage.

Back on topic.  I decided to give the DK another shot –  a dual role tank that can solo pretty much anything.  Rune management is why he’s been benched for years.  He was 94 (from the Legion pre-launch event) and had yet to unlock WoD content.  I am not a fan of WoD, for reasons explained many times on this blog.  But to level up, I know that Shadowmoon + part of Gorgrond is usually enough.  But wait, what about flying to make things ultra easier?

Flight Paths

Above point about not being in love with WoD = not having unlocked flying on Draenor.  I also left Legion before unlocking that flight mode.  Let’s take a look see what’s involved…You can check that out here – Flying Pre-check tool.

Quest lines – ok.  Treasure collections – that’s fine.  Exploration – done.  Reputation – ugh.

There was a time I loved reputation grinds.  I remember the centaur clans in Vanilla, lots of fun.  Blizzard has taken many approaches over the years.  Pure enemy grinds, daily quests, weekly quests, boosts, rare drops…you name it.  And the differences between WoD and Legion are enough to make me question my sanity.  (Irony – meet Insane in the membrane)

Legion requires you to have completed the Suramar questline, which was actually pretty neat, and at the time a great source of gear/power.  There’s a single part where you need to LFR and kill Xavious, but that was a quick romp.  Most of it dealt with launch-era things, which is good.  The real kicker is the faction amounts.  You get that from a long quest chain, or through the World Quests at 75 rep a pop.  It adds some variety to it all, but it’s not something that will be done in 2 or 3 days.

WoD is based almost entirely on Tanaan, which was added late in the cycle.  Same general requirements which are just fine.  Then there are 3 factions to max.  2 of them take about 15-20 days, depending on your luck.  One of them can be done in a day, but only if you grind out elite mobs.  So I can spend a month or so unlocking flying for content I won’t spend more than 1 or 2 sessions playing through.  In an expansion that was designed for ground travel.  I’ll make due.

Side note, in the recent patch all flying pre-WoD was combined into a single skill, which is great for leveling and saves some cash.  There are even 2 heirlooms per faction to unlock all the vanilla zone flight points.

Next Steps

So the plan is to work on the flight plan in Legion since I have many characters in that content and the rewards are relevant to some of them.  Also to upgrade all my heirloom items to at least 100 that provide an exp boost (helm, back, chest, legs).  That’s 500g for the level 60 item, then 1000g for 90 upgrade, 2000g for 100 upgrade, and 5000g for the 110 version.  I already had some portions of this done, but the entire investment for a level 110 is 34,000g.

The good news is that since stats are spec-specific, I can use any piece of plate instead of DPS plate.  The bad news is that since 7.3.5 enemy HP now scales, meaning that I can’t have 1 super set of cloth from 1-100, ignoring the benefits of armor.  Dreadmist for everyone is over with.

From there, I’ll work the DK up through to 101 in order to unlock the basics of Legion.  I figure I’ll hit 100 before Shadomoon is half way done.