Another week has gone by and I’m still in my infatuation mode with Legion but it is starting to wear a bit at the edges. In the big picture sense I haven’t made a lot of huge progress since last week, but everything has still been moving forward in a satisfying way. Mage and Monk are still my only 2 characters at 110, but I now have 2 druids, a priest, pally, and another monk in various stages from unlocking the class hall through level ~105. Other than the minor faction BS that happens in Stormheim, there’s not much difference between Horde and Alliance side. This is making me feel less bad about focusing on my alliance servers where my friends are. It also helps that professions are so tied to quests that having my army of alts horde-side isn’t as huge a benefit, and is more a liability at this point.
I got to raid a tiny bit on Friday! We only cleared the first boss and put in a few attempts on the spider-bird boss, but it was a fun time. I also got to try a couple mythics and my first mythic+. Mythics are fun, they feel about what I’m used to for heroic dungeons. My only complaint about them is that they aren’t available through the group finder. I am hoping as the expansion goes on and the gear cap rises that they might lift that restriction, because there’s nothing about normal mythics that makes me think a restriction on grouping is necessary. Mythic+ on the other hand, that kicked our butts. I mean it probably didn’t help that we had never been in that particular place on regular mythic. We had a good time and we did complete it, but nowhere near beating the timer. With a couple weeks worth of experience and gear I’m sure we’ll be in good shape.
A few other things happened inside my brain over the last week. First, I finally realized that yes, I really am a healer at heart. Goodbye short-lived mage main, we hardly knew ye. Monk healing is fun and satisfying, and since I have a good group of friends to do mythics and raids with I think it needs to be my main. It will take a couple weeks to get fully up to speed on her compared to where my mage was, but it will be worth it to be settled in and not feel pulled in multiple directions. I even kinda enjoy windwalker, even though I usually hate melee. I’ve been playing it enough during world questing to get used to it though, and ran a dungeon as dps and it wasn’t awful. That was my one outstanding worry about monk and it is pretty resolved so I think I’ll be really happy going forward.
The other brain thing that happened is that Blizz’s insistence on forcing people to manually group for things and putting story content out of reach of the group finder has made me stop giving any fucks about it. I’ve got groups and friends so I can totally do these things! But sometimes I just want to queue for LFR and knock out a quest or run a random dungeon when my friends aren’t around. Now LFR gives absolutely nothing I need, not gear or quests or anything, so I have zero reason to do it. And heroics are only really worth it if there’s a world quest or a healer goodie bag. I am wondering if this expansion is going to really divide the population, between casual solo-ish folks who only do world quests, because they can’t move the story forward in accessible content, and raiders who group with their guild for the hard stuff and have no reason to do LFR or heroics. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive this time around for those two groups to overlap. At least in the last 2 expansions you could work on the legendary questline in LFR. Anyway I’m curious to see how this plays out, but I’ve decided I need to stop caring about the story and rewards that Blizz put in front of me and just wander around doing whatever I feel like instead.
