Good morning everyone. I need to order a new keyboard because the one I have been typing on randomly seems to repeat characters. So if you ever see a word with one too many of a specific letter I am going to blame it on this phenomena. This week in Blapril is “Get to Know You” week, but I am not really sure what I can tell you that I have not already told you in the other 2312 posts on this blog. I’ve always tried to be open with my readers and share large swaths of my life. There are of course a few edits here and there to hide the identities of the innocent, but the core truth is always there. Anything prior to about 2013 makes me cringe massively when I have attempted to re-read it because I think it was written by a very different version of me.
I will tell you one thing I have been kicking around in my head is whether or not we should do an actual Blaugust this year in addition to Blapril or not. I think there are positives and negatives to it in both ways. That might be a little too much blogging and togetherness in one year, and at least for the folks who are actively participating in Blapril it might feel a little weird to turn around and do it again in another four months. All of that said who knows if we will be getting back to normal by August or not. I will say five weeks into isolation mode, a new sort of normal is starting to settle in and I am not entirely certain if I like it or not.
The only analogy I have for what I am feeling is that I go through something when my wife has a work trip. I go through a day or two of enhanced freedom mode, where I order pizza exactly the way I want to and do other minor random acts of defiance… before I am mostly just wanting her back because I am not sleeping right without another body beside me in the bed. The first few weeks of remote work were really fun… until it set in that this is now the reality rather than the escape from it. There are a lot of days where I would much rather drive into the office and be present there, than work remotely. Like I have said before I have a brand new respect for folks who have been doing this for years. All of that said I am probably way better suited to deal with this than a lot of folks given how generally solitary I tend to be by nature.
On the gaming front I hit 120 with my Hunter and have gotten his item level up to 380ish. The hardest part are the weapons and the trinkets, and I am largely just gearing through soaking up free world quest gear. On the 8th I was sitting in my 70s and on Sunday night I dinged 120. I am not sure how many total hours it took me but it absolutely felt faster than it has any right to be. Legion and Battle For Azeroth were the slowest part, largely because a lot of the quests that you end up doing are more complicated and simply take more time. I am finding that I am really enjoying the Beast Mastery Hunter, and I am contemplating doing further nonsense and trying to farm up missing set pieces from a few Hunter sets.
As far as my next victim goes… I decided to start pushing up my fresh Zandalari Druid. The entire goal here is not necessarily to gear out a single character, but to abuse the fact that leveling is insanely fast right now to build out my stable of horde characters. I spent a decade exclusively playing Alliance characters, so it makes sense that I have one of everything over there above the level of 100. On the Horde side however I have a bunch of “youngins” that my goal is to get several up to the cap before this buff runs out. I spent the better part of last night running around the Barrens doing quests that I have not done in quite some time.
I have to say it is hard to explain how much better the post Cataclysm version of the Barrens is than the World of Warcraft Classic version. This really is driven home by the fact that I spent so much time leveling in it last August during the crush of Classic. The flow of the quests just works so much better and there seems to be much less randomly ping ponging from various corners of the map back to the Crossroads. What is also making this exceptionally fun are the really cool dinosaur druid forms. I am not sure exactly what I am when I am in “cat form” but it looks badass and I am all there for it. I also randomly decided to make my Druid my Alchemist, so I need to spend some time working on that at some point.
I am having a lot of fun leveling random things in World of Warcraft, which is about the level of engagement that I need right now.
