Featuring: Arolaide, Ellyndrial, and Liore
The circular nature of life can be strange. You are oftentimes presented with opportunities that you never quite expected. The Thirteenth of April was the six year anniversary of AggroChat, and that is extremely germaine to today’s topic. In 2014 I was listening to a podcast created and hosted by one of my good friends called Cat Context. The shift to listening to it was extremely natural because at the time I was playing Rift as part of the Machiavelli’s Cat, so it felt like I was listening to an extension of guild chat. It was effectively three friends, hanging out on voice chat and talking about a bunch of loose topics for roughly an hour.
The chemistry that this group of friends had was staggering, and it planted a seed in my head that I could in theory do the same thing with the large cast of characters that I hung out with on a nightly basis on Teamspeak. Little did I know at the time that making a conversation seem effortless is way harder than it sounds, and I am still in awe of the great interactions that always happened on the Cat Context podcast. Over the years I would get wistful and tweet at Liore or Aro about how much I miss the show. Apparently this stuck in Liores head as earlier this week I got a DM announcing that they had gotten “the band back together” but lacked any place to actually host or advertise it.
So it is with great pleasure that I have the opportunity to announce Cat Context episode 117, or at least we think that is the appropriate number. Three years ago life happened to all of these wonderful hosts and the show sorta dropped. As a result we have a show that talks about at least in part what has happened over the last three years and more importantly what life is like now living in the time of pandemic. I hope you are all as pleased to see a new episode of Cat Context and I would absolutely be willing to set up more permanent hosting for the trio if this thing starts happening more frequently.
Well folks… the madness continues. Last night I dinged 120 on my fifth character in rapid succession. Prior to the launch of Legion, there was a pre-launch demon invasion event that I abused for every drop of experience that I could on the Alliance side. During this I managed to level one of every single class to 100 while doing these events. However on the horde side I have had mostly a bunch of low level characters to go along with what is ultimately my two main characters, the Demon Hunter and the Warrior. The goal has been to take these experience boosts and catch the stable of characters up so that going into Shadowlands I have a bit more choice in what I am going to play. I’ve always found running up alts relaxing, and last night getting the Warlock to 120 gave me my first caster.
So one of my friends pinged me the other night on Steam to ask a question and apparently I completely missed it. I won’t lie folks, you are most likely to get an answer from me on Twitter, because in the modern age I am exceptionally bad at paying attention to the chat services associated with the plethora of social options we all have. However the question was pretty straight forward and essentially boiled down to asking how I was leveling these alts so quickly. It is really straight forward… I am questing, rapidly, and with flight. I talked about this the other day but right now there is a Winds of Wisdom buff that gives you an extra 100% experience, meaning every drop of xp gained is twice what it previously would be. If you also have heirlooms that adds up in total to either +45% or +55% depending on if you have rings or not.
What that feels like in experience however is that extra experience gain appears to be multiplicative because I did not have heirlooms while leveling the Warlock and I absolutely noticed a massive difference. Normally speaking with heirlooms I can do all of Battle for Azeroth in completing a single zone’s worth of content and opening the three war campaign footholds. Without the heirlooms I had to complete one full zone, open the three footholds and then go do almost all of a second zone. It felt like everything was going about half as fast as I would normally go, but there were a few other factors. Namely leveling a caster is not my jam and my time to kill was probably significantly lower. This makes a big difference because the other thing that I do while questing is that I kill everything in my path while getting to the next objective rather than just swooping down on a mount.
I’ve always leveled quickly, the the answer has always been the salted earth approach that I take, since monster xp doesn’t seem like much but adds up over time. All of that said I absolutely boosted a mage because it is the least “bel” class on the planet. I actually enjoy leveling a priest way more than I do a mage, so more than anything this is probably just for sake of seeing all 120s sitting in my roster. I boosted the mage last time on the alliance side, so it appears to be a tradition for me. I will never likely take this character off any “sweet jumps”, and often times they turn into my banker alt. The real question is… after having finished leveling the Warlock, what character do I start with next? Right now I am leaning towards pushing up my Highmountain Monk, because a Tauren monk is hillarious.
