Moonshine Mansion

Unlike many unhappy people, my Amazon order of Legion arrived on time and I was able to play when I got home from work. It sounds like most of the issues were with the collector’s edition, and I only got the normal version, so that probably saved me. I booted up the game and spent about 20 minutes waffling about which character I wanted to level first. I logged in to every level 100 alt so they could start gaining rested XP at least. Then I finally decided on my mage. It is just too fun to pass up!

I decided to go with fire mage even though I usually level as frost. This time around getting the artifact power as I leveled seemed like it would be worth it. I snagged my fancy artifact weapon and then spent a long time wandering around the mage class hall. It is so perfectly magey and I love it!

I chose Azsuna as my first leveling zone and I was not disappointed. It has been a mix of enemies so far, legion and naga and others. I don’t want to spoil the story yet but it was interesting enough to keep me entertained. I was surprised that I completed the “main” story fairly quickly, since I still have a lot of the zone left to do, but I got the quest to do the Eye of Azshara dungeon. I dinged level 101 and popped back to Dalaran to check on crafting quests and my class hall. That’s when the DDoS attack struck. Since it was getting late anyway I decided to call it a night instead of getting increasingly annoyed at not being able to do anything. I can’t tell you how happy I am to not be in a hurry this expansion. Questing has been fun and pretty relaxed, and I don’t have to get enraged when normal launch day issues happen. I’m really looking forward to finishing Azsuna and seeing what the rest of the zone has to offer before I move on!

Legion is launched! Unfortunately I purchased a physical copy and have to wait until this afternoon to play. But!! When preorders went live I bought a copy for my 2nd account, so I could get the level 100 boost right away. I can play Legion this morning, but only on my 2nd account where nothing really matters.

So I hopped on to my demon hunter, a class that is far down my leveling list on my main account. Hopefully I got enough out of my system to tide me over until I get home from work and school today and log in on my “real” account. I’ve been having fun, but I don’t want to dig too far into things and end up being annoyed at repetition on my main later. It feels a bit awkward, but it is still better than having to wait while everyone else can play this morning!

I haven’t made any. Jazz Hands.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve done what I felt like doing instead of making sure every character is prepared for Legion. That means I collected the invasion transmog and used invasions to level alts I’ll probably never play, instead of gearing up the characters who will be first out of the gate in the expansion. Heck, I still haven’t truly chosen a main for Legion yet. Mage is in the lead but I may still cave at the last second and play something that can heal. Who knows?! My alts are in disarray, I haven’t kept up with any gold making activities and I have remained relatively spoiler-free about the leveling content for the expansion. It may look like peak laziness but is in fact a carefully calculated gamble. I’m hoping that by going into the expansion completely unprepared and with no concrete plans, I might just be able to slow down, enjoy the leveling process, and avoid burnout. I don’t have any plans for raiding outside of LFR, but I do have at least 2 groups of folks making noises about mythic+ dungeons and that’s good enough for me. It is so much easier to wrangle 5 people on a regular basis than 10 or 20. Plus, the new Karazhan is set up for 5 people, and that’s the only must-see content I’ve seen announced so far!

I also haven’t done any IRL preparations for the launch of the expansion. No days taken off work, no meals prepped ahead of time, and no plans to stay up late. The last time I did a full-out MMO all night launch party was for WildStar. There’s no way I can muster that kind of enthusiasm for a new WoW expansion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see everything new, but I’m not in such a hurry to get leveled that I need to stay up all hours and waste precious leave time. It doesn’t help that this is the first week of classes, so there’s not much chance of me getting away for a few weeks anyway. But this weekend is a holiday in the States, and I am sure I’ll be getting a ton of WoW playing done then!

The sense I’ve been getting from my social circles is that people are becoming less likely to go through the full launch night nonsense as time goes on. Lots of folks are already making backup plans for the next few days in case of the ubiquitous server issues or DDoS attacks. Are any of you planning an all-nighter for Legion? or are you planning to face those demons only after a good night’s rest?