Grace

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?

This week has been very strange due to my recent medical “stuff”. I had a bunch of down time, but wasn’t able to actually sit at a computer to play games. As a result my gaming activity for the week ended up being very different from what I had planned.

World of Warcraft: I had grand plans for WoW this week. With the Legion invasion event still going I was hoping to get at least one more character to 100. Since Tuesday I have barely touched the game sadly, so I think the event is effectively over for me. It was fun overall, and I got a lot of leveling done. Still, I’ll be glad for Legion’s launch this week and the copious amounts of new things to do. If this event is a good indication of how the expansion will feel, count me as excited.

Diablo 3: This is where I spent most of my computer time, which was still pretty small. I’ve been working toward upgrading my legendary gems to 65 for the conquest, and also slowly augmenting some of my ancient legendaries so I can tackle higher greater rifts. Rifting has been perfect since each one won’t last any longer than 15 minutes and I can get up from my desk afterward to take a break. It’s been just enough that it makes me want to grab the stash tab this season, but with Legion coming on Tuesday I doubt I’ll stay dedicated enough to finish the job.

Mobile Games: I don’t usually play a huge amount of mobile games but they got a lot more appealing to me this week. I still play Pokemon Go every day, but lately it consists of logging in, catching any pokemon nearby, and logging back out. Instead I’ve been relying on 3 old favorites to pass the time: Tiny Tower, Puzzle and Dragons, and Alphabear. They seem to have the right combination of mindless tapping and cute puzzles to keep me distracted, and I can rotate between the three as resources or my attention span become limiting. It’s not exactly a high caliber of gaming but it has been great to keep me occupied this week.

That’s pretty much it for me this week. Next week is going to be all about the Legion, assuming I can actually sit at a computer long enough to enjoy it. I hope your week was more productive than mine!