Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me. When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me. I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834. For the most part every single night I am doing two things. Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted. After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased. For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it. For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests. This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish. It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon. This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.
After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer. I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it. The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually. What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon. By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all. The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is. It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight. We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression. After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants. Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.
After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did. From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests. These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content. Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable. While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage. I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on. So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why. I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests. I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases. Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward. Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them. Now I just want them to keep this up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.
Holy cow I can’t believe we’re only 2 weeks into Legion. The first week was a week of leveling and exploring. This past week has been about trying to clear out my quest log more than anything else. The first time leveling in an expansion I like to get the Loremaster achievement, which means by the time I reach the level cap I’m usually pretty close to done with all the quests available. Not so with Legion. I keep half-joking with my friends that there’s some folks at Blizzard laughing their butts off at us because we complained there wasn’t enough to do and now there’s SO MUCH TO DO I don’t even know where to start. I head to an area with the intention of clearing out a quest from my log and suddenly there’s a world quest there too. Or I’m flying somewhere for a world quest and I see a quest hub I missed while I’m flying over. Suramar in particular has two subzones that are gigantic, with pretty extensive quest lines. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of crafting and all its associated quests.
