Blaugust

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE BROKEN SHORE YET The Legion invasions have officially started in WoW, and have been surprisingly fun! I fully expected to barely be able to log in last night, but somehow there were no server crashes and no DDoS issues, only smooth demon hunting as far as the eye could see. First thing I did was hop on my forsaken priest, my character with the most history and achievements, and set off to do the broken shore quest. I knew what was coming, story-wise, but was excited to see how it played out. I was expecting a solo scenario, and was a little surprised and worried to see I ended up in a group of 20 people. Luckily everyone was just excited and nobody was a jerk, and the way things were constructed I felt completely free to watch the cutscenes when they arrived. I liked that there were both a horde and an alliance group doing the scenario at the same time, and the way the combat with the end boss went with friendly banter between the factions. At the end, I was a bit disappointed that Vol’jin got mortally wounded in such a mundane way, while Varian got to have his epic heroic moment before exploding. After watching the later cutscene it was clear that it happened that way so that Vol’jin could make it back to Org and choose the new warchief himself instead of letting the Horde fall into chaos without a clear succession. Then I got to fangirl out for a while, seeing Sylvanas take up the mantle of warchief. For all her faults as a character I still can’t help but love her. I hope she gets the chance to do a good job, and that this isn’t the setup for making her a raid boss down the road. I liked her rallying cry to avenge Vol’jin, and just seeing all the horde races mingling together and cheering in a unified way instead of each being off in their own racial divisions. Once the juicy story goodness was finished, I set myself on a mission to do the legion invasions. The new tech here is incredibly sweet. Zoning into an area with an active invasion smoothly put me into an instance with plenty of other people, and usually at or near the very beginning of the event. Only once or twice did I arrive at the start of phase 2, and usually that was because I had zoned in while on a flight path and it took a minute for me to arrive and land in town. I even tried out the scaling tech on my baby mage, and at level 60 the demons were all level 60-61 for me and I had no problem helping to take them down. Honestly this was the highlight of the night for me, because I think it is huge for the game going forward. I can’t wait to quest through the broken isles with this tech in place, and I hope that they go back and apply it to all the old zones too. It would make leveling an alt a completely new experience, and revitalize so much old content. Between a few characters I managed to get most of what I wanted from the event already, and I’m kind of relieved. I got the pet, a warglaive for my future demon hunter, and 2 of the 4 sets of cosmetic gear. I even managed to get the last zone I needed for the achievement this morning before I ran to work. That means I can focus on the invasions just for the characters that could use gear upgrades, and maybe try to get some of the weapons for transmog. It isn’t much of a grind and that means hopefully I won’t burn myself out before Legion even gets here at the end of the month. If this is what Legion is going to be like, then I can’t wait!