Gracie has thoughts

After my previous run of class mount acquisition I thought I’d slow down a bit. The next mount on the list was actually not a mount, but druid flight form. I like Thisalee Crow, so I was happy to help her when she asked. We’ve got to defend the shrine of Aviana from a demon invasion, and take back the idol they stole so we can restore the flight form for all the druids of the talon who depend on it. This quest was surprisingly action-packed, and even though I’m not quite sure yet whether I like the new flight form, I definitely liked the quest to get it.

Next up was my rogue. I have loved everything about the rogue class hall and story so far, and this one started off with my favorite buddy Lilian Voss so I was excited. Unfortunately this quest chain is somewhat pvp focused and it stressed me out a lot. You have to kill marked targets in each of the opposing faction’s capital cities. This means using a lot of your various rogue-y tricks to infiltrate and murder your target before you get caught by guards or players. After I finished this quest I kept seeing Alliance rogues hovering around outside the Horde cities and now I know why. I have so much sympathy for them. On the plus side, I think this might be my favorite mount of all the new class ones.

Warlock started off slow because you have to gather a bunch of items up front, and one item you need only drops from the end boss of legion invasions. It felt very parallel to the pally quest, which makes sense since both of those classes had previous mount questlines. However where they pally one made up for its annoying start with a nostalgic romp at the end, the warlock quest just felt annoying. It might be because I’m not great at playing a warlock, but I didn’t think their mount quest was very fun. I do really like their mounts though.

The demon hunter quest might have been the easiest of all of them. They just have a short scenario where you fly down to the planet of the felbats and have to punch the felbat brood mother until she decides to be your friend. Or something. You have to chase her around a little bit and there is a cool moment where you have to glide down to her and jump on her back in mid-air. There’s also a set-up where you can use your demon sight ability to try to track her down, but it wasn’t strictly necessary to complete the mission. I might have been cooler to set up something that made it more vital, but it is difficult to make that work and not just be annoying. I was fairly happy that it was easy anyway, since I still felt like I was recovering from the rogue quest even after several days’ break. The mount is kinda cool looking although I hate the weird blade-on-the-head thing.

The only character I have left at 110 that doesn’t have her mount yet is my hunter, and she’s still a few days’ worth of questing away from unlocking the start of that chain. My shaman is still level 100, and the highest level warrior I have is only in the 70s, so it will be a while. So far, aesthetically the rogue mount is my favorite. As far as the quests go, if the start of the paladin one hadn’t been so awful that one would probably be my favorite. But because of the hangup of having to get crafted items and Suramar stuff it got knocked down a peg. Instead I have to say that the priest quest has been my favorite overall.

After how long we’ve had to wait for them to unlock, I was half expecting the quests for the new class mounts in WoW to be epic and complicated and time-consuming. This was not the case, and honestly I’m glad. Leveling up all the alts and finishing all of the broken shore quests to unlock the class mount quest was enough of a challenge. And for those who are dedicated to one class, there are a few extra goodies like spec-specific mounts and bonus pets for unlocking concordance. For me as someone who merely dabbles in all the classes for completion’s sake, I’m happy I get to see this little extra flavor content, and increase my mount stable a bit in the process!

For all classes, you need to complete the “Breaching the Tomb” achievement in order for the mount quest to unlock. It has been a lot of painful busywork doing those quests over the past few weeks, waiting for each new one to open up with the weekly reset. Now that they’re all available you can motor through them on new alts with no waiting. The main things that will slow you down are having to wait for an invasion for one of the early quests, collecting nether shards (I wait to spend any on new alts until after I finish this quest), and completing the broken shore order hall missions (if your champions aren’t leveled and geared yet). That last one was my biggest sticking point on many alts, but now that the requirement has been nerfed from 3 missions down to 1 I can finally move forward.

I haven’t done all of them yet, but much like the initial class hall quests, the mount quests are quite variable. Spoilers and opinions about the specific quests follow.

The monk quest was the first one I did, since that is theoretically still my main. Also because I can use the mount on my baby monk for our level-locked silliness. I was all ready to have more fun times with beer because that was pretty much the entirety of the monk hall quest line, but sadly after buying beer for one Master in exchange for a story there was no brew to be had. The quest has you running back to the peak of serenity to look for the tiger spirit who traditionally serves as mount for the grandmaster. It seems he’s been in mourning since the guy you replaced was killed in the demon invasion, which is why you didn’t know anything about his existence until now. It definitely has a very strong monk flavor even without much beer in it, and the mount is extra cool because he is a sentient being and will occasionally talk to you. Since this is my main I will also be attempting to get concordance eventually so I can unlock the matching tiger pet as well.

Next I did the pally quest. Sadly, one of the first things you have to do is buy a gem from some elf in Suramar. Did I mention I almost entirely skipped Suramar on all my alts? Before I could do the mount quest, I had to do Suramar far enough to unlock the mask so the vendors would even talk to me, and then I discovered I needed 500 ancient mana. My current cap was 300 so I had to first run and find 2 of the items that increase your  cap, and then go pick a few flowers in the vineyard until I had enough to buy the gem. After this inauspicious start, the rest of the mount quest was amazing. It is a huge callback to the original paladin mount quest from vanilla. You get to go back to Stratholme and kill a bunch of undead with a NPC all-pally party, and eventually purify Rivendare’s mount to turn it into your sweet new holy steed. I’m not entirely sure how I brought that undead horse back to life but I still enjoyed this quest a lot!

The next class on the list for me was priest. As someone who used to main a disc priest, I have not been happy with the direction of the “class fantasy” or the feel of priest healing in this expansion. This makes everything I do on my priest bittersweet these days. Anyhow, the priest quest premise was intriguing: Magni Bronzebeard, the dwarf who turned into a diamond and now speaks for the spirit of the planet itself, had a vision and sent me off on my quest. After my own heart, the quest sent me deep under the ocean in a submarine to a lost titan vault. Once there I got to see some banter between the Bronzebeard brothers and relive one of the most annoying Wrath-era dungeon fights with snarky dwarven commentary. It could have been obnoxious but I found it really charming. It didn’t feel especially “priest flavored” but it was an amazing quest and definitely one of my favorites. It also helps that I like the look of the priest mount a lot.

After priest, I tackled the mage quest. For that one you chase down a magic flying disc that Antonidas had been working on. It involved tracking down a couple archmages in various places around the world, and then a trial in the Eye of Eternity. I was hoping for some clever puzzles or something here but it was mostly a matter of tracking down the right mage and asking nicely if I could have their priceless artifact, please. The mage quest wasn’t as exciting or nostalgic as some of the other ones, but the trial was fun enough. You get to murder elementals of fire, frost, and arcane, which somehow bleeds off the excess energy from the disc parts and lets you combine them together into something that works. Sure, Antonidas never figured out how to do this and it was part of his life’s work and you knocked it out in 20 minutes. You’ll forget all about that once you’re riding around on your cool new mage frisbee.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in the past 2 days, but Druid, Warlock, and Rogue are all ready to go and Demon Hunter is not far behind. I’ll have my comments on those quests up as soon as I get through them!

After my WoW alt update post last week I decided to level my druid next. I just couldn’t resist the joy of flight form, cheering many quests and sniping all the herbs. For some reason I enjoyed the process way more than when I leveled my Alliance druid. I’m not sure if it was having flying, or not being an elf or what, but I had a lot more fun. I’ve been tempted to get the new flight form glyph because it looks really nice, but I just can’t bring myself to give up my awesome bat form.

Speaking of herbalizing from the skies, I also decided to give professions another go, mostly because I knew Darkmoon Faire was coming up and I figured at least I could get 5 free skill-ups that way. Unfortunately professions in Legion are still completely awful. I wanted to focus on my priest, who has tailoring and alchemy, since she’s my most nostalgia-heavy character and those professions made me a ton of gold over the years. Sadly the biggest moneymaker she has is still probably the 30 slot bags from WoD. Meanwhile leveling tailoring requires doing the Suramar questline, which I was avoiding like the plague on my alts. I loved Suramar, but it was long and had a rep grind and I don’t have any desire to repeat it if I can help it. On the alchemy side I’ve run up against the RNG of learning upgrades. Having to make a billion potions that are too low to give skillups to try to learn new ranks that might give skillups does not appeal. On top of all of that, you also have to run multiple dungeons for each profession. At least now that I’m 110 I can be carried through heroics by people with way more gear in a matter of minutes, as long as I don’t make myself depressed by looking at the damage meters.

The huge disconnect between how easy it is to level up an alt and how annoying it is to level their professions is really messing with my normal path to expansion/patch lull enjoyment. This is the time in prior expansions where I’d be raking in gold. Sure, we all got spoiled by how easy that was in WoD, but even in prior expansions I could level an alt and be useful making flasks, bags, gems, or transmutes pretty quickly. This time around even my main only got her professions maxed by staking out the Darkmoon Faire, and my alts are getting to around rank 760 (out of 800) at best before I hit a wall of dungeons or RNG or both. It has been fun to see a bunch of the class hall stories, but feels really strange that these alts aren’t being useful like they should. All that investment into leveling alts feels very hollow if I stop logging into them as soon as I’m done with their story. Oh well, at least I can keep selling plenty of Draenor-era bags. Maybe I should park my alts back in my garrison again…