WoW Legion Status: Almost Done

8 September, 2016. 892 words.

Since my last WoW post, I’ve finished the first four zones, and leveled my Mage to 106 and my Hunter to 110. Total WoW time played since August 30, according to ManicTime, has been 55 hours. (It was a holiday weekend.) So yes, basically I’ve been playing nothing but WoW.

I intended to play my Mage all the way to the end, and started out going through Azsuna, then Stormheim, ending up at level 106. (By “finishing” zones, by the way, I mean I did all the quests I found and completed the final dungeon in the zone’s story which gives you the foozboozle piece you put in that Hall of the Guardian.)

Then I realized that I hated soloing with the Mage. It’s just so slow to kill things. I’d made a huge mistake starting out with him and I couldn’t bear the thought of going through two more zones like that. The Mage is much better suited to group play (say, for example, pre-launch Invasions).

I was annoyed to leave six levels on the table, so to speak, but nothing is worse than being bored playing WoW, so I switched back to my Hunter, which is the only other 100 character I have (no, I still haven’t used any level boosts), and went with Beast Mastery. It took a while to get the hang of the more passive, almost DoT-oriented play style, but it’s definitely a faster overall Time-To-Kill than the Mage. (At least it feels that way.)

Taking advantage of the fact that you could do zones in any order, I went to Val’shara next (first zone for my Hunter, but third for me overall), which I came to think of as the hippy free love zone because of all the spaced out half-nekkid centaur ladies. The dungeon at the end was a mess of anxiety for me as I quickly remembered how stressful it is to play a Hunter in dungeons. First there was the panicked search for how to turn off Growl so the tank wouldn’t yell at me. (It wasn’t on the pet bar so I had to find it in the Pet tab of the Spellbook.) Then there was the constant fear of accidentally pulling mobs if one of my pets (and there are two now!) pathed too close to something. (I don’t know if that’s still a thing or not, but I assume it is.)

After that, curiosity got the better of me and I switched to the Survival spec and picked up the Talonclaw artifact before going through Highmountain. I knew from the Internets that a lot of people don’t like the Survival Hunter but I thought it was fun and well-suited to soloing. I usually enjoy spear classes, since they are fairly uncommon in RPGs. (I also like Dragoon in FFXIV.) I liked it right up until I got to the dungeon at the end of the zone and felt pretty worthless. I could just feel all the others in the group staring at me through their monitors thinking, “Why the hell is that weirdo playing a Survival Hunter in here?” Some post-dungeon research confirmed that the Survival spec is apparently not good for groups.

So I switched back to Beast Mastery. (Having wasted a bit of Artifact experience on the Talonclaw.) At that point I had no choice but to start repeating zones, so I went back to Azsuna again. After zipping through Azsuna and Stormheim at a highly accelerated pace*, my Hunter ended up at level 110. (I reached 110 in the middle of Helheim.)

Now it might sound like I’m playing through Legion pretty fast, and indeed I am, because I’m trying to “finish” by September 12th because, you guessed it, that’s when my subscription ends. At the moment I don’t see any compelling reason to continue subscribing, because unless something miraculous happens at level 110, my interest is probably doing to nose dive.

Don’t get me wrong, Legion is fun, and I’m enjoying it. But I probably won’t re-sub. There’s too many other games to play to get bogged down in WoW minutia.

Granted, I have not yet had a chance to explore the “World Quests” at 110. I have to finish another zone apparently before I have the reputation necessary to start that, so I probably won’t get to that until the weekend. When I reached 110, a bunch of people came out of the woodwork to give me new quests, too, so I’ll have to work through those, too. Maybe they will spur me to hang onto my subscription for another month, but I kind of doubt it.

In another post I will get into more details of what I think of the new features in Legion.

* I was listening to the MassivelyOP podcast on the way to work this morning and Justin wondered if the zones were going to be boring the second time through. The answer is unfortunately yes, yes they are. I was mainly going through the motions to finish the quests as quickly as possible the second time, as I already knew how everything would turn out and there was nothing new to see. Occasionally I stumbled on a quest I missed the first time, but it was rare. So yeah, don’t pay for a 3-month subscription. :)

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