WoW: Dragonflight

Foxes are a lot of fun once you unlock them!
I did try out BC just for kicks, especially since I never did horde side. (I never really got very far on alliance side either) I got 3 quests, completed 1, and hearthed the heck out of Outland

I also tried Cataclysm but the intro just pointed me to the hero's call board. (think you might have to be 30 for the underwater expansion areas)

I know they wanted to guide new players into the expansions but all of it just feels like busy work before I get to the real expansion.

thrawn82 wrote:
Shadout wrote:

I started lvling allied race in BC. More fun to play the old content. But it sure is rough compared to the quest design in the modern expansions.

wow.. that's just masochism. BC really shows its age these days.

Haha, yeah, I am considering to switch expansion.
However, as far as I recall, only the first zone is this terrible (low droprate quests and running back and forth, Vanilla WoW style), it gets way better after that (stockholm syndrome!). And even quite good in Nagrand (Nesingwary and arena quest series to the resque!)

Shadout wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
Shadout wrote:

I started lvling allied race in BC. More fun to play the old content. But it sure is rough compared to the quest design in the modern expansions.

wow.. that's just masochism. BC really shows its age these days.

Haha, yeah, I am considering to switch expansion.
However, as far as I recall, only the first zone is this terrible (low droprate quests and running back and forth, Vanilla WoW style), it gets way better after that (stockholm syndrome!). And even quite good in Nagrand (Nesingwary and arena quest series to the resque!)

i did enjoy negrand the last time i did an alt. everywhere else i couldn't get out of outland fast enough.

If you want to explore the old expansions, I highly recommend waiting until level 30 when you unlock flying.

30 is flying? I thought it was 40 .. cooooooool!

I'm 26 at the moment, decided to start a rogue. Fun so far but I think ultimately I'm going to use him to level up, unlock an allied race, and then start a druid. The Zandilari (Probably spelled that wrong) look amazing in bear form!

Druid's travel forms are absolutely useful. The fact that they are insta-cast makes them even more valuable.

As far as rogue goes, if you don't have heirlooms unlocked for them, you will struggle at higher levels any time you are under geared. They are just as powerful as any other class but they very gear dependent when compared to the pet classes like hunter and warlock (unholy DK too). Their self sustain exists, but is likely the weakest of the classes.

So really digging my new human pally. I think it’s a mixture of not having to grind Goldshire plus the new customization options that let me create a character who is a dead ringer for me in my 20s (well ok a little more swoll).

I’m now debating if I level through BFA or Legion. Does anyone know if I can grind Legion the whole way to 50? That might let me finish my campaign hall before I put level the content which happened on my Horde warlock. Would love the mount and title.

Yes, if anything you will hit 50 before you finish the expansion. At which point you can wait until the pre patch event that will let you gear up to be ready for Shadowlands, or level up an alt or finish the expansion without earning any xp.

I've been really into WoW again recently with the pre-patch being amazing. Is there any active and good guilds anyone can suggest? I'm on Fizzcrank but happy to go onto anything.

So one of the first things I did on pre patch launch is do the quest to unlock high mountain taurens.
I wanted to do the other races I have yet to unlock but the requirements looked a lot more involved for kul tirans and zandalari trolls.

So yesterday I wanted to try out a high mountain druid leveling from 10 to see how far I could get on my favorite vanilla zones. And now I am tempted to re roll all of the vulpera I got to ~50ish in BFA because they transfer over to shadowlands at around 18-22. Working my favorite old school zones in shadowlands will only take me a few hours is more fun and will net me level 30+ after the level squish. (so I will gain ~10 levels by re rolling)

Here is my experience on the horde side:
The troll and orc newbie zones will get you from 10-15
Hillsbrad Foothills will get you to 25, perhaps even higher
Stone Talon Mountains will get you to 30 at least
From there I am uncertain but Stranglethorn has some dense questing for a few levels.

Here is what I expect on the alliance side:
The dwarf newb zone will get you to 14
The human newb zone will get you to 15-16
Westfall will get you to 20-21
Redridge will get you well over 25
Kharanos will get you to 30
Wetlands might be able to get you to 35
Blasted Lands will get you to 40

I really need to look at that quest guide add on that gives you optimal routes for every zone. (azeroth auto pilot)

For about 3 of my characters, doing the Legion intro and then the quests until you get your first legendary isn't blisteringly fast questing. It will get you net you 3 levels however.

thrawn82 wrote:
Shadout wrote:

I started lvling allied race in BC. More fun to play the old content. But it sure is rough compared to the quest design in the modern expansions.

wow.. that's just masochism. BC really shows its age these days.

I think BC holds up better than Cataclysm, which does a decent job with the storytelling but is generally way too linear. I remember leveling an alt through the Cataclysm 1-60 zones and afterwards Hellfire Peninsula felt like a breath of fresh air. I like being able to skip a quest that's annoying me without having the whole rest of the zone locked off behind it...

For those who are interested in what mod manager to use... I've switched from using WowUp to Ajour.

Ajour doesn't handle beta/ptr build (which WowUp does), but honestly I don't play those anyway.
Both support ElvUI. It's an exceptionally easy way to upgrade that.
I found that changing any setting in WowUp (such as toggling an addon to use the Beta stream) caused the entire UI to reload, including downloading all of the data again, which is rather slow.
Ajour on the other hand allows you to toggle release/beta/alpha addon streams instantly, without a reload. It is also quite fast at refreshing all of the loaded mods from disk (which I use because I sync my mods on multiple computers, and often update from different ones).

The UI in Ajour is a lot simpler too. Whenever I switch over to WowUp, it feels really clunky in comparison.

I did an (unscientific) comparison of the refresh speed between WowUp and Ajour as well. WowUp takes ~10 seconds, whereas Ajour only takes ~3 seconds.

All in all, I find Ajour a much better mod manager.

Tried to search for this GWJ_Alliance guild on Blackhand but no such luck. Is it gone now? Does anyone have a good active guild suggestion to join?

PM Enix

I gave in a resubbed to try out the time walking. I loves me some Pandaville.

Valmorian wrote:

Tried to search for this GWJ_Alliance guild on Blackhand but no such luck. Is it gone now? Does anyone have a good active guild suggestion to join?

It's GWJ Alliance (no underscore), and the guild is still hanging in there. It's a fine place to park your main and alts, but there aren't many active folks and there aren't any organized runs. PST me in game (Jorrn, Shoeshine and Rucker in guild are mine; Wilfred is my mage side-project). Happy to have you.

I'm in game most nights after 8 pm EDT and Saturday-Sunday morning.

I don't have any recommendations for a more active Blackhand guild. Cry Moar is a top-250-in-the-world guild according to WoW Progress, if you're into that kind of thing. I only recognize one or two other guild names and don't have any impression of them one way or the other.

Its kind of absurd how quick leveling is now. I started a new Monk Sunday morning, played a good portion of the day, then ended last night already level 31. I will say it is sweet having flying at 30 *and* having it open in the old xpacs, flying around Draenor is already making questing much easier.

AcidCat wrote:

Its kind of absurd how quick leveling is now.

No kidding. I went from lvl 11 to almost 12 on my new mage in two (!) quests. (One was kill lots of things; the other was walk over there and hand this in.)

Also: I'm going with arcane. I already have a destro lock (who deals in fire) and a frost DK, so I figure I haven't done arcane yet. I love missiles (which I lost during the patch and get back at lvl 12) and Arcane Blast, my goodness. That thing is nuclear. A four-charge Arcane Blast turns the worgens of Duskwood into grease spots.

Leveling slows down substantially in the 40's. I had struggled with a warrior I had used a boost on from one of the previous expansions. The boost was to 100 and I putzed around getting the legendary weapons but couldn't find a groove after that. I decided to fire it up after the level squish and got a few levels to 44 in westfall and stormsong valley. I left westfall because even in cataclysm chromie time, the quests were worth about 5% of a level. Stormsong seems double that and I switched from fury to arms and it has made a huge difference. I struggled with damage, rage generation and self heal with fury. I have none of those problems with Arms. Ignore pain might be the big difference since it is only 40 rage in Arms and 60 rage in Fury. It makes it much easier for sustain despite Fury having a 3% self heal. (that does absolutely nothing) Arms is all around better and a more fun rotation.

Arcane mages rock! It is probably the least complex rotation of the 3 (fire, arcane, frost). But it is very powerful and versatile in both single target and aoe.

Back to the original point, it seems leveling is halved in the 40's. Also, the 40's is sort of a weird spot with the level squish and gear. Upgrading heirlooms those last stages (to 110 and to 120 in BFA) is really expensive. Before the pre patch you could get away with just upgrading them to 90 because you would get legendary weapons in legion that would carry you to BFA and then BFA dropped azerite gear to carry you to cap.

Post level squish the level 90 heirlooms convert to 34 and 100 converts to 39 I believe. Azerite gear requires you to be questing in BFA and drops at level 40. So far, the 39 heirloom weapon on my arms warrior is fairing okay at 44. Azerite weapons don't drop very regularly in BFA so I hope my warrior doesn't get stuck again so close to cap. I also wonder when world quests open up (40?) if you have progressed enough through the BFA campaign. I noticed at 43 that the quests to establish outposts in the other faction areas was available upon setting foot in Boralus. Perhaps that will open up world quests?

Ok, so back to BfA and a ton has been added since I last played.
What is worth working on and what should I skip?

lunchbox12682 wrote:

Ok, so back to BfA and a ton has been added since I last played.
What is worth working on and what should I skip?

I'm big on following the story line, which means the War Campaign. That'll take you to the other continent (the opposite of where you start, depending on faction), then to Nazj. When you've played all the way through (and it's long), go get your cloak. If you're stuck or bored, do WQs or instances to gear up. I don't think you need rep to unlock any War Campaign stuff.

Details of the Alliance War Campaign are here; Horde is here.

Meanwhile, new tank/heals/DPS ranks are out. (The left-hand column is current; the middle column is from before 9.0.)

Prot paladins, holy priests, shadow priests, afflocks and arcane mages are performing the best right now and will be the Flavor of the Month. Demon Hunter tanks, holy pals, feral droods, demo locks and fury warriors are the bottom of the heap about now. Note that these ranks are all based on Nyalotha fights, and there's a lot of data that's not counted.

My personal feeling is that if things die before I do, all's good. But some folks like to argue about this stuff, so have at it.

PS: I will say that my ret paladin (14th of 24 DPS specs) feels weaker and a lot squishier now than he did before the patch. I don't know how much of that is the new normal or the lack of SL upgrades or the usual pre-patch imbalance. For the moment, it made some island expeditions very interesting last night. Wasn't expecting to die so quickly after pulling half the zone, and I didn't anticipate that it would take so damn long to kill some of those elites.

I really like ret pally now. We got holy word or whatever its called back. (the heal that uses holy power)

And I whole heartedly disagree about arms warriors getting weaker. I think people get stuck in obtuse rotations or cooldowns (anger management) and when the class gets more diverse they cry bloody murder. Arms is a ton of fun and far better than Fury. (that rightfully fell)

I am doing some leveling testing in vanilla zones and I've found some interesting results. It appears that casually leveling with full heirlooms (no pots, enchants or war mode) will get you from 10-50 in about 10 hours in vanilla zones. 10-20 is about 2 hours. 20-30 is about 2 hours. 30-40 is about 2 hours. And 40-50 is about 4 hours.

Horde: troll and orc newb zones is 10-15, hillsbrad is 15-25, stone talon is ~7 levels, ashenvale is all over the place but there are good spots to get you to 40 more than likely

Alliance: northshire is 10-13, westfall is 13-18, redridge is 18-25, wanted to do coldridge but everything is grey even with chromie time so should have done it before westfall, kharanos is 25-30 (guesstimate), darkshore is 30-40 (guesstimate), then you have stone talons and the good half of wetlands that will get you to 50

Is Chromie Time tiered, or does everything still scale to your level? I guess not if stuff went gray. Oh well, it was nice having the back halves of zones back while it lasted.

Vargen wrote:

Is Chromie Time tiered, or does everything still scale to your level? I guess not if stuff went gray. Oh well, it was nice having the back halves of zones back while it lasted.

My reading says it should go to 50. So you may not have Chrome Time enabled for that zone.

Chromie time is supposed to scale to your level but coldridge valley does not. I'd wager it tops out at 20 or it is bugged. I have played the troll, orc, human and dwarf starter zones. All seemed to scale except dwarf. But I played troll, orc and human before I hit level 15.

Also, I just confirmed that kharanos is good for 4 levels (27-31) on my ret pally.

IMAGE(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/689880315455340678/768345416256716850/unknown.png)

Well, THAT is hecking delightful.

My ret pally is now level 35 at 9 hours.
I played some of darkshore which is really nice.
Then I went to kharanos to get 27-31.
Then wetlands was a bit of a let down only netting 3 levels to 34.
And now I am steeped into stone talon at 35 which should get me to 38-40.

I still have at least half if not 2/3 of darkshore left to go back to. I may be way off on my initial estimate. It may be closer to 13-15 hours to get to 50. I mean, I shouldn't complain because that is like 10x faster than before pre patch.

I guess I will try BFA next as I am sure I can beat 15 hours there. Apparently you can hit 50 without ever touching Drustvar which is the last zone to unlock if you start from scratch. Doing the other 2 zones should only take 10 hours.

I did Pandaria with a shaman and I think I'm close to 15 hours and 42 or so. I was not trying to be uber efficient and I jumped zones a few times to remember things I missed years ago.

Thanks to the no rep requirement I have unlocked maghar orc, vulpera and mechagnome in short order.

Is it just me or are the mechagnome racials crazy good?

Well I’m back in just resubbed. Haven’t played since early BFA and haven’t been paying attention so will have to relearn everything.

I know it’s not active but is the Blackhand guild still a thing. Could use some guild perks!