A Shifty World #1: First day of War Within & Esmëriel Level 80

The first day of "normal" World Within release was yesterday, and I found myself regretting having bought the expansion and not dodged the release like I did Legion. But still, I played most of the day... And reached level 80 on the Druid! Dinged by picking a herb, as is tradition.

State after day 1 was this:

Some thoughts on the leveling bit

• I spent about 10 hours from 70 to 80, which involved a longer dinner break and some chores.

• I attempted to just stick to the main quest to get all of it in one go and avoid Shadowlands-like leveling traps where you overlevel the quasi-scaled zones. I was 75 when I came to the last zone which started at 78, so I backtracked doing sidequests and delves to 76 and a bit - and ended the campaign at 78 and did more sidequests and delves. This was not a good idea. If I did it again, I'd pick up side quests near the main quest and avoid having to do the same mobs 2-3 times and cut 1-2 hours of leveling time.

• The main quest story was ok. I like the big bad and hope they flesh her out a lot during the next 6 years, and I am somewhat curious about where Alleria ends up in the end.

• The zones lived up to the expectations, high quality as usual. Hard to pick a favorite, but Ringing Deeps if I had to pick one at gunpoint.

• I leveled as Guardian, which worked well - bad dps never turned into a problem.

Ready for War Within

Everything set up to go for tWW now! I will start during "general" release, and not the early access bit as I didn't feel 3 extra days for €40 was worth it, and I need to complete Baldur's Gate 3 before I end up in the WoW bubble again. It's looking like the entire guild except me are playing Early Access and so are most of my friends, so I will be doing it all on my lonesome. It's also the first time since BFA I have not played the beta beforehand, so going in blind will be a new and fresh experience :)

For the first time ever I did a proper inventory cleanup before the expansion release, somewhat helped by the addition of the Warband bank.

• Deleted about a dozen characters after clearing out their stuff, and would delete a few more if they didn't come with a guild (and guild bank) attached. [Was capped on characters.]

• Cleared out all old gear and old profession materials back to and including Legion. Which was a lot. [Kept some vanilla profession mats in case I ever get around crafting the legendaries.]

• Cleared out all quest logs.

• Monetized as much of the random currencies and BOA thingies as I could.

• Cleared out most of the consumables except some vials and potions that might be handy for leveling.

Should make it less of a chore to log on old characters I might level up, and obviously freed up loads of bag space and generated some gold.

After considering a bunch of scenarios and what other people play at the moment, I ended up wanting to try my hand at Druid - I have signed as Balance for raiding, and will try to tank and heal dungeons while leveling and at level cap with guildies if DPSing in dungeon is overcrowded.

The inventory clean out generated about 700 000 gold, on top of the 1 000 000 gold I had spread out over all the characters. There's more in the 3 personal guild banks I have, but I've had enough cleaning out for now.

Reasons for choosing Druid as starter

• Guild raid roster is nearly full, but had no druids when I changed to it - a resto druid decided last minute not to reroll after all - but seems to be the class people flee from at the moment.

• Guardian seems ok in m+.

• As it currently stands, could try for full leather groups at the start for loot trading.

• Being able to play ranged in raid while also being able to tank in m+

• I considered druid for BFA, Shadowlands and Dragonflight but chickened out every time, so using the lack of pressure on me to fill some role to actually make it happen.

• Guild raid will have 3-4 Mages, 3-4 Paladins and 2-4 Hunters so will drown out in the competition for keys and loot overlap in raids.

• Have some hope to try out Resto in raids and m+ properly, I enjoy it more than Holy Paladin and Shaman doesn't have a tank spec.

• I can steal Ruthe's builds and ideas she might blog about :D

Dragonflight RIO Review and Shadowlands Comparison

It's xmas in August for statistics people again!

There's a reason I am super sick of Amirdrassil... All of the Vault kills are from the Awakened season. I rated Aberrus as the best, but that just might be because it has a more moderate boss kill number... Overall I found DF raiding to be enjoyable, good heroic difficulty and had good experience with the two raid teams I was part of.

I just raided a lot more than in Shadowlands, and had the opposite development. The difficulty of Nathria and Sanctum combined with the increasing guild tensions made raids something I disliked.

Case in point. The boss times are inflated in Amirdrassil because I progged all of them the same weeks in two different teams.

I did not even curve Sepulcher. And I seriously doubt the timers still on Sire and Sylv - we had ~150 wipes on both over several full raids.

I failed to have constant progression, and I blame the crest system for that - you hit the point you need vault items (or raid mythic) to get upgrades much faster in the current system. I like that, but it made it hard to spread out the gearing over more time :)

However, it does look like I have fewer weeks in Shadowlands with upgrades still. And obviously my best geared character was the same one for 3 seasons straight and my only prolonged period of having a main.

Top 3 are BM Hunter (650 runs), Protection Paladin (428 runs) and Frost Mage (290 runs). Not even sure how I managed to stick to just 9 specs after the last decade of altoholism. The increased number of runs on a few characters is to blame, with the increased need to farm crests drawing me away from 1 run on 28 characters.

Top 3 are Vengeance Demon Hunter (642 runs), Protection Paladin (432 runs) and Beast Mastery Hunter (418 runs). And obviously played everything besides the Evoker that released during the prepatch. So I played the top two about as much, but made time for all the other specs too in Shadowlands.

In season 1 and 4 I never tried to push. In season 2 and season 3 I did try in pugs, but most of the score increase can be attributed to the scaling being easier.

Shadowlands had all these scoring changes, so a bit hard to compare. Season 2 I remember I had hundreds of keys done with the same people, and then season 3 had hickups and leaving TH and change in people I played with. Got portals in Season 4, but don't think there was any pushing besides that. The score colours are about the same, and seeing how I just pugged in DF and SL was the premade expansion I find that a bit... odd.

Retribution Paladin (870 occurences) got massively popular after they had a rework at some point, and then the legendary on top - plus had several in the guild for runs. Resto druid (641 runs) always gets a fix that makes them m+ viable, and Nighed, Trollblomst and RaeSea's healer friends were all resto druids. BM Hunter (568) remained popular throughout the expansion, even if none of my usual non-pug friends besides Simple (and I didn't play that many keys with him).

Resto Druid (1359 occurences) was very popular after Resto Shaman fell off - and Ulveblomst most likely had a few hundred of those instances. Fury Warrior (1278 occurences) was in every pug and Grongle was in a few I think. Restoration Shaman (1190 occurences) were popular, and between Kris, Zebullit and Makaria there were hugely popular in the "static" groups. Not sure why RIO claims I missed playing with an Aug, as they did not exist until mid season 2 DF.

This shows how much I played in premades in season 4. We had one saturday where we did 6-7 keys with two of RaeSea's friends (I think) which was this comp.

While Shadowlands finished with the "new" premade of Rae, Sea and Chaos. With Sherazade the most frequent healer.

Oh dear. That's a lot of mythic plus... Except for season 4, progress was spread out more than in SL below. I also did less dungeons, and the average length of the dungeons is obviously shorter since ~500 dungeons less cut ~15 days of playtime. I did not cut as much as I wanted, but I did cut.

Graph a bit wonky. The sheer amount of premade nights that had keys that went to around the dungeon timer makes the amount of time spent absurd. Glad I didn't do this in Dragonflight. Despite good memories during a wonky time period in the Outside.

Top 3 are Freehold (143), Brackenhide (133) and Waycrest Manor (113). At least one actual expansion dungeon made it into the top 3... Bottom 3 are Temple of the Jade Serpent (47), Halls of Valor (40) and Galakrond (38). Two from least played season and Galakrond I still don't understand how ended up so low considering how short and easy it ended up being.

This paints a perfect picture of how far away from everyday Shadowlands my WoW gaming has become... Raennya (17), Trollblomst (16), Smør (16), Astiria (13) and Searkareth (10) makes up for a very low percentage of keys run.

Meanwhile, in SL... Raennya (73), Searothr (50), Marowak (49), Searey (16) and Lavabloom (11) had a premade going for portals where none of us really played outside.

Summary of important numbers for goal tracking

• 1830 keystones (do less than this).

• 9% (top m+ partner). [The rest of the m+ partners are so low in % it's no point calculating.]

• 9 classes in m+ (do fewer).

• 0 multispec classes in m+ (do more).