I feel like I am in a weird place right now with World of Warcraft Classic. Last week I allowed myself to take a break from the game for the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. Now that I have hit the light soft cap I have been trying to re-engage with Classic and it for whatever reason just hasn’t been taking. What has been happening is that I log in… run around a bit… and then log right back out and go over to Destiny 2 to play it some more. As a result I am in the woeful position of being out of the level range with most of the crew that I had been running with previously. I am sitting at a little over 44 and now folks are starting to ding 50.
I think I am more or less just lacking to find traction in a set of quests that are enjoyable to do. Right now Tanaris is a little over my level range, and what is left in Stranglethorn feels tedious and boring. Last night towards the end of the evening I moved over to Feralas and managed to make it through a few quest chains, so maybe just maybe this is going to be my home for a bit. I figure if I can somehow eek out 45 and 46 I can return to Tanaris and start to make some proper traction there. The benefit of Feralas is that there is plenty of meat to keep cooking up food… of which I go through a silly amount of because that is how I ultimately heal to lower downtime.
I am very much in the doldrums of the leveling curve and post 40 everything slowed down massively, which I think is part of the problem. It feels vastly different than the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 that I allowed myself to get used to. As a result my brain sorta rejects Classic each time I try and spend more than a few minutes playing it. What makes it worse is there is a tangible feeling that day by day people are getting ahead of me to the point where it will be super difficult to actually catch up. I could in theory run a bunch of dungeons, but the dungeons in my level range are not super exciting because there isn’t much more than XP waiting for me in them.
On the Destiny side of things I have stalled out a bit as well. I am starting to get pretty much exclusively 410s off powerful engrams, which is fine so long as they drop for a new slot. However when the same slot keeps dropping over and over there isn’t much gained by it. I probably need to spend a bit of time in the world grinding blues and legendary drops between powerfuls to try and keep pushing it upwards. I still have yet to beat the campaign… which I really should do soon.
I could also start an alt which would help with the light pushing a bit. For the time being however I am just enjoying the moment to moment game play so much. I am curious what changes the reset is going to bring today. Right now the activities seem to be dropping a fixed set of weapons, and I am wondering if that is going to rotate today.
I haven’t been timing it strictly but I am pretty certain that if you just want to level you might as well forget aboout quests. They actually slow you down.
At 41 I get 3000- 3500xp from completing a quest. Killing at-level mobs gives me around 200xp per kill. Every quest, almost without exception, involves a good deal of time spent travelling and locating the correct mobs (or NPCs). I can kill 20-25 mobs for that 3-3.5k xp in considerably less time than it takes to complete the quest so questing is at the very least non-optimal if your goal is levelling.
I was able to judge this pretty well because I’ve spent several levels splitting my time between grinding mobs to get huge stocks of silk and leather for crafting and doing quests. The ideal is a kill 40 quest (almost anything with drops will require that) that needs me to kil mobs that also drop silk or can be skinned. I take those quests and skip all the rest. As a consequence I haven’t noticed any slow-down in the early 40s, where levelling ticks along just like it did in the 30s.
I guess it does depend on your tolerance for grinding. I prefer it to questing anyway so it’s not a difficult choice for me.
Because I haven’t been focusing on levelling in Classic, I really don’t care when I ding 60. And it’s much healthier (for me). I remember the slog of getting to 60 in vanilla, and I know that if I push too hard, it’s WoW… I’ll get bored and just stop playing. Better just to relax and enjoy it as I feel like playing.
And like you, I’ve been having a lot of fun in D2. Got my hunter up over 900 last night, which helped with some encounters that’d been just a smidge challenging (read: long).