I’ve continued to poke around in World of Warcraft over the last few days. As I said yesterday I managed to get Belgrace my formerly-Tauren now Blood Elf Paladin to 120. After that I have begun the process of gearing through abusing the World Quest system to cherry pick rewards until I get my item level up. I started by mailing all of the Benthic gear I had laying around and then buying whatever I happened to be missing. I am still annoyed that there is no catch up mechanic for weapons, rings or trinkets. Thankfully World Quests seem to reward rings fairly often, but Trinkets and weapons still are a constant problem. In theory it even looks like the highest level crafted option I could find is 400, which is fine but also seems like a waste of resources when you are going to ultimately need to push past that. I look like a mess but I also cannot be bothered to spend the gold to fix that until my item level stabilizes a bit.
I’ve been enjoying tooling around by air as I zip between World Quests, and as a result I have been noticing levels of detail that you just can’t see from the ground. Over on the coast of Zuldazar there is an area near Xibala where apparently there is a giant dinosaur skeleton exposed in the side of the mountain. I would have had no clue about this, as from the ground it just looks like a normal hill. I am wondering what other gems can be seen form the air that are not quite visible from the ground. I will say that air travel helps a lot in the end game, but I still find myself mostly moving around on ground while leveling because you end up getting so much experience killing random stuff while you travel between point A and point B.
I had every plan yesterday to pick up and start leveling my Warlock, which ultimately was my next highest in level. However I am finding it sorta hard to get into the swing of leveling a caster right now. I flipped back to Demonology from Affliction and I think it makes me a bit happier. All of the Warlock specs seem super fiddly at the moment, when I am mostly looking for some “mash button, get reward” classes to level. I am sure I will rotate back to the Warlock at some point, but it is going to require a bit more time “back” in the game for me to get to it. I do not love being squishy.
So instead I flipped over to my Hunter which was level 79 and sitting in Netherstorm. I dinged 80 and swapped over to Pandaria over the other option which was Catalcysm. I do not love Cataclysm, and revisiting Pandaria has made me realize how much I actually like that expansion now that some time has passed. However it did not take long before I realized that due to the pet changes in Battle for Azeroth… I don’t actually have a tanky pet anymore. I WISH pets were account bound, so that you could share them among multiple hunters. Instead I decided to make an attempt at taming Arcturis the Spirit Beast bear. I probably spent every last bit of luck I had in the game because by the time I flew over to Grizzly Hills he was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him. I made passes through to see if any of the other Northrend spirit beast were up, and tamed King Krush along the way but came up empty on the others.
So at least for now I am going to be in a mode of soaking up the loot from World Quests and then swapping over to the hunter and leveling. Having quite a bit of fun right now, and it has made me realize that I seem to really enjoy the end of expansions. I’ve come back at the tail end of most expansions and had a grand ole time thanks to the various catch up mechanics. I sorta wish I could play this mode of the game indefinitely. However I know an expansion will release and I will get caught up in the race of grinding to the top once more. I did not get an Alpha invite to Shadowlands, because I assume at this point they have gone out. Quite honestly I am not really sure if I would want one at this point, because on some level I kinda want to hit the ground running fresh. That said if I ended up getting one I am not sure I would be able to stop myself from logging in and playing with it. I’ve said enough bad things about Blizzard over the years that I am certain I am no longer on the “friends and family” list.