I spent the majority of this weekend in World of Warcraft Retail. I am not exactly sure what prompted this, but I needed something somewhat mindless and grindy. I’ve been in a bit of a weird mental state of late and I always find working away on characters in WoW to be relaxing. I can put something on YouTube or an Audiobook and level away happily, pushing my mind somewhere outside of myself for awhile. A few months back I had been on this kick of trying to level one of everything to 120 before the release of Shadowlands. The next in line was my Monk but I stalled out in the Cataclysm levels after having ground up something like seven characters to 120 in a row.
Yesterday afternoon I managed to push the monk across the line and ding 120. This was not the easiest of characters to level, because there were quite a few points where it seemed weaker than I would have expected the Windwalker to be. The biggest problem I encountered was that the healing of the spheres that you spawn randomly doesn’t seem to make up for the incoming damage. I contemplated swapping over to Brewmaster Monk but managed to stick things out but that last level was a pain in the butt. Really it just seemed like certain mob types dealt way more damage than I could keep up with.
Now I am going through the very familiar long grind, of cherry picking which daily quests reward item level upgrades all with the goal of getting up to somewhere in the vicinity of 430. At this point I managed to push up to the neighborhood of 358 so I am slowly making progress. What is ultimately the problem is the lack of ring, trinket and weapon slots. The first thing I did upon dinging 120 was to purchase a full set of benthic gear, which sorta begins the process and is a seed for getting the world quests up into reasonable levels. I’ve already replaced a number of pieces, which always feels a little bad but I know it is just part of the process.
I’ve already picked out the next character I intend to level, which is my Maghar Shaman. For now I have decided to go elemental, because this is not really something I have ever spent much time with in the past. I’ve spent lots of time leveling enhancement, and I figured it might be an enjoyable break. That leaves Rogue and Priest that are still low levels, but if I can somehow manage to push all of these up I will have a full stable of 120s going into Shadowlands. The next trick would be pushing up some of their tradeskills, though the segmentation mostly makes that useless.
Finally there was one other thing that I was not expecting that happened this weekend. I managed to get a slot in the Perky Pugs lead Friendship Dragon. I had more or less resigned myself that it was not a thing that was going to happen this time. However Saturday night shortly after we had wrapped up the podcast I got pinged to join what was one of the last few runs of the 12 hour N’zoth-a-thon in which the horde team managed to get 455 people their mounts. The really cool thing however is that they managed to raise $10,425 for RAINN at the time of posting this. Still super humbled and shook that I managed to get in and get a purple dargon.