When I am in deeply stressful situations, I find myself leaning on the old and familiar. In this case it is in the form of World of Warcraft and leveling characters. I didn’t get a massive amount of time this weekend to play, but when I did I spent it methodically leveling my Alliance characters that have long been neglected since the early beginning of Legion. Legion was the expansion when I more or less switched sides and as a result I only had a handful of characters at the level cap. Since I finished off my Hordelings last week, that cleared the way for me to really focus on my oldest characters.
Prior to this weekend the only character I had at max level was Exeter my Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I pushed my Warrior, Death Knight, Demon Hunter and Hunter all to the level cap and am now working on my Warlock. Prior to the launch of Legion I abused that launch event and the invasions that came with it to push everything Alliance side up to level 100, which translates across to 40 in the level squish. So this means that most of my characters need ten levels in order to finish them off… which is shockingly easy to do especially in the Battle for Azeroth content.
That is one takeaway from the weekend, that the BFA content goes so much faster than trying to do the Timewalking content through Chromie. My Demon Hunter went that route and I chose to level in Outland, and it took considerably longer than any of my characters I opted for the modern zones. I am not sure if the quests are just more spread out or if it is that each individual quests rewards more experience. Whatever the case for the sake of speed I am probably going to stick to Kul Tiras for the moment. Why exactly am I doing this nonsense you might ask? I have no clue other than it gives me a good excuse not to think about other things.
As far as my Mom and Dad, I think things are going fairly well or at least as “well” as could be expected. I was up yesterday afternoon after editing the two podcasts, and attached some things to my dad’s walker in an attempt to help him navigate things a bit more easily. What he really wanted was the ability to make a cup of coffee on his own and the cup holder should in theory allow for that. he also needed some way to carry things back and forth across the house so I added a wire basket… with zip ties of course. It is surprisingly sturdy however and I think it will function in the manner he needs it to.
Thankfully in both the case of my Mom and Dad they have some more local support lined up. It would take me about an hour to get there were I not speeding, and instead they have a network of contacts that are local that they can reach out to for assistance. A friend of the family is going to be by every day this week, they are signed up for meals on wheels and home health will be there daily to work with dad. For now I think we are good… which eases my mind a little bit as I have to go back to work this week and can’t be there every day. I honestly think as good as dad is moving around, that he will probably switch over to a cane before the end of the week.
Outland is ridiculously slow compared to just about anything else I tried. Pandaria was pretty close to BfA but BfA definitely had the edge. The winner on my runs so far, however, had been Warlords of Draenor aka The Iron Legion on Chromie’s list. Quest xp seems significantly high there but the real benefit seems to be the small number of kills required in kill quests, the sheer number of “go speak to the guy standing ten feet away and I’ll give you some xp” quests and the way everything seems to be really close together. It all adds up to more xp per minute for me without me having to cut any obvious corners.
I do think what makes the difference is Outland used to be a leveling bonanza since you had to kill so many mobs in the process and the individual mob kills were worth quite a chunk of XP. In the post squish world every single kill seems to be largely meaningless and the quests are what actually push you up in level. I think they wanted to disincentive grinding mobs for some reason?
I am going to guess you probably ended up a bit more wealthy going the BFA route. I have chars in WotLK and Legion and my Legion char has a lot more gold, due primarily to the fact that gray drops vendor for a lot more.