Blizzard is the wise shepherd, leading us to fertile fields of its new ideas, only to have us spit out those ideas and return to the more familiar fields of yesteryear.
Now that I’ve moved and am starting to approach something near a semblance of a return to routine, I’m able to game in blocks longer than ten minutes at a time. And while I made an effort to diversify my sessions, I also used last weekend to pour some serious time into World of Warcraft. The goal? To hit level 120 on a single character.
About one month in is pretty much my regular pace, at least when I look back to how long it took me to reach 110 in Legion. With alts and other games and my preference to actually read and absorb the stories, a month is about what I’m facing. But I decided that my dilly-dallying was growing a little too long in the tooth, and with a desire to jump into warfronts and get in on that easy loot, I pushed hard to get my Death Knight through her second zone (which I had already seen most of with my Hunter) and scoop up as much XP as possible.
I suppose another reason for hitting 120 is just to take away the psychological pressure of the task and free me up for other pursuits. World of Warcraft is always enjoyable to me in moderation but not when I’m pushing myself through a massive grind or marathon.
And while I did drop my Hunter to the road and haven’t looked back, I am still giving some time for my Horde alt as she plods through the content on that side. Yes, I said “plod.” I’m sure this is so incredibly subjective, but there’s so little that’s actually good over here on this side. As I said on Twitter, it’s like the Horde lost the biome lottery and ended up with the three worst types — jungle, swamp, and desert — then had to make the best of it.
Then we’ve got Trolls to the left, Trolls to the right, here we are stuck in the middle with bad accents. I’ll overlook the fact that Trolls are basically uglified elves according to lore, they’re just not a good race. They look so off-putting with the hunches and tusks and nose rings, and it doesn’t help that everything they say has to be written/said in a weird Jamaican dialect. I don’t know, I’ve never warmed up to Team Troll, even though that race was huge in the whole history of Azeroth.
Alternating between sides, I keep going from savage lands and mud huts to Pirates of the Caribbean. Some nights, I can’t wait to be done with the Horde side so that I can get back to Alliance. At least I’ve found a great groove with my Affliction spec and can take out whole packs of mobs without breaking much of a sweat. The only thing that worries me is when my voidwalker gets overwhelmed and I can’t keep him (it?) healed up fast enough. At least bringing out a new one takes only a second or so.
What’s next? Finishing all of the zone stories, war campaign, and gearing up, of course. Probably doing that at a much more leisurely pace. Hopefully getting in place for the first content patch of this expansion cycle. Weirdly enough, I don’t think I’m going to be pushing as hard for gold any more. I’ve been doing that most of this year, and now that I got the expansion for free and have a full year’s worth of free play time ahead of me, that feels like it’s enough.
Bio Break 
I will take barren deserts over swamps and Forrest’s any day. Having to change my go to mount as the water strider just to get around the constant, river ankle deep water, river, ankle deep water, and trees, so many trees. I really don’t like being zoomed in to almost first person shooter view. I like being zoomed all the way out to check my surroundings.