It took me a few days to get rolling with WoW Legion. I was facing a bit of choice paralysis. Which character did I want to play? Which of the zones would I start out on?
I rolled out with Vikund, my paladin initially, getting him to his artifact weapon, but then turned aside from him and did the same with my alliance druid Alioto and then my alliance warrior Makarov, getting each their weapon and exploring their order halls a bit. I must admit to liking the warrior hall. The leader is fun, even if borrowed from Norse mythology and spiffed up a bit.
More like Mecha-Odyn! Still with a single optic input.
Also, getting in and out of the warrior class hall is pretty funny.
I was less impressed with the druid class hall. It is pretty… the graphics overall in the expansion so far are very well done given the system requirements… but somewhat generic in that “seen one redwood tree, seen them all” sort of way.
And if that wasn’t enough, I also decided that maybe I should start a demon hunter. So I ran through the starting area with one. A decent melee class I suppose. But I am sure, somewhere in some post at some point, I said that Blizzard should steal fae glide from EverQuest II. Well, mission accomplished on that front. Double jump is great, but getting glide on the third jump seals the deal.
Then, on top of that, I found that I was not entirely done with Draenor. There is still one garrison shipyard achievement I am working on, which meant Vikund hanging about in the Lunarfall and running missions now and again.
I will be called “Captain” before this is done
Those naval bonus missions just haven’t been coming up often enough, and I can’t do this on another character without starting pretty much from scratch because Vikund is the only one with which I went all out on the shipyard. So just 13 naval bonus missions and I can wrap that up.
So basically I pottered about and didn’t do much with the expansion except hang around Dalaran or the various order halls waiting for a sign. Fortunately, Dalaran had such a sign for me. As Darkmoon Faire is up this week I decided that I had best get Vikund setup with Legion level professions. So I wandered about Dalaran speaking to the various trainers, stopping for a bit to fish in the fountain.
I spent so much time fishing there during WotLK
As it turns out, the goldfish from the fountain are decent food to have around… also, the vendor now sells bonus items to add to your fishing pole to scoop up the coins from the fountain for the achievement… though I am not sure they work on THIS fountain, as opposed to the fountain in the Dalaran that is still floating above Northrend.
But I digress.
When I hit the engineer trainer, as Vikund is an engineer… which must be why he is my main… he told me, after a bit of running around, that I needed to go to Azsuna to finish setting myself up. So, choice
Destination: Azsuna!
And even then it took me a bit to get into things. You launch straight into killing demons and I might have been a bit burnt out on simply killing demons after three weeks of leveling characters up via demon invasions. However, after a bit of just killing demons for a bit, the zone did start to get going with what Blizzard does pretty well at this point: Story lines that are actually engaging and lead you across the map. I spent most of Sunday afternoon running around Azsura and enjoying myself. I made it through what I would guess is a large chunk of the zone and ended up just shy of level 103.
Along the way I also acquired a bunch of items for Ashbringer, leveling that up or whatever we want to call it when you get to upgrade it.
Artifact notification
The artifact weapon is good and completes my ret pally. Rotation and skills felt awkward after the pre-Legion revamp, but now things are better. I am sure this was by design. However, that does make me wonder about the whole 1-100 experience. Does anybody really want to run that many levels with a “not quite done” set of skills? Does anybody actually go from level 1-100 any more? Is that a significant portion of the population? Or is Blizzard just hoping everybody will buy level 100 boosts?
Anyway, Ashbringer and I get along nicely, though I have a couple of additional nits to pick. First, running back to the order hall to change things up is probably the right plan, but it does remind me a bit too much of the legendary weapon thing from Lord of the Rings Online, which is not a happy association.
The second is the little bits and pieces the drop which you can click on for artifact experience. It would be cool if they were not seemingly a random set of reused icons, as I lose them in my bag all the time. Every once in a while I am mousing over items in my bag and find some artifact experience item hidden away in there.
Neither are big items, just minor annoyances. I’ll live.
Meanwhile, back in the order hall things were moving along. I started off with the first couple of followers and the missions thing, which is clearly a product of the Draenor-era in some ways.
Looks familiar enough
Missions themselves are a little more tied into the story line of the expansion as opposed to being so very focused on being an ecosystem in and of itself.
There was a funny bit of time when the status icon on my mini-map went away, no doubt because I was still running missions back in my Draenor garrison as well as order hall missions. Eventually it seemed to sort itself out, and even showed me what my other characters were up to… which was all Draenor stuff.
The usual suspects
The names are color coded for what class they are… or so I gather. And it does show characters across servers, which is nice. The one anomaly is Selirus/Hurmoo, which are the same character, my druid that I moved over to the Horde. Somebody is having problems letting go I guess. More fun.
Having hit level 102, I was also offered the option to obtain the class artifact for another spec, which I am posting here to answer a question that came up for a couple of friends who seemed to be unhappy with their initial choices.
I can go get the others
I figured there would be such an option, given the fact that there is an achievement for getting all of the artifacts for your given class. I passed on this option for the moment, primarily because you have to change spec to get the appropriate artifact weapon and I was finally getting into the groove for retribution and I didn’t want to screw that up by changing specs.
All in all, I am pretty happy with the expansion so far. I think my plan at the moment is to carry on with Vikund now that I have the ret pally rhythm going.
Vikund out in Azsura
My last grumble is about transmog. I remain mildly annoyed that it applies to gear as opposed to slots, so when leveling up your chosen outfit is pretty much constantly disrupted and there is never a transmog NPC handy when you need one. This wouldn’t be much of an item to me… I just went back to showing whatever gear I was wearing… except that Blizz seems to have gotten rid of the “show helm/cloak” options from the settings, so to not show helm… and the helms are astonishingly ugly so far… you have to do it through transmog. It is free to not show helm, and I made a transmog set that is just that, but you need that NPC around. I’ll have to check, maybe engineers can create a deployable transmog bot.
Finally, I saw somewhere along the line this weekend a complaint that leveling in WoW Legion was too slow, something that would have made me do a spit-take had I been drinking something at the moment.
Given the number of 110s I saw in Dalaran this weekend, I might suggest that leveling is a bit too hasty. Even I am just shy of 103 and I haven’t even finished my first zone yet. I know that some people are keen to get to heroic dungeons and raids as they become available, but remember, we’re likely going to be playing in the Broken Isles for the next two years. There is no need to wear it out on the first weekend.
All in all, I am happy enough with the expansion so far. It feels like a “lessons learned” expansion in some ways. We’ll so how it weathers over time.
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