Blapril 2020 - How I started Blogging

I've been blogging about World of Warcraft for almost 11 years now.  That boggles my mind.

Honestly, I started the blog primarily to talk about an idea I had about trying to level a whole bunch of alts.  In my early days of playing Warcraft, I had a few guildies that had 3 or 4 different toons that they played current end game content on.  Not necessarily raiding, but at least running dungeons on those characters on a regular basis (this was before group finder).

It was amazing to me that was even possible, so I thought it might be interesting to start blogging about my plans.  The original dream was to have a character of each class at max level, which back then was 80.  The blog really was about tracking those plans, talking about different leveling paths and strategies and providing updates on where I stood with making this happen.

I looked at a couple of different blogging platforms, primarily WordPress and Blogger, and just generally found Blogger earlier to use for someone that had no clue what they were doing (and frankly still doesn't, 11 years later).  I eventually started to use Twitter as well, for it's normal use and also for promoting my blog posts.  I don't get much traffic.  My second ever blog post, laying out the dream of a level 80 of each class, is still my my most read post ever.  My second most read is a fairly random post about how I'm enjoying leveling my Death Knight during Cataclysm.  Weird.

But I enjoy it.  It gives me a way to maintain some history and see what I've been working on from time to time.  It's also a good collection of data on the progress that I've made over the years.  And it's sometimes fun to look back to see where things used to be and how they used to work (farming for Justice Points gets some discussion for example). 

Cheers,

Joar

Escape to Azeroth

A 100% xp bonus.  For Joar.  For me.  Seems like a bad idea, right?  I mean, how many more characters could I potentially level to 120?  I'm sitting at 41 now, and practically, I can only do 9 more before I run out of room on my account and am forced to start a second (which seems like a tremendously bad idea, honestly). 

So I've been working on leveling Abbert.  Abbert was the first first toon that I ever created.  A gnome mage.  He's been sitting abandoned in Ironforge, patiently waiting his turn, for something like 14 years.  So now it's Abbert's time.  I've been leveling him as Arcane, because why not?

He just dinged level 59 yesterday, and to mix things up even further, I'm probably going to take him to Outland instead of my usual leveling route through Northrend and Borean Tundra.  So much wild and crazy going on in the Joar household these days.

I'm continuing to do the Uldum and Pandaria stuff dutifully every week because....it's there.  I took a shot or two at the last wing of LFR and decided I'm going to wait a few weeks before taking another.  Seemed to not being going very well upon initial release.  Too many folks just not getting it at all.

Making good progress on gearing up the various alts.  Only two of the 41 are still looking for gear from world quests.  The rest of the team is just waiting for me to run them through the Nazjatar intro quest line to get the ilvl pop on the Heart.  I'm currently sitting at an average ilvl of 388.8, so well above the goal, with a total of 23 currently above 385.  So decent progress there.

Once Abbert is done leveling, I've got the two new 8.3 allied race toons that I can work on, and then there will be six additional characters on my fourth server before I run out of space.  Not sure how long this bonus is going to last, but I'm guessing it won't be long enough to get much past finishing the allied race toons.  And that's fine.  Totally fine.

Cheers,

Joar