A Lot of Warcraft Leveling

Since my year-in-review post two weeks ago, I've mainly been focused on leveling in World of Warcraft.  Not only did I finish up the hunter mentioned in that post, but I also finished up the paladin, death knight, and druid.  For the last few, I focused on doing all the quests in a particular zone and the main story quest, so that let me knock out Dragonflight Loremaster for my account as a whole.  At some point, I should probably go back and do everything on Joar just for the additional reputation, but there's probably no time for that right now.

Right now, out of all of those alts, the leveling time for the death knight came in fastest at 9 hours and 38 minutes, while the paladin ended up slowest at 11 hours and 30 minutes.  Oddly enough, the hunter and the druid had the exact same leveling time, to the minute, at 10 hours and 11 minutes.  These are definitely much faster leveling times than previous expansions.  Granted, I only leveled two alts in Shadowlands before quitting, but the average for those was around 13 hours.  And for Battle for Azeroth, the average was 13 hours and 50 minutes.  Of course, all of those pale compared to Cataclysm, the earliest expansion for which I have data, which came in at an average of 23 hours and 20 minutes.  

For many classes, the leveling process gets to be highly challenging, particularly later on in the process.  I ended up leveling the death knight exclusively as blood for survivability.  I did level the paladin primarily as retribution, although a lot of the reason that the leveling time was so long was that he died frequently.  I switched to feral from balance for the druid because I saw feedback that was easier.  As someone that generally enjoys leveling alts, I'm not particularly thrilled about this particular aspect of this expansion.  I like being able to level my alts in whatever spec I choose, so having some that appear significantly less viable than others is a bit frustrating.

In other developments, I knocked out the newest raid finder wing and have done it twice on Joar.  I also got my first piece of tier gear yesterday morning, not out of LFR, but out of my vault.

Next up in Warcraft will be the shaman and demon hunter, the last two I need to round out a complete set of professions.  My priest is the only other character that I leveled to max in Shadowlands, and I haven't decided yet if I'll level them up in Dragonflight or any of the other of my 42 or so max level alts.

Of course, the other big news this week is that there was a new FFXIV patch yesterday morning.  I'll provide my thoughts in my blog post next week.  I did finish the latest MSQ release but have not done the new 24-man raid yet.