Blapril 2020 - Topic Brainstorming - Joar Style

I've covered this a little bit before in earlier posts discussing how I got started and what I primarily talk about and topics that I've selected just to keep things going.

For me, that's leveling.  That is the activity that tend to do most in game.  I do stay up with current content on my main, Joar the Undead Warlock, and usually a few other toons.  But for me that mostly consists of doing the regular current grindy content (dailies, world quests, whatever it is at the time) and staying up with LFR since that's been an option.

For you, if you're getting started with blogging, that can be talking about the aspects of the game that you are currently enjoying.  Whether that's raiding, PvP, gold making, role playing, fishing, mount collecting, pet battles, whatever.  The best advice I can give on having a blog that you will find personally fulfilling, is to talk about the things that are important to you.

Even with that focus on what's important to you, it does leave a lot of room for ancillary topics and I've covered a lot of them.  I've talked about professions, about raiding and dungeon strategies.  I've reviewed beta stage content and new patches.  I've even spent time providing some analysis of Blizzard's financial reports and earnings releases back when it was possible to glean a reasonable amount of data on World of Warcraft from those.  I've provided ideas and suggestions for future changes.  I've even talked a decent amount about PvP and about gold making.

Having a primary focus doesn't eliminate the ability to talk about other ancillary areas of interest.  Those just help to add some richness and diversity to your overall theme.

This is actually an exciting time to be starting to blog about World of Warcraft.  We have alpha / closed beta invitations for the next expansion going out soon and as we're winding down on Battle for Azeroth, it's a good chance to do some reflection, critique and make constructive suggestions on what can be improved next time.

In the next post this week, I plan to lay out a few of the topics that I plan to cover during Blapril 2020 and also provide an update on what I'm doing now with the Joar army (hint, I'm leveling again).

Cheers,

Joar

Blapril 2020 - Blogging - Keeping it Going

I mentioned in my last blog post that I've been writing a World of Warcraft blog for almost 11 years now.  It hasn't all been completely consistent.  There have been years where I've been fairly productive (although I've never come anywhere close to once a day) and years where it's been pretty slim.  I think in general, I've tried to generally get pretty close to every two weeks, but even there, I haven't always quite made it.

My absolute high was 2010, my first full year of blogging, where I had 77 posts.  The last 3 years have been lows for me and I was at 22-23 post per year for 2017-19.

One of things that I noticed in my blogging history in the past is that at times, when I was getting a little bored with a content lull on World of Warcraft, I'd explore other games and write about those.  So there are definitely some posts in those earlier years about things like RIFT, SWTOR, Wildstar and Diablo 3.  The first post about another game was in September 2011 where I spent some time on RIFT.  And January 2012 I started messing with SWTOR.  The year 2014 was heavy on both Diablo and Wildstar. 

Recently I've backed off on trying other MMO's (honestly there hasn't been a new release for PC that has really intrigued me since Wildstar), so when the content gets slow, now so does the posting.

A lot of my blog has been about leveling progress and strategies, but there have been a lot of other topics that I've covered, including leveling professions, easy gearing of alts and there was a brief period of time during MOP when I got into pet battling.  It's mostly a way for me to talk about what I'm doing and why.  It also became a way of documenting my frustration with drops on things like the Headless Horseman mount. 

So this will be post 428 on my Warcraft blog, which is something I'm fairly proud of.  Part of the reason I like participating in Blaugust / Blapril is because, personally, I've gotten a lot out of blogging and really hope to encourage others to do the same.

Cheers,

Joar

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

Just Gearing Up Alts

So in answering the "what next" question that I raised last time, I elected to go down the rabbit hole of gearing up my various alts, mostly using just world quests and emissary quests.

The goals was to get everyone to an average ilvl of at least 385.  Now, I was able to cheat that quite a bit right off the bat as I had more than enough Nazjatar tokens to get everyone full 385's except for rings, trinkets and weapons.  So it's mostly been a matter of watching world quests for those.

When I started a few weeks ago, the average ilvl of all 41 toons was 349.75.  Now it's 370, so I've made pretty decent progress.  There are twelve that are above the 385 mark.  I feel like I may need to run a bunch through the Nazjatar intro questline in order to get their Heart of Azeroth leveled up to a reasonable level though, and that may obviously take quite a bit of time, since I've only done that on 6 characters so far.

Beyond that, I've mostly been keeping up with Assaults and new LFR wings on my main.  So far, I've been enjoying things.  I've done wing 2 twice now and not sure I'll be doing it again.  Just way too long.

Looking forward to seeing wing 3 this week.

Lastly, I finally finished the goblin heritage armor questline.  This one was a major pain in the neck on a warrior, but after gearing him up a bit, and a few lucky pulls, I was able to get it knocked out.

Isn't he cute?  That's Joarmama, the Goblin Warrior.  And yes, I know I need a better transmog for the weapon.

Once I hit everyone's gearing targets, I may go ahead and work on professions, but not sure I see the point in that.  Something to do I guess.

Cheers,

Joar

So What Next?

I'm running out of things to do. 

That's the realization that I've come to.  I've run three characters through the 8.3 intro quest line, and I was doing the assaults on all three of them, but there doesn't really seem to be that much point to it.

I'll keep doing all of that on Joar and working on reputation for the two factions, but it's not interesting enough to keep me doing it across multiple characters.

I changed in a bunch of my Nazjatar manapearls and now all 41 max levels toons are sitting in full 385 gear.  It kind of stinks that there is no catch up mechanism for rings, trinkets and weapons.  They're easy enough to get via world quests, but I'm not sure I want to bother across all of those toons.

So I've hit a decision point  - what next?

Option 1 is going back to Classic, which I frankly haven't been enjoying that much.  My warlock there is sitting around level 35, so it theoretically shouldn't take a ton of time to finish him up the rest of the way.

Option 2 would be to start a second account, and start leveling a bunch more toons on retail.  Maybe see how quickly I could level and accumulate a decent amount of gold on a completely fresh account.

Option 3 is just to find stuff to stay engaged with on retail.  Focus more on gold making, finish up the professions on my primary server, gear up all of those other toons. 

I'm not sure what the answer to the "what next?" question is at this point, but I'm pretty disappointed with where 8.3 has me sitting at this point.  Perhaps the massive leveling push during the anniversary event was a mistake.

Cheers,

Joar

Looking forward to 8.3

Having accomplished all of my goals for 2019 and for the anniversary event, I've sort of run out of things to do.  With the leveling streamlining that will be coming with the new expansion, I really don't want to start leveling a new character.  

So for that reason, I'm really looking forward to the patch coming next week.  Seems like there is going to be lots of new content to get through once that drops including some pretty long introductory quest lines, which I'll likely be running on 6-8 different characters.  Between that and new Warfronts and new Incursions and everything else, hopefully that'll be a lot of progress in filling my time gaps.

In the meantime, I've been working mostly on making some extra gold.  Was debating whether I wanted to buy the brutosaur mount thing, but I'm not entirely sure it's worth 5 million gold just to avoid having to mail things to an AH alt. 

I may do some PvP as I enjoyed that a bit during the anniversary event.

So for now, I'm back to running emissary quests on 5 different toons each day, and doing some crafting and farming for gold.  I've never actually done a heroic warfront, so I might give that a try as well.

Cheers, 

Joar

 

2019 World of Warcraft Year In Review

This year, I'm continuing with the tradition of the annual year-in-review blog post.  Once again, the family is not off skiing during these last few weeks of the year.  Instead, the youngest Joarlings, who are both competitive swimmers, are spending a few hours each day with weightlifting and swim practice.  So that means we get a blog post summary again this year.

During 2019, I've managed to level 29 characters to 120, giving me a grand total of 39.  I've got one more that I'm working on during the anniversary bonus, and I expect he'll be done by the end of the week, giving me a grand total of 40.  Thirteen of those 29 have been completed during the last two months while the anniversary bonuses have been active.  This has also included getting seven of the eight allied races to max level.  One of my favorite things has been the heritage armor sets for the various allied races.

Looking back at last year's update, I had just managed to get all of the professions to max level shortly before writing that update.  I'm nowhere close this time around.  There doesn't seem to be as much need to level the professions.  The fact that you don't have to be maxed in order to train the next expansion's professions really eliminates the pressure entirely.  Right now, I have five professions of the fourteen currently maxed.  I've got one more that will be done soon, but the other 8 may not end up getting finished at all.  There just doesn't seem to be a compelling reason.

In other updates, I've got a Horde and an Alliance character that have both been fully through the current content.  My main has completed all of the raids on LFR and I'm really looking forward to the new expansion in mid-January. 

Right now, the big consideration is going to be what to do after the anniversary bonus expires in a week.  I will likely go back to running daily emissary quests on 4-5 different toons.  I may also work on completing the rep for heritage armor sets on a blood elf, dwarf, gnome and paladin.  The gnome has the farthest to go.  There will obviously be new content and new raids with the new patch that will take some time, and I'll at least want to get characters set up for the new allied races.  I'm likely done with leveling until Shadowlands hits though.

I may also spend some time on gold making.  This expansion hasn't been a particularly good one for me from a gold standpoint.  Part of that is I've spent quite a bit on new mounts and on upgrading heirlooms (leveling so many toons is pretty expensive on that front).  I'm still net ahead for the expansion, but not by nearly as much as normal.

So that's the update for 2019.  Hope you'll continue following into the new decade!

Cheers,

Joar

Ding. Level 120 #36 is done. Three characters of each class complete.

So I managed to hit 120 on my Highmountain Tauren Warrior yesterday.  It was an interesting milestone because it managed to give me three characters of each class complete, and also finished getting all of the Legion Allied Race Characters to 120 as well. 

I'm now left with working on the remaining four Allied Race Characters from Battle for Azeroth.  As noted in my last post, all of those are at least level 60 already.

My plan is to work on the two alliance characters first, simply because I like the alliance leveling zones in BfA the least, and if I'm potentially only going to get two done before the anniversary bonus expires, I'd prefer it be those two.

Also, I've been trying to get a handle on when the experience bonus for Korrak's Revenge ends up being better than leveling.  It is definitely not the case in the 60's and 70's for leveling.  I'm goign to give it another try in the mid 80's.  The leveling in Legion with Treasures and Gorgrond Bonus Objectives is so fast anyway, I doubt that it's faster in the 90's even if it is in the 80's. 

I already tested the Highmountain Tauren through Legion and Korrak's / AV is definitely faster than the Legion zones.  The exception is when invasions / incursions are up.  You can always just wait for those and work on characters while those are up, but if you're just powering through, you'll be lucky to get one up anyway.

After I get these guys up to 120, I'll likely to continue to do daily emissary quests on my five horde-side mains but then switch to working on finishing the rep to get the last of the Heritage Armor sets that I don't already have.  Those four are Blood Elf, Dwarf, Gnome and Tauren.  Gnome is farthest away as the highest rep of my two gnomes is at 5,100 / 12,000 towards revered.  The other three are all around halfway to Exalted, so shouldn't be too bad.  One of those two gnomes was a Death Knight, so that's at least part of the reason the rep is bad.

Cheers,

Joar

Maybe Working on the Allied Race Toons a Little

So having gotten all of my 110's to 120, and with the anniversary bonus still sitting there calling to me, I've decided to go ahead and work on the allied race toons a little bit.  So I'm setting this blog post in place as an indicator of where I started with my remaining non 110/120 allied race characters.  So here is the list:

Highmountain Tauren Warrior - level 80
Mag'har Orc Hunter - level 58
Dark Iron Dwarf Warlock - level 59
Zandalari Troll Druid - level 69
Kul Tiran Shaman - level 61

So we'll see how far I get before the anniversary bonus expires.

Beyond that, I'm mostly just doing emissary quests each day on my five "mains", mostly for gold and whatever happens to drop.

Cheers,

Joar

Anniversary Provides Change In Plans

So the anniversary bonuses and events provided a quick change in plans and basically threw everything I said in my last blog post out the window.

Since that time, I've used the anniversary rep token and the new Korrak's Revenge / Old School AV event to level absolutely ALL of my remaining level 110 characters to 120.  It was taking on average about 3 1/2 hours each to go from 110-120 in AV.

So those are all done, and I've now got 35 characters sitting at 120. 

I'm now back to running the daily emissary on 5-6 different characters.  I've debated working on the remaining allied race toons and leveling them using the xp token as well.  I've decided to do those a little bit and work on my character in classic a little bit.  Running the emissary quests each day doesn't take a ton of time and seems to be keeping the gold rolling in.

Cheers,

Joar