Wednesday 8th April 2020

World of Warcraft is my coping mechanism for lockdown.  Like many I can be guilty of getting into an endless news cycle which just drags my mental health down.  So to get away from it, I choose to go to Azeroth for extended periods of time.

It means that when I do emerge, I feel a lot calmer and able to deal with whatever challenge the real world puts in front of me.  And I’ll admit, I’m in there a ridiculous amount of evenings at the moment.  My plan is just to burn myself out on it and then move onto another activity to keep my mind busy if needed.

My medium term focus is to gather the 5 million in-game gold needed to get a mount.  The ability to obtain it is going to be removed with the next expansion (probably due around November or later).  That may sound like loads of time, but I’ve been playing this game for 15 years and still haven’t amassed a 3rd of what I need.

After disappointing sales last week, I invested the time into characters.  There’s a general theory that with an army of high level characters you can do some limited high-return activities multiple times.  And with that you can have a multitude of skills and professions to create your own little production line rather than be reliant on prices on the auction house.

I did some trials running old raids on my main.  I never knew you could run them on multiple difficulties so I tried that out running Hellfire Citadel on my main at Normal, Heroic and Mythic difficulties.  My returns matched what I’d read online and I got about 12k raw gold from that farm.  In theory I could then run that with all my powered up alts.

Therein lay a problem.  Warcraft is series of leveling loops.  Get your character to level 120, you then need to level up their gear which there are multiple ways to do – some quicker than others.  My main had enough resources from reputation leveling to send them ilevel 385 gear, and I took each of them through to get their legendary cloak and started farming the corrupted gear for them.  They still need a lot of work.  Old rings and trinkets are dragging their overall ilevel down (which in turn means world quest gear rewards are still a bit crap).  But it’s better than it was.

I wanted to unlock a few new allied races, and I managed to do that this week.  I’ve created a few placeholder characters and was pleased that one of the names I wanted for a new one was actually available.  Genuinely chuffed about that.

This week is the Timewalking dungeons.  This gives great XP, especially with the current boost, and I want to use this to get the rest of my level 110s up to 120.  I’ve also been working on another batch.  They were all around the 40-70 level mark, and I believe to do the Timewalking Dungeosn they need to be 80.  So I’ve been questing and doing dungeons with those to get them to 80.

My plan is to go hard this week.  As a minimum I want to get the level 110s to 120, but I’d also like to get a few of the 80s as well.

Outside that I have a few characters around the level 20 mark but I doubt I’ll have chance to do much with them this week.

I will also need to gear them and do some levelling up of professions at some point.  My idea is to farm materials and use half for levelling up professions, half to sell.  That might have to wait until next week as I don’t want to be distracted.

This next week is prime time for levelling characters and I intend to do just that.  I currently have 4 max level characters, it’ll be interesting to see just how many I have by next week.