Sunday 12^th April 2020

The four day holiday over Easter always used to be a big time for me. It would either be a big writing convention, or a massive Geocaching weekend; or even before that, a time to meet up with friends and watch movies.

At the start of this year I had considered going to Eastercon this year. I’ve not physically caught up with writer friends in forever and I’d been working on the idea of possibly popping up to Birmingham, even if just for a day, to have a bit of a barcon with friends.

But due to lockdown, this hasn’t felt like much of an Easter weekend. If anything it’s been a bit of a distraction from the routine I’ve made myself over the last couple of weeks.

I think I’d be suffering a lot more if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been continuing to massively distract myself with World of Warcraft. I’ve been putting a lot of focus into leveling up my alts and over the weekend I’ve been trying to get my warrior from a lowly level 34 to 120.

I’ve welcomed the distraction personally. It’s made for a pretty boring day in terms of things achieved, but it’s stopped me pining for the event-filled Easters of old.

To be fair, I’ve enjoyed myself, progressing through a mix of questing and dungeons and seeing how the game has evolved over the last 15 years. There’s been some expansions I’ve wanted to spent more time in. Wrath of the Lich King was when I first started raiding but I do love the aesthetics of those zones. I didn’t really like Cataclysm due to the zones being all over the place, but I had some fond memories of tanking some of those dungeons. Mist of Pandaria was always beautiful and I enjoyed spending time in those zones. Warriors of Draenor added more story and it was certainly a thrill to unlock my Warrior’s garrison. And finally, as I make it into Legion, I’m impressed at the polish and how far the game has come across the various expansions.

I still have a few levels to go before I’m into the latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, but I’ve been quite impressed with myself at how quickly I’ve managed to level this character. The dungeon event that drove this push to level alts ends on Tuesday night, but surprisingly, for this alt I’ve not used it.

I still have several more I want to level up, and I want to take advantage of the double XP buff that ends at the end of the month, but I’ve realised that I don’t need the dungeon event for that. My plan is to start working on those other characters once the Warrior is done. I also want to split my time a little by getting the various professions up.

I’ll have a think on the strategy for a post on Wednesday but I suspect I’ll be trying to split my time between various characters and activities.

But for now the focus is just leveling this character to 120, and with any luck I’ll have that done by the end of the Easter weekend.