Building An Army In Azeroth – The Climb #605

Monday 19^th October 2020

I’m playing a load of Warcraft at the moment.

There are several reasons for this. First is that it is the ultimate de-stress tool for me. I can disappear into Azeroth for a couple of hours each day and just forget the current world. Secondly, with pre-patch going live last week, all the levels have been squished… which means it’s now easier to level alts.

I always go into expansions unprepared. As a result, I always feel like I’m playing catch up. I want to have one of every profession, I want to have gathering characters, I want to have spares in case I want to run a weekly lockout again. I want to have options.

I’ve realised over the last couple of months that one of my preferred way to make gold is by running old instances. Whilst I never had enough time to farm for the Bronto, I did bring back an awful lot of gold in a single week by having all my max level characters run the same weekly instances. I could see myself also running these old instances for rare mount drops. The odds are more in your favour if you can run a weekly lockout with 10 characters instead of 1.

Usually in Warcraft you have 2 tiers of characters. You have your main. That’s the one you do all the quests on and try to max armour and reputations. Then you have your alts. These are typically played to enjoy a different story option or have different professions or to give you options in the endgame.

But I find I now have three tiers: I have my lead main. Then I have main alts. These will typically be geared better than a normal alt and will do specific rep grinds to unlock needed recipes. And then I have my alts.

I already had a max level alt of every profession, but with the pre-patch having launched and the expansion delayed, I’ve seen this as chance to level some more. Some of these are bank alts (characters you create to form guild banks to allow you to stockpile items to auction). Some are new Allied races. I’ve typically made these as dual gatherers and a plate wearing class, specifically so they are better suited to running old content.

It means I have about a further 10 characters I want to take to max level. I used the level squish to give each of them a garrison, and the plan is that eventually, they’ll all be set up with profession buildings and routines to max profit out of that game mechanic.

In the meantime I’m leveling each of these new batch of alts through a variety of content and enjoying the chilled game play. Future me will thank current me, but for the time-being, current me is enjoying the process.