The Alt Army – The Climb #645

Saturday 28^th November 2020

My long term plans for Shadowlands is to level all my 18 max level toons (or at least… what were max level until last week).

This is obviously going to take some time.

However, where I normally ‘fail’ with most expansions is that I play a main or two and then forget the others until such time as the final patch has been released and we’re into the content drought before the next expansion.

I want to do things a little differently this expansion.

Whilst I’ll still have a main or two, I want to edge the others up. I want to have their professions from day 1 and even if I don’t max them now, I’d like that by the end of the year most of them are 80% of the way to max level profession, even if their actual level is still only 50.

You see, as with previous expansions, you can max professions without maxing your level. There’s one barrier though, you have to be in Oribos in order to learn the profession upgrade, and that means going through The Maw.

It’s the 45 minute opener to Shadowlands and gets you a ton of XP. And it’s a cakewalk if you are geared up from pre-patch. Just as well I spent all that time gearing them up!

And so, today’s task has been to get ALL my alts through The Maw and picking up their profession upgrades.

It’s one of those grindy little tasks to slot between everything else lest it be forgotten, but I made a big push today. My big plan is that as I level characters to 60, the crafting reagents they pick up along the way get funneled to the corresponding alt to level up their profession. Profession materials are crazy prices on the Auction House right now, but competition is also very fierce. So I’ll level up my alts for when the market quietens down and save myself a bunch of money in the process.

But first things first.

I played on the laptop whilst watching TV. The Maw intro is pretty easy, so it doesn’t need a lot of attention, and you quickly get into the swing of it. Quest here, Quest there, wait for cut scene.

I got every character to Oribos, picked up their profession upgrade and then logged them off.

I did this 15 times before it was late and I needed to go to bed. I have 3 I still need to bring across, but I can do them some other time.

Because of the massive XP you get through the Maw, they are all nearly level 51. I can now pick up each one in turn over the coming months and do a quest here or there to level them further, but for now the focus is on my two mains: my main and my alliance raiding alt which I’ve started taking through the Threads of Fate system.

All this work today had seemingly little benefit but the fact that I have all my alts ready to start working on Shadowlands professions is massive. I just wish I had more hours in the day in which I could spend time leveling both them and their professions.

All in good time. I need to remind myself I’m playing the long game here.