Shadowlands Completed? – The Climb #691

Wednesday 13^th January 2021

It feels like things are starting to quieten down in Shadowlands. This week, my characters completed the campaign quest – nicely timed with taking down Denathrius on my raiding alt. Whilst it’s still a pain to get all the anima, I had saved the turn in from Denathrius so at least one of my characters had it all stocked up and didn’t need to grind.

And yes, there’s further renown to be done but it’ll be 2 a week rather than 3. Unfortunately the anima hunt persists but there doesn’t feel as much an urgency like there did.

In terms of gearing, things have gone well, but with my main only doing LFR I now don’t expect much in the way of gear progress from them. The raiding alt is onto Heroic raiding but, other than this or mythic dungeons, there’s not a lot of fast progress to be made.

Does that mean that I’m done with Warcraft for the time being? No. It just means I can give other things a little more focus.

I’m leveling another character for my alt army. This will be my 6th. I’m trying to do those whilst listening to audiobooks to both encourage me to read a lot more this year AND get through the laborious grind of leveling a gazillion characters. I want to ensure I level all their professions as well.

So I suspect that Warcraft Wednesdays will persist, but focus now goes from the games’ aims to my own personal aims. Hopefully with that, it’ll get a bit more relaxed. I feel I’ve done well to get so many characters and professions leveled whilst trying to keep 2 characters current, but I feel outside of reset day, a lot of the focus of the week can be put on the more grindy personal goals in the game.

The good news is that I don’t feel burnt out, which I usually do at this stage. There’s enough variety and scope in the things that I’m trying to do in my life during lockdown that I can go and do other things during the day and return feeling refreshed.

As well as being my escape, Warcraft is where I go to recharge– my own little isolation pod from the world. When I intersperse gaming sessions with other work, I tend to get a lot done. With a year that seems to be all about inching lots of huge goals forward, being able to reset, do a bit on Warcraft, then do a bit of writing, and repeat, will prove vital to accomplishing that.

I still have things like ember court and reputations to add to the long term list. Ordinarily, this would be the point I flake out of the game, dipping in and out until the last patch of the expansion in a year or so’s time when I then try and catch up. It doesn’t feel like that this time, and who knows, maybe I’ll get to a stage where come the next patch, I have a bunch of characters all done and ready.