reviews – A Pixel Nomad

Unique Ways to Level

I am not a fan of traditional leveling methods in most MMORPG. Since I mainly play World of Warcraft these days, that’s what I’ll be talking about. After running through a story or quest chain once, I’m pretty much done with it and I don’t want to do it again unless I absolutely have to. So over the years I’ve found other ways to level my characters, whether it’s purchasing boosts or through pet battles.

At the moment I have 11 level 80 characters (almost all of them leveled through timewalking, minus my main) and 27 characters at level 70 (almost all of those were leveled up with pet battles). When a legion trainer pops up who is repeatable (especially snail race) I know it’s going to be a great time to level a character (or two).

With the release of The War Within came a new race – the Earthen. This race has a bonus to exploration, and it didn’t take long for people to take advantage of that. The addon above (Dystinct Earthen Skyriding) allows you to level from 10-70 within a few hours time. It does take some time to get used to the method, you do need to use the fancy dragonflight and not just basic flying. You also need to spam a movement key as you fly for a lot of the discovery to actually register. Nothing to do with the addon.

I created a warlock since I don’t currently have one at 80 and I would like one – it took me 15 minutes to do their starter tutorial (I died, was rushing things) and then I was off, flying around Azeroth. After two hours of flying, I was level 42. It took me approx 1-2 minutes per level. I could probably shorten this time significantly as I become more familiar with the addon. For example, it doesn’t warn you before you fly over top of faction cities, and 6x (so far) I was shot out of the air by alliance guards. Not ideal. Instead of trying to get back to my body in a hostile land, I would just talk to the ghost and continue on my way.

It’s a really fun change of pace, and then once I hit 70 I have the option of doing more timewalking (if I’m not sick of it by then) or I can wait for a legion trainer daily and grind out some pet battles. Last night I managed to get from 70-80 on my mage with that method. Sure, she doesn’t have any gear, but that’s not a big deal as I have a lot of warbound stuff or I can just craft her some. Most likely I’ll just leave her at 80 without gear as I don’t really play that class, at all. I just like having an alt army available, if I need one.

I did also set 10 characters aside who are forever parked at their covenants, doing the covenant table twice a day. This is mostly for farming pet tokens and reputation, nothing fancy. These characters don’t really have a purpose, I don’t “need” 65 characters, but it’s nice to have, fun to level, and you just never know.

Have your own unique way of leveling up if you’re not in the mood to quest? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Catching up On 20+ Years of Content

I have a plan (of course I do) to try to catch up on all of the content that is currently missing from my brand new EU World of Warcraft account. Now, it’s absolutely NOT necessary to play catch up this way, you can play through the current content and be perfectly happy with that – but me, well. I want to try to get this account close to my old account.

Week1 (July 7-13): The War Within (Campaign, Undermine, etc)
Week2 (July 14-20): Vanilla (factions, pets, dungeons, raids)
Week3 (July 21-27): The Burning Crusade
Week4 (July 28-Aug3): Wrath of the Lich King
Week5 (Aug 4-10): Cataclysm & TWW
Week6 (Aug 11-17): Mists of Pandaria
Week7 (Aug 18-24): Warlords of Draenor
Week8 (Aug 25-31): Legion
Week9 (September 1-7): Battle for Azeroth
Week10 (Sept 8-14): Shadowlands
Week11 (Sep 15- 21): Dragonflight

While I do realize that there is a LOT more than 1 week of content in each of these expansions, and there are multiple quests and achievements that take weeks to do – I am hoping I can at least manage the main storylines + dungeons + raids of each expansion within that week, while continuing to complete TWW content. It will depend on how much time I have to play (it is summer, so I do have more time than usual) and how much ‘stuff’ I am doing in TWW, I think. I’m also going to try to complete it all on ONE character, and finally achieve my goal of having one character who has ‘done it all’ as opposed to 60 characters who have done little bits here and there.

There’s no hard and fast rules about any of this, I just wanted a small guideline to get myself focused so that I wasn’t (once again) all over the place. We’ll see how it works out. Some parts I’ve already completed ahead of time, too. Like I went and opened up the Garrison and with timewalking taking place I’ve started doing Draenor dungeons. My gold is also in short supply over here on the EU servers, so while leveling up professions IS on the list, it’s not going to be as carefree and easy as it was over on NA where I have … everything.

In any case, I like this challenge. I like having direction. I really like trying to get everything completed on a single character (I do have 4 characters total, that may expand in the future, we’ll see). Now I’m trying to level up some pets so I can get situated with pet battles.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Let’s Talk about the Single Button Assistant (spoiler alert, I LOVE it)

Blizzard recently implemented a controversial mechanic to World of Warcraft, where you can attack & cast abilities with a rotation by pressing only one button – but your global cooldown of abilities will be 25% slower thus you’re going to lose some DPS. For example, after looking at some parses, it was a 7% loss in dps on my hunter who uses GSE, an addon that does almost exactly this but also requires a lot of maintenance.

I LOVE this feature. I absolutely love it. This allows people who have disabilities to play. This allows people who are reluctant to try new classes because they don’t know how to play them, a chance to jump right in. Are people going to be rushing M+ with these? Probably, but since they do less dps, it’s going to be painful. Those who are interested in the min/max side of the game won’t use this feature, because it will be a downgrade.

More people in the game is a good thing. More accessibility, also good. Less barriers to playing new classes, amazing.

Don’t like it? DON’T USE IT. No one has to, it’s completely optional. Whether or not someone else is using it has absolutely zero impact on my gameplay – unless I’m doing a high level M+ and in that case I would expect them to be able to keep up with the group no matter what system they’re using, and if they CAN’T keep up in competitive gameplay then I might have an issue.

World questing? Looking for raid? Timewalking? Fantastic.

Does this mean I’ve wiggled my way back into Warcraft?

Well, yes and no. I’ve recently started playing on my EU account – the account that does NOT have all the mounts, pets, or other fun things that my main account has. Why? It has been something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. The time zones are more to my play style, and I have a lot of EU friends. I also gifted the account some game time and the shop sold auction house mount some time ago. While I can’t share bnet balance or gold between EU/NA, I can gift items to the account (has to be a completely separate bnet account). Of course it does make me miss everything I have on my main account so there’s no telling if I’ll actually stick with it (spoiler alert, I won’t) but it has been a lot of fun returning and it feels like a comfortable time to be back. I’m also excited about the future with player housing and all of that good stuff. I’ll just have to take it day by day, and see how things go.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

A Day in Castle Mistmoore

I’ve been playing THJ EverQuest EMU for two days now, and it has taken me some time to settle down with a selection of classes that I actually fully enjoy but I think I’ve finally found my combination. I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with having to purchase spells for three different classes, so I remade and I’ve been playing a berzerker/monk/paladin combination that seems to be everything I was looking for, at least so far.

My husband is still playing his berzerker/monk/rogue combination, and we’re currently level locked at 30. The advice from most is to lock here, and reach the current cap of 150aa before proceeding, so that’s what we’re doing. We created a respawning instance of Castle Mistmoore (this has a 2h timer, everything respawns but you won’t get any big named, the other version is a despawning version, big named will only spawn once, and I believe that instance is on a 14h timer). We can then farm the entire instance just the two of us – and experience happens to be zone wide because you’re in an expedition. While the husband is at work or doing chores, I can continue soloing the zone, and vice versa.

Right now I’m sitting at 82/150 aa earned. There’s also a gear leveling system, so we’ve been taking advantage of that. As you earn experience, any piece of gear (minus augments and bags) that you put in your ‘power’ slot, will level. Gear can come in 3 different flavours, the base version – an enchanted version – and a legendary version. It takes a long time to reach the legendary version of a piece of gear. These items can also drop in their base/enchanted/legendary versions, and you can sell them. I’ve been slowly working on my gear so that all of it is enchanted, and then I’ll contemplate working some to legendary (again, long process). I’m also thinking of starting some tradeskills, because why not.

The players on this EMU are lovely and helpful. All chat goes to the OOC channel which is also replicated on their discord server, so if you have a question about pretty much anything, you can search discord because chances are it has already been asked.

Once we reach 150aa we’ll go back to leveling and attempting to reach level 50. Our ‘big’ goal is to take down Lord Nagafen, and Lady Vox. We’ll see how that goes. It’s required to unlock the next stage of progress, and I’m pretty excited about it.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!