Becoming a Well Rounded Azerothian

And not by voting, because they don’t have that yet in game. What is the Azeroth equivalent to the Donald? Leeroy Jenkins?

Worlds Apart

I continue to be torn between the world of ‘Mains’ and the world of ‘Alts’. Couchon (Main) is at 867 ilvl which means he can do all of the pug content out there.  I started looking at things in game I couldn’t do solo – not for lack of ability, but lack of effort – and found a couple key areas I was missing. First, is that I don’t cook. Back when I was raiding I was an alchemist so I made pots, and elixirs for everyone and received my food for free. As I push into more advanced content I am thankful I can provide my own mana/health pots and flasks, but never have stat food available. Since I do not raid in my guild I do not want to ask. Auction house prices are rediculously inflated, permanently (I know this because I am easily playing for free, and make more money than I spend each month. AND I have been hording all my materials..) and I am disinclined to buy. If I can’t pay for my sub in game I will stop playing. Time to learn cooking.

Cooking is fun in Legion because you load up on ingredients and get Nomi, a panda chef, to discover recipes for you. I am not even in the cooking phase but I have a ton of stat food from Nomi and am getting some nice discoveries. I get a lot of meat ingredients naturally by my world quests but also notice a lack of fish, which seems to be a popular ingredient, so off to learn fishing I go.

Fishing is very zen-like in game. i actually quite enjoy it. It is a good non-distraction when you are on a conference call or other time at work where you don’t really need to focus, but need to be present.

I do all the freebies on Couchon to ‘advance’ my character. I have two legendaries (one of which came from a world quest chest) and I hit up profession world quests and all the checkoxes every week for the chance to get just a bit better. I have full confidence in my gameplay as both Healer and Tank in game. One nice weekly feature Blizzard added was a weekly world quest that has included some fun things in the past – Mythic dungeons, Timewalking dungeons, Heroic dungeons. The reward is a chest and Artefact Power and it’s a nice focus for the week. This week it was Arena Skirmishes. PVP. I haven’t done PVP since The Burning Crusade expansion, and was hesitant. Meh, what to fear? Off to PVP I go!

They “fixed” PVP finally by not having a secondary gear set, and separate PVP talents. I know (knew…) in the past that a good healer is critical in a team PVP environment so I queued up as Restoration. I needed 10 wins in the week to get the chest. I forgot that PVP was hard. Very hard. I went 1 and 15 on my first 16 matches. I did advance and get some PVP talents along the way – and most importantly learned A LOT. I also started switching around my non-PVP talents to fit better for burst healing and survivability. I also had to better prepare to use many spells and talents I can skip on using in PVE. Slow improvement lead to getting into a good group of three where we had 4 wins in a row. After one loss that group disbanded. A couple of groups later we had 6 wins in a row in a random group that stuck together. More importantly I was having a lot of fun. I do find it funny that when you have some success in a group they only stick together until the first loss. Soon as you lose one the group breaks up. That was very interesting to me.

I have spent less time on my Rogue and more on my Paladin as of late and I have been getting a huge pull to my Shaman (used to be my main, the past few expansions). The Paladin is easy because instant tank 5-man queues, which I thoroughly enjoy. Running regular 5-mans as I level up has actually helped my Mythic runs on my druid with pathing and mob density.  I hope Blizzard introduces more mechanics to encourage using alts – they hint that it will come so that in itself acts as a barrier to playing them (which put in 100% effort now when you can put in less later for faster results?)

Legion has pulled me into new things and I am becoming a far more rounded citizen of Azeroth. Trying new things has been enjoyable and I am glad I have put some effort into them. I really like PVP (turns out) and that is something I will continue. Fishing and Cooking are good time investments and improve my character for the other styles of gameplay I frequent more often.  About the only thing I haven’t tried is Pet Battles.

Hey, even I have standards.

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