Postcards from Boralus

So, I’m behind even on the moderate goal of posting twice a week. It happens. Today I’d like to post a couple of Screenshots from Boralus, the starting city of …

Travel Log: to the Broken Isles

I won’t spoil anything story-wise for those of you who haven’t been logging into Legion by now, just giving a few quick impressions.

First of all, of course I didn’t make it to 100 with one of my “normal” characters and had to learn how to play a Retribution Paladin- which isn’t my class at all. Shaman, Druid, Priest- I could live with those. But I boosted a Paladin (rightfully) thinking that I wouldn’t play one through the rest of the game, so here I was, playing Lizah the Paladin for the second time, a boosted character in an MMO I haven’t seriously touched in about 10 years.

Thankfully, there aren’t many abilities to learn. I don’t know if I made a mistake, but my main bar isn’t even full- I placed normal fighting abilities there, with buffs/debuffs populating different action bars. Something feels off, though, as Lizah feels a bit low on the damage dealing side for sporting a damage spec.

As I’ve been absent for quite some time, I don’t know when World of Warcraft became so good in storytelling- I didn’t remember it that way and when I returned, the old zones didn’t feel particularly different. But at least on the way up to Legion lands, it’s great, it’s varied and it’s presented in a way that actually made me want to experience the story- that of Legion as well as what came before.

I have a new sword…it’s supposed to be important.

It took some time, though- 3 hours to reach Stormheim, the zone I decided to start out with. The scenario bugged out once, so I needed to repeat it. Other than that, I visited my class order halls and became very important for the Paladins of Azeroth (don’t they know I boosted?).

Anyhow, it’s beautiful, it’s new, it’s somewhat fun, albeit a bit confusing for someone returning after a long absence, and I’m not only talking about the story. It’s nice being able to do current content with all the others, it’s a feeling I didn’t have in ages. But somehow, I get the feeling that for all that I’m gaining- actually playing the content of the current expansion, that is- I’m also losing out on something else- namely, the experience that comes with playing characters from 1 to 100, and maybe even content droughts. It might actually be that downtime I’d need to close the gap a bit.

I’ll share a couple of screenshots, hopefully without spoilers.

Deadmines 2016

In World of Warcraft, i’ve finally made my way through the Deadmines. It was the one dungeon i simply had to do for nostalgia’s sake, so i put my Discipline Priestess on hold at level 21 to be able to run it.

Although i knew that most early WoW dungeons are 20-30 minute-affairs nowadays, it took me some time to gather the courage to go at it as a healer- normally, i love the support or hybrid role, ideally doing damage by default and helping out with heals/off-tanking if the group is in trouble.

That’s why up until today, the vanilla WoW Druid below level 30 or so is my favorite class i’ve ever played- because the Druid could do it all. Of course, even in early WoW, at some point you had to decide what kind of Druid you wanted to be and the group expected you to hold your role instead of being cat-elf-bear-cat during one run.

The upside? This way, there’s almost no possibility of messing up- instead, you help your teammates if they’re in it over their heads. As a healer, though, i had responsibility and actually, the only way to go was to mess up. Nobody’s going to tell you what a great healer you’ve been if everyone survives- but if one group member goes down, guess what?