Just looking at the update on the opening client, and Draenor seems to be the timewalking one this week. I think there probably now needs to be a guide to which expansions had awful dungeons and which had decent ones. With the one flying up to the spires, and that damned one on the train, I think Draenor isn’t one which is going to keep me extending my wow subscription which expires in about a weeks time anyway.
I refuse to heal dungeons anymore. Tanks just go-go-go making enormous pulls without a second glance at my mana bar, DPS refuse to interrupt or CC, nobody tries to execute even the simplest of fight mechanics or move out of the dark swirlies on the floor. And while I’m furiously trying to keep these idiots alive, I’m getting messaged, “heals, wtf?!?!?!” or getting pestered by the first DPS to die for a brez. No thanks.
Oh, I agree 100%, but I -like- healing. In a good group (note the caveat) healing is the most fun, with DPS and Tanking being a distant second or third. But, well, that’s not what you have in most LFG situations. Generally I won’t do LFG at all under the current style, unless it’s for serious compensation (more on that in a sec) or with a character such as my hunters who can see the writing on the wall for a ‘fuck that’ and feign death. Which these days gets you a party boot for refusing to die with the rest of the idiots.
But - with a goodie bag up, a single run as a healer was netting me over 6k gold on average. Roughly 1k for the goodie bag and dungeon reward, and another 4-7 from selling the new augment tokens. So the siren call of a metric ton of gold got me to do a few while there was the bonus reward. Hell no would I do it for gear.
Just an interesting side effect to the “better” auction interface, and general crafting and buying gear off the AH for this expansion.
I pretty much never previously really bought any gear from the AH. Certainly not much. Occasionally looked, but it was always massively overpriced for not much gain.
Now on my levelling, I check on 61 and 66, and sometimes other, and I realised today the combo of the new auction interface is that people are putting the low end ones on there for pretty much the vendor price (so after the AH takes a cut, they lose money on vending it), and it is in effect free for me to buy. I buy a 72G bracer, once I’m done, I sell it for 72G. Pretty much costless.
As a longtime altaholic, I read an article recently that nicely summarizes my experience in Dragonflight – it’s never been easier to level an alt, and there’s never been less reason to do so. In Legion I leveled one of (almost) every class to experience the class hall stories and obtain the artifact weapon appearances and class mounts. BfA had distinctly different leveling experiences and storylines between the two factions that made it worthwhile to at least level an alt of the opposite faction. And Shadowlands had story progression and transmogs tied to the covenants that – while technically you could eventually get on one character – was a lot easier to do with alts.
In Dragonflight it is drop-dead easy to level an alt. The dragon riding skills are account wide, which is huge. You only have to complete the main campaign on one character and all subsequent characters will have world and side quests unlocked automatically. But there’s really no additional content that you can experience (or is easier to experience) by virtue of having an alt. The lack of a factional divide in this expansion means that Horde and Alliance get pretty much exactly the same story, and you can level all of the renown reputations simultaneously on one character.
I still enjoy my alts simply to be able to experience a different role or playstyle, but it does seriously cut back on the incentive to keep leveling multiple characters. Which probably isn’t a bad thing. 
It think it’s simplistic to say it’s easier to level the alts. Some are as difficult as ever. Some really benefitted from cheap gear on AH. It’s just more fun to level them, you’re not walking along bleak roads to get to another three quests you’ve repeated in the same order with all your previous alts.
I’m getting towards the park it and unsub period. I realise at 67, my rogue is going no further. Struggles to kill a single mob at same level as him, with long food breaks to get the health back and the murloc bit at the start of the plains was near impossible without another character tanking the mobs up, with the masses of wandering adds. Levelling gear, ilevel 287.I came to this conclusion on my boomkin at 64, and I can’t be bothered to level as a bear.
Rest of the main alts (no monk or demonhunter or the new one) are at 70 or 69 with rested waiting to go. Mage was fun, I do like the playstyle of a frostie, and that survived with mostly single target pulls but didn’t die like a dog when a few adds came on, had loads of things he could do. Rogue doesn’t, vanish, evasion, and a small heal.
Previous time I got three to 60, one to 55 and 1 to 51. I just couldn’t be bothered doing those same damn boring quests over and over again. The variation this time was a lot better with loads of decent side quests.
My main reason for alts has always been professions, and the new professions system pretty much murders that. It’s too expensive to level profession skill levels so I do without alt profession support.
Character boosted one of my gatherer-alts to help boost my alts with professions, which is fine. She’s a spunky little twice-undead Deathknight. The problem is the death thing - she keeps forgetting to call her dragon before stepping off cliffs.
Good thing death isn’t permanent in WoW.
-chuckles-
Yeah, I still have that happen time to time, but normally on my Druids, who are used to just, you know, changing forms and flying off.
After the second time, I made sure that all my avatars had a stack of Goblin Glider Kits on hand. Helps if one of the ‘windswept’ items on top of a spire throws you out into mid-air.
My engineer, for many expansions now, has always had reliable income from making goblin gliders. She also keeps the rest of the “family” supplied.
If you have one or more Draenor garrisons up, the ingredients are ‘free’ after all.
I made tens of thousands of gold early in Shadowlands selling off my stockpiles - people trying to get unusual places or using them to bypass terrain, but with Dragonriding being a key mechanic here, they’ve dropped to 2-3g each on my server, so still profitable, but generally not worth the time.
Sure, not a high profit, but the spunky mortally clumsy Deathknight need to get repair money from somewhere…
The Deathknight Gatherer was getting better about that falling-off-stuff thing. She mined a node, slipped off the edge, deployed a glider, landed… and slid off THAT ledge to her doom (again). Who knew gathering was that dangerous? Lends an edge to professions that used to be pretty routine in the past.
Hey, it’s still better than the times I played EQ 1&2 with friends and was killed trying to smith something!
I missed being unsubscribing with 8 80s because I still had some things on the Auction House, so I went for another month. Which meant. Other alts!
I tried the “select another zone” thing from Chromie, and with my Monk I chose Draenor, and realised after a bit of tough questing, you don’t reset to the start if you’ve already done that zone before. I didn’t get any mining or herbing xp (I don’t think you did in Draenor at that point). Still, zoomed up to 60 on Shadowlands AGAIN.
On my Demon Hunter, I chose Wrath of the Lich king and that worked out well. Nice bit of nostalgia doing the west side, and getting xp for gathering too. Only problem is that after 58, it kept nagging me to go back and turn a quest in at Stormwind for Chromie, which meant… Wrath went back to its old xp and level again, which wasn’t clear to me. So I had to finish 59 by doing the Shadowlands intro. Except that didn’t work either, the quests gave me 1/10th of the amount, and the kills gave me no XP. So I waited for the boat and got it to Dragon Isles and killed some mobs to get to 60. Bit crappy, blizz.
I tried the evoker as well. It was fun and a bit different. I am not sure I’m enjoying it as much as the tank specced others, and I keep forgetting its a dps not a tank. But still, its ok and that extra soar stuff and glide does make mobility even better in Dragon Isles.
In other news, I popped back to the balance druid with the intention of respeccing to bear to take it to 70, and something had changed. The talents had reset, so I set them from icy veins export, and gave it a go… And THEY FIXED BALANCE DRUID! It doesn’t die like a dog when 2 mobs are on it. It plays fine. I sometimes pull 2 mobs. I’ve not struggled with the higher quality mobs which give 1.5K rested XP. It’s fixed.
On my assassination rogue, the talent points have been reset as well. So here’s hoping that has improved too. It was very striking seeing a tanking monk bust the hell out of any normal mobs, when a dps specific alt whittled it down slowly, with no armour to keep him going as he’s chopping away.
I am pretty sure they regularly screw up their spreadsheets and calculations in Wow, and perhaps notice its a problem by nobody playing the classes anymore. Well, one is fixed now, for sure. Will see whether the rogue makes it to 70. Chance of a full house, 13 chars now.
I did see some improvement for my feral build as well, slightly less squishy at least.
But I think part of the problem is for the last few expansions, tanks have been seriously over-build. They very much can take all the hits and still do solid to excellent damage. Given the change back to Cata plus where aggro control and taunts largely went out the window in favor of ‘tanks do lots of damage and thus hold aggro’ it’s been that way to a greater or less extent.
So yeah, tanks worry very little about anything solo, unless they do truly obscene pulls or have to worry about stuns or other mechanics, but it’s not something I’m happy with as an old player. Too many times where a tank pulls 20% of the instance at once, I’m healing and the whole non-tank party is wiped out by the incidental damage from the adds (which targets random people or ranged that the tank doesn’t have a hold of) but the tank lives.
It keeps encouraging this style. 
Well, it’s approaching subscription renewal time-4 days, so it’s time to pack it up. Holiday, illness and Vampire survivors cut down the time with this one.
Got my boomkin to 70. Man, that was painful. There’s bits which don’t suit casters which squish, which balance druids definitely are, but the likes of mages have so many other things to stop them so don’t do so bad. One example is the main storyline, where you’re jumped by two centaurs when looking for Boku, and you just die like a dog as boomkin with knockbacks (often from the spare mob dragged in), and interrupts, and heavy hits. I tried going down to the span to have a go, and couldn’t even solo kill Gorger which was almost trivial for tanks, and even the mage didn’t struggle with it.
I do think some specs are endgame only, like healers, and boomkins, there to provide buffs for raids.
The trouble with boomkin vs a frost mage, is that the mage has the cc mechanics to slowdown them so not even let a mob get to them, lockdown spare mobs, and have cooldowns and extras to cater for chaos (mirror image, heroism), plus strong burst.
It’s kind of pointless making a caster dot based when they just get the shit kicked out of them while waiting for the mobs to die. Works with warlocks and a tank, boomkin bad.
And boomkin’s spell interrupt? 1 minute? You’ll be dead if there’s a second cast you need to interrupt, and it’s location based, so interrupting a distant caster to draw it in, the standard interrupt tactic, is pretty much useless. It’s like bad decision on bad decision. They’ve at least made it easier to spec for now this time, you had to sacrifice real skills to get it before the last patch mob, so it was much worse.
Rogue is at 68, will go next. Never felt as weak as the druid after that last patch buff, good burst, good recovery, And I actually enjoy playing the class. Isn’t that strange eh?
Got my evoker to 65, Monk and Demonhunter might make it as far, but it’s easy mode with both of those. I’m thinking the sub is up this time around. Nothing more to do.
It didn’t take long to get the rogue to 70. Nothing quite like having to kill a bunch of casters as a rogue, stunlock, kick and blind to stop their spells, good clean fun.
Weirdly when I hit 80 and looked at my skills, I even realised that I had missed about 3 new ones when I loaded up the standard icy veins spec, and it could have been easier. They reworked assassination rogue well this time around.
First expansion when I’ve levelled all ten base classes during first few months (9? dk added later?) since Wrath. Priest still making a lot per day making bags for 5g and selling them for 150g. But not enough to keep me on.
At this point, I’m not playing a huge amount, except with my weekly group on Friday nights. I play an hour or so a day to make the gold, and have 3 70s (Feral Druid, Demonhunter, Hunter) and swarm of mid 60s. Overall, I still really like the expansion, but I just cannot make myself do instanced content anymore, the dungeons and raids are full of such toxic elements that it makes me sick.
So WoW for me has moved into get together with friends and solo play. I’m not saying the current game is wrong for their target, but for those of us who played from the beginning, I guess we’re supposed to play classic or get with the times.
Still, the 5-6 million gold I had saved and spent has bought me 3+ years of gametime and Diablo 4, so I’ll play with my friends whenever they want and look around at anything new that comes out in the world. Maybe the story will evolve in a direction I don’t expect, but I would be very surprised.