After a week and a half of leisurely quest grinding, my diminutive Warlock has reached World of Warcraft’s new level cap of 120. Now it’s time to explore dungeons, hunt for treasure, and power up my equipment. Or I could just wait for the next expansion to come along and render all that extra effort moot.
After playing Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game for 14 years, I’ve grown a bit weary of the expansion cycle.
An expansion pack drops and players scramble to complete content, hit the level cap, and power up their characters. A couple of years later a new expansion drops, changing game mechanics and introducing powerful new equipment that makes the gear players spent the previous months raiding for look like children’s toys.
I could stop playing my Warlock right now, having just hit the level cap, and she’d be fully prepared for when the next expansion rolls around.
But World of Warcraft is a social game. It isn’t all about amassing gear and becoming the most powerful character on your server, though many players like to focus on such things. It’s about getting together with people and taking on challenges. It’s about grouping up with strangers for a team treasure hunt or gathering your guild members for a mythic dungeon.
Sure, ultimately none of the virtual weapons and armour matter. It’s the folks wielding and wearing them.
And so I continue on. Achieving level 120 unlocked a number of new dungeons for me to explore with friends. I can now challenge higher level Island Expeditions (treasure hunts), though I need to gather gear so I can meet the item level requirements. Luckily I’ve also unlocked Battle for Azeroth’s version of the Legion expansion’s world quests, filling my map with opportunities to gather gold, gadgets and gear.
As with all World of Warcraft expansions, launch is only the beginning. Blizzard has new dungeons, new allied races and special events planned for Battle for Azeroth in the coming months. I’m expecting cities to fall as the war between the Alliance and Horde escalates.
And while I know I declared my Alliance ties prior to the expansion’s launch, I still have a free 110 boost that could go towards creating a Horde character.
Ugh, I feel so dirty.
Keep an eye out for more from Battle for Azeroth, including a full review in the near future.
Comments
3 responses to “Battle For Azeroth Level Cap Reached, What Now?”
It is what I have never understood about Blizzard’s approach to MMO. Instead of building upon what has come before, which ESO does quite well and to a lessor extent LOTRO, WoW completely ditches everything every xpac. Instead of expanding features in new ways it replaces them, not always for the better. It wasn’t so obvious at first with BC but after they kept adding systems since then it has become more and more obvious. And with BfA it is incredibly obvious, particularly with the changes made to professions, the instant level boosts, and the cookie cutter replacements for garrison/class hall yet again. Basically Blizzard themselves is making the statement that the rest of the game doesn’t matter, don’t play it.
Now would have been a great time for an ESO style level system, throughout the WHOLE game, and not gimped like it is at the moment. So I can replay parts of older xpacs without outleveling it within a few hours.
FOR THE HORDE!
Hitting the reset button each expack has many pros and cons, but it’s good for my team. I had a regular weekly M+ group in Legion, with the 5 of us running dungeons together every week for over a year. Primarily we had 1 night but it became 2 nights with us running 4-5 characters each through high level M+ (our best was a +20 when we decided to push it).
Going into BFA changes our focus from playing a wide range of classes and roles and re-hones us in on our favorites so we can feel them getting stronger again rather than stagnating. The 5 of us took the launch week off of work, all 5 hit 120 on the first day~ish (last two took until 2am). Day 2 of BFA saw us running Heroics and we were into Mythic by day 3-4. None of us had touched the beta/test realm at all so it was nice going in fresh.
It was the most fun we’ve had in WoW in the last year.