Leading Up to Shadowlands

September 30, 2020

The Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft comes out next month. A lot of things seem to be happening in October this year. I'm opting to focus my gaming time on WoW, given the new expansion.

A month ago, I was playing a lot of WoW. The new expansion offers a lot of opportunities for starting new characters, and I wanted to unlock the Vulpera allied race to try something new. Unlocking that race previously required completing a particular story arc and reaching Exalted status with the Vulpera. I'd finished the story arc, but the reputation grind was quite a slog, and I hadn't come close to finishing it.

Then, I discovered that the pre-patch for Shadowlands was going to remove the reputation grind from unlocking allied races. This completely killed my interest in playing WoW before the pre-patch hits, and I haven't played since, despite keeping my subscription active.

As soon as the pre-patch is live, I'm diving back into the game with a vengeance. My new character will be a Vulpera shaman. I want to play a healer, and the Vulpera shaman's totems are fox-shaped which I love.

The new leveling experience takes you from 1 to 50 (the new pre-expansion cap) in a single expansion's content. I'm going to go through Wrath of the Lich King as my choice, since that remains my favorite expansion so far. It remains to be seen if I will blog about this process or not, but it might be fun to journal my experience. I don't think I'll be able to reach level 50 with my Vulpera before the expansion lands, but that's going to be my goal anyway.

I don't know if pet battle levels will be rewired too, but if they are, I definitely want to try and bring at least one group of pets up to level cap during my leveling. We'll see how that works out.

So yeah. I'll be retiring Exsecratus as my main, which is only the second time I've ever changed mains since I first started playing WoW back in 2004. Here's to new beginnings!