Planned to write a “Getting ready to raid” post 2 weeks ago. Fumbling a keybind ate it and then I forgot to post the boring rewrite.

Normal raids drop 250 gear, and we said we’d like people to have 220+ iLvl, 230 is better. Back then I hadn’t guessed how much the gear would be dropping, I estimated being 230 sharp or a bit over, I ended up at 246 and of the 19 potential people 15 showed up to raid and we had at least 10 over 240. (And just like in TWW and DF S1 I even had some spare chars at the 230 mark, just unenchanted.)

So I had written about my Retri Paladin being the 2nd to 90, shortly after that I managed to finish the Elemental Shaman. Then it kinda spiraled out of hand, with the Demon Hunter getting to 90 on Thursday or Friday, the Demo Warlock the next day, and the BM Hunter today. With the full +25% experience boost and a well-known speed leveling route (first one was campaign + some side quests, second one was finishing missing side quest lines, third one was kinda random, only the fourth was mostly done with the “Follow the Arrow” addon)… the BM hunter was finished in a bit under 6h today – from 80.4 to 90.

WoW is a bit boring right now and I’m mostly playing around with addons. Others’ and my own.

My sub will run out soon and I plan to only pay on the day of the expansion launch, not earlier, but to continue doing addon stuff I needed a low level sub-20 character, so I have a new Shaman now.

Looking at my list of too many characters I started counting the high level ones. 5 Warriors, Rogues, Paladins – 4 Hunters – 3 Warlocks, Druids, DKs, Priests – so from my actually favourite classes only Shaman and DH were missing, so that’s why it’s a Shaman. If we had server transfers I’d shuffle quite a few around, but I am not planning to spend money on chars I hardly play. It’s still a shame, though.

My trial and error phase expanded in the last 2 weeks (part 1), and there are some new developments, first some 1:1 replacements or installing what I missed:

• AstralKeys – keeping after all
• Chattynator instead of Prat – trial
• Details – keeping after all
• Platynator instead of Plater – trial
• WarpDeplete – keeping after all
• TargetedSpells for M+, trial
• Missing Class Buff instead of several WeakAuras – trial
• Sensei Class Resource bar – trial

And then some other stuff:

• WeeklyKnowledge – for professions, trial
• Watchtower (WeakAuras Light) – trial
• Already Known? – trial

The Cooldown Manager seems semi-ok, but the last big thing is Unit Frames. I’ve had no luck finding something I like and that works, so I’ve started writing my own (not from scratch, of course), but based on the setup by oUF’s main developer. We’ll see if I get that into a usable shape until the release.

This week I spent a bit of time in Dornogal, sorting all my gear from this expansion, converting to set pieces and upgrading stuff but I’m missing a few bits and pieces.

So today I checked out the prepatch event and it’s kinda… bad?

Story is meh, but that’s ok, the quest line itself is short, but then I get to two weeklies – kill 3 rares and also a combined “kill 8 rares and/or do WQs in that zone” so I dutifully do my 4 or so WQs and need some rares (only managed to grab one while doing the WQs) and then I notice they’re only spawning every 10 minutes, one at a time. What? Got one, missed one due to looking at the other screen, then I set my phone alarm and go tthe last two. But I was just waiting for 20min. Engaging gameplay!

And then I don’t even need most of the gear.