Legion: The road to 110
After quite an epic and longer-ish levelling experience, how did Legion's levelling experience hold up?
As you can probably tell, given the lack of recent articles, I've been somewhat busy playing a particular game since August 30th...
Yep, Legion has launched and has been out now for about 10 days so far. By now most of us will have levelled at least one character to the 110 level cap, and seen a fair amount of the levelling content in doing so.
Blizzard took a fairly novel approach to levelling in Legion, introducing the scaling tech that it's been toying with since Mists to the levelling process. This meant that no matter where you went in Broken Isles, with the exception of the endgame specific Suramar zone, you were always faced with mobs and quests appropriate to your level.
This meant that players could take a pick & mix approach to the zones, perhaps doing small part of one zone, going somewhere else and coming back to finish off the storyline. Conversely the opposite approach works too, staying in one zone for as long as there is content to use to level with, regardless of what level you get to before that happens.
The only downside of this approach is that you never come across weaker mobs that you've largely out-levelled. Aggro ranges never shrink*, and a rare in any zone can never be left for a later time when you're a higher level and ostensibly more powerful, gearing up aside.
*If you didn't know, the range at which you can face-pull, or aggro mobs through simple proximity is entirely dependent on the variance in level between you and the mob. The higher the mob's level, the further away you'll pull it by your presence. The lower the mob's level, you'll eventually have to be within its hitbox in order to aggro it. Test it out by taking a level 1 into a level 30 zone in old Azeroth, then taking a level 110 into a starter zone.
However, that very slight, small niggle aside, I really enjoyed the levelling process the first time through. That said I really enjoyed it the first time round in Warlords as well, and then began to hate it, as I always do, on subsequent alts.
In all, on Sarcrux my Guardian Druid, it took about 22 hours to level through the content. I was happy to just take my time, soaking in the zones, the stories and the characters. Doing it this way helps me with alt levelling, because I know exactly where to go, what to do and how to get there, making alt levelling that much quicker. This has already borne out, as I was able to get Mecha to 103 within 3 hours.
After hitting the level cap?
Well after getting to 110, refreshingly there is a lot of stuff to do. If you've gotten your reps to at least friendly by the time you hit cap, you'll open up World Quests. These are a great addition to the game, ensuring that players will spend most of their in-game time after hitting 110 out in the world, bolstering reps, gathering garrison Order Hall (OH) resources and even quests that reward gear comparable and better to that which you have already.
Of course the thing you'll probably be mainly concentrating on is gathering Artifact Power for your main weapon, or perhaps your off-spec weapon, as well as completing your first Order Hall campaign.
I completed my OH campaign in about 8 days, which rewarded me with a new artifact/Bear Form appearance, the Stone Bear:
Additionally there are OH upgrades to research which take increasing lengths of time to complete, eventually giving you the ability to get a free bonus roll token and the ability to equip a 2nd legendary item.
Not that anyone I know even has one, never mind a second Legendary, but it'll be handy when it's needed.
In terms of gear, I'm presently in the mid 820's, nearly on the cusp of being geared enough for Mythic dungeons, and largely face-rolling Heroics.
Tanking is a lot of fun on the Bear, and I'm really enjoying the challenge of only having a handful of mitigation abilities, whereas the Pally had a smorgasbord of cool-downs to use.
However, come Tuesday I'm off to sunny Spain for 10 days! So I'll be missing out a fair bit, especially right as raids begin to open, but luckily Thunder has bloomed into life really well, and we currently have a raid roster nearly 40 people strong!
So we've plenty of cover to allow me to relax a bit, and do things at my own pace, which is a nice change!
All in all I'm really enjoying Legion so far. In fact it's presently shaping up to be one of the best expansions Blizzard has ever made, but its ability to beat Mists as my favourite is something that will have to wait until it's over before I can make the call.
It's off to a bloody great start though.
