World of Warcraft – Preparing for the Pre-Patch

After what feels like waiting an eternity (or longer, it was probably longer) for the pre-Shadowlands patch, it’s now less than a week away. I have World of Warcraft installed on the new PC, complete with the addon folder I remembered to copy over. I am so ready for this.

I still have yet to pre-order Shadowlands, but I have no intention of spending more on it than the base edition, so I don’t have to think about what to do with a boost, because it doesn’t come with one. Besides which, I still have some manner of boost collecting dust, so I’m not really a huge fan of them in the first place.

I decided to pop onto my loading screen and try to make some sense of characters to prioritize my leveling. Please forgive the Inactive tag on most of my characters – I don’t plan on actually resubbing until patch day.

I only have three characters sitting at 120 – which might be the worst I’ve done with leveling in any expansion since Burning Crusade, when I first started playing and had exactly one max level character.

I have pretty much decided to be 100% done with Battle for Azeroth, which means other than cleaning out bags and banks, and possibly dabbling in the pre-expansion event, these ladies are done until after Shadowlands release.

After that is two pairs of characters, currently stuck in their respective expansions, who will be less than 10 levels from cap once the squish drops. I might work on the priest and paladin (two characters who I have had level capped every expansion between Pandaria and Battle for Azeroth), but I’m likely to let the Demon Hunter and Warrior continue to languish.

My warlock will plummet to level 21 post-squish, but she is probably the character who I will dedicate myself to leveling first. I don’t think I’ve had an end-game warlock since Cataclysm, and I’ve missed it (even though I don’t tend to spend much time with DPS only characters).

As evidenced by the fact that three out of four of my rolled but mostly unplayed characters are pure DPS classes. The hunter has the best chance of getting out of lowbie limbo – I have enjoyed playing hunters in the past, but it’s been a long time and a lot of changes, so I’m not going to commit too heavily.

That’s the full roster of characters (bank alt notwithstanding) I have on my main server, and honestly, I can’t even start to think about cross-faction or alternate server characters at this point.

Depending on how quick leveling goes, I would like to commit to having the warlock, paladin, and priest ready to start Shadowlands content. If it’s all super-fast, and I’m still having fun with it, hunter will be next, and then I can hem and haw over the merits of the remaining lowbies versus the almost theres. It will be weird to be playing just about everything except a shaman for a yet undetermined period of time, but since I have played very little in the last 18 months, playing at all is going to feel pretty weird to start out.