We’ve officially entered something of a lull enroute between the end of Dragonflight and The War Within for World of Warcraft.

Sure, there’s still a Season 4 of content on deck, sure, we don’t know anything really new about the expansion to come, but lulls for me mean prep time – a chance to assess what I want to accomplish in the coming expansion and what the best way to do that is. Dragonflight’s general alt friendliness has also led me to an interesting place where I have more max-level characters than ever – at the time of writing this, twenty level 70 characters with overlaps in classes.

When starting to think about prepping for the next expansion, I always think of things that I missed at the start of the current expansion. In Dragonflight, I admittedly had a bit of a rough start, because I hadn’t made the decision fully to come back until just around a month and a half prior to the full launch, well into pre-patch, and I hadn’t kept up as much with the big changes like professions and the overall way the expansion would play from the high-level gameplay view. That might be, perhaps, contributing to a desire to over-prepare for the next expansion to make sure I can do more of the things I want to sooner. But still, it serves as a good jumping off point to discuss.

My self-assessed flaws with my start in Dragonflight:
-Unprepared nearly completely for the new profession systems
-Didn’t read up enough on the talents for what became my main (I switched to Brewmaster Monk about 4 weeks out from the expansion drop)
-Didn’t get into the super-rare farming as early as possible to keep my gear progression riding high
-Underprepared slightly for the first tier of raiding on Normal (remedied that by Heroic, thankfully)
-Didn’t have a plan for alts or full tradeskill loadout

So addressing all of these has given me a few goals, one of which might literally be insane but let’s dive in.

Fixing Tradeskills

It’s expected from Blizzard interviews around Blizzcon that The War Within will keep to the model of professions introduced in Dragonflight – likely with new TWW-specific forms of Artisan’s Mettle and a new Consortium rep, but the general shape of it is expected to be the same. Given that, there are a few tweaks I want to make to my gameplay in early days to do better at this than I did in Dragonflight, where I still have yet to max out a single profession knowledge point loadout.

First, I plan to level all the skills in parallel on alts as quickly as possible for first craft/gather bonuses and quick skill-ups to whatever the trainer ceiling on TWW professions ends up being. I want to make sure I am getting max points as quickly as possible and using new resources like the Warband reagent bank to do that. It’s important to me to do this in parallel because I want to ensure that I am not dragging on any of the tradeskills, To that end, having multiple characters working through trades will let me send cross-account work orders to make sure I do whatever equivalent to the Artisan’t Consortium work order weekly quest exists.

Secondly, I plan to reallocate tradeskills on my characters to ensure that I have access to at least 2 of each crafting profession, and in some cases more. Early in Dragonflight, there was a big benefit to being able to go all-in on a single set of skill points and specialize in one thing so you could quickly make max-quality items. Because I want to save gold by building self-sufficiency this expansion, a big part of that for me is to ensure I have enough of a skill-point spread across my account such that I can make whatever I need to the highest available quality. Having two alchemists means having a potion and phial master, having two leatherworkers means I could spec for leather armor and mail separately, having two enchanters means I can ramp weapon enchants on one and gear enchants on the other, etc. My hope is basically to ensure I have a full production factory under my account, ready to build whatever I could want as quickly as possible.

For gatherers, specialization will likely have some resource-specfic nodes as the DF model does today, so having multiples means better overall results, on top of just having more stuff, so hey. Not as crucial in any sense, but still worth doing especially since more high-rated materials means easier high-rating crafts.

Planning For Early Access

The very concept of WoW having early access for an expansion, tied as it is to the most expensive expansion version, is a topic worth discussing in its own right on another day (I have mixed feelings about it to be sure). For today, let’s discuss briefly how I intend to use that window, since I do have it. Firstly, while Blizzard claims it won’t be useful for player power, I think that is a very narrow interpretation on their part that only considers being able to run base-level Mythic dungeons as “player power,” and not tradeskill levelups, profession knowledge, spamming Heroic dungeons for gear, and the ability to power multiple characters through the leveling experience for more benefit. For me, that explains about the extent of it and what I want – I want to kit my main out in as high an item level as will be possible in that window (likely Heroic dungeon item level), I want to level a couple of tradeskills to at least TWW skill of 50, and I’m trying to get at least 4 characters leveled to 80 in that span. I intend to plan a specific set of characters to level and with no new class, it should be easier to prioritize my time. However, I will have a lot of leveling options, because my actually-insane prep idea is…

Having Thirty-Nine Level 70 Characters

Yep, 39. Weird number right? But it makes sense when you consider that there are 39 specs in the game. My goal is to level another 19 characters in the space between now and TWW launch so that I can play a bit with every spec in the game. Why do this? First, I just want to have a character for every spec so I can work to gear each character I play optimally for a given spec. Secondly, more alts in the warband system is, theoretically for now at least, better. Thirdly, right now I’m enjoying leveling alts and it gives me a low-stress thing I can do for some fun while waiting on the next thing to launch. Fourth and finally, for my purposes of writing here about the experience of playing WoW, it’s interesting to see how the new player experience of Exile’s Reach and leveling flow in general are.

Goals Make for Fun

Ultimately, all of this is a little silly and overboard, but it is also just a fun challenge to set forward for myself. If I meet any or all of them, cool. If not, that’s okay too! It gives me a bit of fun to enjoy in the time between now and The War Within and especially right now with no Season 4 date in sight. And that, for now, is all I really need these things to be.