The alt rut

Here I am on my 9th 110, en route to 120. There is a nice well trodden rut to 120 for me now, and I thought I would pass along what I learned in this process to anyone else who has a bunch of 110s sitting around.

The unpack the 110 routine- dump out all the old legion quests, except the battle pets ones. Who knows? One day I may do those. Clear out the action bars of the old items and food from legion. Will not use that anymore. Take a look at the inventory and bank- ship off legion stuff to the guys below 110. Log onto my enchanter and send over gathering enchants for the gloves. That helps a lot in speed. If you are dual gathering, do the herb one, you see about 2-3x more herbs than you do mining nodes. Hit up Icy and figure out what buff food is needed, and ship that over from The Chef most extroadinaire! Go look up my macros thread on Wowwiki for this forum and figure out what I will go with.

Now head on over to the target dummies in the class hall. Try out lazy macros and tinker with them until something works. This part takes a while, but is usually worth it. Head to Stormwind, take the portal to Silithus, find the dude near the giant sword stuck in Silithus, do the heart thing, figure out what azurite piece to use first, and pull up Icy Veins on the ranking for azurite traits to pick the right one. Back to stormwind, twiddle the thumbs through the lore part with the king, then it is to the harbor again. Turn off the Questic addon so it doesn’t auto select the scenario when I interact with Jaina, pick the ‘I have seen this before option’ and It is off to Boralus.

Do the escort thing, do the scrap quest, pick up gathering skills, professions, archaeology, cooking, and fishing. Talk to the guy to pick the zone, pick Drustvar, go to the ship to get the 100 war resource quest, untrack that, and now it is time to do the world tour. I always take Drustvar first because that zone has the most flight points that you have to quest to unlock, and that zone is laggy as hell for world quests, and I want to shove the rep to revered first in that zone so I no longer need to WQ in there ever again.

The world tour- the aim of this is to take your 110, ride the waterstrider to all the flight points, pick up war resources chests and gather along the way. If you do this right, you hit 100+ war resources and can immediately start the first ship mission. Also if you do this right you should rapidly get a lot of skill points in your gathering profession and unlock the quests for the higher stars on gathering early, netting the greatest yield on this nth alts trip to 120. I grab every open node and chest. I will reasonably fight for guarded chests as a starting level of war resources matters a bunch. I will avoid heavily guarded nodes. Typically I sweep through the Proudmore section, then sweep flight points in Drustvar, and finish up with Storm at the turtles. If you do this right you complete the turtle scroll mission as you reach the last flight point, and turn in for another piece of azurite armor. This typically takes an hour, and pays off with all of that rapid travel while questing, and pays off later when you WQ having all of the FPs unlocked. Typically I am 111 by the time this is done, having got lots of xp from discoveries and gathering. I will pop rares as I see them doing this, particularly if someone else has tagged it, or if I have my major cooldowns up.

Then it is Drustvar time, with pauses at 112, 114 to do the main story line in the Horde zones. When I open a zone there, I will also do the ride there and get all the FPs there. Yeah you croak a few times, but at this level, you will replace the armor you damage and it is no big deal. Same deal…have all FPs up in all zones by the time you are 120. I only go for open nodes if I am out of combat, and only go for open chests if I am out of combat, as stuff is 120 there, and it will trash you hard. For Drustvar proper, I will do all of the side quests, which upon completion of the zone puts me well into honored with Order of Embers.

Somewhere around 116-117 the quests dry up in Drustvar, and I pick storm as the next zone. Here the push is to follow the main quest line to unlock the flight point on the island far to the NE. Doing WQs without that FP is a bear. I will also make a point of doing the turtles hub in the NW. There are no table missions for turtles, and that is the hardest rep to hit revered, so putting turtle quests higher in the complete list is important. I will also dab a bit in the Proudmore quest line just to get that rep started.

As far as the ship goes, I build the first 2 upgrades and quit. I run missions off that table until I hit revered, the point at which all the crafting recipes are unlocked. After that it is gold and pet token missions. I skip the azurite missions as saving your war resources for as late as possible will give you the greatest gain there.

I typically pile up all my scrapped stuff in inventory along with the gathered stuff. I scrap everything I can, and only mail stuff to the appropriate crafter when I hit a 200 stack. 30 slot bags are dirt cheap now and it is easy to get plenty of inventory.

At 120, I do two big things…knock out the emissaries, and do Arathi when the portal is up. Emissaries give you gear. I prioritize WQs for gear upgrades, war resources, and will try to do the minimum to complete the emissary since I have so many alts. If I am revered with that faction, I will skip that emissary. With good strategy, you can hit the ilvl 320 point in a couple of weeks, and at that point the alt is ready for whatever. Arathi portal day is a good one, and I run all alts through it and do all the quests. Those quests give you 1000ish war resources which lasts weeks, and you get a lot of 340 pieces doing the boss group through Arathi. I skip the actual warfront as there is an ilvl requirement. The trap here is to sink too much time into this end game stuff per alts, and I think these 2 activities give you the biggest bang for the buck.

Doing all of this has let me get a really good feel of how each class plays in end game. I am generating by scrapping quest rewards piles of resources to do crafting later. I figure when all alts are 120, I will be able to shove each crafting profession to 150 and tick off that completionist box. I will then likely dump all the excess mats on the AH and build up the gold pile for the next expansion. I have DK, priest, druid left to go on this class tour. Typically I can get one alt to 120 per weekend. Every 3 days I run the emissaries. I have a good 5 toons above 330 ilvl now doing this. I suppose as they drop other expansions the ilvl will explode again, and these guys will have enough gear to do that.

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Wow, that’s organized and comprehensive, kudos! :+1:

My occasional lazy leveling of 110 alts to 120 has lately been via Island Expeditions taking advantage of rested XP, since Blizz buffed the XP that Island Expeditions provide. The downside of lazy casual Island Expedition leveling is that a character arrives at level 120 pretty poorly prepared to be there, heh. Snydelee’s approach is definitely the better one for actually developing a character for BfA participation, not just getting to level 120. :slightly_smiling_face:

For those 110s that I leveled up with the Legion demon invasions, and would enjoy having them at 120 when the next expansion arrives, I saw some mention out of BlizzCon that there will be some sort of similar faction invasions in BfA’s future, but I don’t yet know how that will compare to the current casual alt Island Expedition leveling using rested XP.

It’s one of the reasons why I quit WoW, actually. The latest expansions have all been absolutely terrible for alts.

When you hit the point where you can level 2 characters without doing too much of the same thing, then that’s nice. But with the last couple of expansions, you can’t even level 2 without repeating exactly the same thing for each and every one of them. It gets really really annoying.

And in Legion they then added the fact you couldn’t even just level alts for your crafting, because you had to do dungeons even for your crafting…

This gave me a good laugh…thanks Snydelee.

oh nice, I did not realize this was even being discussed by Bliz. I do wish they had implemented things like the invasions so we could actually bring our alts to them without having to grind so much.

I looked and found a description, looks like the plan is for them to arrive with Patch 8.1 on Tuesday, December 11th. Here’s the info from Blizzard Watch, the old WoW Insider folks: Everything we know about World of Warcraft’s patch 8.1: Tides of Vengeance

Return of Legion Invasions

Legion Invasions are coming back as Incursions. Instead of fel demons though it will be the opposing faction that will be invading the lands. These will take the form of new World Quests and will be available to characters under level 120 as long one character on the account has unlocked Battle for Azeroth World Quests. This is make a great way to level alts, just like in Legion .

Finally. This will be a great boost, but it took them long enough to decide to do it.

However, are they bringing the Legion invasions to BfA lands or just remaking them for the Legion areas? Confusing the way its written.

I was extremely disappointed the legion invasions went away when BfA dropped, since that pretty much took away any chance my alts that weren’t maxed in Legion would be able to do BfA content.

That was another one of many reasons why I quit WoW. :smiley:

I did not know about Island adventures. I suppose that is pretty quick, and I bet your lower level toon gets carried on a lot of those. That might be a fun variant.

I am sort of in this mode where I never really found a favorite in BFA, and I am just trying to shove as many characters into the end game as possible before I burn out on WoW. The repetitiveness of the 110-120 grind as I outlined above is tiring. It is broken up by the novelty of the new class you are running up. I am really looking forward to getting this rogue to 120, because then I will get to do my lvl66 DK, and that means different non-BFA zones.

For the most part I play with headphones off. Still have construction guys in the house and need to be somewhat aware of what is going on. I’ll put on the radio or talk shows or music and just mow through it, losing myself in the zen of the path well travelled. I still have this odd fascination with completing garrisons from Draenor, and routinely log over, apply armor tokens to followers and send them out. What really disturbs me is I think I am looking forward to doing it again on my DK. Ugh. Sign me up for deprogramming.

Those invasions should occur around the time I am taking one of those allied races level 20 toons through the grinder, and that should be a great catchup mechanism. I still have plans to go over Horde side and do a full up lore tour of that side of the fence. Perhaps I should have done it earlier.

I also have in the back of my head this notion of maybe getting all these new battle pets I have up to snuff. Not sure why. I am not really into the whole ranking at WoWpets thing. I have been generating a pile of pet tokens doing WQs and table missions, and I am thinking of doing a market survey and see what sells for the most and try to grind up some cash that way.

They didn’t go away. They have been active several times when I’ve been back in the Legion areas.

Yes, as kalsion says, I see Legion demon invasions all the time as I go back to the Legion class hall to do missions, still trying to get those mount rewards. If they took a break before returning, I did not see it, I thought the Legion demon invasions just continued on, on whatever schedule it is that Blizz has them on. It may be harder to find a group now, with so many folks having moved to BfA, but maybe with CRZ all the folks doing the invasions are in the same zone instance so it’s not an issue.

FWIW, I don’t know how much “carrying” is actually being done on Island Expeditions, my understanding is that they are scaled, and I wonder if most of the geared 120s are running the Heroic, rather than the Normal Island Expeditions. My characters with Legion Legendaries did feel powerful, until they hit 116 and the Legendary powers went away.

Hopefully 8.1 will introduce some new elements. (not a Shaman joke)

I thought shamans were the joke?

Ouch… :roll_eyes:

Early on my son was carrying me through Island Adventures. He was overgeared for it and could pull the whole island. I suppose this happened because we queued as a group, and if you go in single you will be paired with a more even team?

I actually went into an Island Expedition with two other guild members and it was fun. Having a 3-man group works perfectly if you and two friends just want to do these and have fun. It also makes it easier to pick and choose what you want to pursue (just azerite, hidden chests, etc.).

So I am testing something, but hey I play alts a lot and it gets boring too.

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