I’ve long had big plans for pre-patch.
Part of those plans was to blog my progress, to detail all what I was doing and why. But whilst I would say pre-patch has been a resounding success, the only failure has been the documenting of it all.
The Importance Of Pre-Patch
You might well ask, what’s so special about pre-patch? It just seems to be an event with some basic content intended to plug some holes in gear that you’ll replace 5 minutes into the new expansion, anyway. And in some ways, you’d be right.
But I think pre-patch, aside from being a way to hype up the new expansion’s release, is very much about preparing mentally for the expansion ahead. It’s about getting things ready, getting used to the changes in your class and ensuring that THIS TIME you will do that thing that you always say you are going to do each expansion.
Talk among WoW players and they will all tell you about THEIR plans. Everyone has a plan for next expansion, whether it to join a raid team and do progression or to make loads of gold, or just to take the levelling casually and enjoy content instead of rushing through it and stressing. Everyone has some sort of plan.
And just like a hearty breakfast sets you up for the day, so pre-patch sets you up for the new expansion release. In many ways, it’s more mindset rather than the content.
Aims
My plan for Shadowlands was simple. I wanted to level all my characters and max their professions. I did that, and did it quicker than I hoped, but I was still too slow to really benefit from the auction house, especially on such a low pop realm. What I didn’t do was to do some of the end game profession levelling, ensuring I could make better quality legendries. So whilst I might not have made loads of gold on my alts, I did get their professions maxed and I made gold elsewhere.
I missed out on the Brontosaur in BFA and I’m still sore about that. BFA is my least favourite expansion. I played it at start and then pretty much left it until the last 9 months, by which time I was running old raids for raw gold. I ended up doing better in BFA than prior expansions, but I fell well short of the 5 million needed for the mount.
If BFA taught me the power of alts, in Shadowlands, I doubled down and used those to do the command table. I could have done better if I’d focused on that content earlier, but I ended up making nearly 150k raw gold a week, which for me was a high.
It also taught me to plan a little more. I started setting tasks in my todo list for various things on all my characters. That allowed me to take 18 characters to max Cyphers of the first ones in Zereth Mortis without burning out.
So for Dragonflight, I want to build on that. I want to get characters to level 70 faster, I want to optimise their professions and be in a position where come new year, I feel I’m maintaining rather having to fight progression.
The challenge there, however, is that I know very little about Dragonflight. I don’t want to be spoiled. I want to go into the content with it feeling fresh, not something that feels 6 months old because I saw all the spoilers on Twitch during Beta. Sure, characters 2 – 32 will skip quest text and cut scenes, but I will take my time with Doomcow, reading every quest, acting it out on Twitch, and enjoying my first playthrough.
During Shadowlands, I discovered ATT and it gave the game a new angle for me. I’ve dipped my toe into a lot of different systems, but for all my hours played, I’ve accomplished very little. That’s OK, the game is primarily about fun, but I like the idea of collection and I want to be better at it. I’m around 29% currently. I’d like to end Dragonflight with that higher.
So it might not be surprising that one of my aims in Pre-patch was to get all the transmog and exclusive items. I wanted the heirloom trinket, as well as the reagent bag on all my characters, That however, did not come until phase 2, which left me with 2 weeks at the start where I felt I should be doing some preparations.
Personal Guild Banks
Many years ago (maybe as far back as MoP), I set up personal guild banks on a number of characters. This proved super useful as I’ve used it to funnel items for later use. All cloth went to my tailor who stockpiled it in their guildbank. All herbs to my herbalist. All meat to my cook. Then if a character needed 32 slot bags, I didn’t have to go paying Auction house prices. I just got my tailor to grab a bunch of cloth and make them all. All my characters have 32 slot bags. All made by me.
Likewise, as my inscriptionist levelled up, I had the herbalist send the herbs to them.
Yes, there was a lot of mailing but it worked incredibly well, to the extent that one of my aims with pre-patch was that ALL characters would have personalised guild banks.
When I did it originally, I remember it being a time-consuming exercise. I had to stop before I’d done all the characters I wanted due to the person helping me getting bored. As a result, I’d made the decision to do it myself.
I had a second account that I’d created during Legion, back when multiboxing software was allowed to some degree (I just had one character follow another, with the stronger class doing all the killing as they both went through the quests). I’d not played it in a couple of years and no longer had a subscription on it, so I used this, and three more new accounts (each with a fresh level 10 allied race) to create a potential guild.
If you don’t know, you need four additional signatories to create a guild. They have to be from different WarCraft accounts (although can be from the same Battlenet account).
Obviously doing that costs money, but I referred-a-friend myself to each to get some rewards and free-playtime to recoup some of the cost. My plan was that after I had created the guilds, those additional alt accounts would be shut down, meaning that doing this for around 20 characters would cost me 4x one month subscription of £9.99
So I had my guild master on my desktop, logged into one of the temporary alt accounts on my laptop, invited said alt to sign guild charter, log off account on laptop, log onto another one. Each character on my main account, times four on my laptop as those alts progressively joined and then left guilds once chartered, leaving the character on my main account the proud owner of their own personal guild bank.
That took a good weekend to do, but given nothing else was going on, and I had long planned it, that was a good investment of time. With Dragonflight supposedly having a LOT of reagents, having space to store them will be critical (even if it just means moving stuff out of personal banks into guild banks because said reagents need to go there due to being soulbound or something). I have room to shuffle things around, no matter how crazy it gets.
RIP Command Table
Whilst I knew that my golden goose of the command table was going away, I was surprised to see that they did not nerf the gold rewards in phase 1. So a lot of my time in phase 1 was spent logging into each character every morning and doing their command table, followed by laps of Zereth Mortis opening chests for those that were low on anima in the evening. It was a grind and sometimes I felt that with everything else, I was drowning in characters needing anima. But given the gold rewards, it was worth it. Could I have made more? Sure. But I did it without burning out.
I also made use of the wow anniversary buff coupled with the winds of wisdom buff to finish levelling characters to 60. I did my alliance alts, and whilst it was too late to make some money with the command table for them, now they have a couple of guild banks between them that I can use to make a little extra gold in Dragonflight.
Phase 2
So come Phase 2, I was ready. Like really ready. Everyone was 60, most characters were around 220 or 240 ilevel and I could go into this phase focused purely on trying to 100% the event.
With the Primeval essences being account-bound, I could farm the four items needed for the heirloom on my 291 DK and then pass the essences around so everyone could get a reagent bag. Yes, I know we’ll probably get a bigger one, but as I said this was as much about being mentally ready as it was about being a completionist.
When Dragonflight was announced, along with the new race / class combinations, I reserved a number of names by creating placeholder characters. My plan was to wait until pre-patch, delete the placeholder character, thereby freeing the name and using it for my new alt.
However, there’s always a worry that in the 9 hours you spend on Drakthyr customisation, someone grabs the name. I’d planned to do the switch over late into phase 2, very late at night or early in the morning (like 4am), but I got up a little earlier one mid-week day (like 6am) and decided to chance it.
To minimise the risk, I decided to go with the default look and then use the barber’s chair to customise them AFTERWARDS.
This proved to work very well and I’m now the proud owner of a new drakthyr and Tauren Rogue. The Drakthyr got to level 60 by playing through the intro; I used the boost I got with my collector’s edition to get the Tauren to max.
And then, I went through the rigmarole of getting them personal guild banks as well.
With the command table now nerfed, my profits plummeted come Phase 2, but I was prepared for that and see it as a lull before the mayhem of Dragonflight begins.
So instead of having to farm anima every night, I farmed the invasions, helping friends get their alts to 60 very, very quickly, and getting myself a load of Primeval Essences along the way.
I used those to buy gear for some of my weaker alts, completing all the transmog along the way. I’d been worried that I might not get everything done in the 10 or so days of pre-patch; three days in and I had all the transmog, my new Tauren rogue and Drakthyr created and kitted, and my ATT reading 100% for the event.
So for the last week, I’ve continued to help friends, and have been burning through my mountains of sandsworn relics to get 246 gear to plug in gaps left when running out of Primeval essences. After all, I think someone said that to get all the transmog needed 1400 or 1600 essences, and that’s only technically 4 characters. I have 32!!
I mostly care about my horde team and I think the lowest ilevel is now around 220. That’s respectable, and as I said, we’ll likely replace it with 310 gear by the time we finish levelling, so there’s little advantage other than perhaps helping some of the cloth classes be less squishy.
My alliance characters need some attention before launch as they are not as healthy. Still fine to do the expansion content though. I tanked the new dungeon on an ilevel 180 death knight.
Raiding
So what else has been happening during prepatch? Well, raiding took a weird turn… in a good way.
Doomcow lives on a very low pop server, and when my old guild decided to change servers at the start of WoD, I didn’t move him. We swapped to alliance when we moved and I didn’t think the name Doomcow would work as an alliance race. Plus, I had a number of alts, even back then, and server moves were not cheap. So I levelled a new character instead (which was how my alliance characters were born).
But in leaving him there, he became a bit of a nomad. I didn’t have the support of a guild, plus my focus had to be on my raid character. But after the guild died, I went back to him and have been solo playing Warcraft ever since, sometimes only able to enjoy content two expansions later when I was geared and levelled enough to solo an old raid.
For that reason, I went blood spec. I tried to max strength over stamina (when gear came in multiple flavours) and really learnt how to mitigate damage. I became good at survivability. Took me ages to kill anything, but I could do most current 3 player content solo.
Come Shadowlands and one of my old guildees is now in a new guild (guild #2) on a new server, and invites me to play. But he’s still alliance, so I again level a new alliance character on a new server and spend the first part of Shadowlands playing Havoc, trying (and sometimes failing) to progress the Demon Hunter AND the DK. That was until 9.1 and the revelations about Blizzard, when a lot fo the guild quit and Guild 2 fell apart.
My time playing solo has made me love tanking… just running in and smashing enemies in the face; duking it out. BUT, I don’t like the anxiety that comes with PUGS and mistakes wiping an entire group.
So in the lead up to Dragonflight, with the creation of cross-faction cross-server raids, Doomcow could finally raid again.
I did a couple of raids with the same old friend from guild #1. I had to go Unholy, which I don’t know how to play, and did horrible DPS. But the group (guild #3) was nice. Another friend I’d met in guild #2 was tanking for them and getting bored. He knew I wanted to tank, so started taking me to Mythic Pluses, where I did OK.
Then one of the folks in our mythic plus group said that their guild (guild #4) was after a few other people, and so me and friend from guild #2 tanked Heroic Castle Nathria for them. I loved it, and thanks to the friend’s guidance, I did good enough that this alt guild has invited us back anytime.
This in turn lead to me tanking Heroic Castle Nathria and Heroic Sanctum of Domination for guild #3 and now in a space of weeks I find myself with a wealth of tanking opportunities come Dragonflight.
And I love it, but it has meant that I’ve done all these activities in pre-patch whilst raiding 3 nights and doing mythics on another.
Huge Success
As a result, pre-patch has been a huge success. Not only are my characters geared and ready for Dragonflight, they all have plenty of space for the huge number of reagents with personal guildbanks. I’ve also got Doomcow ready to tank with lots of potential opportunity.
I’ll save my plans for Dragonflight for a later post (I don’t plan for them to all be this long) but pre-patch has been a massive success and I’m both physically and mentally prepared for the upcoming expansion
All that’s left is a final few pieces of gear on the alliance characters and to alter my sleep schedule so I’m ready to play through the night come Monday.
