A couple things have converged to inspire me to level up more alts: first, we're all stuck indoors while we wait out this pandemic (I'm very grateful for things like Roll20 and Zoom allowing me to keep playing my D&D games despite our not being able to meet in person,) plus we're officially in the lull stage of the expansion.
Actually, I'm a little disappointed in myself for not having finished the final wing of Ny'alotha on my main in LFR - I've really been sitting out LFR this expansion (I haven't even entered The Eternal Palace yet) and I wanted to make an effort on Ny'alotha given that there's been a decade of build-up to the raid. I only wish there had been more of a build-up in the expansion. I've done the other wings, and this is my basic impression:
Overall, this feels like a remake of Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, which I mean in a good way. It has that ancient evil Lovecraftian city feel (ironically, while Temple of Ahn'Qiraj is the one that actually has C'thun in it, I think I like the aesthetic of AQ20 better - more Cyclopean architecture than endless generic caves). I particularly love the first wing, with its massive and oppressive black stone and gaping voids below.
But anyway, as I procrastinate (possibly to the point where actually finding an LFR group will be interminable) Blizzard has given everyone a 100% experience buff, which seems like the perfect cue to level up a bunch of allied races I never had done.
Prior to this buff, I'd gotten a Lightforged Draenei (Paladin,) Void Elf (Rogue,) Nightborne (Hunter) and Kul Tiran (Druid). I have members of all the other allied races left to go, and they're all sitting at various levels (I'm also leveling my Goblin Hunter, whom I've had now for... Jesus, ten years, but who had been sitting at 100 since later Warlords - given that there's now Goblin heritage armor).
Playing so many alts - there are now 23 playable races - does lead to some redundancies. Ever since dual-spec came out in Wrath, and particularly now that you can swap specs on the fly, it feels harder to justify having multiple characters of the same class. And ultimately, even if I really love some of the new races (I'm a big fan of Lightforged Draenei, though I hate that their heritage armor helmet cuts off the awesome beard you can get) the only character who has truly overtaken an old "primary alt" of a given class is my Kul Tiran Druid, but given that my Druid is one of my least-played alts, it's not like I'm maining a Kul Tiran now.
I was tempted for a bit to race-change my Draenei Death Knight to a Lightforged Draenei, suggesting that by confronting his literal demons on Argus, he might have finally found redemption and embraced the Light, but until 8.3, one could not be a Lightforged Draenei Death Knight, and now that you can, I've decided that it would be weird to hear a different voice from the character I've played for twelve years (I did make an alternate-universe version of him on my main server's connected server, though, and was lucky enough to have the same name available.)
Indeed, the very concept of Allied Races bumps into this issue: you cannot unlock them unless you have invested heavily in content from Legion or Battle for Azeroth (I pity anyone who didn't play much in Legion and wants to have a Void Elf) but most people who have gotten that far are probably pretty invested in their existing characters.
So to an extent, I'm really just leveling these guys up for the sense of accomplishment, and it's likely that most of them will be sitting on my character select screen and just showing off their heritage armor, rather than playing through into future expansions.
Perhaps if I weren't already so invested in existing alts, I might be more motivated to play these ones. Admittedly, it's fun to get the ding-satisfaction of leveling them up through the old content, but on the other hand, the power level at those low levels (after leveling so very many characters up over the almost fourteen years I've been playing this game) can get pretty frustrating (Rogues don't get any sort of AoE other than multi-dotting until level 63!)
I'm eager to see how leveling feels in 8.0 and beyond. I imagine that if you can get from 10 to 50 in just a single expansion's quests, it'll make this current buff feel like nothing (consider that if you choose BFA to level through, that means you could level up 13 times just doing Drustvar).
Still, WoW currently has a huge benefit - you can see your friends and fight alongside them without any risk of spreading this deadly virus.
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