Alts in Shadowlands

 We're now over two weeks into the expansion, and I only have two max-level characters.

I don't recall precisely when I got various characters up in previous expansions, but it's pretty clear to me that there's so much to do on each character that I've got my hands mostly full with just the Paladin and Death Knight. In a break with tradition (largely based on which covenants I'm intending for them to join - trying to cover all four before I do repeats) my Mage is next in line, to be followed by my Warlock - after which I'll get my Demon Hunter, Shaman, and Rogue.

The massive amount of content is welcome, though - WoW thrives when there's a lot to do. The real question, though, is what, of this content, will feel particularly important.

My daily routine on my main, the Paladin, is this:

Make sure I do my Anima Conduit.

Go to the Maw and do my dailies for Ve'nari.

Try to run a Mythic Dungeon or two (I'm not really in a place guild-wise where we're anywhere close to hitting Castle Nathria, so I'll be seeing it for the first time in LFR.)

Do the Calling for the day.

Weekly, add in:

Torghast (clearing both wings at the highest layer I can - I've actually found layer 4, the current max, to be perfectly doable in a tank spec with a healthy selection of Mythic dungeon gear).

Any Renown-based stuff (anima collection and souls in the Maw)

The two weekly dungeon quests.

And if I have time, doing some of my Covenant mini-game (though that's been very back-burner.)

And the World Boss now.

So doing that on two characters is quite a lot.

I think over time we'll start to get a sense of which of these are really important to do if you want a character to be "caught up" and which you can let slide. I'm also really curious to see what kind of catch-up mechanics they'll have.

I know that Renown can drop in Calling boxes and from dungeons if you're behind the curve, but when it comes to stuff like anima, especially looking at how much the higher-level version of your various covenant sanctum bonuses cost, I do wonder if we'll see some sort of inflation of anima rewards (I might imagine that world quests and such start dropping more of the anima-items.)

Anyway, it's only two weeks into an expansion that should last us two years, but there is my usual altoholic (see name of blog) impulse to feel like some of my characters are missing out.

Once I get my Mage to 60 (he's a little into Ardenweald and is at 56) I'll start to get a sense of what sort of catch-up mechanics there are. For now, he's gotten to that point in leveling where the deprecation of secondary stats has really started to hit him - his Ice Lances are far from guaranteed to crit even with Fingers of Frost.

One other thing I've been thinking about is upgrading legendary items. I actually did craft a legendary belt for my Paladin (the effect that makes Avenger's Shield sometimes not have a cooldown, which seems to often chain several times in a row, which is excellent) but it seems as if, should I drop a few tens of thousands of gold on the AH (not as much as that used to seem, given that I'm making about 2k a day from Callings) I could, in theory, push that belt from 190 to 225 item level. I have not yet made one for my Death Knight, especially because I don't really know if he's going to be maining Blood or 2H Frost this go around (while I'm overjoyed to see that 2HF is back, it's also about 1000% easier to get a mythic dungeon group if you're a tank, and I do enjoy Blood as a spec, even if it was a little scary the first few mythics, as Blood needs a bit of ramp up time to get its defensive stuff going and that made those first pulls pretty nerve-wracking.)

Still, I sometimes feel as if my Demon Hunter is looking very sad to be waiting in Stormwind while alts he was ahead of in the priority in most situations get to start earlier, all because he wants to go Venthyr and the DK got there first (my Rogue is also probably going that way). My Mage is likely going Night Fae (I just got the ability, which is... weirder than I expected, but could be good) and my Warlock is probably going Necrolords (I actually don't know what the ability is, but if it's fun to use, I'll feel very good having the 'Lock go with the jock-bros of the Shadowlands.)

Still, that seems far on the horizon. I don't think my Mage or Warlock will be prioritized quite as much as the Paladin and DK were (I've always thought of them as kind of Main and Vice Main) which might make it a bit easier to spare some time to work on the other alts. Still, I want to keep up with renown so that I can see the stories in each of the covenants. I just hope that I'll also be able to keep them geared enough to do the content the covenant stories entail.