Early Access Begins, for Like 40 Dollars

 My best friend, who also plays WoW, accidentally bought the Epic Edition of the War Within, and so was able to start the expansion about 48 minutes ago. I, a mere plebeian who got the standard edition, will have to wait until Monday. This might be a little complicated, as I'll also be in an AirBnB in New York, where I'm going to spend a month helping my sister and my brother in law with my newborn nephew (the AirBnB is so that I will be an adult who gets a full night's sleep).

On top of that, my dad will be staying with me for a week, so for the first time in a long time, I probably won't be able to go hardcore into leveling my main from the jump.

It's giving me flashbacks to 2007, when I could't find a copy of Burning Crusade at the Greenwich Village game stores. Granted, at the time I didn't have any characters at level 60, so the only thing I'd have been able to do at the time that required the expansion was to create my first Draenei and Blood Elf characters.

Unfortunately, as much affection as I have for a game like WoW, I do think it operates partially on FOMO - you feel pressured to keep up in leveling and gearing so that you don't miss the window to experience certain bits of content. I still haven't seen the inside of Sepulcher of the First Ones, and it's not like I could easily jump in a queue to run it now on LFR mode. (I don't know what the testers have reported, but I really appreciated the easier difficulty of Aberrus and Amirdrassil on LFR, though I know some heroic raiders felt they burned through the content too quickly because the difficulty was too low across the board).

Especially as someone who mains a tank, there's a lot of extra pressure to get as well-geared as you can as quickly as you can, because when a DPS player shows up who vastly outgears you, you can start having threat problems. Indeed, it's tough when you primarily tank LFR and someone shows up with even just Normal raid gear as your co-tank, and you suddenly have to start desperately fighting for threat on a boss because they're just going whole-hog and stealing the boss' attention back even when their debuff hasn't fallen off. (PSA to tanks: remember that it's your responsibility not to pull threat if you're not supposed to have it!)

I'm hoping that, especially with Follower Dungeons being a thing, it should be a little easier to get one's foot in the door gearing-wise at max level. Granted, generally speaking heroic dungeons have been a pretty quick step to graduate into as of recent expansions. I'm also very curious to see how rewarding Delves are.

Anyway, we'll see the degree to which I can play in NYC (I mean, the city should be fine - it's where I first started playing the game in college).