The Queue: You missed when Time and Life shook hands and said, “Goodbye.”

Hello! Apologies for any confusion my absence yesterday might have caused. As you probably guessed (or were told by Liz), I was in the middle of some serious HARDCORE GAMING. But I’m back now and can report that level 120 is full of… well, max-level content. I didn’t do most of the cross-continent content on beta, so it’s all new territory for me (as opposed to the leveling zones, which I did at least once each, if not twice).

Anyhow, it’s Queue time.

I’m posting this here for visibility, even though we already discussed in the comments. There is a portal to Silithus in your faction’s capital city on the new islands (Kul Tiras or Zandalar), so you don’t need to make a long trek to Magni every time the Champions of Azeroth Emissary is up.

It hasn’t been said. I think a lot of people were thrown off when it wasn’t released a week after Sylvanas’ was. Heck, I think a decent portion of people were surprised when it wasn’t released in place of Sylvanas’, with Sylvanas’ landing the week of the Siege of Lordaeron.

I thought maybe we’d see it during the questing experience, since several areas on beta mentioned Azshara — but looks like no dice there. Maybe it’ll be pre-8.1 hype? (Like, early October.) Or maybe it’s tied to raiding content, which would be around mid-September.

1. I hit level 120 at 6:00 a.m. Eastern after ~12 hours of playing. Probably would’ve been closer to 11 hours, but my Stormwind scenario bugged and I had to do it in full twice :
2. Hmmm… maybe 3 or 4 bathroom breaks? Had tortilla chips, fruit, nuts, gummie worms, and a couple other things to snack on.
3. I hit 120, played for another hour and a half, then went to bed at 7:30 a.m. — ended up only sleeping for maybe 6 hours, so I napped later in the evening. Then, last night, I got a solid 9+ hours.
4. Question you didn’t ask, but I completed all of Nazmir and Voldun, and actually hit 120 at 2/7 chapters done with Zuldazar. That surprised me, to be honest. I thought it would take a complete tour of all the zones to make it.

For those who don’t know me, expansion launches are my thing. I love grinding to max level as fast as possible, of staying up at all hours playing the game. It’s what I do, and I’m already looking forward to the next time it happens. (Oh, and before you say it, I took my time reading all the quests and such on the beta specifically so I could zoom through them on live.)

First to jump to mind are the Snek People, just because I love their design and movements and aesthetic. But I think personality-wise, the Tortollan win. Their inability to tell male/female players apart while also calling a bear their “dog,” and their extreme fascination with stories makes them feel very fleshed out.

That said, I haven’t done much of the Alliance side of things. I assumed you meant friendly races, too — because all the creepy witch people and their weird ManBearPig creations in Drustvar are totes my aesthetic.

There might be an addon that will do this for the sum total AP you’ve collected, but right now, it should be showing up as a progress bar below/above your XP bar, just like AP did in Legion. It will only show your current X/Y progress for whichever rank you’re on, though.

If you, like me, were not given your Heart of Azeroth until several hours into the game due to a bug, then there is apparently not an internal system tracking earned AP. I was told by a GM that they could not retroactively award AP for any of it I had earned while HoA-less.

So, there are three slots that can be Azerite Armor — head, shoulders, and chest. You can get them while leveling for “milestone”-type storyline completions. But mostly, you’ll be getting them post-120 via dungeons, World Quests, and rares/treasures*. I still don’t entirely get how the Azerite Trait system itself works, though. I picked up a lower-ilvl chest that required HoA levels 12, 16, and 20 versus my current chest which was something like 2, 5, and 8. And the Traits themselves did not feel stronger, so… /shrug

*Cannot 100% confirm rares/treasures from experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a lower percent chance.

Ana and D.Va are fantastic, if you ask me. But everything else has been kind of “meh” for me. They’re very well designed, mind you, I think it’s just maybe I’m just not much of a “sports” guy.

It totally depends on what your goal is for the game. If you only want to experience current content for the sake of gearing and pushing top-tier raids, then you have no reason to go back. If you want a fuller picture of the story, then it’s worth leveling a new toon to see at least once, because there are some seriously spectacular quests out there. (Though I wouldn’t blame you for just looking at a Wiki page or something for a summary.)

If you want to look good while you kill, there are lots of old armor sets to be found for transmog. If you pet collect, those things are also all over the place.

Basically, if your only goal is getting gear and progressing in a meaningful fashion, you don’t have to go back. But if you like collecting/being a completionist, go back and do some of the other stuff.

My advice? Just play the game and see where it takes you. Some of the most fun of playing an MMO is going in blind and discovering what the world has to offer. Maybe you find something utterly meaningless in terms of progression but at the same time, the exact thing you’d always dreamed of finding in a game. Follow that interest! There’s no right way to play :)

That’s it for today, folks! I’m gonna go hang out with my Dark Ranger posse some more now.