The Queue: Gearing, iLevel, PVP Bonus, and salad

Happy Monday, everyone! We’re back from a week of Battle for Azeroth, here with your Queue.

I asked on Twitter last night, but no one was really able to answer. Our staff was stumped as well. This might be out there somewhere and my Googling didn’t find it though — maybe someone here knows for sure?

Now with that said, I have a feeling it’s going to be around 320 or 325. Heroic dungeons drop 325 gear, and while it makes sense that you’d ideally have a full set of heroic gear before going into LFR, I also don’t think it’s going to be as easy to do this as other expansions. While yes, there’s a lot of people that are doing mythic 0’s now, that’s not everyone — remember that LFR is everyone, so the bar has to be a bit lower. In particular, I think with this expansion the bar is lowered in that there isn’t a set of items that raise the overall character iLevel several points.

Consider Legion. If you got one legendary, you could have some blues and greens on you still and hit the early LFRs. Granted you might be a drag on the group, but still, accessing the content wasn’t prohibitive. I believe this is good for the game — the more people that can experience content the better. In BFA we don’t have that. Yes, we have our neck piece, but if you’re like me then your neck piece is one of the lowest iLevel items you have on. Right before publication, my neck was iLevel 306, my overall iLevel was 317, and my lowest iLevel was 300.

That all adds up to me thinking that the ideal LFR iLevel is 320. The neck is going to be a drag on our ability to get a higher iLevel for right now; that should be taken into consideration early in the expansion. I could see adjusting these entry iLevel requirements once the expansion progress further and catch up mechanisms are in place.

Finally, I want to wrap up this question by saying that my /played time at max level is only 12 hours. Of that time I probably have actually done stuff for only 9 or 10 hours, the rest of it was pretending I was going to play but getting pulled away for something else. Granted I’m tanking so I don’t need to worry about LFG times, but the real winner for me was getting iLevel 300 gear from the AH. Overall I spent around 100k and got my iLevel up to 302 (including a couple normal dungeon runs). I hit 307 the next day by getting one piece of iLevel 325 gear from a world quest, and then heroics just keep bumping stuff up. After only a handful of hours yesterday I went from 307 to 317, and the game became much much easier for me — both in terms of tanking and soloing the harder World Quest mobs. So what I’m saying here is don’t be afraid to drop some gold right now on gear, the prices have really sunk in the last few days as more people are leveling up their professions and getting BoEs.

Having played through everything now I think the zones are of equal size and larger. I’m not really feeling that any zone is smaller. What does feel different to me, and I’ve spoken to Joe about this a bit too, is that the density of quests and sheer volume of quests feels greater than other expansions. It’s hard to tell this exactly because it’s just anecdotal right now, but I leveled from 110 to 115 in one zone (Vol’dun), and then only got a quarter of the way through the third zone when I hit 120.

The amount of time it took to complete a 110 to 120 leveling jog was the same as it took for 100 to 110, it felt like to me at least.

What Blizzard seems to have done is make six zones, three of which you start in, and then three of which you’ll go into when you hit max level (the other faction’s zones, with or without PVP turned on). And the three zones you started in have at least somewhat equal if not more than Legion’s initial zones did combined. Again, I don’t have direct evidence of this (I want to ping Perc at Wowhead — maybe they know of a total), but this is the way it feels. I still have an absolute metric ton to do that are going to keep me quite busy, and at the end of the day that’s what I’m after in a long-tail RPG like WoW.

At this point I’d say no, it’s not. Horde and Alliance are solidly going back and forth between zones now, and that little boost was nice while it lasted, but now you’re going to be asking to get snipped by a higher level character out lookin’ for some good ol’ PVP action.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it if you enjoy that — I know a lot of people that have really liked leveling on PVP servers. And some of my friends have turned it on and won’t ever turn it off, that’s cool. But as for those of us that were using it as a bonus, I’d recommend shutting it off now.

Really, look at that salad you guys. It’s the best salad I’ve ever had — from 6smith in Wayzata, Minnesota last night. It’s their Heirloom Tomato Salad with Calabro ricotta, pickled mango, basil, arugula, and various oils. This isn’t even a sponsored post or content, it was just so damn good I had to share with you all because if you’re like me, you’re going to totally try to make this at home now.