Kamalia is at Artifact Knowledge 10, with 23 traits in Sharas’dal and 15 traits each in the Fist of Ra-den and the Doomhammer. She has relics for all three slots of all of her Artifacts. I just got to the point with her Leatherworking where I need my Enchanting alt and one of my Mining alts to come out to the Broken Isles and start working on their professions to get the stuff that Kam will need to buy the rank 1 Dreadleather and Gravenscale patterns. She’s not quite to Revered with the Valarjar or the Wardens yet, and I’d like to get her to Exalted with Highmountain. There’s a dungeon loot piece of shoulder armor that I’d like to use for Transmogrification that I haven’t seen drop yet, so I should try to run a daily Heroic with her until I get it. And then I think I’ll be pretty much “done” with Kamalia — for RP personality reasons, I’ve decided to pursue the Suramar storyline with my Mage and the Xe’ra/History of Illidan questline with my Demon Hunter — and I’m starting to feel ready to be “done” with Kamalia so that I can start playing with my alts more.
After having seen all of the Shaman campaign and the opening scenes of the Mage and Demon Hunter campaigns, I’ve decided that my primary, overarching goal for Legion is to complete all of the Class Order Hall campaigns.
Before Legion launched, I had a plan for how I was going to manage my alts. I was going to bring them all out to the Broken Isles, get their first Artifact weapon, and establish their Order Halls, one by one, starting with the alts that I have the least overall interest in playing and ending with the alts that I thought I’d want to do a lot of Legion stuff with. After that, I would play with whichever character I felt the most like playing with in the moment.
Then in the early days of Legion, I read posts by folks who’d hurried to get all their alts through those initial stages and were feeling totally overwhelmed by all the lore of the Artifact storylines, too overwhelmed to process it all. I decided that maybe I’d better not try to rush all my alts to the Broken Isles, but rather space them out and let myself have time to savor each character’s unique stories.
A little later, it became apparent that just getting to the Broken Isles, getting that first Artifact weapon, and getting into the Order Hall wasn’t really going to be enough for me to feel like I could just let a character idle in her Order Hall — I would want to get each character to level 101 to get the first pair of Champions and open up the Order Hall missions. Gnomecore calls this “The Pawn Move”. I took my Demon Hunter out to the Broken Isles first of all my alts, and having her sitting in the Fel Hammer at level 100 felt… pointless. My Mage was already level 101 by the time I took her to the Broken Isles, and being able to do that Order Hall stuff immediately was more fun. I have a couple of other alts who have been doing old dailies and will probably reach 101 before I get them to the Broken Isles… but do I want to try to do that with all my alts? (Corollary question — are there any past expansion reps that I might want to work on with any of my alts?)
Now my Mage is level 103 and has the quest for the next stage of her Order Hall campaign. Steadily moving my alts through two levels at a time, to get to the next piece of their Order Hall campaign would be following Gnomecore’s Chessboard strategy.
What I’m trying to decide now is — do I want to do that? Or do I want to focus on one character at a time and try to do everything I want to do in Legion with that character before moving on to the next one?
If I’m only playing one character at a time, though, has Legion effectively broken my altoholism?
Why yes, yes they have broken your Altoholism. It is almost as if they have to settle into specific roles to justify their “time spent”. However! I see several of my friends fully moving their profession alts to 110 and crafting away, so it can be done.
I have to say that by earning relics that my “new off spec” starts with a pretty high ilevel even without traits and that made me happy.
Getting to 110 by “alt”ernate means (lets say fishing and pet tamer dailies in the Eastern Kingdom) could easily be done and now WQ open at 110 pending the original trailblazing by your main — the question is: could you survive in 700 gear?
I don’t think I want to try to get to 110 by alternative leveing paths before going to the Broken Isles — just to 101 so that I can get that Order Hall stuff going right away.
I don’t *want* to have my altoholism broken! So as I was musing in my reply to Gnomecore, I think I might start working on the Chessboard Strategy with my alts once I’m “done” with Kam.
[…] asks the question has Legion effectively broken my Altholism? This is a response to a post by Bio Break and helps me see the player […]
First of all, thank you for the backlinks!
I don’t find playing alts too hard in Legion. We’re two months into expansion, and my 12 alts of different classes feel very confident about where we are.
I have got only half a level and half of Highmountain questline to make all the alts reach 110 – that’s hardly an hour of gameplay. We are all deep in Class Order Hall campaigns, three already finished. Yes, there’s much to do in Legion even for one toon, but it’s not a disaster for 12 ‘mained’ alts either.
I guess the secret is not trying to hurry with your main and rush to the highest gear asap. It’s just a different approach. I play my alts for different experience, and I’m not in a hurry to enter raids, mythic what’s-its and all. They just take their time – we’ll be there, it’s inevitable 🙂
I actually rather like your idea of bringing up all your characters in parallel, as it were, rather than in series. I definitely don’t want to reach the end of Legion and have some alts left at level 100 (or low 100s) because I hadn’t managed to get to them yet — and I don’t really want to do again what I did in May at the end of Warlords and burn all my alts up to max level over just a couple of weeks.
At the same time, I kind of feel like I need to be “done” with Kam before I spent a lot of time with alts, or I’ll always feel conflicted over playing with alts versus pursuing Kam’s goals.
Maybe after I’m “done” with Kam then I should level my alts in parallel until they all reach 110, and then focus on one alt at a time to complete their Order Hall campaigns, and then do Suramar with my Mage… And when new patches come, I can take a couple of weeks to do new content with Kam, and then go back to working on alts.
I’m sticking to the “play who I feel like playing, plans be damned” strategy. Like you, my goal is to complete all of the class campaigns, but I’m leaving it as simple as that. If I try to have a more detailed plan than that, I stop having fun. So far it seems to be working as I have alts at 106, 105, 104, 103, a couple at 102, etc. I started out playing whoever ran out of order resources because that kept them from doing anything, but now that I can trade Bloods for resource caches for my alts, I can continue doing whatever I want. 😀
The Bloods for Order Resources is the most best thing about that vendor, for sure!
I wrote up a draft of a post with a fairly detailed list of things I would like to do with my alts — reps to grind, order hall armor set pieces to obtain, hidden artifact appearances to try to get — but then I trashed it and wrote this post instead. I, too, have found that if I make *too* detailed a list of things I want to accomplish in a play/hobby activity, doing that activity turns into a chore and stops being fun and I wander away from it.
I had big plans for my alts and they have pretty much fallen through. Cat hogs all the time. I have a suspicion that Cat (me) won’t let go as she’s sure as soon as she does an alt would get a legendary and it would kill her, okay me.
This is ridiculous as I don’t do enough of the kind of activity to get one and I’m also NOT lucky with RNG. The best thing I’ve received out of an emissary reward was one of those coins. I guess if I’m going to be ridiculous it might as well be in a game.
Kam is certainly hogging all of my time, too — though not in hopes of getting a legendary. I know I’m not doing enough of the right kinds of things to get one… eh, whatever. If and when I ever get a legendary, then I might start stockpiling resources with the intention of doing that last order hall research. Until then? Not worth the trouble.
Legion has put a large dent in my altoholicism so I’ve focused down a lot. I’m also focusing on one at a time since I’m mostly leveling by pet battles and you can only do the trainers once a day. Once they are at 110 I’m cherry picking world quests but mostly just sitting back and letting artifact research tick along for now. I’ll do the order hall campaign done on each of them eventually. The main is still definitely getting the most attention and I think that will continue for a long time with so much to do.
I had 16 max level toons across both factions at the end of WoD and am planning to level 7 of them. I *might* go as high as 10 but I really doubt I’ll reach the upper digits again. I think it’s a good thing though.
Keeping that artifact research going will be one of my priorities once my alts start hitting 110, too. I’ll probably be doing the cherry picking of World Quests for faction rep and AP, as well — there’s no way I’ll be able to do WQs with every character every day!
If I’m remembering correctly, it’ll be Pet Battle bonus week either next week or the week after that. I’m going to try to get some leveling done via Pet Battling during that week — both of pets and of characters!