No achievement spam today.

(Well, maybe one.)

Soloing the Dragon Soul raid – taking on Deathwing, the final boss of Cataclysm – is apparently dead simple for any level 100 character.  I did it at 95, and it turns out that even being ten levels above the intended level for a raid isn’t always enough to make up for not having the other nine guys with you.

What I’m saying is, I died more than I’d like to admit.

But, it ended with a nice cutscene where all of the dragons I DIDN’T kill told me how awesome I was, so good times all around.

When I wasn’t butting heads with old raid content, I was burning through levels 91 to 100 by running Warlords of Draenor dungeons, and managed to wrap up all of the non-heroic ones.  Had some spectacularly-competent groups, some less-competent groups, and some beautiful drama along the way.

My favorite, I think, was in a group for Iron Docks, one of WoD’s early instances, where we had a paladin tank who just didn’t quite seem familiar with the zone and was having a bit of trouble with aggro, but the group was willing to work with him…

…right up until the point where he admitted he didn’t know how to change from a dps mode to tank mode.  That was followed by one of the quickest group kick votes I’ve ever seen.

Eventually I got to level 100, ran all of the level-100-minimum dungeons and trotted my butt over to Tanaan Jungle to get some gear upgrades (and I’m playing a Draenai, a race of space goats, so “trotted” is the appropriate verb).

Space.  Goat.

As an aside, WoD introduced a feature that I’m absolutely in love with – lots and lots of overland enemies you can kill that drop nice items, but only the first time you kill them – so, while they’re basically loot pinatas, they discourage farming the same ones over and over.  They’re even helpfully pointed out on the map with pretty yellow stars when you get close enough to them.

Sadly, that is the only nice thing I can say about WoD overland zones.  While the expansion had some great dungeons, the outdoor zones are frustrating as all get out when you’re on foot and unlocking flight is a massive undertaking.

Anyway, freshly kitted out in the spoils of my farming, I went back to Stormwind and started the quest chain taking me to Legion, the most recently-released expansion.  Considering I’ve only been playing for a hair over three weeks, that is a fast catch-up by MMO standards.

One of the Big Features in Legion is the Artifact Weapon Quest, which gives you a sword or dagger or bonky stick that you will be upgrading over the course of the expansion – there are no other weapons dropped in the expansion.  It has me flashing back a bit to LotRO’s terrible, terrible Legendary Weapon system, but hopefully Blizzard will handle it better than Mythic did.

I rather expected the whole process of going through the Legion intro story and earning my Artifact Weapon would take a while, so it was quite surprising when it took barely over an hour before I was triumphantly holding my new shiny weapon aloft.

Now, I’ll be grinding and upgrading the thing for AGES, but at least it wasn’t too painful getting to this point.Next up – I need to gear a little before I can start Legion dungeons, and then I can actually run Legion HEROICS once I’m done with those, and then there are MYTHIC versions after that, and old raids and zones to bash, and more leveling to do and……well, this could keep me busy a while.