Well, obviously I didn’t BEAT WoW, but I did get to level cap, which took almost exactly a month.

I could have done it much more quickly, but there is just something irresistible about going back to old content and stomping raids, even if I have zero nostalgia for the days when the raids were current content.

Getting from 100 to 110 was a very different experience from my path to 100, because one of the big changes Blizzard made for the Legion expansion was to dramatically reduce dungeon XP.  If you want to get to 110, you are going to be running quests.  (Or doing PVP)

There’s a lot of player power locked behind the questlines, as well.  One of the neater features of this expansion are “Order Halls”, which are little pieces of the world carved out for, and accessible to, only members of the class you’re playing.  They’re very busy places, and it’s pretty neat to be seeing dozens of versions of what you once were / what you could have been / what you still could be run past you.  Every one also comes with its own questline, gated by levels and reputation and quest completions, and they’re all designed with enough annoying time sinks to ensure that you will be working on the quests for several weeks.

So, it was a big change for me.  Less “get four other players, follow them through a dungeon keeping the bars full, get loot, repeat” and MUCH more “go kill ten harpies, because harpies need killing”.

I lucked out in one very important aspect of timing, however.  Last week was what Blizzard calls “timewalking”, where you and four other people get scaled back to make you effectively level 70 and then tossed into a level 70 dungeon.  As you get loot in the dungeon, it’s actually loot for your character at their “real” level, so I got to very quickly gear up after reaching level 110, well past what normal dungeons would provide.  In theory, I’m already at the gear level to start running Legion Heroic dungeons – in practice, I should probably wait until I’ve run them all at normal difficulty.

So, basically, in my “pancake batter” MMO model, I’m past the long slow drip of batter from the mixing bowl and on the griddle where it all spreads out and cooks.   This is also right about the point where stuff can either still be fresh and exciting, or where I realize that I’ve seen everything, am only logging on to make the numbers bigger and should probably log off again until there’s another expansion.  So far, I haven’t reached that last point.