…OK, still not really, but I did finish one of the big parts of the Legion expansion, the class campaign.  This is a fairly long affair, largely because there are some mandatory timesinks in the middle – you need to recruit NPCs and send them off on missions, those missions take a certain number of hours, and you can only have one of the missions active at once – but using Blizzard’s phone application to dispatch missions when you can’t get to your computer does make the whole process a little more efficient, anyway.

Huh, that was one sentence and I should be ashamed of it.

Anyway:

I also hit a gear milestone Sunday evening, pushing my ilvl up to 825 and opening up the first set of “LFR” raids.  LFR is Blizzard’s way of making large group raiding content accessible to everyone with patience enough to push a button and wait in a queue, and it’s pretty damn brain-dead stuff.  It’s not much more than watching a swarm of locusts devour a corn field that occasionally spits out epic gearz.

I am not good with the metaphors this morning.

Anyway, they pretty much consist of charging forward, nuking everything that looks at you funny, OCCASIONALLY moving so you’re not standing in fire, and looting.  The most challenging mechanic I’ve seen is “hey there are TWO things to tank and you need to move them every once in a while or die”, which is not  a high bar to step over.

If you do manage to wipe somehow, the entire raid gets a buff so you do more damage / take less damage / do more heals, and this buff improves with every wipe.  It really is no-fail raiding, and the rewards are a little less than you’d get from a proper raid, where everyone is on edge and ready to snap at each other for real or imagined shortcomings.

It’s a lot more healthy, though.  There’s really no stress and you get to let your derp flag fly.

Anyway, between some upgrades from those, and some upgrades from finishing the campaign and doing some other things, my ilvl hit a whopping 840 last night, so there are 3 or 4 NEW raids for me to LFR and button mash my way through.  Those are for tonight.

…and I still need to finish running all the group dungeons from this expansion.  They’re way harder than the raids, though, I actually need to pay attention. 🙂