I’ve never really been one to play alts in World of Warcraft because, in general, redoing everything I’ve already done doesn’t appeal to me very much. The only time I’ve actively played an alt has been during Wrath of the Lich King, and that was only because my guild was transitioning to be casual and I wasn’t ready for that yet. So, I made an alt to raid with another guild during my off nights. Aside from that one time, alts have pretty much been an end-of-expansion activity for me. So, it is with great surprise that I have a second max-level character, and I’m thinking about maybe leveling a third as well. What is it about Dragonflight that makes it so fun to do on alts?
My main is a Guardian Druid, as it has been ever since Legion. I’m still really enjoying it, and I do love tanking. But after hitting raiding and M+ hard since the season started, I noticed I was beginning to feel a little burnt out on tanking everything all the time. I also found myself pretty sick a few weeks ago, so I decided to get to play my dracthyr and see how that went. Until then, aside from doing the starting area and heading back to the Dragon Isles, all I had done with my dracthyr was run around mining and skinning some things. However, I decided it was time to actually work on gaining some levels with her.
The first thing I noticed that really set a positive vibe was, that I had the option to follow the story or not as I saw fit. Choosing to do side quests or world quests didn’t mean that I couldn’t go back to the storyline when I wanted to. After the way, Shadowlands alt leveling was structured this was a real breath of fresh air. After putting around doing dragonriding races and world quests, I decided to punt over to the Azure Span to work through the questline there. I hadn’t spent much time in that zone on my main, and I did enjoy the main storyline, so I figured that would be a good first zone to focus on. Following the storyline in Azure Span also didn’t lock me out of going back and doing anything else. This, more than anything else, is what facilitated me leveling an alt. How I leveled was consistently a question of what I wanted to do, not what I needed to do.
I was also incredibly surprised to discover that the weekly quest Aiding the Accord, was available to me while leveling my alt. On its own, it isn’t a huge source of experience, but it was a nice bonus, and the rep rewards make it easier to level up my renown with the various factions. I still wish that renown rep levels were shared across account, but on the Brightside, every character will get those quest rewards where you choose between different cosmetic rewards. This means that it is possible to get every single cosmetic reward without having to bother with however many bear spines it would cost to buy the variations.
Honestly, the biggest downside I’ve encountered is that since I leveled through a very random combination of things, my Evoker has a ton of story quests littering every map. This makes finding the things I want to do much harder to see. I wish that once I got to level 70, there was someone I could talk to in Valdrakken so I could mark all the leveling quests as complete. That would have been super convenient. I originally thought I’d want to do them again, but I’ve very quickly realized I’m not ever going to. There’s just too much other stuff I want to do on my Evoker, and the renown I get from doing those quests isn’t at all motivating. Overall, the leveling experience has been great on my alt; I just need some way to mark the story and campaign quests as being complete once I hit level 70.
Gearing her up has also been crazily easy, even considering I am completely ignoring the gear I could get from getting my renown up and doing elemental overload collection. Given a choice, I’d rather do Mythic+ dungeons or LFR to obtain gear. That said, for players who don’t like group content as much getting renown levels up and spending a bunch of time farming up the elemental overload currency and sigils is a great way to obtain higher ilvl gear. World Quests are also a good source, but I feel like I see the slots up all the time and never see others. Just this last week, it was shoulders and belts all of the time. Meanwhile, I’ve been hoping for leg rewards, but I’ve had no luck at all with that.
All in all, the alt game in Dragonflight is miles better than it was in Shadowlands, and I’m already thinking about what my next alt will be. Hopefully, they will be able to keep improving the quality of life for players when it comes to playing alts. The key really seems to be in letting us choose what we want to repeat and skip things we don’t want to do again, on an individual basis. I guarantee that the things I find annoying to do more than once aren’t the things others find frustrating. How’s everyone else finding the alt game this time around?
