It's been a long time since I leveled up several characters to max in a World of Warcraft expansion. I did so at the end of the Battle for Azeroth expansions because I wasn't quite sure which class I wanted to play for Shadowlands. Since then I've only leveled one character to max which I ended up playing for the whole expansion, mostly because World of Warcraft has never been quite alt friendly. That has changed with the War Within.
Side quest mop-up
There's so many good features to mention in the War Within expansion for World of Warcraft but the very best thing to happen to the game in almost 20 years (besides being released) is the Warband feature. This just makes the game so much more alt friendly by making a lot of progress and other things account wide. Earlier you could play for 500 hours on character, getting a lot of progress for yourself, only to feel like you're being punished for wanting to try a new class by having all that progress start over on the new characters.
With Warbands almost everything is account wide. When I started this druid I was able to skip the campaign so that I could focus on side quests instead. I also keep all earlier reputation gains across both my characters, meaning I can also get a bit of a head start with this new character by getting some decent gear for it. I also get to pick and choose how I level up and can choose to complete acitivites I haven't done before which will give further progress to my account. It now feels rewarding instead of punishing to start a new character.
It's also worth a mention that you now get an account wide 5% experience gain buff per character you get to max level, capping out at 5%. That means each character I level up will make the next one faster.
Since this in the case I will most likely be leveling up a few characters throughout this expansion. While I currently love playing as a Death Knight I do also like to change things up a bit. I'm starting out with the druid because it's a class I enjoy and it can be built to be quite speedy which will be helpful for farming older content for mounts and transmogs. I also have the skinning and leatherworking professions on this one that I'm hoping to get some decents crafts and gold making out of.
I've always liked the class fantasy of druids, being one with nature and being able to shape shift into a number of different animals. I decided to go the route of a Guardian druid meaning I mostly shape shift into a tanky bear, making it easy to tag up a lot of mobs and AoE-ing them down. I can still benefit from the movement speed of cat form and flight ability of travel form on the go, but for combat I'm mostly a bear.
I've made it to level 73 so far, meaning there's still 7 levels to go. It's taken me one and a half zones of side quests to get here so I might end up running out of side quests before I get all the way to 80. Luckily there's a ton of other methods to gain experience.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
Awesome to see the game becoming more alt friendly! I remember when you would have to spend days upon days to level up alts!
It's definitely a lot better now. The old classic version is still available if you like the slow pace but this version is just so pleasing.