All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zek'vir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.