My Apologies to League of Legends

My Apologies to League of Legends

I've been having ongoing login issues with my primary game, World of Warcraft. I could make angry accusations at what I went through, but I've cooled down enough to let that all go now. While wrestling with that issue, I went looking for something else to play, and League of Legends (LoL) was recommended. League of Legends is a free game that is a lot of fun to play. I went so far as to get it installed (simple and easy) take the short "get to know the game" tutorial, and played a few tune up games against the computer. Unfortunately, real life intervened and my gaming time went down considerably for a time.

When I was able to spend a little more time on playing, the issues with the Warcraft login were finally (hopefully) resolved by switching from the standard Warcraft Launcher to the Battle.net launcher, which seems to avoid the login issues. That's the long way around of explaining why I'm not playing LoL.

Back to Warcraft, I checked into getting the pre-release upgrade from Mists of Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor (WoD). The WoD expansion won't be available until the end of the year, but buying the pre-release still allows me to "boost" one character up to the max 90 level. I have planned all along to boost Jocelyn, my young level 27 paladin, to level 90. Today I did just that. She got a new set of i483 gear, courtesy of the boost. She got Holy spec gear (for healing), which is what I wanted. Wild and JB had also been collecting gear on the Timeless Isle, and had six pieces of i496 gear available for Jocey. She chose Retribution (damage dealing) as her secondary spec and used the Timeless Isle gear to fill some of her retribution gear slots. Jocey had about 7,000 gold and spent most of it buying fill in pieces. Surprisingly, Jocey hasn't asked Happy for any gold. Yet. I thought that the gear for sale would be cheap, but knowing that boosted players are going to need additional gear has kept prices fairly high. The closer to the release of WoD, the higher the price will get for that gear. Jocey likely got a bargain by buying early.

Getting a boosted character was relatively easy. After paying the $50 (it's $60 for additional character boosts after the first one), a button appears on the character screen. You have to decide what your main spec is, and once that is done the change appears instantaneously. The character gets a full set of gear for the selected spec, and then there is the work of setting talents and buying the secondary spec from the trainer. I was really annoyed when Jocey seemed to have lost all of the items in her bags. She got a full set of embersilk bags, which was great, but they were empty! Not to worry - it took about a half hour, but Jocey got mail and all of her old gear and items in her bags were all returned to her. Note, though, that boosting a character under level 60 will wipe out all profession gains made. I planned on changing Jocey's professions anyway, so it was no big deal to me. At level 90 she should be able to grind through her professions pretty quickly.

All in all it was a pretty simple and painless transition. Now I just need to learn how to play a paladin again.