A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Back in October I wrote a post about why I'm currently not playing that much Classic anymore, and I always meant for that to have a kind of part two, in which I talk a bit about why I am still playing retail and how I got back into it in the first place.

"How to get Classic players back into retail WoW" is a question to which I'm sure the Blizzard devs would love to have the ultimate answer... because while a subscription is a subscription regardless of which game mode you play, retail has extra monetisation opportunities that Classic lacks, which I'm sure makes it the much bigger earner of the two, regardless of what the actual player distribution might look like.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video called "I Asked Over 400 Classic WoW Players Why They Don't Like Retail" and the most interesting thing about it to me was the conclusion, as the creator said that he'd originally intended to have a section about how to get Classic players interested into playing retail again, but gave up on the idea when the majority of the people he interviewed flat out said that nothing would bring them back to retail, ever.

I think this reveals that for many Classic players there's a strong emotional component to their dislike for retail, which also expresses itself in a sort of tribalism at times - I've found that in retail environments, nobody really cares if you also play Classic, but in pretty much all the Classic guilds I've been in, admitting that you also play retail is likely to result in persistent (if hopefully friendly) mockery.

I'm not being judgemental of that behaviour here either, because I was in the same boat only a few years ago. When I resubscribed for Classic, I had zero interest in ever playing retail again, and I shared several of the opinions expressed in the above video.

What changed? Well... the biggest and simplest draw to return to retail was curiosity. Having a single subscription for both was a pretty genius move by Blizzard in that regard, because I never would've re-subscribed to retail in specific, but since it was already part of my "subscription plan" so to speak, checking it out again cost me nothing other than giving up a bit of disk space after pressing the "install" button.

And I do suspect that this is something that has worked on other Classic players as well... the problem is that the initial experience you have upon returning is most likely pretty bad. Your natural reaction is probably to log back into the last character you played several years ago, which might have logged out in a location from multiple expansions ago, whose UI will be messed up, and which probably has a bunch of half-empty action bars. The game offers you a free teleport back to the capital nowadays, but I'm not sure how helpful that really is... I still dislike post-Cata Orgrimmar for example and always try to get out of there as soon as I can when playing Horde side.

Either way, even if you put up with the mess that greets you and try to make sense of it, the experience of trying to sort out what's what is likely to exhaust you and make you feel like the whole thing is just an awful chore. I remember that's exactly how I felt when I briefly logged into retail when I first renewed my subscription in the run-up to Classic's launch.

When I actually did start to play retail again, I did so by making an alt, a course of action which would also be my personal recommendation to you if you're a Classic player who's considering giving retail another try, even if you're not usually an alt person. It means that "chores" and elements of confusion come at you at a much more manageable pace, and you have a better chance of re-evaluating the game for what it actually is.

There are two basic strategies here from my point of view:

The first is what I'd call "the nostalgia route", in which you create a character of a race and class you like and start levelling them through familiar zones. While things are likely somewhat different from how you remember them from Classic, familiarity is going to outweigh strangeness, making it much easier to process the things that actually stick out to you as odd. I did this at first by creating a draenei shaman named Bluu and levelling her through the draenei starting zone, followed by having her go to Outland (this was before Burning Crusade Classic). I got a good shot of nostalgia out of the zones and quests, while pausing to be bewildered by things every now and then: Wait, they changed the intro cinematic for draenei, this makes no sense! Why does lightning bolt have no mana cost now? Why is the quest log weird like that now? What's up with the first aid trainer only teaching tailors now? Etc.

The risk with this approach is that you may run into one too many things that hurt your nostalgia after a while and sour your mood: elite quests that aren't elite anymore, barren landscapes where you remember bustling crowds, or confusion about where to go now that boats and portals don't work the way they used to. In addition, with the way scaling works nowadays, questing in old content means that you'll likely fall behind in terms of gearing and will eventually find combat increasingly awkward and drawn out.

Which takes us to the second approach, which is to still make an alt but almost with the opposite attitude: You know that trying to approach retail with nostalgia goggles creates problems, so you opt for a scenario where this won't be an issue, by creating a character of a race and/or class you've never played before, and jump into one of the more recent expansions that you know little to nothing about. This means that you'll be bombarded with more newness and strangeness than on the nostalgic path, but on the plus side, since you don't have expectations you shouldn't be disappointed by failing to have them met. Just read those quests and follow the markers and take in parts of the world you've never seen before. The slower trickle of information and features should still make the experience a lot more manageable than trying to get back to your old main instantly, and you'll get to explore a whole bunch of new content in the process. You can pick your old characters back up again later on if you want, when you're actually used to the UI again and have a better grip on how things work.

This is all under the assumption that you enjoy exploring and questing, which I would expect to be the case for a good chunk of Classic players at least. However, if you're looking to jump right back into group content and endgame, I'll admit that you'll have a tougher time and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Dragonflight and War Within have solo versions of all their dungeons at least, so you can check those out in a low-pressure way the first time around.

I will say that playing retail again hasn't suddenly "converted" me to thinking that it's the better version of WoW or anything. Here's a list of things I still prefer about Classic: 

• The way the whole world is relevant to some degree and how players interact with it by travelling a lot
• The slower-paced levelling and gearing and how it makes everything feel more meaningful, from your connection to your character and the ability to take in your environment to the excitement of getting a rare item drop
  
• The slower-paced combat with its simpler rotations and how it's more about being strategic about things like relative positioning to other mobs than about perfectly executing a complicated rotation
• The way being social is more integrated into general gameplay and the difficulty of just making progress in the world encourages you to co-operate with other players
  

Now, you might read that and go: Wait, what's even left for you to like about retail then? Well...

I think one major point is that I'm an explorer type, and while the Vanilla world is great, I've seen a lot of it by now (I know there are still some things I haven't personally experienced, but not a lot of them to be honest). In retail WoW, there are always new things to try out and new places to see, and since Dragonflight the devs have also made it a lot more rewarding to just cruise around the open world and explore. Nobody can tell me that the zone design isn't still top notch.

I also like how many casual activities they've added over time beyond just grinding dailies/world quests. I loved all the different recurring events they added during Dragonflight, from the communal soup cooking to the time rifts, and War Within has added more of these. They are little things that feel somewhat rewarding to do on pretty much every alt and are just plain fun. Classic has less of a variety of pre-made content: you either quest, do dungeons, raid or PvP.

Most importantly though, Classic is simply not getting any updates, the occasional experiment on a seasonal server not withstanding. Retail WoW is in a unique position in the MMO genre in that it's such a juggernaut with a huge budget, it's been pumping out new content like nobody's business for several years now. (It's fun to think back to when this game used to have "content draughts" of half a year or more. No longer an issue as it stands.) I love that there are always new things to do and new places to see, and even if not every single one of them is a banger, there's still a lot to love for players of all kinds of different persuasions.

War Within's Mythic+ Season 1 Kinda Sucked (For Me)

The new expansion's first season is coming to an end soon, and as I did repeatedly during Dragonflight, I wanted to jot down some thoughts.

I initially wasn't sure whether I wanted to do more M+ in War Within, as I was feeling kind of burnt out and tired of it at the end of Dragonflight and wasn't super optimistic about War Within in general, but then I had a blast once the expansion launched, switching roles from healer to tank was invigorating, and I was rearing to go again.

Unfortunately M+ this season was... not great - in fact it's probably been the major criticism about the expansion from people who actually play it. It's like this dark stain on the expansion's (so far) overall positive reception.

I'd even mentally prepared myself for it to be kind of rough, as we didn't seriously get into M+ in Dragonflight until Season 2 and I'd been told that the content tends to be a lot harder at the start of an expansion than towards the end of it.

What I hadn't been prepared for, however, was how utterly, utterly unrewarding it was, in particular compared to delves. I said early on that I wasn't the biggest fan of delves, but I did power through and tried to find some things to like about them because the loot they gave was insanely good compared to the amount of skill and effort required to complete them. The problem with this is that we all ended up with gear that could only be upgraded in M+ if we ran I think... 7s and up? Something generally above our pay grade, so I and others spent the entire season running M+ purely for the "fun" of it and without gaining any rewards from it other than some currency (crests) and the occasional lucky pull from the Great Vault. Which was kind of disappointing, I'm not gonna lie. I mostly do M+ for the social aspect, but it did kind of suck to challenge ourselves so much and basically get no rewards for it. People will argue about whether M+ rewards were bad or delve rewards too good (I think it's the latter, but your mileage may vary) but ultimately the result was the same.

Oh, and I didn't love that all the affixes were Xal'atath-themed, considering that I'm not her biggest fan. At one point I looked up an addon to make her shut up in M+ but ultimately decided against installing it because I felt I did kind of need the sound cues to know what was happening, even if I was tired of hearing her voice.

Here's my personal ranking of the season's eight dungeons, as usual:

The Dawnbreaker 

This was easily our group's favourite dungeon all season, which I guess aligns with the general perception that people either love or hate this one. We had our fair share of wipes on the first boss, but ultimately it was a fun romp that always felt quick and not too painful. We never had any major issues with the airship bugging out on us or anything like that, and I appreciated the fact that being able to fly inside this instance gave an unprecedented amount of freedom in regards to choosing which trash to kill with your group.

City of Threads

This was another fun one with the killing of the spies in an otherwise neutral area, and I never got tired of listening to the Vizier's voice work feigning shock at our actions. The corridor leading to the last boss caused us issues sometimes, but otherwise this was another dungeon that we were able to time quite reliably relatively quickly.

The Stonevault

I initially wasn't too much of a fan of this one because some of the boss mechanics seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, and we had quite a lot of wipes on several bosses in here until people started to figure out their roles in each fight. Once we got over the worst of that though, it started to become another staple with fairly straightforward pathing that we could deal with reasonably well.

Grim Batol 

I liked this dungeon quite well in Cataclysm, and while I wasn't necessarily too keen on the various upgrades given to the bosses to bring them more in line with modern retail (as in, needing more mechanics and more shit to dodge), none of it was too bad (nothing like Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle during Dragonflight Season 2).

Siege of Boralus

I think this may have actually been the very first dungeon we attempted on M0 back in the day, when we finally got a third person in our guild high enough to join us for some group content. I remember that we tried to under-man it while being over-levelled, but it still went horribly. With that in mind, we didn't do too badly with this dungeon this season, except for a tendency for aggroing way too many unnecessary trash packs and then not quite being able to hit the timer. The bosses were all straightforward and decent fun, but getting to them was the annoying part and for some reason it always felt to me like the trash went on forever. Also, banana peels are my nemesis.

Mists of Tirna Scithe

This dungeon on the other hand was the nemesis of one or more of my group members. It's for the most past fairly inoffensive, if it wasn't for Mistcaller and that damn guessing game... The maze leading up to her wasn't actually that much of an issue, but on the boss fight for some reason seemingly everyone would freeze and be totally unable to solve the puzzle, over and over again. I don't find it hard in principle, but since I was also tanking and needed to pay attention to a cast that could only be interrupted by me and which would kill me if I missed an interrupt, I wasn't always in a good position to call, and the number of times apparently not one of my four guildies (including my husband) could figure out how to find the real Mistcaller among the illusions left me feeling rather bitter towards this dungeon in the end.

Necrotic Wake

People have expressed disdain for having two Shadowlands dungeons in the M+ rotation so soon because of the negative associations people have with that expansion, and I guess I kind of felt that too. And I didn't even dislike Shadowlands, or either of these dungeons in particular! And yet... something about this dungeon always made me feel down the moment we set foot inside it. I blame the fact that during our earliest runs, people were endlessly complaining to me about the trash, about how I should pull this pack but not that, wanting to do awkward skips just for us to end up short at the end and having to go back to the entrance, and so on and so forth. Also, I remember some particularly annoying wipes and fails in this dungeon, such as when one of our damage dealers lost internet close to the end and we continued with one man down and just missed the timer.

Ara-Kara, City of Echoes

First off, please tell me we weren't the only group that struggled with the fact that there were two War Within dungeons called "City of" in the rotation? The amount of times people got confused about that and needed clarification of where we were going was honestly amazing. Other than that... I kind of wanted to like this dungeon actually, because I found it interesting from a trash-pulling and tanking perspective, but the last boss was absolute cancer for our group. I think we did kill her successfully once or twice on low keys, but every visit afterwards was always a pain, mostly due to the pull-in mechanic and us somehow never having enough sticky puddles to stand in. We're quite familiar with failing keys, but we usually still finish every dungeon, even if it takes us a while - except this one: a particularly bad run of Ara-Kara was the one time I remember when we literally just gave up, and one group member was so upset about the whole thing and how it affected him emotionally that he dropped out of M+ altogether. So yeah, can't say this will ever be among my favourites.

---

Loot and tuning fails aside, I'm also once again not sure I want to continue doing M+ going forward. I was so hyped at the start of the season, but one of our members decided to also join a raiding guild and... I didn't think much of it to begin with, because why not, if that's something that interests him? However, after a while it affected the vibe of our runs and not in a good way. At one point I got into an argument with him after he told me wanted to remove someone from our group for not putting enough effort into their gear by grinding delves and timewalking, which I felt was ridiculous for what I thought was supposed to be a group of friends casually socialising. And there were a lot more minor incidents like that, all of which would probably sound quite petty on their own, but which added up to an increasing sensation of nails on chalkboard for me. And at some point I was just like... why am I doing this to myself? Why am I dedicating my Sunday evenings to something that just makes me annoyed with my friends? Aren't there a hundred better ways to spend my time?

So I didn't even get to 2k rating this time around. While I'd technically have almost two weeks left to get a couple more runs in, I just don't want to. We'll see whether anything changes next season, but I've got to admit I'm not hopeful. The gear curve is supposed to be smoothed out significantly, but the dungeon pool looks extremely unappealing to me at a glance, and I just keep thinking of all the things I'd rather be doing. I'm glad I got to give M+ a try and that it didn't turn out to be as scary as I once thought it was, but at the same time it's possible that it's once again time to move on to other things.

So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.

Rune Hunting in Season of Discovery

I mentioned in my last post about SoD that I'd decided to put levelling on the back burner for a bit in favour of hunting down more of my class runes. Yes, I know you can just buy them all from a vendor now, but that just defeats the purpose for me - I don't so much care about having the runes at this point, I just want to see what kind of content/gameplay Blizz put into SoD related to acquiring them.

Back in phase one, I actually collected all but one of the available runes for my priest; the only one I was missing was the one for which you had to grind out various junk items for a goblin in Ratchet so he would turn into a vendor and sell you a rune (this was the same for all classes). I could never be bothered with that one, and when I returned to this goblin recently, I found that while the grindy quests are still there, he's just a vendor by default. I then opted to simply return to Orgrimmar and buy the rune from the trader there for one copper, because if I'm going to just buy these from a vendor, I might as well save myself some cash (the price at the goblin was still three gold).

Then it was time to whip out the Wowhead guide and go travelling around the level 30-40 zones for the phase two runes. The common theme for these seemed to be that they required you to travel a lot, and I tried to get several things done in each location at once for efficiency, but there was pretty much always something I'd forget and that I later had to go back for after all. At least I got my master fishing quest done during these repeated round trips around the world as well.

I also found out that the devs did away with the whole "meditation" thing, a.k.a. the buff sharing mechanic I absolutely adored in phase one (and without which you couldn't actually learn many runes even if you'd found them). Honestly, I was glad. While I thought that the whole concept was an incredibly cool idea a year ago, with most people at level cap and no longer hunting for runes, I think it would've been a massive pain in the rear to acquire those meditation buffs every time I wanted to learn a new rune. 

The tooltips are now a lie. And also a bit broken.

Anyway, about half of the phase two runes were relatively straightforward and uneventful to acquire with a guide. Farm some mobs over here until they drop a thing, click on this item over there that starts a short quest, that sort of thing. However, three runes stood out as more interesting/challenging:

First there was the Dispersion rune, which according to the instructions, first required a rogue to pickpocket a scroll for you, then a mage to decipher said scroll, and then the resulting item starts a quest for the priest to do a couple of bits and bobs in Stranglethorn. Fat chance I'm going to find anyone to help with that at this stage, I thought at first, but then I noticed that the guide said that both the pickpocketed scroll and the deciphered scroll were tradeable and could be sold on the AH. And what do you know... I checked the AH and there was exactly one of the pickpocketed scrolls there, for a rather silly price of six gold or so. However, I was grateful for the opportunity to still do the quest after all, so I bought it and sent it to my mage alt to decipher, which ultimately enabled me to still unlock this rune the originally intended way. I suspect I was rather lucky to achieve that at this point.

Next there was the Spirit of the Redeemer rune, which requires you to hunt down the seven dark riders of Karazhan across the world. This was one of those things I'd heard people talk about in early coverage of SoD phase two, and the general impression I got of said coverage was that this was another task that all classes needed to do for one of their runes, that it was very time-consuming, and that it required a full group. I figured that would be another thing that might be tough to do at this point in the game, but I was tentatively hopeful based on some comments I'd read and the fact that I was a few levels past 40 at this point that I'd be able to solo this one. So I made sure to grab some world buffs before revealing the first rider... and it worked! It was still a somewhat tough fight that required me to blow all my cooldowns and I was out of mana by the end, but it was doable, so I travelled to all seven of the required zones and hunted down the rider in each one. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that each rider hunted down counted as a quest that translated into about one bar of XP at my level, so I actually got a decent amount of that just for working to unlock this one rune.

The biggest challenge however turned out to be the Pain Suppression rune. This one required you to collect items from four different zones in opposite corners of the world (naturally) which you then had to use inside one of the rooms in the library wing of Scarlet Monastery. Now, obviously people are still doing SM runs, but I'd kind of reached a level where groups wouldn't really have been too happy to take me to the library wing (plus I wasn't sure how a pug would feel about me wanting to pause in the middle to faff around with no-longer-required rune stuff), but at the same time I wasn't yet high enough to easily be able to solo the place.

I spent a little time looking for a group but quickly grew impatient and decided to give soloing it a try anyway. As it turned out, a single mob inside the dungeon was easy enough for me to take down at this point, two were doable with mind control but kind of slow, and three were a mad scramble but survivable if I had cooldowns up. So I started to slowly work my way through the first corridor and then the courtyard, with things going wrong several times and forcing me to run back out, usually when I couldn't stop a runner in time.

My little Homunculi were also a bit of a mixed bag. They were incredibly useful in terms of combat capabilities, but they are also uncontrollable and can be stupid unholy little terrors, and would sometimes randomly decide to charge off into another room to pull more when I really couldn't take any more mobs at that particular moment. I survived a lot of close calls, but one time it all got too much and I died. When I ran back in I had to discover to my chagrin that because I'd been so slow, trash at the entrance was already starting to respawn.

I almost gave up at that point, but I was so close to the room I actually needed that I persisted, carving an even narrower path through the respawned mobs to get back to where I was, and eventually I succeeded in getting to the corridor I needed and was able to place my items there to "summon" the rune.

With all the phase two runes polished off, I started to have a look at the phase three ones. There was one that was really easy, only requiring me to kill a regular one mob just outside Gadgetzan. Since it was in the area, I also tried the one that requires you to summon a voidwalker in a waste wanderer camp, but that went horribly wrong since it was an elite, immune to shadow damage (never great news for a priest) and had an absolutely horrific damage output. So I died and decided to leave that one for another day.

Time to get back to actual levelling.

Plunderstorm Redux

Plunderstorm is back (for a bit) and it's been updated. Kaylriene is quite enthused by the changes, but to me, they've been more of a mixed bag. I like that they added horses out in the open world that work like a temporary speed boost, and the fact that regular mobs respawn now is great in so far as I've been able to hit level 10 for the first time ever. (In the past, even if I lived quite long, by the end the map used to be completely scoured of all NPCs and treasures, so it was no longer possible to gain experience past a certain point.) Blizzard also added a training lobby, which is a nice enough idea but is basically just a copy of the pre-match lobby that doesn't time out.

Some new abilities were added as well, and while that's interesting in principle, it also feels to me like it's made it harder than ever to actually upgrade your weapons throughout the match as the odds that you'll just get a dozen different abilities drop at level one are also increased.

In addition, you can now queue up for Plunderstorm while you're logged into one of your WoW characters, which is a thing some people wanted I believe, but I didn't particularly care for. When I log in to play Plunderstorm, I'm often quite happy to just do that and don't want to do anything in "regular" WoW anyway, so I still prefer going in from the character selection screen as it is. In fact, I was rather miffed when I couldn't find that option anymore after a couple of days and appeared to be "stuck" being unable to change the look of my Plunder character (as you don't get access to the character customisation option when queueing from within WoW itself). It was only about a week later that I realised you could still select Plunderstorm from character selection, they just hid it away in a drop-down menu for some reason.

You also get to choose a colour-coded "drop zone" at the start of the match now, and you'd think that having more choice like that would make the game better, but to me it's honestly just made things more boring. It feels like the population self-segregates very heavily now, which makes matches a lot more predictable. As someone who's not good at the PvP part and just enjoys collecting shinies for the rewards, I tend to choose one of the "green" zones, and they do indeed tend to be pretty empty or at least few people that land there will immediately look for a skirmish. This makes it easier to get your daily objective done, but it's honestly also a bit boring. Yet if I try to "mix it up" by choosing one of the harder zones, that just means that I get ganked moments after landing and get nothing done. It makes me miss the chaos of players of different types all getting jumbled together randomly.

Fortunately I don't need to be too excited about the mode this time around, as Blizzard massively ramped up the rate of plunder acquisition, which I do think is another good thing, even if I found it slightly amusing. It's as if they really did hear all the feedback after the anniversary event about how they are always too conservative with rewards at the launch of something new and decided to go "OK, allow them to go all out and be done within a few hours this time if they want; let's see how they like it". I only play about a match a day but am able to buy something from the new Plunderstore after almost every match, and since there are more returning rewards (which I all earned last time) than new ones, I don't even have that many items left to chase after two weeks. But hey, it is what it is; I'll continue to play in small doses for the duration of the event. I just think it's actually a little less fun now than it was.

ALL The Addons!

A few weeks ago, Wowhead drew my attention to a YouTube video called "What happens if you install EVERY ADDON for WoW Classic?" by Baltoboulbobbi. I clicked because the title intrigued me, but by god, I was not ready for what it showed me. It's not a very long video, only about seven minutes, but that's still a pretty long time to keep laughing, so my husband eventually grew concerned about what had me quite so amused.

At the time, the video had about 80k views, and I noticed that the pinned comment by the creator was "If this gets 20k views I'll do a 1-60 all addons challenge on a hardcore server". Someone asked whether he was seriously planning to do that, and he replied that he'd already started.

Needless to say, I immediately proceeded to his stream archive and started watching that too. At the time of writing this, I've watched about four hours of him streaming like that, and while it's been both funny and fascinating, I'm not sure I'll be able to take much more of it.

If you've ever watched someone else play a game awkwardly and found yourself fighting the urge to give them advice and tell them to do things differently, watching this stream is similar but ten times worse. The whole experience is just so painful to watch, Balto must have extraordinary patience to deal with it as calmly as he does, and it's rare that you notice any kind of annoyance sneak into his voice at all.

It's really quite astounding just how awkward the game is to play with all those unknown addons stacked on top of each other. Aside from the fact that all the extra windows mostly obscure his view of the actual game, they also break all kinds of other game functionality in unexpected ways.

For example he has no mini map, and the map addon that asserted itself always opens the map with a single view of the full continent, so that he then has to scroll about twenty times to get to the right corner of the actual zone he is in. With his visibility so limited and navigational tools largely out of action, he managed to get lost more than once even just trying to navigate the dwarven starter zone. He states early on that he's never actually played a dwarf before, which manages to make everything even worse as he doesn't even have the "legacy knowledge" of where the quests are and what they require.

Inventory turned out to be another tricky matter, as all the different bag addons created a situation in which he couldn't actually view or interact with anything in his inventory. He eventually figured out that he could get it to open any time he interacted with a vendor, but that was kind of it. At one point he also managed to somehow accidentally unequip his weapon, which started to sink in only slowly once he noticed that his little dwarf paladin was now punching things to death with his fists. Just locating his weapon again and getting it back into his hands was almost a mini adventure in itself.

It's not all doom and gloom, mind you. The addon that announces "You may now drink" in a weirdly snooty tone every time his character gets out of combat never gets old, and another one plays the sound of a metal bar clanging on certain occasions, though I don't think anyone's figured out yet what triggers it. Another one starts playing a repeating "sproing" sound at intervals that goes on for some time and then stops again, sometimes getting faster for a while... but again, it's open to interpretation what it all means. It just gives the notion of "coming up with new ways of playing the game" a whole new meaning.

Levelling Through Raiding in Season of Discovery

I've kind of stopped caring so much about my alts in SoD and have been more focused on just continuing to level my priest at the moment. I hit level 40 during a Scarlet Monastery run that was funny because in Cathedral, we had so much dps that we bugged out the last fight and Whitemane died from dots and totem damage before she could actually revive Mograine, something I didn't think was possible. This bugged out the fight so we only got one piece of loot and no quest completion, but most of the group was happy to just reset the instance and go again.

Also, I noted in my last post about SoD that buffing a full group with fortitude "still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD", so I was rather chuffed when one of the bosses in SM dropped a priest scroll that reduced the mana cost of fort by 50% while also extending its duration by the same amount. This is the kind of change I can get behind!

Once we were done in SM, I manually legged it back to Brill in anticipation of getting my ground mount. I wasn't sure whether I was actually going to be able to afford it since I didn't have 90 gold yet, but I was hopeful that with how much certain things had been streamlined and sped up in SoD, the price might have been reduced and I would be able to afford it anyway. This turned out to be correct.

At this point I thought I should maybe start focusing a bit more on getting my professions and runes caught up before doing more questing, but I hadn't yet been fishing for half an hour when a warlock whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go to Gnomeregan (the raid). I replied that I hadn't done it before but was up for it and quickly got an invite, which was followed by a summon only a few minutes later.

We killed the first boss with no issues, but wiped on the second one due to massive AoE. The warlock (who was also the main tank - what is it with warlock tanks in SoD?!) just went "adds?!" and rage-quit the group. I thought that was quite funny, considering he'd been the one to actually put the raid together and didn't seem to have any issues with inviting people who openly said that they'd never done this before. Talk about giving up quickly.

The rest of us hung around and tried to get a replacement, but without a summon we knew it would take a while for them to arrive. We spent about fifteen minutes sitting around waiting for this shaman to make it to Booty Bay for the teleport, just for them to notice the level 60 we had in the group and go "oh, never mind, I just wanted to come for the XP" and leave again. (I think they were worried that a 60 in the group would nerf their XP too much?) We just nine-manned it in the end and had another wipe, but once people finally understood that the adds had to die, the fight was easy-peasy and we were able to move on.

Crowd Pummeler seemed pretty straightforward, and I commented that the XP was pretty good even with the level 60 in the group. That remark clearly jinxed it for everyone, as on the next boss, everybody but the level 60 died, and he shaved off the last sliver of the boss's health all by himself, which meant that none of us got any XP for it, being dead at the time.

On Menagerie (an encounter completely new to SoD) we wiped once because people didn't make sure to get the bosses down at the same time. On the second attempt we were successful, but then Thermaplugg spawned right in the middle of the room and even though we'd been warned about that, someone immediately aggroed him and we wiped again. At this point the level 60 and two others quit the group, but the new raid lead valiantly made an attempt to find a few more replacements, including another level 60. In the end we gave Thermaplugg a few more tries with nine people, but we only got as far as the third phase with basically no mana and immediately dying to massive damage at the start of the phase, so we eventually called it there.

I didn't get any loot but was still happy to have had the opportunity to see the raid. Even though I recalled Blizzard buffing XP gains in BFD when phase two launched, I wasn't sure how common it was for people to actually run the low-level raids as levelling content. The XP was indeed very good, even with the level 60 in the group and me only being alive for four boss kills, as I gained more than a full level of experience from that run. I'd kind of like to go again at some point to see whether another group might be a bit more successful (and with me having the advantage of actually knowing the fights now) but I probably won't put too much effort into finding a group since there are plenty of other sights to see still.