Turtle WoW: Notes from a Dying Server

At the time of me writing this, Turtle WoW has less than a week left to live. I haven't dropped everything to binge Turtle above everything else, but I've been happy with the number of hours I've been able to get in. My high elf hunter is level 43 and I'm hoping to wrap up one last custom zone before the server goes down.

The moment I hit level 40 I bought my blue racial mount. Call me basic but I enjoy an elf on a unicorn.

After the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the shutdown announcement, the server has been getting a lot quieter. Nordanaar used to have thousands of concurrent players, but within days it was down to a few hundred whenever I checked, and has remained at that level pretty consistently since then. To be clear, I've played on servers that size before and it's actually a perfectly fine population level to have a good time with - it's just sad here in the context of how quickly and sharply activity dropped off. The same applies to the auction house, which still had 50k+ listings the day of the shutdown announcement, then half of that, then half of that, and with only a week to go we're down to about 5k active auctions.

The people who were already pretty invested in the server and its community have mostly tried to pack up and move somewhere else as a group from what I can tell. The guild message of the day has been "AQ40 8/9 - Great Job - C'thun kill Monday" for weeks. I wonder whether they ever did go back for C'thun, but I kind of doubt it. The one officer (?) who still checks in did a bunch of promotions the other day, which resulted in my level 43 becoming a "Core-Raider", which amused me. I'm guessing it was just a simple way to increase everyone's guild bank permissions for the final weeks or something.

I think most of the people who remain are in a similar situation to me and just want to see some more of the content/enjoy some more of the vibes before it all goes away. I'm grateful for those who still put things up for auction, not to get rich but to help out other adventurers who might still benefit from certain items on their journeys. I remember when I used to vendor all my iron ore because there was just too dang much of it circulating - over the last few days I went back to listing everything I mined and sold all of it for a decent profit, though I primarily hope that it's simply been useful to someone. I've also been on the other end of this as I had to buy some green trousers after accidentally vendoring my previous pair, purchased an enchanting material I needed for a quest, and a player-crafted item that was required to continue levelling my jewelcrafting.

In general, while my focus has been on doing some more exploring, I haven't been "min-maxing" the experience in that respect. I still pause to fish here and there and do some crafting. At one point I did the quests to unlock the last rank of cooking and first aid. For what purpose? Because it was fun.

Touring some of the old zones for the cooking quest was a reminder of just how much Turtle WoW modified in those as well. In the Hinterlands I found a narrow mountain path that led me all the way up to a troll village that was located on a sort of overhang from the Hinterlands into Arathi, which did make me a bit wistful about the many more things I now wasn't going to get a chance to see.

A few days ago, the Turtle WoW devs also launched the "Fantastical Farewell Faire", a little event to allow players to get together one more time for the server's shutdown. A faire barker in town will offer to teleport you to Moonwhisper Coast, another custom zone, this one located north-east of Winterspring. They put up some Darkmoon Faire style tents and activities there that allow you to earn a currency called "Turtle Coin", with which you can buy some random items like pets and mounts.

I'm sure many must wonder why people would bother with any of that at a point when the shutdown is so near, but I found it a nice gesture. There's also a vendor who sells all kinds of raid consumables for cheap, presumably to help those players who are trying to get a few more clears in and might find the auction house no longer a source of sufficient supply. Additionally, there are a couple of quests, including one to light the way for the "Great Turtle Spirit", which actually made me tear up a bit.

I'd kind of like to be there when the server shuts down for good, to take one last screenshot and see who else is there for one last hurrah, but I don't know if that will align with my work hours. We'll see.

The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.

The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.

Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs, and the family of blacksmiths down south.

What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd. 

There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.

At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.

One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.

Drinking from the (Buggy) Content Hose

WoW Midnight got its first content patch last week. Despite only being a "minor" patch, 12.0.5 introduced no fewer than four new casual activities (among other things): Abyss Angling, Decor Duels, Void Assaults and Ritual Sites.

My first impression of all of them is that they are... fine. I've had fun trying them all out, and I'll probably do at least some of them a few more times, especially the Ritual Sites. However, I also would have been perfectly fine without them. Midnight has been out for less than two months and I'm far from being done and bored with the launch content. I didn't need even more stuff on my plate. It all feels like a bit much to be honest, even if I'm not necessarily a completionist who needs to do all the things. I didn't think it was possible for an MMO to overwhelm people with constant additions of new stuff, but at least to me, WoW feels like it's coming close right now.

This relentless onslaught of more content also comes at a price. This patch was apparently so buggy at launch that Blizzard actually felt the need to officially apologise for it. I wasn't affected too badly myself, but I'm not surprised it happened as this is something that has been building up for a while. It's kind of wild how we went from "Blizzard polish" and "we'll release it when it's ready" to the complete opposite, with new releases being pushed out the door on a strict schedule seemingly no matter what state they are in.

Not sure if this counts as a bug or is just down to my old rig, but the most noticeable new nuisance since the patch for me has been that the water graphics in the new zones go bananas sometimes. 

I remember when I started playing WoW back in 2006, bugs in the game were basically not a thing. I'm not saying there literally wasn't a single one, but they just weren't something I ever encountered. (Now, server stability was a huge issue at the time, but that's a different kettle of fish.) And Blizzard maintained that reputation for polish for a pretty long time, even as they piled on expansions.

Over time, some bugs did start to appear here and there, but it still wasn't too bad. The first time I used the "bugs" tag on this blog was in 2015, and even that was in relation to a private server. I didn't have cause to use it while talking about official WoW until 2021, in this post about a Shadowlands patch. 

And then with Dragonflight, the flood gates opened. I generally loved Dragonflight, and while I did notice that the increased content cadence seemed to come with a trade-off in the form of a lack of polish, at the time it didn't seem too bad yet. In War Within things escalated, and while I really enjoyed the Nightfall event for example, it was an utterly buggy mess at its launch.

With Midnight, things have ramped up yet again, and I've gotten used to encountering bugs everywhere. They're usually not game-breaking show stoppers, but noticeable nonetheless, from activity trackers not working and settings that won't stay saved to just randomly buggy quests. There's a world quest in Silvermoon where Magister Rommath asks you to spy on the newcomers to the city, which had been so hastily copy and pasted from a previous expansion that the written instructions still said to "take pictures of the wildlife" for weeks, which I thought was pretty hilarious in context.

I've been wondering whether and when we'd reach a tipping point, and I wonder if this is it or if we're still not there yet.

The thing is, I have sympathy for the Blizzard devs here. By nature, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my own work - I'm human and make mistakes, sure, but I'll always strive towards 100%. However, in over a decade of working at the same large company, I had to learn to let a lot of things go or else go insane. I've been lectured about the 80:20 rule and how some things are just not worth doing from a business point of view. Some bugs you just write a ticket for, knowing full well that they are never going to get fixed because you just can't demonstrate the business value of fixing a typo and some wonky looking formatting, and I'm guessing that the WoW devs face some of the same pressures. It's probably better for the financials to work on the next content patch to improve retention than to fix some bug that most people will never encounter, never mind unsubscribe over. The impact this has on brand perception is not a metric that is easy to measure and demonstrate the value of.

I'm also not really upset because I've got to confess that my own tolerance for that kind of thing in MMOs has actually increased over time, even if admitting that marks me as not the most discerning of customers. I play SWTOR as my main MMO and that game has been buggy as heck ever since its launch. To this day, you've got to expect every major patch to have at least a couple of very noticeable and annoying bugs, and I know people who intentionally hold off on playing any new content for at least a few days to wait for some live bug testing first and then go in once the worst of it is fixed. If WoW is going down the same path, I'm not someone who'll easily be put off by that, but at the same time it's still a shame, because I honestly don't need quite such an aggressive patch cadence to stay interested anyway.

Turtle WoW Dungeons: Crescent Grove vs. Stormwrought Ruins

Let's talk more Turtle WoW while it's still around, shall we? Next on my list to explore and write about were the two custom dungeons Crescent Grove and Stormwrought Ruins.

Crescent Grove is a level 32-38 dungeon located in southern Ashenvale. I actually played through this one last year already, and did originally mean to write a post about it at the time - but then it turned out to be kind of boring, and I was like "wow, this is not enough material for a post, I'll have to bundle it up with whatever the next dungeon on the list is and write about them together". And then I lost interest, naturally.

To be clear, Crescent Grove is not a bad dungeon. I had a perfectly fun time running it with a friendly pug. It just seemed pretty uninspired, especially after my previous experience in Dragonmaw Retreat. I couldn't help but think that it must've been one of the first dungeons the Turtle WoW devs built by themselves, as it actually didn't feel very dungeon-like and nothing about it felt in any way original. To me it kind of felt like someone was just familiarising themselves with the devs tools and played around with Ashenvale assets, adding a little vale to the map where they tried out all the different environmental textures available in the zone and populated it with matching mobs, such as furbolgs, satyrs and demons.

I checked the Turtle WoW Wiki and according to that, Crescent Grove was added at the end of 2021 - compare that to Dragonmaw Retreat coming out in 2025. It makes sense that they would've learned some things about how to do more interesting things with the tools available to them over the course of four years.

Stormwrought Ruins on the other hand, a level 35-41 dungeon, came out in the same patch as Dragonmaw Retreat, and boy, does it show. The first time I zoned in and opened the map, I was stunned by how massive it was. It's not quite as sprawling as BRD, but in terms of number of bosses it certainly comes close.

I'd been aware from the group finder that it had two Stormwrought instances listed, Castle and Descent, but I hadn't realised that it was effectively one giant dungeon that they'd just split into parts for the sake of the queue. I was quickly introduced to how that worked as the first group I got into only wanted to do the higher-level half and headed straight for the back door, even though I'd specifically queued for the first half. I didn't feel like I was in a position to complain and was just happy to take in whatever sights they were willing to show me.

Like Dragonmaw Retreat, Stormwrought Ruins goes extremely hard on the ambience. The custom music featured what sounded like church bells, choirs and... synthesisers? I don't know, music is not my area of expertise. But it was very loud and basically screaming "epic and scary stuff is happening here" (you can listen to some of it on this playlist).

Like everything else on Turtle WoW, all the environments and bosses were strongly reminiscent of existing dungeons, but unlike in the Crescent Grove example above, existing assets were put together in a way that still felt refreshing and new, even if it was clearly a derivative creation. The first half set in the castle reminded me of Shadowfang Keep and Scarlet Monastery in places, which makes sense when you think about it. That didn't change that the Duke's throne room looked pretty cool and impressive.

Also, the mobs were mostly (Stormreaver) orcs, which did make for an interesting combo with the human architecture. One of the bosses was Oronok Torn-Heart, and I've got to admit that with this one, I definitely felt a bit bad about killing him, recalling his canonical retirement in Outland as a peaceful boar farmer.

The mid section of the dungeon, where the two halves meet, is dominated by wetness and fungal decay, reminiscent of Maraudon or the Naxx plague wing. There's a room with a death knight boss that was pretty intimidating.

You encounter members of the Shadow Council as trash mobs throughout, but the final section of the instance is dedicated to them in specific being, well, horrible, conducting human sacrifices and shit. The penultimate boss was a giant red blob called "Remains of the Innocent" and there's a quest that has you confirm that this used to be the missing son of a grieving mother in Northwind. It strongly reminded me of Scholomance, but even that has less of a downer ending, because at least you give the ghosts some peace at the end.

The second group I ran with did the full dungeon from start to finish and it took us something like two and a half hours. At the end, people wanted to pose for a screenshot together, which I thought was cute. A true adventure! In both runs, the more experienced players had been more than happy to explain to us newbies how everything worked as well, which was very much appreciated.

The Twilight of the Turtle

When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.

Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.

After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected. 

I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.

In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.

I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.

It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.

When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.

Turtle WoW Is Shutting Down

This morning I woke up to the news that the owners of Turtle WoW have officially announced that the servers will be ceasing operations after the 14th of May. This shouldn't really have been a surprise, but I've got to confess: considering that the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them broke close to eight months ago at this point, I wasn't ruling out that they would manage to get away with it somehow. Unlike other private server operators whom I've seen fold instantly the moment Blizzard's lawyers as much as looked at them, the Turtle team certainly gave evading the law a good shot. They made adjustments to the website, changed domains, and the owner supposedly deleted her old Discord account and created a new one in an attempt to not be pinned down.

All that said, it looks like the lawyers caught up with them in the end, somehow. I'll reproduce the Turtle WoW team's statement in full, since their website will eventually go dark and disappear:

Hello friends,

They say it's the journey, not the destination. How long must a journey last to be remembered fondly and warmly? We don't know. We only know that ours is coming to an end.

After almost 8 years online, Turtle WoW is heading towards shutdown. The final day of operation will be May 14, 2026, and the servers will go offline at 12:00 AM on May 15th.

Working on Turtle WoW has been the highlight of our lives. It has been an honor to build with you and for you. Whether you were exploring new stories, leveling, raiding, PvPing, roleplaying, or just enjoying a quiet moment in the world, seeing how much this game means to you has been our greatest privilege.

The adventures you had, the battles you fought, and the friends you met are what made it all worthwhile. We hope you will cherish those moments. What we leave behind are fond memories of an 8-year-long journey, and we hope you'll remember it every now and then.

Until the project's final day, we'll keep technical and in-game support active for everyone who keeps playing. All realm timelines will be immediately shifted to the final progression patch for those who want to see the new raids before the project's sunset.

We've turned off all donations until the end of the project and want to thank you sincerely for supporting us over the years.

Our website, forums, and social media will also be closed on October 16th.

Finally, we want to thank our incredible team.

Thank you for playing.

Thank you for being such a wonderful gaming community.

Thank you for your creativity and talent.

Thank you.

I logged into my high elf for the first time in a while and found that I hadn't been removed from the guild I was in despite my pretty prolonged period of inactivity. Some people were talking about where to play once Turtle WoW is gone, but others were continuing business as usual. I also saw a stream of announcements of level 60 hardcore characters dying, which I can only assume were people deciding to go out with a bang before the server shuts down, though doing so almost a month in advance seems a bit premature to me.

I'm thinking about going back to complete a couple more goals before the shutdown, such as actually hitting level 40 and buying a mount. I'd been playing with the idea for a while but it was kind of lacking in urgency. Now that the shutdown is final, it's now or never. We'll see where it ends up in my priorities over the next month.

And of course there's always a chance that the whole project will eventually pop up again somewhere else under a new name, which is not unusual for WoW private servers. I've also seen mutterings on reddit that the Chinese and South East Asian servers (seeing how Turtle was operating globally) might be staying up. Still, even if that's true, losing the English-speaking servers is certainly a blow.

They had it coming, but I still feel a little sad. Both things can be true at the same time: that Turtle WoW was blatantly profiting off an IP they didn't own, and that the people behind it were genuinely passionate about their product and had some great ideas. 

More Notes from Midnight

The husband and I are continuing to play a lot of Midnight, both together and individually. Over Easter we both had a few days off and used most of that free time to binge on the game together. It was actually really nice that we were equally excited to play for once. Often our shared play time consists of one person gently coaxing the other into doing a specific thing they want to do, while the other just goes along for the sake of playing together without necessarily caring that much about the activity. However, right now we're both equally keen on the new WoW expansion.

Delving Deeply

We jumped into delve week with so much gusto that we already have the achievement for doing all the delves on tier eleven as both tank and dps roles. For the first round, I tanked on my warrior while he did damage on his mage, and then we did the whole thing again with him on his death knight and me on my hunter.

Delves were already a source of fast gear in War Within, but with the extra streamlining Blizzard has done, my hunter went from freshly dinged to full champion gear in something like three days. Some of that was probably luck, but they also upgraded the vendor at the end of delves so that he sells gear for other slots than trinkets now, so when he had something my hunter could use, I was able to just transfer some Undercoin from my main and bam, another gear slot sorted.

Despite this I was never running out of keys, and my levelling alts are already swimming in them before they've even hit max level. A guildie surprised me by saying that he didn't like the change because he used to farm key shards via World Soul memories in War Within at the start of the season, and now he felt more limited by being hard capped at six keys per week, which was a stance I'd never even considered. For me the effort required to farm keys had just always felt like too much and often prevented me from doing even four delves on alts because I couldn't bear to go through the same lot of key-awarding activities on every single character. Now that shards come from seemingly everywhere including treasure chests, they've just become a complete non-issue for me and I love it.

I also learned that you can apparently meet yourself in delves. This is my priest (who was my third character to 90) sitting across an "echo" of my hunter. 

Soloing Nullaeus

Somewhat related to delves, there's the new nemesis boss. Let me backtrack to the end of War Within for a second: back in September I stated that I was still planning to do ?? difficulty Ky'veza at some point, but then Legion Remix happened and that was just so much more fun that I never even bothered with Ky'veza again. (Not to mention that I'd already found the regular version of the fight extremely un-fun. Having every single mechanic be a one-shot if you mess it up is just not my cup of tea; I prefer the elation of being able to recover from a slight misstep over feeling like I have to force my brain to achieve 100% perfect execution through endless repetition.)

When Midnight came out I heard that the newest delve boss was really easy, so I went to check him out sooner than I normally would have. Normal mode was indeed a cakewalk and I one-shot him without even having read any kind of guide, but ?? still took a bit of practice (though not nearly as much as Zekvir or the Underpin did).

Nullaeus basically feels a bit like Zekvir with all the edges filed off: there's crap to dodge on the floor, something to interrupt, something to dispel, and adds you need to kill, but everything is easier. The stuff you need to move out of doesn't hurt so much that clipping it a bit will kill you, and when adds are summoned, the boss goes into an immunity state and leaves you alone so you're able to focus on the adds without also having to worry about him.

Finally, this boss is where Valeera really shone as a companion for me as it was noticeable that she'd been tuned to be much more competent than Brann. One of the difficulties with Zekvir was that Brann would only interrupt or cleanse every other cast, but it could be inconsistent when he'd do it, which made it hard to coordinate with his abilities. Valeera in dps mode on Nullaeus just interrupts every single cast that needs interrupting, or alternatively, if you set her to heal, you need to do the interrupting yourself but she'll reliably dispel you at all times so you don't have to worry about that.

Doing ?? Nullaeus on my protection warrior was my first experience with Valeera set to healer and the healing orbs she throws are also much more consistently targeted than Brann's potions used to be - one will always land right on top of you, with the other two to your left and right, so no having to race across the room to find Brann's latest drop in Narnia.

One of the things that challenged me on ?? Nullaeus was, ironically, maintaining focus for the interrupt through the tedium of nothing much happening. On Zekvir it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on, but here there's so little going on that after a few minutes my mind tended to wander and I would lose focus and miss an interrupt (which was a guaranteed one-shot).

The other thing was the tank buster, which I didn't even realise was a mechanic exclusive to tanks until he flattened me from full to dead with the boss at about 1% health. It was only when I googled what the heck was going on that I learned that this one ability exclusive to tanks is meant to be mitigated - while I'd been able to get by with sloppy shield blocking for most of the fight, his damage increases during the final burn and that's why I'd died. Still, after about half a dozen attempts he was down.

Majestic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been very motivated by the profession system and have been enjoying the new "high value beast" designation for skinning targets. This has since intensified with a renewed focus on what are called "majestic" beasts, which need to be called forth with a special crafted lure and have a chance of dropping valuable epic materials.

This is a system that has existed since the profession revamp in Dragonflight, but I distinctly remember crafting my first lure back then, using it, and getting absolutely nothing useful from the mob it spawned - which led to me concluding that the whole system was a waste of time and then never bothering with it again.

In War Within, I became somewhat more aware of the value of these rare materials as certain patron crafting orders kept requiring them, but I just tended to skip those. However, in Midnight the new epic profession tools that Blizzard has added all require the new "majestic" materials to craft, so I've been on a mission to learn how to lure all five of these beasts so I can hunt and skin them every day. While the RNG can be frustrating for sure - the day after I'd crafted my shiny new epic skinning knife with a boost to perception I didn't find a single purple item on any of the beasts - doing my daily tour of the four zones is a routine I enjoy right now.

It's also motivated me to pick up fishing again - prior to this, the last time I maxed out my fishing skill had been during Shadowlands. During Dragonflight and War Within I dabbled a little but found it too difficult to make sense of which fish had value and why. All the beast lures require specific fish, which has provided me with a new motivation to gather that is easy enough to understand.

Nightmare Prey

Seguing from the subject of hunting to the prey system - I did already mention it positively in my last post, but I did want to give nightmare difficulty another shout-out now that the husband and I have had a chance to dig into that too. Basically, I really like it! Sure, we'll both complain when we're on a squishy character and things go terribly wrong when too many random events happen at once, but as I also said to him, it weirdly reminds me of vanilla gameplay in a way, in the sense that one of the biggest challenges of questing in the open world in vanilla WoW is accidentally pulling more than you can handle, and Nightmare Prey kind of pushes the same buttons for me as it expects you to keep an eye on your surroundings and prepare for the worst at any moment whenever you're on a hunt. That's cool and I like it!

They also work pretty well in a party - I haven't fully figured it out, but it does seem like progress is shared to some degree as long as you're not too far apart, as we'll always find our prey at the same time. It even overrides the penalty you get from dying, where it will say that your progress has been reset to zero, but if your partner pushes their own hunt to completeness while you're close by, your own progress indicator will also instantly go back from empty to full.