Casual Thoughts on the Midnight Class Changes

It's a given these days that WoW dramatically revamps all the classes with each new expansion, but for Midnight in particular the headline was "ability pruning". I took that to mean that Blizzard had heard people's feedback that damage and healing rotations were getting too complex and should probably be simplified at least a little.

I was curious enough that I even engaged with a Bellular clickbait video titled "The Numbers Are In: Midnight's Ability Prune Is BRUTAL*" - just for said video to tell me that each spec was losing a whole two buttons on average. I rolled my eyes at that and largely forgot about the whole thing again, until the Midnight pre-patch actually hit.

My protection warrior honestly seemed almost unchanged, seemingly confirming that the whole thing had been completely overblown, but when I logged into my holy priest I was actually in for a shock, as she appeared to have lost almost half her abilities, most of which had been in the game since Vanilla: No more Shadow Word: Pain, no more Mind Blast, no more Renew, no more Power Word: Shield, no more basic Heal. Holy Nova was still there but now had a 30 second (!) cooldown.

The removal of shield honestly annoyed me the most, largely because I was so used to casting it on myself on cooldown for the speed boost. Now you have to spec into Angelic Feather to run faster for a few seconds, and I've never liked that spell.*

I was willing to give it a go though, just to see what abilities I even had left, and ran a tier 11 delve without any problems, though I really missed being able to dot enemies up, and only having something like two spells to spam on Brann got really boring. I just kept thinking that this wasn't what I'd had in mind in terms of simplifying things, though at the time I couldn't quite articulate yet what the issue was.

The problem really came into focus for me when I started trying to play some of my dps toons. Let's take my hunter for example. Hunter is a class I really want to like because I used to love it in the game's early years, but at some point Blizzard seemingly lost the plot in terms of what a hunter is supposed to be and now the class just feels terribly clunky to play a lot of the time (in my opinion anyway). Still, I definitely thought that Marksman had too many buttons in its most recent iteration, so I figured the only way was up.

I read and assigned my talents, checked my ability tooltips and started working on killing some things in the Twilight Highlands for the pre-patch event. My damage felt abysmal. I figured that I was clearly doing something wrong, so I pulled the one-button assistant in a corner of my hotbars just to see what abilities that was recommending I use.

I was flabbergasted when I saw that it recommended I start every fight, even against a single opponent, with Volley, an AoE ability with a 30 second cooldown. But I tried it, and lo and behold, it triggered some kind of proc that made things explode big time.

And that really made me realise why these changes still didn't really work for me. I don't actually have an issue with having a large number of abilities, as long as it's sufficiently straightforward to figure out what they are good for. To use a made-up example, if I have a damage-over-time ability, a big hitter with a long cooldown, and an attack that does less damage but can be spammed, I'll probably want to start with the DoT, use the big damage attack, and then spam the lesser one. It's only logical, right? You don't need a simulator to figure that out.

The problem with combat in modern retail is that everything relies on weird interactions between abilities that are opaque to figure out and feel like they don't make intuitive sense. Having to start a single-target fight with my biggest AoE attack is just one such example.

Another one popped up on my arcane mage, who now has a talent called Touch of the Magi, whose tooltip reads: "Applies Touch of the Magi to your current target, accumulating 20% of the damage you deal to the target for 12 sec, and then exploding for that amount of Arcane damage to the target and reduced damage to all nearby enemies." My takeaway from that was that this was only useful against opponents who live at least 12 seconds, and ideally there should be some sort of AoE situation going on as well to make the most out of the explode-y proc at the end.

Yet the one-button assistant once again recommended that I start every fight with it, and after a bit of testing I could see why - because of some interaction with another talent it also boosts other spells of mine, so I really want to use it on cooldown - not for anything it actually says in the ability description, but for this buff it gives my other casts. Just... why?! Why does every rotation have to start in an unintuitive way like that? I'm not saying there can't be interactions between different abilities, but they should be a bonus for those who've truly mastered the spec, and the default ability shouldn't feel useless on its own.

I suppose you could argue that I should've paid more attention to the talent descriptions because all that info is probably buried somewhere in there, but come on - I've got sixty-odd talent points to assign that all try to be "interesting" and you expect me to remember every single interaction I read through once? I guess in the past this kind of thing would have been easier because if you level more slowly, you look forward to each new talent point and are more conscious of what it does, not to mention that you then have some time until the next level-up to see how the changes it unlocks play out in practice. With retail WoW's levelling speed it's impossible to stay on top of these things nowadays, never mind that I wouldn't want to level a whole new alt every time Blizzard decides to once again completely redo every spec anyway.

I know this all sounds a bit whiny and I'm well aware that it is. From my point of view, combat and rotations have long been one of retail WoW's weaker points due to how overstuffed and complicated they are, but I've mostly come to accept that. I guess I'm just extra bummed about these particular changes since the "pruning" carried with it a promise of simplification and perhaps even a return to the game's roots - yet what I've seen so far doesn't actually deliver on that. Instead we've just had a bunch of fun abilities taken away in the interest of baking ten different procs into three spells instead.

*On further review, I learned that spamming Prayer of Mending on yourself also works to give you a speed boost, though it has a longer cooldown and the speed boost it gives is shorter. It also just feels weird. I then re-checked my talents and apparently there are no fewer than ten different talents that modify how Prayer of Mending works, which kind of supports the point I'm making in the second half of this post.

My Most Played Characters

I've been seeing people talk about a new addon called "Account Played" that tallies up your /played time across all your characters and displays it as a neat bar chart broken down by class. I was briefly tempted to get it but ultimately decided that I didn't care that much about the class breakdown, and Altoholic already helps me keep track of my /played time across characters.

It did make me curious where exactly I stood myself though, especially after I noticed some surprises in my own roster, such as the fact that even though I've been back to playing retail for close to five and a half years now, none of the characters I've played during that time had particularly impressive /played times. I decided I'd share my top five characters in terms of accumulated hours:

Shintar - 188 days

I had a hunch that the original Shintar might still be my #1, but I was not prepared for the sheer scale of it, with her /played time still being three times that of second place. This is a character that I created in early 2007 and played until March of 2012. Let's pretend it was a round five years, or 1,827 days. That would mean that during those five years, I spent more than ten percent of my life, or about two and a half hours of every single day, playing just this character. Not WoW in general - I had alts as well, see below - but only this character. That honestly seems pretty crazy to me in hindsight, even as someone who still likes to game a lot. I know that at the start of it all, I was an unemployed student - and a student who neglected her studies at that - so I had a lot of free time, but still...

I haven't really played her since coming back to WoW, and thanks to the Shadowlands level squish she's back to being level 32. And yet still so far ahead. 

Tiirr - 64 days

I was actually surprised to find that my MoP Classic hunter is my second most played WoW character at this point. A good chunk of that can be attributed to the launch of original Classic, as the clone I made of her before the transition to Burning Crusade still shows as having 36 days of /played. But then the rest would've had to be a mix of BC Classic (which I abandoned halfway through) and whatever time I accumulated since I picked her back up last year. I mainly attribute this one to just how bingeable and impactful the original Classic launch was.

Being level 90 in MoP Classic, she's currently the highest level character I have in all of WoW's game modes (since War Within's cap is still 80). This amuses me.

Tiranea - 58 days

This was my first main, created back in October 2006. I'm not surprised that she's still high up, but I was somewhat surprised that she's this high, because from what I remember, I switched to Horde side after around six months of playing. Now, I didn't fully abandon the character at the time, and still levelled her through Wrath and Cata as well, but after those first few months I never spent much time in group content to rack up dungeon or raiding hours. Must have been those first few months when I was super addicted and basically living and breathing WoW.

I did play this one a little bit in more recent times when I levelled her up to do the night elf heritage quest back in 2023, so she's a whopping level 53.

Golu - 54 days

This was one of my major alts on Horde side back in the day, a druid on whom I both tanked and healed. I guess I'm not entirely surprised that she got a lot of play time, considering I was clearly playing a lot back then, but it does make me sweat a little to think that I was spending two and a half hours a day just playing Shintar the priest and also 54 days on this character. And yet! There's even more, such as...

Pukaja - 52 days

The tauren hunter who was my very first Horde character and also another one of my major alts during those days, though there was never much demand for me to play dps in group content when I was also willing to both tank and heal. Like Golu, she hasn't been played since Cata and was squished down to level 32.

It really stands out to me how none of my more recently played characters are even anywhere near close to those numbers. The monk that was my main during Shadowlands sits on 22 days played, my evoker on 27 days and the warrior that turned into my War Within main on a little less than 18 days. I guess WoW is more alt friendly nowadays than it was back then, so my play time is spread out across a larger number of characters, but still - I had alts back then too, and three of those are in the top five!

I guess at least some of it has to do with levelling in the vanilla world (which is why the Classic hunter is ahead of all of my retail characters created in recent years). When it takes about ten days of /played just to get to the level cap, it's just a different ballgame. I never play as intensely at the level cap unless I'm raiding (which I've kind of sworn off in WoW at this point, not counting visiting LFR once per tier), so new characters just don't have as much of a chance to rack up play time when they are capped within mere hours like my Lemix alts were.

The New and Improved Exile's Reach

One thing that's always fascinating to me is how little the wider WoW community cares about the starter/levelling experience. I guess it's what you get when you've spent the last two decades fostering an environment where endgame is the only thing that matters, but it still takes me by surprise whenever Blizzard makes changes to what new or returning players see and I almost miss it just because of how little publicity it gets.

One such change that actually already happened a whole patch ago now was a revamp of Exile's Reach, to improve the transition from the tutorial island to the Dragon Isles levelling campaign. I don't know why I suddenly remembered about that the other night, but I decided to start up my US trial account again to make another alt there and see what's new.

I stared in wide-eyed surprise when my little troll hunter loaded in on the boat and instead of finding myself face to face with Warlord Grimaxe, I was greeted by Thrall himself. (I think for Alliance it's Jaina.) Not to mention the two dragons gliding casually alongside the boat, Kalecgos and Wrathion. (Warlord Grimaxe was still there by the way, but as more of a background character.)

You can't see Wrathion because he was behind me, gliding along on the other side of the boat. 

The framing is still that you're looking for a missing expedition, but not just any expedition now, but one that was on its way to the Dragon Isles. That... actually works surprisingly well.

You still go through the whole shipwreck routine (Thrall's control of the elements really isn't what it used to be) and all the other minor NPCs you meet along the way are also still there. Grimaxe's daughter also shows up at some point but without any fanfare - instead the person who needs rescuing from the big bad ogre is Wrathion.

The only gameplay change I noticed was that when you get out of the spider cave, the game forcibly breaks your gear. As someone who's kind of OCD about repairing I noticed that immediately, and though I was confused about what had happened, I instantly stopped by the repair guy to get it fixed. Funnily enough, the next quest I was given then said something like "Oh no, your gear was damaged during your last adventure! You should repair it!" and then everything made sense. I guess that's not a bad thing to add to the tutorial.

The final confrontation in the ogre citadel has also been changed, as you no longer need to prevent the raising of an undead dragon, but instead rescue Kalecgos from being mind-controlled. (Though Blizz hasn't been 100% thorough with cleaning up the NPC chatter, as I encountered at least one instance of a character still talking about the raising of an undead dragon.)

After this, instead of a group of Alliance/Horde arriving on gryphons/wyverns to whisk you away to the capital, Kalec offers you a ride to the Dragon Isles, completely skipping the introduction to Stormwind or Orgrimmar. That definitely made me raise an eyebrow, but I can't objectively say that I think it's a bad change. My own nostalgia just wants those places to feel important, but truth be told they haven't been core to the retail experience in many years.

A few months ago I winced at this reddit post illustrating how someone can get very invested in the modern game without having the slighest clue about many classic locations. When I shared it with my guild, the guildie who's gotten the most into raiding and M+ in WoW revealed that he had no idea either where or what Thunder Bluff even was. There's a part of me that wants to grab players like that and shake them, shouting "These places are amazing, you've got to go there and see them!" but realistically, the modern game doesn't work that way.

And in fairness, seeing all the old stuff that people loved in the past is not necessary to fall in love with WoW. I had never played any of the Warcraft RTS games when I started playing in 2006, so I had no idea about who Arthas was or any of the lore behind anything, but I was fine and had fun learning as I went. It seems fair to posit that players new to retail WoW in 2026 can also be plopped directly into newer content without having all the background on anything, as long as the new stuff is interesting and somewhat coherent. And I think the Dragon Isles are pretty good for that. You could do worse than leading players into that as their first adventure.

Of course, they'll get to explore a world that is very different from how Vanilla was twenty years ago. In the classic world, it took a long time to encounter your first dragon, which is very different from buddying up with allied dragons from level one. And that does feel a bit weird to me, but to be honest that's just where the game's lore is at right now. It doesn't have to be bad; it's just different. (Though I do think it's a bit funny that your first lesson about dragons is basically that they're not very impressive and will immediately need rescuing from random ogres.)

Anyway, I cheated a bit and made a quick trip back to Orgrimmar for my own peace of mind, and also detoured to Valdrakken to pick up some professions. As someone who always enjoys levelling professions I bristled a bit at their complete absence from this tutorial, but then they were always treated as a lower priority feature. And there is a brief intro to them in Dornogal if I recall correctly, which might be a better time for it nowadays so as not to front-load too many systems I guess. Anyway, after that I continued my journey across the Waking Shores as seemingly intended. There's another Winds of Mysterious Fortune event going on right now, so gear drops were aplenty.

Learning how to ride my red protodrake felt a bit weird now that Blizzard basically took away the whole skyriding mini game and it's just pressing buttons on cooldown, but oh well. I guess it's still not bad to ease first-timers into it slowly.

The one hitch I encountered was that I was unable to do Ruby Life Pools as a follower dungeon when I got there. I'd get the loading screen for the instance, followed by the Dragon Isles loading screen, and then I was back at the entrance with a note that I'd been removed from the group. Are free-to-play players not worthy of being boosted through dungeons by NPCs? I found some reports of other people encountering the same issue and finding it odd, but no real confirmation on whether it was an intended restriction for trial accounts or a bug, and whether there's anything you can do about it.

Regardless, I soon hit level 20, the cap for free accounts, and stopped playing. With world scaling I could technically keep going for a while longer I suppose, but I don't think I care enough about seeing the new solo version of the Raszageth fight they supposedly added for levellers as well.

Still, all in all I was kind of impressed, honestly. Obviously the real judges of whether this new experience is any good will be genuinely new players, but it did seem like a real improvement to me. I was sceptical when I first heard about it because I thought it sounded cheesy to shoehorn all these important NPCs into the starter experience for seemingly no reason, but it actually works alright in context. Thrall gave players a quest at level ten in Vanilla as well, so it's really not that strange.

I feel like the changes embrace retail WoW as it is - when you have more of a focus on stories involving named NPCs for example, it makes sense to introduce them earlier on, even if it's in the context of a minor, relatively inconsequential adventure. There's time to learn more about them later, but it makes for a better starting point. And the whole skipping Stormwind and Orgrimmar bit really hurts me as a veteran player but is true to the reality that these old capitals aren't places where anyone spends a lot of their time nowadays - better to just lead the newbies straight to the hubs where there are actually other players.

Running Out of Steam in MoP Classic

I got back into MoP Classic around Christmas one and a half months ago, and while I was initially surprised by how much fun I was having, it looks like my enthusiasm may already be on the decline again.

I got to exalted with the Golden Lotus, saw the relics of the Thunder King get stolen (no surprise there) and got to defend the Vale against a big Mogu incursion with the aid of the Celestials. I'm glad I got to see all of that, but I've found little reason to keep going afterwards. There was a small incentive at least as I picked up a few Skyshards during my time doing dailies in the Vale, and I was always curious what was up with that big hostile cloud serpent that's generally un-attackable (turns out you need 10 Skyshards to dispel the shield, and then it drops a mount on defeat), but the drop rate of the shards is so low, who knows how many months I'd have to keep grinding to get ten.

There are only three or four Tillers with whom I'm not quite best friends yet (can't be long now though), and I'm close to maxing out all my cooking skills as well. Then the only thing left to do on the farm would be to keep planting crops for other Pandaria reputations, which is not as interesting. Plus I learned that apparently things like the plow, sprinkler system etc. all came in with a later patch, and having to till every spot on the farm manually every day is getting a bit tiresome.

I've also been doing the Anglers dailies for a few weeks now, and happened to fish up the Sea Turtle mount on one of these days. I don't have that in retail, so that's another +1 for having this character merged into my retail stable one day I guess.

My enthusiasm for the other factions has been more limited though. I've done a bit of work on the August Celestials, but being sent to a different corner of the continent every day gets old quickly. I also did the Klaxxi dailies for a few days but just didn't enjoy them, even though I think they're a faction with an interesting story. Just never liked the Dread Wastes I guess.

I started the legendary cloak quest chain with Wrathion, another piece of content that's no longer accessible in retail, but I've got to admit I don't find that nearly as interesting as I found exploring the old Vale. It's just so grindy, even if the devs made it a bit easier in Classic by also allowing you to progress certain steps through dungeons, without needing to raid. The first stage felt like it took forever, and then it was immediately on to "earn 1600 valor", ignoring the thousands of valor I'd already ground out previously, which just made me sigh.

I did actually get into the dungeon endgame for a bit and did every dungeon on Celestial difficulty. It took me three runs to realise I was supposed to talk to a Celestial at the start of the run to get a buff, and I only did that after I saw someone complain on reddit about stupid slackers who nerf their whole group by not picking up their buff (oops). It didn't take too long to get the hang of what the different buffs do though, and ultimately the gameplay isn't really that different from heroics.

After my initial experiences with dungeons in MoP Classic were pretty mellow, zoning into any Celestial is full rush-rush mode by this point though. The tank will pretty much always pick up all the trash at once and drag it to the next boss to AoE down. If they die while doing that, they'll blame the healer. If it's after the second boss in Shado-Pan Monastery, it's almost guaranteed to result in a wipe regardless, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. I can just about keep up with the madness most days, but I've got to admit I don't find it very fun.

Curiosity and gear were enough of an incentive at first. The special currency that drops in Celestial dungeons lets you buy pretty high level gear pretty quickly. While I didn't need any of it, it was still nice to grow more powerful, and while doing dailies it was very noticeable when my kill time on a named elite went from several minutes down to a single full skill rotation. At this point I've got 502 gear in most slots though, and while there are more things to buy, such as a goodie bag that drops rare pets and mounts, I just don't care enough about any of that.

At one point I saw a familiar name online - my 2020 guild's Scarab Lord, a fellow hunter. We chatted a bit and he's basically kept playing and raiding all this time, now a member of a guild that has also been around since Classic's launch and that I was friendly with back in the day. He said that if I was feeling lonely, I shouldn't hesitate to give the GM a poke for a guild invite.

I thought very long and hard about this. Part of me was amazed that there was an opportunity here to come back to the game after several years of absence and potentially fit right back into an old and at least somewhat familiar structure. I thought of the potential fun and companionship, and wondered whether I would maybe even want to try attending a casual raid or two. However, ultimately I decided against it. I already have enough going on in SWTOR and other modes of WoW without attempting to put down roots in MoP Classic again. I think I'll be happy to just drop it again in a few weeks to be honest. 

Am I Looking Forward to Midnight?

After my little retrospective about War Within, I wanted to take a moment to look the other way - forward - to talk about Midnight. Specifically, about how weird it feels to me that it's coming out in less than a month.

When we were still in Dragonflight and War Within was the thing to look forward to, I had some concerns. I'd really enjoyed Dragonflight, and I was worried about how War Within was going to change things.

With Midnight, I don't really feel anything like that. If I had to articulate any concerns, I guess I might point out that with two out of the four expansion launch zones being revamps of old zones, Midnight might end up feeling like there isn't enough "newness" to it (*cough*Cataclysm*cough*). But that's not a huge worry for me or anything.

However, at the same time, I'm not really particularly looking forward to the expansion either. I don't feel negatively about it, mind you - I pre-purchased a couple of months ago, and I expect that I'll have fun playing the new content. It's just...

In a weird way, it doesn't really feel to me like an expansion is coming out. To me at least, Midnight currently has the vibe of just another major patch.

Partially, I suspect the whole Worldsoul Saga thing is to blame. I already talked a bit about that in the context of the big expansion reveal back in August. Traditionally, WoW expansion announcements have been these huge surprise events: What's going to be the next big thing? Where will we go next? What will we find there?

Midnight didn't have anything like that, simply because we'd known for a long time that we were going to fight the void in Quel'thalas and that's exactly what we got out of the announcement as well. Not a huge fan of Xal'atath? Sorry, you're signed up for more of the same.

The other contributing factor to my weird lack of excitement is probably the relentless patch cadence that Blizzard has been following since Dragonflight. And don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that frequent content patches are a bad thing! Truth is though, nobody can fire on all cylinders 24/7, 365 days a year. Players need breaks.

People will probably consider this a hot take, but I don't recall ever minding the so-called content droughts towards the end of an expansion. As someone who was never at the cutting edge of the newest content, it gave me some time to get caught up, maybe level an alt, as well as pursue some goals that weren't tied to the most recent content patch. I'll always remember the last months of Wrath of the Lich King with fondness, simply because I used that quiet time to go back to the old world and get the original Loremaster achievement for example.

These "down times" give you time to recharge and get ready and excited for the next big thing. Except this time around, the husband and I were grinding Legion Remix like crazy people until only a few weeks ago, and now we're just tired. The other day he told me that he hadn't even logged in since the pre-patch because he's still feeling burnt out from Lemix. How can you get hyped for what's coming next when you're still feeling burnt out from the last major event?

I don't know; like I said I fully expect to have some fun with Midnight when it comes out, but in terms of new expansion excitement I'm not sure I've ever felt less of it (at a time when I was actually playing and enjoying the game that is, obviously I didn't care too much about what was happening when I wasn't subscribed).

Was War Within a Better Expansion than Dragonflight?

With only a month left until the release of Midnight, I wanted to take a bit of time to look back on The War Within as an expansion. (Truth be told, I already wanted to do this a couple of months ago, but other things kept popping up.)

Aside from people who are negative about modern WoW in general, I think you'll struggle to find many who'll say that War Within has been a bad expansion. There've been some ups and downs, as there always are, but all things considered, it's felt like a positive experience and solid addition to the game. However, as far as the question goes just how good it was exactly - I find that one much more difficult to answer.

What makes it particularly tricky for me is that I had a really easy time calling Dragonflight great, and War Within made some improvements that caused me to play even more this expansion, so you'd think I'd obviously consider it also great, but for some reason saying that doesn't feel quite right.

I had a lot of concerns about War Within before it came out, and I'm happy to say that none of them turned out to be as big of a deal as I originally feared. Nonetheless, it's still felt "lesser" compared to Dragonflight in many ways, at least to me. The Earthen actually turned out to be pretty cool, but still not as good as getting a whole new race and/or class. The War Within zones were beautiful, and the world designers did a really great job at minimising the impact of the whole underground thing potentially making things feel oppressive, buuut... I still didn't really like "hanging out" in any of the subterranean zones, always "fleeing back" to the surface at the end of each play session. I may rank Dornogal slightly above Valdrakken as a hub city, but outside the capital, none of the zones felt as homey to me as nearly every Dragonflight zone did. And while I don't think the story "regressed" in any of the ways I had feared, it didn't feel very cohesive either, or even like the proper start of a trilogy to be honest.

That said, there were other areas in which the War Within was really strong. While I may have found the overarching story kind of "eh", individual character arcs were much more well-defined than in Dragonflight, and the quality of the in-game cinematics went through the roof, with incredibly smooth and detailed facial animations in particular (I also think a big reason the Legacy of Arathor side story got so much backlash was that it suddenly regressed to BfA-era weird cartoon animations just for that one quest).

Delves, after being off to a very bad start at least as far as I was concerned, soon turned into the perfect duoing activity for me and my husband and came to dominate our weekly play time for many months.

Professions, which I actually cited as one of Dragonflight's weak points, received changes that completely turned them around for me, and I went from barely paying attention to them in Dragonflight to getting the "Algari Master of All" achievement in War Within for maxing out all profession skills.

Finally, the introduction of warbands in the expansion pre-patch was also huge for me. All my characters becoming connected in a more organic way actually made me revive old alts on long-forgotten servers (since they could now contribute to my warband) and I even levelled one of each class to the level cap, something I'd never done before. (And then I did it again for Legion Remix, but that's a whole other story.)

If we were to look at nothing but raw hours played and number of characters levelled, War Within should be my personal favourite expansion of all time! Why isn't it?

I find myself weirdly thinking back to Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the original ones that is. I technically started playing in late Vanilla, but the original Burning Crusade was definitely my "golden era" of WoW. I didn't do all the content and was pretty bad at the game to begin with, but I loved to explore and learn. I've often said that I'm not sure whether the original vanilla endgame would've managed to capture me in quite the same way at the time.

And then Wrath of the Lich King came along, which many still consider the superior expansion, and it occupied this weird space between good and bad for me. I clearly enjoyed a lot of the content as I ran hundreds of random dungeons and daily quests throughout the expansion's lifetime and levelled several alts, but it was also the first time that Blizzard made some decisions that I found actively off-putting, such as taking away my shadow priest main's utility role, or the way the Lich King fight played out.

In a similar vein, Dragonflight was the expansion that really got me back into retail (after some extremely casual dabbling in Shadowlands) and actually made me feel invested in the world and my characters again, even if that didn't necessarily result in hundreds of dungeon runs or whatever. War Within had the advantage of me already starting off at a much higher point in terms of engagement, so that I could roll right up and immediately do ALL THE THINGS, but it didn't quite have the same "magic" for me as Dragonflight did.

Ultimately I think I'd consider them both similar in terms of quality, with Dragonflight retaining a slight edge for me personally. 

How did the War Within compare to Dragonflight for you? Or to other expansions, if you'd rather look at it that way?

A (Futile?) Endeavour

In my last post about first impressions of the Midnight pre-patch, I mentioned checking out endeavours and being disappointed that they seemed to consist of nothing but two new daily quests in the town centre. I wanted to write a follow-up since I've found that there is more to them than that, but they are messed up in an entirely different way.

First off, I learned that several endeavours are live at the same time, but your neighbourhood has to pick one (if it's managed) or gets one assigned randomly (if it's public). Mine was assigned the dracthyr (with a portal to the Forbidden Reach), but there are also ethereals (with a portal to Netherstorm), grummels (Kun-Lai Summit), mechagnomes (Mechagon) and niffen (Zeralek Cavern).

There is an endeavours tab in the housing window now, which shows you a bar to progress and activities to do so, similar to the Traveler's Log. Unfortunately the UI is not very intuitive. Still, once I understood the assignment, I travelled to the Forbidden Reach (now scaled to level 80) and went at it like it was 2023 again: chasing rares, mining Dragonflight ore, opening Zkera vault doors. Since the indicators on the UI weren't very clear, it took me a bit to figure out that the game discourages you from doing the same task over and over as there are diminishing returns on each completion, which is something that sounds sensible in theory but in practice there already aren't that many tasks to begin with, meaning you can quickly run out of things that give points.

Worse, a single person's progress is basically not even measurable. The overall endeavour progress gives you no details about how many "points" you need or have earned, it just has those milestones dividing the bar into quarters, and all my efforts seemed to do virtually nothing. There's also an activity tracker to show you who else has been working on the endeavour in your neighbourhood, and over the past day it's all been me. Before that I saw a few people getting credit for "killing a raid boss" or "doing a delve", which were probably not done specifically for the neighbourhood, and maybe one or two names actually doing things in the neighbourhood or in the Forbidden Reach. I'm guessing the complete lack of visible progress put them off after a while though.

Apparently the progression bar is supposed to have some sort of dynamic scaling, as people in small guilds were able to fill up the whole bar in a matter of days, but if you're in a public neighbourhood where most people don't really care about endeavours and only put down a house because the UI kept nagging them about it, it seems you're just out of luck. Five days into the forty-day endeavour, I reckon we've achieved less than five percent progress. If we wanted to hit the final reward in time for the end, we'd need to be at least halfway towards the first milestone already (12.5%?).

I'm not that bothered because I'm currently not that invested in this housing system anyway, but it's still a shame that the devs have been so far off the mark on this one. I'm sure the numbers will be adjusted eventually, but the whole thing just feels badly thought out. They wanted neighbourhoods to be a thing "for the social aspect" and gave us endeavours as something to work on together, but there isn't even a way to properly communicate with the people in your public neighbourhood.

So far, endeavours have only managed to make me feel more lonely in retail WoW than I've felt in a long time. It seems to be commonly agreed that retail is not good at fostering cooperation and community spirit, but it does generally feel lively enough to me. Dornogal is always busy, and I always see people out and about in the world, whether they are gathering, doing world quests or what have you. However, being the sole person in a public neighbourhood who's trying to progress the endeavour on their own while achieving absolutely nothing is a decidedly isolating experience. If they want this to be viable for public neighbourhoods with mixed engagement levels, they'll have to do a lot more than just tweak the numbers.