MoP Pre-Patch Impressions

Mere days after I hit the level cap in Cata Classic last week, the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch dropped. I wasn't particularly excited about it, but I couldn't help but notice some changes as I logged into my hunter to do the daily cooking quest (like I said before, the profession dailies were easily one of my favourite things about Cata, so I'm still doing those until I max out my cooking and get the achievement for completing all the variations in all three capitals). 

The new talents were there, which I didn't particularly like in original MoP and still don't like now. Most notably though, my bow was in my bags and my hunter only had her staff equipped. Re-equipping the bow resulted in the staff going back into the bag instead.

Ah yes, remember how I said last month that one of the things I was enjoying about Cata was that hunters could still wield both a ranged and a melee weapon? R.I.P. to that particular class fantasy; I just never realised that this was a change that happened in MoP.

It actually made me realise that class fantasy aside, it's really kind of bizarre how Blizzard handled this. Survival didn't become a melee spec until Legion, so why would you let hunters equip a melee weapon only and then have them be locked out of using every single one of their combat abilities? Talk about a giant noob trap.

In fact, this is something that's still confusing in retail as I noticed the other day when I rolled up a survival hunter, because you still start with a ranged weapon and then when you hit level 10 and spec survival, you initially have like... one ability you can actually use, with everything else suddenly greyed out. It just feels terrible. Also, I only found out at that point that retail hunters no longer start with a pet for some reason? But you don't get a quest to tame one either, so... I have no idea how new players are supposed to figure this shit out. Anyway, I digress.

I had also logged into my feral druid briefly before the patch, to make the boat ride to Valgarde now that I'd remembered where to get on the right boat. Checking on her after the pre-patch, I was dismayed to be reminded that MoP was also when they did away with the whole notion of being a bear-cat, as feral was split into new feral (cat only) and guardian (bear only). I hadn't realised just how many gameplay changes that I didn't like actually came about in Mists of Pandaria. Both Wrath and Cata did things that I felt at least ambivalent about at the time, meaning I saw both pros and cons to them, but it seems MoP was when stuff got really bad, considering how many of its gameplay changes are triggering a pure "oh yeah, I remember hating that" response in me.

Anyway, with all those bad feelings, that likely would've been it for me and the pre-patch (other than to continue my daily cooking), but then I learned that Pandaren were already available and that you'd earn a free mount in retail for completing their starting zone in Classic, mirroring the promotion they had going on with a protodrake and the death knight starting zone during Wrath. I did that one in spite of feeling less than lukewarm about WotLK Classic, so re-doing the panda starting zone this time seemed like a no-brainer.

I'd actually only been through the Wandering Isle once before, about three years ago, so I was happy to pay it another visit. I also thought it would be interesting to do it as a monk this time, since I didn't create my first monk until BfA and therefore had no idea how different the class was going to be in its initial iteration.

The first difference was in fact immediate and very noticeable as my first ability was a move called "Jab" that actually hit my opponent with my staff, which I thought was delightful. In retail, monks don't use their weapons for anything, ever (which also makes the first Pandaren quest, which asks you to pick up a weapon and show that you can use it, quite nonsensical).

I made it to about level five, slowly jabbing things to death, when it occurred to me that while the Wandering Isle was very pretty, it was also quite boring to hit things to death so slowly. It was only then that I realised - oh right, we're in MoP, where you learn new abilities automatically and I guess they don't even show up on my bar? (Looking back, they did used to go on your bar in original MoP if there was space, so maybe this is just a bug.) Checking my spell book actually revealed new abilities I hadn't even realised I had access to, and that sped things up considerably, even if it was very weird to me to see Tiger Palm be a Chi spender instead of builder, which is the polar opposite of how it works in retail.

I was kind of surprised by how busy the island was, because on a lark, I had decided to create this "throwaway panda" on Hydraxian Waterlords, my old RP server home. Even though it was soft-merged into the regular PvE servers back in Classic BC and was meant to be closed down entirely in the run-up to Wrath, it's somehow still there, not just not closed, but not even locked for new character creation like most of the other old servers are. I figured it was going to be more pleasant to level in this more quiet environment without too much competition for mobs, so still seeing ~40 characters in the zone every time I played was a surprise.

When I got to Stormwind on the other hand, there were only about ten people there, and the auction house looked mostly empty. I wonder if there are any genuine holdouts still playing on this server or if it was mostly players like me who decided that levelling a throwaway character was more pleasant to do in a low pop environment.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Completing the storyline on the Wandering Isle, it was still a bit too linear for my personal taste, with a lot of running about, but overall pleasant. It's probably a better "island introduction" to the game than Exile's Reach to be honest. I was kind of surprised by how emotional the ending still made me.

The Alliance intro for Pandaren was new to me and was actually pretty funny! You meet with King Varian and he lectures you a bit about what it means to join the Alliance, but finishes by asking you to spar with him, because he's curious about the Pandaren fighting style. Now, when this duel starts, he has a buff that gives him 100% dodge chance, so all your attacks miss and he taunts you about it. Until... one hit suddenly goes through, and you get this slow-motion cut scene of him falling backwards and your companions looking absolutely horrified that you just punched the king of Stormwind, which I thought was hilarious. He just laughs it off and simply wanders off afterwards.

Anyway, with my free mount claimed and nothing else about the pre-patch looking particularly appealing, I'll probably coast by just doing those cooking dailies until the expansion releases properly and I can start my journey to the Vale. Though probably even that will have to wait at least a week or two, as I have no particular desire to compete with the launch day crowds.

Cata Continued

I finally hit level 85 in Cataclysm Classic! About time too, as the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch is only a few days away. 80-85 took me a little longer than expected mainly because I took a bit of a break about halfway through, otherwise it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than 70-80 did.

I ended up loitering in Northrend for longer than expected, since there were a few milestones I wanted to hit before moving on and the XP I got along the way wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I have this memory of many years ago, that XP gains in Outland became absolutely abysmal the moment you hit level 70 and the game wanted you to move on to Northrend, and it's stuck with me ever since that Blizzard hates you lingering in old expansion content. However, I'm starting to wonder whether I didn't exaggerate that effect in my mind over time, because as I said, continuing to quest in Northrend past level 80 wasn't all that bad. Sure, XP was reduced, but it wasn't abysmal. I actually ended up making it to 82 and about a third into level 83 before moving on to Cataclysm properly.

The main things I did in Northrend were the cooking and fishing dailies, as well as finishing up my exploration of the continent by uncovering all of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. In the former zone I also did the Loken quest chain, because unlike many players back in the day, I absolutely loved the Sons of Hodir. I briefly contemplated doing the Argent Tournament in Icecrown as well but ultimately decided against it as I didn't want to get bogged down with doing jousting dailies.

The last goal I finished up was getting my leatherworking skill caught up to the appropriate level, which required me to do a bit of farming for leather and other mats. I actually found it strangely zen to farm yetis in Storm Peaks and revenants in Wintergrasp, and it made me realise that this is an activity that I kind of miss in retail. Skinning as a skill still exists of course, but since skins - like all gathering nodes - are shared, the best way to farm leather is not to farm by yourself in a quiet corner of the map, but the opposite: to find an area where lots of people are killing skinnable mobs and then clean up behind them (and since the skins are shared you won't be "stealing" from any other skinners). It really drove home for me that while these shared gathering resources are a good thing in many ways, they have also taken something away from the game.

Anyway, once I was finally ready to get started on Cataclysm content properly, I did what I had planned and hauled my butt over to Vashj'ir, as I felt that it had been ages since I last visited that zone and I figured that it might actually be nice and nostalgic to replay after all this time. This turned out to be... partially true.

My initial review of Vashj'ir back in 2010 was pretty positive, but already a few months later I noted that replaying the zone on alts felt like "a massive drag". This time around, the first few quests felt pleasantly familiar and nostalgic. Back in original Cataclysm, mounts were not account-wide yet, so I had to do at least the first hub and a bit on every alt in order to earn my underwater breathing buff and seahorse mount to be able to navigate the zone.

As I continued deeper into the zone, my memories became fuzzier and I realised that there were some bits I barely remembered at all, such as the whole Nespirah chain. However, by the halfway point or so things definitely started to drag again this time too. I got the "2000 quests completed" achievement at some point and it struck me that almost 10% of those quests took place in this one zone alone, which is insane.

There's nothing wrong with any of the quests by themselves (and the Battlemaiden chain provides nice insights into the world of the naga), but it's just the fact that you have to go through almost 200 of them in a strictly linear chain just to cover a plot that can be summed up in two sentences. The same story could have been told in less than half the number of quests; there's just way too much "kill 15 naga" filler.

It's funny because at the time, I didn't think Cataclysm questing was that bad, but having revisited several older expansions in recent years it seems undeniable to me that Cata was an absolute low point in terms of questing. Mists of Pandaria was a noticeable step up again, but even BC and Wrath have aged better than Cata - in my opinion at least.

Gear progression was another interesting thing to observe. I'd started my journey in mostly tier five from BC and only replaced a few pieces of that while levelling through Northrend, and for very marginal upgrades at that. And then I started doing quests in Vashj'ir and the starts on the green quest rewards just went through the roof. By the end of level 83, after questing in Vashj'ir for a while, my health had nearly doubled compared to what it had been at level 82.

Finishing all of Vashj'ir got me most of the way to level 85. For the rest, I did the introductory quests to the other four Cataclysm endgame zones to unlock all the portals in Stormwind, as well as a bunch of cooking and fishing dailies. (I'd forgotten how much I used to love those in Cata.) At some point the Midsummer Festival also started, adding more supplementary XP from bonfire visits and torch tossing dailies.

I also got the "Stood in the Fire" achievement while doing the Uldum intro thanks to Deathwing paying the zone a visit. 

I was surprised to see the Darkmoon Faire return after only two weeks, but then I recalled reading somewhere that Blizzard increased the frequency of its visits in Classic due to the sped up expansion schedule compared to the game's original run.

I even paused to do a bit of archaeology when I found myself flying past dig sites. I was surprised how good they were for XP and pleased to see that Blizz had already increased their yield a bit to five fragments or more per unearthed relic - I vividly recall that when archaeology was first added, you only got about three to four pieces per successful survey.

Now my plan is to perhaps continue doing the cooking and fishing dailies as well as possibly level my leartherworking some more. I'm not planning to dive into Pandaria the moment it launches as I expect things to be very crowded and I'd rather avoid all the mayhem tied to that. With my modest goal of wanting to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I should have plenty of time to get there at my own pace, as long as I do so before the release of the later patches.

I've got to admit I found myself wondering why I still care so much about this night elf hunter. Sure, part of it are the fond memories I made with her during Vanilla Classic, and another part is that I simply enjoy things like levelling professions, regardless of how useful it might turn out to be. However, I think at this point it's also that I'm kind of hoping that eventually she'll be united with my warband in retail. I don't think she'd bring anything particularly rare to the table, but she may well have collected some transmogs that I don't own in retail yet.

I know Blizzard hasn't even hinted at Classic merging with retail, and in fact said at the start of Classic that the two would always be separate. However, with Classic about to move into Mists of Pandaria, that seems like forever ago now, and I find it hard to imagine any other endpoint than an eventual merge with retail, regardless of how many more expansions will actually end up getting the classic treatment. I can be patient.

Retail Bits & Bobs

I'm actually having more fun in Cataclysm Classic than in any other version of the game right now, how weird is that? Still, things haven't exactly been quiet in retail either, rather the opposite - it's just that nothing has been particularly sticky for me. Some notes on what's been going on: 

Retribution Paladin

I finished levelling the paladin I wrote about last month. I didn't get to the cap before the bonus XP event ended, but I was well into War Within by that point and the last few levels didn't take me long at all.

I can see why retribution paladins are so popular. People loved the idea of that class even back in Vanilla, when it performed really poorly in terms of output, so I'm not surprised that it's still popular now that it's more balanced and comes with a lot more shiny effects attached. Fighting as a retribution paladin is basically a massive light show with literal bells and whistles going off everywhere and hammers flying around, and it's just plain fun.

With the free delve keys you get from Renown it was surprisingly quick and easy to get her into a set of decent gear, but now I already find myself thinking "what now" again. Still, it was nice to actually play and level my first ever character in current content after all these years, even if I'll continue to primarily think of her as the one that first explored Elwynn Forest, fought gnolls in Redridge, protected weaker party members on a moonlit night in Loch Modan and got yelled at for tanking badly in the Deadmines.

Horrific Visions

The current patch (11.1.5) got criticised a lot for drip-feeding its content with too much time-gating, which is something I really don't mind, but what is true (for me at least) was that each part of the patch that was released later was less interesting to me than the previous one.

I loved the Nightfall event even if it was buggy and farmed my way to maximum Renown with the associated faction, but the return of Horrific Visions (a feature that was originally part of Battle for Azeroth) was already a lot less interesting to me. The husband and I actually dabbled in these a bit at the end of BfA when we first started playing again, but we didn't stick with them for very long, for reasons I can't recall now.

This time around, I think I already said during the second or third run that I could see these becoming boring really quickly. Sure, repeating content is a big part of WoW and MMOs in general, but there's just something about these little scenarios that makes the repetition even more blatant and tedious. It's become a bit more interesting as we've started to challenge ourselves a little with the higher difficulties, but I still wouldn't want to do these more than a couple of times a week.

Dastardly Duos

Finally, the latest part of the patch to be released belatedly was something called "Dastardly Duos", which I'd heard content creators praise while it was on the PTS, but my personal experience with this feature was comically bad. You see, the husband and I queued into them, and I thought that they would scale to your group size like delves and visions do. There were helpful NPCs at the start, but again I was thinking of Horrific Visions - where the general recommendation was to dismiss the help since it just increased mob health and wasn't actually all that helpful - and simply dismissed them.

This turned out to be a big mistake, as the content is clearly intended for five characters, and your gear is scaled down as well (something I had no idea about), so we got absolutely smashed and soon found ourselves camped at the spawn point. There was a timer on screen so I thought "oh well, let's just let the timer run out" but that did not complete the instance. We couldn't find any exit button either! I eventually distracted the mobs for a bit so the hubby's mage could hearthstone out, and I managed to get out the same way a bit later. It was just funny and bizarre but also totally killed any desire we'd had to engage with this content. Nothing like being thrown into an instance where you can't tell what's going on, get spawn-camped by NPCs and can't figure out how to leave.

I did eventually go back and complete a couple of rounds with the NPC group as intended, but I still didn't really understand what was supposed to be the point and it just didn't look particularly fun. There are plenty of more entertaining things for me to do instead of struggling to figure this out. 

In fact the next patch, 11.1.7, is already supposed to launch this week, so there's already something new to check out, yet again.

Legion Remix

During PAX East, something that was already floating around as a rumour was officially confirmed: that there'll be another Remix event like last year's Mists of Pandaria Remix, only this time it's going to be for Legion and it's going to launch towards the end of the year. I ultimately ended up liking MoP Remix quite a lot, so I'm looking forward to this, but at the same time my own experiences with Legion weren't that long ago and I didn't play the expansion at all when it originally came out, so I'm not currently feeling a lot of nostalgia for it.

I also have a character of every class at the level cap now (plus the extra paladin mentioned above) so what would I even level next? Another one of every class on the opposite faction, trying out different race and class combos? Not sure where I'll end up landing on all this. 

Housing Hype

And because all of this clearly isn't enough, Blizzard also keeps trickling out more news about housing. There's been a few dev blogs on the subject, such as this one and this one, and last month they had an event where different content creators got an early preview of how things are going, which resulted in a lot of them making gushing videos about the experience.

I'm following all this with interest but at the same time I'm not that much of a housing enthusiast that I'm on the edge of my seat (which is why I haven't felt the need to post about any of the above until now). In fact, a lot of the more advanced features don't sound all that interesting to me because I don't think I'd ever use them, so I was mainly relieved that it's been stated that there'll be a basic editor for players like me who just want to keep it simple.

One quote that amused me and that stuck with me (though I sadly can't remember now where I heard it) was something along the lines of: "Interior and exterior are completely separate, so your house can be much bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS. Or as we should say in WoW, like Naxxramas." 

Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Game Design

The other day I found out that WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas gave a presentation at Nordic Game less than two weeks ago. Even though I personally don't recall hearing about it before, Nordic Game touts itself as Europe's leading games conference, and handily, its various talks are available on YouTube for free. So I went ahead and watched Ion's.

It's a little less than an hour long but seemed to go by really quickly as I found it very interesting. Mostly he explains just how much WoW's design philosophy has changed since 2020, when retail's subscriber numbers plummeted during Shadowlands and Classic surged with popularity. He talks about how he was originally tasked with preserving "the vision" above all else, with Shadowland's widely lambasted covenant system having been the last gasp of that, and how they've come to appreciate since then that when you maintain a live service game that's this big and this long-lived, the players own it just as much as the devs and it makes no sense to try and force things on the players that they say they don't want. (I wonder how much Holly Longdale had to do with that change of heart.)

He talks about how even if you change absolutely nothing, player attitudes and interests change and you've got to be reckoning with that. He talks about how new systems will always benefit from a sense of novelty, but that even something that is loved at first will get boring and disdained after a while.

Another part related to that which I personally found particularly interesting was that he said that in the past, they were too obsessed with future-proofing everything, at the cost of making things actually fun. The example he gave of this was the Mists of Pandaria talent trees, which could have been built on for several more decades because of just how little they gave you, but that this also made them really boring and uninteresting while levelling (which I heartily agree with).

The contrast to this are the new talent trees added with Dragonflight, which are more similar to the old ones - and are even more complex than the old trees, in my opinion. I did also worry when they decided to add hero talents on top of that for War Within, that it was all getting a bit too complicated again already. His response to this was that they are well aware that it will all get out of hand at some point and will need tearing down again, but that this is a problem for the future, and that they don't want worries about ten years down the line to stop them from doing fun things now.

I think it's clear that he's very passionate about what he does, and I think it's also obvious that he strongly believes in this new strategy - and it has played out positively in the last two expansions so far! Nevertheless, I have to admit I also remained a bit sceptical of the things he said because they sounded a bit too simplistic sometimes. Listening to your players sounds great, but as he admitted himself, sometimes they want diametrically opposed things and you can't keep everyone happy - so how do you decide which way to go? And making things fun now without worrying too much about the future... again, I do get the idea behind it, but as an MMO player I've also seen my fair share of systems that were clearly built with that same attitude, that a certain result needed to be achieved now, and which then continue to be an albatross around everyone's neck because people didn't think enough about how they should continue to fit into the game's framework in years to come.

Either way, I can heartily recommend watching the video for yourself if you have any interest in why the WoW devs have made certain decisions in the past few years, as there's a lot more in there than just the examples I picked out.

(Ever wondered just how fast retail levelling is nowadays? Well, straight from the horse's mouth, it's "literally ten times faster" than it was in Vanilla.) 

Checking in on Cataclysm Classic

Back in October, in a post about why Classic wasn't really vibing with me at the moment, I noted the following: "If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state." As far as I can tell, MoP was the last expansion in which Blizzard permanently replaced a zone with an updated version, as in the years since, they've opted for the Bronze-Dragonflight-sponsored time travel option instead whenever they made major changes, which allows people to still access the old zone if they want to.

Since I made that post, Mists of Pandaria Classic has not only been announced, but also had a public beta and is currently scheduled to go live in mid to late July. As I hadn't forgotten about that goal of mine, I decided that it was about time to re-download Cataclysm Classic and get a character expansion-ready.

For those of you not keeping track, I last played "progressive" Classic at the end of TBC. I checked in extremely briefly both at the start of Wrath Classic and at the start of Cata, but did not feel drawn to either expansion. This meant that my characters were server-transferred last year as part of the latest round of soft server consolidations, but other than that, my hunter Tiirr (now with two Is and two Rs) was still level 70 and sitting in Shattrath.

I took the portal to Stormwind and started doing some maintenance to get her into a playable state. As an aside, I was surprised by how busy things were in Stormwind (and that's on a server that was flagged as having a medium population). Classic Cata is the currently live version of Classic that I've been hearing the least about in terms of people actually playing it, but clearly it still has its audience. Ironforge.pro has registered slightly fewer than 100k characters raiding in Cata Classic last week, which is about the same number as on the vanilla Classic anniversary servers. So for all the scoffing I've seen about how Cata is where the real Classic ended and surely nobody actually wanted it, there do seem to be plenty of players who've been happy to play it anyway.

Either way, my primary task was to get my bags in order. All my mounts and pets could be added to the new collections interface to no longer take up bag space. Toys were eligible too - the first time around, those didn't became part of collections until Warlords of Draenor, but in progressive Classic that part is already there. Likewise, the transmog interface is the one that was introduced in Legion, and the auction house is the new one that was added in Battle for Azeroth. I swear, this is going to make it harder than ever to remember which features were introduced in which expansion.

Anyway, other bag slots were freed up from selling items that had been turned into vendor trash, such as all my arrows, or things that were simply no longer relevant to a hunter in Cata, such as pet food and mana potions. One bag was filled with a bunch of random keys tied to various BC quests that I wasn't even on... I can only guess that those had been on my keyring when that was removed. Either way, more stuff to destroy. A few items, such a stacks of cloth, I decided to actually list on the AH since there were presumably still some people interested in them.

I had to visit the flight master to unlock flying in Northrend and the revamped old world. (Fortunately the ramp I was jumping off when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fly yet without this wasn't very high.) I stopped by all the profession trainers, as well as - after some initial confusion - my class trainer. (For some reason I'd had it in my head that Cata was also the expansion where they removed the need to train abilities, but no, that actually happened in Mists.) I dragged abilities from my spell book back onto my bar and spent my pet's talent points.

My hunter herself had no spec either, and my first impulse was to go Marksman as usual - but then I read some of the talents and went "eurgh" - right, Cata was when I went Survival, back when that was still a ranged spec, so I opted to revisit that particular setup. Still, I was kind of surprised by how incredibly boring all the talents looked, as I seem to remember quite liking the condensed talent trees during original Cataclysm.

Finally I was ready to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Northrend. It sent me to Borean Tundra when I would've preferred Howling Fjord, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't even remember where to board the right boat for that. So I just hopped onto the next ferry leaving Stormwind to start in the Tundra.

I miss boats being relevant. They are slow but they really force you to immerse yourself in the world for a few minutes in a way that portals don't.

I decided I could be picky with which quests to do, so I only did about a third of the zone (if that) and also made a trip to Dalaran and Howling Fjord to pick up some flight paths. Unsurprisingly I suppose, this was enough to net me two levels in that single play session. The Wrath portion of the levelling curve was presumably nerfed again with the release of Cata, there's another bonus XP event going on right now, and I was fully rested. Still, considering I'm not here for Northrend or the Shattering, I found the levelling speed heartening and it made the prospect of making it through the last two expansions I'd skipped less daunting. I expect that 80-85 might still be a bit of a pain unless they nerf it with the pre-patch or something, but we'll see. I'll probably do Vashj'ir since I haven't done that zone in ages... but first I need to actually make my way through Northrend.

Riding the Winds of Mysterious Fortune

I've noticed that there's a very clear pattern to the way I've come to play retail WoW. It goes something like this:

New content! → Check it out on the main to see what it's all about → Repeat a few times for rewards if applicable → Occasionally do said content on alts for a while → Engage with said content less and less as rewards become less frequent/more RNG-dependent or I just get bored → New content!

The slump before the next new content patch is usually when I'm the most likely to start messing around on random low-level alts. I've got to admit that ever since I got one of each class to 80, I've started to question that gameplay a little bit ("Do I really need another shaman?" etc.) but sometimes it's just fun to revisit old zones and quests or try to learn more about a spec I've never played.

Lately, one of those characters has been the human paladin that was the very first character I ever created. She lives on a German server, so I had little reason to play her once I migrated to playing in English, but after the introduction of warbands made all those alts relevant again in a way, I decided to take her out for a spin. Originally I just did a bit of questing and gathering in her old human starting zone haunts (back in Vanilla I got her to level 20 or so), but eventually I decided that the Cataclysm versions of those zones just weren't doing it for me and that I'd rather take her to the Dragon Isles, since I'd been meaning to replay the Dragonflight story for some time anyway.

(Am I the only one who's feeling somewhat nostalgic for Dragonflight? I think The War Within is good, but I loved the zones and the general vibe in Dragonflight, and War Within just doesn't hit quite the same way for me.)

The other day I logged into her again (she was sitting at level 32) and did a couple of quests when I noticed that I had some "mysterious satchels" in my inventory. It was only then that I remembered that there's a levelling event going on right now, which is something I usually ignore since I think that levelling in retail is plenty fast and I don't necessarily need a boost to it. As such, I hadn't really looked too deeply into the special twist they added this time either: that you occasionally get these satchels as bonus loot from quests and drops, and they contain gear appropriate for your spec and level. The first one I opened contained a two-handed weapon that was a massive upgrade from what I had, and I equipped it with delight.

I then continued questing and was surprised by how much I fell in love with the whole satchel idea. It has long been my main complaint about levelling in retail that normal gear acquisition can't keep up with the speed at which you gain levels, meaning that if you don't wear heirlooms, you'll quickly get weaker and weaker due to scaling until even simple quests start to feel unplayable. These satchels came in so frequently that they finally addressed this problem.

You could tell that it was still a bit of a struggle, as even with the bags constantly showering me with new gear, each new piece would be about 50-100 item levels above the one it just replaced, but it was still a dramatic improvement from how this process normally goes. Some satchels also contained "fun" consumables instead of gear, such as the Night Elf Mohawk grenade making a comeback, which I certainly didn't mind either.

Within two days I blasted through several zones and gained close to 35 levels. I generally find Classic's slower-paced levelling more meaningful, but every now and then I achieve good "flow" in retail as well and this was one of those instances. I was really surprised though by just how well the little goodie bags addressed the usual gearing issue, and while it feels more like a band-aid than a "clean" fix for the scaling problem, I've got to admit I'm kind of hoping that they make these satchels or something similar a permanent part of the game as, at least for me, this would go a long way towards making random alt levelling more enjoyable again.