Hope You Like Snakes

Midnight got its first major patch almost two weeks ago now, and I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about it.

I've enjoyed what I've seen of the story so far, but now I'm once again in dodgeball mode trying not to have the post-raid ending spoiled for me while Blizzard withholds story mode for another week and everyone who raids or is happy to just watch the raid-end cinematic on YouTube with no context is mindlessly posting spoilers left and right.

In general, patch 12.1 is all about snakes and venom (green goo). I've rarely seen a patch that is this hyper-focused on its main theme - maybe Undermine and goblins, but I think even that didn't go in quite this hard. Everything is about snakes here: The new island is inhabited by snake people and there are even ore nodes that erupt into fountains of green goo. The new delve variants are snake-themed, the new prey bosses are snake people, the new nemesis is a snake guy. Snakes, snakes, everywhere! I feel kind of bad for anyone who hates snakes or has a phobia of them.

I love that the Coiled Isle is immediately off the coast of Zul'Aman and can be flown to directly with no loading screens. I tried to fly there early in the expansion just to be ejected, but was immediately intrigued by that, so I'm happy that we actually get to explore it now.

As for the activities on the island itself, I'm unsure whether I like them or not. You get a quest early on to do three "cursed surges" but for a long time the husband and I couldn't even figure out what they were. Turns out they are short zerg events that spawn once every 45 minutes at different locations around the island, so they are very easy to miss if you don't already know what you're looking for.

The biggest activity hub is Atal'Utek, the giant vault under the island, and I've got to admit my first impression of that was that I found it extremely overwhelming, with all the different map markers and always a timer counting down to something or other. You can only use your ground mount, but there are some neat ways to get around more quickly beyond that; you just need to be good at figuring out how to best use them, which I definitely haven't yet. This week, there was a bit where I was supposed to go up a level to reach an objective so I ran to one of those feathers that throw you up into the air, but on the way I aggroed several mobs so I couldn't click on it because I kept getting interrupted. It took me a while to kill them all, and by the time I was able to grab the feather, the objective upstairs had disappeared.

The whole place just makes me feel a bit weird. There is definitely something fun about joining a zerg and running from one objective to the next like a crazy person, but the mob density is also quite high and if you want to go in a different direction than wherever the zerg currently is, it can be tedious. For some reason I also really dislike descending down underground through these long tunnels where you can only use your ground mount (even if you're given a speed boost while in there). Have I finally reached my limit for underground zones? I've been worried about any major content updates putting us in caves since at least Dragonflight, but they were never as oppressive as I feared. I originally had no concerns about these vaults, but they make me feel weirdly penned in and I don't currently enjoy going there. We'll see whether I'll adjust.

In general, the arrival of the patch has also made me feel a bit melancholy. New content should be a reason to be excited, but I'd just gotten a bunch of my alts into a place where I was happy with them and I was starting to think about some alternative projects, but here we are back to the next gear reset and grinding time. I know I don't have to engage with that... but the game definitely makes me feel like I should, and it just feels a bit bad. I don't think I will ever grow to like modern WoW's seasonal model, even if I've learned to tolerate it for the most part.

A Second Look at Housing

For all the fun I've been having with Midnight, its main new feature, player housing, has largely fallen flat for me. I made a few posts in which I talked about why, and then I moved on, because I'd rather focus on the many things that I have been enjoying.

However, I did want to use the release of 12.1 as an opportunity to take another look at housing and how it's been coming along. To be clear, nothing has been done to address the major criticisms I had with the system, but my opinions on some things have at least become a bit more nuanced.

For example, while I still don't care much about decorating, I did eventually go and decorate my house a little bit. I do enjoy collecting decorations regardless of whether I plan to use them or not - I'm the same in SWTOR; there's just something satisfying about claiming new decos and adding them to my stash. And after accumulating a certain number in WoW, it felt only natural to actually place at least a few of them. It's nothing exciting, just a basic house with some simple furniture, but I have started to feel at least a little bit of a connection to it. Even though I've reached housing level 10 from my various housing-related activities, I've stuck to the single room because I don't like the Tardis aspect of the whole thing and this way my sense of how warped the whole house is isn't too bad at least.

I do visit the neighbourhood at least once a week because in a typical case of Blizzard logic, after being extremely shy about giving the houses any utility whatsoever because they didn't want anyone to feel "forced" to use them, they also added a repeatable quest that rewards currency to gear up and requires you to go to your neighbourhood and do some simple task there every week, such as helping someone find some lost animals. It's just funny to me.

I will say that I really like the variant of the quest that asks you to attend a gathering of at least five players in a player house, because it's served as an opportunity for everyone in the guild to take turns visiting other people's houses, and there are nice spontaneous random groupings for it as well. One week when I couldn't get it done with guildies, I ended up joining a party via the group finder where someone was showing off their insanely detailed wizard tower interior - I quite enjoyed hanging around for a bit and having a look around. I also took a screenshot of my character sitting in their custom-made bathroom.

 

In general I do appreciate how much joy people who really like building and decorating purely for the sake of it get out of the system. Nobody in my immediate circle of friends is really into it, but I don't need to cast my net very wide on social media to come across players who are having an absolute blast with their house. Just take a look at the WoW Housing subreddit and get ready for your jaw to drop. I do at least get a bit of happiness by association out of that.

Oh, and remember endeavours? It did indeed not take long for Blizzard to nerf the requirements for public neighbourhoods to complete their endeavours, but the devs basically swung so hard the other way that they now basically seem to complete themselves. I just have to remember to check in at some point to collect my free housing coupons.

I do like how they make the neighbourhood look a bit different when your visitors change, though the randomisation aspect of that may still need some work. While some people were complaining that they'd already seen all the available endeavours and were now bored of them, the Grummels camped out in my public neighbourhood for three months in a row, meaning I didn't get to see anything else for a quarter of the year. When the system finally switched to Ethereals I had some fun with the jumping puzzle they added, and I'm kinda enjoying the Amani-themed one that's going on right now as well. The weird circular gift-giving thing with Griftah made my head spin a little but I was proud that I was able to figure out all the relevant neighbourhood NPCs organically. 

I reckon overall, housing is probably shaping up to be a success for Blizzard - the "usage" metrics must be decent thanks to the weekly quest for gear rewards, and I'm sure all the decor they've added to the shop has made for some nice supplementary income for the game. Housing enthusiasts in MMOs always seem to be quite happy to spend on the cash shop without complaining too much.

Checking in on Hardcore

I hoped that merely writing about my current feelings about Classic would be enough to calm that particular itch until BlizzCon, but that hasn't been entirely the case. After mulling things over for a bit, I decided to log into my hardcore priest for a bit, whom I last played over two years ago.

The first thing to note is that I had already played her a bit more back then, by which I mean more than I actually wrote about at the time. I don't recall why I didn't post about it right away, but I did save a screenshot of me being in a group in Wailing Caverns to remind myself that I did in fact end up running it. I don't know why I stopped playing after that, considering that being unable to get a group for Wailing Caverns was the main reason I cited for losing interest at the time, but I guess it doesn't matter now.

What I did capture in the screenshots I saved was that I had a druid tank who wore the Arena Grand Master trinket - an item that requires you to get the treasure from the centre of the Gurubashi arena in Stranglethorn Vale twelve times. That's not something many characters will ever get, never mind a lowbie on a hardcore server - he'd clearly been twinked in some way. I think the dungeon run was pretty quick and smooth as a result - I certainly don't remember anything like the nerves I felt while trying to keep everyone alive in Ragefire Chasm.

But as I said, all that was two years ago already. What did I find upon logging in this time? A very empty Orgrimmar for one thing, which immediately made my heart sink. I did recall that Blizzard had launched a "fresh" hardcore server at some point (completely unnecessarily, in my opinion), and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in the two original servers becoming pretty depopulated. They are not dead by any means... but very quiet. Gone are the days of world buffs dropping on massive crowds in Orgrimmar every day.

While I do see other levellers around, the make-up of the population is... odd. When I did a /who for my level range, the vast majority of characters were hunters, and when I opened the LFG tool, again, I had to scroll past something like ten hunters before I even saw another class looking for a group. I get that they are probably a popular class for hardcore, but just how dominant they are on Nek'rosh now feels abnormal and weird, and doesn't give me much hope for being able to find dungeon groups.

Lonely at the zeppelin 

Checking on what I had in my quest log, I had some quests pointing me towards Stonetalon Mountains, which seemed like a fun and safe option to start on at level 22. And it was. I gained about two levels doing various green quests and never really found myself in any danger. The scariest thing I did was solo Besseleth, but even though I was out of mana at the end, the fight never really got too scary.

I also did a bit of work on my professions on the side, picking more flowers, making potions and pausing at various fishing pools. And I'm a bit embarrassed to admit... I may have been affected by primarily spending my time in retail for months now, but I kept thinking that it was all a bit slow and boring. By the third time I was running up and down the full length of Stonetalon on foot with no speed buffs I found myself wishing for a mount. It just felt lonely and I wasn't particularly excited by any of it.

Nonetheless, I pushed on for a little while, mixing it up a bit by also questing in the southern Barrens and Hillsbrad, but I just didn't feel any of the old magic. I guess I can say that I hit level 25, which officially makes this priest more long-lived than Lossy the mage was, having died at level 22, but I don't think I'll keep at it for now. I've had a taste of Classic and at least this particular experience wasn't actually the flavour I was looking for. We'll see what September brings.

My Midnight Season 1

As we're approaching patch 12.1 and with it the start of Midnight's second season, I wanted to take a moment to reflect a bit on Season 1.

My primary activity for gearing have of course been delves, and those have been fun. I already talked a bit about it previously, but I've basically been happy with everything Blizzard has adjusted about delves in Midnight. I got Valeera to her current level cap in no time, and she already feels much better tuned than Brann ever was. Her only weakness are those Spellshield Collaborators in the Darkway, which seem to be capable of reflecting her Mandate of Sacred Death and basically cause her to get one-shot randomly if you don't kill them quickly enough.

One thing I hadn't mentioned yet in previous posts is how much better tuned the delving experience has become as a healer. I did a fair few delves as a healer in War Within, but one thing that always put me off was how incredibly slow it was, even while wearing gear that was better than the drops you could get within the delve itself and with Brann fully maxed out. Boss fights were particularly bad, and I got into the habit of changing my companion from tank to dps for the last fight to speed things up, yet that final boss still tended to remain a 5+ minute slog on tier 11. In Midnight I followed the same strategy early on, but I quickly found that Valeera's dps had improved so much compared to Brann's that I could leave her as tank and we'd still kill any end boss in decent time. That's really appreciated.

Also, it feels a bit weird admitting it, but Blizzard have been very good at stringing me along all season to keep me playing for longer. I was "done" with basic delve rewards months ago, but they kept adding either reasons to re-run them or other/similar content (like the ritual sites) and I went along with it. I've only really been taking a bit of a step back for these last two weeks of the season.

I do think there's a risk of burnout if they keep trying the same trick in upcoming seasons. 

The big surprise this season, however, was that I actually ended up doing some Mythic+ again. You might recall that I decided to nope out of M+ after War Within Season 1, and I had no plans to get back into it since then. And I didn't... really, but what happened was that our guild group was somewhat diminished at the start of Midnight, and my husband was still part of it, so I naturally got pulled in as a backfill to make sure they could keep running. Part of it was that I was obviously an easy person to ask, the other part was that due to my enthusiasm for delving, I had reasonably geared characters of every role at a time when others were still struggling to gear their main.

So I ended up running some M+ in all three roles, though the vast majority of it happened on my hunter - which again, was a surprise considering that dps are usually not the role that's hardest to find. In fact, she ended up doing so much backfilling that by the end of what was declared our last run as a group, she was only a single-digit number away from 2500 rating. I hadn't really cared about it before, but that was so close that it seemed a waste not to take that last step. A more experienced acquaintance who plays tank agreed to take me through the one dungeon I was still missing for rating (Pit of Saron), which eventually resulted in me getting Keystone Hero for the first time, in a season when I wasn't even trying to play M+ at all.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that. There was a lot of talk about how Midnight Season 1 was one of the easiest M+ seasons ever, and my own experience seemed to bear that out in so far as our little group had never been able to reliably clear +10s before (and we even went a little higher than that this time!). At the same time, because of the irregular nature of my backfilling (even if it ended up adding up to a lot of runs in total at the end) meant that I never felt particularly engaged with the system. I couldn't really give you my detailed thoughts on all the dungeons as I didn't run some of them on mythic more than once or twice.

As far as intra group tension goes, which had been the main reason I stopped in War Within: as dps it was easier to just hang back and let people do whatever, and likewise nobody seemed to care that much what I was doing. When I had been tanking there had always been a lot of annoying backseat driving that slowly drove me up the wall.

That said, I still don't know whether I'd necessarily want to do more of this again. In some ways it was good fun, but other times I did feel a bit stressed by the hyperfocus that M+ requires for thirty minutes straight. I don't mind that kind of intense activity as a one-off once a week, but every run? Meh. I guess points go to Blizzard for being able to add me to their metrics this season.

My warrior tank's final M+ scorecard

My hunter's final M+ scorecard

My holy priest's final M+ scorecard

Pent up Classic Energy

I haven't written much about Classic in recent months, but I'm still thinking about it a lot. Especially in the shower for some reason.

You know how your brain will sometimes form somewhat random but extremely strong connections between things that aren't necessarily related? Like a certain smell instantly taking you back to a moment from your childhood, or a song always making you think of a specific person you once shared it with. I have something like that going on with WoW Classic, specifically the Barrens and Wailing Caverns, as memories of them come to mind every time I take a shower and wash my hair on a warm, sunny day.

I'm not sure why that is - I just know that when Classic launched back in 2019, I binged on it pretty hard for the first few weeks, which included thinking about it basically all the time, even when I wasn't playing - including in the shower I guess? Since I rolled several Horde characters back then, I also must have spent a fair amount of time in the Barrens, including running Wailing Caverns over and over, which logically would then have been something I was thinking about a lot. And I guess it must've still been warm and sunny in September 2019? Like I said, it's pretty random, and it does crack me up a little every time I shampoo my hair and suddenly remember that time I grouped with an undead priest outside Wailing Caverns.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent to start with, but I'm generally thinking about how I just kind of miss Classic right now. I find retail fun in its own way, but it simply doesn't scratch the same itch. At the same time, there's no Classic mode I really want to get into right now.

I did log into MoP Classic after the launch of patch 5.4 and checked out the Timeless Isle for a bit, but I was quickly reminded of just how many hours I spent grinding there in MoP Remix almost exactly two years ago now, and I just have zero appetite for doing all of that again, and more slowly at that.

Sometimes I cast my mind towards Season of Discovery and wonder whether I should go back and pursue some more of the goals I originally had for that mode before it potentially goes away... but the feeling just isn't there.

The anniversary servers seem weirdly alluring right now, mostly because I keep seeing people on my Battle.net friends list playing there, and I just miss that Burning Crusade feeling a bit. It's so weird now: I used to say that BC was my favourite expansion, then Classic came and ruined a lot of that for me because of how differently people were approaching it in the modern era, but with some distance I'm once again reminded that there were also vibes and content there that I still genuinely love.

I just don't want to get into the cesspit that are the anniversary servers, so I'm vainly holding out hope that maybe Blizzard will make Burning Crusade era servers this time around when Wrath of the Lich King comes around again. I was so disappointed when there was no interest in that back in 2022, but in fairness, at the time Classic era still looked pretty dead and I reckon there were probably people both in the community and at Blizzard who wondered whether having these era-locked servers at all had maybe been a mistake. But as mainline Classic progressed further into more expansions, the era servers truly came to life and have managed to maintain a healthy population ever since, even if it ebbs and flows a bit depending on what else is going on with other versions of Classic. Plus if it's true that Blizzard is planning to make a fresh set of servers go through the first three eras of the game every few years (as indicated by the leak), having both a BC and Wrath era server as final destinations for some of these characters would simply make sense to me. Or are you telling me that people would prefer to go through anniversary editions of Cata and MoP Classic?

Regardless, the demand for BC era might still not be quite there yet, and even worse, as WillE has suggested recently, it might actually be in Blizzard's best financial interests to not have them. Sure, they'll lose a few subs from people who don't want to progress into Wrath or whatever, but at the same time BC anniversary has apparently been extremely successful in terms of selling boosts, which can probably at least partially be blamed on the fact that there were several years when there was no way to play BC Classic officially and people had time to miss it.

So I know I'm probably going to be disappointed on that front, but I just can't help hoping. If BC era ever became a thing, I'd definitely roll up a character there to see whether I could find a BC-focused community with similar chill levels as the guys and gals on Classic era.

One way or another all the Classic news will be coming out at BlizzCon in a bit over a month, including the reveal of whatever Project Camelot turns out to be exactly - and whatever it is, I'll definitely want to check it out just to see what it's all about. So I'm kind of sitting here, thinking I might as well save that desire for Classic for the big reveals and new opportunities that will become available soon - but that doesn't mean that I don't still miss it in the meantime.

Midnight Profession Goals Achieved!

The other day I was very pleased to finally get this pop-up:

For the uninitiated, that's the achievement for raising every primary profession in Midnight to (the max skill level of) 100. (In case you're wondering, this is now my new 7th rarest achievement according to Data for Azeroth.)

On top of that, all my profession alts now have the purple version of all their profession tools and accessories. I actually made a little spreadsheet to keep track of that, and yes, it took a crapload of Abundance runs - but that wasn't a problem for me because I enjoy the Abundance event! In fact, I'd already gathered all the rare materials I needed from that a while ago; the thing holding me back on the last few crafts were other materials and concentration.

In general my attitude to this project was that I wanted to do it all "in house" with my alt army supporting each other and with minimal purchasing of mats or reagents off the auction house. At the same time, I also wanted to avoid crafting crappy or useless items just to skill up, which slowed me down some more as it often meant spending more time and resources on more expensive/harder-to-make items for skill-ups.

In that regard, the easiest crafting profession to level was engineering - I didn't start playing my engineer until quite late, but skilling up was so fast and easy that she soared right past the progress of several of my other crafters in no time. Especially compared to blacksmithing, all the crafts were so much cheaper in terms of mats, and engineers make a ton of profession tools (which were my focus) so she had lots of things to craft that gave multiple skill points each per craft.

Hardest for me personally were probably inscription and jewelcrafting, due to how many steps the mats for my desired items had to go through, with each step requiring use of concentration to get a good result, e g. prospecting ore to get gems, crushing the gems for shards, turning the shards into lenses and so on.

There seem to be certain "break points" with these where you can suddenly get the high quality result by simply using high quality mats - without having to use concentration on top of it - which speeds things up considerably, but I was probably assigning my points badly for those and it took a while to reach them.

Of course that doesn't mean that I'm "done" with professions - there are plenty of knowledge points left to earn in order to fully populate the various spec trees, but I've got to admit that's less interesting to me now, as I no longer have a specific personal goal to work towards, so it's just a matter of more gathering/grinding and fulfilling patron orders that aren't too expensive as and when they pop up.

Still, this was one of my major goals for Midnight, and since professions don't reset seasonally (please Blizzard, I'm not trying to give you ideas), there won't be as much to do on that front as the expansion progresses. Presumably there'll just be a couple of new recipes to collect in 12.1 and 12.2. 

Alas, Poor Decor Duels

In unexpected news, Blizzard announced on Tuesday that Decor Duels will be going away with the launch of patch 12.1 in August. They were only added in April, as one of the new side activities to do in patch 12.0.5. I did say at the time that they were fine but that I could've done without them, however a few weeks later, I randomly got really into them and ground out enough matches to get all the achievements and buy all the cosmetic rewards, including the mount. I would've bought the decorations too, except that the disguised decor vendor was too well disguised for me and I didn't realise it existed.

What do you mean, I was supposed to talk to the chair? 

So the feature getting removed now shouldn't really affect me, but I've got to say I'm still somewhat dismayed. It was a fun little mini game, and most importantly I don't think Blizzard actually ever announced it as a limited-time event (until this recent shutdown notice). Maybe it was always meant to be, as its achievements sit under the "events" category of the achievement panel, but it certainly wasn't obvious. In fact, when there were conversations at 12.0.5's launch about how Blizzard was maybe trying to push out too much content too fast, one of the counter arguments I heard was that there can never be too much content and there's no need to stress about any of it because it's all evergreen stuff that's going to hang around forever and you can always do it later. That argument sure has aged like milk!

I've also heard speculation that maybe Blizzard were thinking about keeping it around originally but ultimately decided to phase it out because queue times were getting too long. Which sounds reasonable on the surface except that apparently plenty of old queueable content that rarely pops is still around, such as warfronts from BfA (not that I've ever done one of those). If queues are something the devs are worried about, there are really other things they should fix first.

In fact, let me go off on a little tangent here for a moment: After my Decor Duel spree, I decided I might as well go back to doing a bit of casual normal PvP, like I'd done at the start of the expansion. Just whatever the weekly quest for battlegrounds told me to do each week - and it turned out to be largely impossible because nothing would pop. I did eventually get a few epic battlegrounds done on weekends, but I've not seen a single one of the weekly PvP brawls for example, even after hours and hours of queueing.

I started googling what was going on and found out that there are apparently separate queues for "newbies" and "veterans" and everyone with an honour level of less than 30 counts as a newbie. Since I did most of my PvPing back in the days before they introduced the current honour level system, my level in it is only 11... and apparently the newbie queues rarely pop, creating a catch 22 where you can't PvP regularly until you're honour 30, but you can't get to honour 30 because you can't get into any matches. There's a queue problem you should be worrying about, Blizz, not about Decor Duels taking fifteen minutes to pop! Honestly, this whole situation was pretty shocking to me because I always used to think of WoW as the game that could make queues pop for everything at any time. How the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, back to Decor Duels. I decided to do a few more matches before they're going away, just for fun and to also buy the decos I'd missed until now. Fortunately they are much cheaper than the cosmetics were, plus coin gains have been doubled for the remaining duration of the event.

I've seen people criticise the mode as "not good for a prop hunt" while drawing comparisons to how other games handle their own versions of the same thing. I can't judge that because Decor Duels have been my first and only experience with a prop hunt, but I really quite enjoyed the mode. By the time I got into it, queues had already gotten a lot quieter, and it was interesting to see how a sort of meta was evolving from match to match.

The first time I saw a hider get revealed on one of the floating platforms at the end of a match for example, my jaw dropped - were they cheating? How could you get up there? Naturally, the next time it was my turn to hide I made a point of finding out how to get up there, and it was where I successfully managed to remain unfound for the rest of a match myself. But then people caught on to that being a popular strategy, and a seeker would leap up there almost first thing every match. It was always interesting to see others succeed in new hiding places that I'd never even considered. 

With the announcement of the impending shutdown, people's FOMO receptors have been activated and queues are back to being almost instant. A lot of the players coming in now have clearly not played before or very little, so the meta is all over the place again, especially since Blizzard also made changes to make seeking harder and hiding easier, so that's kind of fun in its own way. I can personally recommend at least checking it out while it's still around (if you haven't yet done so).