Skyborne Are Fine

Not everyone was as pleased with the WoW Forever reveal as I was - which, to be honest, was to be expected. They did manage to hit a lot of the right notes, but considering the sheer amount of crazy theories and expectations people had expressed by now, disappointment from some corners was very much unavoidable.

People are entitled to their opinions on that and I'm not here to argue why anyone who doesn't care about WoW Forever should like it - but there is one topic I'd like to take a closer look at: the most frequent criticism I've seen so far, even among those who are generally positive about the whole thing: that people don't like the Skyborne a.k.a. the sky/wind elves.

I do get the initial knee jerk reaction, because even I said in my last post that their reveal seemed quite weird. Here's a trailer that manages to hit beat after beat of nostalgia with familiar characters and locations - and then there's that sudden moment of confusion: Where's that? Why is there a blue elf? Who is she? What is she?

For me though, once they got to the part where they explained what we'd just seen and what WoW Forever is meant to be, it all made sense. Oh, so they are high elves that made a pact with the elemental wind lords to live in Skywall? That's fine, that totally sounds like something Chris Metzen would come up with. Let's go!

So I was somewhat surprised to see how many people instead dug their heels in and doubled down on that initial negative reaction, telling everyone that sky elves are bad. I feel like a lot of the discourse around this is honestly quite muddy, but after some browsing, I think I've distilled it down to four basic arguments, which all come from slightly different directions.

They just don't fit

The main argument here seems to be that the lore explanation for this addition is too far removed from original vanilla content. Sure, elves in general exist, the elemental wind lords are a known force, but... there's never been as much as a whisper about these particular elves! They haven't shown up in retail in over twenty years either! (Though at the same time, I've seen people argue that they look like "something out of retail", presumably because the poster hasn't logged into retail in at least a decade - let's hand-wave that contradiction for now.)

Their models are basically recoloured blood elves, so at worst they look like something out of Burning Crusade, which is not that far removed from Vanilla aesthetically. As for how well their lore will actually fit in - I feel like this is something we won't actually know until we play the content. Could it be done badly? Sure. But it could also be done well, and there's no reason to just assume that it will be bad.

I kinda get the grousing about a lack of connection to existing lore, but at the same time, the whole point of Classic+ is to let us discover some new things. People can't help how they feel, but I do think this immediately highlights the extreme tightrope fans expect Blizzard to walk in terms of what they are and aren't allowed to add to this mode. Don't you dare be too creative! Zero surprises please!

I want elves, but not these elves!

This segment of the player base likes elves, but they need to have the right label. "Why couldn't they have just given us high elves?" For the same reason they didn't give high elves to the Alliance back in 2006, but instead opted to give blood elves to the Horde: population balance.

I'm old enough to remember when Horde was considered the "ugly" faction, with Alliance being considerably more popular. Before Burning Crusade came out, I remember someone telling me that the Horde needed the blood elves added to even out the population imbalance - and it worked! Blood elves remain the most popular race to this day, even with all the additional options modern WoW has added over the years.

If they took Vanilla as a starting point and added high elves to the Alliance, population balance probably would've been shot forever, sorry. This isn't some hypothetical by the way, it was absolutely the case on Turtle WoW for example - they just didn't have to care, because they made the auction house and all grouping cross-faction anyway.

There are some variations of this that try to acknowledge the above problem by coming up with some sort of workaround to have different elves (as long as they aren't these elves), but every single one of those then just introduces a different problem or thing to complain about, e.g. "They could have just done blood elves again!" → "How lazy to make Classic+ just Burning Crusade all over again."

Elves suck, period.

World of Warcraft has always included elves, but in Vanilla, you didn't have to group with any if you were Horde at least. Again, I remember a time when people complained that the addition of blood elves "ruined" the Horde because it brought all the airheads who just want to play a pretty character over to the other faction. You can probably still find people who think that today!

And as petty as it may be, I kind of feel like this is probably the most genuine and heartfelt complaint, and the one I have the most sympathy for. No, I don't think elf aficionados are dumb and childish (and not just because I've played some elves in my time), but I actually do think there's some truth to it that the Horde's vibes definitely changed when the blood elves were introduced, and having pretty blue elves in Orgrimmar may well do something similar. Sorry if this is an absolute deal breaker for you. You get to stick with Classic era. You're probably also part of an absolutely tiny minority, though.

They cost money, which is evil.

Now this one is interesting, because while I don't want to judge anyone who might feel that way, I do also get the vibe that this is the most "bad faith" of all the arguments listed here, possibly pushed by private server players who just hate Blizzard and anyone who gives them money, ever.

The reason I say this is that there was never going to be a world in which Blizzard introduces a second version of WoW that receives continuous development while not expecting to make any additional money from it. There had to be some kind of new income source on the horizon.

I suppose the obvious alternative could've been to charge a "box price" for WoW Forever, but in my opinion that actually would've been much weirder, considering that Blizzard waived the box price for regular World of Warcraft in BfA eight years ago. Having Forever be the only version of WoW that requires a purchase beyond the subscription to even access would've been strange.

I think the way they've done it, with Forever being part of the existing subscription and the sky elves being an optional extra purchase is actually about the most benign way an MMO can do monetisation. It means the barrier of entry to convince your friends who are already part of the WoW ecosystem to at least try it out is very low, and if you don't care about sky elves, you don't have to pay for anything new at all. Wins all around.

We'll see what other ways to monetise they'll come up with in the future. Could there be some bad ones? Sure, but this isn't one of them.

---

Ultimately, I think this "controversy" is going to end up being a storm in a teacup - there will be a lot of people who'll enjoy playing as an elf (I'll definitely make one to check out the new starting zone if nothing else) and even those who grouse about them now will mostly find that it's not enough to make them stay away or spoil their enjoyment in the long run. If anything, I feel like this being the biggest complaint that most people could come up with shows how well Blizzard has managed to hit the mark with everything else.

Classic+ Is Real: Warcraft Forever

I was hoping to watch the livestream of the BlizzCon opening ceremony only briefly to catch the WoW news but soon realised that they were doing their usual thing of starting with the smaller games, to leave Warcraft and the biggest announcements until the end. I knew we were in for something major for Classic when they actually did the retail bit first... and then had to watch the rest on my second monitor, being very distracted in the process.

Not gonna lie, that trailer nearly made me cry.

To start with the classic shot of the dwarf hunter and his bear, but then having them go in a different direction, through beautiful fields.

Dalaran in the bubble that then opens up.

An undead paladin! I don't even care about playing one, but it was like an in-universe way of saying that there'll be new class/race combos.

The beauty of classic Mount Hyjal, with the music swelling...

... and then, sky elves? Okay, that was a bit weird. There had been some datamining related to this months ago, but I thought it was going to be a retail thing. Either way, not a deal breaker.

There was also a features trailer:

New zones, new dungeons, new raids, a new battleground. New race/class combos, new talents. A toggle for whether you want to see the old models and animations or the new ones.

Other important bits were mentioned during the presentation, but I'm not sure I even caught everything. The level cap will be 60 and we'll stay in Azeroth. Transmog will exist but you decide/toggle whether you want to see it or prefer to see everyone in what they're actually wearing. Any future direction will be influenced by community feedback. Launch will be on November 4th.

Will it be perfect? Probably not, but what is? This is way closer to my personal idea of what I wanted out of a Classic+ than I ever dared to hope (I wasn't really on board with the idea until I tried out Turtle WoW and saw how lovely it was). I haven't been this excited about anything WoW-related in a long time.

Final Pre-BlizzCon Thoughts

We're a week away from BlizzCon now, and I don't think I've ever looked forward to it with this much anticipation. I've always enjoyed the spectacle and the big announcements - even in the years when I wasn't playing WoW, I still had a look at the trailers they released every year. And while 2017's WoW Classic announcement was probably the single most exciting piece of news I've ever gotten out of BlizzCon, most of us weren't looking forward to that one at the time, because we weren't really expecting it.

This time, it feels like the Classic community has been holding its breath waiting for what's to come for a long time. Some of us only for a few months, some for years. Whatever the truth is, we'll find out next Saturday. Please, no more "this is what Classic+ should do" videos in my YouTube feed. And give the people in the WoW Classic subreddit something real to talk about, instead of them trying to wring deeper meaning out of things like the Blizzard store changing its CSS.

Worst case, even if Camelot turns out to be a bit of a bust, I'm hoping we'll also find out more about the future of other modes of Classic soon after (even if that stuff doesn't make the big announcements). As I wrote back in June, I have a lot more questions on that front to which I'd like to get answers.

Interestingly, retail is less clear in terms of what announcements to expect this time. I have no doubt that there'll be some, but it feels a bit early to start hyping The Last Titan -  Midnight's only been out for six months! In the past, with new expansions coming out every two years, the annual hype cycle would basically alternate between the actual release of an expansion and announcing the next one about a year in advance, but since they've been trying to make an eighteen month cycle happen with the Worldsoul Saga, it kind of complicates things.

The increased focus on story and the fact that the Worldsoul Saga is meant to be a trilogy also means that it would make no sense to focus on whatever's going to happen in the final part when we don't even know yet how Midnight is going to end. Maybe they'll go for several mid-sized announcements instead: what's coming in 12.2, what's the next Remix going to be, maybe just a teaser for Last Titan, giving us glimpses of the revamped Northrend or showing us what Iridikron has been up to.

The Remix question is probably the most fun thing to speculate about on the retail front. I was originally thinking Wrath of the Lich King to get us in the mood for Last Titan, but considering that the anniversary servers are also supposed to continue into Wrath Classic next year, that might be a bit too much Northrend at once? Most people seem to think that a more modern expansion like BfA or Shadowlands is more likely, usually because they see Remixes less as a nostalgia trip and more as an opportunity to do a lot of item collecting in a short period of time, and apparently both of these had a lot of collectibles that people loathe to go back for in the regular game. We'll see.

And of course, there's the off-chance that they announce something else Warcraft-related that's not about WoW itself. The timeline from the purported leak discussed a few months ago included a Warcraft RTS, an anime and an Arthas ARPG, but even if these projects are real, the earliest any of these were meant to be released was late 2028, so it might still be too soon to talk them up.

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