Exploring Midnight (Professions & Abundance)

I've got to admit, after finishing the Midnight campaign and hitting the new level cap on my warrior, I initially felt a bit lost. Not in the sense that there was nothing to do, but in the sense that I wasn't entirely sure what it was I wanted to do next. I already knew that I was going to spend some time going through all the side quests with the husband later, but activities to gear up initially felt quite limited due to access to a lot of expansion features being more time-gated than ever. (There are two whole delves that you can't even access yet, at all, and I only found out because I googled them after I couldn't find their entrances on the map.) However, I also wasn't sure whether I really wanted to get back into the gear grind just yet anyway - and levelling my army of alts towards an uncertain future at the level cap didn't seem particularly appealing either.

Eventually it hit me that what I really wanted to do was level professions on my alts. The Dragonflight profession revamp didn't really work for me when it first happened, but something about the tweaks Blizzard made to the system in War Within just made everything fall into place all of a sudden, and as a result I had a lot of fun spending time gathering and crafting throughout that expansion.

With me being armed with a better understanding of how things work right from the start in Midnight, I decided that the next alts to follow my mining and blacksmithing warrior should be my hunter (skinner/leatherworker) and my warlock (herbalism/alchemy). Well, those two and my tailoring/enchanting priest, but I've mostly used her to dip my toes into healing some random dungeons. I can't tell whether people are genuinely a little less unpleasantly rush-rush at the start of a new expansion or whether I've just become desensitised to the whole experience by now, since I simply know that I need to constantly be running in order to keep up. Regardless, those few normal mode pugs I've had were all pretty okay.

But primarily, I've spent time on my warrior, hunter and warlock flying around and simply gathering. I like the system with the "special" gathering nodes, but I feel like it must already be getting difficult for Blizzard to keep coming up with new ideas for them every expansion. I'm not sure anything will be able to top the explodey ones from War Within for me, which I genuinely came to enjoy once I'd gained the ability to mine them a lot faster.

In Midnight so far, my favourites are the "wild" nodes in Zul'Aman, which spawn little rock elementals (ore) or lashers (herbs) when you gather them. Fighting those is extra work, but since they also drop extra resources it feels to me like you actually get more bang for your buck on each node. (Initially the lashers were much less lucrative than the rock dudes, but just this morning I did another round of herbing and it seems that Blizzard has now buffed their drops to be more competitive.)

Unfortunately, the overload effects that I've seen so far all seem pretty boring. I don't think I've tested all the herbs yet, but not a single one of the ore effects actually felt worthwhile to me, which was disappointing. Maybe once I've upgraded my skill tree for the special nodes a bit.

The most delightful surprise however has been skinning. I love skinning for the soothing "swish swish" sounds and for the fact that you can basically do a lot of gathering as you go along, without having to go out of your way for it. The problem I had in War Within was that once I was done with questing, farming more leather always felt like a chore, since I basically either had to go out and kill things specifically just to skin them, or keep an eye on opportunities to skin other people's kills (such as when certain world quests were up).

In Midnight, Blizzard introduced a new feature called "high value beasts", which show up on your mini map as little knife icons. Skinning one of these marked creatures will yield much more leather than normal. I've really enjoyed flying laps around Eversong and Voidstorm looking out for these little treasure troves, since it makes for a farming experience much more similar to a classic mining or herbing round. The only slight disappointment I've had with the system so far is that it seems to be completely random which animals get the buff, and sometimes it's given to something like a neutral eagle soaring so high up that you can't actually attack or otherwise aggro it.

Professions aside, another thing that's been interesting to me have been the new open world activities. I loved almost all of these in Dragonflight, and still enjoyed most of them in War Within. Midnight so far seems a bit... eh. Sartheril's Haven and the different factions there are a nice callback in terms of lore but gameplay-wise it just feels like an old-fashioned daily hub to me. Stormarion Assault looked like a chaotically fun group event at first but in reality just seems to come down to several minutes of AoE spam. We'll see whether my opinions on these change as the weeks go by.

The one thing that immediately charmed me was the Abundance event. When I first did it in duo mode with my husband, it didn't seem that exciting, but I soon heard whispers that it was great in a group so I decided to sign up for a raid one night - and it was insane!

To take a step back and explain what it is, it's basically just a timed mini game where you run around a cave gathering resources (mostly little bubbles that you simply run through, but there are also some things to tap regardless of your profession, like ore nodes or plants) and depositing them at the altar of Dundun, the loa of Abundance. There's probably a whole sub-genre of single player games like that, but in WoW it's just this little side activity.

Anyway, what made it so funny in a raid group was that the altar has a shared progress bar, and every time it gets filled up, Dundun yells about GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE and unleashes some kind of bonus that lets you gather even more (such as additional bubbles falling from the sky). With enough players in the raid you could trigger a cascade where people would basically deliver resources almost faster than the bar could deplete itself again, so that it was constantly going up and down like a yo-yo, with Dundun yelling and spawning extra treasures non-stop.

Also, did I mention that Dundun is voiced by Darin de Paul? As a SWTOR player, that's just a whole extra level of bizarre.

Anyway, this madness was incredibly fun, and not even that overpowered because there was a pretty low hard cap on your personal rewards anyway, so it's not like we were unduly enriching ourselves. The problem was just that since the cave wasn't an instance, the whole zone would lag like hell, much to the chagrin of people who weren't busy worshipping Dundun.

So I can't say that I'm entirely surprised that Blizzard quickly ended up nerfing the whole thing, though it's still sad to me. You can still do it in a raid group and Dundun still triggers more bonus events that way, but they aren't even remotely as crazy and entertaining as they were beforehand. Oh well.

The Quiet at Midnight

The two MMOs I currently play have been competing for my attention particularly hard recently, which meant that WoW's latest expansion launched during a week when I was also extremely busy in SWTOR. This meant that I didn't actually play that much for the first couple of days, and am only slowly getting into it now.

Thanks to splurging on the epic edition I had early access too, something I still feel a bit uncomfortable about because I still don't like the whole notion of only the biggest spenders getting to play early. But it was a fairly trivial upgrade for me to make in terms of my current financials, and I quite liked the idea of the extra Trader's Tender and housing items (that was before housing went into early access and I realised I don't actually like WoW's housing all that much, at least not in its current state).

Anyway, thanks to the aforementioned business in SWTOR, the husband and I only made limited use of the early access, playing for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday, when EA had started on Friday. It felt like a very strange experience to me, due to how empty everything was. When we did the expansion intro event - which was pretty long - I think we saw a totality of two other players throughout the entire thing. (Which made it funny when I saw Redbeard's post a few days later in which he concluded looking at it from the outside "that most people bought Early Access".)

Someone on reddit pointed out that the new Silvermoon looks great with an Inky Black Potion, and I can only concur. 

Now, said expansion intro is phased, and there were a few more people in Silvermoon once we got there, but it was still strangely quiet. That whole experience only reinforced my earlier sensation that Midnight doesn't feel like a "proper" expansion to me somehow. I endlessly bemoan the state of Classic's mega servers because I think an open world where every square inch of landmass is permanently overcrowded with players is stupid, but an occasion as special as the launch of a new expansion should definitely draw crowds to feel exciting.

After the "proper" launch, things admittedly picked up a bit, and Silvermoon is laggy as hell whenever I fly over it, but I still feel like I don't see a lot of players out and about a lot of the time. I don't know if there's that much phasing going on, or everyone is just perfectly spread out across the long, winding path that is the campaign storyline, but I maintain that it feels strange.

Back at War Within's launch, the husband and I initially did all the quests in the first zone, and then switched to just doing the main storyline as we were already halfway to the new level cap. It then turned out that the actual main campaign was really short. This time around, we decided to just focus on the campaign from the beginning, since access to so much of endgame is locked behind completing it, and it turned out that this time around, the main story was much longer. We didn't 100% avoid all side activities, and we're both miners which also adds to one's XP gains, but I was still surprised that I was only a few bars away from 90 by the time we wrapped things up in the Voidstorm.

The levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years. Without going into spoilers, I'll say that I had fun questing with Arator and seeing his personality get fleshed out. Crazy fantasy settings aside, it also struck me as a quite realistic and relatable narrative for a young adult to have to come to terms with the fact that his parents are also just people with their own hang-ups and issues.

From a technical perspective, I was kind of impressed by how many cut scenes they included in the levelling journey - War Within already had a lot of these, but it feels like Midnight ramped it up by yet another level. Then again, it also seemed quite noticeable to me that this increase in quantity came with a bit of a drop in quality. From what I remember, most of War Within's levelling cinematics featured extremely detailed, hand-crafted animations, and while Midnight had a few of those too, there were also a lot of the more basic cut scenes that featured the old stock character animations that people sometimes clown on. I didn't mind that too much myself; I'm just saying that I found it noticeable.

On the plus side, I've appreciated the move to most of the cut scenes now being triggered by a prompt that has you talking to an NPC, which means it's clear when they're meant to happen. I say this as both the husband and I had issues in previous expansions when automatically triggered cut scenes bugged out and didn't play, causing us to be fast-forwarded in the story without any clue about what just happened.

I also have to say that there's something magical about being back in the Eastern Kingdoms, connected to the original World of Warcraft with no loading screens. There was one point in a quest where we had to go to the Eastern Plaguelands, and the husband asked how we even get there, and I responded that this had been my first thought as well since EPL is usually quite out of the way, but we're in Quel'Thalas now, so it's literally just the next zone down to the south.

Also, while I was 100% in on the Draenei at Burning Crusade's launch and never much into the blood elves, there's still something nostalgic to questing in Eversong and Zul'Aman again. Not to mention mining copper, tin and silver again, even if they have extra adjectives in front of their names now. (I had to look up what "refulgent" means.)

All in all, Midnight has still been off to a good start with me, despite the "Is this really an expansion or more like a big patch?" feeling. Ironically, I think it helped that Xal'atah didn't play that much of a role for most of it aside from in the intro, because honestly, all the stories that didn't involve her were just that much more interesting to me. As a commenter on Wilhelm's blog put it, "I still don’t understand why the angry blue orb girl wants to annihilate everything" - just...yeah, I agree. I laughed at and appreciated this line of dialogue on how we should deal with Xal in game:

Oh, and totally unrelated to Midnight itself: During this first week of the expansion, after more than a year of clearing MC almost every week, I finally got my second Binding of the Windseeker and was able to claim my Thunderfury. Definitely not the worst start to a new expansion I've had.

The WoD Classic Question

"Will we get Warlords of Draenor Classic?" is not a question I thought I would ever be asking myself ten years ago. Hell, I didn't think we'd ever be asking it five years ago. WoW Classic transitioning into Burning Crusade Classic seemed natural. Following that up with Wrath Classic was a no-brainer. Cataclysm Classic already raised some eyebrows, because can you really call any expansion that takes place after the destruction of the old world "classic"? Anyone having any interest in MoP Classic seemed even more unlikely considering the weak reception MoP had during its first run, not to mention that retail had just had the Mists of Pandaria Remix event. And yet here we are, wondering whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be next.

I've tried to compile a list of factual pros and cons for why things could go either way:

Yes, we will get WoD Classic:

• It's a relatively low effort option. Not no effort, as it's still work to reinstate the way WoD worked in the modern Classic client, but at least Blizzard wouldn't need to expend any creative energy on coming up with anything new.
• There are still hundreds of thousands of players playing on the progressive Classic realms, numbers that many smaller MMOs would be envious of. You don't hear about them much, but we can see from activity data that they exist and are playing, which they presumably wouldn't do if they weren't enjoying themselves. MoP Classic as a whole seems to be a prime example of a quiet majority that just gets on with things and that you never hear about because they are simply content. That should be enough incentive for Blizzard to keep the good times (and people's subscriptions) rolling.
• We know that Blizzard is at least considering WoD Classic, because as part of a survey sent out around the middle of last year, they asked players where they'd want go play after MoP Classic ends. WoD Classic was one of the options, with some of the possible alternatives being a merge into retail, a MoP era realm or a transition back into a previous expansion (no idea how that would even work).

No, we won't get WoD Classic:

• From the outside, it would be a bad look. WoD is still considered one of WoW's worst expansions. (No longer the worst thanks to Shadowlands, but definitely in the bottom three.) While there is an audience that would like to revisit it for sure, the more outspoken parts of the WoW community all look down on the progressive Classic servers at this point. Most of the Classic community no longer considers them "classic enough", while they are obviously still more than a decade removed from retail as well. Cataclysm Classic already got a pretty lukewarm reception at BlizzCon 2023; I can't imagine anyone cheering for a WoD Classic if it was to be announced at BlizzCon this year. The devs must know that it would be terrible PR to potentially announce a Classic expansion and get booed, so with that in mind, they shouldn't do it. (If they go ahead with it, the announcement better be low-key and they damn well need to make sure that there'll be some other major Classic news to overshadow it.)
• While the old world has already been replaced with the Cataclysm revamp in Cata Classic, at least MoP Classic still has the old character models, right? WoD Classic would take another step closer towards retail by introducing the new character models (if we want to stay in sync with how things went during the original run). The closer the two versions get in terms of features, the less it feels like there's a point to still having this separate progression branch.
• Even if there's still a significant number of people playing MoP Classic, it's undeniably a branch of Classic that's in decline. New or returning players interested in Classic are far more likely to want to check out the anniversary servers rather than grind through 85 levels of an already disjointed levelling experience to start adventuring in Pandaland, and this is only going to get worse if more levels get added. On the dev side, Blizzard also seems to have cut back on the amount of attention they've given progressive Classic, and after the impeccably built original Classic launched in 2019, each subsequent expansion has been buggier and buggier. There was a post on the WoW subreddit three days ago about how Throne of Thunder in MoP Classic has been out for three months and still almost every single boss in there is bugged in some way.
• I know I cited last year's survey in the "yes" column already, but to be honest, you could also interpret it as a sign pointing towards no, considering that the relevant poll question had seven different options, only one of which was WoD Classic, and even that one said "if it becomes available" - Blizzard did not want to lock themselves into going down that route!

---

I think there are compelling arguments for either course of action at this point, and I suspect that what will tip the scales for Blizzard will depend a lot on their internal metrics for MoP Classic, including the results of that survey.

Personally, I would actually check out WoD Classic on my hunter if it does come out, simply because WoD is one of those expansions I didn't play back in the day and going back to do some of the content in retail just hasn't been the same. It's definitely more insightful and authentic to do either a Classic or a Remix run. I don't think I'd play it for long, but I'd at least take a look.

On the other hand, I can't say that I'd be sad if they decided to call it quits on the progression servers at this point either, and I would also be fine with my hunter being merged into my retail character stable (or even going back in time to a previous version of Classic I guess, if that somehow becomes a thing).

On Writing a WoW Blog in 2026

This is going to be a post about blogging, so if that doesn't interest you at all, feel free to skip this one.

When I created this blog during the height of Wrath of the Lich King, blogging was a popular thing to do in general, and there was a thriving community of bloggers writing about World of Warcraft in specific. Even though I didn't have a huge number of readers even back then, I very much felt like part of a community - we'd all constantly link to and respond to each other, and it just felt very cosy.

When I returned to WoW (Classic) in 2019, that community no longer really existed in the same form, and the world had moved on to YouTube videos and streams. I think when people talk about "content creators" these days, most of them don't even consider that said content could be in written form as well. I found all that a bit sad, but as I was blogging primarily as a means of self-expression and documentation, it just was what it was.

That doesn't mean that I don't want people to find this place if they are actually looking for content like this though. At some point I noticed that Google was missing a lot of this blog's content, so I tried to kick it into indexing more of it. This has worked to some extent, though according to Search Console it's still only indexed about 500 pages when I've produced nearly twice that number of posts on here.

Anyway, in recent months Google started sending me little congratulatory notices about my "search impact", saying that my content was attracting more and more clicks through Google each month. Curious, I started looking into this a bit more. I'm not going to cite any exact numbers, because Google Analytics and Blogger's own internal metrics are always miles apart despite being owned by the same company, but they do agree about the general trend of what gets the clicks/views.

Here are my top ten most viewed blog posts from the last twelve months, according to Blogger:

1. Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon
2. WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006
3. Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail
4. Connected Realms Are Confusing
5. Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience
6. The Island of Balor
7. Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?
8. I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down
9. Exploring the Forests of Northwind
10. A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Basically, six of them are about Turtle WoW, and the other four are either about Classic or at least have some connection to it. (The fishing tournament post for example is about how to win "in retail" but it's from the perspective of a Classic player, trying to figure out what the differences are. Also, only Classic players actually call it "retail" in everyday conversation.)

As I've actually been spending less time playing and writing about Classic recently, I find that very interesting. I guess it makes sense that my posts about new retail content don't get that many views because there's huge competition on every topic and people don't care about the thoughts of some random casual.

I'm guessing the Turtle WoW posts are so high up because there's not nearly that much content about it out there. With so much content creation being done professionally these days (as in, to earn money and make a living), tying one's income to a private server that's actively under siege would probably not be a good idea, and anyone creating content for "official" WoW who wants to remain in good stead with Blizzard will have reason to avoid going into private server topics in too much depth. But it's interesting to see in actual numbers that it's clearly an underserved niche with some demand.

Official Classic does have its own content creators, but many of them follow the same "style" as retail, making videos and guides about how to make the most out of the newest patch, and considering Classic's overall development over the last year, there isn't much for them to chew on. I really used to enjoy WillE's videos about Classic for example, but he's clearly just waiting for the mythical Classic+ at this point and doesn't seem to have enjoyed anything that's actually going on in Classic for a while. Now he's just regurgitating all his old videos from the first time BC Classic came around, since that's hot in the algorithm right now due to the anniversary servers and presumably secures his pay check.

Which is to say that I think the Classic content scene has less going on right now as well - though I also think that players who actually enjoy Classic for its old-school feel, the ones who actually read the quests and so on, are probably also more open to still reading a blog than your average audience.

That was actually another nice thing about Classic era - it's so small, nobody can make a living creating content about it, so anything that people did make was purely a passion project, and again, because it's such a small niche everyone kind of knew everyone else. (Just another reason why it's a bummer that I kind of got bored with it gameplay-wise.)

Anyway, I'm actually not sure how to best conclude this post. There isn't really a point other than that there's still a niche for blog content about niche WoW topics, and that there are still people out there interested in reading about Classic and Turtle WoW. If getting more views was my primary purpose, I should write more about those subjects I guess. However, since I'm just a human shouting into the void for my own entertainment I'll continue to write about whatever WoW-related thing happens to rattle around my head in any given week. (Though yes, that will also include more Classic posts at some point.)

Casual Thoughts on the Midnight Class Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Most Played Characters

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

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

Shintar - 188 days

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

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

Tiirr - 64 days

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

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

Tiranea - 58 days

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

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

Golu - 54 days

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

Pukaja - 52 days

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

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

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

The New and Improved Exile's Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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