Was War Within a Better Expansion than Dragonflight?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A (Futile?) Endeavour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midnight Pre-Patch Impressions

The Midnight pre-patch landed this week, and I feel like I approach this kind of update with more and more trepidation as time goes by. Where I used to be excited to see what's new, now I just sigh. Oh, all my alts' talents are reset again? Addons stopped working again? These changes always just seem to mean more and more chores.

That said, the addon situation actually wasn't that bad. For all the talk about the "addon apocalypse", I was pleasantly unaffected as someone who never used many combat addons to begin with, and the few utility addons I do have all had updated versions available for once (I think because Blizz disabled the "use out-of date addons" option for this patch from what I read, which forced all the addon creators to get a move on). It's rare that all my addons have been this up to date all at once!

The warband screen was simultaneously an amusing and horrifying surprise. I knew that part of the pre-patch was a revamp of the transmog system, but what I didn't anticipate was that this was going to strip all my characters of their current transmogs, which made the lot of them look like hideous clowns.

I kid you not, the random shaman alt that I last played through Burning Crusade Chromie Time and who hadn't mogged any of her gear actually looked the best of the lot. We used to make fun of the BC "clown suits" but at least everything you got back then still looked like armour, even if it was easy to end up with a lot of mismatched colours. In modern WoW, so many of the armour sets are these ridiculous fortresses of spires and wings and god knows what, they often look awkward enough when you wear the full set, never mind jumbling pieces from different ones together. Basically, this experience taught me that modern WoW needs trangsmog or we'd all look unbearably hideous.

My little BC-levelling shaman actually looking pretty good. 

So I logged into my warrior with the intent to get her good looks back and immediately hit a snag. Over the course of War Within, my six-year-old PC has increasingly started to struggle with retail WoW, with the most common symptom being the game freezing up and the screen temporarily going black for a second or two, before assets start to slowly load back in one by one. Most frequently this happened after hearthing to Dornogal or - you might have guessed it - when I opened the transmog window.

I was hoping that the revamp would result in a more streamlined UI that would perhaps be easier on my machine, but the opposite was the case: now the game actually crashed entirely whenever I tried to open the transmog interface. Fortunately I wasn't the only one who's been struggling with variations of this problem for a while, so Google led me to a variety of tips that were supposed to help: changing from DirectX 12 back to 11, adding an additional command line argument to my Battle.net launcher for whenever I start WoW, marking my WoW folder as "do not index" in Windows... in the end I'm not sure what eventually did the trick, or maybe each step helped a little, but I eventually got the game back into a playable state. It still chugs and struggles with the transmog window, but at least it no longer crashes and I was able to update some looks. Going through all my dozens of alts will be a lot of work though...

Wanting to distract myself from the impending chores, I decided to revisit the random neighbourhood where I had plopped down my house a few weeks ago. It was interesting to have a bit of a look around and see what my neighbours had been up to in their yards. One guy's house was floating high in the air, something I'd only read about previously.

Endeavours were also supposed to finally be live, one of the housing-related features that had initially intrigued me. So I visited the town square and two dracthyr gave me one daily quest each, one to help with smelting some ore via a short mini game, and one to pick up some vegetables from a nearby farm. That was it. I got two pieces of some new currency that I didn't know anything about but which I guess will probably be good for buying decorations. I honestly expected a lot more out of this feature. Something to make us actually leave the neighbourhood and then come back.

Anyway, Midnight is coming. I'd like to write up some thoughts about that in the next few weeks, as well as a little War Within retrospective.

MoP Classic: Still the Better Housing

I expected that I'd be dropping Mists of Pandaria Classic the moment I finished my "Project Vale", but surprisingly, this has not been the case. In fact, I got back into it more vigorously than I'd been playing while just trying to get to level 90.

I think the main reason for that has been the farm. Everything associated with it, from the Tiller reputations and the vegetable-planting mini game to maxing out my cooking skills in all the different Pandaren "ways" is just plain fun to me. It helped to keep me engaged for a few months during my original time in MoP back in 2013/14 and wasn't part of the MoP Remix experience, so it's genuinely been over a decade since I last did all these things and I'm happy to do them again.

After my disappointment with retail's new housing system, it also stood out to me how the farm, to me, still feels like better housing than the new system. The farm is located in a beautiful, central zone and while it uses phasing, you can transition into your personal area without needing to go through a portal or loading screen so it's a very integrated experience. The neighbourhood feels alive with all the different Tillers visiting the Halfhill market throughout the week. And the farming gives you a reason to visit every day and spend a few minutes there, without trying to keep you cooped in all day like the WoD garrisons did. It's the reason I've got my hearthstone set to Halfhill instead of the Shrine of the Seven Stars, even though the latter is where all the portals and vendors are. It feels like home. Comparatively, retail housing allows me to place and arrange my own chairs in a dark box that's an instance inside an instance located nowhere in specific. I know what matters more to me.

Another thing that I've been working on has been the Golden Lotus reputation, because I wanted to see whether raising it would unlock some more quests that no longer exist in retail. And indeed, my first reward for doing all those dailies was to unlock even more dailies. They're still not among my favourite quests, though I did do a double take when Ren Firetongue casually suggested that Anji and Kun Autumnlight may be looking to have a threesome with me. Not something I would've expected from WoW quest dialogue to be honest!

I also unlocked a one-time quest that had me collecting three relics of the Thunder King, with the Golden Lotus deciding that the safest thing to do was to put them all into a single room in the Guo-Lai Halls. There's no way that could possibly go wrong, I'm sure!

Doing all these dailies has been pretty good for my hunter's wallet as I have very few expenses, so her savings have shot up by the thousands. I'm sure it's still nothing compared to someone who's actually played through the last three Classic expansions consistently but it still makes me feel pretty rich. I actually don't think it's as easy to make money just from questing in modern WoW, which is weird when I think about it. I've noticed that throughout the first few expansions, gold rewards from quest completions kept going up in pretty big leaps. In vanilla Classic you get about four gold per quest completed at max level, in BC that doubled to about eight or nine, I think in Wrath it was fifteen? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but the point is that rewards kept going up for several years, and then they just... stopped. Inflation kept going, and there are some quests in retail that give payouts in the hundreds and thousands, but "regular" questing is way less profitable in modern WoW than it used to be. Just something to think about.

The wider endgame in MoP Classic is of course a bit disappointing compared to modern WoW. It's basically dailies, dungeons or raiding, and that's it. I wasn't initially planning to engage with any of that beyond the dailies I'd already chosen to do for other reasons, but at some point I found myself wondering whether I had earned enough reputation with the Golden Lotus to buy a gear upgrade or two, and that quickly led me down a rabbit hole of where else you can get what gear, how crafted gear compares, how the item upgrade system works, trying to figure out what stats I wanted as a hunter in MoP, and more.

So now I've also run all the dungeons on heroic, and today I ran my first three "celestial" dungeons, the "slightly harder" version of heroics that's meant to serve as a replacement for LFR in terms of gearing. I'm not quite sure what to think of those yet. There were a lot of celestial-related fireworks going on that I didn't fully understand, with some coloured circles actually being good to stand in, but in terms of overall feel they didn't seem significantly harder than heroics. (Though there was that one time I got one-shot by some sort of explosion where I'm still not sure what caused it.)

People are definitely not as forgiving as they are in LFR though. In those three runs I was in, there were two vote kicks. I actually voted yes on the first one, because the guy had joined with res sickness, which... yeah, you shouldn't do that (though I wouldn't have initiated a kick myself). The second time someone tried to kick another hunter in the group for the reason "low", which I assume meant dps, but I voted no on that one cause it seemed mean, and it failed. Karma promptly punished me for my solidarity as the same hunter then outrolled me on all the hunter loot that dropped at the end. Oh well.

Bringing Order to the Isles

There's a little more than a week left in Legion Remix, and a few days ago I finished my last achievement for this special mode. According to Data for Azeroth, Bringing Order to the Isles is now the rarest achievement I've got to my name, with less than one percent of all accounts having earned that one. That's rarer than even some of the old achievements I have that are no longer available, such as Champion of Ulduar or The Ancient Keeper, though I expect a few more people will get those last few quests in and tick the box before Lemix ends.

Bringing Order to the Isles required completing all class order hall quests for all classes, meaning both the basic campaign and the quest chain for the special class-specific mount. I had a lot of thoughts on these but I think I'll save those for another post because obviously twelve different storylines and mounts are a lot to talk about!

For this post I'll limit myself to the general experience of playing Legion Remix, especially compared to MoP Remix. Here's my final roster of timerunners and their /played time:

• Kinta, blood death knight: 4 days, 18 hours
• Flerence, havoc demon hunter: 14 hours
• Clar, mistweaver monk: 10 hours
• Axal, discipline priest: 12 hours
• Floo, fury warrior: 6 hours
• Bith, beast mastery hunter: 10 hours
• Bosan, retribution paladin: 14 hours
• Fangry, feral druid: 8 hours
• Whie, affliction warlock: 11 hours
• Tenderpaw, assassination rogue: 9 hours
• Rockpaw, elemental shaman: 7 hours
• Emb, fire mage: 6 hours

I felt a bit stumped initially, having to create twelve new characters when I had just levelled one of each class to 80 this expansion, but eventually I simply opted for some race/class combos that I'd never played before. Coming up with a fitting transmog for each one was actually the hardest part. As you can see, comparatively little play time was required just to level up and get through all the class order quests, with my death knight main being the only one with a significant /played time due to the fact that she did all the zone storylines, dungeons, raids and other achievement-related activities. And yes, I mained a tank again, how strange. It wasn't a choice with a lot of intent behind it; it just kind of happened that way.

Overall, the experience of levelling twelve new alts in such a short time frame felt weird. It's not that it's difficult exactly, what with how fast it all was, but from a gameplay experience it was honestly kind of terrible. I quickly gave up on even trying to sort out my action bars or understanding my talents, because it was all flying past way too quickly anyway. I just tried to remember a handful of buttons on each character and that was it. I'm someone who very much enjoys levelling alts in general, but the way Blizzard actively encouraged you to pump out new ones at speed in Lemix just felt weird. There isn't even a semblance of RPG left in playing that way, you're just trying to catch them all like some sort of Pokemon trainer, while also collecting and discarding shinies like you're in Diablo. It's bizarre.

In general I think I preferred the way the Remix experience was a bit more free-form in MoP last time around. I'm sure all the new structure they introduced for Legion helped with player retention, as the staggered content releases forced you to come back every so often if you wanted to see and do all the things, while the endless infinite research assignments for gear tried to hook into that part of your brain that likes to do dailies, way harder than anything in MoP did. And it worked, including on me! But it also shifted the experience towards being a bit more chore-like as opposed to the way MoP Remix just gave you all the content and was like "have fun, you figure out what you want to do".

And well, there was the whole "levelling twelve characters" side of it of course, compared to the five I chose to level up in MoP. It's weird because the moment I learned that Lemix was going to be a thing, doing exactly this in order to see all the class order halls was something I immediately considered, but only as a kind of "wouldn't it be crazy if I went that hard" type of idea. The fact that Blizzard put levelling one of each class in with the standard achievements for this event felt like it shifted the goal posts in way that I didn't really enjoy, and it's not something I'd ever want to do for a limited-time event like this again to be honest. They asked me to play this one a lot, and I did, but now the only direction for my investment to go in future Remixes is down.

But I guess that's Legion in a nutshell, isn't it? I already observed previously, after levelling through it for the first time in Chromie Time, that I could see why people loved it so much when it first came out, what with the expansion's coherent theme and steady progression with ever rising stakes. Revisiting Suramar was a delight, as I genuinely enjoyed seeing that story and all its characters again. (I love Oculeth!) But after Argus... where was there even left to go?

Doing all the class order halls this time around only drove home just how badly Blizzard screwed this up, actually. It kind of reminded me of how Bioware more or less made you the most powerful person in the galaxy during SWTOR's Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. It was insane, something that was always going to be a terrible idea in an MMO, even one with a personal story in which you are the hero, because it was a high that wasn't sustainable and climbing back down from that peak was always going to feel bad. (People still grouse about it ten years later.)

And Legion (which actually came out around the same time) did a very similar thing with the artifact weapons and class order halls. I'm not sure the quest to deplete your artifact weapon is still in the game, but basically giving you the Ashbringer and then making you throw it away was always going to feel bad, no matter how they spun it. But the class order halls are just as bad in my opinion! These should always have been a permanent feature, not something for one expansion only.

For any character that was actually played during the Legion expansion it must have felt utterly insane to, I dunno, ascend to Skyhold in the heavens (as a warrior) and then just... stop going there once BfA came around. Same with the "Highlord" paladin no longer caring to hang out under Light's Hope Chapel. It's just nuts that they built the player character up to this level and then just shrugged and expected you to move on from it without a second thought.

I guess in that way, Legion Remix mirrored the vibe of the original expansion. All those achievements to level one of each class made sense in the context of all the unique class-specific content, but no other expansion has that much of it, so it wouldn't make sense to ask people to do it again in whatever comes next, and I expect it will feel somewhat less exciting. My bet is on a Wrath of the Lich King Remix next, to get us ready for returning to Northrend in The Last Titan (the expansion after Midnight). 

The Original Vale of Eternal Blossoms

The original Vale of Eternal Blossoms has, strangely, turned out to be WoW's most short-lived and exclusive zone. Some of us may have been sad when the Cataclysm ravaged Darkshore, but at least people had had a chance to play and explore that area in its original state for a full four years. Not to mention that it was eventually brought back via Classic in 2019.

Comparatively, the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was released in September 2012 and only got to hang around for about a year before it was destroyed, with no way to go back. Mists of Pandaria Classic revived it this past summer, but in only a few months time it's scheduled to be destroyed again, which is why I didn't want to miss my chance to have a proper look at it this time around.

I actually played for a few months during Mists of Pandaria's original run, but that was after the Vale had already been ravaged by Garrosh. I actually found that experience a little confusing. I'd heard a lot of complaints about the grindiness of the dailies for the Golden Lotus, but I never actually got to see them for myself. The faction still existed, technically, but they weren't really represented by anyone in particular. The first time I came across the Fallen Protectors encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar, it seemed strange to me that these characters were clearly people we were supposed to know, but I had never come across them even after questing my way through the entire continent of Pandaria (as it was then).

Seeing this content from the beginning in MoP Classic was actually an interesting experience. The Vale gets opened up apparently not just to outsiders, but many Pandaren get to see it for the first time as well and stream into it to settle there. Though it doesn't remain entirely peaceful for long even then, as Mogu invade from the north the moment you hit the level cap, at which point the Golden Lotus (a group that includes those who would later become the Fallen Protectors) give you dailies to fight off said Mogu as well as other, more minor threats.

In fairness, I can see why people didn't love these. Basically, you get sent to the Golden Stair in the north every day to fight some Mogu, and then get a shorter follow-up at another location in the Vale to fight off some sprites or crocolisks or whatever. As far as dailies in Pandaria go, these are not the most inspired. However, for me as someone who appreciates exploring and documenting things, it's still been interesting to see all the different quests and get to know the various NPCs.

The moment the Vale was destroyed, they were basically all killed off and their quests removed from the game. I'm thinking the devs must've still been riding high on the Cataclysm idea of "it's so boring that the world never changes, what if a bad guy blew everything up and it actually showed as blown up in game (and then stayed that way for the next decade)". It didn't really sink in until later that players weren't necessarily huge fans of that. 

Interestingly, the Vale was "kind of" restored in BfA... just so it could be assaulted by Old God forces instead every other week. However, this version of the Vale is a) still quite inaccessible, as you'll only be able to see the bronze dragonflight NPC to switch between versions if your character has done a certain amount of content in BfA (I don't know the details of that, I just know that I could only go there on my human monk) and b) not exactly the same as the original. While its general beauty is mostly restored, the old quests are still gone, and even the environment isn't exactly the same. The two giant stone guardians that were destroyed in the first assault on the Vale remain broken for example, with their broken-off pieces just a bit tidied up.

The so-called Twin Monoliths in their different states: in the original Vale (top), in the destroyed Vale (middle) and the restored Vale (bottom). 

Another interesting detail is that there are some quests that reference the Vale in quest text, such as "The Golden Dream" which is supposed to give you a vision of the Vale while questing in the Valley of the Four Winds. After it's been destroyed, the quest giver is distraught and yells "No... That's not right... It should be beautiful. It should be pristine!". What they were meant to say originally, while the Vale still is pristine... I don't know, because the Classic devs forgot to update those little details, and seemingly all the relevant quests still have the dialogue about the destroyed Vale from the start, months before it's supposed to happen. 

Retail WoW & Me in 2025

What with the 80/20 split in play time mentioned in my previous post, it seems hard to deny that I'm more of a retail player now, even if it still feels weird to me. I still prefer the way many things work in Classic, but with retail being the mode that both my husband and many of my friends prefer, it's easy for me to end up spending more time there.

I'll have to change the way I do the character round-ups this time, since we got the new warband character selection screens this year! It's technically still possible to take individual shots of each character by dragging them out of their groupings, but that's too much extra effort for me, so I'll just follow the groupings I've created for myself in this post as well.

Oh, and I've decided that I'm not going to get into Legion Remix at all in this post. I'll just note that I created twelve new characters for it, most of whom have had very little play time, have no professions (since those are disabled in Remix) and I don't quite know yet what I'm going to do with them going forward. I intend to make a separate post about that whole experience later down the line. Meanwhile, let's look at the best of the rest:

Mains

My main warband screen contains the four characters that I've played the most throughout the year.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
• 16 days, 16 hours /played (+11 days, 23 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Blacksmithing (+17), 100 Mining, 48 Cooking (+12), 139 Fishing (+91)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 66 Outland Blacksmithing (+66), 15 Cataclysm Blacksmithing (+15),  5 Kul Tiran Blacksmithing (+5), 58 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+58), 300 Classic Mining (+5), 75 Outland Mining (+75), 75 Cataclysm Mining (+62), 28 Pandaria Mining (+28), 14 Kul Tiran Mining (+14), 100 Dragon Isles Mining (+100), 7 Outland Fishing (+7), 4 Kul Tiran Fishing (+4), 7 Archaeology (+7) 

Towards the end of last year, the warrior I levelled in MoP Remix was still kind of transitioning into being my new main, but 2025 was definitely her year entirely, as no other character came close to accumulating even half as much play time. At the start of the year I was still tanking M+ dungeons for guildies, but I dropped M+ entirely at the end of season one, for a variety of reasons. I continued to have lots of fun duoing delves with the husband though, which probably took up the majority of our time. I also did some work on professions though, some of which I talked about in this post. (No, that second Thunderfury binding still hasn't dropped.)

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker
• 27 days, 2 hours /played (+2 days, 13 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Leatherworking (+17), 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking (+27), 250 Fishing (+106)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): Legion Leatherworking 3 (+3), 218 Classic Skinning (+89), 69 Outland Skinning (+8), 5 Pandaria Skinning (+5), 31 Draenor Skinning (+31), 100 Legion Skinning (+15), 36 Kul Tiran Skinning (+6), 31 Kul Tiran Fishing (+1)

I still feel attached to my Dragonflight main because I loved that expansion so much, but she got the least play time of the four characters in this group because preservation evoker just hasn't felt good to play for me ever since War Within dropped. It's not terrible, it's just felt slightly off all expansion, leading me to prioritise my priest whenever I felt like healing.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest
• 12 days, 9 hours /played (+4 days)
• War Within professions: 100 Tailoring (+35), 100 Enchanting (+39), 39 Cooking (+18), 88 Fishing (+15)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 75 Northrend Tailoring (+44), 75 Cataclysm Tailoring (+30), 76 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+2), 300 Classic Enchanting (+204), 51 Outland Enchanting (+25), 25 Cataclysm Enchanting (+10), 78 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+4)

... this being the aforementioned priest. She remains that character that serves no particular purpose in our little group's adventures; I just really like playing holy priest sometimes. I also did some real work on her professions this year, levelling up enchanting and tailoring skills from several old expansions. 

Shinfur - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 pandaren monk
• 4 days, 20 hours /played (+3 days, 16 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Engineering (+17), 36 Cooking (+30), 63 Fishing (+59)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 Classic Mining (+12), 7 Legion Mining (+7), 3 Classic Engineering (+3), 5 Outland Engineering (+5), 6 Draenor Cooking (+6) 

The monk I levelled during MoP Remix ended up supplanting my human monk from Shadowlands somehow, maybe because I'd levelled the latter primarily as a healer while this one gets played as windwalker all the time. She's the one dps character I have on whom I feel moderately competent and who was also the one on whom I beat Zekvir's Lair on ?? difficulty.

Melee dps alts

I've had kind of mixed feelings about my melee dps alts all year. I mostly decided at one point that I wanted to have one of every class at 80, plus more alts allowed me to work on more professions. But when push comes to shove, I only have so much time to grind delves or whatever other gameplay to gear up, which was mostly invested in the mains, meaning all of these ladies came out only now and then whenever the mood struck me.

Mehg - AN

• Level 80 night elf demon hunter (+8)
• 12 days, 12 hours /played (+1 day, 15 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining (+70), 100 Jewelcrafting (+75), 40 Cooking (+40), 53 Fishing (+53)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 290 Classic Mining (+274), 39 Outland Mining (+39), 44 Cataclysm Mining (+17), 11 Classic Jewelcrafting (+11) 

Hekatie - ER

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 12 days, 16 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Inscription (+29), 43 Cooking (+13), 63 Fishing (+21)
• Other professions: no changes this year

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue
• 3 days, 15 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism (+13), 105 Skinning (+35), 25 Cooking (+25), 12 Fishing (+12)
• Other professions: no changes this year 

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 80 human paladin (+61)
• 3 days, 8 hours /played (+1 day, 10 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 44 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 25 Cooking, 30 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 43 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+43), 15 Northrend Mining (+15), 94 Dragon Isles Mining (+94), 23 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23)

The paladin (who was the very first character I ever created, located on a German server) probably had the most interesting journey as I decided to level her up on a whim during a Winds of Mysterious Fortune event. 

Ranged dps alts

Yes, that's right, there's only three of these! I guess there's a job opening here for whenever I hit level 80 on another ranged class.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter
• 5 days, 19 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
• War Within professions: 88 Leatherworking (+32), 100 Skinning, 32 Cooking (+6), 53 Fishing (+20)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 20 Outland Skinning (+14), 53 Legion Skinning (+4)

Hunter is a class I kind of want to like and play more since I loved classic hunters so much, but for some reason Blizzard just keeps making the retail version of the class worse and worse. I still think that turning survival into a melee spec in Legion was a mistake, and trying to take MM hunters' pets away in War Within just to appease raiders was even worse. They just don't seem to have any kind of clue what hunter players want from the class, and this reddit post on the subject I saw this year really resonated with me.

Willowie - QT

• Level 80 human warlock (+6)
• 1 day, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 3 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Alchemy (+52), 100 Herbalism (+38), 37 Cooking, 45 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only) 2 Classic Alchemy (+2), 11 Classic Herbalism

My perception of warlock gameplay tends to oscillate between "this is terrible" and "wait, this is fun" but then Blizzard changes something again, I get confused and lose interest again. This is the warlock I levelled in MoP Remix by the way. 

Daerys - Darkspear

• Level 80 draenei mage (+10)
• 31 days, 6 hours /played (+21 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 100 Mining, 53 Jewelcrafting, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 4 Legion Mining (+4), 6 Legion Jewelcrafting (+6) 

Honestly, I just levelled this one so I would finally have all classes at 80. And so someone could wear the banging tier one mage transmog once I'd finally completed the set. 

Tank and healer alts

Yeah, so... I already have a tank and two healers in my "mains" group, how much time could I realistically have left for these guys? They just exist for the occasional change of pace at this point. 

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
• 2 days, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 5 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 1 Cooking, 32 Fishing (+16)
• Other professions: no changes this year

I'll say that my bear druid came close at one point to getting some more play time, after I kind of ran out of things to upgrade on my warrior main, but for the rest of the year Blizzard was very good at drip-feeding me just one more upgrade over and over again, which kept me chugging away at the warrior until the very end of most seasons. 

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
• 4 days, 12 hours /played (+22 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 7 Northrend Mining (+4), 300 Classic Skinning, 28 Northrend Skinning (+16), 56 Archaeology (+6)

Shimeri - AN

• Level 80 dwarf shaman (+10)
• 5 days, 2 hours /played (+18 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 93 Alchemy, 100 Herbalism, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions: none 

Recent levellers

The last grouping I'm going to feature here is... a bit of a lie, because none of these have actually been levelled "recently". They had been when I named the group though. 

Surly - QT

• Level 25 blood elf hunter
• 5 hours played
• Professions: none

Surly was originally created because I had picked up a "bound to warband" polearm that I thought would be good for a survival hunter. Not that I ever levelled her that far. Instead I just got a bit of a first impression of melee survival (extremely clunky in the first few levels) and got to revisit the blood elf starting zone (pretty nostalgic). She was also my first test subject for doing Lorewalking on a low-level character.

Spinny - QT 

• Level 21 goblin monk
• 3 hours played
• Professions: 34 Classic Herbalism, 20 Cataclysm Skinning

Spinny was created so I could refresh my knowledge of goblin lore before the release of Undermine. After that I couldn't quite decide where to level next and ended up going nowhere.

Tidella - AN

• Level 55 Kul Tiran shaman (+1)
• 2 days, 1 hour /played (+4 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 292 Classic Mining (+186), 9 Cataclysm Mining (+6), 245 Classic Engineering (+105) 

When I first looked up this character I was like "what, I gained a level, I didn't think I even played this character this year" but then I checked the profession stats and oh right, I guess I worked on her Classic mining and engineering at some point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also ran:

No more warband screens, just two more characters for whom I noted down some minor changes: 

Shinlu - AN

• Level 71 human monk (+3)
• 22 days, 16 hours /played (+2 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 War Within Skinning (+12)

Again, I hardly remember playing my old monk from Shadowlands this year, but apparently she gained three levels. I think I took her to Khaz Algar and did a couple of easy delves to explore more variants back before they made it so you can see the delve variant of the day on the map.

Eartha - AN

• Level 52 earthen shaman (+26)
• 8 hours /played (+6)
• Professions: none 

Finally, this character! I mentioned last year that I'd created her to benefit from the earthen racial bonus to exploration XP and that I was going to write about that... but then I didn't. We'll see whether I eventually get around to it or not.