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.

Running Out of Steam in MoP Classic

I got back into MoP Classic around Christmas one and a half months ago, and while I was initially surprised by how much fun I was having, it looks like my enthusiasm may already be on the decline again.

I got to exalted with the Golden Lotus, saw the relics of the Thunder King get stolen (no surprise there) and got to defend the Vale against a big Mogu incursion with the aid of the Celestials. I'm glad I got to see all of that, but I've found little reason to keep going afterwards. There was a small incentive at least as I picked up a few Skyshards during my time doing dailies in the Vale, and I was always curious what was up with that big hostile cloud serpent that's generally un-attackable (turns out you need 10 Skyshards to dispel the shield, and then it drops a mount on defeat), but the drop rate of the shards is so low, who knows how many months I'd have to keep grinding to get ten.

There are only three or four Tillers with whom I'm not quite best friends yet (can't be long now though), and I'm close to maxing out all my cooking skills as well. Then the only thing left to do on the farm would be to keep planting crops for other Pandaria reputations, which is not as interesting. Plus I learned that apparently things like the plow, sprinkler system etc. all came in with a later patch, and having to till every spot on the farm manually every day is getting a bit tiresome.

I've also been doing the Anglers dailies for a few weeks now, and happened to fish up the Sea Turtle mount on one of these days. I don't have that in retail, so that's another +1 for having this character merged into my retail stable one day I guess.

My enthusiasm for the other factions has been more limited though. I've done a bit of work on the August Celestials, but being sent to a different corner of the continent every day gets old quickly. I also did the Klaxxi dailies for a few days but just didn't enjoy them, even though I think they're a faction with an interesting story. Just never liked the Dread Wastes I guess.

I started the legendary cloak quest chain with Wrathion, another piece of content that's no longer accessible in retail, but I've got to admit I don't find that nearly as interesting as I found exploring the old Vale. It's just so grindy, even if the devs made it a bit easier in Classic by also allowing you to progress certain steps through dungeons, without needing to raid. The first stage felt like it took forever, and then it was immediately on to "earn 1600 valor", ignoring the thousands of valor I'd already ground out previously, which just made me sigh.

I did actually get into the dungeon endgame for a bit and did every dungeon on Celestial difficulty. It took me three runs to realise I was supposed to talk to a Celestial at the start of the run to get a buff, and I only did that after I saw someone complain on reddit about stupid slackers who nerf their whole group by not picking up their buff (oops). It didn't take too long to get the hang of what the different buffs do though, and ultimately the gameplay isn't really that different from heroics.

After my initial experiences with dungeons in MoP Classic were pretty mellow, zoning into any Celestial is full rush-rush mode by this point though. The tank will pretty much always pick up all the trash at once and drag it to the next boss to AoE down. If they die while doing that, they'll blame the healer. If it's after the second boss in Shado-Pan Monastery, it's almost guaranteed to result in a wipe regardless, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. I can just about keep up with the madness most days, but I've got to admit I don't find it very fun.

Curiosity and gear were enough of an incentive at first. The special currency that drops in Celestial dungeons lets you buy pretty high level gear pretty quickly. While I didn't need any of it, it was still nice to grow more powerful, and while doing dailies it was very noticeable when my kill time on a named elite went from several minutes down to a single full skill rotation. At this point I've got 502 gear in most slots though, and while there are more things to buy, such as a goodie bag that drops rare pets and mounts, I just don't care enough about any of that.

At one point I saw a familiar name online - my 2020 guild's Scarab Lord, a fellow hunter. We chatted a bit and he's basically kept playing and raiding all this time, now a member of a guild that has also been around since Classic's launch and that I was friendly with back in the day. He said that if I was feeling lonely, I shouldn't hesitate to give the GM a poke for a guild invite.

I thought very long and hard about this. Part of me was amazed that there was an opportunity here to come back to the game after several years of absence and potentially fit right back into an old and at least somewhat familiar structure. I thought of the potential fun and companionship, and wondered whether I would maybe even want to try attending a casual raid or two. However, ultimately I decided against it. I already have enough going on in SWTOR and other modes of WoW without attempting to put down roots in MoP Classic again. I think I'll be happy to just drop it again in a few weeks to be honest. 

Am I Looking Forward to Midnight?

After my little retrospective about War Within, I wanted to take a moment to look the other way - forward - to talk about Midnight. Specifically, about how weird it feels to me that it's coming out in less than a month.

When we were still in Dragonflight and War Within was the thing to look forward to, I had some concerns. I'd really enjoyed Dragonflight, and I was worried about how War Within was going to change things.

With Midnight, I don't really feel anything like that. If I had to articulate any concerns, I guess I might point out that with two out of the four expansion launch zones being revamps of old zones, Midnight might end up feeling like there isn't enough "newness" to it (*cough*Cataclysm*cough*). But that's not a huge worry for me or anything.

However, at the same time, I'm not really particularly looking forward to the expansion either. I don't feel negatively about it, mind you - I pre-purchased a couple of months ago, and I expect that I'll have fun playing the new content. It's just...

In a weird way, it doesn't really feel to me like an expansion is coming out. To me at least, Midnight currently has the vibe of just another major patch.

Partially, I suspect the whole Worldsoul Saga thing is to blame. I already talked a bit about that in the context of the big expansion reveal back in August. Traditionally, WoW expansion announcements have been these huge surprise events: What's going to be the next big thing? Where will we go next? What will we find there?

Midnight didn't have anything like that, simply because we'd known for a long time that we were going to fight the void in Quel'thalas and that's exactly what we got out of the announcement as well. Not a huge fan of Xal'atath? Sorry, you're signed up for more of the same.

The other contributing factor to my weird lack of excitement is probably the relentless patch cadence that Blizzard has been following since Dragonflight. And don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that frequent content patches are a bad thing! Truth is though, nobody can fire on all cylinders 24/7, 365 days a year. Players need breaks.

People will probably consider this a hot take, but I don't recall ever minding the so-called content droughts towards the end of an expansion. As someone who was never at the cutting edge of the newest content, it gave me some time to get caught up, maybe level an alt, as well as pursue some goals that weren't tied to the most recent content patch. I'll always remember the last months of Wrath of the Lich King with fondness, simply because I used that quiet time to go back to the old world and get the original Loremaster achievement for example.

These "down times" give you time to recharge and get ready and excited for the next big thing. Except this time around, the husband and I were grinding Legion Remix like crazy people until only a few weeks ago, and now we're just tired. The other day he told me that he hadn't even logged in since the pre-patch because he's still feeling burnt out from Lemix. How can you get hyped for what's coming next when you're still feeling burnt out from the last major event?

I don't know; like I said I fully expect to have some fun with Midnight when it comes out, but in terms of new expansion excitement I'm not sure I've ever felt less of it (at a time when I was actually playing and enjoying the game that is, obviously I didn't care too much about what was happening when I wasn't subscribed).

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.