My Raiding History, Part 5: WoW Classic

When I updated something on my about page the other day, it occurred to me that the series about my raiding history that I have linked on there and which I wrote in 2020 is actually missing a fifth installment about what happened after that point. There's no time like the present, so let's get on it now!

Everything I said in part four about how I realised that I mainly raid for social reasons and how that's why I still I raid in SWTOR is still true, but something else happened in the meantime: WoW Classic.

I started playing Classic at its launch in 2019, but I once again had no interest in raiding there initially. I just rolled up some Horde characters on the EU's biggest PvE server with a couple of friends from back in the day, hoping to revel in a bit of nostalgia. Unfortunately said friends all dropped out pretty quickly, which left me feeling somewhat lonely on a server that at the same time felt unpleasantly crowded to me personally.

I ended up re-rolling a night elf hunter on an RP server, where I was happier - while I still played by myself, the medium population and general vibes felt noticeably nicer to me. However, my interest started to falter again when I approached max level for the second time and started to run out of things I wanted to do - until I ended up joining an explicitly casual pug for Zul'Gurub one weekend, a raid I knew very little about at the time. It went so well that I returned the next week when the opportunity arose and won lots of loot.

Soon afterwards, a random paladin ended up chatting me up in Ironforge (which I still think was because of that raid gear) and I found myself invited to a raiding guild, where I quickly became swept up in the manic scramble to get someone the Scarab Lord title. I had an insane amount of fun taking part in the server's gate opening event, and my new guild just generally made me feel extremely engaged with the game again. Soon I started to join their raids as a social member and even though I was extremely reluctant at first, they eventually convinced me to become a proper progression raider as well. (It seems a bit strange in hindsight, but they really wanted more hunters at the time for some reason.)

I learned that I really loved 40-man raids and was very motivated to contribute as much to the good vibes as possible, even if what was required of everyone was very little. I spent several months primarily raiding AQ40, yet it felt like barely any time had passed when Naxxramas was released. I also geared up my paladin alt to serve as back-up healer for some bosses there that were more healing-intensive than others. Overall, Naxxramas was more challenging than expected for a bunch of casuals like us, and we ultimately ended up killing Kel'Thuzad only once, in the week before the Burning Crusade pre-patch, though in a way that ended up being a nice capstone to the experience. (I just felt bad for the people who had been on the bench that night and never got to take part in a kill.)

I was very excited to continue into the Burning Crusade, since that had been the golden height of my original WoW raiding, but boy, did I end up being disappointed on that front. The downsizing from 40-man to 25-man had wreaked havoc on many guilds when it happened the first time, and BC Classic was no different. As the roster was trimmed down, many more casual and less optimised members were no longer welcome, and others just drifted away on their own. Everyone who remained suddenly seemed a lot more hardcore and less interested in just hanging out, which left me feeling very frustrated.

We did clear tier four pretty quickly, but I was just not happy raiding anymore and stepped down. I took a break for a couple of months, but then ended up returning during tier five, when a lot of the initial excitement had worn off and people seemed to have chilled out a little.

Unfortunately then Blizzard decided to inject some drama from their end instead by axing the RP server we were on, which resulted in a huge emotional rollercoaster for me. I eventually rejoined my guild on its new regular PvE server home, but a couple of months later, early into tier six, the guild suffered a sudden death anyway. I continued playing for a few months, but once I found out that everyone would be forced to transition into Wrath of the Lich King (which I really did not want to replay), I lost all interest in that version of Classic.

However, after a few months away I felt the itch again and decided to start exploring the vanilla Classic era servers instead, which were considered very dead at the time. (I had paid to clone my entire stable of characters during the BC transition.)

I quickly found myself invited into a guild on Horde side, and almost immediately hopped right back into 40-man raiding there, again as a hunter. I ended up raiding with them for a little over a year and it was a lovely time, though I made a point after the emotional intensity of my BC Classic adventures to not get quite as emotionally entangled. Progress was really hard and slow at times, largely due to a lack of numbers, and I never actually got to fully clear Naxx with them (though they did go on to do so without me later). I still check in on their Discord every so often and am happy to see that the guild is still going strong years later.

The main reason I stepped down from raiding on era was simply a lack of time. When I first started raiding in Classic, it was the height of the pandemic and my employer had everyone working from home full time, which meant that I had a lot of extra free time from not having to commute to London. Even so, I was still working, so I'm honestly not sure in hindsight how I mustered the energy to raid almost every single day of the week (as I was still playing SWTOR as well).

My job kept us working from home longer than most, but by late 2023 I did have to return to the office at least twice a week, and those days coincided with my Classic era raiding days, which was one of the main reasons I stepped down.

That said, I still miss it sometimes, because those chill 40-man raid vibes are just something else. I know why many people hate the format, and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the poor officers who have to organise it all, but as a mere participant it's a unique experience that I've loved more than once now. A friend in retail keeps asking me whether I want to come along to some raids with the guild he's in there, but the mere question always makes me recoil a little because while I've come to enjoy many parts of modern WoW too, raiding is still not one of them and I don't think it has anything to offer me on that front. Those impeccable Classic vibes though... the memories still make me sigh wistfully and just re-reading some of the posts I linked about the subject here hit me right in the feels. I just don't think that I have enough time for it now. Maybe one day if circumstances change again.

The Zones of Midnight

Back in November 2024, I wrote a post called "The Zones of The War Within", in which I shared my thoughts about the previous expansion's environments. It didn't get any comments, but it was one of those posts that felt really good to write because my sentiments about those zones were very strong and it was nice to get them out of my head. Unsurprisingly, I have the urge to do the same for Midnight.

Like last time, it took a bit to get here largely because the husband and I were very slow to complete the last few side quests (which I also wanted to include in my assessment). We breezed through the first three zones in what felt like no time, but then we got all caught up in gear and achievement grinding, so it took us a very long time to go back and finish up Voidstorm. (We LOLed when we found out that we really should've clicked the research console there months ago. Why did that quest not have a purple triangle?)

Anyway, it's done now, so here are my thoughts:

Eversong Woods / Quel'Thalas

This zone and the expansion's capital, the revamped Silvermoon, are without a doubt the crown jewels of Midnight. Look, I don't even feel particularly nostalgic about the original Eversong Woods and Ghostlands (they are alright, but not among my favourites), but this zone was updated with so much love and to such gorgeous results, it makes me really excited to see what the environmental artists will end up doing with Northrend for The Last Titan.

There's a video on the official WoW channel about what happened behind the scenes for this update to happen and I can only recommend it. It also taught me how I can tell while flying whether I'm accidentally entering the Horde area!

Quest-wise, I like how the side quests give us a glimpse into what life in Quel'Thalas is like nowadays and how the blood elves have evolved over the years. There's still a bit of that old arrogance but there's also a genuine desire for a fresh start and appreciation for the fact that a ravaged land that was thought to be destroyed forever has slowly been healing after all.

The only even slightly negative thing I have to say (if you want to take it that way) is that you can still tell that these zones weren't originally designed with flying in mind. This means that while flying over Eversong, the view largely consists of low forest canopy and not much else, and Silvermoon is still as awkward to navigate as it was back in the day. The new central plaza and its surroundings are alright because they are a lot more open, but in general it's not one of my favourite capitals in terms of ease of use.

Zul'Aman

What blew me away about this zone was just how big it is. I kinda figured that the original Zul'Aman by itself wouldn't cover enough ground to make for a proper modern WoW zone and that they might have to add to it, but even so the original area (now called Atal'Aman) is actually only a tiny part of the Midnight zone. It was awe-inspiring to me how much and how beautifully the zone designers expanded on that, with all those mountains and tall trees. I'm partial towards lush green zones, so this one's right up my alley in that regard. The music is catchy too. (Once while flying over Atal'Aman I started to sing along with the choral bit and the husband immediately told me off for my bad singing. "But you still recognised it!" I said.)

Story-wise, I was generally happy with the troll stuff, though they do seem to have an above-average number of severely dysfunctional families over there...

The only (again) slight downside to doing anything in this zone is that due to Harandar and Voidstorm having portals in the capital, business in Zul'Aman requires the biggest travel times in the expansion right now. I still like going there though because it's worth it.

Also, I was immediately intrigued by the mysterious island across the sea to the east that you currently can't access, and rumour has it that it will be the point one patch zone. I hope that's true. 

Harandar

Hardandar, weirdly, turned out to be the biggest letdown of the expansion for me so far. It's visually beautiful for sure, but the way they handled its introduction and story kind of diminished the experience in my opinion.

There was datamining back in War Within that revealed that apparently Harandar was originally meant to be a patch zone for that expansion and would've been accessed via the roots in Azj-Kahet - and honestly, I wish they had still introduced it like that in Midnight, because descending deep into the earth like that would've felt very cool. As it is, Orweyna just pops a portal out of the ground and off you go, which results in Harandar feeling like it's not a real place on or inside Azeroth. Sure, there's all these world tree roots coming from the ceiling, but without any real sense of place they don't feel "real" to me somehow.

There's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like an underground zone and everyone's really blasé about that. It's like the devs saw how much everyone loved Hallowfall (where the fact that there was a fake sun in the "sky" was a big source of wonder and a notable plot point) and decided that they could just repeat the same thing with any other underground zone without explanation. Why does the whole zone feel like it's just floating in space? Why is it so bright? Nobody seems to know or care. If you do the Haranir lore quests, there is one eventually that explains that it used to be dark after the goddess' departure and then one day light magically appeared, but that's a rather weak explanation in my book.

The Haranir in general feel like the opposite of the Earthen to me - I expected the latter to be quite boring but they actually ended up being interesting and charming. The Haranir I thought would be quite interesting based on what we saw of them in War Within - how extremely reclusive they were, to the point that Orweyna and Hannan made themselves outcasts by just venturing outside their home and talking to other people. But then in Midnight they are just a little unfriendly towards strangers for all of five minutes and then everyone gets along just fine anyway.

Aside from their adorable druid forms, everything about the Haranir just feels so generic. My husband, who's notoriously bad at remembering fantasy names, kept calling them "the other trolls" when we first worked our way through the zone because to him they were just a slight variation of what we'd just gone through in Zul'Aman, and he sadly had a point.

(Also, one more minor thing, but we had this whole emotional cut scene in War Within when Orweyna says goodbye to Hannan, and then we return to Harandar and they barely talk to each other and instead she seems to have an old crush on some other guy suddenly? What the heck was up with that?) 

Voidstorm

Midnight's (current) final zone is one I feel kind of "eh" about, I think largely because I'm a bit tired of purple environments. Maybe I would've liked it more if we hadn't just finished up War Within on K'aresh, which was also purple and rocky. The two zones are by no means identical, and the environmental designers clearly did their best to still give the Voidstorm a unique look - I do like the chasms with the red hues for example, they bring blood to mind and add to the eerie atmosphere. Still, overall I just don't find it that appealing.

I'll say that I did enjoy the side quests and how they drove home that everyone in this zone basically becomes either vicious or depressed, including the back story of how it was once a thriving planet that was destroyed by one of its own people.

Also, like with Harandar. I feel like this zone might've benefitted from having a more connected introduction. Personally I think we should've just flown straight into the storm above the Sunwell during our first attack instead of all that faffing around with building a portal! I didn't think it detracted as much here though, because Voidstorm is on another planet so it was always going to involve teleporting at some point.

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Overall WoW's team of environmental designers continues to deliver outstanding work as always, but I've got to admit that after the lengths Blizzard went to in Dragonflight and early War Within to make the world cohesive and avoid loading screens, it's felt a bit jarring to have two out of this expansion's four launch zones be hidden behind portals with no other way to access them. To me at least it makes the world of Midnight feel somewhat smaller than the last two expansions, even though I have no doubt that in terms of overall landmass built there's little to no difference.

WoW Classic BlizzCon Ponderings

The other day Google sent me an email to let me know that my most popular post recently has been the one about whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be happening or not. Most people may not be that keen on the idea of playing WoD Classic, but a lot of them are at least curious to find out whether it's happening or not. 

I've also been thinking about this again recently, and as I've said previously, I expect to get some pretty big Classic news at BlizzCon in September. However, until then I think it's fun to speculate a bit about what else will happen. You see, at this point I'm actually not even that curious about the details of the next big Classic thing. It'll be whatever it'll be.

What I'm personally more interested in is Blizzard's general direction with Classic, by which I mean more or less the rest of it. If they do indeed release a "Classic Plus", will they want to funnel everyone into it? I'm sure there are plenty of players who would approve of this approach, especially as the modern mega server model has fostered a community that is very anxious to be where everyone else is, which is naturally easiest if people simply have nowhere else to go (if they want to play some flavour of WoW Classic on official servers).

If Blizzard were to go for this sort of focused or consolidation approach, I could see them shutting down basically every other version of Classic that isn't the new hotness or Classic era. Characters from MoP Classic and Season of Discovery would be transferred to Classic era or retail. Anniversary... actually, I can't see them shutting down the anniversary servers without at least letting people have another run at Wrath of the Lich King first, so I guess that would also be allowed to stick around (for a while at least).

The other option though would be to go in completely the opposite direction. More versions of Classic, more!

In this scenario, a Classic+ would be purely additive, with all previous versions of Classic also hanging around. MoP Classic would continue into WoD and then Legion. (I don't know why it took me so long to realise that an easy way to make a WoD Classic announcement more palatable would be to announce WoD and the fact that Legion will come afterwards at the same time, even if the latter is still some time away.) Anniversary Classic would still continue into Wrath of the Lich King, but maybe they'd also split off a Burning Crusade era this time for good measure.

I watched an interview with Ghostcrawler the other week, and when he gets asked about WoW Classic (handily that section is available as its own, shorter clip) he said that the big obstacle to overcome at its inception was the fact that WoW simply didn't have a versioning/branching system and that this had to be built from the ground up.

I'm not an engineer, but I reckon that now that Bizzard have the ability to run different versions of WoW (and Classic even) and are already quite happily doing so, it's probably considerably less effort to add one more variant to the pile. It's still extra work and presumably there's some sort of minimum level of player engagement that's required to make each version viable, but they might very well consider it a way of expanding their base.

From a player perspective, the main downside here is that it looks very confusing from the outside and new players often don't know where to start. But I guess any time they spend trying to figure out which mode they like is still subscription time paid.

I suspect the reality is likely to be somewhere between the two extremes I outlined. Burning Crusade Classic era is probably nothing more than a pipe dream, and I can see them shutting down the SoD servers eventually, but every version that retains a good population will likely be kept rolling until it doesn't anymore. We just don't know for sure! And that suspense of whether one's preferred mode has a future or not is definitely a bit of a weight on people's minds right now I suspect.

Why I Like Midnight Professions

Back in March I wrote about how after the initial levelling frenzy that followed Midnight's release, I ended up turning my attention towards professions. This is an interest that hasn't dropped off since then. Sure, I also do other content such as delves, but the first thing I do after each Wednesday's reset is log into my (currently) seven profession alts and do their weekly profession quests. I didn't think too much about that at first, but after a few months of doing it, it does seem like I'm rather in the minority in enjoying the profession system this much.

Flying across Eversong in search of copper, like I do every week 

I hesitate to put too much stock into the WoW subreddit because it's hardly representative of the player base as a whole, but it does tend to give at least vague insights into what a lot of players are happy or unhappy about at any given time. The profession system seems to be fairly solidly in the latter category, with threads decrying its terribleness receiving thousands of upvotes, while one I found that said it was great was sitting at a rating of zero, with over a hundred disagreeing comments.

After a bit of reflecting, I think the reasons I've come to like the current iteration of the profession system so much and why so many people on reddit seem to hate it are probably the same: it's honestly more reminiscent of the way a lot of things worked in Classic than modern retail's general design philosophy.

I suppose you could argue that the way the acquisition of knowledge points is time-gated is very un-Classic-like and you wouldn't be wrong about that, but I'm less talking about the nitty gritty details and more about the overall vibe of the system.

One part is that you are forced to make choices about what to prioritise that you can't take back. Sure, eventually you'll be able to fill out all the profession skill trees if you grind long enough, but if you pick one tree early on and then wish you'd chosen another one instead - tough luck, no resets. (Though I seem to remember that they are going to implement a once-per-expansion reset opportunity or something.)

On my tailor, I made a similar mistake as the guy who wrote the second post I linked above, specialising into profession equipment at first, only to find out that the epic pieces I wanted to craft all required me to have dozens and dozens of bolts of a special rare cloth that I couldn't even loot until I'd gone halfway down a completely different skill tree - that sucked, and is one of the reasons my tailoring is one of the professions on which I'm still more behind than some others.

However, I don't feel like I'm in a race and my error is something that will be rectified over time, which brings me to another big "Classic-like" positive about professions from my point of view: that the work you invest into them isn't tied to the whole seasonal cycle that constantly obsoletes your gear every major patch. (Let me knock on wood and hope that Blizzard has no plans to change this.) It's very grindy and you have to keep coming back to it week after week, but the benefits remain and accumulate over time.

Thanks to the spark system, crafted gear is relevant each new season without you necessarily needing to learn a lot of new recipes, so if you put the time into learning how to craft gear for every armour slot under the sun - that will still be useful as the expansion progresses! Same with gathering professions, where the benefits of grinding out those knowledge points are very noticeable - when I started on my blacksmithing in Midnight, I was constantly short on copper (another callback to Classic if I've ever seen one) and the output of each mining node felt absolutely anaemic, with many of them only yielding one piece at a time when I needed dozens to create a single alloy bar. But as I've filled out those skill trees and the yield of each type of node has increased, I could feel the pain easing, and now it actually feels like I'm already in a pretty good place in terms of raw materials, helped by the way the weekly knowledge point unlocks encourage me to keep gathering and not just stop the moment I have enough for my current project.

It's basically slow and grindy but rewards you in a way that is consistently useful throughout the expansion and to some degree even past it, now that housing exists and some decor items can only be crafted. A few months ago I levelled Cataclysm blacksmithing and now I can make pitchforks - not the most popular thing ever, and also only tangentially related to the new crafting system in particular, but it's something, and it's a big contrast to the way any gear you earn will be worse than a random world quest item by the time the point one patch hits.

I wonder if this old-school feel of the post-Dragonflight profession system was an intentional decision to bring a bit of classic flavour back to retail and appeal to different player types, or whether the devs will eventually decide that it was an accident that needs to be rectified and streamlined, considering how much pushback there has been against the way things work from more entrenched retail players.

Turtle WoW's Version of Gilneas

I said I had one more post about Turtle WoW's custom content coming up, and this is it - about the Turtle WoW version of Gilneas. I'm glad I still managed to make it to this zone before the shutdown (it was designed for levels 39-46) because it was uniquely interesting in the sense that it was the first custom zone I encountered that had a direct retail counterpart.

I mentioned in my post about Grim Reaches that in terms of location and vague themes it had connections to retail's Twilight Highlands, but they weren't exactly the same zone. Gilneas though, that's the same place at its core as in retail: the werewolf-infested kingdom beyond the wall, ruled by Genn Greymane. Somehow, that made the differences all the more fascinating.

As I hadn't come across a breadcrumb quest to lead me to the zone, I simply rode over to the Greymane Wall from Southshore and stepped through the now open gate, bursting with curiosity. Visually, it was very much a continuation of Silverpine with slightly fewer trees.

The first quest hub I encountered was a refugee/rebel camp whose residents needed help with fending off the local wildlife and gathering food - pretty standard fare, but it did make me wonder what these people were fleeing from/rebelling against. My eyebrows shot up some more when further down the road, I encountered hostile mobs with names like "Greymane Enforcer" - followers of Greymane are the bad guys here?! What the heck is going on?

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long to find out what was happening, as the town of Ravenshire contained an NPC called Lord Darius Ravenwood that was more than happy to provide an exposition dump about what the zone was all about. In short, Gilneas' isolation led to famine and unrest, which was only exacerbated by Genn having outsiders that were stuck in his castle whispering in his ear and ultimately led to him seizing the nobility's lands to provide food. After his wife Mia was killed in a riot, Genn completely withdrew from the public, and the population is now in open rebellion.

Now, I hated the bit about Mia dying because it seemed pretty much like a copy and paste of Tiffin Wrynn getting a rock to the head, and I don't consider the fridging of female characters a classic trope to be preserved. However, other than that, I thought it was an interesting twist. Genn is no werewolf in this alternate history of Azeroth - in fact, most Gilneans aren't.

This got me thinking about how the worgen lore in Vanilla is a bit confusing - in Pyrewood Village in Silverpine they are basically classic werewolves, living like normal humans by day, but the Scythe of Elune quest chain, somewhat contradictory to this, describes them as these demonic beings from another dimension that were summoned onto Azeroth. I can see on Warcraft Wiki that this has since been recontextualised so that the first worgen were actually druids... but regardless, the point is that in Turtle WoW's Gilneas, the worgen are still more like these strange, demonic creatures that are to be avoided at all costs, not like in Cata where they were made more obviously werewolf-like and Worgen and Gilnean became largely synonymous.

Anyway, to get back to the point - I had a feeling that Lord Darius' quest would result in more story about all that Greymane business, but I made it a priority to explore and do basically every other quest first instead, which led to some interesting discoveries.

In a crypt I found a cult of worgen worshippers that did want to become werewolves, so that idea was also present in Turtle WoW after all. It wasn't quite clear to me from the quests whether they were already capable of turning or were still working towards that part, as they were all normal humanoids and friendly towards me.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice because I so rarely look up in MMOs, but the centre of the zone was a tall tree on top of a mountain, and in a cave under said mountain I encountered the Pellars, a word I had to look up. They're kind of... nature-aligned witches friendly to the populace, but also a bit weird. One of them spoke in rhymes for example.

There was also a ruined town where the Scourge had broken through once, and a naga incursion from the south. The beach with the naga was a bit wonky as there was an invisible border where you could suddenly phase, with the current mobs around you disappearing and different ones suddenly popping into existence. It also made me realise that for all the love and care the Turtle devs put into their zone design, I don't think they were very good at beaches, as those always seemed more dull than the ones designed by Blizzard.

Regardless, I did decide to follow what I'd call the "main story chain" eventually, which tasked me with freeing Liam and Tess Greymane - yes, Liam is alive in this one! I already knew that Tess had escaped as I found her hanging out with the Pellars before I actually got sent there, but Liam was chained up at the back of a cave. Rescuing him was pretty tedious as I had to fight my way in, back out to get the key to his shackles, and then back in again - this was probably less annoying when there were more other players around than there were towards the end of my play time. I was half expecting that I'd have to escort him out as well, but escort quests are one thing I didn't see the Turtle WoW devs port over from Vanilla actually, and there wasn't one here either. Liam just finds his way to Ravenshire on his own once you've freed him.

In a nutshell, you then go on to fight some more Greymane soldiers, as well as recruiting the werewolf worshippers and the Pellars to your cause. Then you get given a quest to do the local dungeon, Gilneas City, to "save" Genn Greymane. Yes, it's in quotes in the quest text as well, which gives the game away a bit.

Unfortunately I didn't get to run the dungeon before the shutdown, but I did pop my head in the door and used my hunter's Eagle Eye to look around a bit. I could tell from the map at least that this one wasn't another mega dungeon like Dragonmaw Retreat or Stormwrought Ruins, but much smaller, so I don't feel I missed as much. I also watched a YouTube video that someone recorded of the place and it's basically a few streets full of Worgen and then a tower in which you kill Genn, who I presume has gone mad with grief or something (still not a werewolf though).

So I ultimately didn't get to see everything the zone had to offer - there were also a couple of elite quests I wasn't able to complete, and in a small house I found a guy that taunted me with a grey exclamation mark over his head, but at 45 I was apparently still too low to see what he wanted people to do.

However, I do think I got the gist of the zone, and I really enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to call it my favourite of all the Turtle WoW custom zones I played through, possibly outdoing even Northwind and Balor (and I did like both of those a lot as well). The people who designed it really seemed to get what makes a Vanilla WoW zone great, with lots of little stories woven together to form rich tapestry of everything that's going on in the zone, culminating in a big finale in the zone's dungeon, similar to how the lawlessness of Westfall makes you wonder just who these Defias guys are, until you eventually take the battle to the Deadmines. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give I think!

Battlefield: Barrens

Still feeling a bit sad about Turtle WoW's demise, I found myself logging into Mists of Pandaria Classic again when I was craving my Classic fix this weekend. It's on patch 5.3 right now, with 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar) meant to go live in a little over two weeks.

I figured it might be interesting to have another look around, as MoP's 5.3 patch was another one of those weird experiments Blizzard performed at the time, adding some content that only existed for that patch and was then immediately removed again. From everything I'd heard about it, it wasn't particularly exciting, but I still wanted to at least have a look since I had the opportunity.

In a nutshell, the short introductory quest leads Alliance players to Durotar, where they find out that Vol'jin's Darkspear are openly rebelling against Garrosh, and you concede that you have a shared interest in stopping him. You agree that you'll both hassle his Kor'kron in the Northern Barrens where they are trying to gather lumber, meat, oil and stone, to deprive them of said resources and help bolster the rebellion instead.

This is all meant to be part of the build-up to Siege of Orgrimmar and kind of reminded me of how in Wrath of the Lich King, there were these repeatable quests to gather lumber in Cystalsong while the Argent Tournament was under construction, which also went away once that was completed, only with Battlefield Barrens being much larger in scope. The overall design of it feels more like an extremely early predecessor to world quests and other dynamic open world activities that would get added many years later.

Basically you can always collect resources by just killing hostile orcs that are gathering them all around the Northern Barrens, but this is very slow and you're better off tackling one of the dynamic spawns that pop up on the map every so often, such as caravans that need escorting and named elites Kor'kron commanders that drop large numbers of resources. The intro quest only requires 15 of each type, but then you get a weekly that asks for ten times as much, which takes some time to accumulate.

I was pleased when I managed to join my first communal kill of a named elite and he dropped a pretty good chunk of resources at once. I followed the small crowd to kill another couple as they spawned, figuring that I'd actually be done quite quickly, similarly to how these things play out in retail, but then everyone just disappeared all of a sudden and I found myself alone at the next elite. I did try to take it on by myself and failed miserably, so I was forced to go back to smaller and slower gathering tasks. (I did keep an eye on the elite's icon on the map and it never went away for the rest of my time there, everyone had just gone.) I was honestly quite baffled by how abandoned the zone was aside from the brief burst of activity of four or five people killing a few of the elites together - I know the patch has been out for a little while but it's still the current content, with an expiration date no less, so I would have expected more activity there.

One bit that was funny to me was that when I completed the weekly I earned the title "Hordebreaker" - a title that I learned is somewhat rare because patch 5.3 was the only time you could earn it. It does feel more like something you should get out of PvP though rather than as a reward for a weekly collect quest.

I also decided to try and pick up Wrathion's legendary quest line again. After I finally hit revered with him from another two rounds of Shieldwall dailies, he tasked me with queueing for the two battlegrounds that were added in MoP (Silvershard Mines and Temple of Kotmogu) and queues were looong. Once I waited over an hour for a pop. In terms of gameplay, my team was completely stomped in Silvershard Mines while utterly dominating the enemy in Temple, which to be fair is my usual experience with these in retail as well.

The other quest he gave me was more of a problem though: you're supposed to kill a boss type orc called "Warlord Bloodhilt" at Domination Point, the Horde base in Krasarang Wilds. The quest does state that you'll need a group. Looking it up, it seems that he was a raid level boss originally, but had already been nerfed to be more of a small group fight or possibly even soloable with some skill. My first attempt was a miserable failure however as he ate my cat for breakfast and I had to acknowledge that I needed a proper tanking pet, so I went out to tame a turtle. I also realised that I'd never bothered to learn a single glyph, another thing I rectified.

Unfortunately, returning more prepared ultimately didn't help because Blizzard introduced a bug a few months ago that causes the Kor'kron flak cannons in the base to not just shoot at players on flying mounts, but also on people on the ground, and more importantly - they can shoot through walls and inside buildings. So I honestly never got very far, less because of the boss himself but more because of the flak cannons often randomly nuking me in two to three hits. Certain spots sometimes seemed to be safe from them, but it wasn't consistent so I never really managed to come up with a safe strategy.

At one point I briefly got my hopes up when a pandaren monk arrived who also wanted to kill the boss. We grouped up and after getting blown up by the cannons a few times he suggested we just kill them. We did so, but unfortunately they respawned too quickly and were soon nuking us through the walls again. Eventually my gear was broken and the monk got fed up and said he'd rather go fishing than deal with this fuckery any longer.

I'm at a bit of a loss about how to continue. I find it very hard to think of a way to progress the quest at this stage, as even a larger group would likely get nuked by the cannons, never mind me being able to assemble such a group. As mentioned, I know for a fact that this bug has been in the game for a few months already (as I was actively playing when the daily quests in that area went from chill to "WTF is going on with these cannons"), and bug fixes for MoP Classic have not been a priority for Blizzard. You'd think something that blocks the legendary chain like this might still matter, but most people who care are probably already past this stage, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you've got any hot tips for this one, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Turtle WoW's Final Farewell

As of today, the Turtle WoW private server is no longer available. I was able to make it to the final shutdown event last night, and I'm glad I did because it certainly was a unique experience.

I originally logged in about an hour beforehand, because I wasn't 100% certain of the exact time and didn't want to accidentally miss it. There were already plenty of people in both Stormwind and Moonwhisper Coast (at the Farewell Faire) and GMs were walking among them openly while spawning in some strange NPCs, such as a giant white cat.

One thing I think I never mentioned before was that Turtle WoW also had an in-game radio station. The reason I didn't mention it was that I never used it. I basically tried to connect once but nothing was playing, so I figured it was only active on special occasions. Plus, to be honest I wasn't that keen on having some modern music blasted into my ears while playing WoW anyway - I prefer the in-game music for immersion.

Either way, that evening I clicked the button for the radio again as there was a DJ playing for the final shutdown, and it worked. From my understanding he was also hosting some community run event on the Ambershire server.

Still, as there was still over an hour to go and I didn't care to just hang out for that long, I took some screenshots and then went away again to do something else for a while, only logging back in about ten minutes before the real shutdown.

It was nice to see how many people had shown up for the final farewell. As mentioned previously, the population had dropped down to a couple hundred concurrent players after the shutdown announcement, but for the party we were back to several thousand online on Nordanaar alone, and I'm sure there were just as many if not more on Ambershire, plus I imagine even some on the smaller Tel'Abim PvP server.

Some were sitting quietly on the beach and staring out into the sea, others were dancing, others were bouncing around like rabbits on crack. Chat got so busy that I was no longer able to read anything because the text was scrolling past so quickly - it was like in one of those Twitch streams where you get nothing but a vague impression of sentiment as hundreds of people spam yells in ALL CAPS.

Along the beach a line of people riding their turtle mounts had formed, and after riding back and forth along the line a couple of times, I planted my own among them. The DJ put on Semisonic's Closing Time as the last song to play before the shutdown and I've got to admit I was definitely feeling some feelings, having that in my ear as I sat among the turtles with fireworks going off around us and chat spam flying everywhere.

And to think I had only come here after the lawsuit, knowing full well that it was all going to go away! I'd only wanted to have a brief, curious peek, but even though I wasn't looking to make friends, it was hard not to get engrossed and feel part of something bigger. I'd always scoffed at the idea of a "Classic Plus" but what I saw on Turtle WoW really did bring back that feeling of old school excitement for me, of not knowing where that boat was going to go, being giddy about making it to the next zone to see what was new, and of eagerly thinking about what I was going to do the next time I logged in even when I wasn't actually playing.

For my own reference, here's how much progress my little high elf made over these last few weeks (since I last wrote down her stats in my 2025 end-of-year post):

• Level 45 Hunter (+7)
• 5 days, 15 hours played (+1 day, 12 hours)
• 225 Jewelcrafting (+24), 250 Mining (+24), 261 Cooking (+36), 221 Fishing (+16), 270 First Aid (+58), 1 Survival (-97 since they reset it)

The DJ did his job well in terms of timing, so the song ended and then it was over as we were all disconnected.

I have my blog to record my personal adventures, but the Turtle WoW devs also put up a website for people to share their own most memorable moments on the servers, which can be found on theturtlegrove.com. I do think this server will stand up there with Nostalrius as one of the big WoW private servers that really made an impact. We'll see whether there'll be any traces of it in what Blizzard does next for Classic, though I'm not particularly hopeful, not because I don't think the devs are capable but because I simply don't think Blizzard is interested in catering to this particular niche.

One thing I haven't changed my mind about in regards to a potential Classic+ is that it will be impossible to make everyone happy, and that applied to Turtle WoW as well! It just happened to really hit the points that I personally love. While they also created new raids and did things for PvPers for example, you didn't hear nearly as many people talk about that because it simply wasn't as popular. If all you wanted to do was PvP, there were probably better places for you to do so. You just didn't hear that much negativity about Turtle WoW because if someone didn't like it there, they just moved on to somewhere else. It's not like with official WoW, where there's a whole economy around publicly ranting about how terrible everything is and people can make a living off that.

Turtle was focused on the world, the old Warcraft RTS lore, roleplayers, community and levelling above all else, and they did those things exceptionally well. I don't think anyone currently in power at Blizzard shares those interests in the same way, so I suspect it's unlikely that we'll see anything close to this level of investment in those areas again.

Not that nobody is going to try at all, of course. People have been joking that surely the server will spring up again somewhere else as soon as it's shut down. I'm not on the Turtle WoW Discord, but I've seen some comments about how people should keep an eye on it for some sort of special announcement about the future later down the line.

Meanwhile I've also been hearing talk about a server called "Octo WoW" run by different people, which is based on a leaked older version of Turtle and apparently they've been trying to get some of the newer content back onto it as well. I've not got any personal interest in that, but I'm sure some people will jump right onto it. Plus there are the usual rumours about a rogue dev running off with the code and wanting to spin up his own project.

For my part, I'll just have one more "post mortem" post about Turtle WoW so to speak, to talk about my experiences with the last custom zone I played through, which was their version of Gilneas. Then I'll close the book on the subject of private servers again for the time being. That said, I've certainly made a lot of memories on this one for the relatively short time I played there.