Pandas of Draenor

Just as I was starting to wonder whether I still had enough of a reason to stay subscribed to WoW, my husband came in clutch for Blizzard by expressing a desire to pick up retail again, now that our new-expansion gearing frenzy in SWTOR was coming to an end for the time being. Much to my surprise, he wasn't that keen on going to Zereth Mortis yet, but wanted to roll up a new pair of characters, this time to level through Warlords of Draenor.

After a bit of discussion about what to go for, we ended up with a pair of pandaren, him a brewmaster monk, me a discipline priest. I've certainly come a long way from being notably underwhelmed by the Mists of Pandaria announcement, to finding the expansion itself kind of neat, to actually playing a pandaren myself!

I had never played through the pandaren starting experience before and found it enjoyable enough, though I did get a bit of a sense of déjà vu towards the end, which makes me think that I must have watched a playthrough of the zone on YouTube at some point many years ago.

And then we were off to Warlords of Draenor, the one remaining expansion from which I hadn't played any content before, though it does of course have a strong reputation. I remember when it was first announced I was actually kind of intrigued and considered checking it out, but that interest didn't last long. I also recall watching my husband play through the content on his own at the time and commenting how ridiculous it was that all the orc warlords appeared with their names floating next to them in giant letters - I guess Blizzard didn't think people would be able to tell them apart otherwise. My opinion on this was unchanged when we got to that part ourselves.

The introduction to Draenor in general is a fast-paced adventure that feels super odd to jump into story-wise with the new levelling system. A moment ago we were noobish pandas only just earning the right to leave the Wandering Isle for the first time, the next Khadgar greets us as famous champions who are Azeroth's only hope. I know that opting into Chromie Time includes implicit acceptance that the timeline won't really make sense, but this just seemed like a particularly extreme contrast. There also isn't any real context for why we suddenly have to go through the Dark Portal, it just feels very rushed and out of nowhere. Also, speaking of Khadgar: I thought he was kind of funny in Legion, but here the first impression he makes is actually one of being rather cold and uncaring... not a fan.

After the intro we were off to Shadowmoon Valley to start building our garrison, another feature that was reported on a lot back in the day. My husband seems to be very fond of it (he has several across his stable of characters) but he does love base-building games in general. I was a little overwhelmed at first to be honest, especially with him going on about all the things I "should" be doing to upgrade my garrison asap. The process looks like it must have been sped up a lot compared to back in the day, but it still costs resources - in fact it's ironic that the garrison had a reputation for being a massive gold generator when WoD was current but now seems to have been reduced to a gold sink instead - my husband confessed that he sent his new alt several tens of thousands of gold to be able to upgrade his buildings asap. As I've refused to do this so far, my own garrison is still extremely basic as my panda priest has only earned a few hundred gold throughout her questing so far.

At the time of me writing this, we've only done a few quests in Shadowmoon Valley plus one random dungeon and we're already level thirty, so I anticipate that just like with Legion, we'll hit fifty very quickly and will then continue running through the rest of the zones overlevelled, one-shotting everything for almost zero XP just to see the story.

While it's been fun to level with my husband again, I have to admit that the expansion content itself hasn't really grabbed me yet. The Alliance garrison being situated in a zone where it's basically always night is an emotional downer for me, and I struggle a bit to care about what we're doing. I think it's a mix between the whole alternate timeline thing and the story just not establishing very well what our motivations are. It was one thing to stop a sudden and barely explained invasion in the intro, but what exactly our beef with all the orcs is now that we're settling down on Draenor ourselves feels a lot more fuzzy. I was always told that the hate for WoD mainly came from the fact that it had little to no content added after launch but that the levelling experience was fine, but to be honest it doesn't really strike me as all that great so far either. We'll see whether that opinion changes as we explore further.

Oh, and as a fun little aside: I'd only been playing my new panda priest for a few hours when a friend whispered me on Battle.net:

Him: Did you really name a character Pishin? [Panda-Shin... get it?]
Me: Please don't tell me it means something bad!
Him: Oh no... OK, my lips are sealed.

At this point I put "Pishin" into Google of course... first result was a city/district in Pakistan, that didn't seem so bad? However, a bit further down the page I found "(Scots): urine, piss" - and of course the friend mentioned above is Scottish. Sigh!