Kalimdor Cup

My play time rotates a lot at the moment. One week I'm all about Classic, then something in retail grabs my interest, then SWTOR is king again. One activity that had my attention in Dragonflight the other week was a limited-time event called the Kalimdor Cup. I worked really hard to finish all my goals related to it before it was supposed to end - naturally Blizzard then went ahead and extended it by another week. Oh well.

When I first heard about this event, I thought it meant that Blizzard was going to unlock dragonriding in the old world sooner than expected, but that was not the case. As it stands, you still have to flap to all the race locations in Kalimdor the old-fashioned way - it's just that when you talk to the NPC that starts the race, you're put on a generic dragonriding mount and off you go. A few seconds after you finish the race, it disappears and you get teleported back to the starting point.

I still really enjoy dragonriding... though my attempts to get gold on all the advanced courses on the Dragon Isles haven't got very far. I remember falling down that particular rabbit hole one Saturday morning and it felt like three hours later I'd managed to complete only one zone - I like dragonriding, but not that much. With that in mind, I only aimed for gold on the basic races of the Cup and only did the advanced and reverse versions once or twice before moving on. I first did all the races on my evoker main, and then went back to do the intro quest on a few alts in order to get enough currency to buy all the cosmetic rewards. I think the cosmetic gear set looks pretty nifty, though it looks to me like it's made for a dwarf.

Thanks to Kamalia highlighting that the races also give a bit of XP, this served as an incentive for me to also do them on my hunter to level her a bit more without repeating the same stuff on the Dragon Isles yet again.

I really liked the way this event made you revisit the old world, and there was something quite peculiar about dragonriding across the old zones, an added perspective to just how large the Dragon Isles are and how comparatively small these old zones are, when you can basically do a race around the whole map in a minute and a half. It's such a weird contrast to zoom through Frostwhisper Gorge in what feels like the blink of an eye when I think of riding around Winterspring on my hunter in Classic to mine Thorium, how long it takes to get anywhere, and how every nook and cranny of the environment feels important.

The one that tickled me the most was probably the race around Ahn'qiraj, which effectively does a round of the open world version of the AQ20 raid. It says something about the scale of those old raids that this didn't feel all that restricting, even going at dragonriding speeds. Apparently an Eastern Kingdoms Cup and an Outlands version are already confirmed, and even more might be in the works. It's a relatively low-effort way of giving some purpose to old zones and I like it.