WoW Memories #3: October 22nd & 23rd, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

Today I'm combining two posts since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on October 22th, 2006 under the title "Socialising In The Twenty-First Century":

Yesterday was full of quite a lot of socialising of different kinds.

[The first two thirds of the post talk about me playing Neopets¹ with other people, followed by me throwing a karaoke party for my real life friends in the evening.]

And because that wasn't yet enough to make my day, I got back online after all my guests had left and made a new WoW character to play with Nemi² on an English server. She said she'd want to be a Night Elf, so I said I'd be one too.

Can you guess who is who?³

Either way, things really are more fun when you do them together. Certainly there are still tasks you'll want to take care of on your own, but when it comes to things like venturing into a cave or attacking a particularly strong monster it's definitely nice to have someone who watches your back and can help you out when you get in trouble.⁴

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The following was originally posted on October 23rd, 2006 under the title "*shuffles uneasily*":

Don't really have anything interesting to say about today. Went to uni, cleaned the piggies' cage⁵ and generally didn't feel too hot.

The only fun thing I did was play WoW with Nemi again, and this time Mechanichamster joined us too.⁶ Do I sense a new addiction?⁷ I sure hope not, because my Sims deserve better than that.⁸ Still, at the moment I can't help it I guess, after all the game is all new and shiny to me.

¹ I played Neopets for about five years before getting into WoW, and I tend to think of it as my "proto-MMO" nowadays. While it was a simple browser-based game and the world of Neopia only existed as a bunch of flash images, it did invite people to think of it as a virtual world, there were "dailies" to do and I ended up interacting with other players quite a lot, which included joining a guild, signing up for multiple forums, and contributing to a Neopets fan blog for a while.

² I've mentioned my friend Nemi a couple of times before. In a nutshell, she's another person I met on an online forum around 2001. She was from Sweden and we met up in real life a couple of times. We ended up playing WoW together for something like a year or two, though our association became more loose over time, as she was more progression-minded than me. She also came back for Classic for a couple of weeks, though quickly lost interest again.

³ On the left we have my priest Tiranea and on the right Nemi's druid Elentiel. I think either her or Matje recommended that I should roll a priest because having a priest around would be handy for getting into groups. I had no idea what that was going to mean in practice, but I didn't mind filling the role. I ended up enjoying it enough that Tiranea stayed my Alliance main for several years, until I stopped playing in Cata. It wasn't until last year that I finally dusted her off in order to do the night elf heritage quest.

⁴ With how much railing I've seen against "forced grouping" over the years, I've occasionally come to doubt my own commitment to it. Do I just love group content because that's simply what I got used to over the years? This post shows that the answer to that question is no. I had barely been playing WoW for a few days when I concluded that it was much more fun with other people than to just play by myself.

⁵ I was still living with my mother at the time and we owned two guinea pigs.

⁶ Matje created a night elf warrior called Dantaniel to play with us, but from what I remember we didn't actually end up grouping that often. He spent most of his play time raiding with his guild on his mage main on another server and would just log in every so often to level his new alt a bit. Being a much more experienced player, he had no issues keeping up with us even with less play time, but our schedules just didn't seem to align that often.

⁷ I'd mentioned the subject of addiction previously, and it would come up again later too. I think it's easy to forget for how much hype there was about WoW at the time, there was also fear-mongering about its addictiveness, with the news reporting on people who had got so lost in WoW that they lost control of their real lives. I don't think I seriously expected it to have that kind of effect on me, but I was definitely a little worried about potential negative impacts it could have on me.

⁸ It goes to show again just how much I was into Sims 2 at the time that I was worried about "neglecting" my characters in the game in favour of WoW.

The Joy of Exploration in Modern WoW

One of the things I love about the vanilla World is how utterly explorable it is. You've got these huge land masses full of interesting things to discover everywhere, and even after years of playing that version of the game, I have no doubt that there are still some quests and hidden surprises that I've never come across. The sense of wonder this created was amazing.

Sadly, this is also something that kind of fell by the wayside in the expansions that followed. The artists still created beautiful environments, but you weren't really meant to spend much time in them; they were increasingly just a backdrop for the quests you rushed through on your way to the level cap. Just today I did a few low-level Cata quests on an alt, and while mining an ore node, I accidentally got into combat with an elite. It was surprisingly powerful and took me a while to whittle down... just to then drop nothing, and not even give XP, presumably because it only exists to be blown up with a quest item in one specific quest.

Fortunately Blizzard has backtracked on this in recent years, and both Dragonflight and War Within are full of all kinds of neat things to find if you only allow yourself to look. Sure, you can never be that same wide-eyed newbie again, but there are still new vistas to marvel at and fun secrets to discover.

On that subject, I just wanted to share a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently and that really resonated with me. First we have small YouTuber ButchX3's series about playing World of Warcraft for the first time.

The first part with the title "I played World of Warcraft for the first time EVER" showed up on my YouTube feed when it came out, but I've got to admit I ignored it at first. The thumbnail hinted at him having difficulties, and I figured I'd seen enough videos of people struggling to figure out basic mechanics or not understanding the story recently.

But then part two showed up, with the title "FIRST TIME Player Discovers the SECRET of World of Warcraft", with a thumbnail of him gaping in awe at a purple flower in his hand, at which point I was like "fine, I'll click, let's see what a new player considers the secret of WoW". And I was not only surprised, but positively enchanted. The purple flower in the thumbnail even turned out to be relevant! I immediately went back to watch part one afterwards, and found that there was a third part as well.

In a nutshell, he started by playing through Exile's Reach and had a fun time, but once Azeroth fully opened up to him, he forgot all about questing and got completely distracted by other players and the sheer size of the map, embarking on an epic adventure to immediately travel as far as the game would let him, which he conveys with appropriate excitement and sense of grandeur.

He got a lot of help from newcomer chat as well, which really impressed me, as until now this was a feature that I was vaguely aware of but hadn't really given much thought. I felt inspired to sign up as a guide myself after that. I wonder if there'll be any more installments in this series, now that he's explored the world in all three dimensions.

The other video that showed up in my feed one day and really surprised me was "DragonNoFlight: A love letter to ground travel" by tiny YouTuber FaroraSF, which caught my eye with both its title and the lovingly hand-drawn thumbnail.

Unlike Butch, Farora is an old hand at the game, but clearly loves to explore. In this nearly two-hour long video, she decided to randomly quest through Dragonflight without flying, documenting along the way the kinds of challenges she'd come across. Spoiler: For an expansion all about flying, the Dragon Isles turned out to be surprisingly accessible on foot!

At various intervals, she takes a break from her current adventures to look back on older versions of the game, going over fond memories and analysing different expansions' zone designs. I found this really eye-opening, as she points out a lot of things that I'd kind of noticed sub-consciously but had never really thought about myself.

Finally, she also made a shorter sequel about exploring War Within without flying. Seriously, the way she did that quest with the pipes!

Anyway, I just really wanted to give these two creators a shout-out as examples to show that modern WoW still has room for exploration and a sense of wonder as well, and because I found all their videos thoroughly enjoyable.

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

Delve Week

I mentioned a few weeks ago that delves weren't off to the best start with me, or I with them. After I wrote that post, I did a few more delves on low tiers on levelling alts, for whom they really were the advertised fun 15-minute romps, but otherwise I mostly stayed away unless the husband needed help with a tier eight on his mage. Some things you just don't get to say no to.

More generally speaking though, I continued to feel vaguely annoyed by delves and didn't want to bother with them. For some people they may be the greatest new feature ever, but I figured Blizz couldn't pay me enough to put up with them. Except... maybe they could.

Which is to say that this past week was "delve week". Not only were rewards from delves increased for seven days (as if they needed to be any more rewarding than they already were!), there were also not one but two weekly quests available for max-level characters in Dornogal to complete multiple delves. I know I didn't have to do those, but I really like ticking off my weeklies... fine, Blizzard, I'll play your game.

With four characters at level 80 by this point, I was potentially looking at twenty delves or more, so I knew I needed help. I searched for advice and found this video by SignsOfKelani particularly helpful. The "use your utility" section was what stood out to me the most. Careful pulling? Using crowd control? That sounds like heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade and I used to like those! Maybe I just needed to let go of this notion that because Blizzard promoted delves as this quick and easy activity, that's what they were actually meant to be. I mean, I guess they could be if you were sufficiently overgeared or doing them at a low enough tier, but if you were actually trying to use them to gear up, they were something else. Maybe it was just a matter of accepting and embracing that.

I decided to make my holy priest my dedicated solo character for this purpose and started with a round of Fungal Folly, since I'd heard that the exploding spores in there actually do damage to the enemies as well, something I hadn't originally realised. Soon my go-to strategy became to simply aggro everything on a given platform, including all the spores, and then run screaming in hopes of making it out before they exploded. It worked surprisingly well and was - dare I say it - strangely fun.

In Kriegval's Rest, I progressed one tiny step at a time, using mind control to make the mobs beat each other up from a distance so I had fewer of them left to finish off at the end. I actually used abilities like Mind Soothe and Psychic Scream, which I hadn't really found a use for in forever. Without exploding spores to help with the dps, killing things took a really long time (I sadly had to find out that many of the mind-controlled mobs' abilities gave the error "target not a player" when I tried to turn them against each other), but I did get there in the end.

I had absolutely hated my last experience in an underwater delve, so that was next on my list of fears to face down. I made sure to grab some underwater breathing potions this time to get rid of the constant pressure of drowning and that immediately helped a lot. In the middle of a pull featuring more mind-control, Zekvir breached the delve and I had barely time to go "oh no" before he swatted me. Weirdly enough the fight didn't reset though, probably because I went into Spirit of Redemption form and had the talent that brings me back to life for free once every ten minutes. When I got up again, blinking in confusion, Brann was still fighting so I joined in, and with a lot of frantic kiting and spam-healing, I managed to stay alive long enough for Brann's dps to push him back. Now that was satisfying.

People have very different attitudes to challenge in MMOs, or video games in general for that matter. Some don't really want to be pushed at all, desiring only relaxation from their gaming experience. Others want challenge and thrills as often as possible. I'm more in the "taking it easy" department myself nowadays, but there are definitely times when a game pushes me that I will push back. I'll always remember that time I spent something like half an hour fighting a beholder boss in Neverwinter just because he was standing between me and completion of a quest. This situation with delves has felt similar in that at first I was just put off, but somehow this week's event was the push needed to nudge me back into action and it actually felt satisfying to go back into delves and be successful.

It's also been a good opportunity to do more duoing with the husband. I mostly talked about the solo challenge so far, but we also did more delves together. The main lesson we took away from this is that one person just has to be on a sturdy character that has the cooldowns to stand still and take some hits. When we tried the Underkeep as an evoker/mage duo it was just a disaster because we were both too squishy. Sure, sometimes you can kite, but sometimes you can't, and then you're stuck. In this instance we'd got the variant of that delve that requires you to defeat a row of ambushes within a small circular area, and there just wasn't enough room to make kiting work, and neither of us could survive getting hit more than a couple of times. After losing all our lives, we went out and redid it twice as evoker/death knight and mage/warrior instead and both of those were a breeze. In fact, that was the first time we did complete a tier eight delve in the advertised fifteen minutes, because with the right combination of classes it was just a whole different game.

Warrior and mage taking a break at the campfire after surviving an ambush in the Underkeep

I guess the point of all this rambling is that you only get to make a first impression once, but sometimes a second look does change things. I'm glad I gave delves another try because approaching them with a different mindset made a huge difference to my enjoyment. That said, I'm not planning to suddenly start running them by the dozen like I did last week. They are still time-consuming, and (in my opinion!) overly rewarding to the point that they can feel like a chore that you must do because the rewards are too good to pass up. 

This past weekend my guildies and I also stepped into Mythic Zero dungeons for the first time since the expansion launch, which was definitely the right choice based on the challenge level we encountered (which is to say we cleared them in decent time, but we did wipe and generally die more than a few times, showing that we weren't really ready for M+ yet), but most of us got no gear rewards out of the exercise since all the item drops were about ten item levels lower than what people already had.

WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006

As mentioned about a month ago, I'd like to celebrate WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends back then. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'll be adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 20th, 2006 under the title "[My RL name] Goes WoW":

I saw the German version of Pets in a store here today.¹ For sixty Euros (a little more than seventy-five dollars). Hrglnglrgl. And people ask me why I prefer to buy my computer games abroad...² to be fair though, I then saw it in the store across the street for only half of that. Which in turn made me wonder what possessed the people in charge of the first store to think that sixty Euros would be a good price. Crazy.

I also got a completely different computer game in the post today³: World of Warcraft. I know I said I wouldn't⁴, but those were just the last fragments of denial from someone who was just too curious to resist the temptation any longer. Especially after I talked to Mechanichamster⁵, who's been playing for a while and assured me that it was all good fun.

Unfortunately he wasn't around today to give me any guidance, so I just started by creating a Human Paladin on a German server and ventured out on my own.

This is Isadora.⁶ She's even decently dressed and everything!⁷ Though I'm sure I'll end up finding some more revealinguseful armour soon enough.

Being a newbie was fun, starting from the moment that I entered the realm and was hopelessly confused because I couldn't see myself, having merged with a bunch of other characters that stood in exactly the same spot as me. A lot of exploring, general stupidity and annoying death followed. And I almost laughed myself silly when I found the corpse of "Dumbledore" in the forest.⁸ I can kind of see why people find this addictive, because the world is huge, and as you enter it for the first time it seems as if the possibilities must be endless.

Still, I think that all on your own it's bound to become a bit boring after a while, especially with all the running around you end up doing as you level up. I haven't really interacted with any other players yet beyond helping each other out at defeating the occasional monster, and I'm a bit worried about making a fool out of myself due to my noobishness. I haven't even figured out how to make my character wield anything but that giant hammer thing yet, and I'd really like her to have a different weapon. Not that there's anything wrong with it in terms of functionality, but there's just something very ungraceful about clubbing wolves to death with a giant mallet.⁹

If any of you've been secretly playing WoW already, feel free to let me know - or if you've been thinking about giving the game a try but haven't yet, now would be just the perfect time to keep me company! *looks at Nemi...*¹⁰

¹ This is in reference to the Sims 2 expansion of that name. Before WoW, Sims 2 was my gaming addiction for a couple of years. While a single-player game, it had a very active community around things like custom content, storytelling and community challenges, which meant that I was always sharing how things were going for my Sims and talking to other people about it.

² Funny to see me complaining about video game prices back in 2006. To be fair, sixty Euros was a lot more back then that it is now.

³ It feels kind of weird that even the mere notion of receiving a new PC game in the post seems incredibly quaint and outdated already.

⁴ This linked to a post I had made about two weeks earlier, in which I expressed interest in the subject of MMOs after seeing a lot of friends and acquaintances talk about WoW, though I noted at the time that "I wouldn't trust myself with something as addictive as an MMORPG" - girl, you had no idea.

⁵ Mechanichamster, also referred to as Mecha or Matje later, was the first friend I ever made online, about four or five years prior to writing the original version of this post. We met on a message board about the Transformers cartoon from the 80s and actually ended up meeting in real life in the Netherlands (where he lived) too.

⁶ I actually posted this screenshot on this blog before, in this post from 2014, in which I answered some questions about my early/formative years in the game.

⁷ In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was so surprised that my character got to wear "decent" armour. I think my image of fantasy worlds at the time was still strongly influenced by the kind of materials I had found in my older brother's room while investigating the subject... which tended to feature very skimpily dressed barbarian ladies.

⁸ I was easily amused back then. I still am now, but that example seems like a low bar even by my standards. Then again, Harry Potter was actually super relevant back then, as we were still all anticipating the release of Deathly Hallows.

⁹ Fun fact: I tend to prefer swords to maces to this day.

¹⁰ My friend Nemi responded to the post with: "I'll install it tomorrow."

These Pugs Be Crazy

As much fun as I've been having in War Within over the past month, one thing I carefully avoided for the longest time was the random dungeon finder. I wrote a post earlier in the year about how WoW's random dungeon experience is terrible, and early indications from reddit pointed towards things only having gotten worse with the expansion. It made sense to me too, seeing how the introduction of follower dungeons meant that people who don't want to be harried or berated by strangers could now opt out of that experience while still seeing the content, further increasing the relative percentage of rushers and toxic players in LFD.

So for the first month or so, I strictly stuck to doing dungeons with the NPCs or in guild groups. However, in the past week my resolve started to weaken a bit. My priest needed a couple more levels and random dungeons started to look appealing as both a source of XP and as a way of practising my healing with the new priest toolkit. I'd had plenty of time to get to know all the dungeons on a basic level, and I figured that the sweatiest of the sweats would probably be in Mythic Plus or wherever by now, right? Right?

You can probably already tell that I ended up being wrong about that, at least to some degree. Basically, I ran about half a dozen normal mode pugs, and while they made for excellent healing practice, at least half the runs had someone in them who was acting insane. That is not a good percentage!

The very first dungeon I got into was Priory of the Sacred Flame with a monk tank. They pulled the entire courtyard to begin with and it felt like a minor miracle to me that nobody died, especially since I got silenced at some point. But okay, I'd consider that "normal" pug behaviour, even if unpleasant.

However, then they made a straight beeline for the first boss, which immediately made me go "uh oh". In case you don't know, the first boss in Priory is a bit like the second boss in Court of Stars in the sense that he gets buffed by lieutenants that you're supposed to draw away and kill separately first. He is however slightly less deadly than his Court of Stars counterpart, meaning that I'm told it's technically possible to kill him without taking out the lieutenants first, as long as your group has a perfect interrupt rotation. Which a normal pug obviously wasn't going to have.

Unsurprisingly, we got AoEd to death within a few seconds, which then resulted in the tank saying something along the lines of "you guys have no clue how to interrupt, good luck" and dropping group. I was only annoyed because I really wanted to tell them "What in the world did you think was going to happen?" The replacement tank we got did the fight the intended way and we had no further issues for the rest of the run.

Insanity of a different kind - but also displayed by a tank - was something I encountered in the Rookery. This tank was a death knight and level 71, when the scaling is most in your favour and you should be a god among men. However, for some reason this tank felt like they were made of paper and it was a real struggle to keep everyone alive, especially as the tank decided to go for massive pulls regardless.

Still, healing practice, right? At some point I opened Recount just to get an idea of how the numbers were looking, and I noticed that the tank was at the bottom of the damage done chart, having done less than half of the damage I had done as a healer (and that was with me not having had much time to add dps since everyone was constantly on the brink of death). I really have no clue what this person was doing.

Considering that every pull was a life or death battle due to the tank's disregard for their own or anyone else's health, I was worried about the bottom floor of the instance, as this is where the trash does a lot of AoE damage and can wipe you even if you were fine with bigger pulls up top. Naturally the paper tank tried to pull three groups at once and died. Somehow the dps had the sense to go into crazy kiting mode and it wasn't a full wipe, but it sure was intense. After we'd killed the last boss, one of the damage dealers put "please don't tank" into /say before leaving and I felt that.

However, the most impressive display of - to me - crazy behaviour happened in a Stonevault that actually seemed to be off to a good start initially. Sure, everyone was running and we were doing huge trash pulls as usual, but this death knight tank actually seemed to know what they were doing and things were much more controlled, with not that much damage hitting the party.

However, after the first boss a vote kick for the mage in the group suddenly popped up, with the given reason being either gibberish or a language I didn't understand. Naturally, I voted no. Moments later it came up again, this time with "puller". I voted no again, though I hadn't really seen what was happening. Everyone was ahead of me, I hadn't seen who had actually pulled, but there hadn't been that much damage going around either way, so it seemed fine?

The vote kicks kept popping up though, with different reasons. There should really be something to prevent you from trying to vote-kick the same person over and over if it keeps failing. The mage tried to kick the tank in turn at least once as well, but I voted no on that one too. We were fine! Why were people freaking out so much?!

This continued until after the second boss. On the trash to the third boss, the tank decided that they'd had enough and stopped tanking. This time I could see that the mage had indeed pulled, and naturally I had managed to get healing aggro already. The mage ran out of the instance portal and I had to do the same as the tank showed no interest in saving me from the mobs either. We both zoned back in once aggro had reset and rejoined the group at the third boss. Here the tank decided to... I don't even know what exactly they did, but it ended up wiping us, clearly on purpose. The mage gave up and quit, and people in chat were like "haha, finally". I was honestly just confused.

As we got a replacement and made our way to the last boss, the tank seemed surprised that I hadn't quit as well, and a conversation along the following lines ensued:

Tank: "Why didn't you kick the mage if you weren't together?"
Me: "Because I don't like kicking people over the tiniest things."
Tank: "Do you tank?"
Me: "Yes, I do."
Tank: "Don't you find it annoying too when dps pull for you?"
Me: "Yes, but I also find it annoying when tanks don't save me from healing aggro just cause they're annoyed with a dps."
Tank: "Who was annoying here first though?"
Me: "Here? To me? You were! But I didn't vote to kick you either."

Now, if you're someone who's very cynical about retail WoW, you might just chuck this up to retail being retail, lacking incentives to socialise etc., but the funny thing is, out in the open world I keep having great collaborative experiences and keep thinking how nice everyone is. It's just normal dungeons that have become this pocket of utter insanity.

I definitely find it worrying that so many of my runs were like this though. This wasn't one bad apple in a dozen runs, this was every other dungeon or worse. How are new players ever going to have a chance to experience grouping in a positive way like this? Friends and guilds are great, but I'm not sure people are going to stick around long enough to get to that point if their first grouping experiences are like this.

Nerub-ar Palace Solo Vs. LFR

I actually got one of those opinion surveys from Blizzard today. It wouldn't make for an exciting reddit exposé because the questions were all over the place (though the one that asked whether a MoP Classic would make me more likely to spend time in Classic was certainly something to take note of), but one subject it asked about in particular was something I've been meaning to write a post about anyway, namely how I felt about the new solo/story version of the Nerub-ar Palace raid.

WoW has long had a reputation for being both a solo player's game and yet all about raiding. I certainly think that both of those play styles can coexist peacefully, but as Blizzard has put more and more emphasis on storytelling, this dichotomy has certainly presented a bit of a problem: Over and over, you'd go through this whole intricate storyline by yourself just to have it end at the entrance to a raid, with nothing but a breadcrumb quest telling you to go do the raid now. By the time the next patch came around, it was on to the next storyline and solo players were largely left in the dark or confused about what had actually happened at the end of the raid.

The devs tried to alleviate this problem a little by adding an NPC after a few weeks that would let you watch the raid-end cut scene regardless, but that only worked to a limited extent. I thought Amirdrassil was a great example of this actually, as the story leading up to it ended with big baddie Fyrakk entering the raid and needing to be stopped, and then the cut scene you were allowed to watch afterwards was just a few seconds of the aspects looking surprised while their eyes glowed. I believe my initial response to this was something along the lines of: "What is even happening?" (I did eventually get more of a resolution through LFR, though that took more than one attempt as well.)

Being aware of this problem, Blizzard decided to try a new approach with The War Within's first raid by adding an actual story/solo mode. It's not the whole raid - only the last boss - and you won't get any loot out of it, but it should provide more context for what's going on. Naturally, as someone who's been following the in-game story through LFR for the last couple of expansions (or at least trying to), I was very interested in this.

So how does it work? A week after the raid opened for group play, a new quest appeared for solo players that had completed the campaign story, asking them to meet a contact in the City of Threads. He gives you a couple of tasks to help out people in the city, which culminate in a mission that tells you that the time has come to strike against the queen. Another NPC near the raid entrance "smuggles" you inside... along with nine friendly NPCs, the same ones that help out Horde and Alliance in the follower dungeons.

You then get to meet and fight Queen Ansurek in what I can only call a weak imitation of a raid fight, with some flashy mechanics going off that don't really seem to do anything and the NPCs mostly just forming a big pile. If you're a tank or a healer, the game doesn't even trust you to do the role you signed up for, as you'll be slotted in as the sixth dps regardless. But you do get a (very) vague idea of the fight and can watch the little cut scene at the end in peace. The reward for the quest also includes one of those rare crafting materials for a high-level item, which I actually used to place my first ever public crafting order for an epic belt.

I still wanted to see the whole thing in LFR too though - more than usual in fact, because while I'd appreciated the opportunity to see the story conclusion at my own pace, it did feel a bit "off" to me to just "sneak up" on the queen like that and face so little resistance. It made me go into LFR with a different attitude than usual, in the sense that I knew exactly how it was going to end this time, but I wanted to see more of how you're supposed to get there. Even if LFR fights are also mostly unorganised mayhem with extremely toned down mechanics, it does feel more epic with real people, and it's certainly possible to wipe.

I also found myself paying more attention to the bosses. I was happy to get a proper conclusion to the last fight of the Dawnbreaker dungeon for example (the boss runs away at the end and you don't get to take her down properly until the raid), and I found myself wondering just how the Ethereals will play into all this, as they were featured in the pre-expansion quest line and one of the bosses is a "Nexus Princess" who also makes an escape after you defeat her. These may be minor, but there are still story threads leading both into and out of the raid that you don't get to see in solo mode.

Overall I'll say the new story mode is a big improvement though. Its biggest weakness this time around was actually just the bad signposting. I was looking forward to checking it out, but I would not have known when or how to start it if a headline from Blizzard Watch hadn't caught my eye on my Bluesky timeline.

Blizzard is usually quite fond of just auto-granting you new story quests, but not only did they not do that with this one, it's also marked as a side quest - in an expansion with about a million of them. So unless you'd already cleared your map of all side quests before this one came out or used some sort of map filter, odds were high that you'd simply miss this new exclamation mark being added in town.

The other issue I had is that the WoW community is still absolutely atrocious about spoilers. The cut scene at the end of Nerub-ar Palace doesn't exactly contain any major plot points, but I still tripped over it left and right mere hours after solo mode was released and before I'd had a chance to see it in game for myself, as multiple YouTubers I watch used it as background footage for their videos while talking about something else. Like, come on, dudes. Is it that hard to show your viewers a little bit of courtesy by holding off on doing that kind of thing?

As far as Blizzard themselves go though, I think story mode is a good addition and didn't even turn me off LFR. I'm generally not a huge fan of LFR - I don't dislike it by any means but I also find it a bit tedious as a way of just seeing the end of the story, so I was wondering whether this new story mode would make LFR feel redundant to me. Surprisingly that hasn't been the case though - if anything, it kind of made me appreciate LFR more for what it is. Like a side quest to the final boss fight that I'm happy to check out, but I also appreciate that I don't have to do it to understand what's going on.

It's worth noting that the overall structure of the storyline also felt a bit different in this first tier of War Within than it usually does, as the raid is really more of a side story. Not to downplay Queen Ansurek's importance, but we know from the beginning that she's not the one in charge. The solo campaign also has a satisfying ending of its own (for the moment), so the pressure to go see the raid to understand how it all wraps up is actually lower than it would usually be at this point in an expansion. And I think that's a good thing as well.

What was your experience of the Nerub-ar Palace raid storyline?

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.

I Dislike Delves but Not for the Reasons I Expected

So, hey! My first negative post about The War Within! Like I said, the bad things always take a bit of time to come out. To be clear, I'm still enjoying the expansion overall, but this post is about the one major gripe I have with it so far.

Delves were actually on my list of TWW features I was concerned about, but those original concerns could basically be summed up as me expecting delves to be boring and inconsequential, which is how I felt about Mist of Pandaria's scenarios.

As far as the inconsequential part goes, delves have actually been the opposite: This past week they have been the best way to get gear, giving higher item rating than was even possible to acquire in dungeons or raiding, meaning they were the "meta" thing to do. As I was already feeling only lukewarm about delves at this point, being made to feel like I "should" be doing them to gear up didn't endear me to them any further. But let's start at the beginning.

I did my first few delves duoing with my husband, and my first impression was actually that they were pretty alright. Unlike scenarios, they didn't throw you into the middle of some ongoing story or overwhelm you with gimmicky mechanics. Earthcrawl Mines, the first delve and the one you get led into as part of the story, was a pretty straightforward little mini-dungeon in the sense that you go into a hole in the ground and clear out some baddies. There were some unique mechanics like the sticky spider webs, but it wasn't too much. I actually enjoyed that it seemed to reward slow and thorough exploration over speed-running, as there were little treasures to be found in every corner.

As we continued to explore different delves, the gimmicks started to ramp up a bit, like the candle circle that shrinks with each step you take. Having the husband yell at me to stand still with the candle while he pulled all the mobs was a bit less fun (thankfully the devs added a "drop candle" button later so I could do that and move too). Then we found that there were delves that were underwater, with constant fear of drowning. Ugh! There are air bubbles you can run through but they are finicky in their respawns and positioning. We had more than one death from drowning or falling off a cliff when trying to pick up a bubble close to an edge. (Why do you die from "falling off a cliff" in an underwater setting anyway?!) These definitely feel like something you shouldn't even attempt without a warlock or underwater breathing potions.

I also kept being a bit baffled by the delves' length, as Blizzard had been promoting them as something quick to do when you only have fifteen minutes, but I don't think we ever managed to do a delve in less than half an hour. They looked shorter than a dungeon based on the map, but every mob was a massive hitpoint sponge that took forever to die, which made things quite tedious gameplay-wise.

At one point the husband and I were about to do Waterworks together when he suddenly felt a bit unwell and wanted to lie down for a bit. I thought I'd give soloing it a try, as we were only on tier four and my item level was way, way higher than the recommended one already, so I figured I was going to be okay even as a healer.

My preservation evoker ended up being absolutely destroyed by the very first mob. I immediately decided that this clearly wasn't going to be worth my time and left again.

On reading around a bit, scaling for different specs, classes and group sizes has apparently been all over the place, and Blizzard has been applying hotfixes pretty much daily that could vastly change your experience even on the same character from one run to the next.

So you simultaneously have people talking both about how delves are a big cakewalk and should really be made a bit harder considering the high-level loot they give, and people saying that the bosses they're encountering are numerically impossible to beat even on lower difficulties. And both groups may be telling the truth, because depending on your class and spec, both of these scenarios, plus a number of ones in-between are all possible.

However, because you don't really know what others are experiencing, people just end up resenting each other over the whole thing, because if they are having an easy time, they think that WoW is full of bad players who are entitled and want loot for nothing, and if they are having a hard time, it's no fun to listen to others humble-brag about their easily earned loot showers while you're being told that you just need to learn to play.

Oh, and I haven't even talked about Brann yet! Brann Bronzebeard is your companion in this first season of delves and just... bloody hell. It's funny to me that Blizzard made such an effort to turn Magni back into a more serious character after how much of a meme he had become in BfA with his constant yells about the wounds of Azeroth, and then they went ahead and turned his brother into an even worse meme. He's just an absolute ball of chaos, firing off random abilities accompanied by voice lines non-stop. It's honestly pretty funny at first, but gets kind of annoying quickly. (I'm not surprised that there's already an addon to mute him.)

I've heard people complain about companion pathing in SWTOR on occasion, but after seeing Brann in action, I feel the SWTOR devs deserve more mad props than ever, considering how much our dwarven friend just leaps and teleports all over the place. "Where is Brann now?" is a question you'll find yourself asking often.

Oh, and unlike SWTOR companions, Brann can only be set to dps or heal, not tank, and his performance in either role also seems completely random, just to add to the pile of massive imbalances already described above. I've heard both reports of him being supposedly absolutely godly, making you unkillable while he's healing, or basically soloing the entire delve for you while dpsing, while others say that he's utterly useless, doing virtually no dps or healing, and that he just dies at the drop of a hat.

So ultimately, what we're left with is a mini-dungeon that somehow takes longer than a regular dungeon, with gimmicky mechanics that are sometimes fun and sometimes annoying. Promoted as TWW's new solo progression path, it can technically be soloed, but you gotta be the right class and spec. Healers (which is what I still main at the moment, but more on that another time) seem to be having a particularly terrible time, what a surprise. I actually think an argument could've been made for this kind of content simply not being designed with solo healers in mind, but apparently Torghast was perfectly fine to do as a solo healer during Shadowlands (I didn't try that myself) so I'm not sure why it's suddenly a problem.

I guess you can always go in with a group, but another thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there's a death counter as well, and if there are too many deaths during the run you lose the big prize at the end of the delve. Just to make sure healers don't have too much fun while doing these in a group either I guess.

It's just an all-around unappealing situation from my point of view, to be pushed into content that seems broken and un-fun in so many ways. I can only hope that Blizzard will eventually achieve some kind of balance for delves, or more importantly that they will lose relevance as the gear rating from other game modes ramps up. I feel like I'm clearly not the target audience for these so having them be the most optimal way to gear up right now is just not something I like.

WoW's Upcoming 20th Anniversary

This November, World of Warcraft turns twenty years old. There are MMOs that are even older than that, but in general, a game being live and continuing to be developed for such a long time is still a rare thing. I remember when I had just started playing WoW and was absolutely enthralled by it for the first few months, the thought occurred to me how I would feel if it was going to shut down, and I found the idea rather heart-wrenching at the time. Still, I don't think I would've expected to still be here playing and talking about it almost twenty years later. Funny how that goes.

There are always some celebratory activities going on each year, but they usually don't change from one year to the next. I think the first time I did them I was quite impressed and meant to write a post about hunting down the modern version of the green dragons, but I never actually ended up doing that. When I came back in subsequent years and found that it was just the exact same stuff again I became somewhat less impressed.

I remember there were some big nostalgic events going on during the tenth anniversary and that I was vaguely tempted to resub just to check out Molten Core in LFR, but that ultimately didn't end up happening either. During the fifteenth anniversary I was technically subscribed, but Classic had just launched and I had absolutely zero interest in retail at the time.

For this year's 20th anniversary, it looks like Blizzard is pulling out all the stops. They just released a video and accompanying article about everything that will be happening and it's a lot of stuff. Chromie will host an event to commemorate the opening of the AQ gates, there'll be a Blackrock Depths raid, classic dungeons will come back for Timetalking, and there'll be new high-res versions of the old tier two sets available, to name just a few of the items on the list. It sounds really cool and I look forward to checking it all out. Inject that nostalgia right into my veins, baby.

I'm thinking about doing something for the anniversary on this blog as well actually. I've really enjoyed what Wilhelm and Bhagpuss have been doing for Everquest's 25th anniversary this year for example, and I never even played that! Wilhelm wrote a series of posts about the game's many different starting/early zones and how he remembers them, and Bhagpuss is currently working his way through a series remembering all his EQ characters and their adventures in order of their original creation date. I couldn't do that for my WoW characters as WoW doesn't let players see their characters' creation dates, and I feel there's been more than enough talk about WoW's original starting zones already (really enjoyed this recent video by Jediwarlock about the human starting experience for example).

Some readers may remember however that I mentioned in the past that I used to maintain a personal blog for more than a decade. You wouldn't find it via Google because this was during a time when personal blogs like that were "noindex" by default. Imagine people writing with the express intent of not being found by search engines. Those were different times...

Anyway, I'm actually not that keen on looking back on that blog because even though I'm sure it contains some interesting tidbits about my past, on a more general level it mostly covers a period of my life that I don't look back on with too much fondness. However! It also contains some notes about my earliest experiences with World of Warcraft, and those I find quite interesting. I actually wish I'd written more about that so I'd have more written evidence of what I thought about things like new content when it actually came out. What I did write down reads quite strangely two decades later, as it harkens back to a time when I basically knew nothing about MMOs and therefore talked about my experiences in WoW in very different terms.

I think for the anniversary it could be fun to pull some of those old blog posts and reproduce them on here, maybe with some commentary. We'll see how that goes. Oh, and if you are interested in reading more personal ramblings, I did actually start a new personal blog last year that currently has zero readers because I didn't tell anyone about it, even though it's linked from my blogger profile. I only update it about once a month but if you ever were curious about what goes on in my life outside MMOs, feel free to take a peek.

Early Musings on The War Within

The War Within's official launch happened less than a week ago, and as usual with new WoW content like this, the husband has been binging hard while kind of dragging me along for the ride, meaning that I've spent most of my limited free time last week exploring the new expansion with him.

So far I've hit level 80 on one character and started levelling a second. I'd heard in a dev interview prior to launch that they'd trimmed down the main storyline to only events they felt were absolutely necessary for players to take part in to understand what was going on, while moving a lot more optional story content into side quests. This sounded reasonable enough to me, but seeing it in action was still kind of weird.

The husband and I started with our usual modus operandi of just doing all the things, which meant that we were level 75 by the time we'd finished the first zone, and keeping in mind that access to a lot of endgame activities is tied to campaign completion, I suggested that we should just push through the main story for the remaining three zones to not delay unlocking this additional content for too long. This resulted in us gaining access to endgame at level 79, meaning that the main storyline plus all side quests in the first zone did more for our levelling than the entire rest of the storyline spread out across the remaining three zones. That was more than a little surprising, though I don't mind having to do more than just the campaign to level up.

It's not as if there is a lack of fun things to do. If anything, I'd argue that the number of indicators for things to do on your map gets a bit overwhelming, especially once you unlock world quests and all that jazz at the end of the campaign. At one point the husband and I touched down in the third zone near some farms where it looked like there were a few world quests right next to each other... but then it turned out that there were more than just a few, plus there were also bonus objectives, and rares kept spawning in, and if you lit a fire in front of any of the many farm houses an NPC would come out and offer you a daily quest - something that was only visible to the original clicker and not to other members of the group and which caused us quite an amount of confusion. We just ran in circles killing and clicking things for what felt like ages and the whole thing just made my head swim.

Overall I've been having a lot of fun though. Not that that's saying a lot - the first few weeks of a WoW expansion are always fun; the discontent with this or that feature usually follows a few months later. Still, considering I had a lot of reservations about what I'd seen and heard about the War Within pre-launch, it's not doing too badly so far. I wouldn't say that all my concerns have been dispelled - while the zones are big and beautiful for example, I'm definitely feeling that difference between overground and underground in my head, with an urge to always return to the one overground zone at the end of each session. We'll just have to see how things feel a few months into the expansion.

I looked back at my first impressions of Dragonflight for comparison, and Blizzard did sadly ditch some of the things that charmed me about that expansion from day one. I loved the boat ride to the Dragon Isles for example, but this time we're back to having to go through an auto-granted scenario, which I can already tell will either be a nuisance in the future (I think of every alt that's been auto-granted the quest telling them to go to the Shadowlands while levelling up) or make it confusing how to actually start the expansion later down the line (to this day, I don't know how you start the Legion story outside of Chromie time).

Dragonflight's sense of hope and optimism coupled with whimsical exploration is once again replaced by a sudden, potentially world-ending threat that overrides everything else. I remember last expansion I saw some lore discussion about just how the Dragon Isles "awakened" so they could be found after being hidden for so long, but this time around there's remarkably little excitement surrounding the fact that we're going to a place that seemingly hasn't had any contact with the outside world in forever. Magni just has a vision of where to go I guess, and Jaina and Thrall know where to point the boats later on in the story. The Earthen reject us as trespassers for about five seconds before we're actually all welcome and wander about as if we owned the place. It's a bit odd in my opinion how much is just taken for granted here.

The "story regression" I was worried about hasn't really been in evidence yet, exactly... a lot of the main levelling storyline actually had a similar vibe to Dragonflight, with conflicts between factions needing to be resolved and people talking about their feelings. The intro scenario though was chock-full of throwbacks to tropes I can't say I've missed, such as having a bunch of death and destruction for shock value, our characters being dumb and accidentally helping the baddie do something awful, and a well-established, powerful character suddenly being completely useless in the face of the newest villain to show how cool the latter is.

Still, overall I enjoyed what I've seen of the story content so far, though I can kind of see at this point why some of it may be a bit too touchy-feely for people's tastes. In Dragonflight, the storyline for the black dragonflight was one of my favourites, as I thought it painted an interesting picture of the messy nature of people trying to change and improve, and the dynamic of Wrathion and Sabellian as both allies and rivals was really interesting. But there was still a plot beyond that, such as the question of who should become the new leader of the black dragonflight, and just what Deathwing had been up to in Aberrus.

In War Within so far, both Alleria and Anduin have an emotional journey in the early questing, but there's very little meat to that part of the story beyond their feelings (if that makes sense) which did feel a bit weird to me. I much preferred spending time with Moira and Dagran, because while they also had a few emotional moments, they were also curious and engaged with the world around them, actually doing stuff and driving the plot forward.

I have been kind of surprised to see a lot of content creators and people on reddit praise the new story to the heavens because while I think it's been engaging and fun enough so far, it doesn't feel dramatically different to me from anything that came before. I've been rather bemused to see Preach for example talk about how this expansion is going to be different and the story is so worth it if you can only prevent yourself from skipping everything... like, are you saying you've been skipping those previous expansion stories that you've done so much complaining about? No wonder you're not enjoying what you're not actually paying attention to; any story is better if you actually engage with it...

I'm very curious to see how reception of The War Within is going to evolve over the coming weeks and months. In some parts I'm seeing huge hype, but I'm also seeing some pushback against it, and anecdotal reports of people's friends lists remaining empty as fewer people have decided to come back for this expansion than for the last one. In the week or so leading up to launch, I was getting absolutely bombarded with marketing for the expac, with every other reddit ad encouraging me to "play The War Within now", and I'm still seeing those ads a week later, while we haven't heard any proud announcements from Blizzard about what a great launch the expansion had.

I thought the call of Chris Metzen would surely bring a lot of old-timers back (and maybe it has; I just don't know), plus Dragonflight's overall good reputation should've gotten the word out that retail WoW has been in a solid place gameplay-wise for a couple of years now. But maybe there's just too much of a divide now between entrenched players loving their new Warbands and those who cynically left during BfA and Shadowlands? The people who are actually playing mostly seem to be having a blast, but is that good enough at this point?

My Last Days of Dragonflight

The War Within launches a few hours from me posting this, and I'm actually looking forward to it now, having managed to overcome the worst of the pre-expansion doldrums I felt a few weeks ago. And yes, I know some people have had early access for days, but really, I don't want to talk about that. The vast majority of us were still hanging out in Valdrakken, running Radiant Echoes and what have you. (At least that was more fun than trying to tiptoe around social media without stepping into massive spoilers or bouncing into invisible walls in game where content suddenly required level 80 to enter.)

I wanted to finish up with some notes about how I spent my last few weeks of Dragonflight and how it managed to rekindle my interest in retail.

Warbands

I've said before that it was about damn time for WoW to make more things account-wide, but it took me a bit for it to really sink in just how fundamental of a change this has been - such as the fact that Warbands and cross-server (almost) everything means that all my old alts could become relevant again.

I can't be the only one who left a lot of alts behind over the years. I played on Darkspear during my early days, switched to Earthen Ring when I swapped to playing Horde, and during my most recent return to retail I got established on the Azjol-Nerub server. Every time I switched server, it meant leaving a lot of connections and resources behind, especially in terms of accumulated profession knowledge and materials.

As the realisation has slowly trickled in that all of those old characters are viable for me to play with my (newer) friends now, I've found myself actually interested in playing them again, going through old banks in search of long-forgotten transmogs or crafting materials that might be valuable (to me personally, if not necessarily on the auction house) and feeling a strange sense of reinvigoration.

Transmog farming

I think I mentioned in the past that while I get the appeal of transmog farming, I'm not really hugely into it myself. Blasting through old raids and one-shotting everything with Holy Nova in order to be able to sport some of the game's most iconic looks is kind of fun at first, but it does get boring quickly, and considering just how many old dungeons and raids there are at this point, it can also be surprisingly time-consuming.

Still, the changes to the transmog system that now allow you to add armour and weapons of any type to your collection regardless of whether the character you're currently on could use them have really upped the dopamine levels, as it will absolutely rain looks on you in every run now. This is opposed to the old slow-drip that could really limit your success, such as when you did a run on your priest just to get only plate, followed by going in on your warrior next and getting nothing but cloth, being able to claim neither for your collection.

Of course, some things are still soulbound... I have to admit I gnashed my teeth a little when I got a Garr binding on my priest and had to destroy it. But I also had fun getting adventurous soloing Cata raids for the first time. Dragon Soul and Spine of Deathwing in particular was certainly a learning experience. (If you know, you know.)

Remix characters

As MoP: Remix approached its end, activity in our little guild saw a bit of a spike as we got back together for one last hurrah and cleared mythic Siege of Orgimmar on the penultimate day of the event. I'm not going to pretend that this was some great achievement with the power levels available to us, but not all of us were that OP, and it was still a nice way of capping off the expansion.

The character conversion process from Remix to regular retail was a bit odd. Landing in Stormwind with empty bags and wearing a set of greens was not a surprise, but it was strange that Blizzard actually redid people's talents - not reset, which I actually would've understood more, but merely changed, which was just bizarre to me. It made the whole experience an odd exercise in picking out just where abilities you may have wanted had been taken out of your setup and replaced with something else.

I was also surprised to get some items in the mail that we were allowed to keep after all. I'd worked on the assumption that absolutely everything we had in our bags would be destroyed, but they did allow us to keep stuff like the bind-to-account rep tokens or various Timeless Isle consumables in the end.

Radiant Echoes

I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised by the Radiant Echoes event, and I found myself coming back to it several times. First I levelled that old paladin (as mentioned in the linked post), then I kept going back to buy all the appearances. (I didn't care about them that much but I was having fun!) Then I realised that I now had every class bar two at level 70, and combined with realisations about Warbands mentioned above, that led to me going back to level my old Draenei mage from Darkspear and my old undead death knight from Earthen Ring to 70 through the event as well. I was just having such a blast! I'm actually a little sad to be saying goodbye to that.

Mythic+ Season 4

I actually haven't done any M+ in several weeks, but I did want to mention it here because I've been making posts about my progress every season all throughout Dragonflight and wanted to at least give a brief shout-out to Season 4 as well before we move on. It was considered a bit of a "nothing" season I think since it didn't offer anything new but just brought back all the Dragonflight dungeons that people had already conquered in Season 2 and 3.

My guildies and I still had a decent time with it though, especially since we didn't actually do that much in Season 1. The new "keystone squish" worked out well for us, as we spent the first two weeks of the season in Mythic Zero just trying to remember mechanics, and this did indeed work out as I had hoped: We did some wiping and then paused at each boss to figure out what we had been doing wrong without having to worry about the pressure of a timer. I broke 2k rating again, which again, isn't exactly the biggest achievement, but we did it in only three months as opposed to the five months it took us in Season 3, so it still felt like progress to me.

In terms of the dungeons themselves, I didn't have strong feelings about any of them in the same way I had during the last two seasons. There were individual encounters I sometimes found challenging, but there wasn't a dungeon I always loved or one that always filled me with dread like there had been in previous seasons.

While I've enjoyed getting to know and understand the M+ system in Dragonflight, I'm still not sure whether I want to get back into it in War Within, but that's a can I'm happy to kick down the road for now.

Inventory Management in Retail vs. Classic

With the launch of The War Within coming up soon, I had to knuckle down and finally get at least some of my characters ready for the expansion in a major way: by cleaning up their bags. And it made me think about how it's weird that I find inventory management in retail to be so much more of a chore than in Classic.

Classic WoW is extremely stingy with bag space, while absolutely overwhelming you with crap to pick up. Look up a random low-level mob on Wowhead and it will show it dropping from a loot table of literally a hundred different items while you're starting out with a 12-slot backpack which is already partially filled up with things like quest items. Earning any extra slots is extremely slow, and you'll find yourself running to see a vendor all the time.

And yet... I enjoy that. I'm that person who has to loot absolutely everything, and I generally enjoy the decision-making process involved in deciding what to keep and what to throw away if I run out of space while out in the field - though there is definitely a pain point where I feel I have nothing but "must-keep"s left and I'm just upset that I really can't pick up anything new anymore.

Retail has evolved into a very different game in that regard. It's pretty generous in terms of bag space - if you're a returning player, you can instantly get a full set of 22-slot bags for free, and it's not hard to get up to 30+ slots per bag. At the same time, they've dramatically reduced the amount of random crap that drops out in the world (I bemoaned this as early as Wrath of the Lich King). M+ has no loot drops at all to avoid the inevitable friction of someone like me slowing the group down just because they want to pick up their well-earned silver from the trash. So... keeping your bags clean should be easy, right?

Well... it is and it isn't. It is in terms of everyday gameplay in that you shouldn't find yourself running out of bag space after every dungeon run or session of questing. I saw a post on reddit the other day where someone showed that it's possible to level a character from 10-70 without visiting a vendor even once (though by that point their bags were very full).

The problem is that your available inventory space will shrink over time as your bags fill up with items of questionable utility. In Classic, there are very few of those. Almost everything can either be classified as gear, consumables, vendor trash or "useful whites" which are usually either relevant to crafters or for some kind of reputation hand-in. It helps of course that everything in Classic is a known quantity, but even so, I think that even if you were to approach it as a completely new player, you can make sense of how to manage your inventory relatively quickly.

Now, retail has theoretically optimised inventory management in many ways over the years. Mounts, pets and toys are no longer items you have to carry around but simply go into a dedicated tab of their own. Same for currencies. Even quest items don't always exist in your bags and often get relegated to just being clickables in the quest tracking UI, though I honestly find that a bit confusing sometimes... the point is, it should all be optimised and extremely easy.

However, the reality is different. For some reason, even though we have all these dedicated tabs for things, they love giving us currencies that don't go into the currency tab, and toys that don't go into the toys tab. All those world events they added in Dragonflight often have some currency or event item associated with them that will go into your bags. They removed the keyring years ago but that doesn't stop them from giving you keys for stuff. The Zkera Vaults in the Forbidden Reach were particularly terrible for this, giving you both a stack of keys and an endless mountain of items that were only useful in that particular instance and nowhere else (but you better save them for next week!)

In Dragonflight in specific, someone also thought it would be funny if a lot of vendors wouldn't accept gold as currency, but would instead insist on bartering for random crafting mats or even gear items. I remember being excited to unlock some new rep reward from Wrathion and Sabellian just to find that I didn't have enough bear spines or whatever on me to purchase it. There was also that trader in Iskaraa who wanted jewellery in exchange for one of his mounts and would literally take off people's equipped rings and necklaces if you weren't careful. Just fun times all around. I picture a WoW dev coming up with this idea as "fun and quirky"... but in practice it was just a pain.

More to the point though, it created this environment where you were never quite sure whether to get rid of some things or whether they weren't meant to be extremely useful for something later that you just hadn't quite figured out yet. I hated that. I enjoy having to choose what to keep in my inventory based on items having different values. I don't like not having a clue what the value of anything is and having to spend the afternoon trawling through Wowhead to figure it out.

Anyway, I finally bit the bullet the other day and actually threw a bunch of stuff away, including thousands of Artisan's Mettle. I strongly identified with this reddit post. I mean, I could tell from the tooltip that it was used in crafting, but never came across anything that used it myself (never mind the "myriad of uses").

On the plus side, with the pre-patch making those coins for the Niffen account-bound, I was able to pool those and buy a few mounts (after looking up where to find what). It was all just a bit exhausting. I can only hope for less of that in War Within.