Expansion Pre-Patch Day

Yesterday (or Tuesday for the 'mericans) was War Within pre-patch day. I think I saw someone say that this might be the biggest patch WoW's ever had (in terms of impact, not file size) and while that sounds hyperbolic, I can't help but wonder whether it's true. Expansions always change a lot of things of course, but moving the game towards everything being account-wide as well as making everything cross-realm at the same time really was a pretty ballsy move on the dev team's part.

I knew about the cross-realm thing on an intellectual level, but I hadn't fully comprehended what it would mean. Suddenly having all my characters from all servers in a single list on the character selection screen certainly put things into a new perspective (it even included "KauvarB87508", the level 3 shaman from Aggramar whose name was released and reclaimed at some point during my years of not being subscribed). There was something funky going on with the character previews as well... all the low-level humans and draenei showed with the same face, hair colour and hair style and all the low-level tauren were identical-looking black cows. I logged into my original paladin, the first character I ever created and whose looks I remembered well enough despite not having played her in ages, and on loading in she appeared as her normal self and the character selection screen also updated, thank goodness.

The realm list feels kind of pointless now... it seems like realms are just like a sort of "last name" that's only relevant when picking a character name now.

And of course there was the warband screen, which everyone is posting screenshots of, so let me join in:

I was kind of surprised to see my old night elf priest be one of my default "favourites", and I can only guess that this was simply based on which characters you last logged into before the patch, because I think I did log her to check something quite recently.

I have to admit I didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for spending time on actually playing though. I don't think I've ever been great with large-scale changes like this, and it's only been getting worse as I get older. Fortunately I don't use a lot of addons, so that wasn't too much of an issue, but for some reason anything but the default action bars had been disabled on every single character and needed manual re-enabling. And of course all those talent resets! Those always exhaust me.

I was also a bit wary of just how broken things were going to be. Taking into account just how massive the changes were that the devs had to make under the hood for this update, I guess we should all be grateful that things weren't any worse, but I saw things like warnings not to use the currency transfer feature (or your currency might just vanish into the aether) and decided not to get too experimental with anything myself.

Mostly I just looked around a lot. There've been a lot of small changes to various parts of the UI like updated icons, and it all looks very busy. I'm sure I'll get used to most of it over time, though I am a bit cranky that they decided to get rid of the green exclamation mark over undiscovered flight masters after twenty years. Instead, the winged boot icon over their heads has a kind of greenish tint now if you haven't talked to them before, which is much harder to spot. (That said, I'm no longer sure how discovering flight paths works anyway. On one Remix character I still had to do it, while another had everything unlocked seemingly by default.)

Dragonriding turning into "skyriding" and becoming available for all flying mounts is kind of cool but also weird. I found myself slipping into the familiar keystrokes quite easily regardless of which mount was summoned, even if it was strange to see my Sunwarmed Furline zoom and leap across the sky in ways it didn't before. On the other hand, I found that evokers' Soar now also works with steady flight, though it looks quite silly the way you wind up for a massive leap just to do a tiny jump into the air and then float around like a butterfly. I'm just not a fan of switching between the two modes being a five-second cast. I wish you could just assign different modes to different mounts to make it smoother.

I also logged into one of my Remix characters whom I'd left at level 60 and had a rather painful questing experience. In anticipation of the level cap going up again with the expansion, the patch massively slashed the experience points required from 60 to 70, and I shot up to in levels in no time... which was not a good thing in this case. People were already complaining about power scaling in Remix in that level range before the patch, but now it gets combined with WoW's standard problem of your character getting weaker if the pace of gear acquisition can't keep up with how fast you gain character levels, and by level 65 I was as weak as a newborn babe. I tried to do one of the intro scenarios to the Isle of Thunder and died on every mob pull (good thing there's no durability or repair bills in Remix). The last fight fortunately offered a protective bubble I could hide in, but the encounter still took something like ten minutes. In regular retail you could at least buy some greens from the AH in that situation, but I'm honestly not quite sure what you're supposed to do in Remix with its trade restrictions when you're too weak to fight anything. Queue for dungeons and hope that others carry you for long enough to pick up a few level-appropriate gear pieces? I don't know.

Hanging With the Freshers on Zandalar Tribe

There is an actual guild called "Freshers" on Zandalar Tribe, so just to be clear on that right away, this post isn't about them. I merely use the term in a general way to refer to players looking for a fresh server experience.

I wrote about the community-driven "fresh Vanilla server" initiative about a month ago, and I noted at the time that this project wasn't really for me, for a number of reasons. Those reasons still apply, however... I'm also a very curious person, and I kind of wanted to know more about how things were going over there, especially after I saw lots of people talking about the US version of the project on the Deviate Delight server, both positively (it's oh so busy, there are so many players here) and negatively (it's all streamers and their fan clubs and there's drama everywhere), yet at the same time heard nary a peep about the goings-on on the European equivalent Zandalar Tribe. Are there no European content creators supporting the project? I mean, WillE gave it a shout-out in one of his video only the other week! What was going on there?

Plus, taking a new alt through the first twenty levels of the Vanilla world is always good fun, even if I'm somewhat creatively bankrupt at this point and keep recreating my night elf hunter from 2019 Classic everywhere.

Anyway, I kept levelling my way through Teldrassil in very short play sessions initially, and it was pretty quiet there. I did all the quests, even the ones that require a lot of running back and forth, and moved on to Darkshore by level 12 or 13, by which point I'd run into what must've been less than a dozen other characters. However, things started to pick up a bit once I made it to Auberdine, and I figured human lands were going to be even busier.

I had my first grouping experience while doing the mushroom quest in Cliffspring Hallow. I spotted a human warrior the moment I entered and worried whether we were going to compete for spawns, so I immediately turned into a direction away from him. Soon afterwards I saw him trying to take a shortcut by jumping down a ledge instead of clearing a proper path, at which point he quickly got swarmed by naga and died (there were some mobs and distance between us, so it's not like I could've come to his assistance). After he revived we found ourselves fighting next to each other for a bit, and eventually grouped up to kill the rare naga as well as to maybe get the quest starter that can drop from the Twilight guys, though we had no luck with that. At least the rare dropped a mail chest for him. We parted ways again after exiting the cave and it felt very friendly.

I continued questing in Darkshore until level 16 or so, at which point I thought it might be a good time to move to Westfall to get ready for the Deadmines. I had another nice grouping experience when I teamed up with a gnome mage to do the Defias traitor escort. After I had gathered up all the dungeon quests, I continued questing, picking flowers and fishing in the zone while keeping an eye out for potential groups. Once someone whispered me to ask whether I'd like to join their DM group, but at the time I was only logged on briefly and didn't have enough time for a dungeon run. Overall it took several days and me being level 19 to actually find a party, which kind of surprised me. I think I'm relatively patient when it comes to manual group finding so I didn't mind too much, but for what's supposed to be a "fresh" server where the low levels are popping, LFG seemed really quiet and like people were mostly looking for mid to high level dungeon groups already.

The DM run itself was fine - people weren't super chatty, but everyone was nice enough and we had no issues. I whispered the priest to thank them for also healing my pet and they replied that they'd just finished levelling a hunter to 60 so they understood what it was like.

Ultimately I came away from the whole experience kind of wondering what the point was. I had a nice enough time, but in terms of population levels, I think I could've had pretty much the exact same experience on the main era PvE cluster or on hardcore. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if those were actually a bit busier than this was.

I guess Zandalar Tribe could aim to fill the niche of "PvP server that isn't as busy as Firemaw", which is something I thought could be viable ever since Classic era blew up at the start of last year and I spent some time puttering around on the empty second PvP cluster. However, as a "fresh" experience, catering to the kinds of players who want to see everyone starting together and huge crowds in the levelling zones, it doesn't really seem to be fitting the bill right now. I guess things could always change if a large content creator ends up giving it additional publicity, but right now - as much as I'm all in favour of more era servers getting love in some form or another - it doesn't strike me as a huge success for its intended purpose.

Honey, Your Changes Are Showing

I've mentioned before that Classic era is in a somewhat unusual situation, being an MMO that isn't supposed to receive updates and changes, yet that due to the fact that it shares a client and code base with other versions of WoW sometimes experiences a degree of "feature bleedthrough" as bugs. It's not ideal, but bugs happen in any game, and I guess when you're playing what's probably the least popular of all the current versions of WoW, you're not in a position to complain too much about stuff like that.

When last week's patch for phase four of Season of Discovery landed and brought some strangeness to era once again, I think most of us figured initially that it was just going to be one of those days, however a post on the official forums by community manager Kaivax quickly raised both eyebrows and hackles, as it highlighted several changes to era as intentional:

• The Guilds user interface has been updated to provide more ease of Guild management.
• Alliance players now have access to the Might of Stormwind, to a version of the Warchief’s Blessing world buff effect. This new buff is gained for turning in a new quest “End of the Dark Horde” in Stormwind and is mutually exclusive with Warchief’s Blessing.
• The Songflower Serenade and Dire Maul Tribute buffs can no longer be dispelled by enemy players.
• Druids can now train and use polearms.

The new guild UI was the most glaring and obvious change, and I've got to admit my own reaction was very much "thanks, I hate it". There's already an addon to at least partially revert to the old one, but I haven't seen an option to banish the new one from the quick bar entirely.

You see, the Vanilla user interface was very basic, but it understood what's important to people. If I'm in a guild and actually looking to interact with other players, the first thing I'll want to know after coming online is who else is online, what classes they play, what level they are and what they are up to right now (as in, whether they are already busy with something else or whether we might be able to do something together).

At the bottom you also had the box for the guild message of the day, in case there was something the guild wanted to immediately communicate to you.

In comparison, the new UI that's supposed to "provide more ease of Guild management" is dominated by guild chat, which you can already read in the chat window anyway, with the list of people who are online being relegated to a narrow column on the side that doesn't show you what level the characters are or what content they are doing. For that information, you have to go to a second tab, and the guild info hides behind yet another tab. It's cluttered and ugly and I hate it.

In retail, I've at least got some use for the fact that the guild chat in the guild window contains historical information showing chats from before you came online, as I'm in a small guild with friends there and it can be interesting to see who's been about when you haven't logged in for a couple of days. But in a large guild like I'm in on Classic era, I really don't need a backlog of people saying hi and bye, discussing trades and announcing world buffs.

Last year during the patch before the launch of hardcore, Blizzard also updated the settings UI to retail's new look and I grumbled about that, but ultimately I've got to admit I didn't mind that one too much. There were some new accessibility features in there which are obviously not a bad thing, and ultimately the game settings are not something I look at very often. The guild window is a very different matter however, as that's something I and I'm sure many other Classic era players interact with every day, if not multiple times a day, and having to deal with this new abomination is... off-putting.

I feel like user interface changes are one of those ways in which you can boil a frog, because one small change is just so easy to justify. It doesn't change the game! You can always get an addon to modify it! I didn't see anyone shed any tears over the fact that Classic launched with WoW's modern raid frame UI for example, instead of the horrible old one from original Vanilla. But this? This just hurts, man.

What about the other changes?

Adding a new quest and a new world buff for Alliance is easily the biggest change of the lot, but ironically I think that both of the world buff related changes might not have been too badly received if they had been communicated properly. Blizzard also revamped the way the PvP system works on era last year, and from what I've seen, those changes were overall pretty well received. Yes, we want era to be the museum piece, but people are not entirely blind to the fact that things are not the same now as they were in Vanilla, and that there are times when it might be a good idea to tweak something. Just not like this.

To add some more context for the world buff changes for those not in the know: people care a lot about world buffs for raiding, and Horde actually had one more world buff than Alliance. Some Alliance players would go out of their way to get it by getting themselves mind-controlled at the Crossroads via a friend or second account whenever the Horde dropped the buff, but my impression has been that this was both very niche and not all that popular. So I don't think many Alliance players are actually going to be upset about getting easier access to the buff themselves... plus from my understanding they'll still have to do UBRS for it, just like the Horde does now.

And as for the dispelling issue, apparently this has been a form of "PvP" on the PvP servers since the launch of Classic, though I've never heard of it happening on PvE. I think the problem was that people were doing it basically just to grief. If you're a shaman hanging out in Stormwind as a ghost, just to revive and spam purge on someone after world buffs drop, before you get killed again by the guards, you're not really PvPing in the classic sense - you're not winning a fight in any meaningful way; you're just eating a repair bill to make someone feel bad. So again, I can't see most people making a big deal about this. Just some context from Blizzard's end and a heads-up would've been nice.

Now, the druid change is simultaneously the least meaningful and the most worrying part of those patch notes. It's the least meaningful because I've been told by druid mains that it has zero effect on their meta. Personally I vaguely recall an occasion while levelling early in Classic, where either I or someone else was on a druid in Razorfen Kraul, and when Armor Piercer dropped, I was a little disappointed when I realised that it couldn't be used by druids in Classic. So yay for a couple more weapon options for feral druids while levelling?

The problem is that this is a class change, something that's completely unheard of on era, and one that nobody asked for. Up until now, the Classic devs have been pretty good about taking care of era even though it wasn't the most popular mode, and being respectful of the community that plays there wanting to enjoy the game in its original state. I can't blame people for being worried about the team suddenly setting a precedent for implementing random changes in era that nobody asked for, presumably just because it was more convenient to copy and paste the same settings from SoD. I hope they'll hear the loud and clear feedback that this is not something players want or take lightly.

EDIT: OMG, it's like someone is reading my blog! They actually reverted the druid change and the Alliance Rend buff, as well as apologising for the way the whole thing was handled. You can read the blue post here.

Fifteen Years of WoW Blogging

I haven't been very good at keeping track of milestones on this blog. Partially I think this is due to the fact that I'd only been posting for a little over three years by the time that I originally decided to step away from WoW. After this the blog lay fallow for a while, even if it never went completely quiet (I'd still find excuses to occasionally comment on BlizzCon announcements and stuff like that), and it seemed odd to celebrate so-and-so many years of blogging when I hadn't really done all that much for a good chunk of those years.

This year I remembered to make a note in advance though... that today, the blog turns fifteen years old. What a crazy ride it's been. I thought it would be fun to look back on those years a bit.

When I started this blog in July 2009, I was 26 years old, working a part-time job in a bakery and still living in Austria with my mother, though I was saving up to relocate to the UK and move in with my then-boyfriend (whom I'd met in WoW, of course) at the end of the year. World of Warcraft was probably close to the peak of its popularity with its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Blogging was quite popular as well, and blogging about WoW was a solid niche.

I'd been reading and leaving comments on other people's WoW blogs for a while (many of which have sadly been lost to time since then), and finally figured that it was time to set up my own space to share my thoughts about the game. My very first post was about heroic Oculus, which was certainly... a choice. In those early days I had a lot of free time and not much else going on in my life, so I posted 12-20 times a month, which seems slightly insane to me now, looking back at it as a 41-year-old with a full time job.

It's hard to summarise all those posts in a few sentences as I wrote about a lot of different subjects. I guess one thing I can say is that my posts were perhaps slightly shorter on average than they are nowadays, and I didn't seem to have as many reservations about just how much "meat" there needed to be to a topic to make it worth its own little post. I wrote about random game mechanics I liked and disliked, good pugs and bad pugs (I spent so much time pugging dungeons back then), raiding with my guild, commented on WoW-related news, and talked about pieces of gear I liked. I basically just really enjoyed the game and almost every aspect of it. I wrote about day one of the dungeon finder, which honestly feels like something of a historical document at this point. At the end of the year, I went through with my plan to move to the UK.

I spent most of 2010 unemployed, and therefore continued to have a lot of time to play and blog, maintaining my cadence of publishing a post pretty much every other day. I continued to write about the same kinds of things, though I think if you look closely, you can see a slow decline in the amount of joy I expressed. There were fewer happy stories, and more rants about inconsiderate pugs and changes I didn't like. Plus my guild wasn't doing so well either. Incidentally, WoW did help me get a job in November though - that post was also the first time I heard of reddit, as someone linked it there and I went to investigate the source of that sudden traffic spike.

At the end of the year, the Cataclysm came, and my boyfriend's physical copy of the expansion got lost in the mail. (If I remember correctly, Amazon refunded him but then the parcel randomly showed up in May the next year or something.) The new content gave me a lot to talk about, something that lasted into 2011.

However, somehow things weren't quite the same. I still posted quite a lot that year, but 12 posts a month went from being my lower limit to being my upper one, with the average being closer to 8. I posted about lacking lustre in February, and nostalgia and doubts in July. When Mists of Pandaria was announced, I was decidedly underwhelmed. I stepped down from raiding and focused on my rated battleground team instead, which brought with it a brief revival of the joy I used to feel when playing. But then Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, and my interest in WoW just petered out. I only made 6 posts in 2012, the last of which was me declaring that I was done with the game and retiring the blog. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

I did indeed not post for more than one and a half years after that, but things changed in my real life during that time. I broke up with my boyfriend (insert some snarky comment about how he was my "WoW boyfriend" so naturally I had dump him when I stopped playing) and started a relationship with the guy who I'm now married to. This included moving house and being unemployed again, which was not so great. As my new love scrambled to find ways to keep me from being too depressed by the circumstances, we ended up realising that he'd also used to play WoW at one point, and we rolled up a new pair of alts at the end of 2013 to check out the changes since both of us had last played. This ended up keeping us busy a few months into 2014, but it wasn't long until we both lost interest in the game again, so I only got a little over a dozen posts out of the whole adventure. In real life, I also got a full time job a couple of months later.

The next revival of the blog came from an unexpected source in mid-2015, as Nostalrius took the private server scene by storm and really made the whole concept of going back to Vanilla go mainstream. I actually never played there myself, as I rolled up on its much smaller competitor Kronos instead. That was super exciting for about a month or ten posts, but then my interest flagged again... though not so much due to lack of appeal this time and more a general lack of time to engage with multiple MMOs at once. At the end of the year I posted about BlizzCon (and shared a video by some medium-sized YouTuber I'd found, called Asmongold) and felt an urge to get back into the saddle on Kronos. I continued to post about my private server adventures at a rate of a couple of posts per month throughout 2016.

By 2017 my enthusiasm for that was starting to dry up again though. I'd left Kronos the previous year since I couldn't stand life at max level on a PvP server, and there always seemed to be something wrong with every other server I tried, so I only made about half a dozen posts throughout most of the year. That November of course was when Blizzard officially announced Classic. I made a few posts related to that in a flurry of initial excitement, and then set in for a long wait until Classic's release, only checking in with the blog occasionally throughout 2018.

The release of Classic in August 2019 is when I feel the blog was revived "properly", as that's when I started posting several times a month again (even if I only made half a dozen posts or less, it was still more and more regular than I'd been for the last seven years before that). I was all in on playing Classic on Horde side for more than six months, followed by me levelling a night elf on an RP server by myself, but I did start to feel the doldrums a bit by spring of 2020 as I didn't have any real friends left to play with.

Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up joining a pug raid in August, and found myself recruited into a great guild shortly afterwards. I also ended up checking out retail again for the first time in more than six years. Hanging out and raiding with my Classic guild - plus an increase in working from home time due to the pandemic - carried me through most of 2021, though things started to go a bit pear-shaped during Classic Burning Crusade as the vibe of the guild changed and Blizzard decided to soft-close the server I was on by enabling free transfers.

I got a few more months of enjoyment out of that expansion in 2022, but my guild eventually folded and when it became clear that there would be no BC era servers, I felt I was done with Classic as it was. I decided to try my luck on Classic era instead and once again fell in with a great guild, though I also kept playing retail on the side and got excited for the Dragonflight expansion.

Throughout 2023, I continued to post about my adventures on Classic era, mixed with posts about retail, which started to gain more ground. Changes at my work meant that raiding with my era guild didn't really work anymore and I had to give up on that, which provided even more of an incentive to focus on retail with my husband and some friends instead. I also tried out Hardcore when it launched, and got excited about Season of Discovery in December.

Sadly, that excitement didn't carry over into 2024 for more than two months, so since then it's mostly been retail with the occasional dip into one of the Classic modes sprinkled in here and there. We'll see where things go from here, but it's certainly been one hell of a journey.

Re-evaluating MoP Content in Remix

All the content people are engaging with in Mists of Pandaria: Remix right now has been in the game for ten years or more, but I reckon with how little reason WoW gives people to go back to old expansions, most players haven't actually seen or thought about any of it in a long time. Or they might never have played through it in the first place if they only picked up WoW for the first time at some point after 2014.

I've seen quite a few "I forgot how good this was" comments around the internet when people talk about Remix, so I wanted to give my own re-review of some of the content. I did play through most of MoP back when it was the current expansion, and I do have blog posts that talk about my initial impressions from back then to fact-check myself when it comes to what I actually thought of it at the time.

Quests & Story

Looking back at my writings about Pandaria's early questing zones from 2014, I was somewhat more critical of them than I remember, in the sense that after I'd just spent the last two years playing SWTOR almost exclusively, WoW's questing felt a bit clunky and dull in comparison. I did think the zones were beautiful though, and it did occur to me in Remix that I was somewhat reminded of Dragonflight in terms of how much the world is just pleasant to spend time in.

I also liked the pandaren more than I expected, though I was rather put off by the way the factions were portrayed. I saw someone say while talking about Remix that Pandaria showed how to do the faction conflict right, and all I could think was "haha, no". I hated how the introductory quest to the expansion has you machine-gunning down enemies from a helicopter, both for stretching the definition of "steampunk elements" to its limits and for making both factions look like horrible warmongers. No, their behaviour is not portrayed as a good thing in the context of the story, but it's not exactly condemned either? You bring so much suffering onto Pandria and except for Taran Zhu, everyone's just weirdly chill about it. Making me dislike my own faction is not great writing in my opinion.

Speaking of not great writing, I'd forgotten how MoP was also the era of... certain other narrative choices, such as Jaina's "I'm gonna be really mad and kill people" arc. Which, you know, is a valid direction to take her, I just never thought it was well done at all, and it still didn't feel that way upon replaying that storyline in Remix either. Mostly it felt like someone saw how people made fun of Jaina's weepiness in ICC at the end of Wrath and decided to make her do a 180 by making her a "badass" instead, even if it felt forced as hell. And oh, I remember all the grousing about the "A Little Patience" scenario and Varian lecturing a night elf leader who is thousands of years his senior about how to be patient...

Still, after recently spending some time in Cata questing zones and realising just how dire they were, Pandaria was definitely a step up in many ways.

Scenarios

On the subject of scenarios, this is another feature that I saw several people comment on with lines like "gosh, scenarios were so fun; I don't know why Blizzard didn't carry them forward into future expansions". Not me! For me it's really just been a reminder of how clunky and awkward they were and that I don't miss them one bit. Though Blizzard did improve one thing about them in Remix: unlike in original MoP, in Remix, mobs in scenarios actually drop loot.

Dungeons 

I apparently never wrote much about MoP's dungeons, and I didn't have any particularly strong memories associated with any of them. On re-visiting them, they are a pretty varied and fun bunch, even if having the revamped Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance in the mix just because they were redone during that expansion seemed odd, considering that they have nothing to do with the expansion story otherwise. I do have a slight dislike for Mogu'shan Palace, because for some reason it's always that dungeon where I end up with an extremely weak group and everything takes forever to die, a problem I haven't had to the same extent anywhere else.

Raids

My experience with MoP's raids back in 2014 consisted of doing a couple of them in LFR, which went fine at the time. I apparently didn't write about it, but I'm reasonably sure that I must've done at least a couple of wings of Throne of Thunder as well, as it seemed quite familiar upon revisiting it. I never set foot into Siege of Orgrimmar.

Now, you can't really pass any judgement on raid mechanics in Remix, considering that LFR quickly turned into a zerg that has bosses dying in mere seconds, and even when we tried to under-man higher raid difficulties, we weren't too worried about mechanics and basically just wanted to see whether we could burst things down before they could kill us. I do think the first tier of raiding being split into three raids was a good decision back then and also makes that tier more enjoyable in Remix because you get to see a greater variety of environments, in smaller chunks. Comparatively, Throne of Thunder and Siege seem impossibly long with their 12-14 bosses, even when you're just zerging through them. I can't imagine how much of a drag that must've felt like when people were actually raiding those places properly.

Also, it's interesting to see how Blizzard clearly hadn't quite figured out how to handle the RP bits in raids yet back in 2014. Some might complain about things like Lorewalker Cho's endless monologuing between encounters in Mogu'shan Vaults, but I think that actually kind of works in Remix as it provides pacing and gives slower members of the group time to catch up, preventing the resident demon hunter from just rushing to the last boss with no care for anyone else. However, boss fights that are hard-coded to take a certain minium amount of time while some RP plays out, regardless of how fast you kill things, do not seem like great design. I'm looking at you, Galakras. Waiting for Lei Shen to finish humping his pillars is another one that I'm particularly un-fond of.

Isle of Thunder

I didn't write much about the Isle of Thunder back in 2014, other than to mention that I found it kind of disappointing after the way a friend had advertised it to me, and that I hated the chain of solo scenarios required to unlock it. At least I was mentally prepared for the latter this time, though I still wasn't a fan of the mechanic. The Isle itself was... fine, though? It's weird that fighting the forces of the Thunder King is made to be so much more annoying than fighting the enemy faction, but in general, the level of OP-ness in Remix makes it a much more chill place than it was back in the day. Back then, the mob density made it kind of dangerous, but in Remix that's not really a problem. While I haven't spent any Bronze on upgrading my shaman's gear, thousands of threads in her cloak still make it a breeze to waltz into the enemy camp and AoE everything in sight. I also got to see the Trove of the Thunder King scenario through to the end for the first time.

Timeless Isle

The Timeless Isle was somewhat interesting to me in 2014, and I praised it back in the day for encouraging grouping and providing an amazing loot rush for newly minted max-levels (among other things). In Remix, I've admittedly found it a lot less compelling. It's nice to finally have a cloak for easy access to Ordos, but in terms of Remix-specific rewards it doesn't really have much to offer. Similarly, it's convenient to be able to solo all the mobs with ease, but it makes hunting for rares even more of a futile endeavour than it was back in 2014. If a star mob doesn't spawn right in front of you, you'll basically have no chance of ever tagging it, and even then it can fail if someone else manages to one-shot it before you can even get your own instant cast off.

Obvious gameplay differences aside, I've got to admit that Remix has done a pretty good at letting people relive the general "vibe" of late Pandaria, encouraging you to zoom around a beautiful landscape to hunt down rare mobs and grinding endless dailies for rewards. I wonder whether another expansion would have worked quite as well with this framework.

The Fresh Vanilla Initiative

One thing I've learned from WoW over the last few years is that people apparently love starting over on a new server. I do get the appeal to some degree, because there's definitely a special kind of energy in the air whenever a new server is opened - it's a bit like an expansion launch, only without the new content. On the other hand though, it still surprises me sometimes just how popular this concept is, simply because being able to keep your progress is a big part of an MMO's appeal in my opinion.

Personally, I'm definitely over getting too excited about that kind of thing at this point. I'm the cliché of that person who has no time for MMOs anymore because she's just too busy nowadays... except for me it's not three jobs and a bunch of kids; it's the fact that I'm already playing multiple MMOs that I'm emotionally invested in, so I just don't have the time or energy to go no-life for a new launch, whether it's a new game or just a new server. And no-lifing definitely seems to be the order of the day on these occasions, or else you just end up being left behind. Me, I just want to be able to drop in once or twice a week to have a bit of fun, which is why a more static and less frantic environment like the era servers are much more up my alley.

Nonetheless, it's undeniable that there is a considerable audience that is always clamouring for the next new thing... or for a new round of the old thing as it might be. In the case of Classic WoW, I'm pretty sure there were people interested in fresh Vanilla servers at least from the moment Classic Burning Crusade was announced, but at the time, they were a very tiny minority. Five years later though, with the Classic train having moved forward three expansions, to the point where some people don't even consider it Classic anymore... the cries for a repeat of the Vanilla launch experience are definitely growing louder. I actually think that this was a big part of Season of Discovery's initial appeal, the promise of "Vanilla again, but with a twist". It quickly turned into something quite different though, so the search for that "fresh Vanilla experience" continues.

The other day I learned that some players have decided to take things into their own hands since then, by launching their own "fresh" community experience, similar to what people did with hardcore one and a half years ago. Since there are enough servers/clusters on era that are just kind of empty, picking one and having lots of people start over there together is effectively like starting on a new server. Sure, someone might still have an old Naxx-geared character lying around somewhere, but they are unlikely to have much of an impact on the new starters, especially in PvE.

Unfortunately the server of choice for this project was not a PvE realm though, but rather the old RP-PvP servers, which are Deviate Delight on US and Zandalar Tribe on EU, respectively. Curious to see the situation for myself, I created a night elf on Zandalar Tribe, spawned into Teldrassil and killed a few mobs while my census add-on ran. It didn't take long to complete its scan though, only detecting a little over a hundred characters online - this was on a Friday at lunch time though. I checked in again later in the evening, by which point the character count was close to two hundred.

I would have liked to check in on the Horde as well, but I forgot that era still has the old restriction that prevents you from creating characters of the other faction on a PvP server, and since Zandalar Tribe isn't connected to any other realms, there's no way to circumvent that limitation. So as for the question of how the Horde is doing, I can only shrug.

I'm not sure how much success this project will see, because while two hundred concurrent players per faction is not bad, it's a far cry from the kinds of crowds I saw on Hydraxian Waterlords when it was the unofficial hardcore server... then again, things started small there as well, so DD and ZT certainly have room to grow.

I guess their biggest problem is going to be that there is so much else going on in WoW right now. Classic Cataclysm launched only a few weeks ago, and Season of Discovery players can look forward to phase four raising the level cap to 60 soon. Meanwhile in retail, there are two months left in Pandaria: Remix, and then the game will segue straight into the next expansion. Unless you're an absolute Vanilla purist, chances are that some other mode of WoW may be vying for your attention already or soon.

Still, I'm a big fan of community projects like this, which is why I wanted to post about it at least. I'm not going to pretend that I have a huge reach, but every little bit to spread the word should help I suppose. I was honestly quite surprised when I first learned about this project and realised that it had been going for a month without me ever becoming aware of its existence. I do think more people should know about it at least so they can make their own decisions about whether it's interesting to them or not. Here are some other resources for you to read/watch if you want to learn more about the project:

• Reddit post from 1st of May outlining the concept/idea
• Reddit post from mid-May promoting the project
• Promotional trailer by AzAMOuS
• Promo video from MadSeasonShow
• Impressions by Solheim Gaming

Remix: FOMO and Culture Clash

There are a variety of things I'd like to be doing in WoW right now: I haven't worked on my hardcore priest in a while for example - in fact, the other day I logged in to find that I'd been kicked from the guild for inactivity. However, Pandaria: Remix keeps pushing my FOMO buttons every time I log in. "67 Days Remaining" it declares right there on the character selection screen, so there's always that feeling that everything else can wait. It's annoying, but that's just one of those things about marketing: simply being aware of how the trick works doesn't automatically make you immune to its power.

One of the criticisms I've seen levelled against Remix is that people think Bronze shouldn't be the currency for everything. I didn't really get that at the beginning, and maybe the devs had a similar line of thinking as I did: that making Bronze the currency for everything would allow collectors to focus on getting mounts and cosmetics, while people who don't care about that kind of stuff could upgrade their gear and be OP instead. I guess the devs didn't anticipate that so many players would feel that they absolutely had to do both.

However, even if people are happy to just focus their efforts on one specific path, the system creates quite a chasm between those who care about the gearing and those who don't. My goals have settled on earning as many mounts and cosmetics as I can with a casual time investment, as well as levelling a few alts over the next couple of months. I haven't invested any Bronze into upgrading my gear because that just feels like a waste to me at this point. However, seemingly everyone in my guild is the opposite, and I keep getting dragged along to do normal and heroic raids under strength, content where I'm worse than useless and just end up dying on every boss because I'm too squishy to survive most of the mechanics. Meanwhile all everybody talks about for hours is their gear and how much dps they're doing. I know I shouldn't be complaining about a free ride to some achievements and Bronze, but ultimately it's not really what I want to be spending my evenings on right now.

My shaman dreams of questing on greener pastures instead of inspecting the floors of Siege of Orgrimmar.

And that's all in the benevolent environment of playing with friends. Pugs are just totally dominated by over-powered speed-runners now that care little to nothing about anyone else in the group. I did the second wing of Siege of Orgrimmar in LFR the other day and after the third boss, people just charged ahead without even fighting any of the trash, so that those who were unable to keep up (thanks to +speed on the gear and cloak it literally becomes impossible to keep up with certain characters) got locked out of the last boss room, and the gate didn't re-open after he had died either. After I'd collected my loot, I felt rather bad seeing the half dozen people or so who were still locked outside as they couldn't even enter to pick up their stuff. I can only hope that the Postmaster mailed it to them.

Dungeons are pretty much the same. For example, I made a little bear druid and queued into Scholomance as my first normal dungeon. I pulled the first two trash mobs, but a dps just ran past me, jumped down the stairs and instantly pulled the boss while ignoring all the trash. I pushed myself through the ice wall she spawns, taking massive damage in the process, and only survived because I levelled up when the others killed the boss. The rest of the run was then just more frantic running after the dps who were simply AoEing everything. Basically, Remix dungeons are just like normal retail dungeons now: no gameplay, just speed-running. I said previously that I don't mind getting a bit of a boost from someone stronger than me, but at some point queueing into any of these activities simply doesn't actually involve any actual gameplay anymore, it's just a chore to jog through the exact same hallways over and over again for more threads and Bronze. Not a very tough or time-consuming chore, but still a chore. And that's the situation we're in with the event having been live for less than a month, with two more months left for people to get even more overpowered.

Earlier today, I was in Valley of the Four Winds when the world boss Galleon spawned, so I flew right over. Nobody had attacked him yet, and since I wasn't confident in my survival by myself, I stood around for a few seconds to wait for others to show up. Then the boss just fell over in front of my eyes before I could even blink, never mind getting a hit in. Someone else had literally just landed and one-shot him. I didn't realise we were at "one-shotting at-level world bosses" degrees of power yet.

Ironically, on the rare occasion when you end up in a group that doesn't have anyone OP in it, it doesn't end up feeling good either, just super slow. More than once I've zoned into heroic Mogu'shan Palace (and for some reason it's always Mogu'shan Palace) with damage dealers that couldn't out-dps a healer with zero gear upgrades, and it just made everything take forever. It's not like there were suddenly real stakes or anything, it just meant that I stood there pouring my piddly healer dps into what felt like a damage sponge for five minutes per boss fight.

I just see all this as a reminder that Blizzard has never really managed to square the concept of getting everyone into the content and keeping queues popping with the reality that throwing people with vastly different interests and power levels into groups together - while also providing zero incentive to be social and treat those other people as human beings - can lead to some pretty crappy experiences. I wish their motto in regards to group content wasn't always quantity over quality. I'd rather have five actually enjoyable dungeon runs than fifty LFD hallway jogs.

Mess of Pandaria

Pandaria: Remix has been out for more than two weeks now and it's been quite a wild ride.

Our initial levelling duo hit level 70 after a little over 19 hours /played. The best personal reference I have for levelling speed is this post from when the husband and I first levelled characters just after the pre-Shadowlands level squish, at which point it took us over 26 hours to get to level 50 (the cap at the time). So our levelling in Remix was indeed sped up, but not by as much as I would've thought, especially considering that I did read all the quest text in BfA, while I'm mostly just skimming it in Pandaria. I'm sure there are people who level much faster than that even in regular retail.

Of course, I figured maybe the real speed levelling was meant to occur with alts, since the cloak with all the stats (including an XP bonus) was meant to be account-wide. This turned out to be somewhat false advertising though, as it doesn't actually work that way. Once you push your first character's cloak past a certain threshold, new alts do start with a bit of a boost, but it's much smaller than your main's numbers and static, so they still have to build up their own cloak from scratch after that. The levelling still goes quite a bit faster the second time around, but still... it was just a little bit disappointing.

The second pair of characters we made was a protection warrior (me) and my husband on a resto shaman. They're level 38 right now, as we're basically just doing a random dungeon every other day or so. Because he had last week off work and (as I mentioned before) always goes all-in on this sort of project, he also levelled a paladin to the cap without me during my work hours.

Happenings in the wider community have been pretty wild. Blizzard nerfed the "froggers" and keeps playing whack-a-mole to nerf new bronze farming spots as they emerge, but it doesn't really seem to matter, because at this point the first no-lifers and professional WoW players have ground out their gear one way or another and once you're at maximum item level, you're meant to be OP. The lofty days of week one when heroic dungeons actually felt kinda hard and LFR bosses would at least get to do one mechanic before dying are long gone. Everything just dies in seconds and every group just zergs to the end.

And that's... alright, I guess? I'm not here for the challenge so I don't mind getting a free carry towards some rewards. But I have been questioning my purpose with this game mode a bit. I don't care about using my bronze to upgrade my gear as it's only really useful in the extreme short term anyway (as is often the case in WoW) and to get all the transmogs and mounts you'd need something like over a million bronze, which is a lot. I honestly don't even feel like I need all of these cosmetics anyway, but since I'm unclear on just what my goals are, the sheer number of things I could miss out on is still daunting somehow.

In the usual way of retail WoW, they make it very easy to get a quick dopamine hit from a reward that only takes minutes to earn, but you're then meant to repeat that process hundreds of times during a specific time window, which is the point where I usually nope out. The rush of quickly levelling an alt can be fun for a while, but again... to what purpose? I have no particular interest in having a stable of alts at the level cap "just because". It'll just mean that I'll have fewer character slots available to level alts through other content later.

The only thing I know for sure is that I'll want to keep completing content with our first levelling duo, in order to polish off most of the questing for our nostalgia tour, and that I'll probably want to level at least a couple of alts for a different gameplay experience. Being a healer quickly started to feel pointless with all the self-healing that characters do in Remix, and on the rare occasion where healing could still be useful it doesn't scale well with the mode's massive stamina numbers, meaning that my biggest heal fills five percent of a tank's health bar at most, which is effectively useless. It's all just a little bit crazy and I suspect not entirely in the way Blizzard intended.

Draenei Heritage

It tickles me that every post I made on this blog in May has been about a different version or mode of World of Warcraft. First I talked about Classic Cataclysm, then Hardcore, then the upcoming War Within, then Classic era, and finally Pandaria Remix. The only thing missing at this point is something about what's currently going on in regular Dragonflight, so why not do that?

I wrote a little about what I thought of various heritage quest lines last year and always meant to continue doing more of them, but other things ended up distracting me and caused that particular project to fall off my radar again for a bit. However, the most recent patch added heritage quest lines for both Draenei and trolls, two races I associate with characters that are particularly dear to me, so I figured it was a great opportunity to have another go at this. I decided to start with the Draenei.

My first ever Draenei lives on the same server as my original priest and has gathered a similar amount of dust over the years. I originally created her back when Burning Crusade came out, and levelled her with a group of friends I'd made early in the game and who also rolled new Draenei alts for the expansion. (I also met them in real life at one point... those were different times. I was always a bit sad that we didn't really manage to stay in touch after that.)

I remember we jokingly referred to our little posse as "The Blue Man Group". One person quickly lost interest in that particular alt, but the rest of us levelled all the way to the cap together from what I remember, even if that meant doing dungeons with a group of four and without a dedicated healer. Our pally tank mostly spent a lot of time healing himself... For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of us struggling with the last boss in Uldaman due to this but we eventually figured out a way to beat him. (This was before any of us knew about the trick with pulling him into the room upstairs to make add management easier.)

Anyway... even after the group drifted apart, I kept levelling my little blue mage through the following expansions as I quite enjoyed playing her. Though I must have given up in Cataclysm as she was level 30 post-level squish, which would have been something like... 83 in the old times? Which would mean that she saw some play time in Cata, but not enough to get to the cap.

I accepted the gear upgrade at the character selection screen and chose to stay arcane spec, though I was surprised to be presented with this as I thought she'd been frost or fire last I played. Since I'd opted not to clear my quest log, I had a breadcrumb to talk to the guy in the Cataclysm portal circle, which I thought was the introduction to Deepholm, but when I handed it in, there was no follow-up. I decided to go there anyway, first questing in the "regular" version of the world and eventually switching to Chromie Time when things started to go green.

Finishing Deepholm felt like it didn't take all that much time, though it also struck me that Cataclysm really was kind of a low point for the game's questing, regardless of whether you prefer Vanilla's more "worldly" approach to questing or the more modern storylines. By Cata they had streamlined the hell out of the process so there was no exploring or finding quest hubs involved at all anymore, but at the same time the voice acting and cut scenes were still pretty sparse, so you didn't exactly get a "cinematic" experience either... just a looong chain of formulaic quests (always in sets of threes, usually one kill quest, one collect quest, and one that required you to talk to someone, use an item or kill a boss), many of which gated access to things like portals or quartermasters back in the day and required doing on every character.

Anyway, after completing the zone storyline I was still only level 45, so I started doing Therazane dailies for nostalgia's sake, until it hit me that levelling up without collecting any more gear upgrades was probably not a good idea. On returning to Stormwind I found intro quests for Hyjal and Vashj'ir waiting for me, which confused me because surely I must've done at least one of those back in the day? Either way I opted for a bit of questing in Mount Hyjal until I hit level 50, though I didn't get many gear rewards there either.

I just mention this as I've often expressed annoyance with the way Blizzard's scaling really affects your character's performance if your gear can't keep up with your levels, and by the time I hit 50 I reckon my gear was about 40 item levels lower than it should've been once again. Combined with the fact that I found arcane spec confusing and didn't really know what I was doing, this didn't make for the best experience with the combat portions of the heritage quest line.

For example there was one part where I was suddenly put in combat with two mobs and managed to die... on top of a ledge. I spent a couple of minutes trying to get back to my body until I gave up and just took the spirit res, just to be reminded that the debuff you get from that in retail only lasts a minute nowadays anyway. And the final fight with the add waves followed by a boss was quite a pain too. I actually thought it was kind of funny that I complained in the context of the night elf heritage quest line that it felt kind of boring to have three powerful NPC escorts, and as if someone from Blizzard read that, the NPCs you get to help you out in the Draenei scenario do almost nothing and might as well not be there in terms of how helpful they are in combat.

Anyway, my 100th rant about awkward world scaling aside... this quest chain was really good. It starts a little slow, and I was once again reminded that I've become too good at recognising certain voice actors as I immediately spotted Darin De Paul and Max Mittleman again, but things quickly became more interesting.

Because it was such an enjoyable quest line, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll say that it was interesting that the Draenei quest chain used the same framing device as the orc one, that of a people reviving an old celebration to look towards a better future... though the Draenei's problems are of course a bit different from those of the orcs.

We got to revisit several important Draenei locations, including the Exodar, Auchindoun and Bloodmyst Isle, a lot of known Draenei NPCs returned, and there were some nice touches with the dialogue. For example the Soultender in Auchindoun noted that he could sense that I had "already partaken of our ritual to see the dead", which I think was a callback to that one Burning Crusade quest line which I clearly must have done back in the day. I'm told there are also some dialogue variations for characters that have one of the new red skin customisations. I didn't look up anything until after I'd finished the quest line myself, but I wasn't surprised to find that reddit absolutely loved this one as well.

The ending definitely tugged at my heart strings... though I wonder if anything will ever come of the Draenei's plans to build a new city for themselves in game. Either way, it was a great piece of content that really struck the right tone and did a lot of world building.

Pandaria Remix Impressions

Pandamonium Mists of Pandaria Remix launched last week, and it's been an... interesting experience. The husband and I were quite keen on another opportunity to level a pair of characters together in a different context and agreed to create a shaman/druid pair. Even though I knew what I was getting into, I was rather startled by the height difference between us when I first logged in. Also, neither of us could believe that he managed to snag the name "Bearie".

Timerunning characters start out at level ten on the Timeless Isle, where you're given a few introductory quests to explain the most important Remix-specific mechanics to you as well as a bit of lore to justify the whole thing, though I didn't pay too much attention to the latter to be honest. Something something time travel... I'm just treating it as a spiced-up version of Chromie Time.

Then you're spat out at the start of the Mists of Pandaria campaign and off you go! If questing is what you actually want to do... because the dungeon finder also unlocks almost immediately, including heroic dungeons, which struck me as kind of absurd, but I figured maybe jumping into those straight away makes more sense if you're on a subsequent character who has some bonus cloak power right from the start.

We did however jump into normal dungeons right away, and did also try some heroics later. Mostly I was reminded of how odd it is that places like the revamped Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery are considered Pandaria dungeons when they have absolutely nothing to do with that continent; they just happened to be redone during the Pandaria expansion. Gameplay was enjoyable as at least initially, enemies actually seemed a bit tougher than in regular retail dungeons, and we actually wiped a few times when we over-pulled. Overall though, incoming damage seemed a bit confusing and random, with my husband's bear sometimes going for long stretches seemingly without taking any damage at all, and then suddenly requiring spam-healing while his health bar bounced up and down like a yo-yo. I don't know if that has something to do with the mode's special gems or is just scaling strangeness... I forget that compared to other MMO devs, Blizzard are actually comparatively inexperienced when it comes to scaling content to groups of all levels, and I read accounts of raids getting wiped by certain mechanics doing way too much damage if they target characters of a specific level, as well as general complaints that characters get significantly weaker as they approach the level cap, which would certainly be on brand for Blizzard's current approach to scaling.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. While we spent a lot of time in random group content (including scenarios and raids, which are actually levelling content in Remix), we also did some questing, which triggered a peculiar kind of nostalgia in me. I only played Pandaria during its original release for less than six months, and while it was better than I'd expected it to be in some ways, I wasn't all that impressed in others. At the time, it basically just reaffirmed to me that retail WoW was a completely different game from the one I originally fell in love with and that I was happy to move on. On the other hand though, the whole reason I picked up MoP to begin with after originally swearing off WoW in Cata was that my husband wanted us to play together (at the time, we had only just become a couple, I was unemployed as a result of my move, and it was something to do together), and revisiting that part of the game rekindled fond memories of the early days of our relationship. I was kind of surprised by how well I still remembered certain quest lines even though I only went through them that one time over a decade ago.

Whenever my husband and I take on a project like this, his passion is like a sprint while mine is more of a marathon, which leads to a certain degree of conflict, as he wants to play 24/7, while I still want to do other things on the side even when I'm having fun with the new project. We probably would've hit level 70 already if he hadn't caught a bug that kept him from wanting to play games for a few days. As it is, our characters are "only" in their 60s... after clearing only about one and a half zones worth of quests, but the group content pays out well in terms of experience gains and power.

When you first start out, levelling doesn't feel that different from "normal" retail in terms of speed and power, but the XP bonus on your special cloak adds up over time, and gear pieces come with more and more gem slots that allow you to equip wacky extra effects, ranging from extra movement abilities to all kinds of passive shields and sources of damage.

And it's... been surprisingly fun! I say surprisingly because I've long given WoW grief for making the levelling process too fast. The reason for that is that I feel - based on how WoW itself trained me to view things back in Vanilla - that levelling should be about more than just making your numbers go up. In the original game the process synergised well with exploring, doing professions, running dungeons... basically doing a little bit of everything. As levelling was sped up, all of that fell by the wayside, but I still wanted to do it, and that conflict between my desire to see more of the world and the game always pushing me onwards long before I felt ready to move on lies at the heart of my frustrations with modern WoW's levelling.

With that in mind, I was kind of positively surprised by Remix's approach to this, which is to simply remove all worries about out-levelling content and get rid of all distractions. The scaling may be a bit wonky in places, but everything is scaled from 10-70 (with the exception of some dungeons and raids not unlocking until you're a bit higher level), so you can level any way you want and still continue to earn rewards from all the content once you hit 70.

The game starts you out with huge bags so you'll never have to worry about pausing to make room (though the sheer amount of gear that is showered upon you does require the occasional bag clearing break - however, you never need to look for a vendor, as you can dissemble everything at any point, anywhere). There is no loot other than quest items, Remix-specific gear and Bronze, the special currency, so you never have to think about what to vendor and what to mail to an alt. The auction house and mail are entirely disabled, in fact. So are professions (with the exception of fishing for some reason, though this also only just yields more Bronze), which was initially a bit disappointing to me as I was hoping to pick flowers and skin things while making my way through the zones - even if the materials were just going to be virtually worthless MoP-era stuff - but it certainly helps to keep you focused. Daily reputation grinds are also removed or drastically reduced - our Order of the Cloud Serpent egg literally hatched the same day we picked it up instead of requiring days and weeks of care, and the farm at Halfhill is entirely inaccessible from what I understand.

It's a strange case of "less is more" for me, where even though I like the traditional approach of having all these different things to do and think about, it's not much fun if the game doesn't really support that way of playing anymore, so I was surprised to actually find myself appreciative of the devs simply taking all that stuff out of Remix. It's like they were going "Look, we're not even gonna pretend that there's any point to levelling professions here or whatever... just focus on the stuff we did put in for you to play around with" and I can actually respect that.

I initially wasn't planning to level more than one character through Remix, but considering how fast our shaman/druid duo has been flying through the levels and that there are almost three months of the event left, I might end up going through it on another character or two. I'm also planning to keep playing my shaman at the level cap though, to revisit more of the content while earning more Bronze to buy transmogs and mounts.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in week one around an "exploit", as seems to have become the norm with these new event/server launches for Blizzard. Frogs on the Timeless Isle were apparently insanely good for farming Bronze and stats, allowing people to power-level their cloaks to have stats in the thousands within a day. Blizzard quickly hotfixed this of course, which then led to a bit of an outcry from people who were complaining that they could now never "catch up", which was just absurd to me, considering that there is absolutely nothing competitive going on in Remix. Any power gains are only temporary for the duration of the event and won't carry over into regular retail, and PvP is another thing that's entirely disabled, so an overpowered "frog farmer" literally can't hurt you. If anything, having a character like that in your group benefits you... I had to laugh earlier when I queued for an LFR wing and was baffled to see all the bosses die within seconds - the entire thing was done in something like five minutes, most of which was taken up by NPC roleplay conversations. I loaded up Recount to see what was going on and in our 20+ person raid group, one guy had done 70% of the overall damage, another had done about 20%, and everyone else was sitting somewhere between 0 and 1%. Froggers I suppose! I just thought it was incredibly funny and was rather amused to be given such a "boost".

I can understand why Blizzard wanted to stop everyone from getting so insanely OP within less than a week, but I personally saw no harm in letting those who already had it keep their power - but I guess that might've been too much fun, so those cloaks are due to be nerfed now and everyone else will just get some bonus Bronze. Either way, I'm enjoying the mayhem.

I Got To See Atiesh Get Made

Vanilla WoW is full of content that was only ever experienced by a small minority of players when it first came out. One of the great things about Classic was that it allowed more people to see and experience things that they missed back in 2005. I didn't go into Classic with any intentions to raid for example, but it was cool to get to do it in the end and to experience the epicness of 40-man raiding for myself. Similarly, I felt privileged to take part in the forging of the legendary Thunderfury more than once.

One thing that I hadn't seen yet after almost five years of Classic was the creation of the Naxxramas legendary Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian. Atiesh never became as widely popular as Thunderfury, partially I think because it's quite drab-looking compared to the flashy Thunderfury, partially because the fact that it comes from the last raid of the original game meant that fewer people really knew about it. Working on getting it also requires even more of a time-commitment than Thunderfury, as you need to collect forty randomly dropped splinters of the staff from bosses across Naxx, then kill C'thun in AQ40 and Kel'thuzad in Naxx once more, just to then finish off with an extremely demanding five-man boss fight. The latter also goes to why I hadn't seen that part before myself - it's one thing to be in big raid group gathering in the sands of Silithus, helping to take down a giant wind lord, but when the presumptive staff-bearer can only take four of their trusted friends (of the right classes) into an instance for the final step, that does kind of limit who can go.

I was therefore extremely flattered and excited when a friendly druid from my era guild messaged me the other week to let me know that she had nearly collected all the splinters for her own Atiesh and to ask whether I wanted to come along to the final fight when the time came. It's really hard for me to capture how meaningful this simple offer was to me, as I haven't really been online much in Classic era for several months now, even if I do keep logging in to do my auction house stuff and try to stay in touch via Discord. It's still not the same as actually being there for the raids every week.

I was initially nervous that I might miss the whole thing since a holiday took me out of the game for a week, but in the end it worked out so that I came back just in time for Bracken (my druid friend) to collect the last pieces she needed before the five-man fight. Thursday night I logged on excitedly after the guild had finished an AQ40 run, even spurning my husband (there are some occasions that are too special to miss!), and it was only while I made my way to Stratholme that I finally learned what was going to be involved in the fight, partially from people talking about it, partially from looking things up.

Atiesh is a demon that looks like a dreadlord (though I'm not sure whether he's actually supposed to be one, lore-wise) whom you summon on Festival Lane in Stratholme and who hits like an absolute truck. Key to the seemingly intended strategy for the fight is to have a warrior in the group to disarm him, which will cause him to drop his sword as a temporary item that you can pick up and use during the fight to do insane dps, kind of like the weapons of Kael'thas' advisors in Burning Crusade. On top of that he has a constant shadow damage aura akin to that of Baron Rivendare, which combined with the damage on the tank makes it recommendable to bring two healers. Oh, and he pulses an AoE curse on everyone that reduces physical attack power by 1000 (!), which also makes it advisable to bring someone who can decurse.

Our group did contain two of the best-geared priest healers in the guild, but we had neither a warrior nor a decurser, as my friend was tanking in bear form and the other dps was one of the officers on his rogue. This was, frankly, an utterly terrible setup in terms of guaranteeing success, as it meant the boss's damage output on the tank was entirely unmitigated and our dps was perma-nerfed by the curse. (Unbuffed, losing 1000 attack power reduces my hunter's overall AP by about two thirds!)

We gave it one go without world buffs, which ended with our poor bear going squish with the boss at only about 75% health. After that, we decided to pop our chronoboons, which helped a lot. Things still got tense however when a stray wandering ghost got pulled into the fight (not even by me) and started whacking one of the priests. We eventually killed this unexpected add and got things under control, but the fight is so tight that this distraction had caused the tank healing to fall somewhat behind and healers to run out of mana a bit earlier than expected. With the boss at about two percent health, our tank died again, immediately followed by one of the priests, and for a nerve-wracking few seconds we didn't know whether we were going to make it. Fortunately, the rogue managed to pull off the classic manoeuvre of evasion-tanking the boss for his last sliver of health so we could get him down.

The actual hand-in for the quest after that is with Anachronos at the Caverns of Time in Tanaris, so we had a little guild assembly there to cheer for the guild's newest "Guardian". The fact that they were letting a druid build Atiesh should give you an idea of how many versions of this staff there are in the guild by now... one of the fun perks of the never-ending Classic era.

She then made her first portal to Karazhan (it's an on-use effect the staff has) and we all took it and did a bit more silly bouncing between portals in front of Kara before calling it a night. I made a 14-minute video to commemorate the event as well:

7 Reservations I Have About The War Within

I made it clear a few weeks ago that I think Dragonflight has been a great expansion. However, with the War Within alpha up and running, all eyes are increasingly turning towards the next expansion, and I'm afraid to say that I still view it with a degree of scepticism at this point.

There are good things about it for sure - I'm very much looking forward to more mounts being upgraded to Dragonriding dynamic flight for example, as well as the introduction of more account-wide features - though as far as the latter goes, Blizzard is so incredibly late to the party compared to the competition that I also find it hard to give them bigger praise than "fucking finally".

However, there are also quite a few points that I currently look at that still make me shake my head and go "I don't know". I want The War Within to be good, and I wasn't immediately in love with Dragonflight based on the early announcements either, so there is definitely room to win me over. I'm just kind of... concerned right now. From biggest to smallest, here are my current worries in regards to The War Within:

1. Pay a Lot to Early Acess

I'm actually not opposed to early access being used as an incentive for new MMO releases in principle - but the way Blizzard are giving people three days of it only if you buy the most expensive super ultra mega deluxe edition of the expansion doesn't sit right with me at all. I know they've tried to reassure everyone that early access players won't gain any significant gameplay advantages during that time, but that's not really the point for me.

The WoW community is one that is always in a rush, and when it comes to people whose brains seem to be permanently on speed, three days are an absolute eternity. Unless we opt to completely stay off the internet, those of us who refuse to shell out this kind of money will be met with an absolute deluge of spoilers about stuff we can't play yet, everyone else who's still locked out will grumble, and I generally expect the community to be in an unpleasant state of tension between the haves and have-nots. I'm pretty sure one or two people in our little friend group will go for the early access too, and it will be super awkward to see them level up ahead of the rest of us.

I mean, I can hope that it will all blow over relatively quickly, because at the end of the day it is "only" three days and any outrage and annoyance may end up just being a storm in a tea cup. On the other hand though, a really bad launch experience can colour people's impressions of an expansion for a long time.

2. Story Regression

Dragonflight's story got a lot of flak but I honestly feel like a lot of that has been overblown because there simply wasn't anything else to complain about. While I'd never claim that it was without flaws, I appreciated that it seemed to try out a fresh new direction in many ways, especially in how it approached themes of familial conflict and death, in a game where a lot of plot points in the past have basically boiled down to "guy gets angry and runs away/goes on a vengeful killing spree". It made me hopeful for the game's future.

And then Chris Metzen came back and they laid off a bunch of the people who've defined WoW's story direction for the past couple of years. My initial reaction was mostly one of confusion, since I didn't have any particular feelings about Metzen and couldn't at all relate to those who seemed to think that his return heralded some sort of return to glory for WoW's storytelling.

However, as more time has passed, I've found myself with a slowly increasing feeling of dread instead - dread that him being back will mean narrative regression for WoW, and that the game's story will simply fall back onto all its old tropes. I'm not a fan of Anduin seemingly turning into a grizzled old war veteran/Varian 2.0 for example (as I never liked Varian much to begin with). And then I came across a massive spoiler for the start of War Within in a YouTube thumbnail of all things - if you want to skip discussion of that, just go ahead to the next point on the list.

If you already know or don't care to be spoiled, I am of course talking about the destruction of Dalaran. And yes, the devs have also already been out there trying to do damage control, telling everyone that they think it's the right thing to do for the story and so on and so forth - but they also thought that when they came up with the Cataclysm, when they blew up Theramore and burned Teldrassil, and yet those decisions still ended up being hated by players for years after the fact. I think "we need to blow shit up or nobody will care" is definitely a step backwards and really dampened my enthusiasm for the expansion already, and I'm not even particularly attached to Dalaran.

3. No Sky All Expansion

This seems to be one of these things that people either relate to immediately or don't understand at all, with apparently no in-between. Simply put, WoW is at its best when it lets you explore wide open and beautiful spaces. Caves and "evil" zones exist as places of danger to venture forth into, but are not enjoyable as somewhere to hang out in all the time.

With that in mind, I'm very concerned about the entirety of The War Within basically being set underground. Sure, they can do things to alleviate the oppressiveness of that theme - one of the zones has something like a "fake sun" in the sky I believe - but I'm not sure that's going to be enough considering that there's never been an underground zone that I loved. Zaralek Cavern in Dragonflight was probably the best zone of this kind they've ever done, and it was still undoubtedly the expansion's weakest spot. Building a whole expansion on that premise is... a choice.

4. Delves

When delves were first announced as a new progression path for open world/solo players, I thought "neat", but the more I've learned about them from reporting from the alpha, the less interested I've become. They're not so much open world content as just another form of instance that can also be soloed instead of done in a group and that... just doesn't sound that exciting? I'm kind of reminded of Mists of Pandaria's scenarios, which I thought were pretty lame.

They're probably not going to be the worst thing in the world, but as the key new expansion feature that's supposed to change the game for years to come the way Dragonriding did, delves currently don't look promising to me at all.

5. Talent Complications

In my Dragonflight review I put the talent revamp down as a positive overall, but the system is quite complex. In my opinion the best way of letting players come to grips with it would be to not change it too dramatically for the next couple of years, just apply some tweaks and refinements maybe.

So what does Blizzard decide to do in War Within? Add a third "mini tree" to the whole thing and it just made me sigh the moment I learned about it. I remember hearing some discussion about the earliest version of the priest "hero talents", and while that obviously wasn't final, it sounded so complicated that just listening to people talk about them made my head hurt. As someone who thinks that retail WoW's combat still suffers from a lot of unnecessary complexity, I find it hard to see how these new talents could be anything other than a way of accelerating us down the road of "it's all too much of a mess" again and having yet another complete talent revamp incoming.

6. Xal'atath

I was rather befuddled when Holly Longdale announced this character as the main villain of the expansion (or at least the start of it) seemingly with an expectation of generating excitment, since I knew so little about her. PlaniumWoW's lore video about the character was very helpful in that regard, and I definitely related to the opening skit that has Holly's announcement ending with someone from the crowd yelling "Who the fuck is that?".

Unfortunately knowing more about Xal'atath hasn't really made me like her more. Her "master manipulations" honestly remind me more of the worst traits of the Jailer - possibly the most hated villain in WoW history - and it feels like people are just more willing to give her a pass because she's an undead elf with a sexy voice. Clearly this was a position that needed filling with Sylvanas out of the picture... Maybe she'll actually turn out to be cool and I'll change my mind, but for now I'm not optimistic that she'll turn out to be anything but an attempt to appal to a certain... demographic.

7. Just... Rock Dwarves?

I'm not saying the success of any given WoW expansion is tied to its new races and classes, but it's worth noting that the only two expansions that added neither of these were Warlords of Draenor and Shadowlands. Giving us an allied race of slightly differently skinned dwarves isn't much of a step up from not giving us anything at all in my opinion. And look, I'm not being anti-dwarf here, I'd also be disappointed if it was just one allied race (as in, one using an existing race's skeleton and animations) of a different type. I don't think this is a huge deal (which is why it's at the bottom of this list) but it's just another way in which War Within seems to want to underwhelm right from the start when compared to many of its predecessors.