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.

MoP Remix: A Retrospective

Mists of Pandaria: Remix is wrapping up in a few days, so I wanted to talk about it one more time. I haven't really written about playing it since mid-June, when I think I sounded a bit disenchanted with it after my initially very positive impressions.

I kept chipping away at it at a slow pace, however, and it soon became evident that a lot of the people who had been super intense about it in the first month (such as my very own husband *cough*) had achieved most of their goals and dropped off. This was very noticeable from dungeon and raid finder queues growing in length (one evening I queued for one of the wings of Siege of Orgrimmar as both tank and healer and had to literally wait for an hour to get a pop) and from slightly less rush-rush madness across the board. That's not to say that there were no longer any overpowered characters farming things... but somewhat fewer than I would have expected. Since the power level of the special event-specific cloak is not capped, I would have expected to see more and more powerful characters over time, but the reality seemed to be that - like when you enter a cheat code in a single-player game and get bored after the initial rush of excitement wears off - a lot of people who worked hard to max out their gear in the first couple of weeks quickly got tired of actually using it. I started to see a lot more weak alts around, and even the stronger characters weren't running around one-shotting world bosses anymore.

Nowhere was this change more apparent than in the dungeon and raid finder, which meant that queueing for group content became a wilder experience than ever. You see, with so many runs effectively involving no gameplay other than sprinting after someone who'd ground out insane power levels, roles were pretty meaningless, and it made sense to queue as everything your class could do just to make pops happen, regardless of what spec you were actually intending to play. But as the player population shifted, you'd more often find yourself in runs without anyone as seriously OP, which would then lead to mayhem and confusion.

I remember queueing into a Stormstout Brewery on my druid who only had tank talents, getting put in as a healer, and being aghast when it turned out that people in this low-level group actually needed healing (I wouldn't be surprised if the actual tank hadn't actually been ready to tank either). We very slowly made our way through the first couple of rooms with multiple deaths, until someone mercifully quit the group and was replaced by an OP paladin who then proceeded to carry us through the rest of the run.

On the other hand though, I really loved that one time when I got into heroic Blood in the Snow on a fairly fresh 70 who I thought was pretty squishy, and it turned out that the rogue and priest I got grouped with were even squishier. We wiped on the very first trash pull, and then died a couple more times for good measure before we actually got our act together and started using proper tactics, such as focus targeting, using cooldowns and kiting. That was quite exciting!

I ultimately ended up levelling five characters through Remix - which is fewer than some, but still quite a lot by my own standards. I would've had time to do more, but as I think I stated before, I just don't see the point of having an endless number of characters at the level cap that have no history, no professions and that I don't know how to play. The five that I did level all had distinct reasons for existing.

First there was my resto shaman, who ended up being my Remix "main" and who quested her way through all the content with my husband's bear druid. Choosing to be a healer soon turned out to be a disappointment, seeing how healers were pretty useless 99% of the time except to facilitate faster queue pops, but I persevered with my healing spec because I wanted to at least try to familiarise myself with the current resto shaman kit a bit.

I will say that even without upgrading my gear, just by doing all that questing and group content, I eventually reached a level where I felt pretty powerful in the open world even as a healing spec, one-shotting regular mobs and able to kill elites in a few hits. I ended up completing all the Remix-specific achievements, and since there was something pretty zen to the whole thing once I hit a comfortable power level, I even ground out some of the non-Remix-specific Pandaria achievements and rewards, such as getting the mount for 100,000 Timeless Coins or killing every single rare on the Timeless Isle (after the War Within pre-patch merged achievement progress from different characters, it turned out I was only missing a few). I also ground out the dinosaur mount from the Isle of Giants and slowly duo-ed Oondasta to death with a random worgen death knight (I hadn't planned to do it that way, but I saw him start and could tell that he wasn't going to survive on his own, so I joined in and ended up heal-tanking the fight while he just added dps).

My next three alts were primarily the result of me trying to be clever about my goal of grinding out the cosmetics (and failing). While any Remix character could buy all the appearances, drops of armour and weapons were still based on your current class, so my shaman for example could only pick up mail gear and weapons a shaman could actually equip. I thought I would be clever by levelling a class of every armour type and saving myself some Bronze by acquiring gear sets "organically". This only worked in part, however. I did get several world and dungeon sets on each character, but in general Remix didn't really seem to be optimised for organic set acquisition. For example I remember one of the mail sets just wouldn't complete, and the UI said that the only source of the two pieces I was missing was a vendor... that turned out to not exist in Remix, and I guess those pieces weren't added to the special drop tables either, so I had to take a regular character to Pandaria to buy those bits for gold to complete the set.

At least I did have a workaround for that particular problem... my attempts to collect the Throne of Thunder LFR tier set for shamans were a lot less successful, as the boots forever eluded me, no matter how many times I queued for the wing that was supposed to drop them. This was stupid in so far as the armour sets weren't even that expensive, and I honestly had enough Bronze to just buy the set after a mere couple of runs, but I still had it in my head that the "natural" way should be better than buying everything from the vendor. It just wasn't.

Anyway, I still ended up with some useful characters levelled, so it wasn't a complete loss. I already mentioned that I created a protection warrior for example. Warrior is a class I've just never got along with in any incarnation of the game, despite its popularity, so this was actually the first time I reached the current level cap with one. I also had a lot of fun charging and leaping through dungeons, though I don't think that really taught me anything about tanking, considering that "tanking" in Remix basically just meant running ahead and spamming your AoE skills, no mitigation or defensives needed.

For the leather, I ended up levelling another druid. I did already have one from the original Mists of Pandaria that's somewhere in the low 60s and that I just never bothered to level all the way to the cap, but with druids being able to play so many roles and me not being a fan of constant respecs anyway, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to make another one. I mostly played her as a bear since I enjoyed watching my husband's fuzzy bear butt and wanted to see more of that kind of thing. But again, like with the warrior... just running around hitting your spammable AoE isn't really representative of tanking.

Finally, my cloth wearer ended up being a warlock. Like with the warrior, this was the first time I ended up getting this class to the cap, but it was a lot less comfortable. I levelled as destruction and honestly had no idea what I was doing at any point. Fortunately levelling a dps class through group content in Remix required very little in terms of knowledge or skill. While she and her incubus are kind of cute (you can't see it in the screenshot, but she's got green hair under that hood), I can't see myself playing this character much in the future because everything about the modern warlock toolkit just confuses me.

So that's four characters, and as my fifth I eventually ended up creating a dps monk on my old Horde server, Earthen Ring. I had seen Belghast talk about using the event to "seed" characters on different servers in case he wanted to play with friends on those servers later, and this seemed like a clever idea to me at the time. (I had no idea that the pre-patch would effectively make servers obsolete, making the whole project pointless from that perspective.) Still, it wasn't a total loss as I also used the opportunity to check out Pandaria from Horde side, something I had never done before. I didn't do all the quests though, as I found out in Jade Forest that the neutral Pandaren quest hubs seemed to be exactly the same as for Alliance, so it made sense to me to focus on the content that had obvious faction flavour, such as the Landfall campaign and the Isle of Thunder intro. I was rather amused to see the Horde actually express disappointment about their recruitment of the Hozen once they found out that the Alliance had got the much cleverer fish people, and seeing the whole drama around the purge of Dalaran play out from Horde side was certainly interesting. Seeing Lor'themar get mad enough to chuck a park bench into a fountain was definitely... something.

All in all, I really enjoyed Remix, despite some early disappointments and the pressure of FOMO. It really hit me in this J1mmy video about WoW how he notes that MMO expansions are about more than just the lore and the quests, but about being there and having a shared experience with other people. And in that respect, roping off an old expansion and sending players off to play exclusively in that content for three months worked so much better than solo-levelling through Chromie Time and being booted out after completing two zones worth of quests. Sure, some parts of the original content were missing, and it still suffered from the standard WoW problem of it being way too easy to accidentally experience things wildly out of order, but at least it was only things from that expansion. I played in original Mists of Pandaria for a few months (which was still longer than the duration of Remix!) but there were quite a few things I didn't get to see at the time, and it was really nice to both re-experience content I'd only really seen once before and to go and finally see the things I'd missed back then, such as Siege of Orgrimmar. There were a lot of things about the end of MoP that had honestly always been kind of vague to me as I hadn't experienced them for myself and had to piece things together from later references that were rather disjointed. Being able to see the story for myself was quite enlightening.

So I really enjoyed the "time capsule" aspect of the whole thing. As for the special cloak, tinker gems and getting super OP... eh, I honestly think I could've done without those things. I mean, there were parts of it that were fun: the tinker gem that made you immune to fall damage for example definitely encouraged you to try new things, and was quite a source of entertainment whenever people forgot that they hadn't slotted it on their newest alt yet. However, I feel they also shone a spotlight on some of the worst issues of the WoW community and dialled them up to eleven, such as the widespread competitive urge to be the first to no-life it to the top, or people with vastly different power levels and goals being thrown together in group content. I remember when I first got annoyed with some of the extreme rushing in dungeons and raids that would even make you miss out on bosses, I did some searching to see if there were people talking about that topic on reddit or the forums, and some of the (often highly upvoted!) responses I saw to the mere suggestion to have some consideration for your fellow players were bad enough to make one lose faith in humanity as a whole. The saving grace was that the worst of those people also seemed to be the first ones to be done with the mode, leaving things to mellow down somewhat over time, as I already mentioned at the start of this post. Ultimately I think I would've enjoyed Remix no less if it had just been about playing through Pandaria with "normal" characters.

I would also happily take part in another Remix - WoD and Legion would be prime contenders for me as expansions I didn't play at all back in the day. Though I think I'd also enjoy a remixed Burning Crusade, just to spend some time in that content again without the weird constant pressure to keep up that defined much of my experience in its Classic iteration.

Radiant Echoes: A Love Letter to Azeroth

Due to my current lack of excitement for War Within, I also ignored the pre-expansion event for its first week or so. It didn't help that what vague mutterings I caught about it usually complained that it wasn't fun for some reason or another. The other night though, I figured that I should really go and at least check it out, even if I wasn't that interested in farming it. I've taken part in the last two pre-expansion events, and it would have felt weird to miss this one entirely while I have an active subscription. Plus people were saying that it had been vastly improved since its underwhelming launch.

And I've got to say: I was positively surprised - except for the fact that the intro quest seems to be a bit buggy for max-level characters and doesn't always appear. Since it's supposed to be auto-granted, there's nothing you can do if it just fails to show up. But I just looked up where I was supposed to go on Wowhead and off I went.

The event, called Radiant Echoes, once again takes place in three older zones: Searing Gorge, Dustwallow Marsh and Dragonblight. The active zone rotates once an hour, and the general gist of the event is that you deal with manifested "memories" (which are basically group world quests) to fill a bar, and once you've done enough of them a big boss spawns (a memory of Rangaros, Onyxia and Arthas respectively). Then the cycle starts all over again.

I'll admit that doesn't sound very exciting on paper, but clearly a lot of love has gone into designing the memories, as they tend to reference a piece of classic content beloved by the community that takes/took place on the same continent as the active zone. So in Searing Gorge for example, you fight echoes of Hogger and Hakkar, hunt down Stranglethorn pages and relive the battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore. In Dragonblight, there are memories of the Argent Tournament and Thorim, so sometimes you hear shouts of "You face Jaraxxus, Eredar Lord of the Burning Legion!" and "In the mountains..." overlapping each other, which always cracks me up.

I had a good time doing a round of all three zones, but wasn't really that fussed about the gear rewards. One thing I noticed however was that a lot of people seemed to use the event to level alts, which is not usually something I want or need, but I realised only the other day that there's exactly one healing class I don't currently have at level 70: the paladin. I didn't want to make another Timerunner since I have a whole bunch of low-level paladins already, but what if... I took one of those existing lowbies through the event? Just to see what it was like? With everything being cross-server now, I could take any character from my old stable of alts and it would be able to play with my friends on any server in the future.

After brief deliberation, I decided to pick a level 25 dwarf paladin from my old Alliance server Darkspear. I chose the free gear upgrade and spent a few minutes feeling confused by the contents of her old bags, as they contained quite a bit of Outland stuff and I had no memory of taking her there whatsoever. She also had exactly one quest in her log, to kill two bosses in BRD. Okaaay?

At least the event intro quest worked fine on a low-level, which is how I learned that I'd been wasting a lot of time travelling to the different zones the old-fashioned way, as there's a temporary portal to Legion Dalaran right next to the Stormwind auction house, and within Dalaran itself there are three two-way portals to the relevant zones all right next to each other that also show you which zone is the currently active one and for how long.

I started my journey in Searing Gorge and rotated through the zones almost every hour, though I took breaks. I learned a lot of things that way:

• The first "cycle" of memories followed by a boss kill within the hour is always by far the fastest one, with huge crowds completing some of the memory world quests in a matter of seconds. I think this is because it's an obvious starting point, and it's easier to decide to take a break later in the hour. While groups kept working on the memories throughout the full duration of the zone being active, they definitely became a lot smaller over time.
• You get occasional gear pieces as rewards while taking part in the event, but for some reason they have a really low item level up to level 60 and are completely useless other than for transmog. This also means that - as usual - you become weaker and weaker as you level up. I initially thought that the people I could sometimes see just hovering on their flying mounts above the event area were "leeching" a bit, trying to get credit without doing anything, until I realised that many of them were levellers that were scared of getting into the fray as they had to worry about dying to something as small as a random knockback due to how squishy they were (something that happened to me multiple times as I got higher up in levels). 
• On top of that, phasing shenanigans can also screw you over. At one point things were rolling along super smoothly in Dragonblight when I flew to the next memory, landed... and found myself completely alone. I flew around to check on the other world quests, but none of them had any real activity, and all I saw was a couple of other levellers that seemed equally confused about where everyone else had gone. I don't know why the game thought that it was a good idea to separate us from the rest at that point. I followed the advice on reddit to go back to Dalaran and relog in hopes of landing in a better version of the zone on returning.
• There is a clear hierarchy in terms of how popular the various memories are. I've completed every single one at least once, but the single boss ones are easily everyone's favourite because they go fast, and they are pretty safe for even the squishiest leveller to take part in, as you just have to hit the boss briefly and stay out of bad stuff. The ones with lots of items to click on and mobs to fight are less popular because they're comparatively slow, and aside from the one with the frogs in Dragonblight, there are no real "non-combat options". Even the ones that look deceptively peaceful at first glance, such as the one to wake lazy peons, feature random mob spawns that attack you... which once again, is very dangerous if you're a squishy leveller as that random scorpid that suddenly aggros on you might well kill you.

Anyway, I didn't keep close track of how much time I spent on all this as I didn't remember to check the character's /played until after I'd started, but I think she was on about two and a half days of play time when I began my little experiment, and hit 70 after about five hours of grinding the event. She also earned just short of 50k of the event currency in the process. That strikes me as... pretty fast! It's not something I'd want to do over and over again, but it was interesting to do as a one-time thing.

Xal'atath Does YouTube

Three days ago, Blizzard dropped another War Within cinematic on their official YouTube channel, called Threads of Destiny. While featuring less visual detail than their last cinematic, it actually gives some background for one of the villains of the upcoming expansion and I recommend watching it. It's in line with the kind of character vignettes that they've been doing pre-launch for several expansions now and which I've always quite enjoyed (though anything's yet to beat BfA's Daughter of the Sea, a seriously incredible musical number whose success is also reflected in it being one of the most watched videos on WoW's YouTube channel, even above some of the official expansion cinematics).

Threads of Destiny is a solid addition, but I've got to admit it does nothing to assuage my worries about the story returning to old tropes, seeing how it shows how one of the first villains we'll encounter in the new expansion is evil because she was ambitious and got corrupted through a bargain with (an agent of the) Old Gods, a WoW villain arc we've dealt with about about a hundred times before. Though I liked that several of the most upvoted YouTube comments drew a parallel to Arthas with phrases like "succeeding you, mother"; I had not thought of that one myself.

Anyway, the agent of the Old Gods in question (even if she might not be working for them anymore) is of course Xal'atath, and she's been very active on YouTube in the past few weeks. I first noticed it in this Taliesin and Evitel video, where around the 12 minute mark Taliesin is about to launch into a long soliloquy about the latest cinematic when he suddenly gets drowned out and disappeared by Xal'atath, who comments: "Welcome to the real weekly reset. Taliesin and Evitel are sadly indisposed as they are busy being consumed by the Void, like you all soon will be!" However, the video then just resumes as normal by cutting to Evitel's next bit. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that to be honest, as their videos are always full of jokes and little skits, plus Tali has been a proud self-professed Xal'atath simp since Legion, so my first thought was that maybe it was just another one of their bits - though I did notice that Xal'atath's real voice actress was being used, not some goofy voice-changer.

It was more obvious that something was going on when I encountered the same thing around the 2:15 mark in a Preach video a couple of days later - and one that had nothing to do with The War Within at all, as it was about the history of the guild Paragon. Xal'atath seems to briefly almost possess Preach while also taunting him about how "you and your world will be mine" - but again, the video just resumes as normal immediately afterwards. I went to the comments to see whether people were talking about this strange interruption, but at the time couldn't find anything. People only seemed to care about the actual content of the video, not this weird interlude. A bit of googling surfaced a forum thread where someone noted that they'd noticed Xal'atath cameos in multiple people's content recently, and others were chiming in with additional examples that they'd seen. Eventually Wowhead did a full news post summarising all her known appearances. Apparently she also speaks Spanish and Portuguese!

Since I work in marketing in real life, I thought that was a really interesting thing for Blizzard to do - clearly it required some effort and a solid degree of collaboration with all these content creators. I'm just not sure I get the "why" exactly. People watching these guys will already be aware of the expansion and of Xal'atath as a character (even if they don't know much about her) and is having her wax poetic about her evil plans really going to make much of a difference to anyone's perception here?

My best guess is that someone in the WoW marketing team was like: "Remember Wrath of the Lich King? People loved how Arthas was everywhere, constantly taunting the players. Nobody had anything bad to say about that. We should do something like that again, and make it even bigger. Maybe we can even take it outside the game itself!" And yeah, you can find my own thoughts on that in the linked sentence, which goes to a post on this blog from 2009, in which I talk about how Arthas became a bit of a joke over the course of Wrath of the Lich King, constantly showing up to make speeches while coming up with excuses for not fighting you at that particular moment.

However, I think that was not the majority opinion at the time, and many players still consider Wrath their favourite expansion in all aspects, so maybe the WoW marketing team isn't entirely off with their thinking there. The only difference being that Arthas was a character with a lot of history behind him, while Xal'atath is not - I guess it remains to be seen whether the power of "sexy elf lady" on its own is enough to make the masses love her. I'm already kind of tired of her myself to be honest and the expansion hasn't even launched yet. I want to see villains with interesting plans and personal interactions, not endless cartoonish speeches about what a badass you are and all the evil things you're totally going to do later (not now though, bye!).

Pre-Expansion Doldrums

The War Within is less than a month away and I'm not at all hyped yet. If anything, it's kind of the opposite and I'm feeling rather down on the whole prospect of the expansion right now. I'm mostly just logging into Remix to finish up my last few goals for that mode but otherwise Classic has been a lot more fun recently than retail.

All my reservations about what we've seen of War Within so far are still in play, but more specifically, I'm looking at the expansion looming in the distance and I just don't know what I'm going to do with it, as in: what class I'm going to play. I miss having an undisputed main. I had one from Burning Crusade through Cata, but ever since I returned to retail properly at the end of BfA it's all felt a bit fuzzy. My monk was my main throughout Shadowlands, but with how little time it takes to level a character in retail nowadays and how little you actually see of the world during your adventures, I'm finding it hard to get as invested in new characters as I used to.

Changing to evoker in Dragonflight came kind of organically, and I only realised in hindsight how lucky I was in that regard, as I both liked the class's gameplay and it slotted into the expansion story really well. Like demon hunters in Legion, evokers were designed to transition straight from their starting area into the story of Dragonflight, and everything actually made sense.

But now we've got this new, supposedly story-heavy expansion looming, which is all about characters from older expansions that none of my own characters have any connection to and I can't quite wrap my head around it. It's funny because I don't think I was that fussed about the story in retail, but the thought of going into an expansion to do tasks for NPCs that my characters have technically never met in game while treating them as if they were old friends really puts me off.

When I logged in yesterday, I was surprised to be greeted by a new cinematic that Wowhead called "Previously in World of Warcraft", though I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the official name. Either way it tries to summarise the most important events from the last four expansions that are relevant to War Within over the course of three and a half minutes - something that I think is actually a really good idea, but at the same time also puts a spotlight on the problem I mentioned above, seeing how the video name-drops no fewer than eleven different characters throughout its runtime, while showing and featuring even more. If you weren't around for the introduction of those characters and/or aren't too well-versed in WoW lore in general, I'm not sure a bunch of disconnected one-liners about how "x did so-and-so" are really going to make things that much clearer for you.

I just really feel like I'm missing an in-game "hook" for War Within so far. A few days ago, the official WoW YouTube channel also dropped a second cinematic for War Within, and I was surprised to see that it currently has more dislikes than likes. I thought it looked very good visually, but after reading some of the comments it became clear to me that this is a sign of the expansion struggling to pull people other than me in as well. A lot of commenters noted that "it doesn't look like WoW", which I don't really agree with, but it certainly lacks a clear hook for you as the player. There are some cool characters and locations on display, sure, but what do any of them have to do with me? The only reason I know anything about who/what any of them are is because of watching content creators talk about beta content - the trailer itself certainly doesn't make it very clear. As it stands, I worry a bit that Blizzard's ambitious new story plans may be built on a foundation of sand.

(I've seen some comments about the new trailer being a throwback to the original WoW trailer, which didn't have an overarching narrative either, but I think that is missing something important: the original WoW trailer had narration setting the scene and showed you different roles you could play in that setting. The new War Within trailer has neither of those.)

Finally, the cherry on top of my cake of expansion uncertainty recently came while doing M+ with my guildies. A couple of them have been really hyped about WoW and the expansion recently, which you know... good for them, but my ears perked up when conversation about "what I personally want to do in the expansion" turned into "how we're all going to do M+ in the expansion". I've had a decent enough time getting to know the M+ system in Dragonflight, but the idea that this was supposed to automatically have locked me in for the entirety of the next expansion as well and that class choices should be made based on potential M+ comp set off massive alarms in my head, because it's something I hadn't even thought about. I tried to express this to the group but we were so far apart in terms of expectations that I think people didn't quite get what I was saying. (Me saying that I wasn't sure I even wanted to do M+ at the start of the new expansion somehow got turned into "of course we're not going to do it immediately, we've got to gear up and unlock it first").

All I know is that thanks to Remix, I'll be going into the War Within with close to a dozen level 70s, none of whom feel like a great fit for this new storyline as they have barely interacted with the relevant NPCs - if at all - and a burden of expectations from guildies who seem to picture us running M+ every weekend in the expansion with no consideration for how much a WoW expansion can change things... both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of people's enjoyment of the game. I once again remember Kordac, the holy priest who was an absolute pillar of our raid team in Burning Crusade and quit the game a few weeks into WotLK because he hated the levelling. Never underestimate how dramatically a WoW expansion can change everything for people.