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.
Posts
I'm not a big fan of account-based systems in general although the dripfeed of such things over the years in most games I play has mostly worn away my original, strong objections. I still think they ought to be opt-in for each character, though. I don't feel comfortable with the assumption that all of my characters somehow know each other let alone hang out together. It just feels off.
ReplyDeleteEven though I don't really role-play, I generally have a head canon of who knows who, why, when and how. I hear that in the new GW2 housing system, all your characters end up in the same home and it actively puts me off getting the expansion to try it out, which I had been thinking of doing. At least some of those characters do "know" each other, though, as do my WoW Classic team, who were making gear for each other for a while. I've never really thought about whether my WoW Retail characters know each other though...
I remember writing a post about this subject in general on my SWTOR blog once... ah yes, here it is, and you were the first person to comment on it back then too!
DeleteI'm still a fan of a lot of character progression being character-specific actually, but I think it's hard to deny that even in a MMO that encourages alts, there are always going to be parts of the game that just simply aren't fun to do over and over again... or at least not as often as the actual alt levelling is fun. I don't necessarily see account-wide features as an in-character admission that all your characters know each other, but more of a wink and a nudge towards the player to say "it's okay, you don't have to go through all that again".
With WoW in specific, the thing that made me feel like it needed more account-wide features was that at least from Cataclysm onwards (which was more than a decade ago now), they intentionally designed a lot of the game around the idea that players could change their main character/class for endgame at almost any moment with minimal friction, clearly elevating the importance of the player behind the keyboard while playing down investment in individual characters. The actual levelling process, something I actually found quite fun, was repeatedly gutted in the process. Yet at the same time they held on to certain other (and significantly less fun!) features like achievements, reputations, currencies etc. being strictly per-character like it was still 2004. That made those things feel like pure nuisances that the devs just couldn't be bothered to address, since they didn't mesh at all with how the rest of the game worked.