Legion Remix: What Am I Even Doing?

Legion Remix continues to enthrall retail WoW players, and that includes me. The other week I went to K'aresh for a bit and it was like a ghost town. Rares I'd never seen before were up everywhere, only surrounded by tumbleweeds. Meanwhile in Lemix, seemingly every part of every zone is popping, as are all the activity queues.

Almost a month in, I'm working on levelling my third character, but I'm also feeling a bit lost. Looking back at how I wrote about MoP Remix last year, I actually had similar feelings back then, though I eventually found purpose in replaying all the Pandaria story quests, selective hunting of achievements, and grinding Bronze to be able to buy all the cosmetics.

I thought I'd just do the same thing again this time around, but the changes made to the system make everything hit differently. I feel like I'm getting showered in Bronze as a mere side effect of everything else I'm doing, and I've actually been holding off on buying too many things as I know that some rewards can be earned by simply playing too, and I want to avoid spending currency on an item that I would've gotten naturally a week later anyway. (I read several comments from people who fell into this trap.)

In terms of doing the story quests, the husband and I made our way through the original four zones as well as the entirety of the Suramar campaign, which meant we were "caught up" until today's patch release opened up the Broken Shore. I'm actually not sure how I feel about the more staggered content release cadence they are doing for Legion. I kind of liked how MoP Remix was just completely open from the beginning and everything felt like you'd simply get there when you got there, but I figured maybe slowing some of the rushers down a bit this time around wouldn't be so bad to maintain interest in Legion Remix for a little longer. Now that I'm seeing it in action though - I don't know, it feels like instead there is this unspoken pressure to always do the newest bit of content quickly while everyone else is there, because in two weeks everyone will have moved on again. It's probably only in my head, but either way I'm not sure this change actually feels like an improvement to me personally.

The fact that there's an achievement for levelling one of each class during Remix, combined with my interest in seeing the different class order halls, has made me consider making that a personal goal for myself, but I'm still not 100% sure I've truly got the motivation. Yeah, seeing different class order halls is cool, but the shtick of being made "leader of your order" or whatever less than an hour after creating your character just grates a bit, even with the humorous explanation given by the infinite dragons. My most recent alt is a monk and having famous NPCs like Chen Stormstout or Taran Zhu fawn over a derpy little level 30 vulpera as "Grandmaster" just feels wrong.

Everything's also flying by so fast it kind of makes my head spin. Does playing a few hours to make a number go from 10 to 80 at super speed even still count as "levelling"? Can I really think of these new alts as characters when they have so little history and have had no real adventures of their own? They feel like dress-up dolls for different transmog sets more than anything else.

It kind of highlights a problem I have with retail WoW in general: that it gives rewards too quickly and for too little, to the point where they start feeling a bit meaningless and I eventually get sick of them. I used to have a similar problem back when I played Neverwinter, whenever they'd have some sort of bonus event and I'd grind like crazy until I just felt burnt out. WoW does something similar to me nowadays, where they'll provide loads of activities that are quick and rewarding, and I keep thinking "wow, that was fun and took no time at all, I should also do that on my alt" or something along those lines, but even a quick task starts to take up significant amounts of time once you repeat it ten times, and eventually I hit the point where it just becomes too much and too repetitive, so that I end up needing a break. It's like when someone gives you a cookie and at first you just think that's nice but if they then expect you to eat twenty more you'll just want to get away from the craziness eventually.

Remix is like that too, only dialled up to eleven. I definitely enjoy it in small doses, but I'm honestly not sure I can deal with the way it attempts to inject dopamine straight into my veins seemingly every five minutes.

Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience

I've mostly written about Turtle WoW in terms of their custom content and how it compares to real Vanilla WoW, but I wanted to also dedicate some time to writing about mechanical and quality of life changes they've made to the game because I think they've made some interesting decisions in that area.

To begin with, what we call "Turtle WoW" actually runs three servers in the West at the moment, two designated as RP-PvE and one PvP. (There are some Chinese servers as well, but I don't really know much about those.) I actually find it interesting that there are no "normal" PvE servers - you've got to be accepting of roleplaying or GTFO. Now, I don't know how much RP actually happens on these servers - I've occasionally seen people that looked like they might be roleplaying but nothing I could identify as such with certainty. However, it sends a message that the devs support RP and immersion and I kind of like that. It strikes me as a virtual application of the broken windows theory - show that you care about the small stuff and it makes a better environment for everyone.

My hunter is on the older of the two PvE servers because I wanted to avoid the new server crowds on the more recently launched server. It's still plenty busy where I am and I've had no issues finding people to group with.

I also accepted a random guild invite at one point just because I thought the name looked kind of neat and I was curious whether there were any new guild-specific features to discover. The answer to that was yes. I wasn't surprised that guild banks are a thing, considering that's one of those features that everyone but the most hardcore Vanilla purists would be quite happy to import from Burning Crusade, however my ears perked up when I saw people mention a "guild house". My first thought was, WTF, Turtle WoW has housing? How come nobody mentioned that before? Well, the reason is that it doesn't really. What it does have is the ability for a guild to designate an existing inn as their guild's "base of operations" so to speak, and your guild tabard then serves as a second hearthstone to that inn. In that same building, you also gain rested XP at a heavily accelerated rate, similar to what you get while standing under a tent. It may not be "housing" but it's still a neat feature. 

Speaking of tents, I previously mentioned benefiting from the rested XP boost of a tent in Darkshore, but I didn't go into any detail about them (to be fair, at the time I also didn't really know much more about them than that standing under one was beneficial). The Turtle devs added a secondary profession called survival, which is not very fleshed out to be honest - but it does allow you to craft this item called Traveler's Tent, which you can plop down anywhere in the world to let people benefit from a quick boost to their rested XP. There's a two-hour cooldown on crafting them and you can only carry one at a time, so you can't spam them, but there's pretty much always at least one active right outside the gates of Stormwind.

It's a lovely way of encouraging player interaction and makes breaks feel more meaningful, but I also like that it's just one more way in which Turtle WoW let's you fine-tune the rate of your XP gains. Basically the tents allow you to almost permanently have an XP boost up if you want it and plan for it, but there are also levelling challenges that intentionally reduce your XP, and you can toggle XP gains on or off entirely via your portrait at any time. Giving players this much agency about just how fast or slowly they want to level has felt very refreshing to me compared to Blizzard's accelerationist approach that likes to just apply huge XP bonuses to everyone to get them to the end already. In Turtle, I made a lot of use of tents earlier on when I just wanted to get to the newer content, but recently I've stopped as I started to feel like I was going too fast. I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that not all players like to level at the same speed, and that even the same player may prefer to go slower or faster at different points depending on their mood.

Aside from obvious XP adjustments, other changes to questing make it feel smoother and more fun than in "normal" Vanilla, without jumping straight to the extreme streamlining that was introduced in Cataclysm. For example, just the addition of all these new zones with things to do helps to ease any potential stresses about where to go and how to get to the next level. I often hear people say that back in Vanilla, there weren't even enough quests to get you to max level so you had to grind mobs to get there, which was never my own experience. What is definitely true though is that as the available quests become more sparse, you spend more time running around for fewer rewards, and if it's not your first character, you'll be going through a lot of the same quest lines and zones over and over.

On Turtle WoW, due to my exploration of their mid-level custom zones, my hunter is approaching 40 without ever having stepped foot into the Scarlet Monastery or having done any questing in any of the traditional level 30+ zones. It's kind of remarkable what that does for pacing and personal motivation, as this freedom to go to half a dozen different places helps maintain that early explorer energy you have coming out of the starting zones, and you never get that feeling of "oh well, guess it's time for [insert zone you're not particularly fond of] because there's not much else left to do in my level range". It genuinely made me wonder for the first time how WoW's history would have gone differently if they had made the first expansion a lateral one instead of adding ten more levels on top.

Another thing that contributes to a smoother questing experience is a change that took me some time to notice - that quests never go grey; they always stay green. (Or rather, I technically don't know about never at this point, but as I mentioned I'm getting close to 40 and haven't seen one go grey yet.) In line with that, the exclamation marks for low-level quests never disappear, which I feel sends an interesting message: that it's more important to make sure players know where there are stories to see than that they only see what gives them the best XP per hour for their level. I've gone back and done some random low-level quests a couple of times, and while a level five quest won't move your bar much past a certain point even if it's technically green to you, it still felt nice to me. I also noticed that this gets rid of the sometimes disappointing experience of completing a green quest, levelling up before you hand it in and then seeing it go grey and close to "reward-less".

Also filed under "subtle but interesting levelling changes" we have rented mounts. I've written about the turtle mount you can get at level 18, but at some point I also started to occasionally notice low-level players riding around on slow horses with odd tooltips on their buff bar. I eventually figured out that at the gates of some towns, you can rent a mount for a few copper, which then puts you on a horse for five minutes. This may not sound like much, but again, if you're a lowbie wanting to get from Menethil harbour to the other side of the Wetlands, it's actually a worthy investment! It's just another small thing that gives low-level characters more options without completely trivialising travel.

Another unrelated quality of life change that surprised me and made me think "it's actually weird that Blizzard never did this" is changed icon art for some items. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect every single item in the game to have unique icon art and for the devs to never recycle anything ever, but there have definitely been instances of this that tend to feel worse than others. For example the drinks Bubbling Water and Morning Glory Dew share the same icon, but while one is only useful for characters around level 20, the other is an endgame consumable. I have definitely been in situations where I got these mixed up in my bag, sometimes with even more items that share the same icon.

Not on Turtle WoW though, as they gave Bubbling Water a new, different icon. Same with all the spices on the trade goods vendor - I remember back in the day I used to buy the wrong spices by accident a lot, because it was just so easy to get them mixed up since they all look the same. This is a lot less of a problem on Turtle WoW, with each spice packet having been given a different colour. Again, I'm kind of surprised Blizzard never seems to have given this any thought, especially after I heard stories of people using recycled icons to scam people in retail. (The specific case I heard about was during BfA when someone would make people believe they were buying valuable Midnight Salmon but would then trade them comparatively worthless Darkmoon Daggermaw at the last second.)

The way things look makes for a good segue to the subject of transmog, which is another thing that Turtle WoW has. Personally I'm someone who enjoys transmog in retail, but at the same time I like Vanilla not having it as I do think it changes the feel of the world around you, so I was quite surprised (and initially a bit put off) that this was a feature that the devs included. However, as I've learned more about it, I've been finding it kind of interesting.

In a nutshell it does not work like in retail where you can transmog very freely by simply paying some gold. Instead every piece of gear requires a special token to change its appearance. These tokens can be bought in the cash shop (naturally) but they can also be acquired via certain material hand-ins and as drops from higher-level dungeons. This means that the feature is generally not used much by levellers and more of a sign of prestige at high level. As a result of that, most people ambling about in town look like you'd expect random Vanilla WoW levellers to look, and only the high levels stand out through their transmogs, and only a very small number of them are ridiculous Playboy bunny style outfits. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this in the long run, assuming that the population at high level and the number of ridiculous outfits increases, but at least superficially this system seems to strike an interesting balance between giving people more options to change their appearance while also preserving a good-looking outfit as something to aspire to.

Finally, the last thing on my list of changes to discuss (for now) is the day/night cycle, which was again something that I only became aware of slowly over time, after first getting confused because I noticed that it wasn't what I expected but couldn't quite figure out yet why that was. Basically what Turtle WoW has opted to do is to treat Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms as opposite sides of the planet - meaning when it's night time on one, it's day on the other. I'm not sure of the reason behind this change to be honest. In retail we're not even 100% sure that the map of Azeroth we use is actually showing us the entirety of the planet. I remember there's a globe decoration in Halls of Lightning that people used to cite as "proof" for a while that the continents we know are all there is, but nothing has ever been stated explicitly and you'd think that if there was nothing in the way, there'd be some boat routes connecting the western part of Kalimdor with the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. Either way, the Turtle WoW devs have locked in on the map we know being all there is to the planet.

There may be more interesting things to discover but these were just some that stood out to me. Most of them are positive in my book, and whatever else you may think of Turtle WoW, I think they've displayed a great understanding of how certain aspects of Vanilla can be improved without harming the overall experience. I wish the WoW Classic dev team was similarly creative with their innovations instead of just coming up with new ways to tweak dungeons and raids.

Turtle WoW: Can't We Be Friends, Blizz?

I haven't played much Turtle WoW over the past few weeks as life has been quite busy and my limited WoW time has been fully taken up by Legion Remix. That's not to say that I lost interest in the private server though - I still have two unfinished drafts about it in the works, and I was expecting to have even more material once I got back into playing. My initial sense of urgency had just been somewhat diminished due to how unbothered Turtle WoW leadership seemed to be by Blizzard's lawsuit. Sure, it was probably going to be trouble for them, but they seemed to be pretty confident that they'd be able to keep going somehow.

Things changed over the course of this week though. As of my writing this, Turtle WoW is still up and running, but they are clearly feeling the squeeze. Turtle staff member Akalix, who Blizzard identified as "Lead of Marketing" in their lawsuit and who's actually a US resident, has had to lawyer up and is obviously feeling the pressure, as Blizzard is looking to subpoena various websites to get more information about the individuals they are suing. I've seen reddit comments saying that the initial defiant reaction to the lawsuit has been deleted and that the primary server owner deleted her old Discord handle and adopted a new one, presumably in an attempt to evade legal discovery. (I'm not on their Discord, so this is all rumours to me, but it sounds credible enough.)

A week ago, she also posted a lengthy open letter to Blizzard on the Turtle WoW forums. I tried to archive it but the Internet Archive couldn't capture it for some reason, so if the Turtle WoW site goes down in the future, there are also screenshots of the letter in this reddit post. To summarise it in a nutshell, it talks about how much the Turtle devs love World of Warcraft and how much players love what they've done with Turtle WoW, sooo... can't we just all be friends? Other games allow mods and stuff, right?

If I'm sounding a bit flippant, it's because I don't think they make a very strong case. It's particularly ironic that they cite Everquest's Project 99 as an example of a licensed fan server when Daybreak just shut down another EQ private server that - like Turtle WoW - was making money of its services. Even if I try to look at this open letter in the best possible light, assuming that the sentiments expressed in it are completely genuine and that someone at Blizzard might actually be willing to listen, I just don't see how any sort of official collaboration between Blizzard and Turtle WoW could possibly work, considering what Turtle WoW is. They more or less admit that what they are doing is illegal ("Blizzard does not yet have a framework that allows projects like ours to operate without risking legal conflict") and since they don't have a leg to stand on, it just comes off as a weak appeal to Blizzard's good graces (yeah, right).

This definitely feels like a pretty desperate move that could also be seen as an attempt to drum up some public support more than anything else, but I don't see anyone's opinion on the matter being changed by this, no matter whether they are currently cheering on Blizzard or crossing their fingers for Turtle WoW.

After what I've seen from playing on the server myself, it'll be a shame if all the work they put into things like custom zones would be lost, but they really brought it upon themselves by leaning so heavily into their microtransaction store "donation rewards" and openly taunting Blizzard on social media. I also noticed how for all the pleading that was done in the letter about how they'd be willing to make adjustments to be compliant with any rules set by Blizzard, giving up monetisation is not something that's mentioned. Maybe I should get back to levelling my high elf hunter while I still can...

First Thoughts About Legion Remix

Legion Remix is here and I've finally had a reason to spend more time in official WoW again. As mentioned in a previous post, I wasn't quite sure what to expect - while I enjoyed MoP Remix, the news I'd seen coming out of the PTR about this new installment didn't sound particularly encouraging, and unlike many, I don't have any nostalgia for Legion since I wasn't subscribed for that expansion. I only experienced its story for the first time about four years ago, when the husband and I levelled a pair of demon hunters through Legion Chromie Time, and while I came away with a vague feeling of "I can see why people enjoyed this at the time", it's not the same thing as when you were there yourself.

Anyway, last week "Lemix" finally arrived, and it's been pretty fun! In a departure from our usual tendency to roll tank/healer duos, and considering how superfluous I'd ended up feeling as a healer in MoP Remix, I created a Kul Tiran blood death knight as my first character, and my husband accompanied me as a gnome warlock. I'd forgotten just how fast you fly through the levels in Remix, and we levelled this first set of characters all the way to the cap right there on that first weekend.

When you have to sit down to be at eye level with your spouse. 

I will say that I was also reminded of some of the things that I didn't like about the last Remix at the beginning - the sheer speed of progression is extremely good at/bad for making you feel larger than usual levels of FOMO, because you log in for the first time on day three and people who've had nothing else to do during that time are already running around one-shotting everything, making you feel like you're hopelessly behind and will never catch up. But of course that's not true - progression is very quick for everyone; I just can't deny that it's a bit intimidating at first. Never mind the prompt on the character selection screen that constantly tells you that there are only X days left in Remix.

I'd also forgotten about my ambiguous relationship with the dungeon rushing meta. Sometimes it's funny to zone in and see some demon hunter just zoom ahead and kill everything before you can even get anywhere close. Other times though it just feels tedious to spend the whole dungeon jogging after someone else, unable to actually contribute anything and possibly not even getting any loot (the Postmaster will only recover certain types of items). It just requires a certain mental adjustment that whenever I zone into a pug instance, I can't expect to have much fun and have to accept that I'm just gonna be in and out to get something specific done/get my participation medal.

(The glorious exception to this that actually made me squee with delight was the Court of Stars run in which I was the one to successfully identify the spy at the end. People have explained to me in the past how that puzzle works, and I figured I'd understood it, but in practice I'd just never been the first one to find and talk to the right NPC. Actually having that honour for the first time felt weirdly validating and exciting.)

Anyway, I'd like to talk a bit about what's the same and what's different in Legion Remix compared to the MoP variant.

Lore-wise, the Infinite Dragonflight is experimenting again and we're time-travelling to help them out. I think the quest writers must have had a lot of fun coming up with explanations for certain mechanical changes that poke fun at the game while also making a weird kind of sense in-universe. Legion is one of those expansions where everyone addresses you as "champion" because the presumption was that your character would've levelled through the five previous expansions and defeated all kinds of potential world-ending threats. How do you reconcile that with dropping a freshly created level 10 into the storyline at this point? Your Infinite Dragonflight companion has answers:

Even better is what happens a bit later, when you get various quests to do table missions in your class order hall, and she outright says: "Like Eternus mentioned before, this experiment will eventually end. So, we have to be wise about how we spend our time." And then the quest just auto-completes. Considering they included these kinds of mobile-style waiting games in four expansions until they eventually left them behind with Shadowlands, it just cracked me up to have your in-game guide effectively admit that these systems are a waste of time, never mind.

Gear-scrapping and Bronze dropping as a currency everywhere are back, though the latter can no longer be used to increase your item level and only serves as currency to buy cosmetics this time, something that many people requested after the last Remix. I'm actually not sure how the gearing up works this time around. I tried to read up on it but found even the guides a bit unclear. It doesn't seem to matter though as simply doing various bits of content every so often rewards me with gear boxes that increase my item level ever so slightly, so I guess I'll just keep doing that and maybe it'll become more clear over time.

Instead of a magic cloak that constantly increases in power, we got the Legion artifact weapons growing with us this time. This generally seems to work well, except (in my opinion) for the missions to acquire the artifact weapons for your other specs, as these force you to respec and unequip your current artifact, making you feel terribly weak for the duration of those quests. There's also no power transfer to alts this time around, not even a little bit, with the exception of the event's XP bonus.

Things that are new are "heroic world tier" and obelisks, which are basically temporary power-ups that sometimes appear after you kill things in the open world. The latter led to one of my most memorable Remix experiences so far as it turns out there's at least one type of obelisk that doesn't actually power you up but summons a doomguard instead that you have to fight. Worse, these have a variety of different abilities, one of which involves them turning the floor to lava instantly and this floor then doing insane damage - that exact encounter and ability were what caused both of us to die for the first time and it was quite amusing and surprising. (For real though, I feel that particular ability needs a nerf. At least give it a cast time so you have a chance to start moving without the floor just disappearing from under your feet instantly.)

Heroic world tier is basically a separate phase of the world where everything has more HP and hits harder. I think you also earn more rewards but I'm honestly not even sure. The husband and I just accepted the prompt to try it out when we were level 30 or 40 and then continued to spend most of our time in there as it made playing as a duo feel a lot more beneficial and rewarding. I hope that this is a sign that my dream of a simple two-phased Azeroth is something they are at least considering for the future. (I'd want one version where you can simply out-level things if you want, and one where you are always in sync with the world, regardless of where you go, instead of the limitations of all the different Chromie Times.)

With enough random buffs applied, even regular mobs can suddenly turn into what feels like world bosses. 

After rushing our first characters to the cap, the husband and I are now as usual butting heads a bit about how to proceed. He just wants to binge nothing else while I still want to do other things on the side (such as work on my seasons objectives in SWTOR), even if I'm enjoying myself.

I'm also a bit uncertain just what kind of goals I want to set myself in this Remix. We'll work our way through all the quests for sure, and ultimately I'd like to buy all the rewards from the vendors, but that's not something I'm too worried about at this point, especially as some of them can also be earned directly from gameplay, so I'd like to see where that gets me first.

I'm actually also not that fussed about making my character super powerful to be temporarily OP, but more interested in the class-specific bits of the story I haven't seen before. Legion is an expansion with an unusually high amount of unique content for each class, and I only ever played through it as a demon hunter before. I get the impression that these class order hall stories contain a lot of "side lore" about more minor NPCs, which is very much my kind of jam.

I remember at the start of Shadowlands for example, I was surprised to see the former Inquisitor Whitemane among the ranks of the Ebon Blade death knights, wondering when the heck that happened. I haven't completed my death knight's order hall story yet, but I have found out the answer to that question, so that was very interesting to me.

But do I really have it in me to level another character of every class just to see all the order halls? Even if the process presumably speeds up a lot as your account-wide XP boost grows (I saw on reddit that people have already found out that it caps out at 400%), that still feels like a considerable effort. I'm just going to roll with it for now and we'll see.

The Island of Balor

After finishing Northwind, my Turtle WoW hunter continued straight on to the private server's next custom zone, which is in fact designed for the same level range: the island of Balor.

Balor is located west of Stormwind, roughly where Vashj'ir is placed in retail. However, design-wise it's got more in common with the more northern Tol Barad, in the sense that both are fairly dreary islands full of ruins and ghosts. That's not to say that Balor is Turtle WoW's version of Tol Barad though - reading around a bit, I found out that the inspiration for it actually came from the map of Azeroth in the Warcraft II manual. It has an island called Balor right there! Honestly, that only increased my respect for how well the Turtle WoW devs know their Warcraft lore.

In terms of what it offers in game, I'd heard mixed opinions about this zone. Some liked it, but a common criticism was that the quests required too much running around, or even swimming. The latter would then usually lead to someone pointing out that there's a vendor offering swim speed potions, which should alleviate that particular issue. I'm glad I knew about this going in, though I'll say right off the bat that I don't think the swim speed potions were that much of a help, at least not the first time around. They seem to count as conjured items specific to the zone or something, so you can't stock up on them if you ever plan to hearth out, as they'll just vanish the moment you do that. They also last only five minutes, which is fine if you know that you need to swim from one end to the island to the other with no interruptions, but in the early stages where you might pause at various points to pick up quests or just explore, you'll just end up wasting a lot of the timer on the effect.

Anyway, let's back up for a moment: What is Balor? One of the quests in Northwind actually teaches you a lot of lore about the island if you pay attention. It's basically an off-shoot of Stormwind that got rich from the local gold mines, but then something bad happened there and we're not sure what. As Alliance you start on a little bit of rock off the main island, where SI:7 has erected a base, and from there you basically set out to explore.

The main island is indeed a royal pain to uncover, with steep cliffs all around so that you can only actually go inland at around four different points on the map. The actual land mass then follows a similar pattern of steep, winding paths that make you loop around a lot with minimal shortcuts. I can see why people would find that annoying, but I actually kind of loved it because it made the place a proper challenge to fully explore. Just when I thought I'd already been absolutely everywhere, I made it to the very end of yet another narrow path to find a little camp with a dwarf and a night elf quest giver in it. It was delightful!

(Side note, after being unable to fish in Northwind, I was also pleased to find that fishing worked in this zone, and there were plenty of pools to both level up my skill and add to my gold stockpile.) 

Mind you, all this did make my first-time questing experience extremely slow and inefficient. For example I got sent into the exact same cave to kill the exact same demons twice in a row - if only I had known and had picked up both of those quests at the same time! I imagine that if one were to come back on an alt and with knowledge of what to do in what order, things would speed up by quite a lot, but it's probably still one of the less efficient zones in terms of XP earned for time spent. It does however get an A+ from me for exploration and vibes, which I think is worth a lot by itself.

If I had to describe the overall feel of the zone, I'd say it's as if Deadwind Pass and Swamp of Sorrows had a baby. Everything's grey and wet and broken. I'm actually not sure we ever learn what exactly ruined everything on the island. There are Stormreaver orcs everywhere, so presumably they played a big part in it, but there are also demons and undead and at least one quest giver talks about a deeper corruption of the land, so there might be more going on. I'm okay with not knowing for sure either way, as it just adds to the island's air of mystery.

I felt the need to look up the Stormreaver clan since their name didn't ring a bell, and apparently they are another thing from Warcraft II, though most of them supposedly died at the Tomb of Sargeras. A survivor and hermit called Dark'thul made an appearance in Warcraft III and Legion, and can also be found in a hut far off the main coast of Balor in Turtle WoW, where he gives you some quests.

I'm not sure I understand how all of this ties together lore-wise, but the zone still gets two thumbs-up from me. If I had to criticise anything at all, it would be that at least one of the Turtle quest writers clearly has a thing for body horror (which comes out in the descriptions of several dying or dead people you encounter on your journey across the island), which I honestly thought was a bit much. 

Exploring the Forests of Northwind

My hunter on Turtle WoW reached the first of their mid-level custom zones recently. According to their wiki, the zone of Northwind is designed for characters of level 28-34.

Located just north of Stormwind, it can basically be summed up as "similar to Elywnn Forest, but more autumnal and higher level". I do think the location for this zone is an excellent choice as that whole area is basically a big chunk of nothing on the post-Cataclysm version of the Eastern Kingdoms map. I made a point of going there in the official game to take a screenshot for comparison purposes, and it's literally a huge swathe of boring mountainside separated only by a small nondescript sea inlet.

Though taking this screenshot at sunset did manage to make it look a lot better than it really is.

Northwind on Turtle WoW has a lot more interesting things going on. My description above is a bit of an oversimplification, as there's also a jousting tournament area and a quarry with Dark Iron dwarves for example. But the general vibe is definitely very similar to Elwynn: a lush forest dotted with human settlements and populated by bears, wolves and boars.

Weirdly, this was another thing that once again made me appreciate Blizzard's artists more because even after ten expansions of adding new terrain, they are still very good at making each zone visually distinctive with new assets and different creative directions. (That's why WoW GeoGuessr is so much fun!) Even if some zones obviously have similarities at this point, I don't think the Blizz devs have ever created a zone that's as obviously just a derivative of another zone the way Northwind is of Elwynn Forest.

That said, obviously part of Turtle WoW's charm is that everything they add is "more of the same" in a way, and I thought the zone was very beautiful and enjoyable to quest in. (It does have unique music too.) I did particularly enjoy the thought put into the lore and how a zone in that location would connect to everything around it.

My favourite bit was probably this mini garden/nook (there's probably a better English word for this that I'm not aware of) that featured a statue of Tiffin Wrynn and has you meeting her elderly mother, who still grieves for her daughter and asks you to carry a gift for Anduin to Stormwind Keep as she's not allowed to see her grandson. That hit kind of hard for me because Queen Tiffin is such a minor character in Warcraft lore, seemingly only created in order to die and give Varian something to brood over, it had never even occurred to me that she should probably have some other surviving family members, or to wonder how they might relate to Anduin.

A lot of non-quest NPCs also offer additional chat options to flesh out their characters and paint a richer picture of the zone, and I thought the whole thing felt significantly more coherent than the Thalassian Highlands.

As for some negatives: Why are all the boars aggressive? Boars are usually neutral mobs in WoW unless they are corrupted or diseased, but for some reason all the boars in this forest hate people and other animals, and you'll soon learn to loathe the sound of their angry squeals as you get attacked by one for the 50th time while just trying to pass through. I've seen people meme about this in general chat too, so I know it's not just me.

The bodies of water in the zone are clearly unfinished in some way, because when you dive into one... you don't get a breath bar! It's apparently a magical forest where everyone can just breathe underwater. Also, while they actually remembered to add fishing pools here (unlike in Thalassian Highlands), you still can't fish - or at least I couldn't, as I'd just get an error whenever I tried.

The worst part of it all though was undoubtedly the Dark Iron quarry in the north-eastern corner. I don't know what they screwed up there with the terrain building, but I struggled with mobs evading, falling through the floor, attacking through walls and the like repeatedly, to the point that it made the whole place a royal pain in the arse to quest in.

Another problem I had was that one quest I had in that area was just to search the quarry and return with anything useful I find, with no further details. At first I thought that I'd be looking for a piece of parchment on a table or something, but after searching the whole area and coming away empty I resigned myself to looking it up outside the game. I found that I was actually looking for a drop from an "Overseer Bragordi", which it turns out I had never come across because she was basically constantly dead. I more or less found her by accident eventually because I loitered near a few other players for a minute and it turns out they were sitting around specifically to spawn-camp her.

This lack of clear directions (this wasn't the only quest this applied to) was generally a weirdly double-edged blade from my point of view. The issue was also exacerbated by it turning out that Northwind was actually Turtle WoW's most recently added zone - there are some help resources for Turtle WoW questing available after how long they've been online, but naturally there wasn't much for their newest release yet.

Sometimes it was just frustrating, like in the above mentioned example. Other times I was actually quite satisfying - there was a quest to find a Defias hideout for instance and I was so chuffed when I found the guy's tent on the shore of a lake in a hidden valley because of course it makes sense that a secret hideout is well hidden and I actually felt quite proud of myself for finding it.

Yet other times it could lead to unexpected adventure and interactions. There was one quest that instructed me to pick some herbs similar to Wintersbite, herbs that were supposed to grow "along the snowy ridges to the north". I understood that to mean that the plant would grow in the snow (like Wintersbite) and wondered how to get up there, as the only snow was on top of the mountain and the cliffs were very steep. I wandered up and down the zone looking for a hidden path or something, and even tried to climb southward from Dun Morogh, all to no avail. I also asked for advice in several chats without ever getting a reply.

Finally, when I teamed up with a paladin for the local group quests and the other player showed as having already completed that particular quest, I asked them directly what they had done, and it basically turned out that I had been massively overthinking the whole thing - the flowers were right there in the grass and looked more like Peacebloom; I had just been so fixated on needing to get to the snowy area that I'd completely missed them. So that was kind of annoying, but ultimately arriving at the solution with the help of another friendly player was kind of nice. Either way not an experience you're likely to ever have in official WoW content nowadays, considering how thoroughly everything gets datamined and mapped out before it even launches.

One last thing I noted, since my character is a miner: the distribution of ore nodes was strangely retail-like, with the whole zone yielding nothing but iron. From what I can tell, the other custom zones around this level are the same. In Vanilla, different ores are always mixed together, which makes it much more challenging to farm just one specific type. As it is, Northwind is an easy zone in which to level your mining skill, but you can tell that its existence has somewhat devalued iron, as it was going for so little on the auction house that I just had to vendor hundreds of bars. Meanwhile copper is quite expensive for its low level, so it seems to me like the economy obviously would have benefitted from a more true-to-Classic approach here by having the zone yield a mix of copper, tin and iron together.

The State of My WoW-ing

I sometimes hear people say that WoW is in a better state than ever because of how many different ways to play it there are nowadays. Not enjoying retail? Well, Classic's right there and could still be earning your sub! Love the original world of Azeroth but Classic is just a bit too same-old, same-old for you at this point? Here's Season of Discovery! And so on and so forth.

I'm going to neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I'll say that the multiple versions of WoW thing has definitely worked out well for me in terms of getting value out of my subscription, as I've at least tried almost every mode that the dev team has come out with and I tend to enjoy playing more than one of them at a time. Sadly (to me), it often seems that I'm in a minority in that regard, with most players that I talk to just sticking to the one version they prefer and perhaps even actively disliking the other versions of the game.

I've been wondering what this means for this blog, because I imagine that if readers just want to read about their favourite version of WoW, me switching back and forth between talking about very different things seemingly at random might be perceived as annoying. I'll still write what I want to write, but I thought it might also be useful and interesting to give a general update on where I'm at with each version of WoW at the moment, so you know what to expect if there's one specific mode you're waiting to hear about.

Retail (The War Within)

I'm currently doing four delves a week with the husband but to be honest not much else. K'aresh has been entertaining enough - I rescued all the wee animals and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have the same staying power for me as the final zones of the last two expansions had. Patch 11.2 also killed my desire to play alts temporarily as it broke the Altoholic addon, and the bank restructuring made all my alts' banks a horrible mess. Altoholic works again now, but those banks are still in chaos and I just can't bear to look at them much, so my alts have mostly remained unplayed.

I'm generally feeling a degree of end-of-expansion ennui, which feels a bit weird to say when Midnight is still more than half a year away, but it is what it is. I don't feel like there's much to look forward to before then. I do have a few goals I want to achieve before the expansion ends, such as throwing myself against ?? difficulty Ky'veza and seeing all of Manaforge Omega on LFR, but none of these things feel particularly urgent at this point.

Admittedly Legion Remix is coming out in a few days, but I'm not actually sure how I invested I want to be in that either. I was quite looking forward to it initially (after how much fun I ended up having in MoP Remix), but from everything I've heard since then, the Legion version is actually going to be quite different and I'm not sure whether all those changes will be good or bad for me. I'll still check it out and will probably get a few posts out of it, but I'm currently not actively hyped for it.

Mists of Pandaria Classic

My "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms" has kind of stalled because I just couldn't bear levelling from 84 to 85. Fortunately this one isn't something that needs to be rushed, as I should still have several months to complete my goal (until Garrosh destroys the Vale in Classic too). I expect that I'll still get back to it in time before then, though I still have no plans to do anything else in MoP Classic.

Season of Discovery

SoD has sadly become another abandoned project. Remember, I wanted to level up so I could see the actual new dungeon Blizzard had added to it (Demon Fall Canyon). However, Incursions apparently managed to completely sap my will to play. It's kind of weird actually, but I really did not deal well with the way they required you to completely clear out your quest log. It made me realise that I really rely on those random breadcrumb quests to give me direction. Even if I technically know in my head which zones to go to for quests at level 45 for example, having to make a choice with no quest guidance whatsoever was weirdly deflating.

I do remember that I actually got to Searing Gorge and was kind of fascinated by the new Blackrock Eruption event there, but unfortunately this was also when my OP raid gear from BFD in phase one was starting to no longer be quite so good, and questing was starting to feel like a bit of a drag. At some point I just stopped logging in.

While I wasn't playing, the devs actually added a second new dungeon (Karazhan Crypts) and an actual new raid (Scarlet Enclave), followed by an announcement that they're stopping development on SoD but also not shutting it down. It's been sitting in this weird limbo state ever since where it's technically still there and has some people playing, but much of the community considers it dead because new content is no longer being added. (The server selection screen has the largest Europen PvE server listed as low pop at this point, and according to Ironforge.pro stats, the number of people still raiding there is about half of what it is on Classic era.)

Assuming SoD does continue to hang around, I expect I will get back to it eventually to check out more of the stuff I missed, but there's also a chance that I won't.

Classic era

I've mentioned before that while I love Classic era, I've seen so much of it as this point that the novelty has kind of worn off. I still log in almost every day to do things like create Mooncloth or put items on the auction house - to what purpose, I'm honestly not sure. I guess since the population on era is not that large (especially since the anniversary servers went live), I feel like I'm still making a small contribution to the server community by keeping the auction house stocked. I'm also still keeping an eye on my guild's Discord even if I don't have anything of my own to add.

I currently find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I'd go back to playing era as my primary mode of Classic, though I guess you should never say never. It seems more likely to me that one day I will finally tire of just logging in for cooldowns and auction house business and that will be it for me then. Though that day is not yet today.

Turtle WoW

I wasn't planning to get back into the private server scene, but I've got to admit my recent exploration of Turtle WoW has had me quite charmed. I'll probably keep at it until the server shuts down or I hit max level, whichever happens first. The dev team seems largely undeterred by the Blizzard lawsuit and even posted another update on their Unreal Engine project this week. While I have no doubt that they won't have a leg to stand on under the jurisdiction of a US court, I've got to admit I do wonder a little what will happen if the stubborn head of the turtle, who is supposedly located in Russia, manages to simply evade the long arm of the law due to geography. I'm sure the lawsuit has been great advertising for them over the past few weeks, bringing in a lot of new business for the time being.

Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon

I would describe my early dungeon experiences in Turtle WoW as "okay" for a Vanilla environment - neither worse than nor significantly improved compared to playing on official Classic servers. I knew that they had added entirely new dungeons to the world though, and I was very curious about those. I became aware of the first of these being called Dragonmaw Retreat, located in the Wetlands and designed for characters around level thirty.

As I was slowly getting the hang of the way the automated group finder without teleportation worked, I made a point of only putting myself in the queue when I was at least vaguely in the vicinity of the dungeon and not doing anything that couldn't easily be interrupted, so that I could pack up and start legging it to the instance at a moment's notice. I had picked up several quests for Dragonmaw Retreat by the time I got there and was very intrigued to find out what awaited me.

The healer in my first run warned me that it was going to be hard, and at the start of my second run someone cautioned everyone that the dungeon was quite long, wanting to double-check that all party members had sufficient amounts of time for the run. It wasn't all trepidation though: the aforementioned healer in run #1 also gushed about how cool and beautiful the dungeon was, comparing its vibe to Lord of the Rings.

The inspiration for that remark was hard to miss, considering we were soon climbing a long flight of stairs reminiscent of the way the Bridge of of Khazad-dûm was portrayed in the Fellowship of the Ring movie.

I was pretty impressed by the dungeon in general. Mind you, to me as someone who's spent way too much time in the vanilla World of Warcraft at this point, it was still quite obviously custom content that didn't quite have Blizzard's level of artistic polish: Everything seemed just a tad too big, too straight, too symmetrical and simply lacking in detail (in a way this exercise has given me a new appreciation for just how much work Blizzard's artists put into these things) - but it wasn't off by much, and I could imagine a more casual visitor who's unfamiliar with many of WoW's dungeons perhaps being unable to tell that this wasn't in the original game.

Lord of the Rings comparisons aside, the dungeon's general vibe reminded me a lot of Lower Blackrock Spire, with a dashing of Blackrock Depths sprinkled into the mix perhaps. At one point we tried to jump across a gap in the stairs, but only the healer and I made it, while everyone else landed on a ledge underneath. When trying to get down to their level, both the healer and I then missed that jump and ended up going splat on the ground below, followed by a corpse run back... I thought that was very authentic to the Vanilla WoW experience for sure.

Difficulty-wise, everything hit very hard, as noted in my last post about how dungeons feel kind of overtuned on Turtle, but oddly enough I didn't mind here at all. I guess it felt more disruptive in the Deadmines, which I've run so many times that I'm very familiar with what to expect. With this being new content, I had no preconceived notions of what it should be like, and it was easy enough to accept that mobs hit hard so you have to pull carefully, which to be honest tends to be my personal MO most of the time anyway.

The bosses were all fairly straightforward affairs with usually just one real mechanic each, e.g. an add summon or a fear on a cooldown. (They also had voice lines, and one orc in particular had such an over-the-top death gurgle, it made me laugh out loud.) The biggest challenge was usually just to get to the boss without accidentally pulling additional trash, and honestly that's kind of how I feel like it should be in a Vanilla environment. I don't know why the Blizzard devs seemed so enamoured with stuffing the updated fights in Season of Discovery with extra mechanics (which were usually still too boring for retail raiders, but disproportionally demanding compared to Vanilla content). 

Speaking of just getting to each boss though, another thing that was interesting was that the last two bosses were hidden behind a locked gate, and to unlock it you needed to create a key from two fragments found within a dungeon. One can be looted from a chest and the other is a guaranteed green drop from one of the earlier bosses. In my first run, everyone greeded on the green drop but we didn't keep track of who won it, and when we got to the gate, everyone insisted that they hadn't been the one who won the item. This meant we had to abandon the dungeon at that point as we couldn't proceed to the last two bosses.

I initially thought that perhaps this key was a temporary item that you had to assemble every run, kind of like the head on a pike in Lower Blackrock Spire, but later I learned that no, it actually translates into a permanent key, as on my second run the tank already had it and told us not to worry about the drops, which I thought was interesting. The key fragments also don't bind and can be bought and sold on the auction house, though you need to be inside the dungeon to assemble them.

The last bit of the dungeon hidden behind that gate was definitely the most interesting and impressive part of the experience, as you end up in this giant hallway in which a corrupted red dragon patrols, and you need to sneak around and kill six enchanters around the room to bring down his 95% damage reduction shield. That definitely felt very vanilla.

The very last boss turned out to be Zuluhed the Whacked, which made me go "oh, I know this guy", though it took me a moment to recall that in official WoW lore, this particular orc leader went to Outland and enslaved the Netherwing there. Not sure it's an upgrade for him to become a mid-level dungeon end boss instead, but it was a cool reveal nonetheless.

Also, shoutout to Hoodedmon the troll shaman, who was our tank on the second run and did a bang-up job both with the tanking itself as well as providing general leadership and explanations of what to do. He was also the first shaman tank I encountered on Turtle WoW, which wasn't that new a concept to me considering they were a big hit in Season of Discovery, but I hadn't realised that specialisation was available on Turtle WoW as well. 

Turtle WoW: A Different Stonetalon & Wetlands

I mentioned in my last post about Turtle WoW that I set myself the goal to level up a bit in order to be able to explore more of their custom content. Their next full custom zone was designed for you to be around level 30, but according to their Wiki there were new sub-zones and quest hubs to be found in several lower-level zones as well, so I made it my priority to spend my time in the twenties questing in Stonetalon Mountains and the Wetlands. Both are zones that I'm reasonably fond of and very familiar with, but I'll also admit that their original versions didn't exactly contain a huge number of quests, so they seemed like interesting candidates for expansion.

Let's start with Stonetalon. This is a zone that I don't think I spent a lot of time in back in original Vanilla (I just remember a more experienced friend warning me that the Scorched Vale was a death trap) but at least from Classic onwards I became very fond of it as a more quiet retreat from the crowds. It feels like a bit of a backwater zone for both factions (though more so for Alliance) and there just isn't a whole lot going on.

By that I don't just mean that there aren't a lot of quests, but that the map as a whole is pretty empty because so much of it is just assumed to be uninteresting mountains (which we didn't really get to see from ground level). It's telling that when Blizzard rebuilt Kalimdor to be fully three-dimensional for Cataclysm, they added a whole bunch of new points of interest to the Stonetalon map and still also ended up creating quite a lot of minimally textured mountainside with nothing going on because there was just so much unused terrain in that zone.

I'm leading with all of this to say that this zone is prime real estate for anyone wanting to expand on it in Classic+ style, as it's not that far-fetched for a bit of mountainside to come down to reveal additional valleys to explore. In the case of Turtle WoW, I found a narrow path up even further up the mountain from Stonetalon Peak, leading me to a Horde troll base that I couldn't get a good view of because high-level guards were blocking all entry. (I could eventually glimpse a bit more of it from the back of a hippogryph, as the flight path to Stonetalon Peak goes right over it.) It's been a long time since I stood at the edge of a Horde town, wondering just what the other faction gets up to over there. (It's probably not that exciting, but the point is that I don't know, and the unknown is fascinating!)

I later also found another, smaller new Horde town belonging to the Horde-aligned goblins - just how many hubs do they need to have in one zone? To the east, my eyes went wide when I discovered that the mountainside above the Grimtotem villages had been conquered by giant brambles, accompanied by quillboar spilling in from the Barrens. Again, it looked like the Horde had some quests to do there.

For Alliance there was actually surprisingly little to do and I mostly ended up doing old quests while I was there exploring. There was a new Venture Co. area carved into the western mountains where I got given a few tasks to do, so that was something. I also really liked the new mine shaft they opened up not far off Stonetalon Peak, since it wasn't very deep but had two guaranteed tin ore spawns inside.

The Wetlands were a very different experience, with most of the zone largely unchanged. To the east there's a new dungeon called Dragonmaw Retreat near Grim Batol, but since that seemed to be designed for around level 30 as well, I didn't go there until I was somewhat higher level. (There will be a post about it!) However, there was also a whole new sub-section of the zone to the south-west, where a steep mountain path just south of Menethil led up to a new dwarf town called Dun Agrath, with an adjacent human village called Hawk's Vigil.

While the main quests in the Wetlands were largely the same old, same old, I was given several breadcrumbs to go up to these new settlements, which filled me with a lot of anticipation. However, when I finally went there, Dun Agrath offered me exactly one quest to kill a few raptors down the hill and that was it. I stuck my nose into every building, and it all looked very pretty and interesting, with plenty of named NPCs you could chat with, but no quests. I'm honestly still a bit baffled by that. Again, I'm not saying every square foot of terrain has to be filled with activities, but what's the point of creating a whole (albeit pretty) sub-zone and then not adding anything to do in it?

The human settlement of Hawk's Vigil was better in that regard, even if whoever created it clearly liked Harry Potter a bit too much based on all the NPC names. (I know, Blizz has always had references to other properties in their games, but a whole town of people with last names from Harry Potter is a bit on the nose.) As there were no hostile mobs nearby, all the quests were of the "go talk to someone" variety, which made for an interesting change of pace.

Some of them sent me quite far afield, which at first made me sigh a bit - everyone hates these fetch quests that make you travel to another continent, right? Why make more of those? But then I thought nah, that's not fair, depending on the story these can be quite memorable so let's see where this goes. One chain ultimately had me exorcising a demon from a lumberjack after doing several slightly questionable things to get to that point, and the other had me hunt down information about the dark past of a guy new to the town and awarded a pretty nice piece of gear at the end. (I did feel a little weird killing the guy. They were clearly going for something similar to the quest chain that ends with "The Attack!" in Stormwind Keep, but that quest has you catching the bad guys in the act, while this chain has a lot of bad things to say about the person you're supposed to kill, but he just kinda sits there in his tent at the edge of town minding his own business, which made me feel a bit bad.)

Anyway, I was definitely more intrigued than I'd expected, even by these relatively minor additions to two zones I know well. I think the additions to Stonetalon felt more natural than those to the Wetlands (there wasn't even as much as a footpath leading up to Dun Agrath; if you didn't already know it was there you'd have no reason to assume that there was anything new down that way), but they were fun to explore either way. And honestly, even the old content felt refreshed by the uncertainty of never quite knowing whether an NPC wouldn't suddenly have a new additional quest or something.

Enjoyable WoW Videos on Exploration

One of the things that sometimes frustrate me about WoW is that in spite of how huge it is, I find it quite difficult nowadays to find like-minded people who enjoy the game in a similar way to me - not even necessarily because I need more people to play together, but just to chat and occasionally exchange some thoughts. There are tons of WoW content out there, but so much of it is just ruthlessly streamlined for clicks and monetisation: guides on how to play, what to do when the next patch drops, 10 reasons why whatever Blizzard is doing next is a terrible idea.

I'm not saying those things are bad or shouldn't exist (well - maybe that last category), but I yearn for more people to just share their love of this virtual world, bits of silliness, and just what they are getting up to in game. So I wanted to highlight three YouTube channels that do scratch that itch for me to some degree, in case there are others looking for the same.

(Wow)crendor

Crendor is actually an old hand at WoW YouTube content as he became well-known for his goofy machinimas around Wrath of the Lich King and was one of the first WoW YouTubers that I'm aware of that managed to turn his hobby into a job. He branched out into other games, sold merch etc. but unlike many others, he never gave me the vibe of having fully "sold out". (Look, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a living off making YouTube videos or other content, but let's not pretend that depending on it for your livelihood doesn't change your incentives and behaviour to some degree.) There's a reason his avatar is a sloth, and his attitude has always remained that he wants to be chill and just do what's fun.

He's produced lots of different WoW content in that vein over the years, but the series that's my personal favourite and that still gets regular updates is "Pointless Top 10". In this, he picks a random thing in the world (of Warcraft), whether it's caves, mailboxes or rivers and creates a top ten list of his favourites. I always love these because they tend to highlight weird little details to me that I missed and teach me more about parts of Azeroth that I'm maybe less familiar with, all in a casual tone that includes all kinds of silly tangents as well.

Jediwarlock

Let me just start by saying that I immediately considered this guy's channel name a good sign as he clearly likes both WoW and Star Wars, like I do! I think the first video of his that I saw was probably "The Greatest Adventure in World of Warcraft" about a year ago, in which he talks about the storyline that winds its way through the first 25 levels or so of the human starting zone in WoW Classic.

I've since come to enjoy other lore videos of his, specifically for the way he talks about it. I feel like many more popular lore YouTubers are very focused on the grand design and the lives of major NPCs, but Jediwarlock talks about the quests we actually do as players, what we see in the zones, NPC dialogue and how it all ties together to create a certain experience for the player (in Classic).

Lani Gray

Lani is a very new YouTuber, but by chance I ended up seeing her very first video about Azuremyst Isle when it had only about 100 views, and I just immediately loved it. Her goal seems to be to document levelling through WoW (the modern version that is, not Classic) and talking about everything she sees along the way. She talks about every zone in incredible detail, including things like the personalities of different NPCs, environmental storytelling, and just what kind of feelings the zone invokes in her. She does all this with an incredible fangirlish energy that I love and that feels like a friend just telling you about some new cool thing they saw and adored. Naturally she doesn't have that many videos up yet, but if what I just described sounds like your cup of tea at all, consider giving one of her videos a watch.

Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.