The Midnight Expansion Reveal

I'm glad I didn't try to watch the Midnight expansion reveal live, because from the sounds of it they abused WoW's popularity to the maximum possible extent this time - which is to say, they knew that people were primarily watching for WoW, so they crammed in two hours of Call of Duty ads and the like beforehand to keep everyone online.

I did hop over to the official WoW YouTube channel later to watch the announcement videos and... huh.

Back when the Worldsoul Saga was first announced, I wrote the following: "I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years."

I think the Midnight reveal has proved my theory correct in so far as I've never seen so many people react with a kind of "meh" attitude to a new expansion announcement. There are always those who'll love it no matter what and will be hyped, and there'll always be those who hate everything Blizzard does no matter what. But those in the middle can be swayed either way, and I've never seen this much apathy from the masses before.

There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I reckon the fact that everyone already knew roughly what was coming must have been a major contributor. "It's gonna be about the void and about elves, something something Silvermoon." So when the trailer showed us elves fighting to defend Silvermoon against the void, that was at best exactly what everyone expected, and at worst a bit of a let-down in the sense that people wanted more (as MMO players always do the moment you tell them about anything).

There was something else about the trailer though. I liked it well enough, but something felt ever so slightly "off".

At first, I thought it was just the fact that Liadrin had been given a new haircut. Seriously, the first thing I did after watching the cinematic for the first time was google pictures of Liadrin's current player model, because I kept thinking "She didn't always have a tight braid, did she?" - and no, she did indeed not; they are giving her a new haircut for Midnight which will be reflected on her in-game model as well.

However, when looking around to find out whether anyone else had the same reaction, I actually found a lot of complaints about the trailer's visuals, which I believe is a first. In the past, even if players hated a trailer for what it conveyed, it was pretty much universally agreed that it was still impeccably animated at least. Not with this one! I don't think all the criticisms are necessarily equally valid, but let's just say that after people pointed out that Liadrin in this looks more like the Elven Hero from Elder Scrolls Online or Tauriel from the Hobbit movies than a Warcraft elf, I haven't been able to unsee that.

After comparing to the Battle for Azeroth trailer (which does feature a similar situation including a city siege), I also found it noticeable how many unique characters were featured in the BfA cinematic - while Sylvanas and Anduin are the focus, we also get shots of Saurfang, Zekhan and Greymane, as well as a number of different "generic units", from undead archers to dwarven riflemen. In the Midnight trailer, we have exactly three focus characters and everyone else is an indistinguishable melee soldier covered from head to toe in armour like they are a bunch of stormtroopers, which I hadn't really picked out before.

I think the biggest thing though is that the pacing/scripting feels slightly off and fails to reach a proper climax. I'd say it's fine for most of the cinematic actually, but when Liadrin returns with the help from the Sunwell it ends too quickly without letting us fully feel the triumph, while also just getting plain confusing because the help are also just a bunch of armoured mooks. I've looked around online and even the most passionate lore nerds are unsure of who these are actually supposed to be (though there are seemingly a million theories, from Guardians of the Ancient Kings to the Army of Light to the Arathi to representations of us, the players).

The gameplay reveals suffered from a similar mix of "well, we knew that was coming" and muddled messaging. Yes, housing is a big deal, but we've known about that for almost a year, and there's been a constant drip-feed of more details since then. You can't expect people to suddenly gasp and be super-excited about hearing the exact same thing again.

I also used to think it was kind of funny how they'd include things like "level cap increase" or "new dungeons" as major expansion features to be excited about, but this time they didn't and it was actually kind of confusing. I saw people ask questions like "Will there actually be a level increase this time?" (yes) and only later found out all kinds of interesting stuff that they didn't actually put into the features trailer, such as that Valeera Sanguinar will be the new delve companion or the major changes coming to transmog (huge!).

My personal takeaway is simply that Midnight will continue the War Within, which was kind of what we knew was going to happen. I'll be happy to buy it because I'm enjoying my time in retail right now, but I'm not sure it really delivered in the hype department the way these expansion announcements are usually expected to.

K'aresh and the Story of the War Within

Patch 11.2 arrived about one and a half weeks ago, and with it the final major story update for the War Within. That still feels weird to think about, considering the Midnight expansion announcement is still a few days away. I mean, we know that there'll be plenty of content to tide us over until 12.0, from Legion Remix to the release of housing, but it still seems odd for the War Within to just kind of end where we are now.

K'aresh is a nice enough zone. It recycles the city of Tazavesh from Shadowlands, which I don't have any particularly strong feelings about as I only ever did the associated dungeon one or two times. The wider zone with its purple tinge, floating rocks and eco-domes is strongly inspired by Netherstorm, which makes sense and is another thing I'm quite happy with. The large areas of desert and packs of devourer mobs also recall Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis for me, and look, I know everyone loves to hate on Shadowlands but Zereth Mortis was a great zone and I don't mind being reminded of it either.

I also liked the storyline well enough (I have yet to kill Dimensius and see what comes afterwards). I wasn't a fan of Xal'atath constantly crooning at me that I was her champion (though this meme on reddit made me chuckle) but the return of Ve'nari's sass gave me life and was good for some genuine laughs. (When she ended that one quest with "Now get some stygia... I joke.") However, I'm also left with a certain feeling of "Why are we here?".

I'm not saying there's no connection at all between the War Within's patches, obviously Alleria chasing Xal'atath has been a through line. But should it have been? The hook at the start of this expansion was that Thrall, Anduin and other important characters were hearing the call of Azeroth's world soul, and that something was seemingly wrong down there. We descended deep into the earth, learned about the earthen and world soul "shards" like Beledar. We met the Haranir, who also seemed to have a connection to Azeroth itself and were worried about corrupting influences. Undermine was admittedly always going to be a bit of a mid-expansion side quest, but it wasn't so far off that we couldn't have pivoted back to focusing on the world soul after that. Dataminers have reported that there was a planned zone called the "Rootlands", presumably under Azj-Kahet, which would have made sense as a final destination for us to find out just what is going on inside Azeroth.

However, instead we chased Xal'atath to K'aresh because suddenly it's all about the return of Dimensius the All-Devouring and the call of Azeroth's world soul seems all but forgotten. Now, considering that War Within and the next two expansions are meant to form "The Worldsoul Saga", we're probably not all done with world soul business, and I really hope that we'll get back to it - but right now, this doesn't feel like the first part of a trilogy but rather like something that was meant to be a stand-alone expansion and was cut off at the knees at the last moment to pivot towards a completely different plot.

Now, this does kind of mesh with how Chris Metzen said that large chunks of War Within were already done when he rejoined the team and had to be somewhat retooled to fit the new Worldsoul Saga narrative. He also indicated that he almost expected people to possibly feel a bit unsatisfied with War Within on its own, while promising that it would all pay off later.

I really, really hope that he is right, because at the moment I can't say that I'm really sold on this story. It's one thing for part one of a trilogy to have a bit of an open ending hinting at bigger thing to come. At the end of Fellowship of the Ring, we know that we're not done, but we do know where we're going and have been witness to some pretty exciting adventures relating to that.

The War Within has not given me that vibe. I know that the next expansion will be about elves and the void only because Chris Metzen said so, not because the War Within has really built either of those subjects up to be a major theme (until the sudden pivot with this patch that is). It's just been very focused on Alleria and Xal'atath as characters, and to be honest I kind of feel like that's been a mistake. You may blame part of that on my general dislike of Xal'atath, but I have no issues with Alleria - it's just that I don't think you can place something like a WoW expansion on the shoulders of two NPCs. Their personal struggles can be part of the larger story, sure, but I don't think they're strong enough to form the framework that's supposed to hold everything up.

I enjoy hearing tales about the adventures of different denizens of Azeroth - I did so in Vanilla too; and I'm fine with the additional bells and whistles of voice acting and cut scenes. But in my opinion at least, WoW is at its strongest when the focus remains on the big picture and the world as a whole instead of one specific character's journey, and I'm just not seeing that right now. People have ragged on Dragonflight's story a lot, but even if you want to make fun of Alexstrasza being kind of useless and other NPCs being flat in their characterisation, it was all extremely cohesive thematically, focused on the Dragon Isles, the dragon flights, the primalists and all their minions and allies, which made it easy for me to overlook the flaws in individual storylines.

War Within on the other hand reminds me strongly of BfA, which started off with this strong Alliance vs. Horde theme, including a very personal and powerful narrative for Jaina, but then we were suddenly spending our time on mechagnome island and under the sea, and next it was all about uniting to fight old gods and wait, what? Metzen may have big plans for the Worldsoul Saga, but I don't think it bodes well that the way he decided to build the first part of this trilogy is superficially indistinguishable from an expansion where the story just felt non-cohesive and random at times. We'll see what we'll learn from the Midnight expansion announcement next week.

Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part. 

Comparing Zekvir and the Underpin

Towards the end of War Within season one, I made a whole post about my journey into Zekvir's Lair, from being largely oblivious to what it was all about to finally beating him on double question mark difficulty. I figured that season two was going to be less exciting now that I knew what this whole challenge mode thing was all about, and that turned out to be true, but that's not to say that it wasn't interesting at all.

Fighting the Underpin (the season two delve boss) on normal mode did admittedly turn out to be a bit underwhelming, as I defeated him on my warrior on what I think was only my second or third attempt. I wouldn't say that's because he was much easier than Zekvir though, it's just that it made a big difference that I actually had some gear from the previous season as well as a better idea of what I was doing.

The Underpin also seemed to be a lot more imbalanced in terms of how the fight played for different roles, and playing tank was actually one of the easier ways to do it. Based on how easy of a time I'd had, I immediately jumped back in on a healing alt and was horrified at how different an experience it was. I think I wiped about half a dozen times and then just gave up, because it was impossible for me to break his healing shield with my piddly healer dps, and dps Brann's AI was seemingly not smart enough to help me focus on the shield, instead getting distracted and shooting at adds instead. I was really put out by that and there was little helpful advice on this problem to be found online at the time, so I kind of just left things there and largely forgot about the Underpin again.

But of course! We're now at a point where the next major patch is barely two weeks away, bringing with it a new season and the removal of a bunch of content and achievements that are currently still live. With my FOMO kicked into overdrive, I remembered that I had yet to beat the Underpin on hard mode, and that I should better get to it.

I don't know exactly how long or how many attempts it took me, because the attempt counter is part of Deadly Boss Mods, which for some reason I just couldn't get to work on this encounter. Reading around, it sounded like there should've been a module for it, but even though I had the latest version installed, the Underpin just wasn't on the list of available delve fights in the addon. I made do anyway.

I still spent more than a few hours wiping on ?? difficulty and trying to improve my gameplay, but compared to the weeks-long project that was Zekvir ??, I got there relatively quickly. I wouldn't say the fight is necessarily easier than Zekvir, but it helped that this one actually played to the strengths of my warrior main, and that she was about as well geared by this point as a character not doing M+ or raids can be (not counting her cursed boot slot). This meant that unlike last season, I didn't have to worry about learning to play a different class/spec or gearing up an alt.

I managed to record my victory again and uploaded it to YouTube since I did the same last season:

You can see that I was still far from perfect, and there's one point around the 4:11 mark where I ate a huge chunk of damage that probably would've been a one-shot in lesser gear or on a non-tanky spec. But still, it was good enough and I'm happy that I was able to check this particular achievement off my list.

So how do I think the Underpin and Zekvir compare? Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted. Thematically, I found Zekvir kind of annoying and loved the Underpin. Zekvir wipes were really frustrating to me because I hated the way he went "Yeees, she will be pleased" whenever I died, because I didn't want Xal'atath to enjoy my wipes! (I guess that's a credit to Zekvir's voice actor though.) Meanwhile the Underpin was the complete opposite in that I loved the goofy music and all his silly voice lines. ("Tick tock, tick tock, ya interlopin' mooks!" is without a doubt my favourite.)

Also, it may sound a bit lame, but I can't deny that I liked the fact that he didn't take me as long to kill and that the fight was actually very doable on my main, even if that feels more like luck on my part than anything to do with good balancing and encounter design (refer to my horror at what it felt like to do even the normal fight as a healer as mentioned above).

Purely in terms of mechanics, the Underpin was a lot more messy and random, which I don't necessarily consider a good thing, though it did feel to me like there was also a bit more leeway there than there had been on Zekvir - on the latter, a single mis-timed interrupt could mean that it was a wipe. I did enjoy that the Underpin's "dance" was a little less rigid and more fluid in comparison.

That said, one thing it really suffered from was the fact that it forced you to spend a lot of time fighting your UI instead of the boss. The mechanic that requires you to kick bombs into the adds is just extremely clunky, as it's literally impossible to mouse-target them sometimes due to boss and camera positioning, meaning you had to enable the "interact key" to be able to kick blindly sometimes, and even then - well, it's right there in the last sentence, kicking the things around blindly was not very satisfying or fun.

Nonetheless, all in all I still enjoyed this encounter as well, and I've now made it my new goal to at least do the normal mode on all classes again, like I tried to do with Zekvir. I do kind of have to wonder how sustainable this "delve challenge boss" model is going to be in the long run though. I mean, isn't it bound to get kind of repetitive? I suppose you could say the same about raids, but at least there you have different roles and a much larger number of players to mix things up mechanically, while any fight that's meant to be something to do for solo players of any class is by necessity always going to be much more limited in terms of what it can demand. 

Lorewalking Impressions

Retail WoW is going a bit crazy with the new content at the moment in my opinion. There are at least three different events going on simultaneously, and while I'm not someone who has to do ALL THE THINGS in WoW, I do think it's getting a bit hard to keep track of what's what as a more casual player, especially when some events are only running for a limited time and you want to prioritise things accordingly.

One permanent new feature that was added recently and that had me very intrigued is called Lorewalking. Whether you enjoy the current story updates or not, it's hard to deny that WoW's story is a tangled mess to newcomers and anyone who isn't constantly keeping track, so I'm always interested when Blizzard makes some kind of attempt to invest in story catch-up, regardless of what form it takes.

Lorewalking is no replacement for actually playing through any given expansion, but what it does attempt to do is string certain storylines, that were previously featured in the game in very scattered bits and pieces, together into a more coherent whole for easier digestion. The framing device is that Lorewalker Cho sits with you on a bench in a capital city and tells you the story of how certain things came to be, with the accompanying gameplay being that you get teleported all over the place to do small tasks here and there, in a variety of very different locations.

I'll talk about the Lich King one in more detail, since there's no new story here and it's quite well-known, so there's no real spoiler territory to worry about. It starts with you being given a (new) quest in which you play as young Prince Arthas inside the Lordaeron garrison, talk to some NPCs and spar with a few guards. It's extremely basic but gives you an idea of who he was before he got corrupted and who the important people in his life were.

Next we're off to the Culling of Stratholme to see him cross that infamous line, and I thought it was kind of ironic that there's now a feature in the game to specifically watch all the RP at the gates that people used to hate back when Culling was a current endgame dungeon in Wrath. I was starting to wonder whether the expectation was to do the whole instance, but no, the moment the RP inside the gates finishes, you get whisked away straight to the end of the dungeon to see the confrontation between Arthas and Mal'Ganis.

Then it's off to Northrend - remember those quests in Dragonblight where you interact with the ghosts of Arthas' expedition, and get to see a vision of him claiming Frostmourne? Yep, you get sent off to do those again.

Cho briefly tells you about Arthas killing his father (I was kind of surprised they didn't use this opportunity to play the Warcraft 3 cinematic here, especially considering that they did actually create an up-resed version of it for Reforged) and then you get sent to Halls of Reflection with Jaina.

Interestingly, here the game does actually make you do the whole dungeon, but I've got to admit I didn't mind because I was just reminded of how freaking cool that instance was back in the day. Also, you get to play the Alliance version with Jaina even if you're Horde, which does get funny at the end when you get rescued by the Skybreaker and the Alliance on board all attack you immediately after rescuing you.

The story gets wrapped up with two more short new bits where you get to play as Arthas again, first ascending the steps of Icecrown Citadel, vanquishing certain memories along the way, and then fighting a group of 25 Horde adventurers until Tirion does his whole kill-steal thing and you get to watch the cinematic of Arthas' death one more time.

Reading around a bit, this seemed to be many people's least favourite of the three Lorewalking entries, but personally, I liked this one the best. It doesn't take very long but gives you a good introduction to who Arthas is, making good use of existing content already in the game. I had no idea who or what the Lich King was when I started playing back in 2006, and back then Warcraft 3 had only been out for a few years. I would've appreciated this kind of interactive "lesson" back then and I imagine it's going to be even more useful to people coming to the game almost twenty years later (if they are interested in the story at all).

The other two Lorewalking entries are about the Ethereals and about Xal'atath and are clearly more aimed at getting people up to speed with the current storyline, which is also fine. However, I kind of thought the quests in these were somewhat less fun and felt like a bit more of a drag. (I was never a huge fan of all the Ethereum stuff in Netherstorm back in Burning Crusade, so I wasn't exactly dying to replay that part of the game for example.) What was interesting was that both of these end with new bits of lore about their subjects being revealed at the very end.

BRIEF SPOILER SECTION

The reveal that BC's Ethereals and the Brokers from the Shadowlands seem to be the same people was amusing in so far as I couldn't help but wonder whether this was actually planned or simply a reaction to the player base openly struggling to tell the two apart when it came to lore conversations.

The reveal of Xal'atath's true form and origin was also quite interesting, though the associated gameplay was a bit of a mess for me personally as I'm apparently the worst old god minion ever, as it took me forever to find the first thing I was supposed to click on (I had literally been everywhere else first except at the correct location).

END BRIEF SPOILER SECTION

I did all three Lorewalking stories in my current warrior main first and initially figured that nothing was scaled as everything was dying in one or two hits and doing seemingly no damage to me. However, after reading around a bit I noticed people mention scaling, which made me realise that the mobs did show up as being technically my level, they just seemed to all be made of paper.

Now, my warrior is close to having the best gear you can currently get as a solo player, so I figured maybe it was due to that. I then decided to take a low-level alt through two of the stories for comparison.

My blood elf hunter had just dinged level 20 from finishing her last quest in Eversong Woods and was dressed in mostly whites that left her with an awe-inspiring item level of 10. I was getting ready to struggle, but to my surprise all the enemies in the Lich King story still seemed to be made of cardboard and continued to die in one or two hits, even in Halls of Reflection. It was only at this point that I noticed that I was actually immune to all damage (though my poor pet wasn't and paid the price multiple times). I can't quite tell whether this was intended or just a temporary fix for a scaling problem as I found some complaints from people who had done the chain closer to its release, saying that the mobs were hitting too hard and killing them.

In the Ethereal story I wasn't immune to damage, though my damage taken still seemed pretty mild - until I walked off the beaten path during the bit on Argus and decided to attack a star mob, which - while nominally also scaled to my level - hit literally ten times as hard as any of the other enemies and killed me in four hits. So... I'm not really sure what's going on there or even what's supposed to be going on.

I will say that the damage immunity in the Lich King story makes that particular bit of Lorewalking an excellent way out if you ever find yourself stuck in outdated gear and unable to quest due to the curse of scaling, as the damage immunity inside the story will protect you and you'll get several level-appropriate gear rewards along the way. My blood elf hunter for example gained a little less than two levels but her item level increased from 10 to 43. The other stories don't work the same way though - as mentioned, I wasn't immune to damage doing the Ethereal story and while I gained almost four levels in that one, I was given only a couple of pieces of gear during that time.

Anyway, I'm curious to see whether Blizzard will add more stories to this feature as time goes on. I'd quite like that, because even for the bits of lore you already do know, it can serve as a nice refresher. That said, let's be clear that this in no way solves the problem of new and returning players being unable to tell what's going on and struggling to connect to the world in general. For that, it's simply too limited in scope and too passive (sit here and listen to me tell you stories about other people instead of getting to know the world on your own).

MoP Pre-Patch Impressions

Mere days after I hit the level cap in Cata Classic last week, the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch dropped. I wasn't particularly excited about it, but I couldn't help but notice some changes as I logged into my hunter to do the daily cooking quest (like I said before, the profession dailies were easily one of my favourite things about Cata, so I'm still doing those until I max out my cooking and get the achievement for completing all the variations in all three capitals). 

The new talents were there, which I didn't particularly like in original MoP and still don't like now. Most notably though, my bow was in my bags and my hunter only had her staff equipped. Re-equipping the bow resulted in the staff going back into the bag instead.

Ah yes, remember how I said last month that one of the things I was enjoying about Cata was that hunters could still wield both a ranged and a melee weapon? R.I.P. to that particular class fantasy; I just never realised that this was a change that happened in MoP.

It actually made me realise that class fantasy aside, it's really kind of bizarre how Blizzard handled this. Survival didn't become a melee spec until Legion, so why would you let hunters equip a melee weapon only and then have them be locked out of using every single one of their combat abilities? Talk about a giant noob trap.

In fact, this is something that's still confusing in retail as I noticed the other day when I rolled up a survival hunter, because you still start with a ranged weapon and then when you hit level 10 and spec survival, you initially have like... one ability you can actually use, with everything else suddenly greyed out. It just feels terrible. Also, I only found out at that point that retail hunters no longer start with a pet for some reason? But you don't get a quest to tame one either, so... I have no idea how new players are supposed to figure this shit out. Anyway, I digress.

I had also logged into my feral druid briefly before the patch, to make the boat ride to Valgarde now that I'd remembered where to get on the right boat. Checking on her after the pre-patch, I was dismayed to be reminded that MoP was also when they did away with the whole notion of being a bear-cat, as feral was split into new feral (cat only) and guardian (bear only). I hadn't realised just how many gameplay changes that I didn't like actually came about in Mists of Pandaria. Both Wrath and Cata did things that I felt at least ambivalent about at the time, meaning I saw both pros and cons to them, but it seems MoP was when stuff got really bad, considering how many of its gameplay changes are triggering a pure "oh yeah, I remember hating that" response in me.

Anyway, with all those bad feelings, that likely would've been it for me and the pre-patch (other than to continue my daily cooking), but then I learned that Pandaren were already available and that you'd earn a free mount in retail for completing their starting zone in Classic, mirroring the promotion they had going on with a protodrake and the death knight starting zone during Wrath. I did that one in spite of feeling less than lukewarm about WotLK Classic, so re-doing the panda starting zone this time seemed like a no-brainer.

I'd actually only been through the Wandering Isle once before, about three years ago, so I was happy to pay it another visit. I also thought it would be interesting to do it as a monk this time, since I didn't create my first monk until BfA and therefore had no idea how different the class was going to be in its initial iteration.

The first difference was in fact immediate and very noticeable as my first ability was a move called "Jab" that actually hit my opponent with my staff, which I thought was delightful. In retail, monks don't use their weapons for anything, ever (which also makes the first Pandaren quest, which asks you to pick up a weapon and show that you can use it, quite nonsensical).

I made it to about level five, slowly jabbing things to death, when it occurred to me that while the Wandering Isle was very pretty, it was also quite boring to hit things to death so slowly. It was only then that I realised - oh right, we're in MoP, where you learn new abilities automatically and I guess they don't even show up on my bar? (Looking back, they did used to go on your bar in original MoP if there was space, so maybe this is just a bug.) Checking my spell book actually revealed new abilities I hadn't even realised I had access to, and that sped things up considerably, even if it was very weird to me to see Tiger Palm be a Chi spender instead of builder, which is the polar opposite of how it works in retail.

I was kind of surprised by how busy the island was, because on a lark, I had decided to create this "throwaway panda" on Hydraxian Waterlords, my old RP server home. Even though it was soft-merged into the regular PvE servers back in Classic BC and was meant to be closed down entirely in the run-up to Wrath, it's somehow still there, not just not closed, but not even locked for new character creation like most of the other old servers are. I figured it was going to be more pleasant to level in this more quiet environment without too much competition for mobs, so still seeing ~40 characters in the zone every time I played was a surprise.

When I got to Stormwind on the other hand, there were only about ten people there, and the auction house looked mostly empty. I wonder if there are any genuine holdouts still playing on this server or if it was mostly players like me who decided that levelling a throwaway character was more pleasant to do in a low pop environment.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Completing the storyline on the Wandering Isle, it was still a bit too linear for my personal taste, with a lot of running about, but overall pleasant. It's probably a better "island introduction" to the game than Exile's Reach to be honest. I was kind of surprised by how emotional the ending still made me.

The Alliance intro for Pandaren was new to me and was actually pretty funny! You meet with King Varian and he lectures you a bit about what it means to join the Alliance, but finishes by asking you to spar with him, because he's curious about the Pandaren fighting style. Now, when this duel starts, he has a buff that gives him 100% dodge chance, so all your attacks miss and he taunts you about it. Until... one hit suddenly goes through, and you get this slow-motion cut scene of him falling backwards and your companions looking absolutely horrified that you just punched the king of Stormwind, which I thought was hilarious. He just laughs it off and simply wanders off afterwards.

Anyway, with my free mount claimed and nothing else about the pre-patch looking particularly appealing, I'll probably coast by just doing those cooking dailies until the expansion releases properly and I can start my journey to the Vale. Though probably even that will have to wait at least a week or two, as I have no particular desire to compete with the launch day crowds.

Cata Continued

I finally hit level 85 in Cataclysm Classic! About time too, as the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch is only a few days away. 80-85 took me a little longer than expected mainly because I took a bit of a break about halfway through, otherwise it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than 70-80 did.

I ended up loitering in Northrend for longer than expected, since there were a few milestones I wanted to hit before moving on and the XP I got along the way wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I have this memory of many years ago, that XP gains in Outland became absolutely abysmal the moment you hit level 70 and the game wanted you to move on to Northrend, and it's stuck with me ever since that Blizzard hates you lingering in old expansion content. However, I'm starting to wonder whether I didn't exaggerate that effect in my mind over time, because as I said, continuing to quest in Northrend past level 80 wasn't all that bad. Sure, XP was reduced, but it wasn't abysmal. I actually ended up making it to 82 and about a third into level 83 before moving on to Cataclysm properly.

The main things I did in Northrend were the cooking and fishing dailies, as well as finishing up my exploration of the continent by uncovering all of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. In the former zone I also did the Loken quest chain, because unlike many players back in the day, I absolutely loved the Sons of Hodir. I briefly contemplated doing the Argent Tournament in Icecrown as well but ultimately decided against it as I didn't want to get bogged down with doing jousting dailies.

The last goal I finished up was getting my leatherworking skill caught up to the appropriate level, which required me to do a bit of farming for leather and other mats. I actually found it strangely zen to farm yetis in Storm Peaks and revenants in Wintergrasp, and it made me realise that this is an activity that I kind of miss in retail. Skinning as a skill still exists of course, but since skins - like all gathering nodes - are shared, the best way to farm leather is not to farm by yourself in a quiet corner of the map, but the opposite: to find an area where lots of people are killing skinnable mobs and then clean up behind them (and since the skins are shared you won't be "stealing" from any other skinners). It really drove home for me that while these shared gathering resources are a good thing in many ways, they have also taken something away from the game.

Anyway, once I was finally ready to get started on Cataclysm content properly, I did what I had planned and hauled my butt over to Vashj'ir, as I felt that it had been ages since I last visited that zone and I figured that it might actually be nice and nostalgic to replay after all this time. This turned out to be... partially true.

My initial review of Vashj'ir back in 2010 was pretty positive, but already a few months later I noted that replaying the zone on alts felt like "a massive drag". This time around, the first few quests felt pleasantly familiar and nostalgic. Back in original Cataclysm, mounts were not account-wide yet, so I had to do at least the first hub and a bit on every alt in order to earn my underwater breathing buff and seahorse mount to be able to navigate the zone.

As I continued deeper into the zone, my memories became fuzzier and I realised that there were some bits I barely remembered at all, such as the whole Nespirah chain. However, by the halfway point or so things definitely started to drag again this time too. I got the "2000 quests completed" achievement at some point and it struck me that almost 10% of those quests took place in this one zone alone, which is insane.

There's nothing wrong with any of the quests by themselves (and the Battlemaiden chain provides nice insights into the world of the naga), but it's just the fact that you have to go through almost 200 of them in a strictly linear chain just to cover a plot that can be summed up in two sentences. The same story could have been told in less than half the number of quests; there's just way too much "kill 15 naga" filler.

It's funny because at the time, I didn't think Cataclysm questing was that bad, but having revisited several older expansions in recent years it seems undeniable to me that Cata was an absolute low point in terms of questing. Mists of Pandaria was a noticeable step up again, but even BC and Wrath have aged better than Cata - in my opinion at least.

Gear progression was another interesting thing to observe. I'd started my journey in mostly tier five from BC and only replaced a few pieces of that while levelling through Northrend, and for very marginal upgrades at that. And then I started doing quests in Vashj'ir and the starts on the green quest rewards just went through the roof. By the end of level 83, after questing in Vashj'ir for a while, my health had nearly doubled compared to what it had been at level 82.

Finishing all of Vashj'ir got me most of the way to level 85. For the rest, I did the introductory quests to the other four Cataclysm endgame zones to unlock all the portals in Stormwind, as well as a bunch of cooking and fishing dailies. (I'd forgotten how much I used to love those in Cata.) At some point the Midsummer Festival also started, adding more supplementary XP from bonfire visits and torch tossing dailies.

I also got the "Stood in the Fire" achievement while doing the Uldum intro thanks to Deathwing paying the zone a visit. 

I was surprised to see the Darkmoon Faire return after only two weeks, but then I recalled reading somewhere that Blizzard increased the frequency of its visits in Classic due to the sped up expansion schedule compared to the game's original run.

I even paused to do a bit of archaeology when I found myself flying past dig sites. I was surprised how good they were for XP and pleased to see that Blizz had already increased their yield a bit to five fragments or more per unearthed relic - I vividly recall that when archaeology was first added, you only got about three to four pieces per successful survey.

Now my plan is to perhaps continue doing the cooking and fishing dailies as well as possibly level my leartherworking some more. I'm not planning to dive into Pandaria the moment it launches as I expect things to be very crowded and I'd rather avoid all the mayhem tied to that. With my modest goal of wanting to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I should have plenty of time to get there at my own pace, as long as I do so before the release of the later patches.

I've got to admit I found myself wondering why I still care so much about this night elf hunter. Sure, part of it are the fond memories I made with her during Vanilla Classic, and another part is that I simply enjoy things like levelling professions, regardless of how useful it might turn out to be. However, I think at this point it's also that I'm kind of hoping that eventually she'll be united with my warband in retail. I don't think she'd bring anything particularly rare to the table, but she may well have collected some transmogs that I don't own in retail yet.

I know Blizzard hasn't even hinted at Classic merging with retail, and in fact said at the start of Classic that the two would always be separate. However, with Classic about to move into Mists of Pandaria, that seems like forever ago now, and I find it hard to imagine any other endpoint than an eventual merge with retail, regardless of how many more expansions will actually end up getting the classic treatment. I can be patient.

Retail Bits & Bobs

I'm actually having more fun in Cataclysm Classic than in any other version of the game right now, how weird is that? Still, things haven't exactly been quiet in retail either, rather the opposite - it's just that nothing has been particularly sticky for me. Some notes on what's been going on: 

Retribution Paladin

I finished levelling the paladin I wrote about last month. I didn't get to the cap before the bonus XP event ended, but I was well into War Within by that point and the last few levels didn't take me long at all.

I can see why retribution paladins are so popular. People loved the idea of that class even back in Vanilla, when it performed really poorly in terms of output, so I'm not surprised that it's still popular now that it's more balanced and comes with a lot more shiny effects attached. Fighting as a retribution paladin is basically a massive light show with literal bells and whistles going off everywhere and hammers flying around, and it's just plain fun.

With the free delve keys you get from Renown it was surprisingly quick and easy to get her into a set of decent gear, but now I already find myself thinking "what now" again. Still, it was nice to actually play and level my first ever character in current content after all these years, even if I'll continue to primarily think of her as the one that first explored Elwynn Forest, fought gnolls in Redridge, protected weaker party members on a moonlit night in Loch Modan and got yelled at for tanking badly in the Deadmines.

Horrific Visions

The current patch (11.1.5) got criticised a lot for drip-feeding its content with too much time-gating, which is something I really don't mind, but what is true (for me at least) was that each part of the patch that was released later was less interesting to me than the previous one.

I loved the Nightfall event even if it was buggy and farmed my way to maximum Renown with the associated faction, but the return of Horrific Visions (a feature that was originally part of Battle for Azeroth) was already a lot less interesting to me. The husband and I actually dabbled in these a bit at the end of BfA when we first started playing again, but we didn't stick with them for very long, for reasons I can't recall now.

This time around, I think I already said during the second or third run that I could see these becoming boring really quickly. Sure, repeating content is a big part of WoW and MMOs in general, but there's just something about these little scenarios that makes the repetition even more blatant and tedious. It's become a bit more interesting as we've started to challenge ourselves a little with the higher difficulties, but I still wouldn't want to do these more than a couple of times a week.

Dastardly Duos

Finally, the latest part of the patch to be released belatedly was something called "Dastardly Duos", which I'd heard content creators praise while it was on the PTS, but my personal experience with this feature was comically bad. You see, the husband and I queued into them, and I thought that they would scale to your group size like delves and visions do. There were helpful NPCs at the start, but again I was thinking of Horrific Visions - where the general recommendation was to dismiss the help since it just increased mob health and wasn't actually all that helpful - and simply dismissed them.

This turned out to be a big mistake, as the content is clearly intended for five characters, and your gear is scaled down as well (something I had no idea about), so we got absolutely smashed and soon found ourselves camped at the spawn point. There was a timer on screen so I thought "oh well, let's just let the timer run out" but that did not complete the instance. We couldn't find any exit button either! I eventually distracted the mobs for a bit so the hubby's mage could hearthstone out, and I managed to get out the same way a bit later. It was just funny and bizarre but also totally killed any desire we'd had to engage with this content. Nothing like being thrown into an instance where you can't tell what's going on, get spawn-camped by NPCs and can't figure out how to leave.

I did eventually go back and complete a couple of rounds with the NPC group as intended, but I still didn't really understand what was supposed to be the point and it just didn't look particularly fun. There are plenty of more entertaining things for me to do instead of struggling to figure this out. 

In fact the next patch, 11.1.7, is already supposed to launch this week, so there's already something new to check out, yet again.

Legion Remix

During PAX East, something that was already floating around as a rumour was officially confirmed: that there'll be another Remix event like last year's Mists of Pandaria Remix, only this time it's going to be for Legion and it's going to launch towards the end of the year. I ultimately ended up liking MoP Remix quite a lot, so I'm looking forward to this, but at the same time my own experiences with Legion weren't that long ago and I didn't play the expansion at all when it originally came out, so I'm not currently feeling a lot of nostalgia for it.

I also have a character of every class at the level cap now (plus the extra paladin mentioned above) so what would I even level next? Another one of every class on the opposite faction, trying out different race and class combos? Not sure where I'll end up landing on all this. 

Housing Hype

And because all of this clearly isn't enough, Blizzard also keeps trickling out more news about housing. There's been a few dev blogs on the subject, such as this one and this one, and last month they had an event where different content creators got an early preview of how things are going, which resulted in a lot of them making gushing videos about the experience.

I'm following all this with interest but at the same time I'm not that much of a housing enthusiast that I'm on the edge of my seat (which is why I haven't felt the need to post about any of the above until now). In fact, a lot of the more advanced features don't sound all that interesting to me because I don't think I'd ever use them, so I was mainly relieved that it's been stated that there'll be a basic editor for players like me who just want to keep it simple.

One quote that amused me and that stuck with me (though I sadly can't remember now where I heard it) was something along the lines of: "Interior and exterior are completely separate, so your house can be much bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS. Or as we should say in WoW, like Naxxramas." 

Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Game Design

The other day I found out that WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas gave a presentation at Nordic Game less than two weeks ago. Even though I personally don't recall hearing about it before, Nordic Game touts itself as Europe's leading games conference, and handily, its various talks are available on YouTube for free. So I went ahead and watched Ion's.

It's a little less than an hour long but seemed to go by really quickly as I found it very interesting. Mostly he explains just how much WoW's design philosophy has changed since 2020, when retail's subscriber numbers plummeted during Shadowlands and Classic surged with popularity. He talks about how he was originally tasked with preserving "the vision" above all else, with Shadowland's widely lambasted covenant system having been the last gasp of that, and how they've come to appreciate since then that when you maintain a live service game that's this big and this long-lived, the players own it just as much as the devs and it makes no sense to try and force things on the players that they say they don't want. (I wonder how much Holly Longdale had to do with that change of heart.)

He talks about how even if you change absolutely nothing, player attitudes and interests change and you've got to be reckoning with that. He talks about how new systems will always benefit from a sense of novelty, but that even something that is loved at first will get boring and disdained after a while.

Another part related to that which I personally found particularly interesting was that he said that in the past, they were too obsessed with future-proofing everything, at the cost of making things actually fun. The example he gave of this was the Mists of Pandaria talent trees, which could have been built on for several more decades because of just how little they gave you, but that this also made them really boring and uninteresting while levelling (which I heartily agree with).

The contrast to this are the new talent trees added with Dragonflight, which are more similar to the old ones - and are even more complex than the old trees, in my opinion. I did also worry when they decided to add hero talents on top of that for War Within, that it was all getting a bit too complicated again already. His response to this was that they are well aware that it will all get out of hand at some point and will need tearing down again, but that this is a problem for the future, and that they don't want worries about ten years down the line to stop them from doing fun things now.

I think it's clear that he's very passionate about what he does, and I think it's also obvious that he strongly believes in this new strategy - and it has played out positively in the last two expansions so far! Nevertheless, I have to admit I also remained a bit sceptical of the things he said because they sounded a bit too simplistic sometimes. Listening to your players sounds great, but as he admitted himself, sometimes they want diametrically opposed things and you can't keep everyone happy - so how do you decide which way to go? And making things fun now without worrying too much about the future... again, I do get the idea behind it, but as an MMO player I've also seen my fair share of systems that were clearly built with that same attitude, that a certain result needed to be achieved now, and which then continue to be an albatross around everyone's neck because people didn't think enough about how they should continue to fit into the game's framework in years to come.

Either way, I can heartily recommend watching the video for yourself if you have any interest in why the WoW devs have made certain decisions in the past few years, as there's a lot more in there than just the examples I picked out.

(Ever wondered just how fast retail levelling is nowadays? Well, straight from the horse's mouth, it's "literally ten times faster" than it was in Vanilla.) 

Checking in on Cataclysm Classic

Back in October, in a post about why Classic wasn't really vibing with me at the moment, I noted the following: "If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state." As far as I can tell, MoP was the last expansion in which Blizzard permanently replaced a zone with an updated version, as in the years since, they've opted for the Bronze-Dragonflight-sponsored time travel option instead whenever they made major changes, which allows people to still access the old zone if they want to.

Since I made that post, Mists of Pandaria Classic has not only been announced, but also had a public beta and is currently scheduled to go live in mid to late July. As I hadn't forgotten about that goal of mine, I decided that it was about time to re-download Cataclysm Classic and get a character expansion-ready.

For those of you not keeping track, I last played "progressive" Classic at the end of TBC. I checked in extremely briefly both at the start of Wrath Classic and at the start of Cata, but did not feel drawn to either expansion. This meant that my characters were server-transferred last year as part of the latest round of soft server consolidations, but other than that, my hunter Tiirr (now with two Is and two Rs) was still level 70 and sitting in Shattrath.

I took the portal to Stormwind and started doing some maintenance to get her into a playable state. As an aside, I was surprised by how busy things were in Stormwind (and that's on a server that was flagged as having a medium population). Classic Cata is the currently live version of Classic that I've been hearing the least about in terms of people actually playing it, but clearly it still has its audience. Ironforge.pro has registered slightly fewer than 100k characters raiding in Cata Classic last week, which is about the same number as on the vanilla Classic anniversary servers. So for all the scoffing I've seen about how Cata is where the real Classic ended and surely nobody actually wanted it, there do seem to be plenty of players who've been happy to play it anyway.

Either way, my primary task was to get my bags in order. All my mounts and pets could be added to the new collections interface to no longer take up bag space. Toys were eligible too - the first time around, those didn't became part of collections until Warlords of Draenor, but in progressive Classic that part is already there. Likewise, the transmog interface is the one that was introduced in Legion, and the auction house is the new one that was added in Battle for Azeroth. I swear, this is going to make it harder than ever to remember which features were introduced in which expansion.

Anyway, other bag slots were freed up from selling items that had been turned into vendor trash, such as all my arrows, or things that were simply no longer relevant to a hunter in Cata, such as pet food and mana potions. One bag was filled with a bunch of random keys tied to various BC quests that I wasn't even on... I can only guess that those had been on my keyring when that was removed. Either way, more stuff to destroy. A few items, such a stacks of cloth, I decided to actually list on the AH since there were presumably still some people interested in them.

I had to visit the flight master to unlock flying in Northrend and the revamped old world. (Fortunately the ramp I was jumping off when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fly yet without this wasn't very high.) I stopped by all the profession trainers, as well as - after some initial confusion - my class trainer. (For some reason I'd had it in my head that Cata was also the expansion where they removed the need to train abilities, but no, that actually happened in Mists.) I dragged abilities from my spell book back onto my bar and spent my pet's talent points.

My hunter herself had no spec either, and my first impulse was to go Marksman as usual - but then I read some of the talents and went "eurgh" - right, Cata was when I went Survival, back when that was still a ranged spec, so I opted to revisit that particular setup. Still, I was kind of surprised by how incredibly boring all the talents looked, as I seem to remember quite liking the condensed talent trees during original Cataclysm.

Finally I was ready to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Northrend. It sent me to Borean Tundra when I would've preferred Howling Fjord, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't even remember where to board the right boat for that. So I just hopped onto the next ferry leaving Stormwind to start in the Tundra.

I miss boats being relevant. They are slow but they really force you to immerse yourself in the world for a few minutes in a way that portals don't.

I decided I could be picky with which quests to do, so I only did about a third of the zone (if that) and also made a trip to Dalaran and Howling Fjord to pick up some flight paths. Unsurprisingly I suppose, this was enough to net me two levels in that single play session. The Wrath portion of the levelling curve was presumably nerfed again with the release of Cata, there's another bonus XP event going on right now, and I was fully rested. Still, considering I'm not here for Northrend or the Shattering, I found the levelling speed heartening and it made the prospect of making it through the last two expansions I'd skipped less daunting. I expect that 80-85 might still be a bit of a pain unless they nerf it with the pre-patch or something, but we'll see. I'll probably do Vashj'ir since I haven't done that zone in ages... but first I need to actually make my way through Northrend.