Adventures in Old Content

I've often said that I consider the speed and ease with which modern WoW makes new content obsolete one of its biggest flaws. Blizzard have actually gotten a little better with this recently - everything added during Dragonflight for example served at least some purpose throughout the entire expansion, meaning that content didn't become entirely obsolete with every new patch.

Still, as a whole, the world of Azeroth is littered with old expansions that tell stories and contain gameplay that people might still find interesting and enjoyable today, but that newer players in particular are simply unlikely to see unless they specifically seek it out, as everyone just gets pushed into the newest expansion and that's that.

That said, while I'm sure that the majority of players largely ignore old content, it's not completely lacking in appeal even after it stopped offering challenges and gear rewards. Transmog farmers and all kinds of collectors in general tend to find plenty of reasons to go back into old expansions to keep adding to their collections.

I think I mentioned before that I've never been a huge fan of transmog farming myself, however my interest in it increased ever since Blizzard lifted the armour type and class restrictions in the run-up to War Within, meaning that if a priest robe drops for your warrior (for example), you can still add its appearance to your collection now, when previously you wouldn't have been able to.

For the most part, I haven't been super consistent in my efforts on that front, but one thing I've remembered to do almost every week is to clear Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on my warrior. They are old raids that I'm very familiar with after Classic and that make me feel quite nostalgic, plus they contain some absolute bangers in terms of outfits that I wanted to collect. Even after months of running both instances every week, there are a couple of pieces that continue to elude me.

I originally did most of this kind of farming on my priest, but switched to my warrior after the former had one of the Thunderfury bindings drop for her (and these are still soulbound, sadly). It then occurred to me that if I did the farming on my warrior instead, I could actually get myself a Thunderfury in retail. Before that, I honestly hadn't even given it any thought in so far as I'd figured it was probably just one of those things from Vanilla that are no longer available in retail, but that was not the case here.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea - no, this post is not about me actually getting said Thunderfury. I've got the Garr binding, but Baron Geddon has so far refused to cough up his part. (He also still owes me an Arcanist Mantle, supposedly his most common gear drop - not in my experience.) However, while you mindlessly run through MC week after week, one-shotting everything in your path, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of related projects.

Because there is of course another legendary that comes from MC: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. That one requires a blacksmith to craft a Sulfuron Hammer first, but my warrior is in fact also a blacksmith, so it was time to level some classic professions!

Mining went pretty quickly for the most part due to how much Blizzard increased the number of node spawns in Cataclysm, plus of course the ability to fly in the old world - also, I don't know if it's intentional or a bug, but you can mine from the back of your flying mount in old content as well now, not just in the newest expansion, which has come in very handy.

As you get closer to 300, things start to slow down a bit, but I had no problem doing laps around old Silithus for hours. However, at skill level 295 I suddenly noticed that I was no longer getting any skill-ups even from Rich Thorium Veins, and I already knew from my MC runs that Dark Iron didn't give any either. That's not how that used to work in Classic! When did they change this and why? And how the heck are you supposed to get to 300 then?

A bit of research revealed that the only way to get from 295 to 300 in Classic Mining was by smelting Dark Iron Ore, which you can still only learn by doing a quest in BRD, so I did that. And to think I'd actually stopped tapping the Dark Iron Ore nodes during my MC runs since I thought they were worthless nowadays! The things you find out...

Anyway, with all the Thorium I had gathered I was able to skill up Blacksmithing without any major issues, and after Ragnaros actually dropped an Eye of Sulfuras one day, I decided it was time to get onto crafting that Sulfuron Hammer. This still requires you to be exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, which is not that hard to achieve in retail, fortunately. At first I thought I'd go and actually do the Cata quests in Searing Gorge, since those are supposed to give pretty good rep, but then I realised that I'd actually accumulated so many of the trade-in items from MC trash that it was easier to just go all the way from neutral to exalted using those.

I bought and learned the recipe and looked at the ingredients. 50 Arcanite Bars? Hmm. I knew that transmuting Arcanite had no cooldown in retail, but it turned out that my Jewelcrafter didn't have quite that many Arcane Crystals saved up in her bank. I started prospecting some Thorium, only to realise after a while that you apparently can't get Arcane Crystals from prospecting. Supposedly this was only possible at one point in early Burning Crusade, which might be where I got the idea from. So I did more mining instead.

Once I'd accumulated enough crystals, I sent them alongside a bunch of Thorium bars to the Worgen druid I'd made back in original MoP, who's a herbalist and alchemist and still had to skill up her professions through all the available expansions at the time. Once I started creating the Arcanite Bars, I was delighted to find that she was actually a transmutation master, something I'd long since forgotten but which meant that I got a lot more bars out of my materials than I'd expected. Good job for making that choice, past me.

With the Arcanite sorted, I got ready to craft the Hammer... just to realise that I was in fact still short something, namely some Blood of the Mountain. I hadn't paid particular attention to that item, just chucking it into the guild bank alongside the other miscellaneous old crafting materials that sometimes dropped from MC trash, so I hadn't realised just how rare it was in comparison to everything else and that I still didn't have ten of them even after months of farming.

I was stunned to find that they were several thousand gold a piece even on the auction house, and while I could've just bought them there, it did strike me as kind of expensive and would've been somewhat unsatisfactory to me. Instead I looked up the exact mob they dropped from and made sure in subsequent MC clears to always kill all the Molten Destroyer trash mobs as well. Again, what a surprise to find that such a random item from Vanilla was actually still rare and valuable!

That whole line of discoveries actually reminded me of a little story from my Cataclysm days as well: At the time, my old guild (which was already in decline) had made me an officer, and at some point a guildie I barely knew asked me whether he could have some old crafting mats from the guild bank, including some Blood of the Mountain. I happily agreed and handed it all out for free, thinking it was just a bunch of worthless junk. Needless to say, the GM was not happy with me when he found out, and I felt like a complete idiot once I realised that at least some of the items I had given away were actually still very valuable. In fact, I was so ashamed that I then spent the next few weeks farming MC on my shaman until I could restock the guild bank with all the Blood of the Mountain I had so carelessly given away.

It feels funny to be back to that now, even if it's happening under completely different circumstances. However, at least to me there's also something comforting in knowing that there are still some things in modern WoW that haven't changed that much since Vanilla.

Delving in Season 2

After the rough start I had with delves at The War Within's launch, I slowly warmed up to them over time, and have in fact been really getting into them this season. I completed the seasonal reward track much faster than last time, and also got Brann to the new level cap of 80, after not even hitting the previous companion level cap during Season 1. I'm currently working my way towards the achievement to complete all delves on tier 11 as every role. Tank's all done, dps is mostly there, and healer still has a way to go, but it's only a matter of time.

Blizzard took an (in my opinion) interesting approach to the new season with delves. While they added two new ones, and they are bountiful more often than the old ones, the old delves are still just as valid as a means for gearing up. I still remember when they added the two revamped troll dungeons back in Cataclysm and how burnt out people got on them due to the reward structure encouraging you to run just those two dungeons over and over again. It's nice to see that the devs have learned from some mistakes over the years.

In fact, they put a surprising amount of effort into giving the old delves a seasonal refresh as well, by adding lots of new (mostly goblin-themed) variants to them. I'm still not sure whether I've already seen them all, as Blizz made the strange decision to just add them to the existing "stories" achievements without requiring you to actually tick them off if you already completed the achievement in Season 1. I guess it makes sense to not make achievement hunters lose points (even if temporarily) but as someone who primarily views achievements as a way of keeping track of what I've done and what I haven't, the lack of an actual new achievement to track has been rather unhelpful.

They also made some changes to various delve mechanics, seemingly in an effort to make them less annoying based on player feedback from Season 1, but I've mostly got mixed feelings about those. The addition of the goblin vendor to the underwater delves who sells you underwater breathing for a hefty markup feels like a tacit admission that the "run through air bubbles to keep breathing" mechanic is not very fun and that people just bought underwater breathing potions to simply negate the whole mechanic anyway. It's still much cheaper to bring your own potions than to pay for the goblin's services, but it's helpful if you find yourself running out of consumables due to deaths or simply find yourself at the entrance of the delve realising that you forgot to buy potions entirely.

The way candles and totems were changed from an item you carry with you to a consumable buff that you plop down where you want them to sit feels like an adjustment to the reality that people were always dropping the candle/totem anyway to be able to move freely during combat, but I miss being able to pick it up again for moving, as the new system basically forces you to move in the dark/through poison a lot, which I'm not a fan of.

I also dislike what they've done to the spores in Fungal Folly and Mycomancer Cavern. I actually really liked the way they were a risk vs. reward mechanic in Season 1, where I actually enjoyed aggroing them and dragging them onto enemies to use them as an additional source of damage. Now they are no longer attackable or move, plus their damage to mobs has been dramatically reduced (if they even still do any at all), so they are just a nuisance that means you can't stand still for too long in certain spots.

And the new web mechanics in the Nerubian delves are just more annoying all around, whether it's the little unkillable egg things that you have to keep hitting every so often or else they'll cover the whole floor in webs again, or the respawning flying web spreaders that you can't fully prevent from dropping webs on you at the most inconvenient times.

Of course, the biggest change to delves this season is that Brann was given a tank role. I'm still not entirely clear on why he was only able to support you as dps or healer in Season 1 anyway. I thought it was very telling when I saw someone comment in a discussion about this topic that duh, he can't be a tank because that would completely trivialise the content. This is amusing to me because it does align with my own perception that tanks in modern WoW are way too overpowered. However, I didn't think it was a sufficient explanation because the devs seemed to have similar concerns about healer Brann and worked around those by making it so that he does relatively little direct healing but instead just plops down all these healing potions that the player has to actively pick up.

It's interesting to see WoW wrestling with these sorts of companion issues when I've mainly been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the last thirteen years, which has had permanent companions since launch. The SWTOR devs did seemingly also have concerns about companions being overpowered at launch, as healer companions were originally much more limited in what they could do. Specifically they were pretty good at rolling heal-over-time abilities on multiple players at once, but their biggest burst heal put a debuff on the player that prevented that person from receiving another burst heal for fifteen seconds or however long it was, meaning that companion healing was very hobbled compared to that of an actual player. After they threw all of that out the window with the big companion revamp of the 4.0 expansion, healer companions in particular did indeed become very OP, and it's been a long-running complaint that this makes content too easy/prevents new players from learning how to play because their healer comp will just heal them through absolutely everything.

Anyway, I digress - let's return to tank Brann. I tried him out relatively early on and my first impression was mostly positive. It certainly was a lot more fun when doing delves as a healer to actually be able to stand there and heal than to constantly kite and hit self-preservation cooldowns because everything's always aggroed on you no matter what. He did seem to take a lot of damage, way more than a player tank would take under the same circumstances, but I figured that was fine as a way of making the healer work for it in a way that aligned with their play style.

Then Blizz decided to nerf him massively, increasing his damage taken by 60% (among other things) because the spec had "simply proven to be too powerful when players hang back and just focus on healing him" aka when you simply play a healer as intended. This was a massive facepalm moment, though they did roll some of those changes back later on I think.

Either way, I've actually found that tank Brann's biggest issue aren't damage numbers but that his general behaviour can simply be extremely erratic and buggy at times. When he works as designed, you aggro a couple of mobs, he rounds them up around himself, and you spam heals on his rapidly dropping health bar until all enemies are dead.

In reality though, I've found that pretty much in every other delve, there'll be a situation where he rounds up the mobs you pulled but then decides to charge off into the next group of mobs... and the next one... and the next one... until you've aggroed way too many enemies and end up wiping. Playing a priest, I've tried to use Leap of Faith on him on those occasions to pull him back, but he immediately runs off again and there's nothing you can do to stop him. At first I took this in stride and joked about how he was training you up for bag pugs, but it's happened so often now, it really feels like this should be something that should be avoidable. In dps and heal mode, there are safeguards in place so that if/when Brann decides to randomly drop an AoE on a new mob group you didn't even want to pull, they just ignore it unless you engage them in combat yourself. I'm not sure why tank Brann is allowed to pull all over the place and doesn't follow the same model.

In rarer but no less infuriating instances, he'll do the exact opposite and just decide not to do anything at all. Just this morning I did a Tak-Rethan Abyss, and on the last boss, Brann just refused to engage for some reason. He somehow held aggro, but barely took any damage and did absolutely none himself. Do you have any idea how long it takes to kill a tier 11 boss with a lot of movement requirements by yourself as a holy priest?! The fight lasted for about fifteen minutes until my concentration finally failed me, I stepped on a mushroom and got one-shot. I then changed Brann's role to dps and on the next attempt we killed it just fine, but not until after I'd subjected my husband to a lot of ranting about what an absolute maniac and "bearded menace" tank Brann was.

I can only hope that Blizzard will be able to fine-tune his performance over time, or even better, that they'll give us some means of actually controlling him in the future. I presume that there are additional concerns here that this might make him too OP or be abusable in some way, but being unable to stop him from pulling or to make him attack when you're in a fight and he just twiddles his thumbs is way worse in my opinion.

Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Jason Schreier's "Play Nice"

Jason Schreier is a big name in gaming journalism, and when I first heard that he was going to publish a book about the history of Blizzard, I got quite excited. I would've even bought it on launch day, but then I found out that for some reason physical publication in the UK was delayed by something like two months, which kind of made me lose interest. I just watched/read some coverage of the book around the time of its release in the US and then mostly forgot about it again.

Until the other day that is, when it suddenly reappeared on my radar for some reason and I decided to finally pick it up. It was an enjoyable read, and I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

I especially appreciated the earlier chapters, because as someone who knew nothing about Blizzard before I started playing World of Warcraft, I always had very limited knowledge of the company's early years. I'd sometimes see people make comments about Blizzard North or Vivendi and have no real idea what they were talking about. Now I do, so in that regard, the book was very enlightening. The chapters about more recent developments were admittedly a lot less interesting, as they mostly covered events that I'd basically seen play out live on social media/in the news as they happened, and in greater detail than was covered in the book.

What really kind of disappointed me though was how little coverage there was about World of Warcraft. To be honest, the main reason I bought the book was that I was hoping for some juicy behind-the-scenes information about just why the devs made certain decisions in regards to the game's development over the years. What were they thinking when subscriptions stagnated during Wrath of the Lich King? What insights did they gain from players' responses to Cataclysm? Just why did Warlords of Draenor turn out the way it did? That sort of thing.

However, for some reason the game and its development got what I felt was very little coverage for something that's presumably been keeping the lights on at Blizzard for the last two decades. There's a chapter about its development and launch, and later there are a few pages dedicated to the release of Classic, but that's kind of it. Occasionally there'll be a reminder that WoW was still releasing expansions but that's as far as it goes, which really struck me as a big oversight.

One of the major themes of the book is the struggle between devs wanting to prioritise player enjoyment and corporate wanting to focus more on monetisation, and I figured WoW in particular would offer a lot of ground to cover on that topic. Talk about the release of the sparkle pony! The introduction of character boosts! The WoW Token! But nope, not a word about any of these things.

Considering the amount of random developers that get name-dropped throughout the book, it was also surprising that there wasn't even a mention of Ion Hazzikostas, considering how many years he's been at the helm of WoW by this point. Maybe he intentionally didn't want to be part of this book, but considering Jason's seeming lack of interest in WoW-related goings-on, I also wouldn't be surprised if he simply didn't consider talking to him.

In summary, "Play Nice" is a well-researched history of Blizzard and definitely relevant to anyone with an interest in Blizzard and/or the PC gaming industry, but for WoW players in specific, it's not as insightful as I would've expected.

I used to hope that Jason would write a similar book about Bioware one day so I could learn more about what happened behind the scenes of SWTOR's post-launch development, but at this rate it doesn't look like that subject would get much coverage even if such a book were to happen.

All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zek'vir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.

Musings on Goblins

War Within's latest patch, Undermine(d), is all about goblins. I like it well enough so far, but we'll see how it holds up in the long term. Either way, it's made me think about goblins a lot and how my perception of them has changed over time.

Looking at how goblins were presented in Vanilla, I always pictured them as natives of tropical islands. We originally encounter them in four different settlements, and aside from Everlook, they are all located on or near the beach of a zone with a warm climate. They seemingly like to cook with fish and clams a lot (the original artisan cooking quest is given by a goblin and rewards you with a stack of "Clamlette Surprise", plus there's that recipe for "Undermine Clam Chowder").

There are quite a few mentions of Undermine in the classic quests, but I've got to admit that despite the name, it never would've occurred to me that the place was underground. At the end of the quest chain from Booty Bay that has you collecting hides from increasingly dangerous crocolisks, the quest giver mentions that his creations will be on "the next boat to Undermine", so I always thought it was just an island.

In terms of their nature, vanilla goblins are portrayed as curious, enterprising and uninterested in the faction rivalries between Alliance and Horde. It's not surprising to find a random goblin out in the middle of nowhere, and if he's a vendor, you know he'll have something rare or interesting for sale. Their quests tend to be pretty straightforward fetch/kill quests, which may sound boring, but by the time you encounter most of these you'll be in higher-level territory where quests start to get more sparse and you're just grateful for something to do. Goblin NPCs often come across as a bit single-minded and greedy, but in a "good-natured scoundrel" sort of way, and they still care about other things too. Alchemist Pestlezugg warns both the Horde and the Alliance about the looming threat posed by the silithids for example, and Umi Rumplesnicker makes you travel all over Kalimdor just to play a prank on her friends.

And then Cataclysm came out and everything was different. I went through the blog's archives to find what I had to say about the goblin starter zone when it first came out and only found this post from 2011, in which I stated: "Those zones seem to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion."

I actually never rolled another goblin after that, so I thought I'd use the occasion of patch 11.1 to revisit Kezan and the Lost Isles just to see how I'd feel about them one and a half decades later. Now, I didn't hate the experience at first, but it still felt very weird. I just told you how I perceived the goblins in Vanilla, right? Well, come Cataclysm they are suddenly polluting hyper-capitalists whose every sentence is some sort of anachronistic joke. The very first quest has you going around applying electric shocks to some slaves for fun, and I mean, I don't want to look at this stuff too seriously, but still... yikes.

At least I got to look cute. I say that as someone who's not usually a fan of short races.

I also forgot that you start the experience with a temporary car and a lot of the intended fun seems to be in running people over. I guess Grand Theft Auto 4 must have just come out while they were working on this? Then you play this parody of American football and the implied joke is that you kicking a specially modified ball/bomb up the mountain is what unleashes Deathwing upon the world. It's just one bizarre scenario after another.

(Now, it was extra funny when I hit level 10 and got a call (?) from Ebyssian calling me a hero of the Horde and that I should go to the Dragon Isles while I was just fighting my way through a cave after having been shipwrecked. However, I'm more willing to be forgiving of content that is more than a decade apart not meshing well than of how weird the goblin starter zone was by itself.)

By the Lost Isles things started to feel like a real drag once again. You're locked into this hyper-linear plot that makes no sense and just has you endlessly running back and forth completing one joke task after another. Fetch an egg from a giant mechanical chicken! Blow up a shark with a laser! Mow down hordes of faceless pygmies with a mounted cannon! Wait, I thought we were shipwrecked and struggling to survive a moment ago? Oh look, the volcano is blowing up, get on this plane that we now have for some reason, time to dog-fight with some gnomes!

It's not that I didn't find any of it amusing (it had been so long I'd genuinely forgotten most of the story and I did at least crack a smile at the quest where a goblin captive in a cage barely has time to point out that their captors have keys before you start blowing things up with rockets instead), but it was just nothing but a succession of nonsense and I was definitely reminded of why Cata made me lose all interest in goblins and why I never had the urge to repeat this starter zone, ever.

In the run-up to patch 11.1, I saw multiple dev interviews where they felt the need to emphasise that they wanted the goblins to be more than joke characters in Undermine(d), and I'm glad to say that that's been true so far at least (the story is time-gated so I've only seen the first three chapters or so at this point). The same old stereotypes are still there, but we do see goblins caring about a variety of things and while there are still plenty of humorous NPCs and encounters, it's a lot more coherent and not just a bunch of random nonsense.

And yet, as I open yet another trash can filled with grey items that was marked as "treasure" on my Undermine mini map for some reason, I still can't help but wonder how we ended up here, with goblins speaking in New York accents and living underground among neon-lit filth. I mean, were they always meant to be like this and it just wasn't conveyed that well in the environmental storytelling in Vanilla WoW? Or if not, how and why did we get here? And did literally nobody but me find the way the goblin lore developed in Cata strange?

Happy (Character) Sorting Day!

I take a probably somewhat unusual pleasure in sorting things. I think it's something I inherited from my father, who was a "spreadsheet guy" before electronic spreadsheets were a thing. He was a collector of many things and he liked to keep them meticulously sorted. For example he used to record songs from the radio on cassette tapes, and movies/shows on TV on VHS tapes, and for both he kept detailed directories of what was stored where. Child me chose to imitate him by neatly cataloguing my own possessions, from my own cassette tapes to stuffed animals to books.

What does that little story have to do with WoW? Well, today's patch introduced a new option to sort your characters, and that delighted me so much that I haven't really gotten around to doing much else yet.

My "old mains" campsite, featuring (from left to right): the night elf priest that was my first ever character to level cap, the Horde troll priest who coined my online nickname of now two decades, the human paladin that was my first character ever, and the human monk that was my main throughout Shadowlands.

As a reminder, the introduction of Warbands in the War Within prepatch merged the character selection screens for individual servers into one big character selection screen. While most changes that have come with Warbands have been great, I thought this particular one was a bit of a mixed bag. At first, seeing all those old alts again was kind of cool and nostalgic, but in everyday play it got a bit annoying to have to deal with such a long list of characters. Sure, you could sort them, but there was still a lot of scrolling to do if you had a lot of alts like I do.

Well, since today's patch you can sort your characters into "warband camps" of up to four characters, which makes things a lot more convenient. I spent about fifteen minutes just creating groups and moving characters around before even logging in properly. My only disappointment was that you can't move the groups themselves around once created, so if you ever decide that one should move up or down, you have to delete/rename the existing groups and then manually shuffle the characters inside them as well.

I even took to reddit specifically to check out how other people were organising their campsites, and it's honestly been quite interesting. As you can see in the screenshot below, my own camps are primarily sorted by level progression and emotional connection. The ones named after servers are basically "those old Alliance characters from back when I played on Darkspear" and similar groups.

But other people took very different approaches. Some were sorting by play style (melee vs. ranged), some by class, faction or role (bank alts, crafters). Some came up with serious RP names, some with whimsical groupings like "might delete later". I just thought it was an interesting look into how other people view their stable of alts. 

Are you also an altoholic for whom this feature has been a godsend? If so, how have you sorted your alts into campsites?

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Back in October I wrote a post about why I'm currently not playing that much Classic anymore, and I always meant for that to have a kind of part two, in which I talk a bit about why I am still playing retail and how I got back into it in the first place.

"How to get Classic players back into retail WoW" is a question to which I'm sure the Blizzard devs would love to have the ultimate answer... because while a subscription is a subscription regardless of which game mode you play, retail has extra monetisation opportunities that Classic lacks, which I'm sure makes it the much bigger earner of the two, regardless of what the actual player distribution might look like.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video called "I Asked Over 400 Classic WoW Players Why They Don't Like Retail" and the most interesting thing about it to me was the conclusion, as the creator said that he'd originally intended to have a section about how to get Classic players interested into playing retail again, but gave up on the idea when the majority of the people he interviewed flat out said that nothing would bring them back to retail, ever.

I think this reveals that for many Classic players there's a strong emotional component to their dislike for retail, which also expresses itself in a sort of tribalism at times - I've found that in retail environments, nobody really cares if you also play Classic, but in pretty much all the Classic guilds I've been in, admitting that you also play retail is likely to result in persistent (if hopefully friendly) mockery.

I'm not being judgemental of that behaviour here either, because I was in the same boat only a few years ago. When I resubscribed for Classic, I had zero interest in ever playing retail again, and I shared several of the opinions expressed in the above video.

What changed? Well... the biggest and simplest draw to return to retail was curiosity. Having a single subscription for both was a pretty genius move by Blizzard in that regard, because I never would've re-subscribed to retail in specific, but since it was already part of my "subscription plan" so to speak, checking it out again cost me nothing other than giving up a bit of disk space after pressing the "install" button.

And I do suspect that this is something that has worked on other Classic players as well... the problem is that the initial experience you have upon returning is most likely pretty bad. Your natural reaction is probably to log back into the last character you played several years ago, which might have logged out in a location from multiple expansions ago, whose UI will be messed up, and which probably has a bunch of half-empty action bars. The game offers you a free teleport back to the capital nowadays, but I'm not sure how helpful that really is... I still dislike post-Cata Orgrimmar for example and always try to get out of there as soon as I can when playing Horde side.

Either way, even if you put up with the mess that greets you and try to make sense of it, the experience of trying to sort out what's what is likely to exhaust you and make you feel like the whole thing is just an awful chore. I remember that's exactly how I felt when I briefly logged into retail when I first renewed my subscription in the run-up to Classic's launch.

When I actually did start to play retail again, I did so by making an alt, a course of action which would also be my personal recommendation to you if you're a Classic player who's considering giving retail another try, even if you're not usually an alt person. It means that "chores" and elements of confusion come at you at a much more manageable pace, and you have a better chance of re-evaluating the game for what it actually is.

There are two basic strategies here from my point of view:

The first is what I'd call "the nostalgia route", in which you create a character of a race and class you like and start levelling them through familiar zones. While things are likely somewhat different from how you remember them from Classic, familiarity is going to outweigh strangeness, making it much easier to process the things that actually stick out to you as odd. I did this at first by creating a draenei shaman named Bluu and levelling her through the draenei starting zone, followed by having her go to Outland (this was before Burning Crusade Classic). I got a good shot of nostalgia out of the zones and quests, while pausing to be bewildered by things every now and then: Wait, they changed the intro cinematic for draenei, this makes no sense! Why does lightning bolt have no mana cost now? Why is the quest log weird like that now? What's up with the first aid trainer only teaching tailors now? Etc.

The risk with this approach is that you may run into one too many things that hurt your nostalgia after a while and sour your mood: elite quests that aren't elite anymore, barren landscapes where you remember bustling crowds, or confusion about where to go now that boats and portals don't work the way they used to. In addition, with the way scaling works nowadays, questing in old content means that you'll likely fall behind in terms of gearing and will eventually find combat increasingly awkward and drawn out.

Which takes us to the second approach, which is to still make an alt but almost with the opposite attitude: You know that trying to approach retail with nostalgia goggles creates problems, so you opt for a scenario where this won't be an issue, by creating a character of a race and/or class you've never played before, and jump into one of the more recent expansions that you know little to nothing about. This means that you'll be bombarded with more newness and strangeness than on the nostalgic path, but on the plus side, since you don't have expectations you shouldn't be disappointed by failing to have them met. Just read those quests and follow the markers and take in parts of the world you've never seen before. The slower trickle of information and features should still make the experience a lot more manageable than trying to get back to your old main instantly, and you'll get to explore a whole bunch of new content in the process. You can pick your old characters back up again later on if you want, when you're actually used to the UI again and have a better grip on how things work.

This is all under the assumption that you enjoy exploring and questing, which I would expect to be the case for a good chunk of Classic players at least. However, if you're looking to jump right back into group content and endgame, I'll admit that you'll have a tougher time and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Dragonflight and War Within have solo versions of all their dungeons at least, so you can check those out in a low-pressure way the first time around.

I will say that playing retail again hasn't suddenly "converted" me to thinking that it's the better version of WoW or anything. Here's a list of things I still prefer about Classic: 

• The way the whole world is relevant to some degree and how players interact with it by travelling a lot
• The slower-paced levelling and gearing and how it makes everything feel more meaningful, from your connection to your character and the ability to take in your environment to the excitement of getting a rare item drop
  
• The slower-paced combat with its simpler rotations and how it's more about being strategic about things like relative positioning to other mobs than about perfectly executing a complicated rotation
• The way being social is more integrated into general gameplay and the difficulty of just making progress in the world encourages you to co-operate with other players
  

Now, you might read that and go: Wait, what's even left for you to like about retail then? Well...

I think one major point is that I'm an explorer type, and while the Vanilla world is great, I've seen a lot of it by now (I know there are still some things I haven't personally experienced, but not a lot of them to be honest). In retail WoW, there are always new things to try out and new places to see, and since Dragonflight the devs have also made it a lot more rewarding to just cruise around the open world and explore. Nobody can tell me that the zone design isn't still top notch.

I also like how many casual activities they've added over time beyond just grinding dailies/world quests. I loved all the different recurring events they added during Dragonflight, from the communal soup cooking to the time rifts, and War Within has added more of these. They are little things that feel somewhat rewarding to do on pretty much every alt and are just plain fun. Classic has less of a variety of pre-made content: you either quest, do dungeons, raid or PvP.

Most importantly though, Classic is simply not getting any updates, the occasional experiment on a seasonal server not withstanding. Retail WoW is in a unique position in the MMO genre in that it's such a juggernaut with a huge budget, it's been pumping out new content like nobody's business for several years now. (It's fun to think back to when this game used to have "content draughts" of half a year or more. No longer an issue as it stands.) I love that there are always new things to do and new places to see, and even if not every single one of them is a banger, there's still a lot to love for players of all kinds of different persuasions.

War Within's Mythic+ Season 1 Kinda Sucked (For Me)

The new expansion's first season is coming to an end soon, and as I did repeatedly during Dragonflight, I wanted to jot down some thoughts.

I initially wasn't sure whether I wanted to do more M+ in War Within, as I was feeling kind of burnt out and tired of it at the end of Dragonflight and wasn't super optimistic about War Within in general, but then I had a blast once the expansion launched, switching roles from healer to tank was invigorating, and I was rearing to go again.

Unfortunately M+ this season was... not great - in fact it's probably been the major criticism about the expansion from people who actually play it. It's like this dark stain on the expansion's (so far) overall positive reception.

I'd even mentally prepared myself for it to be kind of rough, as we didn't seriously get into M+ in Dragonflight until Season 2 and I'd been told that the content tends to be a lot harder at the start of an expansion than towards the end of it.

What I hadn't been prepared for, however, was how utterly, utterly unrewarding it was, in particular compared to delves. I said early on that I wasn't the biggest fan of delves, but I did power through and tried to find some things to like about them because the loot they gave was insanely good compared to the amount of skill and effort required to complete them. The problem with this is that we all ended up with gear that could only be upgraded in M+ if we ran I think... 7s and up? Something generally above our pay grade, so I and others spent the entire season running M+ purely for the "fun" of it and without gaining any rewards from it other than some currency (crests) and the occasional lucky pull from the Great Vault. Which was kind of disappointing, I'm not gonna lie. I mostly do M+ for the social aspect, but it did kind of suck to challenge ourselves so much and basically get no rewards for it. People will argue about whether M+ rewards were bad or delve rewards too good (I think it's the latter, but your mileage may vary) but ultimately the result was the same.

Oh, and I didn't love that all the affixes were Xal'atath-themed, considering that I'm not her biggest fan. At one point I looked up an addon to make her shut up in M+ but ultimately decided against installing it because I felt I did kind of need the sound cues to know what was happening, even if I was tired of hearing her voice.

Here's my personal ranking of the season's eight dungeons, as usual:

The Dawnbreaker 

This was easily our group's favourite dungeon all season, which I guess aligns with the general perception that people either love or hate this one. We had our fair share of wipes on the first boss, but ultimately it was a fun romp that always felt quick and not too painful. We never had any major issues with the airship bugging out on us or anything like that, and I appreciated the fact that being able to fly inside this instance gave an unprecedented amount of freedom in regards to choosing which trash to kill with your group.

City of Threads

This was another fun one with the killing of the spies in an otherwise neutral area, and I never got tired of listening to the Vizier's voice work feigning shock at our actions. The corridor leading to the last boss caused us issues sometimes, but otherwise this was another dungeon that we were able to time quite reliably relatively quickly.

The Stonevault

I initially wasn't too much of a fan of this one because some of the boss mechanics seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, and we had quite a lot of wipes on several bosses in here until people started to figure out their roles in each fight. Once we got over the worst of that though, it started to become another staple with fairly straightforward pathing that we could deal with reasonably well.

Grim Batol 

I liked this dungeon quite well in Cataclysm, and while I wasn't necessarily too keen on the various upgrades given to the bosses to bring them more in line with modern retail (as in, needing more mechanics and more shit to dodge), none of it was too bad (nothing like Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle during Dragonflight Season 2).

Siege of Boralus

I think this may have actually been the very first dungeon we attempted on M0 back in the day, when we finally got a third person in our guild high enough to join us for some group content. I remember that we tried to under-man it while being over-levelled, but it still went horribly. With that in mind, we didn't do too badly with this dungeon this season, except for a tendency for aggroing way too many unnecessary trash packs and then not quite being able to hit the timer. The bosses were all straightforward and decent fun, but getting to them was the annoying part and for some reason it always felt to me like the trash went on forever. Also, banana peels are my nemesis.

Mists of Tirna Scithe

This dungeon on the other hand was the nemesis of one or more of my group members. It's for the most past fairly inoffensive, if it wasn't for Mistcaller and that damn guessing game... The maze leading up to her wasn't actually that much of an issue, but on the boss fight for some reason seemingly everyone would freeze and be totally unable to solve the puzzle, over and over again. I don't find it hard in principle, but since I was also tanking and needed to pay attention to a cast that could only be interrupted by me and which would kill me if I missed an interrupt, I wasn't always in a good position to call, and the number of times apparently not one of my four guildies (including my husband) could figure out how to find the real Mistcaller among the illusions left me feeling rather bitter towards this dungeon in the end.

Necrotic Wake

People have expressed disdain for having two Shadowlands dungeons in the M+ rotation so soon because of the negative associations people have with that expansion, and I guess I kind of felt that too. And I didn't even dislike Shadowlands, or either of these dungeons in particular! And yet... something about this dungeon always made me feel down the moment we set foot inside it. I blame the fact that during our earliest runs, people were endlessly complaining to me about the trash, about how I should pull this pack but not that, wanting to do awkward skips just for us to end up short at the end and having to go back to the entrance, and so on and so forth. Also, I remember some particularly annoying wipes and fails in this dungeon, such as when one of our damage dealers lost internet close to the end and we continued with one man down and just missed the timer.

Ara-Kara, City of Echoes

First off, please tell me we weren't the only group that struggled with the fact that there were two War Within dungeons called "City of" in the rotation? The amount of times people got confused about that and needed clarification of where we were going was honestly amazing. Other than that... I kind of wanted to like this dungeon actually, because I found it interesting from a trash-pulling and tanking perspective, but the last boss was absolute cancer for our group. I think we did kill her successfully once or twice on low keys, but every visit afterwards was always a pain, mostly due to the pull-in mechanic and us somehow never having enough sticky puddles to stand in. We're quite familiar with failing keys, but we usually still finish every dungeon, even if it takes us a while - except this one: a particularly bad run of Ara-Kara was the one time I remember when we literally just gave up, and one group member was so upset about the whole thing and how it affected him emotionally that he dropped out of M+ altogether. So yeah, can't say this will ever be among my favourites.

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Loot and tuning fails aside, I'm also once again not sure I want to continue doing M+ going forward. I was so hyped at the start of the season, but one of our members decided to also join a raiding guild and... I didn't think much of it to begin with, because why not, if that's something that interests him? However, after a while it affected the vibe of our runs and not in a good way. At one point I got into an argument with him after he told me wanted to remove someone from our group for not putting enough effort into their gear by grinding delves and timewalking, which I felt was ridiculous for what I thought was supposed to be a group of friends casually socialising. And there were a lot more minor incidents like that, all of which would probably sound quite petty on their own, but which added up to an increasing sensation of nails on chalkboard for me. And at some point I was just like... why am I doing this to myself? Why am I dedicating my Sunday evenings to something that just makes me annoyed with my friends? Aren't there a hundred better ways to spend my time?

So I didn't even get to 2k rating this time around. While I'd technically have almost two weeks left to get a couple more runs in, I just don't want to. We'll see whether anything changes next season, but I've got to admit I'm not hopeful. The gear curve is supposed to be smoothed out significantly, but the dungeon pool looks extremely unappealing to me at a glance, and I just keep thinking of all the things I'd rather be doing. I'm glad I got to give M+ a try and that it didn't turn out to be as scary as I once thought it was, but at the same time it's possible that it's once again time to move on to other things.

So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.

Rune Hunting in Season of Discovery

I mentioned in my last post about SoD that I'd decided to put levelling on the back burner for a bit in favour of hunting down more of my class runes. Yes, I know you can just buy them all from a vendor now, but that just defeats the purpose for me - I don't so much care about having the runes at this point, I just want to see what kind of content/gameplay Blizz put into SoD related to acquiring them.

Back in phase one, I actually collected all but one of the available runes for my priest; the only one I was missing was the one for which you had to grind out various junk items for a goblin in Ratchet so he would turn into a vendor and sell you a rune (this was the same for all classes). I could never be bothered with that one, and when I returned to this goblin recently, I found that while the grindy quests are still there, he's just a vendor by default. I then opted to simply return to Orgrimmar and buy the rune from the trader there for one copper, because if I'm going to just buy these from a vendor, I might as well save myself some cash (the price at the goblin was still three gold).

Then it was time to whip out the Wowhead guide and go travelling around the level 30-40 zones for the phase two runes. The common theme for these seemed to be that they required you to travel a lot, and I tried to get several things done in each location at once for efficiency, but there was pretty much always something I'd forget and that I later had to go back for after all. At least I got my master fishing quest done during these repeated round trips around the world as well.

I also found out that the devs did away with the whole "meditation" thing, a.k.a. the buff sharing mechanic I absolutely adored in phase one (and without which you couldn't actually learn many runes even if you'd found them). Honestly, I was glad. While I thought that the whole concept was an incredibly cool idea a year ago, with most people at level cap and no longer hunting for runes, I think it would've been a massive pain in the rear to acquire those meditation buffs every time I wanted to learn a new rune. 

The tooltips are now a lie. And also a bit broken.

Anyway, about half of the phase two runes were relatively straightforward and uneventful to acquire with a guide. Farm some mobs over here until they drop a thing, click on this item over there that starts a short quest, that sort of thing. However, three runes stood out as more interesting/challenging:

First there was the Dispersion rune, which according to the instructions, first required a rogue to pickpocket a scroll for you, then a mage to decipher said scroll, and then the resulting item starts a quest for the priest to do a couple of bits and bobs in Stranglethorn. Fat chance I'm going to find anyone to help with that at this stage, I thought at first, but then I noticed that the guide said that both the pickpocketed scroll and the deciphered scroll were tradeable and could be sold on the AH. And what do you know... I checked the AH and there was exactly one of the pickpocketed scrolls there, for a rather silly price of six gold or so. However, I was grateful for the opportunity to still do the quest after all, so I bought it and sent it to my mage alt to decipher, which ultimately enabled me to still unlock this rune the originally intended way. I suspect I was rather lucky to achieve that at this point.

Next there was the Spirit of the Redeemer rune, which requires you to hunt down the seven dark riders of Karazhan across the world. This was one of those things I'd heard people talk about in early coverage of SoD phase two, and the general impression I got of said coverage was that this was another task that all classes needed to do for one of their runes, that it was very time-consuming, and that it required a full group. I figured that would be another thing that might be tough to do at this point in the game, but I was tentatively hopeful based on some comments I'd read and the fact that I was a few levels past 40 at this point that I'd be able to solo this one. So I made sure to grab some world buffs before revealing the first rider... and it worked! It was still a somewhat tough fight that required me to blow all my cooldowns and I was out of mana by the end, but it was doable, so I travelled to all seven of the required zones and hunted down the rider in each one. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that each rider hunted down counted as a quest that translated into about one bar of XP at my level, so I actually got a decent amount of that just for working to unlock this one rune.

The biggest challenge however turned out to be the Pain Suppression rune. This one required you to collect items from four different zones in opposite corners of the world (naturally) which you then had to use inside one of the rooms in the library wing of Scarlet Monastery. Now, obviously people are still doing SM runs, but I'd kind of reached a level where groups wouldn't really have been too happy to take me to the library wing (plus I wasn't sure how a pug would feel about me wanting to pause in the middle to faff around with no-longer-required rune stuff), but at the same time I wasn't yet high enough to easily be able to solo the place.

I spent a little time looking for a group but quickly grew impatient and decided to give soloing it a try anyway. As it turned out, a single mob inside the dungeon was easy enough for me to take down at this point, two were doable with mind control but kind of slow, and three were a mad scramble but survivable if I had cooldowns up. So I started to slowly work my way through the first corridor and then the courtyard, with things going wrong several times and forcing me to run back out, usually when I couldn't stop a runner in time.

My little Homunculi were also a bit of a mixed bag. They were incredibly useful in terms of combat capabilities, but they are also uncontrollable and can be stupid unholy little terrors, and would sometimes randomly decide to charge off into another room to pull more when I really couldn't take any more mobs at that particular moment. I survived a lot of close calls, but one time it all got too much and I died. When I ran back in I had to discover to my chagrin that because I'd been so slow, trash at the entrance was already starting to respawn.

I almost gave up at that point, but I was so close to the room I actually needed that I persisted, carving an even narrower path through the respawned mobs to get back to where I was, and eventually I succeeded in getting to the corridor I needed and was able to place my items there to "summon" the rune.

With all the phase two runes polished off, I started to have a look at the phase three ones. There was one that was really easy, only requiring me to kill a regular one mob just outside Gadgetzan. Since it was in the area, I also tried the one that requires you to summon a voidwalker in a waste wanderer camp, but that went horribly wrong since it was an elite, immune to shadow damage (never great news for a priest) and had an absolutely horrific damage output. So I died and decided to leave that one for another day.

Time to get back to actual levelling.