Level 90 in MoP Classic: What Is This Place?

The other night I felt like playing a little bit of Lemix before bedtime but for some reason all the retail servers were down. I heard mutterings about a DDoS attack? Either way, to get my fix of the particular flavour of WoW grinding that I craved at the time, I instead fired up MoP Classic for the first time in a few months.

The devs went pretty wild with server merges since I last played. Fortunately Mirage Raceway is still the same as it was, so I didn't have to move my characters yet again. I do appreciate that they finally put an end to the farce that were all those single-faction PvP realms and converted them all to PvE. Now there are no more PvP servers in the EU version of MoP Classic at all, while the US only got to keep its lone holdout Grobbolus, the RP-PvP server where people actually cared about community and things other than griefing and therefore managed to maintain a somewhat balanced population. Can we finally stop pretending that the masses crave world PvP now?

I've said it before, but logging into MoP Classic feels weird every time. When I've just been playing Vanilla, it feels strange and too modern. What are all these buttons? Where is my ammo? But when I've been playing retail recently it's the opposite and actually feels quite nostalgic with its enforced ground travel while levelling and a hunter skill rotation that doesn't feel like total crap. 

When I last abandoned my hunter in Pandaria, I was mired in how tedious it felt to level to 90 (even if I wrongly noted it down as levelling from 84 to 85 in this post). I guess that just underlines how meaningless that stretch of levelling felt, just an endless bar going nowhere and taking forever to fill up. Since then, I think the XP required has been nerfed, or maybe the XP rewarded from kills and quests has been boosted - maybe even both. Either way it didn't feel too bad to work my way through that final level via a mix of questing in Kun-Lai Summit and doing chores for the Klaxxi.

 

Fun fact: While doing this, I also installed MoP Classic on my laptop, and even though Classic has been in the Mists era for more than five months now, the shortcut it created on my desktop was still called "Cataclysm Classic". Small indie gaming company and all that. 

I should be able to conclude my Project Vale soon, and we'll see what else I'll feel up to now that max level has unlocked a few more options in terms of content.

MoP Classic is quite an enigma to me in some respects. Both Redbeard and Wilhelm were grousing recently that Blizzard seemed to show little consideration for the anniversary servers transitioning into Burning Crusade, considering how closely in time the devs scheduled the TBC pre-patch to Midnight's in retail. And I don't think that perception is wrong, but I think people also have a skewed idea of where the core of the Classic population sits. Wherever I see people talking about Classic in general, it's usually about the Vanilla anniversary servers, but based on ironforge.pro at least, that's not where most of the people are! For all the talk about how few people wanted it, the numbers show MoP Classic still sporting the biggest population of them all (over 100k weekly raiders), bigger than anniversary (~60k weekly raiders), the remains of SoD and Classic era put together.

I know raiding stats aren't everything and it sure seems weird considering that MoP Classic has no buzz around it whatsoever, but it's not unheard of for lots of people to play in quiet contentment without making headlines. It really does make me wonder about that Warlords of Draenor Classic though. I keep thinking that surely that's got to be where the Classic progression train stops, but if the majority of Classic players are happy to just quietly chug along through all the old expansions that Blizzard will give them, even the ones that weren't that beloved back in the day, maybe it's still a worthwhile thing for them to do? I guess we'll find out one way or another next year.

Starting to Wrap Up Legion Remix

Legion Remix has less than four weeks left to run, and I'm slowly starting to think about how to wrap things up. The phased approach Blizzard has been taking with Lemix makes the whole experience a bit odd, as they added a couple of quests with the release of the last phase that are all about how the timeline is collapsing and we need to say goodbye! Except then we still had more than a month left at that point.

I've ticked off all the Lemix-specific achievements except for needing to level four more classes to 80, and there's one lesser invasion point commander that keeps eluding me. Not much to be done about that last one other than going back to Argus over and over again for another roll at the dice.

The whole "levelling all the characters" experience has been nothing but wacky. By character four or five, thanks to the stacking XP bonus, it was no longer a matter of timerunning but more like... time-tumbling. XP was just happening to me. You could no longer call it "earning" experience by any stretch of the imagination. Even with every quest rewarding a gear box, the constantly rising levels made it impossible to keep up with even the game's most basic gear requirements, and the last leg of each levelling journey was once again a painful struggle even in normal world tier as I tried to kill things with gear that's thirty levels too low for the intended difficulty. Your best bet at that point is to hope for an easy carry through some random dungeons and raids, which does work a lot of the time (it only takes one extremely OP person in the group) but not always. Not exactly my idea of fun, which is one of the reasons I've been stalling on the last four characters. But I'm still working on it.

Most other achievements have been easy and unremarkable enough. Do all the quests once, do all the dungeons once etc. I did want to take note of a few that stood out though.

First there was "Building a Heroic Army", which required you to earn 200 points in Withered Army training in heroic world tier. The trick there is that your Withered don't scale at all and are basically a bunch of fragile little dudes that will die almost instantly if any mob so much as sneezes at them. This turns the whole thing into a challenge of avoiding mobs that do AoE damage and/or that take a while to kill, while guiding your little "army" through the area in a way that allows you to more or less one-shot any opponents you encounter so they don't have a chance to hurt your guys.

I only really engaged with the Withered Army Training briefly during my first run through Legion, meaning I was vaguely familiar with the system but with no real understanding of the details. I had quite a bit of fun running through normal difficulty a few times to learn the lay of the land and collect the various upgrade chests (even if it's my understanding that these don't really make a difference on heroic mode either). Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing it only took me two or three more tries to get it right and I felt quite accomplished for finding a good route.

The other achievement that truly excited me was the one to either earn 999 ranks of the inifinte power progression or beat a M+ dungeon on level 49 or higher. I didn't think I was likely to have the motivation to grind out the power ranks (even at the time of me writing this, my Lemix main is only sitting in the 300s), but the M+ way seemed achievable. Together with the husband and a guildie we slowly increased our key level over the weeks as our power levels increased.

Ironically, at the higher key levels I saw way more boss mechanics than I've ever seen while running any of these dungeons in other modes. We failed the timer on our first Return to Upper Karazhan because we'd gone in blind and hey, it turns out you actually need to do mechanics on Medivh!

Our worst week though was the one when we had an Eye of Azshara level 40-something, failed the timer but decided to power through to the end anyway, just to then have to abandon the key at the very end as it turned out the final boss had an unavoidable mechanic that had buggy scaling and would one-shot even players at max gear and power level. (We confirmed this on the forums after a few wipes.)

However, the very week immediately afterwards I got a really easy key, which when we timed it turned into another easy key, which finally turned into a Neltharion's Lair (another easy key) 49, which we managed to time for the achievement. That felt pretty great. 

The reason we were always three-manning was that there was unfortunately less interest in this version of Remix in our little guild than last time. For raids we could also only get three to four people together. Still, we managed to make our way through all the mythic raids including Tomb of Sargeras (Archimonde was a pain but we got him eventually).

Mythic Antorus turned out to be the final obstacle and we were pleasantly surprised that we managed both Enonar and Imonar (though the latter was a hilarious shitshow - definitely a memorable experience, especially me always having to push him through his first phase by myself while the other two were put to sleep). The unexpected dead stop came at Aggramar, since we couldn't burn through his first phase before he did his knockback, and since the strength of that move is inversely proportional to how many people it hits, the three of us were always yeeted into space the moment he used the ability.

We eventually ended up building a normal pug for it, which I simply titled "Antorus for all" (since we knew we were capable of doing most of it with the three of us anyway and just needed more bodies). People applied faster than I could click "accept". It was a fun breeze that eventually ticked off my last raid achievements too.

I'll probably want to write another full post or two about Lemix once it's over, similarly to how I did for MoP Remix. The experience of levelling all these characters and playing through their class order hall campaigns has definitely been something. It's also been another generally enlightening reminder of what worked and didn't work about Legion in general - some of which I already wrote about a few years ago, but I think I have an even clearer picture of it now.

No Guild Housing for Me, I Guess

Housing has arrived in modern WoW, something Blizzard Watch referred to as "the biggest week for Warcraft since 2004". My feeds are filled with screenshots of some admittedly pretty creative houses. Yet strangely... I feel nothing. Except maybe some slight jealousy that people are so clearly excited for something that simply seems to do nothing for me.

The thing that had me the most intrigued about WoW's version of housing was the promise of guild neighbourhoods and endeavours, as the things I read about those things reignited fond memories of tending to our guild stronghold in Neverwinter for me. That not all of these features are part of the early access is fair enough, but unfortunately I also learned that a guild neighbourhood will require ten continuously active players to be maintained, or else it will be closed down.

It's not entirely clear to me how "active" will be defined in this context, as Blizzard has understandably been cagey about restrictions that could generate any negative press, but it's clear that it won't work like creating a guild, where you just need ten people to sign the charter at the beginning and then everyone but one person can leave and the guild still remains.

Our little guild only has seven active members right now, and while we could probably coax a few friends of friends into moving an alt over to make up the numbers, I wouldn't trust those players to remain whatever definition of "active" is required, and opening a guild neighbourhood just to have it get shut down the moment that tenth player stops playing would just be too depressing. I understand that for logistical reasons there probably had to be some limitations to avoid spinning up too many empty neighbourhoods, but I don't have to like this particular implementation.

So that immediately dampened my enthusiasm, but then everything else about the new housing system also left me weirdly cold. I did the tutorial, bought my first house in a random public neighbourhood, spent a few thousand gold on vendor decos, placed a few of them, and then logged out.

I actually went back to my first post about SWTOR's housing to see whether I felt similarly aimless and confused back when that came out over a decade ago but no, I was actually significantly more excited back then, so I'm not sure what it is about WoW's housing that just seems to miss the mark for me right now. I knew I was never a huge housing enthusiast, but based on how I feel about it in SWTOR, I expected it to speak to me in some way?

The best guess I can hazard is that for me, housing is less about building and decorating and more about a sense of place. Re-reading the above blog post about SWTOR, I had to chuckle at this little tidbit that I'd completely forgotten about: "I did unlock all the rooms on Coruscant though, and promptly felt the urge to throw myself off the balcony just to see if it was possible or if I'd get stopped by invisible walls. (The answer is, I died.) Since it was advertised in the description as offering freedom from safety restrictions, I just had to know!"

I've seen people enthusiastic about the way things work in WoW make comparisons to the Sims, and as someone who went through her own Sims phase about twenty years ago now, building and setting up a house was always my least favourite part of that experience. I just wanted my Sims to have a comfortable space to have their adventures in.

WoW's housing feels like it's purely optimised for builders, with very little sense of immersion and worldliness. Every house is a Tardis whose inside bears zero resemblance to its outside. And while the "neighbourhood" is a space, I was shocked to find that it's a space in limbo. What I mean by that is that I knew it was going to be instanced, but I thought it was going to be instanced the way something like Warsong Gulch is instanced - which still has a marked location on the map, and the instance just allows us to have a little more space on the inside of the instance than there should strictly be available on the world map.

From all the screenshots I'd seen of Founder's Point, the Alliance neighbourhood, I was convinced that it would have a similar sort of entrance somewhere around where Westfall, Duskwood and Elwynn Forest meet, so that people could pretend to have a house somewhere on the edge of either of those zones. But no, Founder's Point is just an island in the middle of nowhere, like Exile's Reach, devoid of any real connection to the rest of the map and only accessible by portal. I hate that, even if I'm fairly sure that it's the kind of thing that won't even register with most players. I thought I was going to be able to plop down a house at the edge of Elwynn Forest. I don't care about living on some random island.

I also thought that we were going to get a second hearthstone, one for an inn as before and one for our new home. Instead there's just a "teleport to plot" button in the housing window. It's convenient, but nobody cares about how any of this is supposed to fit in with the rest of the world.

Lumber, the new crafting reagent to make housing decos, is also weird. I feel like woodcutting should really have been a profession, even if it was a secondary one. Instead you have to buy an axe from one specific vendor, and then this item works as a tracker for lumber while in your bag, independent of the normal tracking UI. Also, all the wood you gather is warbound, so you can't even trade any of it. Why is regular old lumber of all things bound to me? It's just weird.

Finally, maybe the complete lack of utility of housing right now is another thing that's putting me off. SWTOR's strongholds were initially required to access the legacy cargo hold, though I'm not sure whether that's still a requirement now that there are some of those on the fleet as well. Again, I get that the Blizzard devs wanted to avoid another WoD situation where everyone just sits in their garrison all day, but I'd say it's possible that they've perhaps been a bit too aggressive in their efforts to avoid giving housing any utility whatsoever. Would being able to have a mailbox at your door hurt anyone for example?

I'm not writing the whole feature off entirely at this point - it's very possible that I'll loot a decoration one day that'll make me want to go back to my house to proudly place it on my wall, or maybe I'll suddenly discover enthusiasm for crafting decorations, but right now it just feels like a lot of... stuff with zero appeal to me, which is strange - and a bit sad to be honest, as I'd love to have fun along with everyone else. I know it's easy to say "housing just isn't for everyone" but... it has been for me in some contexts, so the fact that nothing about this particular implementation has clicked for me in this first week has been surprising to me.