Exploring Midnight (Professions & Abundance)

I've got to admit, after finishing the Midnight campaign and hitting the new level cap on my warrior, I initially felt a bit lost. Not in the sense that there was nothing to do, but in the sense that I wasn't entirely sure what it was I wanted to do next. I already knew that I was going to spend some time going through all the side quests with the husband later, but activities to gear up initially felt quite limited due to access to a lot of expansion features being more time-gated than ever. (There are two whole delves that you can't even access yet, at all, and I only found out because I googled them after I couldn't find their entrances on the map.) However, I also wasn't sure whether I really wanted to get back into the gear grind just yet anyway - and levelling my army of alts towards an uncertain future at the level cap didn't seem particularly appealing either.

Eventually it hit me that what I really wanted to do was level professions on my alts. The Dragonflight profession revamp didn't really work for me when it first happened, but something about the tweaks Blizzard made to the system in War Within just made everything fall into place all of a sudden, and as a result I had a lot of fun spending time gathering and crafting throughout that expansion.

With me being armed with a better understanding of how things work right from the start in Midnight, I decided that the next alts to follow my mining and blacksmithing warrior should be my hunter (skinner/leatherworker) and my warlock (herbalism/alchemy). Well, those two and my tailoring/enchanting priest, but I've mostly used her to dip my toes into healing some random dungeons. I can't tell whether people are genuinely a little less unpleasantly rush-rush at the start of a new expansion or whether I've just become desensitised to the whole experience by now, since I simply know that I need to constantly be running in order to keep up. Regardless, those few normal mode pugs I've had were all pretty okay.

But primarily, I've spent time on my warrior, hunter and warlock flying around and simply gathering. I like the system with the "special" gathering nodes, but I feel like it must already be getting difficult for Blizzard to keep coming up with new ideas for them every expansion. I'm not sure anything will be able to top the explodey ones from War Within for me, which I genuinely came to enjoy once I'd gained the ability to mine them a lot faster.

In Midnight so far, my favourites are the "wild" nodes in Zul'Aman, which spawn little rock elementals (ore) or lashers (herbs) when you gather them. Fighting those is extra work, but since they also drop extra resources it feels to me like you actually get more bang for your buck on each node. (Initially the lashers were much less lucrative than the rock dudes, but just this morning I did another round of herbing and it seems that Blizzard has now buffed their drops to be more competitive.)

Unfortunately, the overload effects that I've seen so far all seem pretty boring. I don't think I've tested all the herbs yet, but not a single one of the ore effects actually felt worthwhile to me, which was disappointing. Maybe once I've upgraded my skill tree for the special nodes a bit.

The most delightful surprise however has been skinning. I love skinning for the soothing "swish swish" sounds and for the fact that you can basically do a lot of gathering as you go along, without having to go out of your way for it. The problem I had in War Within was that once I was done with questing, farming more leather always felt like a chore, since I basically either had to go out and kill things specifically just to skin them, or keep an eye on opportunities to skin other people's kills (such as when certain world quests were up).

In Midnight, Blizzard introduced a new feature called "high value beasts", which show up on your mini map as little knife icons. Skinning one of these marked creatures will yield much more leather than normal. I've really enjoyed flying laps around Eversong and Voidstorm looking out for these little treasure troves, since it makes for a farming experience much more similar to a classic mining or herbing round. The only slight disappointment I've had with the system so far is that it seems to be completely random which animals get the buff, and sometimes it's given to something like a neutral eagle soaring so high up that you can't actually attack or otherwise aggro it.

Professions aside, another thing that's been interesting to me have been the new open world activities. I loved almost all of these in Dragonflight, and still enjoyed most of them in War Within. Midnight so far seems a bit... eh. Sartheril's Haven and the different factions there are a nice callback in terms of lore but gameplay-wise it just feels like an old-fashioned daily hub to me. Stormarion Assault looked like a chaotically fun group event at first but in reality just seems to come down to several minutes of AoE spam. We'll see whether my opinions on these change as the weeks go by.

The one thing that immediately charmed me was the Abundance event. When I first did it in duo mode with my husband, it didn't seem that exciting, but I soon heard whispers that it was great in a group so I decided to sign up for a raid one night - and it was insane!

To take a step back and explain what it is, it's basically just a timed mini game where you run around a cave gathering resources (mostly little bubbles that you simply run through, but there are also some things to tap regardless of your profession, like ore nodes or plants) and depositing them at the altar of Dundun, the loa of Abundance. There's probably a whole sub-genre of single player games like that, but in WoW it's just this little side activity.

Anyway, what made it so funny in a raid group was that the altar has a shared progress bar, and every time it gets filled up, Dundun yells about GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE and unleashes some kind of bonus that lets you gather even more (such as additional bubbles falling from the sky). With enough players in the raid you could trigger a cascade where people would basically deliver resources almost faster than the bar could deplete itself again, so that it was constantly going up and down like a yo-yo, with Dundun yelling and spawning extra treasures non-stop.

Also, did I mention that Dundun is voiced by Darin de Paul? As a SWTOR player, that's just a whole extra level of bizarre.

Anyway, this madness was incredibly fun, and not even that overpowered because there was a pretty low hard cap on your personal rewards anyway, so it's not like we were unduly enriching ourselves. The problem was just that since the cave wasn't an instance, the whole zone would lag like hell, much to the chagrin of people who weren't busy worshipping Dundun.

So I can't say that I'm entirely surprised that Blizzard quickly ended up nerfing the whole thing, though it's still sad to me. You can still do it in a raid group and Dundun still triggers more bonus events that way, but they aren't even remotely as crazy and entertaining as they were beforehand. Oh well.

The Quiet at Midnight

The two MMOs I currently play have been competing for my attention particularly hard recently, which meant that WoW's latest expansion launched during a week when I was also extremely busy in SWTOR. This meant that I didn't actually play that much for the first couple of days, and am only slowly getting into it now.

Thanks to splurging on the epic edition I had early access too, something I still feel a bit uncomfortable about because I still don't like the whole notion of only the biggest spenders getting to play early. But it was a fairly trivial upgrade for me to make in terms of my current financials, and I quite liked the idea of the extra Trader's Tender and housing items (that was before housing went into early access and I realised I don't actually like WoW's housing all that much, at least not in its current state).

Anyway, thanks to the aforementioned business in SWTOR, the husband and I only made limited use of the early access, playing for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday, when EA had started on Friday. It felt like a very strange experience to me, due to how empty everything was. When we did the expansion intro event - which was pretty long - I think we saw a totality of two other players throughout the entire thing. (Which made it funny when I saw Redbeard's post a few days later in which he concluded looking at it from the outside "that most people bought Early Access".)

Someone on reddit pointed out that the new Silvermoon looks great with an Inky Black Potion, and I can only concur. 

Now, said expansion intro is phased, and there were a few more people in Silvermoon once we got there, but it was still strangely quiet. That whole experience only reinforced my earlier sensation that Midnight doesn't feel like a "proper" expansion to me somehow. I endlessly bemoan the state of Classic's mega servers because I think an open world where every square inch of landmass is permanently overcrowded with players is stupid, but an occasion as special as the launch of a new expansion should definitely draw crowds to feel exciting.

After the "proper" launch, things admittedly picked up a bit, and Silvermoon is laggy as hell whenever I fly over it, but I still feel like I don't see a lot of players out and about a lot of the time. I don't know if there's that much phasing going on, or everyone is just perfectly spread out across the long, winding path that is the campaign storyline, but I maintain that it feels strange.

Back at War Within's launch, the husband and I initially did all the quests in the first zone, and then switched to just doing the main storyline as we were already halfway to the new level cap. It then turned out that the actual main campaign was really short. This time around, we decided to just focus on the campaign from the beginning, since access to so much of endgame is locked behind completing it, and it turned out that this time around, the main story was much longer. We didn't 100% avoid all side activities, and we're both miners which also adds to one's XP gains, but I was still surprised that I was only a few bars away from 90 by the time we wrapped things up in the Voidstorm.

The levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years. Without going into spoilers, I'll say that I had fun questing with Arator and seeing his personality get fleshed out. Crazy fantasy settings aside, it also struck me as a quite realistic and relatable narrative for a young adult to have to come to terms with the fact that his parents are also just people with their own hang-ups and issues.

From a technical perspective, I was kind of impressed by how many cut scenes they included in the levelling journey - War Within already had a lot of these, but it feels like Midnight ramped it up by yet another level. Then again, it also seemed quite noticeable to me that this increase in quantity came with a bit of a drop in quality. From what I remember, most of War Within's levelling cinematics featured extremely detailed, hand-crafted animations, and while Midnight had a few of those too, there were also a lot of the more basic cut scenes that featured the old stock character animations that people sometimes clown on. I didn't mind that too much myself; I'm just saying that I found it noticeable.

On the plus side, I've appreciated the move to most of the cut scenes now being triggered by a prompt that has you talking to an NPC, which means it's clear when they're meant to happen. I say this as both the husband and I had issues in previous expansions when automatically triggered cut scenes bugged out and didn't play, causing us to be fast-forwarded in the story without any clue about what just happened.

I also have to say that there's something magical about being back in the Eastern Kingdoms, connected to the original World of Warcraft with no loading screens. There was one point in a quest where we had to go to the Eastern Plaguelands, and the husband asked how we even get there, and I responded that this had been my first thought as well since EPL is usually quite out of the way, but we're in Quel'Thalas now, so it's literally just the next zone down to the south.

Also, while I was 100% in on the Draenei at Burning Crusade's launch and never much into the blood elves, there's still something nostalgic to questing in Eversong and Zul'Aman again. Not to mention mining copper, tin and silver again, even if they have extra adjectives in front of their names now. (I had to look up what "refulgent" means.)

All in all, Midnight has still been off to a good start with me, despite the "Is this really an expansion or more like a big patch?" feeling. Ironically, I think it helped that Xal'atah didn't play that much of a role for most of it aside from in the intro, because honestly, all the stories that didn't involve her were just that much more interesting to me. As a commenter on Wilhelm's blog put it, "I still don’t understand why the angry blue orb girl wants to annihilate everything" - just...yeah, I agree. I laughed at and appreciated this line of dialogue on how we should deal with Xal in game:

Oh, and totally unrelated to Midnight itself: During this first week of the expansion, after more than a year of clearing MC almost every week, I finally got my second Binding of the Windseeker and was able to claim my Thunderfury. Definitely not the worst start to a new expansion I've had.

The WoD Classic Question

"Will we get Warlords of Draenor Classic?" is not a question I thought I would ever be asking myself ten years ago. Hell, I didn't think we'd ever be asking it five years ago. WoW Classic transitioning into Burning Crusade Classic seemed natural. Following that up with Wrath Classic was a no-brainer. Cataclysm Classic already raised some eyebrows, because can you really call any expansion that takes place after the destruction of the old world "classic"? Anyone having any interest in MoP Classic seemed even more unlikely considering the weak reception MoP had during its first run, not to mention that retail had just had the Mists of Pandaria Remix event. And yet here we are, wondering whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be next.

I've tried to compile a list of factual pros and cons for why things could go either way:

Yes, we will get WoD Classic:

• It's a relatively low effort option. Not no effort, as it's still work to reinstate the way WoD worked in the modern Classic client, but at least Blizzard wouldn't need to expend any creative energy on coming up with anything new.
• There are still hundreds of thousands of players playing on the progressive Classic realms, numbers that many smaller MMOs would be envious of. You don't hear about them much, but we can see from activity data that they exist and are playing, which they presumably wouldn't do if they weren't enjoying themselves. MoP Classic as a whole seems to be a prime example of a quiet majority that just gets on with things and that you never hear about because they are simply content. That should be enough incentive for Blizzard to keep the good times (and people's subscriptions) rolling.
• We know that Blizzard is at least considering WoD Classic, because as part of a survey sent out around the middle of last year, they asked players where they'd want go play after MoP Classic ends. WoD Classic was one of the options, with some of the possible alternatives being a merge into retail, a MoP era realm or a transition back into a previous expansion (no idea how that would even work).

No, we won't get WoD Classic:

• From the outside, it would be a bad look. WoD is still considered one of WoW's worst expansions. (No longer the worst thanks to Shadowlands, but definitely in the bottom three.) While there is an audience that would like to revisit it for sure, the more outspoken parts of the WoW community all look down on the progressive Classic servers at this point. Most of the Classic community no longer considers them "classic enough", while they are obviously still more than a decade removed from retail as well. Cataclysm Classic already got a pretty lukewarm reception at BlizzCon 2023; I can't imagine anyone cheering for a WoD Classic if it was to be announced at BlizzCon this year. The devs must know that it would be terrible PR to potentially announce a Classic expansion and get booed, so with that in mind, they shouldn't do it. (If they go ahead with it, the announcement better be low-key and they damn well need to make sure that there'll be some other major Classic news to overshadow it.)
• While the old world has already been replaced with the Cataclysm revamp in Cata Classic, at least MoP Classic still has the old character models, right? WoD Classic would take another step closer towards retail by introducing the new character models (if we want to stay in sync with how things went during the original run). The closer the two versions get in terms of features, the less it feels like there's a point to still having this separate progression branch.
• Even if there's still a significant number of people playing MoP Classic, it's undeniably a branch of Classic that's in decline. New or returning players interested in Classic are far more likely to want to check out the anniversary servers rather than grind through 85 levels of an already disjointed levelling experience to start adventuring in Pandaland, and this is only going to get worse if more levels get added. On the dev side, Blizzard also seems to have cut back on the amount of attention they've given progressive Classic, and after the impeccably built original Classic launched in 2019, each subsequent expansion has been buggier and buggier. There was a post on the WoW subreddit three days ago about how Throne of Thunder in MoP Classic has been out for three months and still almost every single boss in there is bugged in some way.
• I know I cited last year's survey in the "yes" column already, but to be honest, you could also interpret it as a sign pointing towards no, considering that the relevant poll question had seven different options, only one of which was WoD Classic, and even that one said "if it becomes available" - Blizzard did not want to lock themselves into going down that route!

---

I think there are compelling arguments for either course of action at this point, and I suspect that what will tip the scales for Blizzard will depend a lot on their internal metrics for MoP Classic, including the results of that survey.

Personally, I would actually check out WoD Classic on my hunter if it does come out, simply because WoD is one of those expansions I didn't play back in the day and going back to do some of the content in retail just hasn't been the same. It's definitely more insightful and authentic to do either a Classic or a Remix run. I don't think I'd play it for long, but I'd at least take a look.

On the other hand, I can't say that I'd be sad if they decided to call it quits on the progression servers at this point either, and I would also be fine with my hunter being merged into my retail character stable (or even going back in time to a previous version of Classic I guess, if that somehow becomes a thing).

On Writing a WoW Blog in 2026

This is going to be a post about blogging, so if that doesn't interest you at all, feel free to skip this one.

When I created this blog during the height of Wrath of the Lich King, blogging was a popular thing to do in general, and there was a thriving community of bloggers writing about World of Warcraft in specific. Even though I didn't have a huge number of readers even back then, I very much felt like part of a community - we'd all constantly link to and respond to each other, and it just felt very cosy.

When I returned to WoW (Classic) in 2019, that community no longer really existed in the same form, and the world had moved on to YouTube videos and streams. I think when people talk about "content creators" these days, most of them don't even consider that said content could be in written form as well. I found all that a bit sad, but as I was blogging primarily as a means of self-expression and documentation, it just was what it was.

That doesn't mean that I don't want people to find this place if they are actually looking for content like this though. At some point I noticed that Google was missing a lot of this blog's content, so I tried to kick it into indexing more of it. This has worked to some extent, though according to Search Console it's still only indexed about 500 pages when I've produced nearly twice that number of posts on here.

Anyway, in recent months Google started sending me little congratulatory notices about my "search impact", saying that my content was attracting more and more clicks through Google each month. Curious, I started looking into this a bit more. I'm not going to cite any exact numbers, because Google Analytics and Blogger's own internal metrics are always miles apart despite being owned by the same company, but they do agree about the general trend of what gets the clicks/views.

Here are my top ten most viewed blog posts from the last twelve months, according to Blogger:

1. Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon
2. WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006
3. Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail
4. Connected Realms Are Confusing
5. Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience
6. The Island of Balor
7. Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?
8. I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down
9. Exploring the Forests of Northwind
10. A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Basically, six of them are about Turtle WoW, and the other four are either about Classic or at least have some connection to it. (The fishing tournament post for example is about how to win "in retail" but it's from the perspective of a Classic player, trying to figure out what the differences are. Also, only Classic players actually call it "retail" in everyday conversation.)

As I've actually been spending less time playing and writing about Classic recently, I find that very interesting. I guess it makes sense that my posts about new retail content don't get that many views because there's huge competition on every topic and people don't care about the thoughts of some random casual.

I'm guessing the Turtle WoW posts are so high up because there's not nearly that much content about it out there. With so much content creation being done professionally these days (as in, to earn money and make a living), tying one's income to a private server that's actively under siege would probably not be a good idea, and anyone creating content for "official" WoW who wants to remain in good stead with Blizzard will have reason to avoid going into private server topics in too much depth. But it's interesting to see in actual numbers that it's clearly an underserved niche with some demand.

Official Classic does have its own content creators, but many of them follow the same "style" as retail, making videos and guides about how to make the most out of the newest patch, and considering Classic's overall development over the last year, there isn't much for them to chew on. I really used to enjoy WillE's videos about Classic for example, but he's clearly just waiting for the mythical Classic+ at this point and doesn't seem to have enjoyed anything that's actually going on in Classic for a while. Now he's just regurgitating all his old videos from the first time BC Classic came around, since that's hot in the algorithm right now due to the anniversary servers and presumably secures his pay check.

Which is to say that I think the Classic content scene has less going on right now as well - though I also think that players who actually enjoy Classic for its old-school feel, the ones who actually read the quests and so on, are probably also more open to still reading a blog than your average audience.

That was actually another nice thing about Classic era - it's so small, nobody can make a living creating content about it, so anything that people did make was purely a passion project, and again, because it's such a small niche everyone kind of knew everyone else. (Just another reason why it's a bummer that I kind of got bored with it gameplay-wise.)

Anyway, I'm actually not sure how to best conclude this post. There isn't really a point other than that there's still a niche for blog content about niche WoW topics, and that there are still people out there interested in reading about Classic and Turtle WoW. If getting more views was my primary purpose, I should write more about those subjects I guess. However, since I'm just a human shouting into the void for my own entertainment I'll continue to write about whatever WoW-related thing happens to rattle around my head in any given week. (Though yes, that will also include more Classic posts at some point.)

Casual Thoughts on the Midnight Class Changes

It's a given these days that WoW dramatically revamps all the classes with each new expansion, but for Midnight in particular the headline was "ability pruning". I took that to mean that Blizzard had heard people's feedback that damage and healing rotations were getting too complex and should probably be simplified at least a little.

I was curious enough that I even engaged with a Bellular clickbait video titled "The Numbers Are In: Midnight's Ability Prune Is BRUTAL*" - just for said video to tell me that each spec was losing a whole two buttons on average. I rolled my eyes at that and largely forgot about the whole thing again, until the Midnight pre-patch actually hit.

My protection warrior honestly seemed almost unchanged, seemingly confirming that the whole thing had been completely overblown, but when I logged into my holy priest I was actually in for a shock, as she appeared to have lost almost half her abilities, most of which had been in the game since Vanilla: No more Shadow Word: Pain, no more Mind Blast, no more Renew, no more Power Word: Shield, no more basic Heal. Holy Nova was still there but now had a 30 second (!) cooldown.

The removal of shield honestly annoyed me the most, largely because I was so used to casting it on myself on cooldown for the speed boost. Now you have to spec into Angelic Feather to run faster for a few seconds, and I've never liked that spell.*

I was willing to give it a go though, just to see what abilities I even had left, and ran a tier 11 delve without any problems, though I really missed being able to dot enemies up, and only having something like two spells to spam on Brann got really boring. I just kept thinking that this wasn't what I'd had in mind in terms of simplifying things, though at the time I couldn't quite articulate yet what the issue was.

The problem really came into focus for me when I started trying to play some of my dps toons. Let's take my hunter for example. Hunter is a class I really want to like because I used to love it in the game's early years, but at some point Blizzard seemingly lost the plot in terms of what a hunter is supposed to be and now the class just feels terribly clunky to play a lot of the time (in my opinion anyway). Still, I definitely thought that Marksman had too many buttons in its most recent iteration, so I figured the only way was up.

I read and assigned my talents, checked my ability tooltips and started working on killing some things in the Twilight Highlands for the pre-patch event. My damage felt abysmal. I figured that I was clearly doing something wrong, so I pulled the one-button assistant in a corner of my hotbars just to see what abilities that was recommending I use.

I was flabbergasted when I saw that it recommended I start every fight, even against a single opponent, with Volley, an AoE ability with a 30 second cooldown. But I tried it, and lo and behold, it triggered some kind of proc that made things explode big time.

And that really made me realise why these changes still didn't really work for me. I don't actually have an issue with having a large number of abilities, as long as it's sufficiently straightforward to figure out what they are good for. To use a made-up example, if I have a damage-over-time ability, a big hitter with a long cooldown, and an attack that does less damage but can be spammed, I'll probably want to start with the DoT, use the big damage attack, and then spam the lesser one. It's only logical, right? You don't need a simulator to figure that out.

The problem with combat in modern retail is that everything relies on weird interactions between abilities that are opaque to figure out and feel like they don't make intuitive sense. Having to start a single-target fight with my biggest AoE attack is just one such example.

Another one popped up on my arcane mage, who now has a talent called Touch of the Magi, whose tooltip reads: "Applies Touch of the Magi to your current target, accumulating 20% of the damage you deal to the target for 12 sec, and then exploding for that amount of Arcane damage to the target and reduced damage to all nearby enemies." My takeaway from that was that this was only useful against opponents who live at least 12 seconds, and ideally there should be some sort of AoE situation going on as well to make the most out of the explode-y proc at the end.

Yet the one-button assistant once again recommended that I start every fight with it, and after a bit of testing I could see why - because of some interaction with another talent it also boosts other spells of mine, so I really want to use it on cooldown - not for anything it actually says in the ability description, but for this buff it gives my other casts. Just... why?! Why does every rotation have to start in an unintuitive way like that? I'm not saying there can't be interactions between different abilities, but they should be a bonus for those who've truly mastered the spec, and the default ability shouldn't feel useless on its own.

I suppose you could argue that I should've paid more attention to the talent descriptions because all that info is probably buried somewhere in there, but come on - I've got sixty-odd talent points to assign that all try to be "interesting" and you expect me to remember every single interaction I read through once? I guess in the past this kind of thing would have been easier because if you level more slowly, you look forward to each new talent point and are more conscious of what it does, not to mention that you then have some time until the next level-up to see how the changes it unlocks play out in practice. With retail WoW's levelling speed it's impossible to stay on top of these things nowadays, never mind that I wouldn't want to level a whole new alt every time Blizzard decides to once again completely redo every spec anyway.

I know this all sounds a bit whiny and I'm well aware that it is. From my point of view, combat and rotations have long been one of retail WoW's weaker points due to how overstuffed and complicated they are, but I've mostly come to accept that. I guess I'm just extra bummed about these particular changes since the "pruning" carried with it a promise of simplification and perhaps even a return to the game's roots - yet what I've seen so far doesn't actually deliver on that. Instead we've just had a bunch of fun abilities taken away in the interest of baking ten different procs into three spells instead.

*On further review, I learned that spamming Prayer of Mending on yourself also works to give you a speed boost, though it has a longer cooldown and the speed boost it gives is shorter. It also just feels weird. I then re-checked my talents and apparently there are no fewer than ten different talents that modify how Prayer of Mending works, which kind of supports the point I'm making in the second half of this post.

My Most Played Characters

I've been seeing people talk about a new addon called "Account Played" that tallies up your /played time across all your characters and displays it as a neat bar chart broken down by class. I was briefly tempted to get it but ultimately decided that I didn't care that much about the class breakdown, and Altoholic already helps me keep track of my /played time across characters.

It did make me curious where exactly I stood myself though, especially after I noticed some surprises in my own roster, such as the fact that even though I've been back to playing retail for close to five and a half years now, none of the characters I've played during that time had particularly impressive /played times. I decided I'd share my top five characters in terms of accumulated hours:

Shintar - 188 days

I had a hunch that the original Shintar might still be my #1, but I was not prepared for the sheer scale of it, with her /played time still being three times that of second place. This is a character that I created in early 2007 and played until March of 2012. Let's pretend it was a round five years, or 1,827 days. That would mean that during those five years, I spent more than ten percent of my life, or about two and a half hours of every single day, playing just this character. Not WoW in general - I had alts as well, see below - but only this character. That honestly seems pretty crazy to me in hindsight, even as someone who still likes to game a lot. I know that at the start of it all, I was an unemployed student - and a student who neglected her studies at that - so I had a lot of free time, but still...

I haven't really played her since coming back to WoW, and thanks to the Shadowlands level squish she's back to being level 32. And yet still so far ahead. 

Tiirr - 64 days

I was actually surprised to find that my MoP Classic hunter is my second most played WoW character at this point. A good chunk of that can be attributed to the launch of original Classic, as the clone I made of her before the transition to Burning Crusade still shows as having 36 days of /played. But then the rest would've had to be a mix of BC Classic (which I abandoned halfway through) and whatever time I accumulated since I picked her back up last year. I mainly attribute this one to just how bingeable and impactful the original Classic launch was.

Being level 90 in MoP Classic, she's currently the highest level character I have in all of WoW's game modes (since War Within's cap is still 80). This amuses me.

Tiranea - 58 days

This was my first main, created back in October 2006. I'm not surprised that she's still high up, but I was somewhat surprised that she's this high, because from what I remember, I switched to Horde side after around six months of playing. Now, I didn't fully abandon the character at the time, and still levelled her through Wrath and Cata as well, but after those first few months I never spent much time in group content to rack up dungeon or raiding hours. Must have been those first few months when I was super addicted and basically living and breathing WoW.

I did play this one a little bit in more recent times when I levelled her up to do the night elf heritage quest back in 2023, so she's a whopping level 53.

Golu - 54 days

This was one of my major alts on Horde side back in the day, a druid on whom I both tanked and healed. I guess I'm not entirely surprised that she got a lot of play time, considering I was clearly playing a lot back then, but it does make me sweat a little to think that I was spending two and a half hours a day just playing Shintar the priest and also 54 days on this character. And yet! There's even more, such as...

Pukaja - 52 days

The tauren hunter who was my very first Horde character and also another one of my major alts during those days, though there was never much demand for me to play dps in group content when I was also willing to both tank and heal. Like Golu, she hasn't been played since Cata and was squished down to level 32.

It really stands out to me how none of my more recently played characters are even anywhere near close to those numbers. The monk that was my main during Shadowlands sits on 22 days played, my evoker on 27 days and the warrior that turned into my War Within main on a little less than 18 days. I guess WoW is more alt friendly nowadays than it was back then, so my play time is spread out across a larger number of characters, but still - I had alts back then too, and three of those are in the top five!

I guess at least some of it has to do with levelling in the vanilla world (which is why the Classic hunter is ahead of all of my retail characters created in recent years). When it takes about ten days of /played just to get to the level cap, it's just a different ballgame. I never play as intensely at the level cap unless I'm raiding (which I've kind of sworn off in WoW at this point, not counting visiting LFR once per tier), so new characters just don't have as much of a chance to rack up play time when they are capped within mere hours like my Lemix alts were.

The New and Improved Exile's Reach

One thing that's always fascinating to me is how little the wider WoW community cares about the starter/levelling experience. I guess it's what you get when you've spent the last two decades fostering an environment where endgame is the only thing that matters, but it still takes me by surprise whenever Blizzard makes changes to what new or returning players see and I almost miss it just because of how little publicity it gets.

One such change that actually already happened a whole patch ago now was a revamp of Exile's Reach, to improve the transition from the tutorial island to the Dragon Isles levelling campaign. I don't know why I suddenly remembered about that the other night, but I decided to start up my US trial account again to make another alt there and see what's new.

I stared in wide-eyed surprise when my little troll hunter loaded in on the boat and instead of finding myself face to face with Warlord Grimaxe, I was greeted by Thrall himself. (I think for Alliance it's Jaina.) Not to mention the two dragons gliding casually alongside the boat, Kalecgos and Wrathion. (Warlord Grimaxe was still there by the way, but as more of a background character.)

You can't see Wrathion because he was behind me, gliding along on the other side of the boat. 

The framing is still that you're looking for a missing expedition, but not just any expedition now, but one that was on its way to the Dragon Isles. That... actually works surprisingly well.

You still go through the whole shipwreck routine (Thrall's control of the elements really isn't what it used to be) and all the other minor NPCs you meet along the way are also still there. Grimaxe's daughter also shows up at some point but without any fanfare - instead the person who needs rescuing from the big bad ogre is Wrathion.

The only gameplay change I noticed was that when you get out of the spider cave, the game forcibly breaks your gear. As someone who's kind of OCD about repairing I noticed that immediately, and though I was confused about what had happened, I instantly stopped by the repair guy to get it fixed. Funnily enough, the next quest I was given then said something like "Oh no, your gear was damaged during your last adventure! You should repair it!" and then everything made sense. I guess that's not a bad thing to add to the tutorial.

The final confrontation in the ogre citadel has also been changed, as you no longer need to prevent the raising of an undead dragon, but instead rescue Kalecgos from being mind-controlled. (Though Blizz hasn't been 100% thorough with cleaning up the NPC chatter, as I encountered at least one instance of a character still talking about the raising of an undead dragon.)

After this, instead of a group of Alliance/Horde arriving on gryphons/wyverns to whisk you away to the capital, Kalec offers you a ride to the Dragon Isles, completely skipping the introduction to Stormwind or Orgrimmar. That definitely made me raise an eyebrow, but I can't objectively say that I think it's a bad change. My own nostalgia just wants those places to feel important, but truth be told they haven't been core to the retail experience in many years.

A few months ago I winced at this reddit post illustrating how someone can get very invested in the modern game without having the slighest clue about many classic locations. When I shared it with my guild, the guildie who's gotten the most into raiding and M+ in WoW revealed that he had no idea either where or what Thunder Bluff even was. There's a part of me that wants to grab players like that and shake them, shouting "These places are amazing, you've got to go there and see them!" but realistically, the modern game doesn't work that way.

And in fairness, seeing all the old stuff that people loved in the past is not necessary to fall in love with WoW. I had never played any of the Warcraft RTS games when I started playing in 2006, so I had no idea about who Arthas was or any of the lore behind anything, but I was fine and had fun learning as I went. It seems fair to posit that players new to retail WoW in 2026 can also be plopped directly into newer content without having all the background on anything, as long as the new stuff is interesting and somewhat coherent. And I think the Dragon Isles are pretty good for that. You could do worse than leading players into that as their first adventure.

Of course, they'll get to explore a world that is very different from how Vanilla was twenty years ago. In the classic world, it took a long time to encounter your first dragon, which is very different from buddying up with allied dragons from level one. And that does feel a bit weird to me, but to be honest that's just where the game's lore is at right now. It doesn't have to be bad; it's just different. (Though I do think it's a bit funny that your first lesson about dragons is basically that they're not very impressive and will immediately need rescuing from random ogres.)

Anyway, I cheated a bit and made a quick trip back to Orgrimmar for my own peace of mind, and also detoured to Valdrakken to pick up some professions. As someone who always enjoys levelling professions I bristled a bit at their complete absence from this tutorial, but then they were always treated as a lower priority feature. And there is a brief intro to them in Dornogal if I recall correctly, which might be a better time for it nowadays so as not to front-load too many systems I guess. Anyway, after that I continued my journey across the Waking Shores as seemingly intended. There's another Winds of Mysterious Fortune event going on right now, so gear drops were aplenty.

Learning how to ride my red protodrake felt a bit weird now that Blizzard basically took away the whole skyriding mini game and it's just pressing buttons on cooldown, but oh well. I guess it's still not bad to ease first-timers into it slowly.

The one hitch I encountered was that I was unable to do Ruby Life Pools as a follower dungeon when I got there. I'd get the loading screen for the instance, followed by the Dragon Isles loading screen, and then I was back at the entrance with a note that I'd been removed from the group. Are free-to-play players not worthy of being boosted through dungeons by NPCs? I found some reports of other people encountering the same issue and finding it odd, but no real confirmation on whether it was an intended restriction for trial accounts or a bug, and whether there's anything you can do about it.

Regardless, I soon hit level 20, the cap for free accounts, and stopped playing. With world scaling I could technically keep going for a while longer I suppose, but I don't think I care enough about seeing the new solo version of the Raszageth fight they supposedly added for levellers as well.

Still, all in all I was kind of impressed, honestly. Obviously the real judges of whether this new experience is any good will be genuinely new players, but it did seem like a real improvement to me. I was sceptical when I first heard about it because I thought it sounded cheesy to shoehorn all these important NPCs into the starter experience for seemingly no reason, but it actually works alright in context. Thrall gave players a quest at level ten in Vanilla as well, so it's really not that strange.

I feel like the changes embrace retail WoW as it is - when you have more of a focus on stories involving named NPCs for example, it makes sense to introduce them earlier on, even if it's in the context of a minor, relatively inconsequential adventure. There's time to learn more about them later, but it makes for a better starting point. And the whole skipping Stormwind and Orgrimmar bit really hurts me as a veteran player but is true to the reality that these old capitals aren't places where anyone spends a lot of their time nowadays - better to just lead the newbies straight to the hubs where there are actually other players.

Running Out of Steam in MoP Classic

I got back into MoP Classic around Christmas one and a half months ago, and while I was initially surprised by how much fun I was having, it looks like my enthusiasm may already be on the decline again.

I got to exalted with the Golden Lotus, saw the relics of the Thunder King get stolen (no surprise there) and got to defend the Vale against a big Mogu incursion with the aid of the Celestials. I'm glad I got to see all of that, but I've found little reason to keep going afterwards. There was a small incentive at least as I picked up a few Skyshards during my time doing dailies in the Vale, and I was always curious what was up with that big hostile cloud serpent that's generally un-attackable (turns out you need 10 Skyshards to dispel the shield, and then it drops a mount on defeat), but the drop rate of the shards is so low, who knows how many months I'd have to keep grinding to get ten.

There are only three or four Tillers with whom I'm not quite best friends yet (can't be long now though), and I'm close to maxing out all my cooking skills as well. Then the only thing left to do on the farm would be to keep planting crops for other Pandaria reputations, which is not as interesting. Plus I learned that apparently things like the plow, sprinkler system etc. all came in with a later patch, and having to till every spot on the farm manually every day is getting a bit tiresome.

I've also been doing the Anglers dailies for a few weeks now, and happened to fish up the Sea Turtle mount on one of these days. I don't have that in retail, so that's another +1 for having this character merged into my retail stable one day I guess.

My enthusiasm for the other factions has been more limited though. I've done a bit of work on the August Celestials, but being sent to a different corner of the continent every day gets old quickly. I also did the Klaxxi dailies for a few days but just didn't enjoy them, even though I think they're a faction with an interesting story. Just never liked the Dread Wastes I guess.

I started the legendary cloak quest chain with Wrathion, another piece of content that's no longer accessible in retail, but I've got to admit I don't find that nearly as interesting as I found exploring the old Vale. It's just so grindy, even if the devs made it a bit easier in Classic by also allowing you to progress certain steps through dungeons, without needing to raid. The first stage felt like it took forever, and then it was immediately on to "earn 1600 valor", ignoring the thousands of valor I'd already ground out previously, which just made me sigh.

I did actually get into the dungeon endgame for a bit and did every dungeon on Celestial difficulty. It took me three runs to realise I was supposed to talk to a Celestial at the start of the run to get a buff, and I only did that after I saw someone complain on reddit about stupid slackers who nerf their whole group by not picking up their buff (oops). It didn't take too long to get the hang of what the different buffs do though, and ultimately the gameplay isn't really that different from heroics.

After my initial experiences with dungeons in MoP Classic were pretty mellow, zoning into any Celestial is full rush-rush mode by this point though. The tank will pretty much always pick up all the trash at once and drag it to the next boss to AoE down. If they die while doing that, they'll blame the healer. If it's after the second boss in Shado-Pan Monastery, it's almost guaranteed to result in a wipe regardless, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. I can just about keep up with the madness most days, but I've got to admit I don't find it very fun.

Curiosity and gear were enough of an incentive at first. The special currency that drops in Celestial dungeons lets you buy pretty high level gear pretty quickly. While I didn't need any of it, it was still nice to grow more powerful, and while doing dailies it was very noticeable when my kill time on a named elite went from several minutes down to a single full skill rotation. At this point I've got 502 gear in most slots though, and while there are more things to buy, such as a goodie bag that drops rare pets and mounts, I just don't care enough about any of that.

At one point I saw a familiar name online - my 2020 guild's Scarab Lord, a fellow hunter. We chatted a bit and he's basically kept playing and raiding all this time, now a member of a guild that has also been around since Classic's launch and that I was friendly with back in the day. He said that if I was feeling lonely, I shouldn't hesitate to give the GM a poke for a guild invite.

I thought very long and hard about this. Part of me was amazed that there was an opportunity here to come back to the game after several years of absence and potentially fit right back into an old and at least somewhat familiar structure. I thought of the potential fun and companionship, and wondered whether I would maybe even want to try attending a casual raid or two. However, ultimately I decided against it. I already have enough going on in SWTOR and other modes of WoW without attempting to put down roots in MoP Classic again. I think I'll be happy to just drop it again in a few weeks to be honest. 

Am I Looking Forward to Midnight?

After my little retrospective about War Within, I wanted to take a moment to look the other way - forward - to talk about Midnight. Specifically, about how weird it feels to me that it's coming out in less than a month.

When we were still in Dragonflight and War Within was the thing to look forward to, I had some concerns. I'd really enjoyed Dragonflight, and I was worried about how War Within was going to change things.

With Midnight, I don't really feel anything like that. If I had to articulate any concerns, I guess I might point out that with two out of the four expansion launch zones being revamps of old zones, Midnight might end up feeling like there isn't enough "newness" to it (*cough*Cataclysm*cough*). But that's not a huge worry for me or anything.

However, at the same time, I'm not really particularly looking forward to the expansion either. I don't feel negatively about it, mind you - I pre-purchased a couple of months ago, and I expect that I'll have fun playing the new content. It's just...

In a weird way, it doesn't really feel to me like an expansion is coming out. To me at least, Midnight currently has the vibe of just another major patch.

Partially, I suspect the whole Worldsoul Saga thing is to blame. I already talked a bit about that in the context of the big expansion reveal back in August. Traditionally, WoW expansion announcements have been these huge surprise events: What's going to be the next big thing? Where will we go next? What will we find there?

Midnight didn't have anything like that, simply because we'd known for a long time that we were going to fight the void in Quel'thalas and that's exactly what we got out of the announcement as well. Not a huge fan of Xal'atath? Sorry, you're signed up for more of the same.

The other contributing factor to my weird lack of excitement is probably the relentless patch cadence that Blizzard has been following since Dragonflight. And don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that frequent content patches are a bad thing! Truth is though, nobody can fire on all cylinders 24/7, 365 days a year. Players need breaks.

People will probably consider this a hot take, but I don't recall ever minding the so-called content droughts towards the end of an expansion. As someone who was never at the cutting edge of the newest content, it gave me some time to get caught up, maybe level an alt, as well as pursue some goals that weren't tied to the most recent content patch. I'll always remember the last months of Wrath of the Lich King with fondness, simply because I used that quiet time to go back to the old world and get the original Loremaster achievement for example.

These "down times" give you time to recharge and get ready and excited for the next big thing. Except this time around, the husband and I were grinding Legion Remix like crazy people until only a few weeks ago, and now we're just tired. The other day he told me that he hadn't even logged in since the pre-patch because he's still feeling burnt out from Lemix. How can you get hyped for what's coming next when you're still feeling burnt out from the last major event?

I don't know; like I said I fully expect to have some fun with Midnight when it comes out, but in terms of new expansion excitement I'm not sure I've ever felt less of it (at a time when I was actually playing and enjoying the game that is, obviously I didn't care too much about what was happening when I wasn't subscribed).

Was War Within a Better Expansion than Dragonflight?

With only a month left until the release of Midnight, I wanted to take a bit of time to look back on The War Within as an expansion. (Truth be told, I already wanted to do this a couple of months ago, but other things kept popping up.)

Aside from people who are negative about modern WoW in general, I think you'll struggle to find many who'll say that War Within has been a bad expansion. There've been some ups and downs, as there always are, but all things considered, it's felt like a positive experience and solid addition to the game. However, as far as the question goes just how good it was exactly - I find that one much more difficult to answer.

What makes it particularly tricky for me is that I had a really easy time calling Dragonflight great, and War Within made some improvements that caused me to play even more this expansion, so you'd think I'd obviously consider it also great, but for some reason saying that doesn't feel quite right.

I had a lot of concerns about War Within before it came out, and I'm happy to say that none of them turned out to be as big of a deal as I originally feared. Nonetheless, it's still felt "lesser" compared to Dragonflight in many ways, at least to me. The Earthen actually turned out to be pretty cool, but still not as good as getting a whole new race and/or class. The War Within zones were beautiful, and the world designers did a really great job at minimising the impact of the whole underground thing potentially making things feel oppressive, buuut... I still didn't really like "hanging out" in any of the subterranean zones, always "fleeing back" to the surface at the end of each play session. I may rank Dornogal slightly above Valdrakken as a hub city, but outside the capital, none of the zones felt as homey to me as nearly every Dragonflight zone did. And while I don't think the story "regressed" in any of the ways I had feared, it didn't feel very cohesive either, or even like the proper start of a trilogy to be honest.

That said, there were other areas in which the War Within was really strong. While I may have found the overarching story kind of "eh", individual character arcs were much more well-defined than in Dragonflight, and the quality of the in-game cinematics went through the roof, with incredibly smooth and detailed facial animations in particular (I also think a big reason the Legacy of Arathor side story got so much backlash was that it suddenly regressed to BfA-era weird cartoon animations just for that one quest).

Delves, after being off to a very bad start at least as far as I was concerned, soon turned into the perfect duoing activity for me and my husband and came to dominate our weekly play time for many months.

Professions, which I actually cited as one of Dragonflight's weak points, received changes that completely turned them around for me, and I went from barely paying attention to them in Dragonflight to getting the "Algari Master of All" achievement in War Within for maxing out all profession skills.

Finally, the introduction of warbands in the expansion pre-patch was also huge for me. All my characters becoming connected in a more organic way actually made me revive old alts on long-forgotten servers (since they could now contribute to my warband) and I even levelled one of each class to the level cap, something I'd never done before. (And then I did it again for Legion Remix, but that's a whole other story.)

If we were to look at nothing but raw hours played and number of characters levelled, War Within should be my personal favourite expansion of all time! Why isn't it?

I find myself weirdly thinking back to Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the original ones that is. I technically started playing in late Vanilla, but the original Burning Crusade was definitely my "golden era" of WoW. I didn't do all the content and was pretty bad at the game to begin with, but I loved to explore and learn. I've often said that I'm not sure whether the original vanilla endgame would've managed to capture me in quite the same way at the time.

And then Wrath of the Lich King came along, which many still consider the superior expansion, and it occupied this weird space between good and bad for me. I clearly enjoyed a lot of the content as I ran hundreds of random dungeons and daily quests throughout the expansion's lifetime and levelled several alts, but it was also the first time that Blizzard made some decisions that I found actively off-putting, such as taking away my shadow priest main's utility role, or the way the Lich King fight played out.

In a similar vein, Dragonflight was the expansion that really got me back into retail (after some extremely casual dabbling in Shadowlands) and actually made me feel invested in the world and my characters again, even if that didn't necessarily result in hundreds of dungeon runs or whatever. War Within had the advantage of me already starting off at a much higher point in terms of engagement, so that I could roll right up and immediately do ALL THE THINGS, but it didn't quite have the same "magic" for me as Dragonflight did.

Ultimately I think I'd consider them both similar in terms of quality, with Dragonflight retaining a slight edge for me personally. 

How did the War Within compare to Dragonflight for you? Or to other expansions, if you'd rather look at it that way?

A (Futile?) Endeavour

In my last post about first impressions of the Midnight pre-patch, I mentioned checking out endeavours and being disappointed that they seemed to consist of nothing but two new daily quests in the town centre. I wanted to write a follow-up since I've found that there is more to them than that, but they are messed up in an entirely different way.

First off, I learned that several endeavours are live at the same time, but your neighbourhood has to pick one (if it's managed) or gets one assigned randomly (if it's public). Mine was assigned the dracthyr (with a portal to the Forbidden Reach), but there are also ethereals (with a portal to Netherstorm), grummels (Kun-Lai Summit), mechagnomes (Mechagon) and niffen (Zeralek Cavern).

There is an endeavours tab in the housing window now, which shows you a bar to progress and activities to do so, similar to the Traveler's Log. Unfortunately the UI is not very intuitive. Still, once I understood the assignment, I travelled to the Forbidden Reach (now scaled to level 80) and went at it like it was 2023 again: chasing rares, mining Dragonflight ore, opening Zkera vault doors. Since the indicators on the UI weren't very clear, it took me a bit to figure out that the game discourages you from doing the same task over and over as there are diminishing returns on each completion, which is something that sounds sensible in theory but in practice there already aren't that many tasks to begin with, meaning you can quickly run out of things that give points.

Worse, a single person's progress is basically not even measurable. The overall endeavour progress gives you no details about how many "points" you need or have earned, it just has those milestones dividing the bar into quarters, and all my efforts seemed to do virtually nothing. There's also an activity tracker to show you who else has been working on the endeavour in your neighbourhood, and over the past day it's all been me. Before that I saw a few people getting credit for "killing a raid boss" or "doing a delve", which were probably not done specifically for the neighbourhood, and maybe one or two names actually doing things in the neighbourhood or in the Forbidden Reach. I'm guessing the complete lack of visible progress put them off after a while though.

Apparently the progression bar is supposed to have some sort of dynamic scaling, as people in small guilds were able to fill up the whole bar in a matter of days, but if you're in a public neighbourhood where most people don't really care about endeavours and only put down a house because the UI kept nagging them about it, it seems you're just out of luck. Five days into the forty-day endeavour, I reckon we've achieved less than five percent progress. If we wanted to hit the final reward in time for the end, we'd need to be at least halfway towards the first milestone already (12.5%?).

I'm not that bothered because I'm currently not that invested in this housing system anyway, but it's still a shame that the devs have been so far off the mark on this one. I'm sure the numbers will be adjusted eventually, but the whole thing just feels badly thought out. They wanted neighbourhoods to be a thing "for the social aspect" and gave us endeavours as something to work on together, but there isn't even a way to properly communicate with the people in your public neighbourhood.

So far, endeavours have only managed to make me feel more lonely in retail WoW than I've felt in a long time. It seems to be commonly agreed that retail is not good at fostering cooperation and community spirit, but it does generally feel lively enough to me. Dornogal is always busy, and I always see people out and about in the world, whether they are gathering, doing world quests or what have you. However, being the sole person in a public neighbourhood who's trying to progress the endeavour on their own while achieving absolutely nothing is a decidedly isolating experience. If they want this to be viable for public neighbourhoods with mixed engagement levels, they'll have to do a lot more than just tweak the numbers.

Midnight Pre-Patch Impressions

The Midnight pre-patch landed this week, and I feel like I approach this kind of update with more and more trepidation as time goes by. Where I used to be excited to see what's new, now I just sigh. Oh, all my alts' talents are reset again? Addons stopped working again? These changes always just seem to mean more and more chores.

That said, the addon situation actually wasn't that bad. For all the talk about the "addon apocalypse", I was pleasantly unaffected as someone who never used many combat addons to begin with, and the few utility addons I do have all had updated versions available for once (I think because Blizz disabled the "use out-of date addons" option for this patch from what I read, which forced all the addon creators to get a move on). It's rare that all my addons have been this up to date all at once!

The warband screen was simultaneously an amusing and horrifying surprise. I knew that part of the pre-patch was a revamp of the transmog system, but what I didn't anticipate was that this was going to strip all my characters of their current transmogs, which made the lot of them look like hideous clowns.

I kid you not, the random shaman alt that I last played through Burning Crusade Chromie Time and who hadn't mogged any of her gear actually looked the best of the lot. We used to make fun of the BC "clown suits" but at least everything you got back then still looked like armour, even if it was easy to end up with a lot of mismatched colours. In modern WoW, so many of the armour sets are these ridiculous fortresses of spires and wings and god knows what, they often look awkward enough when you wear the full set, never mind jumbling pieces from different ones together. Basically, this experience taught me that modern WoW needs trangsmog or we'd all look unbearably hideous.

My little BC-levelling shaman actually looking pretty good. 

So I logged into my warrior with the intent to get her good looks back and immediately hit a snag. Over the course of War Within, my six-year-old PC has increasingly started to struggle with retail WoW, with the most common symptom being the game freezing up and the screen temporarily going black for a second or two, before assets start to slowly load back in one by one. Most frequently this happened after hearthing to Dornogal or - you might have guessed it - when I opened the transmog window.

I was hoping that the revamp would result in a more streamlined UI that would perhaps be easier on my machine, but the opposite was the case: now the game actually crashed entirely whenever I tried to open the transmog interface. Fortunately I wasn't the only one who's been struggling with variations of this problem for a while, so Google led me to a variety of tips that were supposed to help: changing from DirectX 12 back to 11, adding an additional command line argument to my Battle.net launcher for whenever I start WoW, marking my WoW folder as "do not index" in Windows... in the end I'm not sure what eventually did the trick, or maybe each step helped a little, but I eventually got the game back into a playable state. It still chugs and struggles with the transmog window, but at least it no longer crashes and I was able to update some looks. Going through all my dozens of alts will be a lot of work though...

Wanting to distract myself from the impending chores, I decided to revisit the random neighbourhood where I had plopped down my house a few weeks ago. It was interesting to have a bit of a look around and see what my neighbours had been up to in their yards. One guy's house was floating high in the air, something I'd only read about previously.

Endeavours were also supposed to finally be live, one of the housing-related features that had initially intrigued me. So I visited the town square and two dracthyr gave me one daily quest each, one to help with smelting some ore via a short mini game, and one to pick up some vegetables from a nearby farm. That was it. I got two pieces of some new currency that I didn't know anything about but which I guess will probably be good for buying decorations. I honestly expected a lot more out of this feature. Something to make us actually leave the neighbourhood and then come back.

Anyway, Midnight is coming. I'd like to write up some thoughts about that in the next few weeks, as well as a little War Within retrospective.

MoP Classic: Still the Better Housing

I expected that I'd be dropping Mists of Pandaria Classic the moment I finished my "Project Vale", but surprisingly, this has not been the case. In fact, I got back into it more vigorously than I'd been playing while just trying to get to level 90.

I think the main reason for that has been the farm. Everything associated with it, from the Tiller reputations and the vegetable-planting mini game to maxing out my cooking skills in all the different Pandaren "ways" is just plain fun to me. It helped to keep me engaged for a few months during my original time in MoP back in 2013/14 and wasn't part of the MoP Remix experience, so it's genuinely been over a decade since I last did all these things and I'm happy to do them again.

After my disappointment with retail's new housing system, it also stood out to me how the farm, to me, still feels like better housing than the new system. The farm is located in a beautiful, central zone and while it uses phasing, you can transition into your personal area without needing to go through a portal or loading screen so it's a very integrated experience. The neighbourhood feels alive with all the different Tillers visiting the Halfhill market throughout the week. And the farming gives you a reason to visit every day and spend a few minutes there, without trying to keep you cooped in all day like the WoD garrisons did. It's the reason I've got my hearthstone set to Halfhill instead of the Shrine of the Seven Stars, even though the latter is where all the portals and vendors are. It feels like home. Comparatively, retail housing allows me to place and arrange my own chairs in a dark box that's an instance inside an instance located nowhere in specific. I know what matters more to me.

Another thing that I've been working on has been the Golden Lotus reputation, because I wanted to see whether raising it would unlock some more quests that no longer exist in retail. And indeed, my first reward for doing all those dailies was to unlock even more dailies. They're still not among my favourite quests, though I did do a double take when Ren Firetongue casually suggested that Anji and Kun Autumnlight may be looking to have a threesome with me. Not something I would've expected from WoW quest dialogue to be honest!

I also unlocked a one-time quest that had me collecting three relics of the Thunder King, with the Golden Lotus deciding that the safest thing to do was to put them all into a single room in the Guo-Lai Halls. There's no way that could possibly go wrong, I'm sure!

Doing all these dailies has been pretty good for my hunter's wallet as I have very few expenses, so her savings have shot up by the thousands. I'm sure it's still nothing compared to someone who's actually played through the last three Classic expansions consistently but it still makes me feel pretty rich. I actually don't think it's as easy to make money just from questing in modern WoW, which is weird when I think about it. I've noticed that throughout the first few expansions, gold rewards from quest completions kept going up in pretty big leaps. In vanilla Classic you get about four gold per quest completed at max level, in BC that doubled to about eight or nine, I think in Wrath it was fifteen? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but the point is that rewards kept going up for several years, and then they just... stopped. Inflation kept going, and there are some quests in retail that give payouts in the hundreds and thousands, but "regular" questing is way less profitable in modern WoW than it used to be. Just something to think about.

The wider endgame in MoP Classic is of course a bit disappointing compared to modern WoW. It's basically dailies, dungeons or raiding, and that's it. I wasn't initially planning to engage with any of that beyond the dailies I'd already chosen to do for other reasons, but at some point I found myself wondering whether I had earned enough reputation with the Golden Lotus to buy a gear upgrade or two, and that quickly led me down a rabbit hole of where else you can get what gear, how crafted gear compares, how the item upgrade system works, trying to figure out what stats I wanted as a hunter in MoP, and more.

So now I've also run all the dungeons on heroic, and today I ran my first three "celestial" dungeons, the "slightly harder" version of heroics that's meant to serve as a replacement for LFR in terms of gearing. I'm not quite sure what to think of those yet. There were a lot of celestial-related fireworks going on that I didn't fully understand, with some coloured circles actually being good to stand in, but in terms of overall feel they didn't seem significantly harder than heroics. (Though there was that one time I got one-shot by some sort of explosion where I'm still not sure what caused it.)

People are definitely not as forgiving as they are in LFR though. In those three runs I was in, there were two vote kicks. I actually voted yes on the first one, because the guy had joined with res sickness, which... yeah, you shouldn't do that (though I wouldn't have initiated a kick myself). The second time someone tried to kick another hunter in the group for the reason "low", which I assume meant dps, but I voted no on that one cause it seemed mean, and it failed. Karma promptly punished me for my solidarity as the same hunter then outrolled me on all the hunter loot that dropped at the end. Oh well.