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.