Casual Midnight Endgame

Considering my slow start into Midnight, I'm really having a lot of fun with it. Now that the expansion's first season has started and (almost) everything has opened up properly, there are a lot of things to do every week, without anything feeling like mandatory chores.

Story

In my post about Midnight's launch I said that "the levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years." However, it turned out that Blizzard had other plans than simply letting us forget about the story this time around, with every weekly reset continuing the storyline a bit further.

They were already kind of moving towards something like this in War Within, but back then the story updates still mostly came with the minor patches, and those minor patch updates tended to feel more like interludes or epilogues - basically, not that important.

This time around, they are all in on the storytelling though, with literal weekly updates (Remember when updates this frequent were "the dream" for many MMOs?) driving the plot forward in major ways. I've honestly been pretty impressed, not just with the update cadence but with the content of those story chapters as well. I was worried that Metzen's return would result in the plot retreading the same old tropes, but at least so far, that hasn't been the case. Instead we've just been getting all kinds of callbacks to really old (and probably largely forgotten by most of the player base) lore, with references to previous expansions being woven into a coherent picture of "now" that makes sense and explains why we are where we are.

The only problem is that the story mode for the raid once again released a full week after raiders had gotten access to the final cut scene, so there were spoilers all over the place, and trying not to be told everything about the ending was like navigating a minefield. Even people who clearly didn't consciously want to post spoilers were "vague posting" about events in very obvious ways within days of release. God help anyone who doesn't see everything the day it comes out. I wonder if that will ever get better.

Dungeons

I don't quite know how I feel about dungeons in retail right now. In old WoW, they were one of my favourite things to do, but in retail, they are nothing like the content I used to love and generally responsible for my worst experiences with other players. I had fun trying out M+ with friends for a bit in Dragonflight, but that ultimately didn't end up working out for me either.

That said, Blizzard is still quite capable of making interesting and beautiful instances, and follower dungeons have made it easier to take a look at them and enjoy them at your own pace, even if you don't have enough friends (or any) to run them with. The normal mode pugs I've done in Midnight so far have also all been really nice? Very little "bat out of hell" level rushing - in fact, quite often I'll see people who are very obviously not super familiar with the dungeon and still learning as they go, which is nice to see even if people aren't particularly chatty.

It really feels like Midnight is encouraging more lapsed players to dip their toes back into the game. In fact, I was making this observation to my husband today while healing a Maisara Caverns on my priest, and at the end of the dungeon the tank whispered me to thank me for my heals and we had the most wholesome little chat. Nicest interaction with a random stranger I've had in retail for years!

Also, I may not be feeling the M+, but I did do a few regular mythic dungeons with friends last weekend, and it was interesting to see the updates to the older dungeons that Blizzard decided to put into the mythic rotation this season. Pit of Saron is an old favourite of mine, and it was intriguing to see the mechanical changes they made to bring the bosses more in line with modern dungeons. Also, Seat of the Triumvirate was hilarious - I had minimal experience with this dungeon to begin with but I do know that L'ura was not as insane a laser show originally. We wiped quite a few times (also on Saprish) but it was pretty fun to actually figure things out together.

Delves

In War Within, delves were the shiny new feature that took several rounds of tuning to find its feet, and even longer for me to warm up to it. Since then, it's become a staple of our duo play for the husband and me, and in Midnight it's been fun to jump into things right away, knowing right from the start how everything works.

The new delves are fun, with some minor iterations that seem sensible. For example Blizzard got rid of all those various utility items that you could loot inside delves and that people either tended to vendor or forget that they even had them. The new buffs are things you click on inside the delve and you either use them right then and there, or you simply don't, which feels much more straightforward to me.

You also no longer collect keys for bountiful delves, only key shards, but they are much, much easier to get than they were in War Within, as they drop from pretty much everything, which I expect will make it easier for me to justify doing more of them on alts when the time comes.

There's also a book in the delvers' quarters that straight up tells you which delves are bountiful each day, meaning you no longer need to click your way through all the maps just to see which icons are glowing.

The one thing I'm still undecided on is Valeera as the new delve companion. I thought Brann was extremely annoying at first, plus a complete joke, but over time I started to find his antics endearing. Comparatively, Valeera is inoffensive but also kind of boring. She has voice lines for various moves, but nothing that feels super quotable. She also seems even more prone to ninja-pulling than Brann was, as she just outright shadow-steps (?) into the next group down the hallway sometimes. On the plus side, she's actually controllable via the ping system now, which I wouldn't have found out if it wasn't for Wowhead, but which is definitely useful once you know about it. 

Prey

Prey/hunts are the new expansion system that I had no particular hopes or fears for, but which has turned out to be decent fun. In a nutshell, you get sent to one of the four new zones to kill a named mob, but it's not a specific location at first. You have to do various activities in the zone to progress your hunt, and sometimes the mob will ambush you mid-combat (and then run away again once they reach half health). After a certain number of these progress events, the enemy's true location is revealed and you can go there and kill them properly.

It doesn't sound super exciting on paper, but it's a nice new twist on open world progression. Plus nightmare hunts count as tier eight delves for the purposes of filling out the Great Vault, so you can increase your number of slots without going completely nuts with delves.

Astalor, the NPC that gives you all the hunt quests, is a complete psychopath by the way, so I'm not surprised that some people absolutely adore him. A bit more concerning to me is when I see comments about how all the blood elves should be like him because they are "too nice" now. Regardless, his voice actor does a bang-up job and I've done quests for worse characters, so I don't mind. It all adds flavour.

PvP

What's this? Yes, I haven't really done PvP in WoW in a while - the last time I got really into it was while levelling my priest during Shadowlands from what I remember (I'm not counting Plunderstorm). What got me this time was a simple incentive quest to "do three battlegrounds" to progress towards a hero quality item - I mean, I didn't even have to win them? Before I knew it, I'd also picked up the PvP weekly and was checking out the weekly brawl.

I still like SWTOR PvP better, but it's made for a nice change of pace to re-visit all those classic battlegrounds as well as to discover some new ones. I was completely taken by surprise when I found out that there's actually a new Midnight battleground called "Slayer's Rise", set in Voidstorm, because I hadn't heard a single peep about it until I actually loaded into it. It's even funnier because I remember having the exact same experience in War Within, where I had no idea that Deephaul Ravine was a new expansion feature until I got put into a match there. WoW's PvP really doesn't get much publicity nowadays.

On the classic battleground front, it was fun to see that Isle of Conquest still has people yelling about glaive throwers fourteen years later, that AV is still about who can rush to the end faster, and that Warsong Gulch still sucks. Good on Blizzard for cross-promoting this content a bit with some simple quest incentives though.

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.