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 super 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.
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.
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