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.