A Peculiar Casual

I've been kind of fascinated by Data for Azeroth ever since I found out about the site via a Bellular video. What blew my mind at the time - around halfway through War Within from what I recall - was that it claimed that I was among the rare five percent who had completed the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement (to max out your reputation with War Within's four base factions). The reason this was shocking to me was that it's something that's extremely easy to do, as every piece of casual content (quests, world quests, delves) awards reputation with at least one of these factions. I get that this isn't something raiders would spend time on, but I'm a casual and lots of other people are casuals like me, right? Right?!

As far as the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement goes, my assumption did eventually bear out, kind of - now that War Within is in the rear mirror and all subscribers have access to its content even without shelling out extra for the newest expansion, Data for Azeroth says that more than 50% of all its tracked accounts have completed this achievement. I guess I was just ahead of the curve, so to speak.

Looking again more recently, I've once again been surprised by what sorts of achievements of mine are classified as super rare. Here's a list of my currently rarest achievements according to their database, as of today:

1. A Hal'hadar Walks into a Swamp - complete a quest line in Naigtal
2. Lorewalking: The Loa - complete the lorewalking quest about the Loa
3. Disguised to the Nines - complete all Decor Duel achievements
4. Omnium Folio Studies - complete the Omium Folio quest line
5. Doing Your Share - smelt 5 Enchanted Elementium bars
6. Prey: Hard Mode III - kill all Prey targets on hard mode
7. Champion of Ulduar - completed a deathless 10-man Ulduar run back in Wrath
8. Destined to be Legendary - craft a Sulfuron Hammer
9. Abyss Anglers: Jeju's New Rival - complete most Abyss Anglers achievements
10. Abyss Anglers: Top of the Class - swim through 250 schools of fish
11. Null and Avoided - get found but not tagged in Decor Duel five times
12. Prepared for a Showdown - complete quest lines on Val and Naigtal
13. Abyss Anglers: Myths from beneath - catch a mythic creature six times
14. Deployed to the Void - tag five players while seeking as a Nullifier in Decor Duel
15. Midnight Delver III - complete every Midnight delve on tier 11 with lives remaining as every role
16. Grand Magister's Sommelier - drink a lot of different wines during a rare Midnight world quest
17. The Ancient Keeper - acquired Rhok'delar before the Cataclysm
18. Bringing Order to the Isles - completed all order hall campaigns during Legion Remix
19. Midnight Delver II - complete every Midnight delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
20. Abundance: Ain't Dun Till It's Dun - complete all the Abundance achievements
21. Heroic: Worlds Ahead - complete 15 different world quests on heroic Naigtal or Val
22. Collector's Edition: Netherwhelp - have the pet from the BC collector's edition
23. Abyss Anglers: Certified Depthdiver - earn 250k cumulative points in Abyss Anglers
24. Midnight Delver - complete every Midnight delve on tier 4 with lives remaining as every role
25. Amani War Bear - earned the Zul'Aman timed run mount back in Burning Crusade
26. Abyss Anglers: Pearls to the Abyss - acquire all the diving upgrades for Abyss Anglers
27. Tagged and Bagged - tag five players while seeking as an Arcane Ranger in Decor Duel
28. The Balance of Light and Shadow - acquired Benediction/Anathema before the Cataclysm
29. Abyss Anglers: Vintage Collector - collect 250 treasures
30. Abyss Anglers: Reservation for One - do a dive and do nothing but kill a mythic creature
31. Abyss Anglers: Pahk Trench Fins - buy an upgrade and catch 500 fish
32. Abundance: Artisan - earn 10k points from artisan nodes during an Abundance event
33. Flame Warden of Midnight - honour the flames in Midnight zones
34. Pinnacle Ritual Work - complete both ritual sites on tier 6 with all challenges active
35. Abyss Anglers: Now That's Anglin' - catch 100 fish from bubbles
36. Abyss Anglers: The Finest of Fish - catch a mythic creature three times
37. Sunreaver Onslaught - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Horde side during MoP Remix
38. Abyss Anglers: Delicate Diver - catch all small creatures with nets
39. Kirin Tor Offensive - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Alliance side during MoP Remix
40. Midnight Lumberjack - harvest 250 Thalassian lumber
41. The Whole Kit and Caboodle - unlock all upgrades in Decor Duel
42. Rise of the Ultradon Slayer - kill the enemy Ultradon in the Slayer's Rise epic battleground
43. The Key to Madness - open 500 bountiful coffers in delves
44. T-A-G that spells "Gotcha!" - tag five players while seeking as a Spellbreaker in Decor Duel
45. Algari Master of All - raise all War Within professions to max skill
46. Abyss Anglers: Luck of the Loa - catch an epic fish from a bubble
47. Putting Wilhelm Out of Business - return all of Omarion's notes from Naxxramas (part of unlocking the old Naxx resist gear to craft)
48. Showdown Success: Val - complete 8 different world quests on Val
49. Algari Delver II - complete every War Within delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
50. Showdown Success: Naigtal - complete 8 different world quests on Naigtal

All of these are only owned by 3% of the player base at max. Some of them make obvious sense of course. Anything that's old and/or no longer obtainable is bound to be rare - 7, 17, 18, 22, 25, 28, 37 and 39 fall into that category.

Similarly, I wouldn't put too much stock into the rarity of anything that was only released as part of the most recent patch (12.0.7) about a month ago, because it makes sense that most people wouldn't rush to do every new thing on launch day. However, even if they did, Data for Azeroth only refreshes character data every few weeks (unless you request a manual refresh) so a lot of these probably wouldn't be nearly as rare if the data was truly up to date. That applies to 1, 2, 4, 12, 21, 34, 48 and 50.

The first big surprise to me were the number of Abyss Anglers and Decor Duel achievements on this list. Now, I'll fully admit that I did get a bit more into these than the average Joe after my initial feeling of simply feeling whelmed by their addition had faded. But uh... being a top 1%-er for casual mini games in WoW feels weird.

In a similar vein, I was surprised by some of the delve achievements that are apparently rare - not the one to open 500 bountiful coffers, that clearly required some level of grinding - but that even completing delves on tier 4 as every role is this rare surprised me. Looking at my achievement list beyond the 50 I reproduced here, it seems that people don't like doing delves as healers, as even the "do every delve on tier 4 as a healer" achievement has only been completed by 4% of players. Tanks and damage dealers have nearly double those completion rates. Still, while there are clearly a lot of people who've engaged with delves in some way (the "complete a delve" achievement is apparently owned by 92% of players), I once again appear to be among the most hardcore for this casual content.

There are a few more achievements that fall into this category: I won't deny that I clearly like the Abundance event more than the average person, and the Sommelier achievement does require you to have more than a passing interest in world quests. Flame Warden of Midnight was only available for a limited time, but I'm still surprised it's so rare, considering that there were only five new fires in obvious places, and it's basically free gold for a click. Then again, I'd managed to fly past the Harandar flame repeatedly without noticing it I guess...

For most of the profession achievements on the list it does make sense for them to be rare in my mind. Learning to craft a Sulfuron Hammer and getting all the mats for it is not difficult but definitely qualifies as an obscure old-school grind nowadays, and most players won't have any reason to learn how to smelt Enchanted Elementium bars, never mind actually doing it. Maxing out all the War Within professions was something that actually took a lot of effort and that I was actively proud of.

The 250 Thalassian lumber is not difficult either but I guess requires both at least a passing interest in housing (to learn how to gather lumber) and a love for gathering in general. I haven't gone out to "grind" lumber at any point but will happily grab a piece here or there as I see it, and over time that has simply added up.

The Naxx recipe gathering is definitely an obscure thing to do, something I didn't even see discussed on any news site when it came out and that I had to actively look up after learning of its existence.

The two (to me) funniest achievements on the list are probably Rise of the Ultradon Slayer and Prey: Hard Mode III. The former I got for the one and only time I got into a Slayer's Rise epic battleground, and I had little idea what was going on in it at any point, so I couldn't even tell you whether this is rare because it's hard or just because not a lot of people have even set foot into this battleground.

The Prey achievement is funny to me because it's three times as rare as the equivalent achievement for nightmare mode, even though it's easier - but I guess more people felt motivated to do the nightmare version for the gear rewards. The equivalent normal mode achievement is even rarer and I don't have it either because normal mode preys just give terrible rewards.

Still, I think what ultimately got me about all of this is the rarity of all of these achievements compared to some of the more common ones. Sure, you can say that almost every activity in WoW is only done by a (relative) minority, so it shouldn't be surprising that only 10% of players have a single Decor Duel achievement of any kind. But then I look at stuff like Myth of the Dawn, for which you needed to have done either mythic raiding this tier or a lot of M+ at level 10 or higher this season, and apparently one in five WoW players has this achievement. Or look at the achievement to beat the final encounter in the Voidspire raid on any difficulty (which does include LFR and the solo story version) - more than 40% of WoW players have done this! How have less than 20% of players ever clicked on all the Midsummer Fires in any expansion but 70% have timed an M+ key on level 10?

It's just wild to me that the WoW player base as a whole seems to be so endgame progression-brained that being someone who focuses on casual content seemingly makes you a rare weirdo in comparison.

The War Within Recap

I have seven characters at the Midnight level cap right now, and I've hit that point where I feel the itch to do some more levelling again but at the same time don't really want to do it in Midnight. While Blizzard have made improvements over the years to make levelling alts less repetitive, I still think it's a weakness of the modern game that the last ten levels always have to be done in the current expansion (or in timewalking dungeons).

Therefore, I was quite delighted when I logged into my level 70 Worgen rogue the other day, still stationed in Dornogal, and was prompted to do the War Within recap. Something different to do! I was very curious how much XP it would give me, as well as what it would look like gameplay-wise.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "recap", I tend to think of those brief snippets at the start of a new episode of a TV show, where they say something like "previously on [show]" and then cycle through a few clips from previous episodes that will be relevant to the current episode. I knew that an expansion recap in an MMO was bound to be more meaty than that, but I couldn't really wrap my head around how it was going to work.

It quickly became clear that a perhaps more appropriate title for the experience would've been something like "The War Within abridged", as the "recap" is basically the expansion's main storyline with a good chunk of gameplay chopped out of it, while still leaving you with a pretty considerable amount of content to go through. I didn't time myself, but it still took me several hours (which included watching a lot of cut scenes; it's probably quicker if you skip them) and my rogue gained two levels throughout the whole thing.

In terms of gameplay, the conceit is similar to lorewalking in that a narrator tells you the gist of what's going on but you are given some of the old quests to play through certain events yourself as well. Instead of Lorewalker Cho (or now Li-Li), it's just a magical flying book, which also serves as a taxi between locations sometimes. Where parts of a longer story are skipped, the book just gives you a brief narration along the lines of "then this thing happened" and off you go to the next step.

The first section on the Isle of Dorn is pretty lengthy and includes the destruction of Dalaran, meeting the Earthen, learning about the Unbound and the big fight at the Meadery. I was wondering just how long this whole thing was going to be if they only took so (relatively) little of the storyline out, but in subsequent zones things sped up considerably.

In the Ringing Deeps we are briefly introduced to High Speaker Eirich , get the cut scene where Magni becomes fleshy again while saving the Awakening Machine from corruption, fight Eirich and that's largely it. Nothing about kobolds or anything like that.

In Hallowfall we are introduced to Faerin and the Arathi but then move on to fighting the Order of Night very quickly, passing through the zone without really engaging with the Arathi's background and culture at all. I also found it noteworthy that the whole bit with Faerin helping Anduin find his connection to the light again was not included either.

Azj-Kahet is again glossed over pretty quickly, and you mainly just play through the section where Alleria, Anduin and you disrupt Ansurek's speech, and then the final confrontation with Xal'atath at the end of the main campaign. As far as the Haranir go, you get to play through the quest where you first meet Orweyna and then they are never mentioned again.

The major patch zones are included in the recap as well but are even quicker affairs, with Undermine being reduced to the few quests where you try to get the Dark Heart from the goblins, and the story on K'aresh basically just telling you that you have to work with Xal'atath for the Reshii wraps before throwing you into the single-player version of the Dimensius fight.

It felt like all the focus was on Alleria and Xal'atath, with everything else taking a backseat. I guess in some way that makes sense, especially if the goal of this recap is to prepare players for the start of Midnight, but I've got to admit it also felt a bit weird, because to me at least, the dynamic between these two was possibly the least interesting thing about the War Within and I cared much more about the parts of the story that told us about the cultures and different societal developments in each zone.

Also, while the argument can be made that a lot of the stuff they cut out was "fluff" or grindy quests, I've got to admit that being left with gameplay that's mostly just listening to narration and watching cut scenes is a bit dull in WoW; it's not really optimised for that kind of experience.

When I first read about the recap on reddit, word was that it was decidedly not good, mainly because of how buggy it was. I'm happy to say that I didn't encounter any major stumbling blocks myself at this point, though it still wasn't exactly a smooth experience. I think I had to relog once to unbug a phase, and while I did get confused a few times because quests disappeared from my quest tracker and I was unsure whether I'd lost the plot, that's a bug that I've also encountered in the regular game several times and which is not limited to the recap experience.

The thing that did disappoint me at the end was when I found out that the recap is a lot more like lorewalking than I expected, in the sense that it's completely self-contained and not connected to the actual War Within campaign at all. So while the game makes you feel like you're getting a speed run through the story, the open world isn't actually updated as it would be if you had done the campaign properly. You may have been to K'aresh to do quests there, but the K'aresh portal will not be unlocked when you finish for example, and you'll still have to go through the proper K'aresh starter experience to unlock it, which is just... why?

The most comical example of this for me was that Dimensius dropped a quest item which the game said I wasn't eligible to use. It turned out that in order to be allowed to turn it in, I had to go back to K'aresh the normal way and do the Dimensius quest again outside of the recap, which just felt bizarre and nonsensical.

I guess I could see the recap experience being okay for players who just want to understand the very basics of what happened in the story, but to me personally it was pretty unsatisfying. At the very least it should count as a proper campaign skip and unlock all War Within content/portals etc. in the open world. As it stands, it left me with the feeling that I'd rather have redone the campaign "properly".

Why Is Fishing So Weird Now?

I mentioned in a previous post that my fascination with Midnight professions made me pick up fishing again for the first time since Shadowlands, motivated by a desire to gather all the fish required for my skinner's majestic beast lures. Since then I've maxed out Midnight fishing on two characters and many more are on their way towards the same. As I've learned more about the uses of fish in this expansion, my desire to fish has only grown, even though I'm simultaneously vaguely confused and annoyed by the whole thing. Fishing is so weird now compared to how it used to be!

Fishing in Vanilla was primarily a slow activity that rewarded patience and persistence. It took long to level up, you had to work on your skill in the right zones for your level, and most of the stuff you caught in open water wasn't actually that valuable or useful. For the good stuff you usually had to hunt down specific pools, which were limited and required even more skill. (There've been times in Classic when my character more or less lived in the Bay of Storms, swimming slow laps around the spawn points for patches of elemental water.)

Even though I enjoyed the change at the time, I think things already became a bit unbalanced when Blizzard changed it so that fishing in pools would always succeed, meaning they went from a reward you had to work for to the opposite: an easier way to level your skill. Nonetheless I'd say that by, say, Mists of Pandaria things still had a certain logic to them (as I've had a chance to re-experience in MoP Classic recently): open water was a bit "meh" and fish from pools were more desirable and something you'd specifically hunt for and farm. 

The thing that immediately threw me off about fishing in Midnight is that all pools contain a selection of fish now. So if you fish in a "Bloom Swarm" for example, you're slightly narrowing down what kinds of fish you'll catch compared to open water, but it's still no guarantee you'll get anything you actually wanted.

Pools have a higher chance of containing rarer fish (as Midnight fish also come in the classic white-green-blue rarity colours) but this actually only adds an extra layer of confusion in so far as more rare doesn't necessarily translate to more valuable. A few weeks ago I did a quick price check of all Midnight fish on the auction house and came away with the following:

Common:

• Arcane Wyrmfish - 90g
• Gore Guppy - 32g
• Lynxfish - 8g
• Root Crab - 5g
• Sin'dorei Swarmer - 1g

Uncommon:

• Bloomtail Minnow - 54g
• Fungalskin Pike - 90g
• Hollow Grouper - 50s
• Restored Songfish - 1g50s
• Shimmer Spinefish - 80s
• Shimmersiren - 52g
• Sunwell Fish - 1g50s
• Tender Lumifin - 3g

Rare:

• Blood Hunter - 2g
• Eversong Trout - 46g
• Lucky Loa - 1g50s
• Null Voidfish - 173g
• Ominous Octopus - 42g
• Twisted Tetra - 32g
• Warping Wise - 29g

Prices have probably changed again since then, but the point here is just to illustrate the huge variance in price in each rarity group. White, green or blue, each group contains both fish that sell for barely a gold and fish that sell for close to one hundred or more. This can lead to the bizarre scenario that in some zones, one of the supposedly more common fish is actually more valuable than the rare ones, meaning you're better off fishing in open water and/or using an alt with lower fishing skill as they are less likely to fish up the (less valuable) rare catches. It's wild to me!

Now, you might argue that this sort of variance is just a normal part of the game, as if you look at gear for example, not all items of the same rarity are of the same value either, and that's true, but in general Blizzard has always worked towards streamlining that. If you get an epic drop at max level, there shouldn't be any situation where your old green is actually better, even if the purple item's stats aren't 100% optimal for you. Why make fishing more confusing and complicated by adding indicators that don't actually relate to value at all?

The many different ways in which fish can be used don't help either. Again, in Classic fish were either for cooking/eating (most of them) and some rarer ones were required for alchemy, but it was all fairly straightforward.

The first thing that threw me off about cooking with fish in Midnight is that you can "fillet" any given fish to turn it into the fillet cooking ingredient, but then some recipes still also require whole, unfilleted fish. So you better make sure to only fillet the most worthless ones - check the AH before getting that knife out!

Next we have lure-making, which is what started me down this whole rabbit hole, and here the value of each fish involved varies greatly based on which beast it lures, what those beasts drop, and which recipes those ingredients are used for in turn. 

As far as I can tell, fish are no longer used in any potions, but my mind was blown when I found out that alchemists can turn fish into gems now. I've been doing that a lot since I learned about it, since my jewelcrafter's gains from prospecting ore have been so anaemic. Getting about ten guaranteed gems out of a bunch of fish feels like an amazing deal in comparison. But I wouldn't exactly say that's intuitive.

Then there are additional "fun" items like fishing lures, but most of them are only for worthless fish so why would I want to lure more of them? Or the Aquarius Bloom item which turns any Midnight fishing pool into a "Bloom Swarm". The description for these says that they have a higher chance to contain rarer fish, but again, I wouldn't necessarily want that! When I consulted the Wowhead comments to find out what I could possibly want with that item, the most upvoted comment stated that they just used it to clear some unwanted pools away more quickly (as Blooms Swarms disappear after a single cast, so even if you don't care about what you get, it makes the pool go away and another one, one that you might like better, can respawn elsewhere). There's even more random stuff like that going on that I won't even get into but I still wonder how we ended up in this place.

What's funny to me though is that I'm not even sure whether I like or dislike it. I think the way I described things above, they sound kind of bad and confusing, no? Yet at the same time, it seems to be exactly that friction and strangeness that has led to me being more motivated to invest time in fishing than I've been in in a long while, similarly to how I like the way primary professions are in Midnight for all the same reasons that make many people hate them.

That Infernal Blue Dot

Believe it or not, I'm pretty happy with what Blizzard is doing with WoW right now. Do I love and agree with every single decision they make? Of course not. I think the anniversary servers are everything I don't want Classic to be for example, but I just don't play there. There's enough going on that I can just focus on the things I enjoy and get good value out of my subscription.

I'm also not exactly a hater of cash shops. If given the choice, I'd rather MMOs didn't have them, but I know that money needs to come from somewhere, and as long as they don't actively annoy me, I'm like... fine, do what you must. Sometimes I'll even buy something myself.

However, there's something Blizzard did to their cash shop recently that annoys me big time, and as far as I can tell I'm literally the only person on the internet bothered by this. It may be that the search term "Blizzard shop blue dot" is too vague, but I've also tried different variations of the search, even different search engines - and yet, I couldn't find a single reddit or forum post talking about this. And by "this", I mean what you can see below:

Basically, a couple of patches ago, Blizzard decided to add a fake notification to the shop button every so often, to make you click on it and open the shop if for no other reason than to make the highlight go away. And yes, it is indeed a fake notification as it doesn't even only appear when there are new items in the store. Sometimes they've rotated what's on the front page, but even that hasn't consistently been the case when the blue dot appears as far as I can tell.

The reason I hate this so much is that I strive to be an inbox zero person. I don't always succeed, but I do try to keep my emails and notifications clean, and it doesn't take much for me to take the sledgehammer out and revoke all access for an app or company that's consistently bothering me about nothing just to get my attention. It's what first made me hate Facebook, when they started sending me daily "notifications" about stuff like "a person made a post", which was absolutely not notification-worthy.

I know that not everyone is sensitive to this kind of stuff - when I look over my husband's shoulder he always has 99+ unread notifications on YouTube and Discord and seems completely unfazed by that. He's fine with ignoring all attempts by anyone to get his attention. However, that I literally couldn't find a single other person talking about this is still wild to me. I tried to see whether there's maybe an addon to "mute" shop notifications but had no luck on that front either.

If you have any knowledge of how to make this go away (other than replacing my UI entirely), please let me know!