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".

Battlefield: Barrens

Still feeling a bit sad about Turtle WoW's demise, I found myself logging into Mists of Pandaria Classic again when I was craving my Classic fix this weekend. It's on patch 5.3 right now, with 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar) meant to go live in a little over two weeks.

I figured it might be interesting to have another look around, as MoP's 5.3 patch was another one of those weird experiments Blizzard performed at the time, adding some content that only existed for that patch and was then immediately removed again. From everything I'd heard about it, it wasn't particularly exciting, but I still wanted to at least have a look since I had the opportunity.

In a nutshell, the short introductory quest leads Alliance players to Durotar, where they find out that Vol'jin's Darkspear are openly rebelling against Garrosh, and you concede that you have a shared interest in stopping him. You agree that you'll both hassle his Kor'kron in the Northern Barrens where they are trying to gather lumber, meat, oil and stone, to deprive them of said resources and help bolster the rebellion instead.

This is all meant to be part of the build-up to Siege of Orgrimmar and kind of reminded me of how in Wrath of the Lich King, there were these repeatable quests to gather lumber in Cystalsong while the Argent Tournament was under construction, which also went away once that was completed, only with Battlefield Barrens being much larger in scope. The overall design of it feels more like an extremely early predecessor to world quests and other dynamic open world activities that would get added many years later.

Basically you can always collect resources by just killing hostile orcs that are gathering them all around the Northern Barrens, but this is very slow and you're better off tackling one of the dynamic spawns that pop up on the map every so often, such as caravans that need escorting and named elites Kor'kron commanders that drop large numbers of resources. The intro quest only requires 15 of each type, but then you get a weekly that asks for ten times as much, which takes some time to accumulate.

I was pleased when I managed to join my first communal kill of a named elite and he dropped a pretty good chunk of resources at once. I followed the small crowd to kill another couple as they spawned, figuring that I'd actually be done quite quickly, similarly to how these things play out in retail, but then everyone just disappeared all of a sudden and I found myself alone at the next elite. I did try to take it on by myself and failed miserably, so I was forced to go back to smaller and slower gathering tasks. (I did keep an eye on the elite's icon on the map and it never went away for the rest of my time there, everyone had just gone.) I was honestly quite baffled by how abandoned the zone was aside from the brief burst of activity of four or five people killing a few of the elites together - I know the patch has been out for a little while but it's still the current content, with an expiration date no less, so I would have expected more activity there.

One bit that was funny to me was that when I completed the weekly I earned the title "Hordebreaker" - a title that I learned is somewhat rare because patch 5.3 was the only time you could earn it. It does feel more like something you should get out of PvP though rather than as a reward for a weekly collect quest.

I also decided to try and pick up Wrathion's legendary quest line again. After I finally hit revered with him from another two rounds of Shieldwall dailies, he tasked me with queueing for the two battlegrounds that were added in MoP (Silvershard Mines and Temple of Kotmogu) and queues were looong. Once I waited over an hour for a pop. In terms of gameplay, my team was completely stomped in Silvershard Mines while utterly dominating the enemy in Temple, which to be fair is my usual experience with these in retail as well.

The other quest he gave me was more of a problem though: you're supposed to kill a boss type orc called "Warlord Bloodhilt" at Domination Point, the Horde base in Krasarang Wilds. The quest does state that you'll need a group. Looking it up, it seems that he was a raid level boss originally, but had already been nerfed to be more of a small group fight or possibly even soloable with some skill. My first attempt was a miserable failure however as he ate my cat for breakfast and I had to acknowledge that I needed a proper tanking pet, so I went out to tame a turtle. I also realised that I'd never bothered to learn a single glyph, another thing I rectified.

Unfortunately, returning more prepared ultimately didn't help because Blizzard introduced a bug a few months ago that causes the Kor'kron flak cannons in the base to not just shoot at players on flying mounts, but also on people on the ground, and more importantly - they can shoot through walls and inside buildings. So I honestly never got very far, less because of the boss himself but more because of the flak cannons often randomly nuking me in two to three hits. Certain spots sometimes seemed to be safe from them, but it wasn't consistent so I never really managed to come up with a safe strategy.

At one point I briefly got my hopes up when a pandaren monk arrived who also wanted to kill the boss. We grouped up and after getting blown up by the cannons a few times he suggested we just kill them. We did so, but unfortunately they respawned too quickly and were soon nuking us through the walls again. Eventually my gear was broken and the monk got fed up and said he'd rather go fishing than deal with this fuckery any longer.

I'm at a bit of a loss about how to continue. I find it very hard to think of a way to progress the quest at this stage, as even a larger group would likely get nuked by the cannons, never mind me being able to assemble such a group. As mentioned, I know for a fact that this bug has been in the game for a few months already (as I was actively playing when the daily quests in that area went from chill to "WTF is going on with these cannons"), and bug fixes for MoP Classic have not been a priority for Blizzard. You'd think something that blocks the legendary chain like this might still matter, but most people who care are probably already past this stage, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you've got any hot tips for this one, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Drinking from the (Buggy) Content Hose

WoW Midnight got its first content patch last week. Despite only being a "minor" patch, 12.0.5 introduced no fewer than four new casual activities (among other things): Abyss Angling, Decor Duels, Void Assaults and Ritual Sites.

My first impression of all of them is that they are... fine. I've had fun trying them all out, and I'll probably do at least some of them a few more times, especially the Ritual Sites. However, I also would have been perfectly fine without them. Midnight has been out for less than two months and I'm far from being done and bored with the launch content. I didn't need even more stuff on my plate. It all feels like a bit much to be honest, even if I'm not necessarily a completionist who needs to do all the things. I didn't think it was possible for an MMO to overwhelm people with constant additions of new stuff, but at least to me, WoW feels like it's coming close right now.

This relentless onslaught of more content also comes at a price. This patch was apparently so buggy at launch that Blizzard actually felt the need to officially apologise for it. I wasn't affected too badly myself, but I'm not surprised it happened as this is something that has been building up for a while. It's kind of wild how we went from "Blizzard polish" and "we'll release it when it's ready" to the complete opposite, with new releases being pushed out the door on a strict schedule seemingly no matter what state they are in.

Not sure if this counts as a bug or is just down to my old rig, but the most noticeable new nuisance since the patch for me has been that the water graphics in the new zones go bananas sometimes. 

I remember when I started playing WoW back in 2006, bugs in the game were basically not a thing. I'm not saying there literally wasn't a single one, but they just weren't something I ever encountered. (Now, server stability was a huge issue at the time, but that's a different kettle of fish.) And Blizzard maintained that reputation for polish for a pretty long time, even as they piled on expansions.

Over time, some bugs did start to appear here and there, but it still wasn't too bad. The first time I used the "bugs" tag on this blog was in 2015, and even that was in relation to a private server. I didn't have cause to use it while talking about official WoW until 2021, in this post about a Shadowlands patch. 

And then with Dragonflight, the flood gates opened. I generally loved Dragonflight, and while I did notice that the increased content cadence seemed to come with a trade-off in the form of a lack of polish, at the time it didn't seem too bad yet. In War Within things escalated, and while I really enjoyed the Nightfall event for example, it was an utterly buggy mess at its launch.

With Midnight, things have ramped up yet again, and I've gotten used to encountering bugs everywhere. They're usually not game-breaking show stoppers, but noticeable nonetheless, from activity trackers not working and settings that won't stay saved to just randomly buggy quests. There's a world quest in Silvermoon where Magister Rommath asks you to spy on the newcomers to the city, which had been so hastily copy and pasted from a previous expansion that the written instructions still said to "take pictures of the wildlife" for weeks, which I thought was pretty hilarious in context.

I've been wondering whether and when we'd reach a tipping point, and I wonder if this is it or if we're still not there yet.

The thing is, I have sympathy for the Blizzard devs here. By nature, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my own work - I'm human and make mistakes, sure, but I'll always strive towards 100%. However, in over a decade of working at the same large company, I had to learn to let a lot of things go or else go insane. I've been lectured about the 80:20 rule and how some things are just not worth doing from a business point of view. Some bugs you just write a ticket for, knowing full well that they are never going to get fixed because you just can't demonstrate the business value of fixing a typo and some wonky looking formatting, and I'm guessing that the WoW devs face some of the same pressures. It's probably better for the financials to work on the next content patch to improve retention than to fix some bug that most people will never encounter, never mind unsubscribe over. The impact this has on brand perception is not a metric that is easy to measure and demonstrate the value of.

I'm also not really upset because I've got to confess that my own tolerance for that kind of thing in MMOs has actually increased over time, even if admitting that marks me as not the most discerning of customers. I play SWTOR as my main MMO and that game has been buggy as heck ever since its launch. To this day, you've got to expect every major patch to have at least a couple of very noticeable and annoying bugs, and I know people who intentionally hold off on playing any new content for at least a few days to wait for some live bug testing first and then go in once the worst of it is fixed. If WoW is going down the same path, I'm not someone who'll easily be put off by that, but at the same time it's still a shame, because I honestly don't need quite such an aggressive patch cadence to stay interested anyway.

Living in the Moment

One thing I personally find kind of off-putting about the wider retail WoW community is how a large chunk of it seems to spend more time looking forward to the next thing than actually engaging with the current content. Where the Classic community sometimes gets bogged down by nostalgia and wishing they could play the game again like it's 2006, retail content creators often strike me as the opposite, always laser-focused on what the next patch will bring, seemingly in a race to be the first to report on what's new, and by the time it actually goes live, they've already moved on again.

I've been finding it particularly noticeable recently because while we don't have a launch date for Midnight yet, I'd say the expansion is definitely still at least three months away (probably more) but I swear anything WoW-related in my feeds that's not about Classic has been about seemingly nothing else for months already. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not at all curious about what the expansion will bring, but I don't want to hear about every time an NPC passes wind in the Midnight beta either. I like having a vague idea of what's to come, plus maybe a couple of more specific things to look forward to, but primarily I want to see things for myself once the expansion launches! The other day a weird headline popped up in my reddit recommendations and all I could think was: "That sounds like it must be alluding to some major story spoiler or something; I think I'll just scroll past as fast as I can." At times, it can feel like navigating a minefield.

It doesn't help that a lot of the expansion discourse I have seen has been extremely tedious as well. To give an example, as a more casual player who uses minimal addons, I really don't think the removal of combat addons is that big a deal. There are millions of us already playing that way just fine! It's obviously going to lead to some changes, but if this game is good at anything it's constantly changing things around, so hey, it's another day ending in y. Another example would be people getting extremely up in arms about Blizzard being open about wanting to monetise housing the way pretty much every other MMO with housing monetises it. I can understand feeling a degree of disappointment if you were hoping for something better/more generous, but let's not pretend that anything they've announced is hugely surprising if you know anything at all about how housing works in other MMOs.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it weirdly challenging to find people talking about things going on in the game right now. I'd like to hear how other people are experiencing Legion Remix for example! Or if you're not playing Lemix, what are you doing? I've picked up running a few delves a week on alts again and it's wild how absurdly buggy they've been for many weeks now (in a way that actually benefits players too). Brann has become stupidly OP as one of his abilities can one-shot an entire group on tier 11, and several of the delve-specific abilities have become similarly overtuned to a ridiculous degree, such as the phase cutter ability in Archival Assault or the footbomb dispenser you can get from treasures.

At first I shrugged it off as "haha, patch day, right" but it's been literally weeks now and I'm finding it weird how nobody seems to be talking about it. Are we just keeping quiet in hopes that Blizzard doesn't notice? I would have expected their "fun detected" sensors to go off pretty much instantly, and I keep thinking that surely they must at least be aware of this bug and have it their backlog somewhere. Are they just too busy with Midnight and Legion Remix to care about things being wonky in the mainline game, where it's presumably a bit more quiet at the moment?

The funny thing is that it's only because of this bug that I've actually started doing delves on my healers again - I'd previously stopped because while they were doable, they were just too slow and tedious. With Brann one-shotting things occasionally (not all the time, but frequently enough), the pace actually feels much better and fun. I now kind of dread Blizzard actually fixing the bug and taking that away again. With how long they've left it in the game at this point, I honestly hope they just leave it in for what remains of the expansion as well. When Midnight arrives with its gear reset, it's going to be enough of a slog to get geared up and powerful again anyway.

Exploring the Forests of Northwind

My hunter on Turtle WoW reached the first of their mid-level custom zones recently. According to their wiki, the zone of Northwind is designed for characters of level 28-34.

Located just north of Stormwind, it can basically be summed up as "similar to Elywnn Forest, but more autumnal and higher level". I do think the location for this zone is an excellent choice as that whole area is basically a big chunk of nothing on the post-Cataclysm version of the Eastern Kingdoms map. I made a point of going there in the official game to take a screenshot for comparison purposes, and it's literally a huge swathe of boring mountainside separated only by a small nondescript sea inlet.

Though taking this screenshot at sunset did manage to make it look a lot better than it really is.

Northwind on Turtle WoW has a lot more interesting things going on. My description above is a bit of an oversimplification, as there's also a jousting tournament area and a quarry with Dark Iron dwarves for example. But the general vibe is definitely very similar to Elwynn: a lush forest dotted with human settlements and populated by bears, wolves and boars.

Weirdly, this was another thing that once again made me appreciate Blizzard's artists more because even after ten expansions of adding new terrain, they are still very good at making each zone visually distinctive with new assets and different creative directions. (That's why WoW GeoGuessr is so much fun!) Even if some zones obviously have similarities at this point, I don't think the Blizz devs have ever created a zone that's as obviously just a derivative of another zone the way Northwind is of Elwynn Forest.

That said, obviously part of Turtle WoW's charm is that everything they add is "more of the same" in a way, and I thought the zone was very beautiful and enjoyable to quest in. (It does have unique music too.) I did particularly enjoy the thought put into the lore and how a zone in that location would connect to everything around it.

My favourite bit was probably this mini garden/nook (there's probably a better English word for this that I'm not aware of) that featured a statue of Tiffin Wrynn and has you meeting her elderly mother, who still grieves for her daughter and asks you to carry a gift for Anduin to Stormwind Keep as she's not allowed to see her grandson. That hit kind of hard for me because Queen Tiffin is such a minor character in Warcraft lore, seemingly only created in order to die and give Varian something to brood over, it had never even occurred to me that she should probably have some other surviving family members, or to wonder how they might relate to Anduin.

A lot of non-quest NPCs also offer additional chat options to flesh out their characters and paint a richer picture of the zone, and I thought the whole thing felt significantly more coherent than the Thalassian Highlands.

As for some negatives: Why are all the boars aggressive? Boars are usually neutral mobs in WoW unless they are corrupted or diseased, but for some reason all the boars in this forest hate people and other animals, and you'll soon learn to loathe the sound of their angry squeals as you get attacked by one for the 50th time while just trying to pass through. I've seen people meme about this in general chat too, so I know it's not just me.

The bodies of water in the zone are clearly unfinished in some way, because when you dive into one... you don't get a breath bar! It's apparently a magical forest where everyone can just breathe underwater. Also, while they actually remembered to add fishing pools here (unlike in Thalassian Highlands), you still can't fish - or at least I couldn't, as I'd just get an error whenever I tried.

The worst part of it all though was undoubtedly the Dark Iron quarry in the north-eastern corner. I don't know what they screwed up there with the terrain building, but I struggled with mobs evading, falling through the floor, attacking through walls and the like repeatedly, to the point that it made the whole place a royal pain in the arse to quest in.

Another problem I had was that one quest I had in that area was just to search the quarry and return with anything useful I find, with no further details. At first I thought that I'd be looking for a piece of parchment on a table or something, but after searching the whole area and coming away empty I resigned myself to looking it up outside the game. I found that I was actually looking for a drop from an "Overseer Bragordi", which it turns out I had never come across because she was basically constantly dead. I more or less found her by accident eventually because I loitered near a few other players for a minute and it turns out they were sitting around specifically to spawn-camp her.

This lack of clear directions (this wasn't the only quest this applied to) was generally a weirdly double-edged blade from my point of view. The issue was also exacerbated by it turning out that Northwind was actually Turtle WoW's most recently added zone - there are some help resources for Turtle WoW questing available after how long they've been online, but naturally there wasn't much for their newest release yet.

Sometimes it was just frustrating, like in the above mentioned example. Other times I was actually quite satisfying - there was a quest to find a Defias hideout for instance and I was so chuffed when I found the guy's tent on the shore of a lake in a hidden valley because of course it makes sense that a secret hideout is well hidden and I actually felt quite proud of myself for finding it.

Yet other times it could lead to unexpected adventure and interactions. There was one quest that instructed me to pick some herbs similar to Wintersbite, herbs that were supposed to grow "along the snowy ridges to the north". I understood that to mean that the plant would grow in the snow (like Wintersbite) and wondered how to get up there, as the only snow was on top of the mountain and the cliffs were very steep. I wandered up and down the zone looking for a hidden path or something, and even tried to climb southward from Dun Morogh, all to no avail. I also asked for advice in several chats without ever getting a reply.

Finally, when I teamed up with a paladin for the local group quests and the other player showed as having already completed that particular quest, I asked them directly what they had done, and it basically turned out that I had been massively overthinking the whole thing - the flowers were right there in the grass and looked more like Peacebloom; I had just been so fixated on needing to get to the snowy area that I'd completely missed them. So that was kind of annoying, but ultimately arriving at the solution with the help of another friendly player was kind of nice. Either way not an experience you're likely to ever have in official WoW content nowadays, considering how thoroughly everything gets datamined and mapped out before it even launches.

One last thing I noted, since my character is a miner: the distribution of ore nodes was strangely retail-like, with the whole zone yielding nothing but iron. From what I can tell, the other custom zones around this level are the same. In Vanilla, different ores are always mixed together, which makes it much more challenging to farm just one specific type. As it is, Northwind is an easy zone in which to level your mining skill, but you can tell that its existence has somewhat devalued iron, as it was going for so little on the auction house that I just had to vendor hundreds of bars. Meanwhile copper is quite expensive for its low level, so it seems to me like the economy obviously would have benefitted from a more true-to-Classic approach here by having the zone yield a mix of copper, tin and iron together.

Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part. 

Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Nightfall Shenanigans

This week we got yet another patch for The War Within, one of those smaller ones this time. From what I'm hearing around the internet, reception of this one has been mixed for reasons that do not affect me in any way, so whatever.

I really like the new Nightfall event though. Yes, I realise at this point the open world events have ceased to be novel: fill a bar, fight a boss etc. - but since I enjoy the format, I'm happy to get more content in a similar vein.

The event isn't synced to Beledar changing from light to dark, but one time it happened just as the event started and it felt very atmospheric.

One thing that intrigued me from what I'd heard about it in advance was that this one had a personal progress bar in addition to the one for the overall event. I can only guess that this was Blizz's response to how in the theatre event, when the bar fills up quickly, a significant number of people just go AFK nowadays.

Yet when I arrived for my first encounter with the Nightfall event, I was immediately confused because not only did I not see a personal progress bar, I saw no indications of what exactly was supposed to be happening at all. I saw people run around and kill things, and the marker on the zone map said that the event was in progress, but I saw no progress indicators, objectives or timers whatsoever. I just ran around for a bit trying to get a few hits on mobs in the crowd, and at some point I suddenly got a prompt to rally for a final attack and kill a boss. I joined in for that as well and got credit for completion, so I was satisfied enough, if a little confused.

The weekly quest for the event rewards you with a token to buy a piece of champion gear of your choice by the way, which I thought was great. You get champion gear from delves as well, so several of my alts have plenty of those pieces by now, but as it goes with RNG, often there's just this one slot for which you're just never getting a drop, so being able to outright buy that one immediately delighted me.

Later in the evening I gave the event another go and was baffled to find the area completely empty. This time the UI seemed to work though, and I saw both an event and a personal progress bar, as well as some personal objectives such as to rescue some prisoners, kill a named mob etc. Unfortunately I quickly realised that it wasn't just quiet - I had somehow ended up in a phase where I was literally the only person doing the event, and my holy paladin was taking a looong time to kill an elite with several million health. I think in the end I only completed three or four objectives before the timer ran out, but at least I got a better view of (how I figured) the event is supposed to work.

Funnily enough, on every subsequent run I've been to since then, I've never been able to get the objectives to pop up again. There's just this huge crowd milling about trying to tag nerubians for 1% personal progress and I go along with it. It's not bad if you're a skinner either since a lot of innocent animals get caught up in the carnage.

Sorry, little guy. A warzone is not a good place to be neutral and carefree.

Even with the huge crowds, overall event progress is weirdly slow, which makes me think that someone is getting the objectives, but if that particular person isn't doing them, everything comes to a halt. Or maybe they are bugging out in some way. My evidence for this is that at one point when I was flying around the edge of the event, I saw an objective pop up to "destory Sureki shadecasters" but it was literally only there for a second or so, and then the whole event UI bugged out and disappeared again.

I tried to find more information on the forums, but there people were mainly complaining that apparently the event had been impossible to complete for the first day or so, nothing about the weird bugginess that I was seeing but that didn't stop people from getting credit.

Yet for all the complaints, it seems quite popular - the one time I was by myself seemed to be a weird anomaly, because every other time I've been there it's been very crowded. When the final boss spawns and everyone converges into a single place, it turns into a proper lag fest, which always amuses me. Lag is just a sign of a proper massively multiplayer experience!

I'll probably keep rotating through various alts for several weeks for both the gear and rep rewards. And hopefully the devs will fix it up at some point so that everyone can actually do those objectives, however they are supposed to work exactly.

Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail

I don't know much about it since I've barely scratched the surface of that particular part of the game, but I get the impression that fishing has a lot more going on in The War Within than it did in Dragonflight. Specifically, I noticed that there's this new item called an Algari Weaverline, which you're supposed to spin into your fishing pole.

I got some of that and it made me realise that my evoker didn't actually own a fishing pole, since they stopped being a requirement to fish many years ago and I just hadn't come across one organically. So naturally, I opened up Wowhead to have a look at what good fishing poles are out there nowadays and how to acquire them. I was stunned to find that after almost twenty years, the Arcanite Fishing Pole that you get for winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza from Vanilla is still the best permanent fishing pole in the game. There are other options that are very close, but this one still beats them all. It even got a new model at some point. Amazing!

What was even funnier however was that it also looked like the most straightforward option to acquire on short notice, as all the other good poles were either RNG-dependent in some form or required a reputation I hadn't ground out on this particular character (and which isn't account-wide yet). I mean, yes, winning the fishing tournament is not trivial, but I'd done so several times in Classic, so it didn't seem that outlandish to think that I might be able to do the same in retail as well.

Somewhat amusingly, I actually struggled to find up-to-date information on how the tournament works in retail. The reason this was funny to me is that the first time I took part in the event in Classic, I confused myself due to having looked up a retail guide with information that didn't apply to the Classic version. Now it was the other way round.

Ultimately, I came up with the following list of differences compared to the Classic version:

• In retail, the tournament is a world quest. This means you get a little pop-up and tracker on your UI when it starts, but other than that, I didn't see this change making much of a difference to the experience. It still doesn't auto-complete or anything; and you still need to hand in in Booty Bay to pick your prize.
• As I'd observed previously, Tastyfish can be fished up all throughout Stranglethorn in retail, not just along the coast.
• There are no longer dedicated pools of Tastyfish, but the regular pools just start giving primarily Tastyfish once the tournament starts (though you can still get those pesky Oily Blackmouths ruining your day sometimes).
• It's no longer a server-wide competition, so you don't automatically win by playing on a low-pop server, but the first fifty people in the region (?) to hand in their forty Tastyfish all get a prize, regardless of what server they are on.
  

I was very curious how the latter in specific was going to pan out. Azjol-Nerub is considered a medium population server, but I decided to follow the advice to do my fishing in war mode to minimise competition anyway. (Also, I had to google how to turn on war mode because who thought the talent panel was the logical choice for that?!)

So I figured I shouldn't be facing too much competition for pools... but I also wasn't optimised in any way. My Classic fishing skill on my evoker was less than 100, even! And I'd read about all kinds of weird min-maxing to win the competition, such as that if you were after the account-bound heirloom ring reward, it would be best to use a Highmountain tauren druid since they can move between pools more quickly with instant flight form, and Highmountain tauren have a racial that lets them catch extra fish sometimes.

Either way, I was happy to wait and see. Min-maxers might be a threat, but the new expansion is also still pretty fresh, so I figured that might work out in my favour in the sense that there might be fewer people spending time chasing rewards from old content. I changed my hearthstone to Booty Bay, parked myself in my usual spot in northern Stranglethorn and set my phone alarm to remind me just before the competition was supposed to start.

When the time came, I was kind of surprised by how not nervous I was, considering the way the Classic version of the tournament had got my heart racing at times. The war mode gamble was definitely paying off as I didn't encounter a single soul while fishing and had all the pools to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder when the first winner would be announced, considering that in Classic the contest tended to end after 15-20 minutes and that the cast bar for fishing is shorter in retail, the yell to announce the first winner went out, only ten minutes in. I kept calm and carried on, reminding myself that there were 49 more prizes to be won.

After another three minutes or so came a yell that Riggle Bassbait had given out about half of his prizes and to hurry up, but fortunately I was close to done myself by that point. Once I grabbed my 40th fish, I quickly hearthstoned to Booty Bay and handed in - and clearly not a second too soon, as two Horde druids did the same right after me, which then triggered a spam of "that's it, we're done" style yells from the quest giver.

I could hardly believe that it had been that easy! Of course, now I needed about another 200 fishing skill points to actually be able to use my new pole. I figured I'd fly around and fish up a few more Tastyfish for consolation prize money, but oddly all my casts came up empty now. A bit of googling revealed that this is a bug that has seemingly been around forever - that you can't actually get any more Tastyfish like you're supposed to after the competition is over. However, the same forum threads also noted that you'd still get skill-ups for your "empty" catches and that you still had a chance to catch one of the rare fish, so I kept it at for a little while until I ended up picking up a Dezian Queenfish which I was able to hand in for another buff to my fishing.

Now to work on those remaining 100 or so skill points...

Expansion Pre-Patch Day

Yesterday (or Tuesday for the 'mericans) was War Within pre-patch day. I think I saw someone say that this might be the biggest patch WoW's ever had (in terms of impact, not file size) and while that sounds hyperbolic, I can't help but wonder whether it's true. Expansions always change a lot of things of course, but moving the game towards everything being account-wide as well as making everything cross-realm at the same time really was a pretty ballsy move on the dev team's part.

I knew about the cross-realm thing on an intellectual level, but I hadn't fully comprehended what it would mean. Suddenly having all my characters from all servers in a single list on the character selection screen certainly put things into a new perspective (it even included "KauvarB87508", the level 3 shaman from Aggramar whose name was released and reclaimed at some point during my years of not being subscribed). There was something funky going on with the character previews as well... all the low-level humans and draenei showed with the same face, hair colour and hair style and all the low-level tauren were identical-looking black cows. I logged into my original paladin, the first character I ever created and whose looks I remembered well enough despite not having played her in ages, and on loading in she appeared as her normal self and the character selection screen also updated, thank goodness.

The realm list feels kind of pointless now... it seems like realms are just like a sort of "last name" that's only relevant when picking a character name now.

And of course there was the warband screen, which everyone is posting screenshots of, so let me join in:

I was kind of surprised to see my old night elf priest be one of my default "favourites", and I can only guess that this was simply based on which characters you last logged into before the patch, because I think I did log her to check something quite recently.

I have to admit I didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for spending time on actually playing though. I don't think I've ever been great with large-scale changes like this, and it's only been getting worse as I get older. Fortunately I don't use a lot of addons, so that wasn't too much of an issue, but for some reason anything but the default action bars had been disabled on every single character and needed manual re-enabling. And of course all those talent resets! Those always exhaust me.

I was also a bit wary of just how broken things were going to be. Taking into account just how massive the changes were that the devs had to make under the hood for this update, I guess we should all be grateful that things weren't any worse, but I saw things like warnings not to use the currency transfer feature (or your currency might just vanish into the aether) and decided not to get too experimental with anything myself.

Mostly I just looked around a lot. There've been a lot of small changes to various parts of the UI like updated icons, and it all looks very busy. I'm sure I'll get used to most of it over time, though I am a bit cranky that they decided to get rid of the green exclamation mark over undiscovered flight masters after twenty years. Instead, the winged boot icon over their heads has a kind of greenish tint now if you haven't talked to them before, which is much harder to spot. (That said, I'm no longer sure how discovering flight paths works anyway. On one Remix character I still had to do it, while another had everything unlocked seemingly by default.)

Dragonriding turning into "skyriding" and becoming available for all flying mounts is kind of cool but also weird. I found myself slipping into the familiar keystrokes quite easily regardless of which mount was summoned, even if it was strange to see my Sunwarmed Furline zoom and leap across the sky in ways it didn't before. On the other hand, I found that evokers' Soar now also works with steady flight, though it looks quite silly the way you wind up for a massive leap just to do a tiny jump into the air and then float around like a butterfly. I'm just not a fan of switching between the two modes being a five-second cast. I wish you could just assign different modes to different mounts to make it smoother.

I also logged into one of my Remix characters whom I'd left at level 60 and had a rather painful questing experience. In anticipation of the level cap going up again with the expansion, the patch massively slashed the experience points required from 60 to 70, and I shot up to in levels in no time... which was not a good thing in this case. People were already complaining about power scaling in Remix in that level range before the patch, but now it gets combined with WoW's standard problem of your character getting weaker if the pace of gear acquisition can't keep up with how fast you gain character levels, and by level 65 I was as weak as a newborn babe. I tried to do one of the intro scenarios to the Isle of Thunder and died on every mob pull (good thing there's no durability or repair bills in Remix). The last fight fortunately offered a protective bubble I could hide in, but the encounter still took something like ten minutes. In regular retail you could at least buy some greens from the AH in that situation, but I'm honestly not quite sure what you're supposed to do in Remix with its trade restrictions when you're too weak to fight anything. Queue for dungeons and hope that others carry you for long enough to pick up a few level-appropriate gear pieces? I don't know.

The Cataclysm Cometh

I wasn't really planning to comment on Cataclysm Classic any further unless I suddenly found myself overcome by a surprise urge to actually play it. I try to have the attitude that if I get tired of an MMO, I turn away and leave it be, because people who still complain about the supposed shortcomings of a game they haven't really been interested in actually playing for years are cringe.

However, that doesn't mean that I don't still take note of some of the things that happen in MMOs I used to play or am still "adjacent" to, so hearing the stories coming out of the WoW Classic subreddit since yesterday's Cataclysm pre-patch has been absolutely wild. I'm enough of an old hand to expect some level of disruption from any major patch, but there are still... degrees. In the context of Classic, I wouldn't have expected:

• Battlegrounds being busted for levelling, allowing players in Warsong Gulch to gain ten levels per flag cap (apparently Blizzard responded by disabling battlegrounds as an emergency measure)
• People being unable to leave random dungeon groups without a script
• Mayhem with professions and spell books
• Utter chaos with the new talents, as people report having talented abilities from all three trees, or from none, or they have abilities for a while and then they disappear, or...

I actually kind of wanted to log in just to see whether the chaos was bad enough to actually be noticeable in game to a casual observer. So I reinstalled Classic Cata... and instantly forgot all about what I had come for when I was overcome by nostalgia on the character selection screen.

As a reminder, I hopped off the Classic progression train during Classic Burning Crusade, but it was a sad parting, not one driven by anger or indifference. Seeing my hunter in her tier five gear still filled me with fond memories of the Forks, even if guild life had soured a bit in the expansion compared to OG Classic. There was my mage in her Frozen Shadoweave! Seeing my druid in her tier four immediately gave me flashbacks to tanking in Gruul's and Magtheridon's Lair. Those were different times, all of... three years ago.

I logged into my hunter and was presented with a cascade of achievements, because of course, those were added in Wrath and I hadn't logged in since then. There was also some automated mail reimbursing me with gold for old currency and keys that had been removed. I wanted to check the status of the guild I was still in, but had issues with seeing everything as the guild UI was kind of bugged out, so I guess that checked out at least.

I then thought about the upcoming server merges that I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago. I didn't think I cared enough to make use of the free transfers instead of letting Blizzard automatically shunt my old characters off to wherever by default, but now that I was already here... In the old (now inactive) guild Discord someone had mentioned that they were choosing to move to Mirage Raceway over Pyrewood, so I actually made the effort to choose that as destination for all my old chars as well.

I even got to keep a couple of names because I'd completely forgotten that back when Blizzard first opened free transfers from Hydraxian Waterlords and before the Forks had decided to go to Nethergarde Keep, I had checked out all the options and reserved names where I could.

Of course my old hunter was not so lucky. Tir had become Tirr with two Rs when moving from Hydraxian Waterlords to Nethergarde Keep, so I thought it would make sense to add a third one for yet another server transfer. This is when I learned that apparently there is a restriction/error message for "you cannot use the same letter three times consecutively". Okay! Never thought I'd run into that one.

Anyway, I completed the transfers and then... I just felt lost. I never thought I'd really want to play anyway. But now that I saw them, I still felt a weird attachment to all those characters and like I should "look after" them. I almost wish I had the casual disregard for virtual life that some of my friends have, being serial character deleters. Meanwhile, I still feel vaguely bad about that gnome rogue I deleted almost two decades ago...

I just want stability for my characters, and Blizzard used to be good at that. My old characters from the game's early days are all still there on the same servers where I originally created them. Sure, they may have had their levels squished, talents reset and contents of their bags obsoleted, but they are still there. I shudder to think how I'll feel about the characters I made in Season of Discovery whenever the time for that comes to shut down. They didn't get to very high levels, but still... this is definitely a downside of this whole seasonal server model and Blizzard making so much more liberal use of server merges in my opinion.

Interesting Classic Era Developments

Classic era being what it is, I don't really expect it to have any kind of active development. We can have different kinds of servers that try new things (Season of Mastery, hardcore mode) but the era servers are a museum piece in maintenance mode and that's fine.

That said, sometimes even the maintenance (aka bug fixing) can be slow. At some point in autumn last year, a client update that was made primarily for Wrath of the Lich King introduced an odd bug to era when it comes to NPC pathing near water. Basically friend and foe alike would get very confused about where the ground was when near a shoreline, and they'd either evade or randomly disappear underground.

The first time I came across this myself was while doing the chicken escort in the Hinterlands on my druid, because the chicken is stranded on a little island surrounded by water and has to go through a little moat before continuing its journey on land. The first time I started the quest, the chicken walked into the moat and then just disappeared. I ran in circles for a bit, wondering how I'd managed to lose sight of it, and eventually the quest failed as it got too far out of range of me. When it respawned and I tried again, I made sure to put a star marker on the chicken's head to make sure I wouldn't lose it again. Again it traipsed into the little moat, and then I could see its star slowly descend into the abyss under the world until it once again disappeared and the quest failed. I got lucky though, because when I tried for a third time, it just walked through the moat as normal, showing that the bug wasn't 100% consistent. I later learned that people also reported seeing it a lot when fighting mobs near rivers and lakes, such as the turtles in Hillsbrad, crocolisks in Durotar, or water elementals in Eastern Plaguelands.

It was the kind of bug that isn't exactly game-breaking, but still noticeable enough to be encountered regularly and to be quite annoying, and it didn't get fixed for almost a year! Needless to say, we got very excited when Aggrend shared on the Classic era Discord that the dev team had finally deployed a solution to the problem about two weeks ago. He also had this to say about it: "Apologies that this took as long as it did to resolve. Won't bore you with the technical details, but it was a very very unique bug that took a lot of time and testing to untangle and find a safe fix for. I hope we are someday able to write a tech blog about or something as its very interesting if nothing else." So, you know, yay!

Bug fixes are one thing though... what I didn't expect was to get news about the devs planning to actively make a larger change to Classic era at this point. We don't even know what exactly it's going to be yet, but Aggrend also took to the forums two weeks ago to warn players that they are going to make a "large update" to the Vanilla honour system and that this will include a complete honour reset - something that's quite a big deal in a system that requires weeks of furious grinding to work your way up a ladder.

I'll say up front that I have no real horse in this race, as PvP is one aspect of WoW Classic I don't really like. I had fun dabbling in AV but that's at least partially PvE, and any other battlegrounds I tried quickly reminded me of all the things I really don't like about the way PvP works in Classic. That said, I've seen my guildies struggle with the way ranking works on Classic era and have witnessed a fair bit of drama surrounding this system. (Bracket breakers, anyone?)

Basically, your PvP rank determines your access to certain rewards from vendors, and to rank up you need to grind a certain amount of honour for several weeks. You also compete with other players though, and for the highest ranks, only a limited number of spots are available each week. In fact, if the overall population taking part in PvP on your server isn't large enough, the top ranks aren't even available.

This has led to a practice called "pool boosting", where people create an army of low-level alts and kill each other over and over again at the Ratchet or Booty Bay graveyard (for instant reviving and re-killing), just to earn enough honour to count as "PvP participants" and increase the overall PvP pool size. If your server is big enough to have the top ranks available "naturally", this also works to open up additional positions.

Now, we don't really know what exactly Blizzard is planning to do - I've seen some speculate that they could do away with the Vanilla ranking system entirely and replace it with something similar to Burning Crusade's honour grind, but personally I don't think that's likely to happen. Whatever you may think of the state of "progressive" Classic, the dev team has been pretty respectful of keeping things authentic for era's small but dedicated population, so I don't think they'd do anything that drastic.

I do suspect that they'll want to address the issue of pool boosting though - while I'm not sure I would call it cheating exactly, it's definitely a case of degenerate gameplay, with people engaging in a very dull activity that was never intended to be there just to gain full access to the ranking system. So if I had to guess, I'd expect Blizzard to either decouple the ranks from population size somehow, or at least change the ratio so you don't need quite so many characters in the pool for a single person to be allowed to become Grand Marshal/High Warlord.

I'm very curious to see what they've come up with and how it'll be received by the PvP player base. I actually think that a lot of PvPers aren't hugely in love with the way the system works right now and will be quite open to some sort of tweaking as long as Blizzard doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Adventures Around Zul'Farrak

I was on my level 42 shaman, farming turtles on the beach in Tanaris and occasionally casting my fishing line into a pool. I've been feeling like this should be my next character to level, and I kind of want to, but as I mentioned in my year-in-review post, she's resto, dungeon groups have been kind of scarce, and questing as a healer is a bit meh. As a stopgap solution I'd been focusing on skilling up my leatherworking for the last couple of levels instead, which involved killing and skinning roughly a billion turtles.

I was just about to cast my line into a fishing pool again when it disappeared right in front of me, even though there was nobody else around. I turned around and the turtles I had just killed seconds ago were all up and about again. Guild chat piped up with various "what the..." type comments which told me that I wasn't the only one who had just had a bit of a Twilight Zone moment. "Looks like the server's got hiccups," I commented and moved on.

I had just earned my final Wild Leather pattern from the trainer when I noticed a call in LFG: "LF1M for ZF, tank or healer". I felt like I was hearing angelic choirs sing. I hadn't really planned to go to Zul'Farrak as early as level 42, but it was high enough, especially for a healer, and I hadn't healed a dungeon group on my shaman since I transferred her to Classic era. How could I say no to such an opportunity?

I whispered the group leader to say that I was up for healing ZF and got some confusing replies in return, something about how they actually had a healer now but no tanks but maybe we could work something out. When I asked for clarification (was I in or out?), the matter crystallised into whether I was up for a non-traditional dungeon group without a proper tank but two "dps tanks". I said of course I was, because people vastly overestimate the importance of tanks in levelling dungeons anyway. Someone who can survive a few hits is all you need really, and that can be a non-clothie damage dealer too.

I hastily went to pick up a few of the dungeon quests for ZF and made my way to the instance entrance, while people in guild chat kept complaining about odd occurrences such as: "Is it normal to fly through a mountain?" Someone else had issues with the zeppelin disappearing from under their feet and then getting teleported to Thunder Bluff.

Despite being the last one to join, I was the second person to make it to the dungeon. One guy in particular, an undead warrior whom I shall call Barry for the rest of his post (not his actual name), wasn't even on the right continent yet and was apparently trying to take the zeppelin from Undercity to Orgrimmar and failing. He apologised for ending up back in Undercity somehow but said he would try again. A minute later I saw him disconnect in my party frames, and when he reappeared he was dead.

"Oh dear," I said. "Where even am I?" moaned Barry, not unlike someone who just woke up from a night of drinking too heavily. I hovered over his portrait. "Says Tarren Mill here." Apparently his corpse had landed next to the Alliance entrance to AV somehow, and as his body was right among the high-level guards he stood no chance at reviving successfully. After one unsuccessful attempt he just resed at the spirit healer.

Meanwhile the rest of us had made it to the instance, but thanks to the server's bugginess, Barry was seemingly stuck in purgatory Eastern Kingdoms. He asked us somewhat sheepishly whether we wouldn't mind summoning him at the stone, which meant that we had to remind him that this was a feature that didn't come in until Burning Crusade (and we didn't have a warlock in the group).

"I guess I have a warlock alt in Orgrimmar if others have alts there to help summon..." Yes, my warlock dinged 20 recently and now had her first chance to become useful! Fortunately everyone has some sort of alt in Orgrimmar, so a quick relog later, our alter egos were in Org and ready to start operation "Save Barry from the Eastern Kingdoms" by casting Ritual of Summoning on him. Thankfully it worked.

Relieved, we logged back onto our characters in Zul'Farrak and got started on the trash, now that Barry was at least safely on the same continent as us and could make it the rest of the way by himself. Our four-manning was a hilarious mess with mobs running all over and dying very slowly, but we didn't suffer any deaths, so it was all good. Eventually Barry arrived too, and in the manner of warriors in Classic, he charged in with his giant two-hander like a god of war and laid waste to everything, meaning that things went considerably smoother from that point onwards.

The rest of the run was pretty unremarkable. We realised we didn't have a mallet so we didn't kill Ghaz'rilla, and we cleared out the entire graveyard in search of troll tempers but still didn't get enough for everyone. Still, by that point we were quite happy to call it a day and started to make our way out.

Everyone said what a nice group it had been, and somehow the conversation turned to pets, which resulted in Barry educating us about ants, after sharing that he owned three different types of them.

Basically, just another day in Classic era. 😁

Oh, and as for healing the instance on my shaman? Loved it. This was the first time I got to use Chain Heal in a dungeon and it really is as OP and easy-mode as everyone says, but I really liked how chill that made the whole experience. Definitely looking forward to doing more of that.