Adventures in Old Content

I've often said that I consider the speed and ease with which modern WoW makes new content obsolete one of its biggest flaws. Blizzard have actually gotten a little better with this recently - everything added during Dragonflight for example served at least some purpose throughout the entire expansion, meaning that content didn't become entirely obsolete with every new patch.

Still, as a whole, the world of Azeroth is littered with old expansions that tell stories and contain gameplay that people might still find interesting and enjoyable today, but that newer players in particular are simply unlikely to see unless they specifically seek it out, as everyone just gets pushed into the newest expansion and that's that.

That said, while I'm sure that the majority of players largely ignore old content, it's not completely lacking in appeal even after it stopped offering challenges and gear rewards. Transmog farmers and all kinds of collectors in general tend to find plenty of reasons to go back into old expansions to keep adding to their collections.

I think I mentioned before that I've never been a huge fan of transmog farming myself, however my interest in it increased ever since Blizzard lifted the armour type and class restrictions in the run-up to War Within, meaning that if a priest robe drops for your warrior (for example), you can still add its appearance to your collection now, when previously you wouldn't have been able to.

For the most part, I haven't been super consistent in my efforts on that front, but one thing I've remembered to do almost every week is to clear Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on my warrior. They are old raids that I'm very familiar with after Classic and that make me feel quite nostalgic, plus they contain some absolute bangers in terms of outfits that I wanted to collect. Even after months of running both instances every week, there are a couple of pieces that continue to elude me.

I originally did most of this kind of farming on my priest, but switched to my warrior after the former had one of the Thunderfury bindings drop for her (and these are still soulbound, sadly). It then occurred to me that if I did the farming on my warrior instead, I could actually get myself a Thunderfury in retail. Before that, I honestly hadn't even given it any thought in so far as I'd figured it was probably just one of those things from Vanilla that are no longer available in retail, but that was not the case here.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea - no, this post is not about me actually getting said Thunderfury. I've got the Garr binding, but Baron Geddon has so far refused to cough up his part. (He also still owes me an Arcanist Mantle, supposedly his most common gear drop - not in my experience.) However, while you mindlessly run through MC week after week, one-shotting everything in your path, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of related projects.

Because there is of course another legendary that comes from MC: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. That one requires a blacksmith to craft a Sulfuron Hammer first, but my warrior is in fact also a blacksmith, so it was time to level some classic professions!

Mining went pretty quickly for the most part due to how much Blizzard increased the number of node spawns in Cataclysm, plus of course the ability to fly in the old world - also, I don't know if it's intentional or a bug, but you can mine from the back of your flying mount in old content as well now, not just in the newest expansion, which has come in very handy.

As you get closer to 300, things start to slow down a bit, but I had no problem doing laps around old Silithus for hours. However, at skill level 295 I suddenly noticed that I was no longer getting any skill-ups even from Rich Thorium Veins, and I already knew from my MC runs that Dark Iron didn't give any either. That's not how that used to work in Classic! When did they change this and why? And how the heck are you supposed to get to 300 then?

A bit of research revealed that the only way to get from 295 to 300 in Classic Mining was by smelting Dark Iron Ore, which you can still only learn by doing a quest in BRD, so I did that. And to think I'd actually stopped tapping the Dark Iron Ore nodes during my MC runs since I thought they were worthless nowadays! The things you find out...

Anyway, with all the Thorium I had gathered I was able to skill up Blacksmithing without any major issues, and after Ragnaros actually dropped an Eye of Sulfuras one day, I decided it was time to get onto crafting that Sulfuron Hammer. This still requires you to be exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, which is not that hard to achieve in retail, fortunately. At first I thought I'd go and actually do the Cata quests in Searing Gorge, since those are supposed to give pretty good rep, but then I realised that I'd actually accumulated so many of the trade-in items from MC trash that it was easier to just go all the way from neutral to exalted using those.

I bought and learned the recipe and looked at the ingredients. 50 Arcanite Bars? Hmm. I knew that transmuting Arcanite had no cooldown in retail, but it turned out that my Jewelcrafter didn't have quite that many Arcane Crystals saved up in her bank. I started prospecting some Thorium, only to realise after a while that you apparently can't get Arcane Crystals from prospecting. Supposedly this was only possible at one point in early Burning Crusade, which might be where I got the idea from. So I did more mining instead.

Once I'd accumulated enough crystals, I sent them alongside a bunch of Thorium bars to the Worgen druid I'd made back in original MoP, who's a herbalist and alchemist and still had to skill up her professions through all the available expansions at the time. Once I started creating the Arcanite Bars, I was delighted to find that she was actually a transmutation master, something I'd long since forgotten but which meant that I got a lot more bars out of my materials than I'd expected. Good job for making that choice, past me.

With the Arcanite sorted, I got ready to craft the Hammer... just to realise that I was in fact still short something, namely some Blood of the Mountain. I hadn't paid particular attention to that item, just chucking it into the guild bank alongside the other miscellaneous old crafting materials that sometimes dropped from MC trash, so I hadn't realised just how rare it was in comparison to everything else and that I still didn't have ten of them even after months of farming.

I was stunned to find that they were several thousand gold a piece even on the auction house, and while I could've just bought them there, it did strike me as kind of expensive and would've been somewhat unsatisfactory to me. Instead I looked up the exact mob they dropped from and made sure in subsequent MC clears to always kill all the Molten Destroyer trash mobs as well. Again, what a surprise to find that such a random item from Vanilla was actually still rare and valuable!

That whole line of discoveries actually reminded me of a little story from my Cataclysm days as well: At the time, my old guild (which was already in decline) had made me an officer, and at some point a guildie I barely knew asked me whether he could have some old crafting mats from the guild bank, including some Blood of the Mountain. I happily agreed and handed it all out for free, thinking it was just a bunch of worthless junk. Needless to say, the GM was not happy with me when he found out, and I felt like a complete idiot once I realised that at least some of the items I had given away were actually still very valuable. In fact, I was so ashamed that I then spent the next few weeks farming MC on my shaman until I could restock the guild bank with all the Blood of the Mountain I had so carelessly given away.

It feels funny to be back to that now, even if it's happening under completely different circumstances. However, at least to me there's also something comforting in knowing that there are still some things in modern WoW that haven't changed that much since Vanilla.

Musings on Goblins

War Within's latest patch, Undermine(d), is all about goblins. I like it well enough so far, but we'll see how it holds up in the long term. Either way, it's made me think about goblins a lot and how my perception of them has changed over time.

Looking at how goblins were presented in Vanilla, I always pictured them as natives of tropical islands. We originally encounter them in four different settlements, and aside from Everlook, they are all located on or near the beach of a zone with a warm climate. They seemingly like to cook with fish and clams a lot (the original artisan cooking quest is given by a goblin and rewards you with a stack of "Clamlette Surprise", plus there's that recipe for "Undermine Clam Chowder").

There are quite a few mentions of Undermine in the classic quests, but I've got to admit that despite the name, it never would've occurred to me that the place was underground. At the end of the quest chain from Booty Bay that has you collecting hides from increasingly dangerous crocolisks, the quest giver mentions that his creations will be on "the next boat to Undermine", so I always thought it was just an island.

In terms of their nature, vanilla goblins are portrayed as curious, enterprising and uninterested in the faction rivalries between Alliance and Horde. It's not surprising to find a random goblin out in the middle of nowhere, and if he's a vendor, you know he'll have something rare or interesting for sale. Their quests tend to be pretty straightforward fetch/kill quests, which may sound boring, but by the time you encounter most of these you'll be in higher-level territory where quests start to get more sparse and you're just grateful for something to do. Goblin NPCs often come across as a bit single-minded and greedy, but in a "good-natured scoundrel" sort of way, and they still care about other things too. Alchemist Pestlezugg warns both the Horde and the Alliance about the looming threat posed by the silithids for example, and Umi Rumplesnicker makes you travel all over Kalimdor just to play a prank on her friends.

And then Cataclysm came out and everything was different. I went through the blog's archives to find what I had to say about the goblin starter zone when it first came out and only found this post from 2011, in which I stated: "Those zones seem to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion."

I actually never rolled another goblin after that, so I thought I'd use the occasion of patch 11.1 to revisit Kezan and the Lost Isles just to see how I'd feel about them one and a half decades later. Now, I didn't hate the experience at first, but it still felt very weird. I just told you how I perceived the goblins in Vanilla, right? Well, come Cataclysm they are suddenly polluting hyper-capitalists whose every sentence is some sort of anachronistic joke. The very first quest has you going around applying electric shocks to some slaves for fun, and I mean, I don't want to look at this stuff too seriously, but still... yikes.

At least I got to look cute. I say that as someone who's not usually a fan of short races.

I also forgot that you start the experience with a temporary car and a lot of the intended fun seems to be in running people over. I guess Grand Theft Auto 4 must have just come out while they were working on this? Then you play this parody of American football and the implied joke is that you kicking a specially modified ball/bomb up the mountain is what unleashes Deathwing upon the world. It's just one bizarre scenario after another.

(Now, it was extra funny when I hit level 10 and got a call (?) from Ebyssian calling me a hero of the Horde and that I should go to the Dragon Isles while I was just fighting my way through a cave after having been shipwrecked. However, I'm more willing to be forgiving of content that is more than a decade apart not meshing well than of how weird the goblin starter zone was by itself.)

By the Lost Isles things started to feel like a real drag once again. You're locked into this hyper-linear plot that makes no sense and just has you endlessly running back and forth completing one joke task after another. Fetch an egg from a giant mechanical chicken! Blow up a shark with a laser! Mow down hordes of faceless pygmies with a mounted cannon! Wait, I thought we were shipwrecked and struggling to survive a moment ago? Oh look, the volcano is blowing up, get on this plane that we now have for some reason, time to dog-fight with some gnomes!

It's not that I didn't find any of it amusing (it had been so long I'd genuinely forgotten most of the story and I did at least crack a smile at the quest where a goblin captive in a cage barely has time to point out that their captors have keys before you start blowing things up with rockets instead), but it was just nothing but a succession of nonsense and I was definitely reminded of why Cata made me lose all interest in goblins and why I never had the urge to repeat this starter zone, ever.

In the run-up to patch 11.1, I saw multiple dev interviews where they felt the need to emphasise that they wanted the goblins to be more than joke characters in Undermine(d), and I'm glad to say that that's been true so far at least (the story is time-gated so I've only seen the first three chapters or so at this point). The same old stereotypes are still there, but we do see goblins caring about a variety of things and while there are still plenty of humorous NPCs and encounters, it's a lot more coherent and not just a bunch of random nonsense.

And yet, as I open yet another trash can filled with grey items that was marked as "treasure" on my Undermine mini map for some reason, I still can't help but wonder how we ended up here, with goblins speaking in New York accents and living underground among neon-lit filth. I mean, were they always meant to be like this and it just wasn't conveyed that well in the environmental storytelling in Vanilla WoW? Or if not, how and why did we get here? And did literally nobody but me find the way the goblin lore developed in Cata strange?

Fifteen Years of WoW Blogging

I haven't been very good at keeping track of milestones on this blog. Partially I think this is due to the fact that I'd only been posting for a little over three years by the time that I originally decided to step away from WoW. After this the blog lay fallow for a while, even if it never went completely quiet (I'd still find excuses to occasionally comment on BlizzCon announcements and stuff like that), and it seemed odd to celebrate so-and-so many years of blogging when I hadn't really done all that much for a good chunk of those years.

This year I remembered to make a note in advance though... that today, the blog turns fifteen years old. What a crazy ride it's been. I thought it would be fun to look back on those years a bit.

When I started this blog in July 2009, I was 26 years old, working a part-time job in a bakery and still living in Austria with my mother, though I was saving up to relocate to the UK and move in with my then-boyfriend (whom I'd met in WoW, of course) at the end of the year. World of Warcraft was probably close to the peak of its popularity with its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Blogging was quite popular as well, and blogging about WoW was a solid niche.

I'd been reading and leaving comments on other people's WoW blogs for a while (many of which have sadly been lost to time since then), and finally figured that it was time to set up my own space to share my thoughts about the game. My very first post was about heroic Oculus, which was certainly... a choice. In those early days I had a lot of free time and not much else going on in my life, so I posted 12-20 times a month, which seems slightly insane to me now, looking back at it as a 41-year-old with a full time job.

It's hard to summarise all those posts in a few sentences as I wrote about a lot of different subjects. I guess one thing I can say is that my posts were perhaps slightly shorter on average than they are nowadays, and I didn't seem to have as many reservations about just how much "meat" there needed to be to a topic to make it worth its own little post. I wrote about random game mechanics I liked and disliked, good pugs and bad pugs (I spent so much time pugging dungeons back then), raiding with my guild, commented on WoW-related news, and talked about pieces of gear I liked. I basically just really enjoyed the game and almost every aspect of it. I wrote about day one of the dungeon finder, which honestly feels like something of a historical document at this point. At the end of the year, I went through with my plan to move to the UK.

I spent most of 2010 unemployed, and therefore continued to have a lot of time to play and blog, maintaining my cadence of publishing a post pretty much every other day. I continued to write about the same kinds of things, though I think if you look closely, you can see a slow decline in the amount of joy I expressed. There were fewer happy stories, and more rants about inconsiderate pugs and changes I didn't like. Plus my guild wasn't doing so well either. Incidentally, WoW did help me get a job in November though - that post was also the first time I heard of reddit, as someone linked it there and I went to investigate the source of that sudden traffic spike.

At the end of the year, the Cataclysm came, and my boyfriend's physical copy of the expansion got lost in the mail. (If I remember correctly, Amazon refunded him but then the parcel randomly showed up in May the next year or something.) The new content gave me a lot to talk about, something that lasted into 2011.

However, somehow things weren't quite the same. I still posted quite a lot that year, but 12 posts a month went from being my lower limit to being my upper one, with the average being closer to 8. I posted about lacking lustre in February, and nostalgia and doubts in July. When Mists of Pandaria was announced, I was decidedly underwhelmed. I stepped down from raiding and focused on my rated battleground team instead, which brought with it a brief revival of the joy I used to feel when playing. But then Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, and my interest in WoW just petered out. I only made 6 posts in 2012, the last of which was me declaring that I was done with the game and retiring the blog. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

I did indeed not post for more than one and a half years after that, but things changed in my real life during that time. I broke up with my boyfriend (insert some snarky comment about how he was my "WoW boyfriend" so naturally I had dump him when I stopped playing) and started a relationship with the guy who I'm now married to. This included moving house and being unemployed again, which was not so great. As my new love scrambled to find ways to keep me from being too depressed by the circumstances, we ended up realising that he'd also used to play WoW at one point, and we rolled up a new pair of alts at the end of 2013 to check out the changes since both of us had last played. This ended up keeping us busy a few months into 2014, but it wasn't long until we both lost interest in the game again, so I only got a little over a dozen posts out of the whole adventure. In real life, I also got a full time job a couple of months later.

The next revival of the blog came from an unexpected source in mid-2015, as Nostalrius took the private server scene by storm and really made the whole concept of going back to Vanilla go mainstream. I actually never played there myself, as I rolled up on its much smaller competitor Kronos instead. That was super exciting for about a month or ten posts, but then my interest flagged again... though not so much due to lack of appeal this time and more a general lack of time to engage with multiple MMOs at once. At the end of the year I posted about BlizzCon (and shared a video by some medium-sized YouTuber I'd found, called Asmongold) and felt an urge to get back into the saddle on Kronos. I continued to post about my private server adventures at a rate of a couple of posts per month throughout 2016.

By 2017 my enthusiasm for that was starting to dry up again though. I'd left Kronos the previous year since I couldn't stand life at max level on a PvP server, and there always seemed to be something wrong with every other server I tried, so I only made about half a dozen posts throughout most of the year. That November of course was when Blizzard officially announced Classic. I made a few posts related to that in a flurry of initial excitement, and then set in for a long wait until Classic's release, only checking in with the blog occasionally throughout 2018.

The release of Classic in August 2019 is when I feel the blog was revived "properly", as that's when I started posting several times a month again (even if I only made half a dozen posts or less, it was still more and more regular than I'd been for the last seven years before that). I was all in on playing Classic on Horde side for more than six months, followed by me levelling a night elf on an RP server by myself, but I did start to feel the doldrums a bit by spring of 2020 as I didn't have any real friends left to play with.

Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up joining a pug raid in August, and found myself recruited into a great guild shortly afterwards. I also ended up checking out retail again for the first time in more than six years. Hanging out and raiding with my Classic guild - plus an increase in working from home time due to the pandemic - carried me through most of 2021, though things started to go a bit pear-shaped during Classic Burning Crusade as the vibe of the guild changed and Blizzard decided to soft-close the server I was on by enabling free transfers.

I got a few more months of enjoyment out of that expansion in 2022, but my guild eventually folded and when it became clear that there would be no BC era servers, I felt I was done with Classic as it was. I decided to try my luck on Classic era instead and once again fell in with a great guild, though I also kept playing retail on the side and got excited for the Dragonflight expansion.

Throughout 2023, I continued to post about my adventures on Classic era, mixed with posts about retail, which started to gain more ground. Changes at my work meant that raiding with my era guild didn't really work anymore and I had to give up on that, which provided even more of an incentive to focus on retail with my husband and some friends instead. I also tried out Hardcore when it launched, and got excited about Season of Discovery in December.

Sadly, that excitement didn't carry over into 2024 for more than two months, so since then it's mostly been retail with the occasional dip into one of the Classic modes sprinkled in here and there. We'll see where things go from here, but it's certainly been one hell of a journey.

Draenei Heritage

It tickles me that every post I made on this blog in May has been about a different version or mode of World of Warcraft. First I talked about Classic Cataclysm, then Hardcore, then the upcoming War Within, then Classic era, and finally Pandaria Remix. The only thing missing at this point is something about what's currently going on in regular Dragonflight, so why not do that?

I wrote a little about what I thought of various heritage quest lines last year and always meant to continue doing more of them, but other things ended up distracting me and caused that particular project to fall off my radar again for a bit. However, the most recent patch added heritage quest lines for both Draenei and trolls, two races I associate with characters that are particularly dear to me, so I figured it was a great opportunity to have another go at this. I decided to start with the Draenei.

My first ever Draenei lives on the same server as my original priest and has gathered a similar amount of dust over the years. I originally created her back when Burning Crusade came out, and levelled her with a group of friends I'd made early in the game and who also rolled new Draenei alts for the expansion. (I also met them in real life at one point... those were different times. I was always a bit sad that we didn't really manage to stay in touch after that.)

I remember we jokingly referred to our little posse as "The Blue Man Group". One person quickly lost interest in that particular alt, but the rest of us levelled all the way to the cap together from what I remember, even if that meant doing dungeons with a group of four and without a dedicated healer. Our pally tank mostly spent a lot of time healing himself... For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of us struggling with the last boss in Uldaman due to this but we eventually figured out a way to beat him. (This was before any of us knew about the trick with pulling him into the room upstairs to make add management easier.)

Anyway... even after the group drifted apart, I kept levelling my little blue mage through the following expansions as I quite enjoyed playing her. Though I must have given up in Cataclysm as she was level 30 post-level squish, which would have been something like... 83 in the old times? Which would mean that she saw some play time in Cata, but not enough to get to the cap.

I accepted the gear upgrade at the character selection screen and chose to stay arcane spec, though I was surprised to be presented with this as I thought she'd been frost or fire last I played. Since I'd opted not to clear my quest log, I had a breadcrumb to talk to the guy in the Cataclysm portal circle, which I thought was the introduction to Deepholm, but when I handed it in, there was no follow-up. I decided to go there anyway, first questing in the "regular" version of the world and eventually switching to Chromie Time when things started to go green.

Finishing Deepholm felt like it didn't take all that much time, though it also struck me that Cataclysm really was kind of a low point for the game's questing, regardless of whether you prefer Vanilla's more "worldly" approach to questing or the more modern storylines. By Cata they had streamlined the hell out of the process so there was no exploring or finding quest hubs involved at all anymore, but at the same time the voice acting and cut scenes were still pretty sparse, so you didn't exactly get a "cinematic" experience either... just a looong chain of formulaic quests (always in sets of threes, usually one kill quest, one collect quest, and one that required you to talk to someone, use an item or kill a boss), many of which gated access to things like portals or quartermasters back in the day and required doing on every character.

Anyway, after completing the zone storyline I was still only level 45, so I started doing Therazane dailies for nostalgia's sake, until it hit me that levelling up without collecting any more gear upgrades was probably not a good idea. On returning to Stormwind I found intro quests for Hyjal and Vashj'ir waiting for me, which confused me because surely I must've done at least one of those back in the day? Either way I opted for a bit of questing in Mount Hyjal until I hit level 50, though I didn't get many gear rewards there either.

I just mention this as I've often expressed annoyance with the way Blizzard's scaling really affects your character's performance if your gear can't keep up with your levels, and by the time I hit 50 I reckon my gear was about 40 item levels lower than it should've been once again. Combined with the fact that I found arcane spec confusing and didn't really know what I was doing, this didn't make for the best experience with the combat portions of the heritage quest line.

For example there was one part where I was suddenly put in combat with two mobs and managed to die... on top of a ledge. I spent a couple of minutes trying to get back to my body until I gave up and just took the spirit res, just to be reminded that the debuff you get from that in retail only lasts a minute nowadays anyway. And the final fight with the add waves followed by a boss was quite a pain too. I actually thought it was kind of funny that I complained in the context of the night elf heritage quest line that it felt kind of boring to have three powerful NPC escorts, and as if someone from Blizzard read that, the NPCs you get to help you out in the Draenei scenario do almost nothing and might as well not be there in terms of how helpful they are in combat.

Anyway, my 100th rant about awkward world scaling aside... this quest chain was really good. It starts a little slow, and I was once again reminded that I've become too good at recognising certain voice actors as I immediately spotted Darin De Paul and Max Mittleman again, but things quickly became more interesting.

Because it was such an enjoyable quest line, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll say that it was interesting that the Draenei quest chain used the same framing device as the orc one, that of a people reviving an old celebration to look towards a better future... though the Draenei's problems are of course a bit different from those of the orcs.

We got to revisit several important Draenei locations, including the Exodar, Auchindoun and Bloodmyst Isle, a lot of known Draenei NPCs returned, and there were some nice touches with the dialogue. For example the Soultender in Auchindoun noted that he could sense that I had "already partaken of our ritual to see the dead", which I think was a callback to that one Burning Crusade quest line which I clearly must have done back in the day. I'm told there are also some dialogue variations for characters that have one of the new red skin customisations. I didn't look up anything until after I'd finished the quest line myself, but I wasn't surprised to find that reddit absolutely loved this one as well.

The ending definitely tugged at my heart strings... though I wonder if anything will ever come of the Draenei's plans to build a new city for themselves in game. Either way, it was a great piece of content that really struck the right tone and did a lot of world building.

Musings on Classic Cataclysm

I just wanted to write down a few more thoughts on Classic Cataclysm. While I'm not planning to play it, I guess now is the time to have opinions on it. I was particularly inspired by Wilhelm's recent post on the subject, in which he explains how he kind of came around to looking forward to Classic Cata, and how he feels he probably didn't give the expansion an entirely fair shake back in the day due to being off to a bad start for a number of reasons.

As for me, I'm kind of surprised how charitable I feel towards Cata (and therefore also its Classic version) in hindsight, especially compared to Wrath of the Lich King. At first glance, this simply doesn't make sense, because as far as I can tell from my old blog posts on here, I actually got more enjoyment out of Wrath than out of Cata, not to mention that Cata was when I originally gave up on WoW.

I think the difference is that while Cata had plenty of disappointments in store for me, Wrath - while more fun in some places - actively annoyed me in others, and there's a big difference in sentiment between "well, they tried but it was kind of disappointing" and "are they actively trying to piss me off or what". It struck me at one point that many of the things that felt bad about Cata were not really the fault of any of Cata's new features, but simply the result of changes originally made in Wrath of the Lich King (such as the addition of the dungeon finder or the push towards only caring about the latest raid tier).

I guess this explains why I had rather strong feelings about not wanting to play Wrath Classic when it came out, while Cata evokes more of a "probably not, but maybe?" I do remember quite liking some things about Cata back in the day.

Then again, looking back at that list also makes it kind of clear that there isn't really any reason for me to go back for those features. Rated battlegrounds and endgame as it was at Cata's release were kind of heavily dependent on being in a guild, something I no longer have in progressive Classic, plus they were also the kind of things that while I enjoyed them at the time, I'm not sure I'd want to go back and do them all over again. The rated battlegrounds in particular ultimately ended like all my organised PvP ventures, with me stepping down since my lack of skill was just holding the rest of the team back. As for the dungeons and raids... they were pretty fun at launch from what I remember, but I'm not sure they were fun enough for me to want to pick things up again and level a character through Northrend and the 80-85 Cata zones (which I remember being very tedious to repeat).

As for the other three items on the list (transmog, the revamped levelling zones and archaeology), those are all things that I can do just as well if not better in retail. Archaeology in specific is vastly improved in retail compared to how it was at Cataclysm launch. I remember when every dig site only contained a few digs before it was exhausted, each dig only gave a tiny number of fragments, and you only got skill-ups from surveying up to skill level 75 or so (out of... 515 I think?), at which point your only way of making any further progress was through combines. That whole process is so much more well-balanced and fun in retail now, so why would I want to play an all-around worse version of it?

I guess the main draw of Cata Classic is going to be for people who've been having a good time in Wrath with guildies and friends, because Cata will bring more things to do in a similar vein and there's no reason not to continue. In that scenario there's really no reason to hate on Cata just for the sake of it. However, it is yet another step further away from original Classic, so I also can't blame anyone for deciding that this is the point to jump off the train.

Timewalking to an Unexpected Achievement

I only talked about timewalking on this blog once before, a little over a year ago. As I noted then, it's a feature I quite like, as it's one of Blizzard's (generally limited) efforts to let people enjoy old content as part of their normal gameplay. Sure, a group rushing through a heroic in ten minutes while AoEing everything along the way is not necessarily anything like the way that dungeon was experienced when it first came out, but it's still better than running it solo while over-levelled and just one-shotting everything. At least you get to see mechanics sometimes.

Last week was Cataclysm Timewalking, and there was a quest to run five of them for a gear reward box, so our little retail-playing friend group signed up for a full tour. It went well and I was actually reminded of how much I enjoyed the Cata dungeons at launch, so I decided to do the run-five-timewalking-dungeons quest on my demon hunter as well.

I've kind of reached the point where I'm reasonably confident queueing up to pug certain content in retail. I still think that the way people rush through dungeons is less than ideal, and makes for a terrible new player experience in particular as it means newbies just spend their time racing after the more experienced players without having the slightest clue about what's actually going on (thematically or mechanically). However, if you know the content you're queueing up for and mentally prepare yourself for the experience, it's generally tolerable.

One of the dungeons my demon hunter got thrown into was Lost City of the Tol'vir. The group rushed through AoEing everything as you'd expect, while I reminisced about how deadly many of those pulls used to be. However, when we killed the last boss, Siamat, something unexpected happened: I saw the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement pop up, as well as a notification that I'd just earned the Volcanic Stone Drake mount.

I was briefly baffled but didn't have time to think about it too much, as I had to leap off the boss's terrace to quickly hand in the dungeon quest I'd picked up at the entrance (what with it being my demon hunter's first time there), and the rest of the group was already hitting the re-queue button.

It was only after completing my five runs that I could really sit down and take in what had happened. WoW's achievement system is a bit confusing with the way it mixes character-specific and account-wide achievements in some situations but not others, and my first thought had been that surely I just got some sort of character-specific achievement on my demon hunter that I'd already earned on another character. I even logged into my old troll priest, the original Shintar, to check her achievement log for comparison.

What I found though was that it was indeed true that it was my demon hunter who had earned me the Volcanic Stone Drake. Looking back at the various achievement dates, it looks like I made a bit of a push for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero in early 2011 and did in fact get all the achievements bar one: Headed South. I don't know why I didn't get that one in specific - I can only guess that it must've been challenging in some way, even if many of the Wowhead comments claim that it's super easy and barely an inconvenience. And then I never went back to try again even though I continued to play Cataclysm for another year after that.

Either way, getting that last achievement purely by accident twelve years later, in a timewalking pug that was just steamrolling the content, created a very brief flash of a connection to past me (who actually cared about this stuff) and made me feel very, very odd.

My Experience on a US Server

I mentioned as a side note in a post from January that I had somehow managed to create a free trial account for the US servers by accident. Despite the fact that I never even logged into it, my Battle.net launcher annoyingly keeps defaulting to that account whenever I want to play retail, which is a bit of a nuisance.

The other day I had a bit of a discussion in Redbeard's comments about Chromie Time and how it works, and it made me want to test some things out for myself, specifically in regards to the new player experience. Of course, you can't very well simulate being a new player on an account that's been active for over a decade... which was when I suddenly remembered my empty US trial account. At last, a purpose for it!

I don't really have all the answers to my questions yet, so I won't  talk about Chromie Time or related matters in this post, but just the experience of rolling up new characters on a US retail server was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it.

I started by creating a night elf druid called Shintar on Ysera - I can't believe that nobody else tried to grab that name over there in over a decade, but it was certainly convenient for me! As expected, I didn't have a choice of starting zone but was put into Exile's Reach by default. Classes that have their own starting zones and start at a slightly higher level, such as death knight and demon hunter, were greyed out with a note that they required level ten to unlock.

When my druid loaded onto the Alliance ship where the Exile's Reach experience starts off, I was confused to find another druid standing there, already up to level six, and spamming a single spell over and over. I was initially a bit mystified as to what spell they were even casting... after all, there were no enemies there! Only after a few minutes did I realise that it was Moonfire and hitting the ship's target dummies... which are killable and award XP. The character was just tab-targeting and hitting Moonfire so fast and consistently that I can only guess that it must have been botted. People do the strangest things.

Anyway, aside from that, the whole thing wasn't very remarkable. As I said in my original post about Exile's Reach, it's a zone that's perfectly serviceable but extremely generic. The only thing that stood out to me was that as a druid, the brief class quest you get about halfway through the zone taught me travel form at level six... but I guess due to homogenisation no class is allowed to go faster than another at that level, so using it actually made me go no faster than night elf or cat form. I could see that being somewhat confusing to genuinely new players...

I also noticed that I was automatically put into a channel specific to new players where people called "guides" would answer questions. I vaguely recall hearing about that system before but I'd honestly forgotten it existed and still don't really know anything about it beyond what I saw. People mostly seemed to use the channel to ask (to me) uninteresting questions like "Which class should I play?" or "How do I link an item in chat?".

As soon as I hit level ten, I logged out and went back to the character creator. All classes were unlocked now, and I was able to choose any starting zone, so I rolled up a human paladin and started her off in Elwynn Forest for comparison purposes.

I'd forgotten what a weird number Cataclysm did on Elwynn, as it actually kept a lot of the vanilla quests more or less intact, but what changes Blizzard did make feel very jarring for old-timers, such as Princess being right next to the quest giver who wants her killed and Goldtooth chilling in a camp outside the Fargodeep Mine instead of inside of it. The changes to Northshire also feel pretty rubbish, what with the oh so threatening "invasion" by lots of neutral mobs. I did note though that Blizzard appeared to have removed the basic "use your abilities on the target dummy" quest I remember appearing after Cata - probably because truly new players for whom this sort of guidance would make some sense all get funnelled into Exile's Reach anyway.

Anyway, I ran about hunting kobolds, murlocs and what not, and it was very noticeable how much less streamlined and efficient this was than the Exile's Reach experience. It's kind of funny to me that I found myself in a world where the Cataclysm content is the one that feels outdated, considering I still always think of the Cataclysm revamp of the old world as the "new" content (compared to how things were in Vanilla).

However, what surprised me was how... comforting it all felt. Redbeard made a post yesterday about briefly logging into retail and going to Goldshire, where he was immediately put off by the crazy mounts. The timing on that was funny to me because my feeling about visiting Goldshire in retail was almost the opposite in this instance. Were there crazy mounts? Probably; I didn't really notice. What I did notice was that there were people out in the town square, chatting, showing off and goofing around, which felt heart-warmingly familiar. There was also a random corpse on the ground, something that represents "typical old-school Goldshire" to me like nothing else.

While I was out questing in Elwynn, local defense went off about the Horde attacking the inn and I had flashbacks to my very first night playing WoW back in 2006, where that exact same thing happened as well.

Another fun moment was when I tore through the murloc village north of the Eastvale Logging Camp - in terms of button presses, retail is of course much more engaging than Vanilla/Classic and characters get more powerful early on, so I was tearing through those murlocs like nobody's business, AoEing and healing myself, which is very unlike the old days... but at one point it did almost seem like I had bitten off more than I could chew, so I was very grateful when a hunter and mage decided to add some damage of their own and probably saved my butt.

I logged into my BC Classic server on EU for comparison and rode down to Goldshire there. All I saw was two levellers passing through, one of whom instantly logged out the moment he entered the inn. People in BC Classic don't "hang out" in Goldshire anymore in my experience. You log on to do the content you want to do and then you log off again. Anecdotal for sure, but food for thought nonetheless.

My Raiding History, Part 4: Cataclysm & SWTOR

As explained in my last post, my guild didn't have the best start into Cataclysm, what with an enforced downsizing to ten-man due to a mass exodus of core players. That said, the new expansion started off pretty well from my point of view despite of that.

The old world revamp provided a great incentive to level new alts, and the new, harder dungeons actually gave people a reason to form guild groups again instead of simply hitting the dungeon finder queue button as soon as they logged in. The first tier of raiding was really good as well, consisting of no less than three different raid instances and offering up what I considered a decent challenge. (I seem to remember Blizzard saying later on that Cataclysm's normal raids were tuned close to what later became heroic mode - there was no real "entry level" at the time.) I also got into rated battlegrounds and really came to love them.

That said, all was not well. There was a certain malaise in the air around the expansion, with everyone citing different reasons for their discontent. Looking back at this blog, I was surprised to find just how well I articulated my annoyance with Blizzard's forced obsolescence model as early as February 2011. It got worse when they decided by the end of June that everyone should be done with tier eleven now and swung the nerf bat hard. Re-reading that last post, it sounds a lot less negative than I remember feeling at the time, but even so I got people in the comments telling me that my guild was just bad if we hadn't managed to clear the tier within six months and that it was time to move on. I remember finding that whole attitude - both from Blizzard and other players - incredibly patronising and annoying.

Firelands was another decent raid tier... but somehow the passion wasn't there for me anymore. I think I got closest to figuring out what was wrong in this post when I concluded that I was still having fun, but couldn't help but feel that based on past experiences, it should be possible to have way more fun than I was having. In hindsight I think it was too many small factors finally coming together: holy priests not being in a great place performance-wise, little useful loot for my class/spec in Firelands, missing some of the camaraderie I used to have with guildies that left (I liked most of the ones that remained a lot as well, but it just wasn't the same with the much smaller numbers), and feeling beat down by Blizzard's constant push to finish new content on their schedule instead of on my own. In September that year, I decided to call it quits on raiding.

I continued to play WoW for a few more months however, with my rated battleground team more or less taking the place that raiding used to occupy in my evenings. At the end of November Blizzard released Dragon Soul, the last raid of Cataclysm, right alongside the new raid finder feature, which I tried and rated kind of entertaining in an odd way but I also concluded that it had little to do with raiding in the traditional sense. The most obvious expression of this was when I saw Deathwing die and felt nothing.

In December, Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, the first new MMO to release since I'd started playing WoW that interested me enough to try it. Like with Warcraft back in the day, I didn't get into the game with the intention to raid (though unlike back then, I did know what raids were this time around and had a general idea of what I was getting into), but the small, friendly guild that included some friends that had formerly been in my WoW guild too (before they stopped playing) soon had me hyped, and when I actually joined my first raid soon afterwards, I had an absolute blast.

In fact, I was loving the endgame in general, despite of the game's general focus on alt play. Not just that - I loved it so much that when my friendly social guild fell apart a few months later, I actually set out to find a new home just so that I would be able to continue to raid, and found it in Twin Suns Squadron - where I eventually ended up meeting my husband, who actually runs the guild these days, and where we are still raiding eight years later.

Both the guild and the game have undergone a lot of changes throughout those years (with the biggest one probably being the introduction of level sync in 2015, which made all raids valid endgame content, even the oldest ones), but in a way it's felt much more stable than anything I ever had in WoW. I think in a way that has served to crystallise just what it is that still attracts me to raiding after all these years.

Throughout my raiding career in WoW, I often found myself wondering just what it was that really mattered to me. When Blizzard seemingly got raid difficulty "wrong" it frustrated me at times, but did that mean that I was looking for a different challenge level than they were providing? Lack of useful gear drops for my class/spec annoyed me, but did that mean that I was only in it for the gear?

I think SWTOR has taught me that above all else, I raid for the social aspect. I guess it should have been a hint that my best times raiding in WoW were when my guild was also at its strongest and most unified. Concerns about things like progression and loot distracted me, but I think ultimately even those things were only really an issue for me in so far as they affected the guild's social cohesion.

SWTOR has little to offer to anyone looking for constant novelty when it comes to raiding, as they only release a new operation once every couple of years at the current rate. Challenge levels are (relatively) consistent across the board (though Bioware has been pushing the envelope somewhat with more recent releases) and are limited by the game not supporting add-ons, so that no fight can throw more at you than a human brain can easily process. For several years now, raids haven't even been the best place to get gear anymore either, just one more supplementary source of it.

So while you do get people that look for novelty, challenge or gear from raiding in SWTOR, they tend to fade in and out relatively quickly as it doesn't take long to satisfy their particular itch and then there is nothing left for them. The ones who stick with it are those that just enjoy the experience of hanging out and cracking stupid jokes with a group of friends on a Sunday evening, and don't necessarily mind that the boss fight they're wiping on has been in the game for seven years already. After all, if it ever gets a bit too much, we can always go and fight something else for a few weeks, what with all the raids being valid endgame.

It's been an interesting journey to say the least.

Update: There's a part 5 now!

No Nostalgia for Blizzard

I've been thinking about WoW again lately. When you read as many MMO blogs and news sites as I do, it's hard not to stay at least vaguely up to date with what's going on in the World of Warcraft at any given time.

Back when Warlords of Draenor was announced, I thought that this might be the expansion that might get me back into WoW, at least for a little while. In practice I ended up checking out MoP for a couple of months last year but still haven't bought WoD to this day. And if I'm being honest, I don't think I will any time soon.

Everything I read about it just sounds thoroughly underwhelming to me. I'm not against log-in rewards, but the way Blizzard implemented them with garrisons just sounds horrible. (What could be more against the spirit of the original World of Warcraft than sitting in a small base all day?) Professions, which I used to love, have finally been relegated to the realm of complete pointlessness. And while I've heard that the quests are supposed to be quite good, a couple of decent quests are just not enough for me to want to invest the time and money (full box price + sub) in what I know is only going to be a secondary MMO for me at this point.

I can't even say that I care very much about the story anymore. I don't know if Blizzard's storytelling genuinely got worse over time or not, but fact of the matter is that it all broke down for me in Cataclysm. Up until then I had always known what was going on around me in terms of lore, because I read all the quest text and actually listened to NPC dialogue. But then they started confining world-changing events to their novels and comics and I just didn't know what was going on anymore. Important NPCs seemed to have full personality transplants from one patch to the next; it was thoroughly confusing. Sure, I could look up summaries of what supposedly happened on YouTube, but that's hardly the same.

Cataclysm also killed my ability to connect to WoW via nostalgia. I know that you can never go back and truly relive those early days, but I think that I would absolutely be willing to pay Blizzard to be able to take the occasional trip down memory lane in the old newbie zones, even today. Thanks to Cataclysm's old world revamp however, I can't even do that anymore. The new questing experience isn't bad, and it made it fun to level a couple of alts purely for the novelty value of seeing the new storylines, but that experience was fairly short-lived. Now I just miss the dusty canyons of Thousand Needles and the lush meadows of Southshore.

It's really kind of sad because for all the flak that Cataclysm got for things like dungeon difficulty and lack of endgame content at launch, I never thought that it was a bad expansion. I had some good times there: fighting some genuinely challenging bosses, mucking about on Darkmoon Island and doing rated PvP. But looking at it now, I think the destruction of the world I used to love (that Cataclysm sold as a feature no less) severed my ties to Blizzard more thoroughly than anything else.

Of course, this being the year 2015, there are ways to get your WoW nostalgia fix even if Blizzard doesn't want to provide it...

To be continued...?

World of Warcraft Cinematic Reactions Over Time

Vanilla WoW



Cinematic message: This is Azeroth, a world full of varied locations and fantastic races who get into badass-looking fights with each other.

My Reaction: This looks amazing, can I be a shape-shifting elf lady too?

Burning Crusade



Cinematic message: Here are some new races you can play. Don't worry though, the old ones are still badass too. Watch a mage sheep a guy and a warlock incinerate murlocs. Hilarious! Also, something about entering the realm of a guy who says that we're not prepared for him.

My Reaction: I have no idea who that demon guy is, but still: looking great! Bring on those new races!

Wrath of the Lich King



Cinematic message: Watch this guy who looks like Sauron raise a skeletal dragon from the ice in a faraway frozen land. He also has a zombie army. The narration implies that he was once a good guy and that there's something like dramatic irony at work.

My Reaction: Well, I'm not sure what this has to do with me, but I guess someone's got to fight that zombie army.

Cataclysm



Cinematic message: Watch a giant, angry dragon wreck the world.

My Reaction: Oi, I was still using that! Quick, let's get him while he's still in Stormwind!

(I wish.)

Mists of Pandaria



Cinematic message: An orc and a human fight each other in a foreign jungle, which seems quite foolish considering that they are shipwrecked with nothing but the clothes on their body. A panda appears and kicks their butts in a humorous fashion.

My Reaction: So, are pandas the bad guys? And will this usher in a new age of peace between the Horde and Alliance as they unite to fight a common foe?

Warlords of Draenor



Cinematic message: Some orc in the past is about to do something very unwise by drinking green goo. But then things don't go as expected and the orcs beat up the big demon and the clearly evil guys.

My Reaction: Go orcs, I guess? Whose side are we on anyway?

The bottom line is, for an MMO trailer to inspire me, it has to make me feel like I want to be part of the pictured world. I can kind of understand why Blizzard moved away from the "look at random characters engage in cool fight scenes" style of the first two trailers, as it probably would have been hard to keep making them that way without things getting repetitive and boring after a while. But especially the trailers for the last two expansions have felt increasingly directionless to me. Why should I be invested in this as a player? This isn't advertising for a movie, where I'll be happy to watch someone else's story play out for two hours. I need to know what this expansion means for me.

Sure, some lore fans will go nuts over seeing Grom again, and seeing him refuse the demon blood and survive. But I reckon that for a lot of people, this is just going to be a bunch of orcs doing stuff that doesn't really relate to anything.

Cruising Through Cata

Up until level eighty, our levelling experience was mostly a pleasant nostalgia trip, even if there were some disappointments along the way. Cataclysm was going to be a slightly different matter however, as it was the expansion that originally led to both of us quitting the game.

"Which zone(s) are we going to do?" I asked. "Not that we have much of a choice... but I'm still feeling burnt out on pretty much all of them. With the way Cata questing worked, you had to do at least part of each zone to unlock all the portals, reputations etc., and with all the alts I had, I must have done most of them half a dozen times in total."

"Hey, I only did them once each," replied my pet tank, "and I hated them the first time."

We eventually agreed on doing Mount Hyjal in full, plus whatever intros we needed to do to unlock at least the portals to the other four zones, which fortunately wasn't too much. Mount Hyjal wasn't too painful either - though the loot we got from completing the whole thing certainly helped. All throughout Outland and Northrend we had struggled to keep our gear up to date, due to a mix of weird and now outdated gear itemisation and the devs seemingly "forgetting" about certain classes and specs when it came to quest rewards and dungeon drops. After a full tour of Mount Hyjal on the other hand I finally had a level-appropriate piece of gear for both of my specs in every single slot for the first time in a long time.

Once we'd acquired a few quest rewards to boost our stats, we set out to two-man Blackrock Caverns. It went very smoothly once again, more so than I expected... but it also felt quite slow. After eighty levels of all of our abilities being way overpowered for their purpose (it was telling when we duelled in Northrend once and my tanking friend literally one-shot me with a Shield Slam), health pools were finally starting to scale and it took a while to chew through things with no dps. So we decided to brave the dungeon finder for the first time since Sunken Temple to speed things up. (The promise of justice points for doing a random helped as well.)

It went reasonably well and we ended up running randoms for a large chunk of our Cata levelling stretch. We met two bad apples in total, a mage and a death knight who both had a tendency to charge ahead and make suicidal pulls when people weren't ready, but everyone else seemed nice enough, and if not chatty, then at least co-operative. In Vortex Pinnacle pet tank had to unexpectedly go AFK at one point, and when I said in chat not to worry because our tank would be back soon, the dps immediately asked whether he was my pet tank, which made me laugh. In Halls of Origination we ended up with a group where pretty much everyone said that they'd only just come back to the game recently and were still traumatised by Cata heroics.

In the end, the five levels flew by even more quickly than either of the previous expansions, and while we were grateful in a way, it also made keeping our professions up to date even more of a pain than usual, with seventy-five skill points crammed into only five levels. We hit eighty-five while doing the intro to Twilight Highlands, which led to the rather odd combination of us getting the Pandaria intro cut scene about Anduin having gone missing at the same time as we were escorting him around Stormwind. I also thought I'd briefly jump into Tol Barad for nostalgia's sake and was booted off the PvP island for being "too low level". What the hell? I take it they raised it to level ninety then or something? Rather jarring to be excluded from that now when it used to be level eighty-five content.

Anyway, so much for Cata. Expect first impressions of Pandaria soon!

Wholesome Levelling

Levelling continues to go well for our little worgen duo and they are almost ready to go to Outland. In a way I'm almost surprised by how well we are doing. We started out with nothing, on a server where we'd never played before... and while I had quite a blast levelling alts back in Cata, the old world revamp hasn't been without its issues. I had alts that outlevelled whatever content I was doing way too quickly, and where seeing everything go grey just sapped my motivation to continue. Trying to level professions as you go turned into a veritable nightmare - I'll never forget the human hunter I had who spent more time farming grey mobs for leather than actually doing quests, until I eventually abandoned her in frustration. More than one attempt at levelling as a duo died in the early levels when one character was a miner or herbalist while the other one wasn't, as the experience gains from gathering made it bloody impossible to comfortably stay around the same level.

We managed to avoid the latter this time around by having me go herbalist and my pet warrior going miner, but even that hasn't been completely without its issues, as I keep shooting ahead ever so slightly and had to train myself to ignore a vast majority of nodes to avoid making things even worse. If there's any rhyme or reason to how much experience you get from gathering from any given node, it's certainly not apparent to me. Within the same zone I would run into one "green" (slight chance to skill up) herb that gave me fifty XP per pick, and another one that gave me five hundred. Why? Who knows, it's not as if the latter were particularly rare or anything. Meanwhile the ores seemed to almost always be of the (roughly) fifty XP variety, which is why we got out of sync quite frequently.

On the plus side, we never really outlevelled our regular quests too badly, despite of the gathering experience, running every dungeon except the Deadmines at least once and doing the cooking and fishing dailies every day. We were always ahead of the levelling curve, coming into each new zone about five levels late, but by that point experience gains had generally dropped off to such a low level (without stopping completely) that we could comfortably continue completing quests without having them turn grey on us (with the possible exception of the first couple of zones we did - it's very hard to make it through all of Darkshore's over ninety quests without outlevelling any of them for example).

Due to us almost always working on green difficulty content, our levelling speed has been relatively sedate and keeping our professions up to scratch hasn't been too bad either. There are massive amounts of mining and herbalism nodes in the revamped old world, so our alchemy and blacksmithing haven't really been starved for materials (though Goldthorn is still hard to come by for how much of it you need to level up).

The secondary professions have been a bit trickier. For example you move through the "cloth tiers" quite quickly at first, and then end up getting nothing but Mageweave for twenty levels or so (or at least that's what it felt like), which makes keeping up with first aid a bit awkward. I expect that we'll be okay though, assuming that they haven't removed the Runecloth drops from early Outland or anything. Cooking is mostly fine as long as you make sure to save any and all meat drops you come across for later, as you'll often come across a particular kind of meat at the wrong level in respect to your cooking. Keeping up with your fishing also helps immensely of course.

Speaking of fishing, I was very surprised to see that you don't actually need a fishing pole to fish anymore now... and my first gut reaction was to be annoyed at yet another instance of unnecessary simplification of the game, but I soon found that I actually quite like this change. The "stick with a piece of string attached" graphical effect is quite cute, and it's nice not to have to worry about changing your equipment if you're only just stopping at a pool in passing. The fishing hat, pole and lures can still come out if I actually sit down at a dock to fish "properly" for ten minutes or longer.

Archaeology is the one profession I haven't been able to keep up with, as much as I would have liked to. My pet battling has also fallen behind, despite of my initial enthusiasm for it. I believe that neither would be impossible to keep levelled as you go along, but you'd have to focus heavily on travelling around to dig/challenge random pets and neglect other parts of the game in the process. I suppose Blizzard designed these features more as something to do at endgame than as an alternate way of levelling, but I suppose it's good that the option is there for those who want to be really hardcore about it.

We've only really been focused on completing all the quests in each zone we decided to tackle (we went for the Darkshore -> Ashenvale -> Stonetalon -> Desolace -> Feralas -> Thousand Needles -> Tanaris -> Un'Goro path) and doing all the dungeons. After my last post we only did Uldaman, Scholomance and Stratholme via the dungeon finder and had no more issues with unpleasant people in those runs. I had forgotten that Scholomance was also redone for Mists of Pandaria and was therefore a bit confused while trying to keep up with the new story in the usual dungeon finder rush, but it was just about bearable. Dire Maul, Razorfen Downs and Zul'Farrak we decided to tackle with just the two of us and had no issues with any of them, except for dying a few times to the guard captain in Dire Maul North, as his combination of fear and summoning of hard-hitting adds was still pretty painful at the level we went in.

Currently we're planning on finishing up our business in the old world with a quick dungeon finder run of Sunken Temple and an extended tour of Blackrock Mountain between just the two of us. Then it's off to the Dark Portal to see how the Outlands will treat us. As much as I loved the Burning Crusade, I remember the transition from Cata questing to Outland being pretty jarring the last few times I tried to level an alt.

My five favourite things about Cataclysm

We probably still have quite a few months of Cataclysm left before the next expansion hits, but still, many players already have their eyes firmly on Mists of Pandaria by this point. ("Mists will fix it!") I've been reflecting a bit on what I did enjoy about the current expansion - while I still think that it's the weakest of the three released so far, it also brought some things to the table that I had a lot of fun with. So without further ado, my top five Cataclysm game additions:

1. Rated Battlegrounds

No surprise here, this is basically the only reason I've remained subbed over the last couple of months. I still think it's extremely strange that Blizzard decided to introduce rated battlegrounds when they did, considering that they are moving the PvE game further and further away from anything to do with preformed groups. And here they come and introduce a PvP feature (and work hard to push players towards it via rewards) that requires you to put together a proper team of ten people or more the old-fashioned way? It's strange.

Nonetheless, I'm grateful because I've really enjoyed having a reason to PvP with friends and come up against a good challenge week after week.

2. Transmogrification

I've never been one to collect lots of different outfits in WoW, but I did care about the way my character looked, especially whenever I found myself "forced" to wear a particularly ridiculous or hideous outfit. Fortunately for me, priest sets have had a reputation for being very pretty in the past, but this expansion I felt that the tier set designers went a bit overboard with the crazy for pretty much every class, and in many cases the results were simply extremely ugly in my opinion. Though to be honest, as a troll priest I often felt that even the nicer looking sets didn't really look quite right on a troll. I'm no worshipper of the light, I should look more like the bosses in Zul'Gurub or Zul'Aman!

Well, now I finally can, and it's been most satisfying. In addition, transmogrification has also turned out to be something that appeals to my inner socialiser, which actually surprised me a little bit. Since its introduction I'm paying attention to random strangers in the city again, and I've struck up more than one conversation starting with: "Nice transmog you got there..."

3. The revamped levelling game

This one might be a bit controversial, as a lot of bloggers at least have ended up absolutely hating the revamped old world as far as I'm aware. And I agree that a lot of things did go wrong with the 1-60 revamp: The levelling speed feels out of whack, nothing poses any kind of threat after level ten, the quest chains are very linear, and the story is way too focused on the current expansion, which means that story-wise, a lot of 1-60 will already be obsolete again once Mists of Pandaria comes out.

However, despite of all those flaws, I really got a lot of enjoyment out of the Shattering. I had fun discovering what had changed and what hadn't, and I brushed the mothballs off low-level alts that I hadn't even touched since Burning Crusade. I probably spent more time levelling alts than doing things at endgame, and I had fun doing so. That's got to count for something.

Incidentally, I also really liked the Cataclysm talent trees. They didn't completely get rid of the "+x% damage/healing" talents, but they did reduce their numbers greatly, and while levelling my alts I actually felt that getting new talent points was always fun. The effect was almost always noticeable immediately, whether it was that I gained a new proc, or an ability gained an extra effect, or one of my base moves just became noticeably stronger. The whole "signature ability at level 10" thing was also a great idea in my opinion, even if it seemed to create lots of balancing problems in low-level PvP.

4. Archaeology

Once again, I think that this is a feature that ended up being a bit of a let-down for many people. At the start of the expansion it offered some extremely useful pieces of gear, but trying to purposefully grind anything out via archaeology is simply madness and created a lot of resentment in players. I mean, I must have solved hundreds of projects by now and still haven't seen any of the items I actually wanted.

However, once you manage to let go of the desire to achieve anything specific with this profession, it can be very zen and relaxing to just fly from dig site to dig site and "dps the ground". It's not something to focus all your attention on, but it's great if you're just waiting for a queue to pop but don't want to spend all your time twiddling your thumbs in a city. I wouldn't want to miss this option.

5. Endgame as it was upon Cataclysm release

I actually liked the hard heroics. For a few glorious weeks I got to enjoy something similar to my best days in the Burning Crusade again, as guildies preferred forming guild groups over pugging with strangers, and we actually flew to the instance and used the summoning stone to summon the ones who hadn't discovered the dungeon entrance yet. Inside the heroics, people coordinated their play, and we wiped if we messed up. Yes, I actually am nostalgic for wiping in heroic Grim Batol!

Similarly, I actually thought that tier 11 was a really solid raid tier. The devs stuck to their promise of releasing multiple smaller raids to allow for a frequent change of scenery, and the bosses were varied. Normal mode was difficult enough to keep us busy for months, and I could almost pretend that heroic modes didn't exist.

Yes, I understand why they changed it - because players like me aren't their target audience anymore - but I would still like to go on record as saying that I actually liked things the way they were.

What did everyone else like about Cataclysm as an expansion?

In which I come to a nice but surprising realisation

I frequently waffle on and on about how all the best times I've had in WoW happened during the Burning Crusade. If I had to pick one specific event or achievement during that time that had a bigger impact on me than anything else, it would without a doubt be the original Zul'Aman bear run. Mind you, I have a lot of happy memories from the BC days, but working on beating that timer week in, week out, failing over and over again until we finally had those ten Amani War Bears for everyone in the team definitely stood out.

(Incidentally, looking back at that picture of our "Team Bear" makes me kind of sad, as not one of the other nine people still plays with me anymore. They all either left the guild for one reason or another or simply quit the game entirely. I'm still in loose contact with most of them, but at least one guy has pretty much vanished off the face of the earth as far as I know. If you read this, Kordac, I still miss hearing your Irish accent on Teamspeak!)

Obviously I've had other good times in the game since then, but nothing that really lived up to those bear runs... until...

The other night I was thinking about how PvP season ten is ending soon and pondering our rated battleground team's performance over the last couple of months. And it suddenly hit me just how much of a good time I've been having and that I really, really care, in a way that I haven't cared about anything in the game in three and a half years. We've had our problems, sure, and for a while we had a couple of players that didn't really mesh with the rest of the team and who made things awkward sometimes, but looking at our regulars right now, there isn't a single person there that I don't like.

I don't exactly await every rated battleground evening with baited breath, but once we get started I tend to completely forget about the time (which is quite a feat, considering that I'm usually one of those people who look at their watch every five minutes) until someone says "well, that's it for the night I guess" and I realise that it's three hours later. I get completely immersed in exciting matches, and I laugh out loud at the silly banter that goes on during breaks between games. Who'd have thought that Cataclysm managed to bring back a little piece of my favourite expansion after all? That feeling of playing in a team, kicking butt and just having oodles of fun is back. I was honestly kind of shocked by this realisation.

The funny and slightly confusing thing is that I can't even really explain what makes these rated battlegrounds so different from everything else that I've done in the game since those infamous bear runs. The first things that come to mind that I enjoy about rated battlegrounds, other than the company, are the challenge and the pacing. Due to the matchmaking system almost every victory and loss push us to our limits in one way or another, but there's also plenty of time to chill out and be silly - between matches, at the start and towards the end of a game, as well as when you're simply waiting to resurrect at a graveyard.

As a bit of a side note, I've been thinking about challenge in games lately. Whenever WoW's difficulty is discussed anywhere, I tend to side with those who say that it needs to be harder, but at the same time I'm the kind of person who sets all her single player games to "easy", so am I being hypocritical? After a bit of soul searching I came to the conclusion that I don't really need challenge in my single player content (though I don't necessarily mind it either if I have to face it), but I absolutely do need it in group content because otherwise... it doesn't really feel like group content to me.

I mean, if I did a heroic Grim Batol through the dungeon finder right now, it wouldn't even matter whether I did it with friends or random strangers in terms of gameplay; just running along and AoEing everything down is boring. There is no interaction. I mean, I could chat with my friends while doing this I guess, but for that I don't really need to have the game running; we might as well go for a walk. For group content to be satisfying for me, it has to be at least difficult enough to require the assistance of another human being that can think for themselves, so that our goal is only achievable by working together. That is the true joy of having other people to play with, for me at least. And PvPing with a fixed group of people is like that all the time.

However, none of these things make rated battlegrounds truly special. Raids still have challenge and cooperation too! It's an interesting conundrum. Then again, maybe I just like riding around with a group of people who are all using the same mount as me. Vicious War Wolves, hoo!