Retail WoW & Me in 2025

What with the 80/20 split in play time mentioned in my previous post, it seems hard to deny that I'm more of a retail player now, even if it still feels weird to me. I still prefer the way many things work in Classic, but with retail being the mode that both my husband and many of my friends prefer, it's easy for me to end up spending more time there.

I'll have to change the way I do the character round-ups this time, since we got the new warband character selection screens this year! It's technically still possible to take individual shots of each character by dragging them out of their groupings, but that's too much extra effort for me, so I'll just follow the groupings I've created for myself in this post as well.

Oh, and I've decided that I'm not going to get into Legion Remix at all in this post. I'll just note that I created twelve new characters for it, most of whom have had very little play time, have no professions (since those are disabled in Remix) and I don't quite know yet what I'm going to do with them going forward. I intend to make a separate post about that whole experience later down the line. Meanwhile, let's look at the best of the rest:

Mains

My main warband screen contains the four characters that I've played the most throughout the year.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
• 16 days, 16 hours /played (+11 days, 23 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Blacksmithing (+17), 100 Mining, 48 Cooking (+12), 139 Fishing (+91)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 66 Outland Blacksmithing (+66), 15 Cataclysm Blacksmithing (+15),  5 Kul Tiran Blacksmithing (+5), 58 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+58), 300 Classic Mining (+5), 75 Outland Mining (+75), 75 Cataclysm Mining (+62), 28 Pandaria Mining (+28), 14 Kul Tiran Mining (+14), 100 Dragon Isles Mining (+100), 7 Outland Fishing (+7), 4 Kul Tiran Fishing (+4), 7 Archaeology (+7) 

Towards the end of last year, the warrior I levelled in MoP Remix was still kind of transitioning into being my new main, but 2025 was definitely her year entirely, as no other character came close to accumulating even half as much play time. At the start of the year I was still tanking M+ dungeons for guildies, but I dropped M+ entirely at the end of season one, for a variety of reasons. I continued to have lots of fun duoing delves with the husband though, which probably took up the majority of our time. I also did some work on professions though, some of which I talked about in this post. (No, that second Thunderfury binding still hasn't dropped.)

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker
• 27 days, 2 hours /played (+2 days, 13 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Leatherworking (+17), 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking (+27), 250 Fishing (+106)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): Legion Leatherworking 3 (+3), 218 Classic Skinning (+89), 69 Outland Skinning (+8), 5 Pandaria Skinning (+5), 31 Draenor Skinning (+31), 100 Legion Skinning (+15), 36 Kul Tiran Skinning (+6), 31 Kul Tiran Fishing (+1)

I still feel attached to my Dragonflight main because I loved that expansion so much, but she got the least play time of the four characters in this group because preservation evoker just hasn't felt good to play for me ever since War Within dropped. It's not terrible, it's just felt slightly off all expansion, leading me to prioritise my priest whenever I felt like healing.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest
• 12 days, 9 hours /played (+4 days)
• War Within professions: 100 Tailoring (+35), 100 Enchanting (+39), 39 Cooking (+18), 88 Fishing (+15)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 75 Northrend Tailoring (+44), 75 Cataclysm Tailoring (+30), 76 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+2), 300 Classic Enchanting (+204), 51 Outland Enchanting (+25), 25 Cataclysm Enchanting (+10), 78 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+4)

... this being the aforementioned priest. She remains that character that serves no particular purpose in our little group's adventures; I just really like playing holy priest sometimes. I also did some real work on her professions this year, levelling up enchanting and tailoring skills from several old expansions. 

Shinfur - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 pandaren monk
• 4 days, 20 hours /played (+3 days, 16 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Engineering (+17), 36 Cooking (+30), 63 Fishing (+59)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 Classic Mining (+12), 7 Legion Mining (+7), 3 Classic Engineering (+3), 5 Outland Engineering (+5), 6 Draenor Cooking (+6) 

The monk I levelled during MoP Remix ended up supplanting my human monk from Shadowlands somehow, maybe because I'd levelled the latter primarily as a healer while this one gets played as windwalker all the time. She's the one dps character I have on whom I feel moderately competent and who was also the one on whom I beat Zekvir's Lair on ?? difficulty.

Melee dps alts

I've had kind of mixed feelings about my melee dps alts all year. I mostly decided at one point that I wanted to have one of every class at 80, plus more alts allowed me to work on more professions. But when push comes to shove, I only have so much time to grind delves or whatever other gameplay to gear up, which was mostly invested in the mains, meaning all of these ladies came out only now and then whenever the mood struck me.

Mehg - AN

• Level 80 night elf demon hunter (+8)
• 12 days, 12 hours /played (+1 day, 15 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining (+70), 100 Jewelcrafting (+75), 40 Cooking (+40), 53 Fishing (+53)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 290 Classic Mining (+274), 39 Outland Mining (+39), 44 Cataclysm Mining (+17), 11 Classic Jewelcrafting (+11) 

Hekatie - ER

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 12 days, 16 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Inscription (+29), 43 Cooking (+13), 63 Fishing (+21)
• Other professions: no changes this year

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue
• 3 days, 15 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism (+13), 105 Skinning (+35), 25 Cooking (+25), 12 Fishing (+12)
• Other professions: no changes this year 

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 80 human paladin (+61)
• 3 days, 8 hours /played (+1 day, 10 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 44 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 25 Cooking, 30 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 43 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+43), 15 Northrend Mining (+15), 94 Dragon Isles Mining (+94), 23 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23)

The paladin (who was the very first character I ever created, located on a German server) probably had the most interesting journey as I decided to level her up on a whim during a Winds of Mysterious Fortune event. 

Ranged dps alts

Yes, that's right, there's only three of these! I guess there's a job opening here for whenever I hit level 80 on another ranged class.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter
• 5 days, 19 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
• War Within professions: 88 Leatherworking (+32), 100 Skinning, 32 Cooking (+6), 53 Fishing (+20)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 20 Outland Skinning (+14), 53 Legion Skinning (+4)

Hunter is a class I kind of want to like and play more since I loved classic hunters so much, but for some reason Blizzard just keeps making the retail version of the class worse and worse. I still think that turning survival into a melee spec in Legion was a mistake, and trying to take MM hunters' pets away in War Within just to appease raiders was even worse. They just don't seem to have any kind of clue what hunter players want from the class, and this reddit post on the subject I saw this year really resonated with me.

Willowie - QT

• Level 80 human warlock (+6)
• 1 day, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 3 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Alchemy (+52), 100 Herbalism (+38), 37 Cooking, 45 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only) 2 Classic Alchemy (+2), 11 Classic Herbalism

My perception of warlock gameplay tends to oscillate between "this is terrible" and "wait, this is fun" but then Blizzard changes something again, I get confused and lose interest again. This is the warlock I levelled in MoP Remix by the way. 

Daerys - Darkspear

• Level 80 draenei mage (+10)
• 31 days, 6 hours /played (+21 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 100 Mining, 53 Jewelcrafting, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 4 Legion Mining (+4), 6 Legion Jewelcrafting (+6) 

Honestly, I just levelled this one so I would finally have all classes at 80. And so someone could wear the banging tier one mage transmog once I'd finally completed the set. 

Tank and healer alts

Yeah, so... I already have a tank and two healers in my "mains" group, how much time could I realistically have left for these guys? They just exist for the occasional change of pace at this point. 

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
• 2 days, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 5 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 1 Cooking, 32 Fishing (+16)
• Other professions: no changes this year

I'll say that my bear druid came close at one point to getting some more play time, after I kind of ran out of things to upgrade on my warrior main, but for the rest of the year Blizzard was very good at drip-feeding me just one more upgrade over and over again, which kept me chugging away at the warrior until the very end of most seasons. 

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
• 4 days, 12 hours /played (+22 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 7 Northrend Mining (+4), 300 Classic Skinning, 28 Northrend Skinning (+16), 56 Archaeology (+6)

Shimeri - AN

• Level 80 dwarf shaman (+10)
• 5 days, 2 hours /played (+18 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 93 Alchemy, 100 Herbalism, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions: none 

Recent levellers

The last grouping I'm going to feature here is... a bit of a lie, because none of these have actually been levelled "recently". They had been when I named the group though. 

Surly - QT

• Level 25 blood elf hunter
• 5 hours played
• Professions: none

Surly was originally created because I had picked up a "bound to warband" polearm that I thought would be good for a survival hunter. Not that I ever levelled her that far. Instead I just got a bit of a first impression of melee survival (extremely clunky in the first few levels) and got to revisit the blood elf starting zone (pretty nostalgic). She was also my first test subject for doing Lorewalking on a low-level character.

Spinny - QT 

• Level 21 goblin monk
• 3 hours played
• Professions: 34 Classic Herbalism, 20 Cataclysm Skinning

Spinny was created so I could refresh my knowledge of goblin lore before the release of Undermine. After that I couldn't quite decide where to level next and ended up going nowhere.

Tidella - AN

• Level 55 Kul Tiran shaman (+1)
• 2 days, 1 hour /played (+4 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 292 Classic Mining (+186), 9 Cataclysm Mining (+6), 245 Classic Engineering (+105) 

When I first looked up this character I was like "what, I gained a level, I didn't think I even played this character this year" but then I checked the profession stats and oh right, I guess I worked on her Classic mining and engineering at some point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also ran:

No more warband screens, just two more characters for whom I noted down some minor changes: 

Shinlu - AN

• Level 71 human monk (+3)
• 22 days, 16 hours /played (+2 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 War Within Skinning (+12)

Again, I hardly remember playing my old monk from Shadowlands this year, but apparently she gained three levels. I think I took her to Khaz Algar and did a couple of easy delves to explore more variants back before they made it so you can see the delve variant of the day on the map.

Eartha - AN

• Level 52 earthen shaman (+26)
• 8 hours /played (+6)
• Professions: none 

Finally, this character! I mentioned last year that I'd created her to benefit from the earthen racial bonus to exploration XP and that I was going to write about that... but then I didn't. We'll see whether I eventually get around to it or not.

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.

Casual Seeds of Renewal

Dragonflight's Seeds of Renewal patch has been out for a few weeks now, but with my casual involvement in retail, I don't always get to see all the new stuff right away. In general I've really enjoyed the way Blizzard has been releasing these "minor" patches between the major ones though, adding new gameplay and story every so often even when there isn't a new zone or raid to be explored just yet. Seeds of Renewal is another interesting example of that.

First of all, Dragonriding is now enabled everywhere where you're able to fly, and it's great. Characters don't even need to have been to the Dragon Isles to be able to mount one of the special mounts, though you might still need to have the Dragonflight expansion at least, I'm guessing. Normal/old flying still has its place, but if you're just trying to quickly get from A to B, hopping on your dragon and going super fast definitely feels great.

They also retooled the dracthyr racial Soar to work like normal Dragonriding instead of an extremely limited version of it, which means that I can now be my own mount and just fly around using my own wings. Again, this feels great! It's not quite as smooth as a druid's flight form, as you get thrown out of "flight mode" the moment you touch ground, so it's happened to me that I kind of clip the edge of a cliff and then fall off because I'm no longer flying... but at least dracythyr always have Glide to save themselves. As there's been talk of giving druids a "Dragonriding mode" for their flight form, I wonder whether that'll also mean that dracthyr will eventually be able to fly the old-fashioned way as well.

There's also a new temporary Dragonriding race event, the Outland Cup. With my love of the Burning Crusade, you'd think I would have loved that too, but... eh. I think now that we can just use Dragonriding everywhere, the novelty of being able to do so in the races isn't quite there anymore. Plus each course is quite predictable at this point in that I'll be able to get gold on the normal race easily, but both reverse and advanced are so tightly tuned that it doesn't feel worth re-doing them over and over again just to eke out something better than bronze. I thought it was interesting that they changed the quest related to the event to actually require you to do all courses now instead of just three, while also significantly buffing the reward. This meant that for the first time, I was able to afford all the prizes after completing everything once instead of having to get on alts to earn more currency.

There's this new thing called the Azerothian Archives, which is a quest chain with some mini games vaguely related to archaeology - the concept that is, not the in-game profession, before anyone gets their hopes up. The quest line was enjoyable enough and I thought it was clever that it included visits to the Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Cavern, presumably in an effort to bring some life back into those mostly abandoned patch zones. As far as I can tell it seemed to work, because I could see that people were actually bumping off rares and picking up chests while they were there.

The mini games themselves all felt a bit weird though, like they were trying to put a new spin on archaeology by making it more complicated. As someone who quite likes archaeology as it is, I wasn't entirely convinced. I guess the proof will be in the pudding as to whether I'll spend any time on the world quests this unlocks. (So far it's just made me miss normal archaeology enough that I went on a bit of a surveying binge the next day.) There's also a new world event tied to all this, where everyone runs in circles as a giant crowd trying to tap mounds of dirt. Again, a bit weird.

In terms of story content, there are some epilogue quests, such as Vyranoth showing you a cinematic that shows Iridikron being up to no good. The night elves get to build a new home under Amirdrassil called Bel'ameth, and Malfurion comes back from Ardenweald. While I'm happy for him and Tyrande to have some quality time together, it does kind of make it look weird in hindsight that there was such a hubbub around him staying in Ardenweald to balance out Ysera returning to the land of the living, considering that it was only a temporary arrangement for a few patches.

There's also a quest chain to reclaim Gilneas, and while it's a nice enough quest by itself, the contrast between everything the night elves got to make up for the loss of Teldrassil (which only happened two expansions ago) and the way the worgen get Gilenas back after more than thirteen years is pretty stark. Basically, Gilneas has just kind of been taken over by the Scarlet Crusade somewhat randomly - so they could kick the Forsaken out, but we couldn't? Yet in turn the Scarlets are really easy to defeat as well, and it's basically all over before you've killed fifty mobs. And while Bel'ameth is clearly being built up to become a proper city with portals etc., the reclaimed Gilneas is just big and empty except for an innkeeper and a repair guy. A bit of a letdown, comparatively.

Story-wise, I thought it was kind of funny that my husband commented while we were doing this together that we'd never really seen much of Tess Greymane outside of worgen-specific quests, and then the cut scene had her telling Genn that while it's understandable that he's still mourning Liam and wanted to take Anduin under his wing, he does also have a daughter, you know... burn!

Also, is it me or did they change Genn's voice actor? I saw others bring this question up online but couldn't find confirmation either way. He definitely sounds very different at least.

Finally, this was also the patch that introduced follower dungeons, something I mentioned only briefly in my post about retail dungeoneering the other day. I've given at least one of them a try since then, which resulted in my husband getting regaled with a lot of live commentary mixed with delightful squealing and giggling. Honestly, I'd take these NPCs over a pug of real people any day. They're so polite, even waiting for me when I want to hang back to skin. The devs apparently tried to give some of them little quirks too, as I noticed that the resto druid NPC was bouncing around like a maniac throughout my entire run. That and the AI is just generally pretty good - I think I even saw Captain Garrick do a corner pull or two? Though she's not perfect, mind you, as was evidenced by her going off to day-dream during the last boss fight, just kind of standing around for a bit doing nothing while I tanked the boss as dps, until being hit by an AoE effect seemed to spur her back into action. Either way, I can highly recommend this mode. It doesn't give a ton of XP, but for pretty much every other purpose - seeing the dungeon, doing quests, getting loot - it seems far superior to doing normal dungeons with random people. And that's coming from me as someone who's not generally averse to pugs, but as I said previously, the normal dungeon experience in WoW is just too unattractive at this point.

Retail WoW & Me in 2023

Ever since the release of WoW Classic in 2019, I've been doing an end-of-year summary at the end of December to track my progress throughout the game, by listing the characters I've been playing and what they've achieved in the last year. This has turned into a very interesting tradition, as a lot can happen in a year and my interests and aspirations have completely changed direction in that time more than once. Without this track record I wouldn't have nearly as clear a picture of that.

I haven't done the same for retail WoW, except for musing on the progress I'd made after a year back in 2021. As my investment in that side of the game has grown, that has increasingly felt like an oversight, so I've decided to fix that going forward. So without further ado, my retail characters and what they've been up to in the past year... and to some degree since 2021, since I'm not always sure when exactly I did certain things and only have that old post as a reference point right now:

Shindragosa

• Level 70 dracthyr evoker
• 14 days, 19 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 90 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking, 100 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 56 Northrend Skinning, 20 Cataclysm Skinning, 31 Draenor Skinning, 81 Legion Skinning, 7 Kul Tiran Skinning, 15 Draenor Cooking, 66 Classic Fishing, 5 Cataclysm Fishing, 15 Kul Tiran Fishing, 99 Archaeology

The hero class that's new with the expansion became my main, who'd have thought? Even though their healing isn't as obviously OP compared to other healers the way dps and tanking were for other hero classes when they were first released (at least as far as I'm aware), I've come to enjoy the unique play style... plus to be honest, at the start of Dragonflight, just the idea of being able to go into the expansion with an empty inventory was extremely appealing (as opposed to sorting out my monk's bags and figuring out what to keep and what to throw away after Shadowlands). For how generous retail WoW is with bag space, it also has a weird habit of filling your bags with absolute tons of crap at endgame.

The fact that her leatherworking is still not maxed out this far into the expansion is a reflection on how the changes to the crafting system haven't really worked for me, even though I initially liked the sound of them, but that could be a whole post of its own really.

Mehg

• Level 70 night elf demon hunter
  
• 10 days, 4 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 100 Mining, 69 Jewelcrafting, 68 Cooking, 52 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 16 Classic Mining, 17 Cataclysm Mining, 100 Legion Mining, 150 Shadowlands Mining, 18 Classic Cooking, 31 Legion Cooking, 75 Shadowlands Cooking, 74 Classic Fishing, 70 Legion Fishing, 27 Shadowlands Fishing, 800 Archaeology
  

The demon hunter that became my first max-level alt in Shadowlands is still my main alt, I think because it's a relatively straightforward class to play at a basic level among a sea of overly complex rotations in retail. Earlier in the expansion she felt a bit squishy (regardless of gear), but that improved a lot after one of the most recent patches. She also still has the same transmog because I really like that set from the demon hunter starting experience... I just change the look of her glaives sometimes.

Tilarea

• Level 70 lightforged draenei priest
  
• 5 days, 10 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 64 Tailoring, 64 Enchanting, 16 Cooking, 37 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 100 Classic Tailoring, 75 Outland Tailoring, 5 Northrend Tailoring, 2 Cataclysm Tailoring, 64 Pandaria Tailoring, 100 Draenor Tailoring, 65 Kul Tiran Tailoring, 100 Shadowlands Tailoring, 96 Classic Enchanting, 26 Outland Enchanting, 25 Northrend Enchanting, 11 Cataclysm Enchanting, 20 Pandaria Enchanting, 25 Draenor Enchanting, 16 Kul Tiran Enchanting, 49 Shadowlands Enchanting, 2 Classic Cooking, 6 Shadowlands Cooking, 15 Outland Fishing, 11 Shadowlands Fishing, 13 Archaeology
  

This was the first alt I levelled without any involvement from my husband, simply because I wanted to be a priest again! She's pugged dungeons, done some PvP, worked on her professions and run a fair few old raids for transmog (as you can tell from her sporting the old tier two set). I just still love being a holy priest.

Tharisa

• Level 70 human hunter
  
• 2 days, 18 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 18 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 14 Cooking, 23 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 119 Classic Leatherworking, 205 Classic Skinning, 70 Northrend Skinning, 5 Cataclysm Skinning, 9 Draenor Skinning, 33 Legion Skinning, 129 Classic Cooking, 37 Archaeology
  

Ah, my old human hunter. I eventually levelled her up because I really wanted to have a better understanding of how retail hunter compares to its classic version. It's still a bit weird. I'm currently marksman spec because that has been my go-to for many expansions, but I don't know if it's still the best option for me in retail. I do still like having a pet, and with the new talent tree you can actually opt out of the "petless" marksman talent, but I have no idea how viable that is and haven't been able to find any discussion about it. Not that it matters, considering that I'm not doing any hard content on her, but I guess it would be interesting to know.

Groghue

• Level 70 worgen rogue
  
• 1 day, 18 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 87 Herbalism, 105 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 35 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 259 Classic Herbalism, 175 Classic Skinning, 23 Cataclysm Skinning, 21 Classic Fishing, 10 Cataclysm Fishing, 107 Archaeology
  

Enter Grogu (silent h, silent e), though she also responds to "rogue" (silent g, silent h). I created her during Shadowlands and actually made a post about it at the time. Considering how much time I spend running around aimlessly while levelling, I think her /played time goes to show just how fast retail levelling is nowadays. You can also tell from her professions that she's hardly seen anything of the world, having only really quested in the old world and on the Dragon Isles. I guess that's probably fairly typical of the modern retail levelling experience.

I also learned from levelling her that I'm terrible at playing rogue. Maybe it's just the subtlety spec, but in an interesting contrast to how the class works in Classic, it feels like you need to be hitting some sort of dps cooldown non-stop or you do basically no damage. In one heroic I did, I was struggling to out-dps the healer...

Oh, and she doesn't have a hump; that's a backpack. It just always looks a bit funny on the character selection screen.

Shinlu

• Level 61 human monk
• 22 days, 9 hours /played
• Professions: 50 Outland Leatherworking, 16 Northrend Leatherworking, 150 Kul Tiran Leatherworking, 100 Shadowlands Leatherworking, 14 Classic Skinning, 75 Outland Skinning, 51 Northrend Skinning, 40 Cataclysm Skinning, 80 Legion Skinning, 175 Kul Tiran Skinning, 150 Shadowlands Skinning, 5 Dragonflight Skinning, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 48 Kul Tiran Cooking, 75 Shadowlands Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 39 Outland Fishing, 12 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 16 Pandaria Fishing, 100 Legion Fishing, 175 Kul Tiran Fishing, 200 Shadowlands Fishing, 678 Archaeology
  

My old Shadowlands main gained a bit of XP from doing stuff like the human heritage quest chain, but other than that she's mostly been chilling in Stormwind since Dragonflight. I feel a bit bad about it because I do still love her, but the thought of having to sort out her bags (there's probably still a dozen different kinds of anima in there for example) terrifies me.

Shinnins

• Level 60 worgen druid
  
• 17 days, 10 hours /played
• Professions: 300 Classic Alchemy, 75 Outland Alchemy (Transmutation), 75 Northrend Alchemy, 75 Cataclysm Alchemy, 75 Pandaria Alchemy, 10 Shadowlands Alchemy, 300 Classic Herbalism, 75 Outland Herbalism, 75 Northrend Herbalism, 75 Cataclysm Herbalism, 75 Pandaria Herbalism, 43 Shadowlands Herbalism, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 75 Pandaria Cooking (with all the different "cooking ways" maxed out too), 12 Shadowlands Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 75 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 75 Pandaria Fishing, 22 Shadowlands Fishing, 608 Archaeology

My main from my brief flirtation with retail during Mists of Pandaria. Back in 2021 I bemoaned that I never even finished all the zones there, but I did actually get the husband to go back with me and do Townlong Steppes and Dread Wastes in Chromie Time. Then I did a little bit of Shadowlands, but I didn't even get to start on my covenant story before Dragonflight came out.

Pishin

• Level 60 pandaren priest
  
• 5 days, 13 hours /played
• Professions: 4 Classic Herbalism, 100 Draenor Herbalism, 56 Shadowlands Herbalism, 21 Pandaria Inscription, 100 Draenor Inscription, 64 Shadowlands Inscription, 6 Classic Cooking, 6 Cataclysm Cooking, 105 Draenor Cooking, 17 Shadowlands Cooking, 100 Draenor Fishing, 17 Shadowlands Fishing, 117 Archaeology
  

Ah, my "piss priest", who levelled through WoD with the husband's monk and then did a bit of Shadowlands endgame. We actually never quite finished all of WoD - maybe once the level cap goes up again, I'll make him do the missing zones with me in Chromie Time, just like I did with the druid.

Other than that, I've been feeling a bit lost with this character. For a while, I logged her daily to tend her garrison, but eventually I had more resources than I could possibly use and gave up on it. I also levelled her as discipline, and regardless of the many changes Blizzard made to that spec over the years, I've pretty much disliked every single iteration of it. I thought I'd try respeccing to shadow, my original love, but all that nonsense with insanity and tentacles is just totally alien to me as well. It's weird to still love the priest class while not getting along with two of its three specs.

Tidella

• Level 48 Kul Tiran shaman
  
• 1 day, 17 hours /played
• Professions: 106 Classic Mining, 3 Cataclysm Mining, 140 Classic Engineering, 3 Cataclysm Engineering, 40 Classic Cooking
  

This character was part of a levelling group with guildies, but we stalled out after the issues we ran into with Wrath dungeons described in this post. Since then she's been sitting in that weird limbo where I kind of don't want to play her because I'm still holding on to the idea that we'll pick things up again one day and the reality of having to accept that this probably won't happen.

Violan

• Level 46 void elf mage
  
• 14 hours /played
• Professions: 8 Classic Herbalism, 61 Legion Herbalism, 2 Classic Skinning, 74 Legion Skinning, 40 Classic Cooking, 8 Legion Fishing, 30 Archaeology
  

After unlocking all those allied races, I thought I should actually create some characters using them. I made a void elf mage because it seemed like a good combo and I didn't have a mage yet. She's currently levelling through Legion.

Marquess

• Level 45 dark iron dwarf death knight
  
• 11 hours /played
• Professions: 139 Kul Tiran Herbalism, 80 Kul Tiran Mining, 15 Kul Tiran Fishing, 28 Archaeology
  

Same story for this dark iron death knight - plus I kind of wanted to level a plate-wearer to unlock certain transmog pieces. She's making her way through BfA one chunk of rested XP at a time, but because she's both a miner and a herbalist, she actually gets to do very little questing between all the gathering (which awards absolutely stupid amounts of XP).

Kehnan

• Level 19 dwarf paladin
  
• 7 hours /played
• Professions: 71 Draenor Blacksmithing, 2 Classic Mining, 3 Draenor Mining
  

This was actually my first attempt at getting a plate-wearer levelled up, but I haven't logged into her in so long that, before I did so to get her /played number for this post, she'd been marked as inactive and eligible for the free gear boost. I had this idea for taking another character through WoD while also checking out the state of paladin tanking, but the garrison quickly sapped me of all enthusiasm.

Kara

• Level 59 orc warlock
  
• 1 day, 3 hours /played
• Professions: 50 Zandalari Tailoring, 7 Classic Enchanting, 45 Zandalari Enchanting, 26 Zandalrai Cooking, 68 Zandalari Fishing, 80 Archaelogy
  

My one Hordie, about whom I've also written a bit here. She's currently level-locked at 59 to see the rest of Horde-side BfA without outlevelling it, and also picked up all the different quests to unlock the BfA allied races at the same time. She's got a long way to go, but at least it's something different.

More on Dracthyr and the Pre-Patch Event

I'm still playing Classic era primarily, however things are just kind of quietly chugging along there at the moment, so the new and (partially) time-limited stuff happening in retail is more interesting to talk about for now.

I've had opportunity to practice playing my evoker some more, and it's turned out to be pretty fun. I finally seem to be getting the hang of soaring, and it's fun to ride a flying mount up to the nearest elevation and then shoot like an arrow across multiple zones.

I also ended up healing the new Uldaman dungeon twice - both times we four-manned it with my husband and two friends. The first time around we went in without a tank as well, which was a bit chaotic and resulted in quite a few deaths, though we did successfully complete the instance anyway. It was certainly good healing practice! The second time around my husband played his demon hunter so that we would have a proper tank, and that just made it super easy.

The only times I really struggled with healing were when there was AoE damage going around and the group was spread all over the room, but I guess that situation is awkward for any healer. In general though I've been enjoying figuring out how to heal as an evoker, with lots of dashing about and trying to aim the different shapes of AoE heal correctly. It's a bit more "action-y" than I'd usually like and actually reminds me of some videos I saw of Wildstar back in the day - I could see that being quite stressful in harder content, but in the context of an easy dungeon it was certainly fun.

I'm also liking my dracthyr's look more over time - I particularly like how her visage form turned out, and dracthyr get this cool ability called "Chosen Idenity" which when activated, automatically puts you into your visage form whenever you're not in combat. Certainly feels a lot less weird to be riding a dragon mount as a humanoid than as a dragon person for example! They really should add that feature for worgen too - would make it a lot less awkward to shapeshift into humanoid form more often that way.

We've also been checking out the pre-patch Primalist invasion event. In the run-up to the pre-patch I'd heard people express hope that these would feel similar to the Legion invasions that preceded the Legion expansion, and which seemed to be quite popular at the time. I wasn't playing retail back then, but I do remember people talking about that event quite fondly. It always sounded like those invasions were quite ubiquitous too, though I just checked and in this post by Bhagpuss from back then he clarified that the Legion invasions also only happened in six zones - still, that's three more than the current event.

My own closest point of comparison are the elemental invasions that preceded Cataclysm, which I also remember with some fondness. The current invasions are okay, but nothing to write home about in my opinion. At first there's something fun to the zerg, but the longer it goes on, the more boring it gets. You basically just spam AoE onto endlessly respawning opponents until you get bored; there's no real ebb and flow to things other than the occasional boss event. Plus I guess it doesn't help that the three zones chosen for invasion are the Badlands, Northern Barrens and Un'goro. I mean, who gives a crap about the Badlands? Let the Primalists have them. Rewards aside, I can't say that I feel very inspired to defend the place, not like I was when elementals invaded the capitals pre-Cataclysm. I'll just keep going there a few more times to earn a few more of the rewards before the event goes away I guess.

D(ragon) Day

So, the release of dracthyr evokers in the run-up to Dragonflight has been... interesting. I was honestly pretty hyped about it. It's been a long time since I was part of this kind of event in retail WoW, and I had pretty fond memories of the community buzz in the days immediately after the Shattering for example. Things didn't entirely turn out the way I'd hoped though.

First there was the confusion about when exactly the unlock would happen. Blizzard had been advertising the 15th for ages, and I already had the day off work for unrelated reasons, so it didn't even occur to me that this might not be one of those world-wide launches - as it turned out, there were no dragons yet for EU players on the 15th, and of course the next day was an office day for me, which left me with minimal time to spend on anything other than commuting and work.

Still, I managed to at least log into the game early in the morning to create my evoker. I had actually done some preparation for this, as I found a tool on Wowhead that simulated the dracthyr character creator. I know that I can get pretty caught up in character customisation, and with the dracthyr having more customisation options than any previous race, I wanted to familiarise myself with all the different options in advance. I was just confused because when I tried to use the option to save my creation, Wowhead kept telling me that my dragon needed more clothes, which made me wonder whether it was mandatory to equip a minimum number of the cosmetic armour pieces that are available for the class (it was not). In the end I just took a reference screenshot manually.

Anyway, thanks to this I had a picture to speed up my decision-making on Wednesday morning, though since I hadn't yet looked at the visage form options at all, the process still took me more than twenty minutes. Still, I managed to at least finish my character before having to dash off to work. Thus, "Shindragosa" was born.

The husband and I then sat down to play together late in the evening, but again things were not off to a good start as I was greeted by the error message "cinematic not available" upon logging in, so I had to immediately set off to YouTube on my second monitor to figure out what the hell my character was supposed to have seen before even starting. While I was doing that, the husband was struggling with a different dilemma - for him the cinematic had played - at least partially - but then he got stuck in the room you spawn in and found himself unable to get out. I googled that issue as well, and the common advice seemed to be to "restart your game five or six times". This did work eventually, but basically, just getting both of our characters out of the very first room took us something like ten to fifteen minutes.

After that, things continued somewhat more smoothly, though the area felt very quiet. I'm guessing this was done intentionally via phasing, as we did see more players once we got out of the first building, but if there had been a big rush earlier in the day, we had clearly missed it.

The Forbidden Reaches were fun enough as a starter zone - mostly WoW standard questing fare interspersed with a few (working) cut scenes, but our real focus was on our soar ability and using it to fly around a bit whenever it was off cooldown. There's a quest at the very start where you can practice soaring with no cooldown and I would have liked to spend some more time on that, but the husband just wanted to move on so I did too, without ever really getting the hang of it. The two times or so when I got it to work properly after that it felt great, however most of the time I just lost momentum way too quickly and dropped like a rock. Needs more practice.

Towards the end of the area quest line there was another "cut scene not available" failure, this time affecting both of us, and we were very confused as a battle we'd been fighting just phased around us and things had clearly gone to shit in some way but we didn't know how or why. Again I looked it up on YouTube and that one was definitely a very important cut scene!

Eventually we made it to Stormwind and did the intro there (I thought Wrathion's introduction was laugh-out-loud funny, not gonna lie), but we felt it was too late to look at the elemental invasion event or do the dungeon quest we'd been given. Guess that one's for another day.

In terms of play style I don't know yet whether evoker will be for me or not. The pacing of skills in the starting zone felt very good, but then you come out of there and the game's like: "Here, have fifty talent points or so and another ten abilites to place on your action bars! Hope you enjoy reading tooltips!" and I really can't judge that without actually trying some of those new skills properly first.