Meme Monday: WoW Forever Memes

I'm going to steal Redbeard's Meme Monday format for a day, since he seems unlikely to be using it for this particular subject. I've been browsing a lot of reddit and social media for more WoW Forever reactions and while there's a lot of utter insanity out there, there've also been some pretty funny memes, a few of which I wanted to share here.

This was basically me for most of last week. I don't remember the last time I was this happily excited for such a long period of time that it interfered with my normal day-to-day operations. Fortunately I've managed to calm down a bit since then! Originally seen on the Classic WoW subreddit but it was deleted for some reason.

Fortunately I don't need to have this conversation with my husband. When I did share my excitement about WoW Forever with him, his reaction was just a slightly resigned "I'm not going to see you for a while when that comes out, right?" Also from the Classic WoW subreddit. Of course, not everyone is this resigned about being sucked back in:

Posted on r/wow under the title "My friend's reaction when I ask her to resubscribe". 

Meanwhile, the following was posted under the title "Meanwhile in Ironforge" (again in r/wow):

  

As much as I loved the trailer, that made me chuckle. You've got to be careful with altering the timeline! (In the original World of Warcraft trailer, the dwarf hunter went on to fight a tauren instead of wandering off.)

Speaking of changes, I was amused by this take on what's probably going to be the most popular new race/class combo:

FaroraSF posted this on the WoW subreddit but also on her Bluesky. This is the same creator by the way who made the excellent video about exploring Dragonflight on foot, which I recommended back here. She's gone on to do the same in War Within and Midnight since then.

Finally, not an image meme, but a humorous post that tries to answer the question "Why the Skyborne don't appear in Retail WoW [Most Plausible Theory]". That is 100% going to be my head-canon now until/unless they get added to modern WoW after all (which wouldn't surprise me in the long run, though I guess for now they are meant to be one of Forever's unique selling points).

Actually, let's throw in one last thing if we're already deviating from the format anyway, because this video just popped up on my YouTube feed and made me laugh - a reaction to WoW Forever from someone who loved WoW back in the day and bounced off Classic:

Pent up Classic Energy

I haven't written much about Classic in recent months, but I'm still thinking about it a lot. Especially in the shower for some reason.

You know how your brain will sometimes form somewhat random but extremely strong connections between things that aren't necessarily related? Like a certain smell instantly taking you back to a moment from your childhood, or a song always making you think of a specific person you once shared it with. I have something like that going on with WoW Classic, specifically the Barrens and Wailing Caverns, as memories of them come to mind every time I take a shower and wash my hair on a warm, sunny day.

I'm not sure why that is - I just know that when Classic launched back in 2019, I binged on it pretty hard for the first few weeks, which included thinking about it basically all the time, even when I wasn't playing - including in the shower I guess? Since I rolled several Horde characters back then, I also must have spent a fair amount of time in the Barrens, including running Wailing Caverns over and over, which logically would then have been something I was thinking about a lot. And I guess it must've still been warm and sunny in September 2019? Like I said, it's pretty random, and it does crack me up a little every time I shampoo my hair and suddenly remember that time I grouped with an undead priest outside Wailing Caverns.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent to start with, but I'm generally thinking about how I just kind of miss Classic right now. I find retail fun in its own way, but it simply doesn't scratch the same itch. At the same time, there's no Classic mode I really want to get into right now.

I did log into MoP Classic after the launch of patch 5.4 and checked out the Timeless Isle for a bit, but I was quickly reminded of just how many hours I spent grinding there in MoP Remix almost exactly two years ago now, and I just have zero appetite for doing all of that again, and more slowly at that.

Sometimes I cast my mind towards Season of Discovery and wonder whether I should go back and pursue some more of the goals I originally had for that mode before it potentially goes away... but the feeling just isn't there.

The anniversary servers seem weirdly alluring right now, mostly because I keep seeing people on my Battle.net friends list playing there, and I just miss that Burning Crusade feeling a bit. It's so weird now: I used to say that BC was my favourite expansion, then Classic came and ruined a lot of that for me because of how differently people were approaching it in the modern era, but with some distance I'm once again reminded that there were also vibes and content there that I still genuinely love.

I just don't want to get into the cesspit that are the anniversary servers, so I'm vainly holding out hope that maybe Blizzard will make Burning Crusade era servers this time around when Wrath of the Lich King comes around again. I was so disappointed when there was no interest in that back in 2022, but in fairness, at the time Classic era still looked pretty dead and I reckon there were probably people both in the community and at Blizzard who wondered whether having these era-locked servers at all had maybe been a mistake. But as mainline Classic progressed further into more expansions, the era servers truly came to life and have managed to maintain a healthy population ever since, even if it ebbs and flows a bit depending on what else is going on with other versions of Classic. Plus if it's true that Blizzard is planning to make a fresh set of servers go through the first three eras of the game every few years (as indicated by the leak), having both a BC and Wrath era server as final destinations for some of these characters would simply make sense to me. Or are you telling me that people would prefer to go through anniversary editions of Cata and MoP Classic?

Regardless, the demand for BC era might still not be quite there yet, and even worse, as WillE has suggested recently, it might actually be in Blizzard's best financial interests to not have them. Sure, they'll lose a few subs from people who don't want to progress into Wrath or whatever, but at the same time BC anniversary has apparently been extremely successful in terms of selling boosts, which can probably at least partially be blamed on the fact that there were several years when there was no way to play BC Classic officially and people had time to miss it.

So I know I'm probably going to be disappointed on that front, but I just can't help hoping. If BC era ever became a thing, I'd definitely roll up a character there to see whether I could find a BC-focused community with similar chill levels as the guys and gals on Classic era.

One way or another all the Classic news will be coming out at BlizzCon in a bit over a month, including the reveal of whatever Project Camelot turns out to be exactly - and whatever it is, I'll definitely want to check it out just to see what it's all about. So I'm kind of sitting here, thinking I might as well save that desire for Classic for the big reveals and new opportunities that will become available soon - but that doesn't mean that I don't still miss it in the meantime.

A Peculiar Casual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midsummer & Darkspear Dashing

I've said in the past that I tend to run somewhat hot and cold as far as WoW's in-game holidays are concerned. Sometimes I'll really get into one, but most of the time I'll largely forget that they exist. Even if I do notice the seasonal decorations, I'll usually just go "huh, it's Brewfest again, is it" and then do exactly nothing about it.

Right now, Midsummer/Fire Festival is on, and I was going to ignore it once again, but then I heard Taliesin on the T&E podcast talk about how there was a new quest line that was very fun, so I decided to check that out.

And indeed, it was quite fun! There's a new daily quest to fly through flaming blossoms above Silvermoon or your faction capital, but it also comes with a one-time chain that sends you flying all over Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms while a Fire Festival NPC tells you about a bit of human, dwarven and tauren lore related to the festival.

I then went back to also do some of the old dailies and slay Ahune, the Frost Lord ("The ice stone has melted!" will forever be a meme to me.) While doing the torch-tossing and catching dailies, I was surprised to see that at some point, Blizzard apparently decided to simplify these - the tossing quest has about three times as many markers going up now, allowing you to finish it much more quickly than in the past, and during the catching quest I noticed that my torch's shadow was very visible and I could no longer see other people's torch shadows, which was what used to make the quest difficult to complete in the past (since you could get confused, accidentally run after someone else's torch and fail - it used to be a hot tip to do this daily on the Exodar where nobody else was there to distract you).

I then did the same dailies in MoP Classic for comparison, but I couldn't really tell whether that expansion already had the update for the catching quest or not, as nobody else was around doing the quests when I was there. I also queued for Ahune there and the wait seemed to take forever compared to retail. When I finally got a group I found that the boss was hilariously undertuned, to the point that you could nuke him down from range most of the way right through his damage reduction. In general, the experience in MoP felt weirdly lonely. I always like to point out that MoP Classic still has a lot of players, but it does seem very raid-loggy. You don't really see a lot of players out and about doing lower-level or more casual content much.

Anyway, aside from Midsummer, there's also a two-day "micro holiday" this weekend. I'm even worse with these than with the regular holidays, in the sense that I don't think I've ever actually taken part in one other than free t-shirt day, which I just happened to notice in Stormwind at the time and which really grew my shirt collection.

The news about this newest addition caught my attention because it's called "Darkspear Dash", featured lots of rainbows and I saw some comments about it being a case of Blizzard adding support for something that was previously a community event. I think the main reason I lingered on the news was that it actually confused me at first: Wasn't that event the running of the gnomes? Why make the official version trolls instead?

Fortunately the answer was only a quick Google search away. The running of the gnomes is in October, for breast cancer awareness, and already has its own micro holiday (the Great Gnomeregan Run). The Darkspear Dash was in fact dreamed up by the same person, but it's on Horde side with trolls (they have a bit more explanation for "why trolls" on their website) and benefts the Trevor Project instead. Mystery solved!

I then heard a few more people talking about taking part and thought "eh, why not". My old main was a troll after all, even if she's only level 32 these days. So I logged her, found the starting point on the Echo Isles and went for a run. Blizzard really was quite considerate of runners' needs, with a barber and a transmogrifier right next to the starting line to make sure everyone can look their best while running. While you can technically fly to go as fast as possible, I opted for my old ground mount myself, a compromise between wanting to enjoy the experience and not wanting to be too slow.

For most of the run I was by myself - in the Plaguelands I saw someone on a Brutosaur behind me for a bit, but they fell off the horizon again after a while. At the entrance to Eversong I ran into two other players, one of them on foot, and we slowed down for a while to all run together. At one point I had to AFK for a bit and set myself to auto-run, and when I came back I was dead in a ditch, eaten by one of those nasty skull level cats in new Eversong. Oops! No big deal though, I just picked myself up again and rode the rest of the way by myself again. It did make me think that I really should level an alt through the Midnight story on foot because the views are so much more impressive at ground level.

Anyway, that would've been it, except... in the late afternoon I spotted someone on Bluesky posting about the fact that the actual community run (which still exists as well) was about to start on Argent Dawn-EU. Apparently this year was also going to be the first time it happened on the EU servers! I looked at the clock and went "snap, that's in only twenty minutes"... and remembered that I did in fact also have a low-level troll alt on Argent Dawn, from back when Cataclysm first came out. So I logged into that one and made my way to the Echo Isles a second time.

What a difference that was! This time the place was absolutely packed, with people spamming rainbow toy effects everywhere. I made use of the transmogger to make my Cataclysm levelling gear look a bit more put together and the barber to change my cat form back to its old colour (at some point my troll druid's cat form had turned white and I don't know why, I just know from screenshots that this wasn't her original colour).

The run was originally meant to start at 5pm my time, but minutes before the scheduled start, some yells were going out that the launch was supposed to be delayed. Clearly not everyone got the memo though as a large crowd still set off at the original time. As someone commented, people getting spread out a bit might not have been the worst thing as it should make the experience a bit less laggy. I set off at the new start time with a still pretty sizeable crowd, though we got more and more spread out over time. By the Plaguelands the trail of runners was spread thin enough that I was largely running by myself again, though I could still see more runners behind and ahead of me this time.

On my first run I'd simply followed the road to new Silvermoon, but this time around I learned that the event was inclusive to people who didn't have the expansion and that you could also go through the portal to old Quel'Thalas and finish the race there. Instructions from the organisers were to go through that portal, so I opted for the alternative route this time. I was happy when I reached the goal in Silvermoon, where it was properly crowded again and people were partying. All in all, a really fun and wholesome experience. 

Project Camelot and Other Crazy Blizzard Leaks

About a week ago, the Classic WoW-o-sphere was getting all excited about dataminers finding information about a new WoW project called "Camelot", which was largely thought to be a code name for whatever Classic Plus type thing Blizzard is cooking up right now. I did briefly consider writing about that, but to be honest there wasn't that much to say; it's not really telling us anything new if we already take the mere existence of such a project for granted.

The most meaningful thing I could think of saying about the name "Camelot" is that it's an excellent choice in so far as there are many different things you can read into it based on your own hopes and expectations. For me personally, the word association went something like this: Camelot → medieval low fantasy setting → something similar to Turtle WoW, which stays more grounded in the world of Azeroth without all the interplanterary shenanigans. That said, I also saw someone say that it reminded them of Dark Age of Camelot (another classic MMO), so maybe it was a sign that Classic Plus would have three factions. I'm sure you, dear reader, can come up with plenty of dramatically different interpretations of your own.

However, today things got more interesting! Due to a disruption on my commute I found myself on trains for three hours in the morning, and as I was browsing reddit I found that apparently someone had gone trawling through old leaks tied to the Camelot name and found one from over a year ago that at the time, was likely dismissed by most as just another attention-seeking fake, but which has now suddenly gained a lot of credibility with hindsight. 

This is your cue to stop reading by the way, if you're worried about potentially being spoiled for Blizzard's future plans for the Warcraft franchise (there's nothing about specific expansions or anything like that though). The leak could still be fake, or even if true, outdated - after all, plans change all the time - but if not, we've got some interesting things to look forward to in the coming years beyond WoW itself.

You can enlarge the above image by clicking on it, but regardless, I'll also describe it in detail below:

It's a photo of a screen showing most of a slide labelled "Franchise Slate - World of Warcraft", tagged with the word "confidential" and a Blizzard logo in the corner. At the top it has a timeline going from Q3 2024 to at least Q3 2030 (there might be more that's cut off).

The first row under the timeline is labelled "modern/mainline expansions" and shows War Within coming out in Q3 2024, Midnight in Q1 2026, The Last Titan in Q3 2027 and the next two expansions labelled as "TBD" but scheduled for Q1 2029 and Q3 2030 respectively.

The second row is labelled "Classic/Camelot" and contains two separate lines, one called "Progression (expansions)" and one called "Era/Camelot". The first line has a lot of entries that we already knew about: Cataclysm just before Q3 2024, Classic Fresh in Q4 2024, MoP in Q2 2025, TBC in Q4 2025... and then WoTLK in Q4 2026, Classic Fresh again in Q2 2028 and TBC again in Q3 2029.

The Era/Camelot line only has one highlighted dot, Camelot in Q3 2026, followed by a little text box that just says "Live ops".

The third row on the slide is labelled "RTS" and indicates plans for a new real-time strategy game called Warcraft Chronicles, set to launch in Q3 2028 and meant to be accompanied by an anime series.

The fourth row promises an Arthas ARPG (I assume the A stands for "action" here, not "augmented"), slated to launch in Q3 2029 and meant to coincide with the release of a live action series.

Finally, there are two more rows called "CN mobile" and "Arcade", which are both just labelled TBD.

Reddit has additionally dug into the credibility of the now deleted account that originally posted this, and apparently the person claimed that the source of the picture was an ex-girlfriend that used to work for Blizzard but was laid off and had been exposed to these slides by accident - which, you know... "I know someone who works at Blizzard" is an age-old preamble to all kinds of BS, but at the same time it is also how this kind of stuff really can get leaked.

The biggest strike against the person's credibility in my eyes is that they also left a comment in another thread saying that "[t]he next expac will return to Black Blood/Worldsoul with Azeroth being final Titan and coming to life to cleanse the planet (including players) - last expac will wrap up with us having to kill Azeroth to restore her. Then off to WoW 2.0" which does very much sound like nonsense to me, but to be fair, that comment was in another, unrelated thread and has no actual connection to the screenshot so may just be an unrelated, unsourced opinion.

The image itself does look very credible to me personally, with the information we have now, over a year after it was originally posted. Blizzard wanting to milk people's nostalgia with repeat releases of the first three expansions sounds very on brand, and the fact that there's nothing after MoP would back up the notion that they themselves weren't sure how far that particular classic train should feasibly go.

A new RTS and an Arthas RPG would make parts of the fan base very happy for sure, and plans for multiple new TV series to go with them are also believable to me. Holly Longdale has been very consistent in her messaging about how she wants Warcraft to be more than it currently is, and it was always a bit strange to me how easily Blizzard seemingly just gave up and rolled over as far as multimedia goes when the Warcraft Movie wasn't a smash hit. Plus they've been doing a lot of experimentation with traditional 2D animation lately, such as with the animated shorts about Alleria, Liadrin and Arator or the A Place to Call Home music video - a lot of the comments on these also expressed the sentiment that people would like to see a full animated show in the same style.

Without taking anything shown in the image as gospel, it does fill me with hope and excitement that Blizzard's plans for the Warcraft franchise are ambitious in a good way - how well any of that will work out is a different question of course, but I'm curious to find out now.

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.

Turtle WoW: Can't We Be Friends, Blizz?

I haven't played much Turtle WoW over the past few weeks as life has been quite busy and my limited WoW time has been fully taken up by Legion Remix. That's not to say that I lost interest in the private server though - I still have two unfinished drafts about it in the works, and I was expecting to have even more material once I got back into playing. My initial sense of urgency had just been somewhat diminished due to how unbothered Turtle WoW leadership seemed to be by Blizzard's lawsuit. Sure, it was probably going to be trouble for them, but they seemed to be pretty confident that they'd be able to keep going somehow.

Things changed over the course of this week though. As of my writing this, Turtle WoW is still up and running, but they are clearly feeling the squeeze. Turtle staff member Akalix, who Blizzard identified as "Lead of Marketing" in their lawsuit and who's actually a US resident, has had to lawyer up and is obviously feeling the pressure, as Blizzard is looking to subpoena various websites to get more information about the individuals they are suing. I've seen reddit comments saying that the initial defiant reaction to the lawsuit has been deleted and that the primary server owner deleted her old Discord handle and adopted a new one, presumably in an attempt to evade legal discovery. (I'm not on their Discord, so this is all rumours to me, but it sounds credible enough.)

A week ago, she also posted a lengthy open letter to Blizzard on the Turtle WoW forums. I tried to archive it but the Internet Archive couldn't capture it for some reason, so if the Turtle WoW site goes down in the future, there are also screenshots of the letter in this reddit post. To summarise it in a nutshell, it talks about how much the Turtle devs love World of Warcraft and how much players love what they've done with Turtle WoW, sooo... can't we just all be friends? Other games allow mods and stuff, right?

If I'm sounding a bit flippant, it's because I don't think they make a very strong case. It's particularly ironic that they cite Everquest's Project 99 as an example of a licensed fan server when Daybreak just shut down another EQ private server that - like Turtle WoW - was making money of its services. Even if I try to look at this open letter in the best possible light, assuming that the sentiments expressed in it are completely genuine and that someone at Blizzard might actually be willing to listen, I just don't see how any sort of official collaboration between Blizzard and Turtle WoW could possibly work, considering what Turtle WoW is. They more or less admit that what they are doing is illegal ("Blizzard does not yet have a framework that allows projects like ours to operate without risking legal conflict") and since they don't have a leg to stand on, it just comes off as a weak appeal to Blizzard's good graces (yeah, right).

This definitely feels like a pretty desperate move that could also be seen as an attempt to drum up some public support more than anything else, but I don't see anyone's opinion on the matter being changed by this, no matter whether they are currently cheering on Blizzard or crossing their fingers for Turtle WoW.

After what I've seen from playing on the server myself, it'll be a shame if all the work they put into things like custom zones would be lost, but they really brought it upon themselves by leaning so heavily into their microtransaction store "donation rewards" and openly taunting Blizzard on social media. I also noticed how for all the pleading that was done in the letter about how they'd be willing to make adjustments to be compliant with any rules set by Blizzard, giving up monetisation is not something that's mentioned. Maybe I should get back to levelling my high elf hunter while I still can...

Enjoyable WoW Videos on Exploration

One of the things that sometimes frustrate me about WoW is that in spite of how huge it is, I find it quite difficult nowadays to find like-minded people who enjoy the game in a similar way to me - not even necessarily because I need more people to play together, but just to chat and occasionally exchange some thoughts. There are tons of WoW content out there, but so much of it is just ruthlessly streamlined for clicks and monetisation: guides on how to play, what to do when the next patch drops, 10 reasons why whatever Blizzard is doing next is a terrible idea.

I'm not saying those things are bad or shouldn't exist (well - maybe that last category), but I yearn for more people to just share their love of this virtual world, bits of silliness, and just what they are getting up to in game. So I wanted to highlight three YouTube channels that do scratch that itch for me to some degree, in case there are others looking for the same.

(Wow)crendor

Crendor is actually an old hand at WoW YouTube content as he became well-known for his goofy machinimas around Wrath of the Lich King and was one of the first WoW YouTubers that I'm aware of that managed to turn his hobby into a job. He branched out into other games, sold merch etc. but unlike many others, he never gave me the vibe of having fully "sold out". (Look, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a living off making YouTube videos or other content, but let's not pretend that depending on it for your livelihood doesn't change your incentives and behaviour to some degree.) There's a reason his avatar is a sloth, and his attitude has always remained that he wants to be chill and just do what's fun.

He's produced lots of different WoW content in that vein over the years, but the series that's my personal favourite and that still gets regular updates is "Pointless Top 10". In this, he picks a random thing in the world (of Warcraft), whether it's caves, mailboxes or rivers and creates a top ten list of his favourites. I always love these because they tend to highlight weird little details to me that I missed and teach me more about parts of Azeroth that I'm maybe less familiar with, all in a casual tone that includes all kinds of silly tangents as well.

Jediwarlock

Let me just start by saying that I immediately considered this guy's channel name a good sign as he clearly likes both WoW and Star Wars, like I do! I think the first video of his that I saw was probably "The Greatest Adventure in World of Warcraft" about a year ago, in which he talks about the storyline that winds its way through the first 25 levels or so of the human starting zone in WoW Classic.

I've since come to enjoy other lore videos of his, specifically for the way he talks about it. I feel like many more popular lore YouTubers are very focused on the grand design and the lives of major NPCs, but Jediwarlock talks about the quests we actually do as players, what we see in the zones, NPC dialogue and how it all ties together to create a certain experience for the player (in Classic).

Lani Gray

Lani is a very new YouTuber, but by chance I ended up seeing her very first video about Azuremyst Isle when it had only about 100 views, and I just immediately loved it. Her goal seems to be to document levelling through WoW (the modern version that is, not Classic) and talking about everything she sees along the way. She talks about every zone in incredible detail, including things like the personalities of different NPCs, environmental storytelling, and just what kind of feelings the zone invokes in her. She does all this with an incredible fangirlish energy that I love and that feels like a friend just telling you about some new cool thing they saw and adored. Naturally she doesn't have that many videos up yet, but if what I just described sounds like your cup of tea at all, consider giving one of her videos a watch.

Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?

I was going to start my day doing something else today, but then I came across a hot bit of gossip late last night that I just had to write about first: that Blizzard is suing Turtle WoW. I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately wondered whether this is going to be another Nostalrius situation.

But let's back up for a second for anyone who might be confused by what some or all of that means. To recap, Nostalrius was an incredibly popular Vanilla WoW private server that was active for a year from early 2015 to 2016. It purported to be not for profit and claimed to offer the most authentic recreation of Vanilla WoW out there. Despite its very short lifespan, it managed to attract an incredible amount of interest within that year, to the point that even mainstream media were starting to report on it. Blizzard eventually sent them a cease and desist, but also ended up inviting the developers over to their headquarters, and it's widely believed that the whole incident was what convinced Blizzard that there was a valid business case for them to release their own Classic servers, as they announced WoW Classic at BlizzCon the following year.

(I myself never played on the original Nostalrius, but I played on its direct competitor Kronos. Vanilla WoW was definitely "in the air" around that time, with the disappointing Warlords of Draenor making many yearn for the good old days.)

The initial release of WoW Classic took a sledgehammer to the private server scene, because most people were happy to just pay for easy access to the "real" thing. However, ten years later, things look a little different.

WoW Classic is still around of course, but it has evolved in ways that have once again started to put some people off. WillE just released a video the other day about how he thinks there are too many versions of Classic at the moment, and I've been thinking about writing my own take on the state of Classic for a while. Because while there are many versions of it, at the same time they haven't necessarily been what (at least some) people wanted. Players were given a chance to play Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and then these expansions were taken away from them again, so if either of these was what you really wanted out of WoW Classic, it was back to private servers for you. Season of Discovery was off to an incredibly strong start with the promise of offering "Vanilla with a twist" and then lost steam hard in its subsequent phases, just to end up in an awkward state of abandonment now, with no more active development planned.

People keep clamouring for "Classic Plus", a version of Vanilla WoW that should be permanent and receive continued active development like retail, but stay true to Vanilla somehow, even though you won't be able to find two people who agree on what exactly that means. In fairness, Blizzard has sent out more than one survey seemingly trying to find out what such a version of WoW could look like, but personally I'm still not convinced that they are really working on a permanent Classic+ as opposed to just the next seasonal server.

Either way, the point is that there is once again a gap in Blizzard's offerings that private servers have been happy to fill, and one of the most popular of these has been Turtle WoW. Unlike Nostalrius, this one has been more of a slow burn. Their website proudly states that they've been online since 2018, but I didn't really start hearing about them until a few years ago. YouTuber McDoubles has a whole playlist about him exploring TurtleWoW that was widely viewed and whose first video was posted roughly three years ago.

I've never played Turtle WoW myself - I'm not necessarily happy with everything Blizzard has done, but I'm also less invested at this point than I was, and ease of access and stability are more important to me - but I read and heard a lot about it. In recent months in particular, I couldn't watch a YouTube video about WoW Classic without the comments being flooded with "go play Turtle WoW" style comments, similar to how people were shouting about Nostalrius everywhere in 2015.

I'm not sure Turtle has become as popular as Nost was back then, but considering how long it's been up, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd had several hundred thousand sign-ups by this point as well, and it's clear that Blizzard was getting fed up with them. Unlike Nostalrius, Turtle WoW also hasn't been afraid to make money with a cash shop, and the lawsuit alleges that they may have made millions of dollars from it.

I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about this whole thing. Legally, Blizzard is obviously in the right (as they were with Nostalrius), and Turtle WoW's big cash shop shows that they weren't nearly as selfless about this whole thing as the Nostalrius team was. However, reading through the lawsuit and seeing the sheer amount of international cooperation required to run Turtle (defendants are alleged to be located in Russia, Germany, the US, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Romania and the Czech Republic) I can't help but also feel the passion of the people involved, even if they were making money off their product.

And there is a reason Turtle WoW got as popular as it has, in that they managed to tap into what at least a significant part of the player base wants out of Classic and that Blizzard doesn't currently provide. Noteworthy to me has been:

1. Their focus has been on PvE (when all the big private servers used to be PvP), levelling and the world. Their website states that they added two new raids, but there are way more improvements and additions made to the open world and lower-level zones, such as additional boat connections and countless new quest hubs, new world events and a new profession. This is in contrast to how with Blizzard, everything always seems to circle back to raiding, endgame and adding even more powerful gear. This was the big letdown of Season of Discovery for me personally.

2. In a time when big companies are constantly outsourcing and reducing staff with "soft skills", such as social media or customer service teams, Turtle WoW had a reputation for having actual human GMs and good moderation. I even heard complaints that their moderation was "too strict", which to me to be honest sounded like a good thing in the context of MMO general chat channels.

This is not to say that Turtle WoW was perfect or anything - what I heard about their cash shop sounded quite off-putting to me (you could buy bags, "transmog" and garish mounts to an extent that puts retail WoW to shame), but to be honest I was still kind of glad the project was there as a signal to Blizzard that there are people who care about things they don't currently offer.

With this lawsuit, it seems unlikely that Turtle WoW will survive for very long - while it's not impossible for a for-profit private server to continue operating in the face of legal threats if they route all their activities through just the right countries (Warmane has infamously been in operation for over a decade), I'm not sure the Turtle WoW team has what it takes to continue evading the law, especially as the details of the lawsuit seem to show that the owners have already been identified and tracked down in real life.

I think the best we can hope for is that the situation will create sufficient amounts of attention and community outcry to make Blizzard think hard about what it is that's missing from Classic right now to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people would rather sign up for and download a private server client than play their product. 

The Midnight Expansion Reveal

I'm glad I didn't try to watch the Midnight expansion reveal live, because from the sounds of it they abused WoW's popularity to the maximum possible extent this time - which is to say, they knew that people were primarily watching for WoW, so they crammed in two hours of Call of Duty ads and the like beforehand to keep everyone online.

I did hop over to the official WoW YouTube channel later to watch the announcement videos and... huh.

Back when the Worldsoul Saga was first announced, I wrote the following: "I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years."

I think the Midnight reveal has proved my theory correct in so far as I've never seen so many people react with a kind of "meh" attitude to a new expansion announcement. There are always those who'll love it no matter what and will be hyped, and there'll always be those who hate everything Blizzard does no matter what. But those in the middle can be swayed either way, and I've never seen this much apathy from the masses before.

There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I reckon the fact that everyone already knew roughly what was coming must have been a major contributor. "It's gonna be about the void and about elves, something something Silvermoon." So when the trailer showed us elves fighting to defend Silvermoon against the void, that was at best exactly what everyone expected, and at worst a bit of a let-down in the sense that people wanted more (as MMO players always do the moment you tell them about anything).

There was something else about the trailer though. I liked it well enough, but something felt ever so slightly "off".

At first, I thought it was just the fact that Liadrin had been given a new haircut. Seriously, the first thing I did after watching the cinematic for the first time was google pictures of Liadrin's current player model, because I kept thinking "She didn't always have a tight braid, did she?" - and no, she did indeed not; they are giving her a new haircut for Midnight which will be reflected on her in-game model as well.

However, when looking around to find out whether anyone else had the same reaction, I actually found a lot of complaints about the trailer's visuals, which I believe is a first. In the past, even if players hated a trailer for what it conveyed, it was pretty much universally agreed that it was still impeccably animated at least. Not with this one! I don't think all the criticisms are necessarily equally valid, but let's just say that after people pointed out that Liadrin in this looks more like the Elven Hero from Elder Scrolls Online or Tauriel from the Hobbit movies than a Warcraft elf, I haven't been able to unsee that.

After comparing to the Battle for Azeroth trailer (which does feature a similar situation including a city siege), I also found it noticeable how many unique characters were featured in the BfA cinematic - while Sylvanas and Anduin are the focus, we also get shots of Saurfang, Zekhan and Greymane, as well as a number of different "generic units", from undead archers to dwarven riflemen. In the Midnight trailer, we have exactly three focus characters and everyone else is an indistinguishable melee soldier covered from head to toe in armour like they are a bunch of stormtroopers, which I hadn't really picked out before.

I think the biggest thing though is that the pacing/scripting feels slightly off and fails to reach a proper climax. I'd say it's fine for most of the cinematic actually, but when Liadrin returns with the help from the Sunwell it ends too quickly without letting us fully feel the triumph, while also just getting plain confusing because the help are also just a bunch of armoured mooks. I've looked around online and even the most passionate lore nerds are unsure of who these are actually supposed to be (though there are seemingly a million theories, from Guardians of the Ancient Kings to the Army of Light to the Arathi to representations of us, the players).

The gameplay reveals suffered from a similar mix of "well, we knew that was coming" and muddled messaging. Yes, housing is a big deal, but we've known about that for almost a year, and there's been a constant drip-feed of more details since then. You can't expect people to suddenly gasp and be super-excited about hearing the exact same thing again.

I also used to think it was kind of funny how they'd include things like "level cap increase" or "new dungeons" as major expansion features to be excited about, but this time they didn't and it was actually kind of confusing. I saw people ask questions like "Will there actually be a level increase this time?" (yes) and only later found out all kinds of interesting stuff that they didn't actually put into the features trailer, such as that Valeera Sanguinar will be the new delve companion or the major changes coming to transmog (huge!).

My personal takeaway is simply that Midnight will continue the War Within, which was kind of what we knew was going to happen. I'll be happy to buy it because I'm enjoying my time in retail right now, but I'm not sure it really delivered in the hype department the way these expansion announcements are usually expected to.