Three Worlds of Warcraft

I continue to be fascinated by the community dynamics around WoW Forever.

Were players of modern WoW worried about the future of their game when Classic first came out? I don't really know because I was paying little attention to it at the time, but whenever I did hear people talk about what was going on in retail during those years, Final Fantasy XIV seemed to be considered the more dangerous competition.

If there ever was any worry about Classic taking away interest and development resources from modern WoW, it seemed to dissipate fast. For several years, my experience moving through different WoW spaces was that players of modern WoW usually cared so little about Classic that they tended to forget it even exists, while Classic players didn't really care about what was going on in the modern game either. (Though if prompted to have an opinion, the latter were much more likely to be hostile towards the other game than the former.) Modern and Classic WoW were very obviously two very different MMOs with different audiences.

With WoW Forever appearing as a third pillar in the middle, things look very different though.

At least the fact that Blizzard has been updating the WoW website and the Battle.net launcher to split WoW into Midnight, Forever and Classic indicates that Classic is meant to stick around, even if players are understandably frustrated about the complete lack of communication about the future of the MoP Classic and anniversary servers. Classic will persist in some form, but the details are fuzzy.

The reason that there isn't more outrage about the lack of news right now is that the vast majority of Classic players are currently too busy being excited about Forever. They have a lot of criticisms about how this or that isn't "classic enough" (some reasonable, some less so), and I suspect that a certain percentage of them will be happy to turn their attention back to regular Classic in a few months time, but for the time being, Classic+ is here and the new hotness. This was to be expected.

What surprised me more was the level of interest from retail players. I mean, I never thought that Classic+ would be completely uninteresting to all retail players - not everyone playing modern WoW raids or runs Mythic+; there's still also a casual player base that just likes to putter about, quest and explore the world, and why would those players not also want to explore WoW Forever? Makes perfect sense.

But I've also seen a fair amount of outright jealousy and seeming fear that WoW Forever is meant to replace original WoW as the "main" game. I do kind of get the gut reaction behind that, not least because WoW has never had to take a backseat to another game the way it did at this BlizzCon. While I haven't watched most of them myself, I also heard that the panels about modern WoW were kind of underwhelming this time around. (I did see a clip where people were booing the dungeon selection announced for Midnight Season 3 - yikes.) So from that angle, a certain degree of sour grapes is understandable.

Some of the more extreme takes have been kind of funny though, like when people think Forever is going to mean certain doom for retail WoW. I say this as a SWTOR player, someone who's seen an MMO suffer actual public failure, as well as having people predict its death at least once a year for the past one and a half decades. Meanwhile WoW is printing so much money that they are actively branching out, but somehow that's supposed to be a bad sign? Come on.

Still, it's going to be interesting to see how the dynamics between the different modes will play out in the long run. For now, all eyes are on Forever, and its launch in a little over a month is bound to be huge. While I think its main target audience is lapsed players, both Classic and retail audiences will want to dip their toes in as well. After a few weeks to months, I expect things to fall off as players return to their usual haunts or just get bored. I suspect that this will be when Blizzard suddenly announces Wrath of the Lich King Classic for the anniversary servers and shines a spotlight on what's coming next for Midnight again. As long as some version of WoW keeps enough people's attention to bolster the overall sub count, it's probably all good.

But it'll certainly be interesting to see whether WoW Forever turns into an unexpected juggernaut or just an uncomfortable middle ground between different game modes that doesn't quite appeal to mass audiences. There are certainly risks there, but I'm extremely curious to find out.

One More for Sausages!

Let's take a momentary break from all the excitement about WoW Forever to talk about... Brewfest. I've repeatedly said on this blog that I often forget about WoW's in-game holidays nowadays, but sometimes when I do remember them, I end up being positively surprised.

So when I noticed the other day that Brewfest had come around again, I went "hmm..." - Brewfest has never been among my favourites as I don't drink in real life, but at the same time it had been so long since I last checked it out, I figured a lot must have changed since then and that it would surely be worth at least a quick look.

And indeed it was! Good old ram racing was still a thing (though I needed a bit of a refresher on the best way to do it) but there were quite a few quests that were new to me as well, such as two that mentioned dracthyr, which made me think they must've been from Dragonflight, but apparently they were only added in War Within last year.

At the full hour all hell suddenly broke loose and an event reminiscent of the Earthen theatre "broke out", with players signing up to gather ingredients, prepare food and drink, or serve the former to revellers in the area. It was delightful! The only slight disappointment I had on later revisits was that the "optimal" strategy to maximise the score seems to be to sign up to just gather lots of cooking ingredients without actually cooking and serving them... not that this stopped me from still doing the latter for fun.

However, the best thing to me was the "Brewfest Chowdown" sausage eating contest, apparently added in BfA. I had actually seen references to this before but had thought that it was just a joke, not a real thing. It's basically a little mini game that requires a total of four people to chomp down plates of sausages as quickly as possible. There are no achievements for this or even a daily quest; the only possible reward to earn is a toy that you can acquire after winning first place five times.

At first I was honestly a bit confused. So this is... a group thing? And there's no automated group finding for it? How do you get other people to join you? However, I found one guy in the manual group finder eventually and got my first go at the game this way, which ended up being just too funny to me. Later I just sat down in one of the chairs by myself and /yelled at people in the vicinity to come eat sausages with me. I haven't talked this much to randoms in the open world in modern WoW in ages. When my character was too full and had to sit out, I'd happily watch other people go as well and spectate while whooping and cheering for them. What a silly little activity to add just for fun. Once again, I'm positively surprised by a modern holiday event.

 

Final Pre-BlizzCon Thoughts

We're a week away from BlizzCon now, and I don't think I've ever looked forward to it with this much anticipation. I've always enjoyed the spectacle and the big announcements - even in the years when I wasn't playing WoW, I still had a look at the trailers they released every year. And while 2017's WoW Classic announcement was probably the single most exciting piece of news I've ever gotten out of BlizzCon, most of us weren't looking forward to that one at the time, because we weren't really expecting it.

This time, it feels like the Classic community has been holding its breath waiting for what's to come for a long time. Some of us only for a few months, some for years. Whatever the truth is, we'll find out next Saturday. Please, no more "this is what Classic+ should do" videos in my YouTube feed. And give the people in the WoW Classic subreddit something real to talk about, instead of them trying to wring deeper meaning out of things like the Blizzard store changing its CSS.

Worst case, even if Camelot turns out to be a bit of a bust, I'm hoping we'll also find out more about the future of other modes of Classic soon after (even if that stuff doesn't make the big announcements). As I wrote back in June, I have a lot more questions on that front to which I'd like to get answers.

Interestingly, retail is less clear in terms of what announcements to expect this time. I have no doubt that there'll be some, but it feels a bit early to start hyping The Last Titan -  Midnight's only been out for six months! In the past, with new expansions coming out every two years, the annual hype cycle would basically alternate between the actual release of an expansion and announcing the next one about a year in advance, but since they've been trying to make an eighteen month cycle happen with the Worldsoul Saga, it kind of complicates things.

The increased focus on story and the fact that the Worldsoul Saga is meant to be a trilogy also means that it would make no sense to focus on whatever's going to happen in the final part when we don't even know yet how Midnight is going to end. Maybe they'll go for several mid-sized announcements instead: what's coming in 12.2, what's the next Remix going to be, maybe just a teaser for Last Titan, giving us glimpses of the revamped Northrend or showing us what Iridikron has been up to.

The Remix question is probably the most fun thing to speculate about on the retail front. I was originally thinking Wrath of the Lich King to get us in the mood for Last Titan, but considering that the anniversary servers are also supposed to continue into Wrath Classic next year, that might be a bit too much Northrend at once? Most people seem to think that a more modern expansion like BfA or Shadowlands is more likely, usually because they see Remixes less as a nostalgia trip and more as an opportunity to do a lot of item collecting in a short period of time, and apparently both of these had a lot of collectibles that people loathe to go back for in the regular game. We'll see.

And of course, there's the off-chance that they announce something else Warcraft-related that's not about WoW itself. The timeline from the purported leak discussed a few months ago included a Warcraft RTS, an anime and an Arthas ARPG, but even if these projects are real, the earliest any of these were meant to be released was late 2028, so it might still be too soon to talk them up.

Hope You Like Snakes

Midnight got its first major patch almost two weeks ago now, and I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about it.

I've enjoyed what I've seen of the story so far, but now I'm once again in dodgeball mode trying not to have the post-raid ending spoiled for me while Blizzard withholds story mode for another week and everyone who raids or is happy to just watch the raid-end cinematic on YouTube with no context is mindlessly posting spoilers left and right.

In general, patch 12.1 is all about snakes and venom (green goo). I've rarely seen a patch that is this hyper-focused on its main theme - maybe Undermine and goblins, but I think even that didn't go in quite this hard. Everything is about snakes here: The new island is inhabited by snake people and there are even ore nodes that erupt into fountains of green goo. The new delve variants are snake-themed, the new prey bosses are snake people, the new nemesis is a snake guy. Snakes, snakes, everywhere! I feel kind of bad for anyone who hates snakes or has a phobia of them.

I love that the Coiled Isle is immediately off the coast of Zul'Aman and can be flown to directly with no loading screens. I tried to fly there early in the expansion just to be ejected, but was immediately intrigued by that, so I'm happy that we actually get to explore it now.

As for the activities on the island itself, I'm unsure whether I like them or not. You get a quest early on to do three "cursed surges" but for a long time the husband and I couldn't even figure out what they were. Turns out they are short zerg events that spawn once every 45 minutes at different locations around the island, so they are very easy to miss if you don't already know what you're looking for.

The biggest activity hub is Atal'Utek, the giant vault under the island, and I've got to admit my first impression of that was that I found it extremely overwhelming, with all the different map markers and always a timer counting down to something or other. You can only use your ground mount, but there are some neat ways to get around more quickly beyond that; you just need to be good at figuring out how to best use them, which I definitely haven't yet. This week, there was a bit where I was supposed to go up a level to reach an objective so I ran to one of those feathers that throw you up into the air, but on the way I aggroed several mobs so I couldn't click on it because I kept getting interrupted. It took me a while to kill them all, and by the time I was able to grab the feather, the objective upstairs had disappeared.

The whole place just makes me feel a bit weird. There is definitely something fun about joining a zerg and running from one objective to the next like a crazy person, but the mob density is also quite high and if you want to go in a different direction than wherever the zerg currently is, it can be tedious. For some reason I also really dislike descending down underground through these long tunnels where you can only use your ground mount (even if you're given a speed boost while in there). Have I finally reached my limit for underground zones? I've been worried about any major content updates putting us in caves since at least Dragonflight, but they were never as oppressive as I feared. I originally had no concerns about these vaults, but they make me feel weirdly penned in and I don't currently enjoy going there. We'll see whether I'll adjust.

In general, the arrival of the patch has also made me feel a bit melancholy. New content should be a reason to be excited, but I'd just gotten a bunch of my alts into a place where I was happy with them and I was starting to think about some alternative projects, but here we are back to the next gear reset and grinding time. I know I don't have to engage with that... but the game definitely makes me feel like I should, and it just feels a bit bad. I don't think I will ever grow to like modern WoW's seasonal model, even if I've learned to tolerate it for the most part.

A Second Look at Housing

For all the fun I've been having with Midnight, its main new feature, player housing, has largely fallen flat for me. I made a few posts in which I talked about why, and then I moved on, because I'd rather focus on the many things that I have been enjoying.

However, I did want to use the release of 12.1 as an opportunity to take another look at housing and how it's been coming along. To be clear, nothing has been done to address the major criticisms I had with the system, but my opinions on some things have at least become a bit more nuanced.

For example, while I still don't care much about decorating, I did eventually go and decorate my house a little bit. I do enjoy collecting decorations regardless of whether I plan to use them or not - I'm the same in SWTOR; there's just something satisfying about claiming new decos and adding them to my stash. And after accumulating a certain number in WoW, it felt only natural to actually place at least a few of them. It's nothing exciting, just a basic house with some simple furniture, but I have started to feel at least a little bit of a connection to it. Even though I've reached housing level 10 from my various housing-related activities, I've stuck to the single room because I don't like the Tardis aspect of the whole thing and this way my sense of how warped the whole house is isn't too bad at least.

I do visit the neighbourhood at least once a week because in a typical case of Blizzard logic, after being extremely shy about giving the houses any utility whatsoever because they didn't want anyone to feel "forced" to use them, they also added a repeatable quest that rewards currency to gear up and requires you to go to your neighbourhood and do some simple task there every week, such as helping someone find some lost animals. It's just funny to me.

I will say that I really like the variant of the quest that asks you to attend a gathering of at least five players in a player house, because it's served as an opportunity for everyone in the guild to take turns visiting other people's houses, and there are nice spontaneous random groupings for it as well. One week when I couldn't get it done with guildies, I ended up joining a party via the group finder where someone was showing off their insanely detailed wizard tower interior - I quite enjoyed hanging around for a bit and having a look around. I also took a screenshot of my character sitting in their custom-made bathroom.

 

In general I do appreciate how much joy people who really like building and decorating purely for the sake of it get out of the system. Nobody in my immediate circle of friends is really into it, but I don't need to cast my net very wide on social media to come across players who are having an absolute blast with their house. Just take a look at the WoW Housing subreddit and get ready for your jaw to drop. I do at least get a bit of happiness by association out of that.

Oh, and remember endeavours? It did indeed not take long for Blizzard to nerf the requirements for public neighbourhoods to complete their endeavours, but the devs basically swung so hard the other way that they now basically seem to complete themselves. I just have to remember to check in at some point to collect my free housing coupons.

I do like how they make the neighbourhood look a bit different when your visitors change, though the randomisation aspect of that may still need some work. While some people were complaining that they'd already seen all the available endeavours and were now bored of them, the Grummels camped out in my public neighbourhood for three months in a row, meaning I didn't get to see anything else for a quarter of the year. When the system finally switched to Ethereals I had some fun with the jumping puzzle they added, and I'm kinda enjoying the Amani-themed one that's going on right now as well. The weird circular gift-giving thing with Griftah made my head spin a little but I was proud that I was able to figure out all the relevant neighbourhood NPCs organically. 

I reckon overall, housing is probably shaping up to be a success for Blizzard - the "usage" metrics must be decent thanks to the weekly quest for gear rewards, and I'm sure all the decor they've added to the shop has made for some nice supplementary income for the game. Housing enthusiasts in MMOs always seem to be quite happy to spend on the cash shop without complaining too much.

My Midnight Season 1

As we're approaching patch 12.1 and with it the start of Midnight's second season, I wanted to take a moment to reflect a bit on Season 1.

My primary activity for gearing have of course been delves, and those have been fun. I already talked a bit about it previously, but I've basically been happy with everything Blizzard has adjusted about delves in Midnight. I got Valeera to her current level cap in no time, and she already feels much better tuned than Brann ever was. Her only weakness are those Spellshield Collaborators in the Darkway, which seem to be capable of reflecting her Mandate of Sacred Death and basically cause her to get one-shot randomly if you don't kill them quickly enough.

One thing I hadn't mentioned yet in previous posts is how much better tuned the delving experience has become as a healer. I did a fair few delves as a healer in War Within, but one thing that always put me off was how incredibly slow it was, even while wearing gear that was better than the drops you could get within the delve itself and with Brann fully maxed out. Boss fights were particularly bad, and I got into the habit of changing my companion from tank to dps for the last fight to speed things up, yet that final boss still tended to remain a 5+ minute slog on tier 11. In Midnight I followed the same strategy early on, but I quickly found that Valeera's dps had improved so much compared to Brann's that I could leave her as tank and we'd still kill any end boss in decent time. That's really appreciated.

Also, it feels a bit weird admitting it, but Blizzard have been very good at stringing me along all season to keep me playing for longer. I was "done" with basic delve rewards months ago, but they kept adding either reasons to re-run them or other/similar content (like the ritual sites) and I went along with it. I've only really been taking a bit of a step back for these last two weeks of the season.

I do think there's a risk of burnout if they keep trying the same trick in upcoming seasons. 

The big surprise this season, however, was that I actually ended up doing some Mythic+ again. You might recall that I decided to nope out of M+ after War Within Season 1, and I had no plans to get back into it since then. And I didn't... really, but what happened was that our guild group was somewhat diminished at the start of Midnight, and my husband was still part of it, so I naturally got pulled in as a backfill to make sure they could keep running. Part of it was that I was obviously an easy person to ask, the other part was that due to my enthusiasm for delving, I had reasonably geared characters of every role at a time when others were still struggling to gear their main.

So I ended up running some M+ in all three roles, though the vast majority of it happened on my hunter - which again, was a surprise considering that dps are usually not the role that's hardest to find. In fact, she ended up doing so much backfilling that by the end of what was declared our last run as a group, she was only a single-digit number away from 2500 rating. I hadn't really cared about it before, but that was so close that it seemed a waste not to take that last step. A more experienced acquaintance who plays tank agreed to take me through the one dungeon I was still missing for rating (Pit of Saron), which eventually resulted in me getting Keystone Hero for the first time, in a season when I wasn't even trying to play M+ at all.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that. There was a lot of talk about how Midnight Season 1 was one of the easiest M+ seasons ever, and my own experience seemed to bear that out in so far as our little group had never been able to reliably clear +10s before (and we even went a little higher than that this time!). At the same time, because of the irregular nature of my backfilling (even if it ended up adding up to a lot of runs in total at the end) meant that I never felt particularly engaged with the system. I couldn't really give you my detailed thoughts on all the dungeons as I didn't run some of them on mythic more than once or twice.

As far as intra group tension goes, which had been the main reason I stopped in War Within: as dps it was easier to just hang back and let people do whatever, and likewise nobody seemed to care that much what I was doing. When I had been tanking there had always been a lot of annoying backseat driving that slowly drove me up the wall.

That said, I still don't know whether I'd necessarily want to do more of this again. In some ways it was good fun, but other times I did feel a bit stressed by the hyperfocus that M+ requires for thirty minutes straight. I don't mind that kind of intense activity as a one-off once a week, but every run? Meh. I guess points go to Blizzard for being able to add me to their metrics this season.

My warrior tank's final M+ scorecard

My hunter's final M+ scorecard

My holy priest's final M+ scorecard

Alas, Poor Decor Duels

In unexpected news, Blizzard announced on Tuesday that Decor Duels will be going away with the launch of patch 12.1 in August. They were only added in April, as one of the new side activities to do in patch 12.0.5. I did say at the time that they were fine but that I could've done without them, however a few weeks later, I randomly got really into them and ground out enough matches to get all the achievements and buy all the cosmetic rewards, including the mount. I would've bought the decorations too, except that the disguised decor vendor was too well disguised for me and I didn't realise it existed.

What do you mean, I was supposed to talk to the chair? 

So the feature getting removed now shouldn't really affect me, but I've got to say I'm still somewhat dismayed. It was a fun little mini game, and most importantly I don't think Blizzard actually ever announced it as a limited-time event (until this recent shutdown notice). Maybe it was always meant to be, as its achievements sit under the "events" category of the achievement panel, but it certainly wasn't obvious. In fact, when there were conversations at 12.0.5's launch about how Blizzard was maybe trying to push out too much content too fast, one of the counter arguments I heard was that there can never be too much content and there's no need to stress about any of it because it's all evergreen stuff that's going to hang around forever and you can always do it later. That argument sure has aged like milk!

I've also heard speculation that maybe Blizzard were thinking about keeping it around originally but ultimately decided to phase it out because queue times were getting too long. Which sounds reasonable on the surface except that apparently plenty of old queueable content that rarely pops is still around, such as warfronts from BfA (not that I've ever done one of those). If queues are something the devs are worried about, there are really other things they should fix first.

In fact, let me go off on a little tangent here for a moment: After my Decor Duel spree, I decided I might as well go back to doing a bit of casual normal PvP, like I'd done at the start of the expansion. Just whatever the weekly quest for battlegrounds told me to do each week - and it turned out to be largely impossible because nothing would pop. I did eventually get a few epic battlegrounds done on weekends, but I've not seen a single one of the weekly PvP brawls for example, even after hours and hours of queueing.

I started googling what was going on and found out that there are apparently separate queues for "newbies" and "veterans" and everyone with an honour level of less than 30 counts as a newbie. Since I did most of my PvPing back in the days before they introduced the current honour level system, my level in it is only 11... and apparently the newbie queues rarely pop, creating a catch 22 where you can't PvP regularly until you're honour 30, but you can't get to honour 30 because you can't get into any matches. There's a queue problem you should be worrying about, Blizz, not about Decor Duels taking fifteen minutes to pop! Honestly, this whole situation was pretty shocking to me because I always used to think of WoW as the game that could make queues pop for everything at any time. How the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, back to Decor Duels. I decided to do a few more matches before they're going away, just for fun and to also buy the decos I'd missed until now. Fortunately they are much cheaper than the cosmetics were, plus coin gains have been doubled for the remaining duration of the event.

I've seen people criticise the mode as "not good for a prop hunt" while drawing comparisons to how other games handle their own versions of the same thing. I can't judge that because Decor Duels have been my first and only experience with a prop hunt, but I really quite enjoyed the mode. By the time I got into it, queues had already gotten a lot quieter, and it was interesting to see how a sort of meta was evolving from match to match.

The first time I saw a hider get revealed on one of the floating platforms at the end of a match for example, my jaw dropped - were they cheating? How could you get up there? Naturally, the next time it was my turn to hide I made a point of finding out how to get up there, and it was where I successfully managed to remain unfound for the rest of a match myself. But then people caught on to that being a popular strategy, and a seeker would leap up there almost first thing every match. It was always interesting to see others succeed in new hiding places that I'd never even considered. 

With the announcement of the impending shutdown, people's FOMO receptors have been activated and queues are back to being almost instant. A lot of the players coming in now have clearly not played before or very little, so the meta is all over the place again, especially since Blizzard also made changes to make seeking harder and hiding easier, so that's kind of fun in its own way. I can personally recommend at least checking it out while it's still around (if you haven't yet done so).

A Peculiar Casual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War Within Recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Is Fishing So Weird Now?

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

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

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

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

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

Common:

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

Uncommon:

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

Rare:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zones of Midnight

Back in November 2024, I wrote a post called "The Zones of The War Within", in which I shared my thoughts about the previous expansion's environments. It didn't get any comments, but it was one of those posts that felt really good to write because my sentiments about those zones were very strong and it was nice to get them out of my head. Unsurprisingly, I have the urge to do the same for Midnight.

Like last time, it took a bit to get here largely because the husband and I were very slow to complete the last few side quests (which I also wanted to include in my assessment). We breezed through the first three zones in what felt like no time, but then we got all caught up in gear and achievement grinding, so it took us a very long time to go back and finish up Voidstorm. (We LOLed when we found out that we really should've clicked the research console there months ago. Why did that quest not have a purple triangle?)

Anyway, it's done now, so here are my thoughts:

Eversong Woods / Quel'Thalas

This zone and the expansion's capital, the revamped Silvermoon, are without a doubt the crown jewels of Midnight. Look, I don't even feel particularly nostalgic about the original Eversong Woods and Ghostlands (they are alright, but not among my favourites), but this zone was updated with so much love and to such gorgeous results, it makes me really excited to see what the environmental artists will end up doing with Northrend for The Last Titan.

There's a video on the official WoW channel about what happened behind the scenes for this update to happen and I can only recommend it. It also taught me how I can tell while flying whether I'm accidentally entering the Horde area!

Quest-wise, I like how the side quests give us a glimpse into what life in Quel'Thalas is like nowadays and how the blood elves have evolved over the years. There's still a bit of that old arrogance but there's also a genuine desire for a fresh start and appreciation for the fact that a ravaged land that was thought to be destroyed forever has slowly been healing after all.

The only even slightly negative thing I have to say (if you want to take it that way) is that you can still tell that these zones weren't originally designed with flying in mind. This means that while flying over Eversong, the view largely consists of low forest canopy and not much else, and Silvermoon is still as awkward to navigate as it was back in the day. The new central plaza and its surroundings are alright because they are a lot more open, but in general it's not one of my favourite capitals in terms of ease of use.

Zul'Aman

What blew me away about this zone was just how big it is. I kinda figured that the original Zul'Aman by itself wouldn't cover enough ground to make for a proper modern WoW zone and that they might have to add to it, but even so the original area (now called Atal'Aman) is actually only a tiny part of the Midnight zone. It was awe-inspiring to me how much and how beautifully the zone designers expanded on that, with all those mountains and tall trees. I'm partial towards lush green zones, so this one's right up my alley in that regard. The music is catchy too. (Once while flying over Atal'Aman I started to sing along with the choral bit and the husband immediately told me off for my bad singing. "But you still recognised it!" I said.)

Story-wise, I was generally happy with the troll stuff, though they do seem to have an above-average number of severely dysfunctional families over there...

The only (again) slight downside to doing anything in this zone is that due to Harandar and Voidstorm having portals in the capital, business in Zul'Aman requires the biggest travel times in the expansion right now. I still like going there though because it's worth it.

Also, I was immediately intrigued by the mysterious island across the sea to the east that you currently can't access, and rumour has it that it will be the point one patch zone. I hope that's true. 

Harandar

Hardandar, weirdly, turned out to be the biggest letdown of the expansion for me so far. It's visually beautiful for sure, but the way they handled its introduction and story kind of diminished the experience in my opinion.

There was datamining back in War Within that revealed that apparently Harandar was originally meant to be a patch zone for that expansion and would've been accessed via the roots in Azj-Kahet - and honestly, I wish they had still introduced it like that in Midnight, because descending deep into the earth like that would've felt very cool. As it is, Orweyna just pops a portal out of the ground and off you go, which results in Harandar feeling like it's not a real place on or inside Azeroth. Sure, there's all these world tree roots coming from the ceiling, but without any real sense of place they don't feel "real" to me somehow.

There's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like an underground zone and everyone's really blasé about that. It's like the devs saw how much everyone loved Hallowfall (where the fact that there was a fake sun in the "sky" was a big source of wonder and a notable plot point) and decided that they could just repeat the same thing with any other underground zone without explanation. Why does the whole zone feel like it's just floating in space? Why is it so bright? Nobody seems to know or care. If you do the Haranir lore quests, there is one eventually that explains that it used to be dark after the goddess' departure and then one day light magically appeared, but that's a rather weak explanation in my book.

The Haranir in general feel like the opposite of the Earthen to me - I expected the latter to be quite boring but they actually ended up being interesting and charming. The Haranir I thought would be quite interesting based on what we saw of them in War Within - how extremely reclusive they were, to the point that Orweyna and Hannan made themselves outcasts by just venturing outside their home and talking to other people. But then in Midnight they are just a little unfriendly towards strangers for all of five minutes and then everyone gets along just fine anyway.

Aside from their adorable druid forms, everything about the Haranir just feels so generic. My husband, who's notoriously bad at remembering fantasy names, kept calling them "the other trolls" when we first worked our way through the zone because to him they were just a slight variation of what we'd just gone through in Zul'Aman, and he sadly had a point.

(Also, one more minor thing, but we had this whole emotional cut scene in War Within when Orweyna says goodbye to Hannan, and then we return to Harandar and they barely talk to each other and instead she seems to have an old crush on some other guy suddenly? What the heck was up with that?) 

Voidstorm

Midnight's (current) final zone is one I feel kind of "eh" about, I think largely because I'm a bit tired of purple environments. Maybe I would've liked it more if we hadn't just finished up War Within on K'aresh, which was also purple and rocky. The two zones are by no means identical, and the environmental designers clearly did their best to still give the Voidstorm a unique look - I do like the chasms with the red hues for example, they bring blood to mind and add to the eerie atmosphere. Still, overall I just don't find it that appealing.

I'll say that I did enjoy the side quests and how they drove home that everyone in this zone basically becomes either vicious or depressed, including the back story of how it was once a thriving planet that was destroyed by one of its own people.

Also, like with Harandar. I feel like this zone might've benefitted from having a more connected introduction. Personally I think we should've just flown straight into the storm above the Sunwell during our first attack instead of all that faffing around with building a portal! I didn't think it detracted as much here though, because Voidstorm is on another planet so it was always going to involve teleporting at some point.

---

Overall WoW's team of environmental designers continues to deliver outstanding work as always, but I've got to admit that after the lengths Blizzard went to in Dragonflight and early War Within to make the world cohesive and avoid loading screens, it's felt a bit jarring to have two out of this expansion's four launch zones be hidden behind portals with no other way to access them. To me at least it makes the world of Midnight feel somewhat smaller than the last two expansions, even though I have no doubt that in terms of overall landmass built there's little to no difference.

Why I Like Midnight Professions

Back in March I wrote about how after the initial levelling frenzy that followed Midnight's release, I ended up turning my attention towards professions. This is an interest that hasn't dropped off since then. Sure, I also do other content such as delves, but the first thing I do after each Wednesday's reset is log into my (currently) seven profession alts and do their weekly profession quests. I didn't think too much about that at first, but after a few months of doing it, it does seem like I'm rather in the minority in enjoying the profession system this much.

Flying across Eversong in search of copper, like I do every week 

I hesitate to put too much stock into the WoW subreddit because it's hardly representative of the player base as a whole, but it does tend to give at least vague insights into what a lot of players are happy or unhappy about at any given time. The profession system seems to be fairly solidly in the latter category, with threads decrying its terribleness receiving thousands of upvotes, while one I found that said it was great was sitting at a rating of zero, with over a hundred disagreeing comments.

After a bit of reflecting, I think the reasons I've come to like the current iteration of the profession system so much and why so many people on reddit seem to hate it are probably the same: it's honestly more reminiscent of the way a lot of things worked in Classic than modern retail's general design philosophy.

I suppose you could argue that the way the acquisition of knowledge points is time-gated is very un-Classic-like and you wouldn't be wrong about that, but I'm less talking about the nitty gritty details and more about the overall vibe of the system.

One part is that you are forced to make choices about what to prioritise that you can't take back. Sure, eventually you'll be able to fill out all the profession skill trees if you grind long enough, but if you pick one tree early on and then wish you'd chosen another one instead - tough luck, no resets. (Though I seem to remember that they are going to implement a once-per-expansion reset opportunity or something.)

On my tailor, I made a similar mistake as the guy who wrote the second post I linked above, specialising into profession equipment at first, only to find out that the epic pieces I wanted to craft all required me to have dozens and dozens of bolts of a special rare cloth that I couldn't even loot until I'd gone halfway down a completely different skill tree - that sucked, and is one of the reasons my tailoring is one of the professions on which I'm still more behind than some others.

However, I don't feel like I'm in a race and my error is something that will be rectified over time, which brings me to another big "Classic-like" positive about professions from my point of view: that the work you invest into them isn't tied to the whole seasonal cycle that constantly obsoletes your gear every major patch. (Let me knock on wood and hope that Blizzard has no plans to change this.) It's very grindy and you have to keep coming back to it week after week, but the benefits remain and accumulate over time.

Thanks to the spark system, crafted gear is relevant each new season without you necessarily needing to learn a lot of new recipes, so if you put the time into learning how to craft gear for every armour slot under the sun - that will still be useful as the expansion progresses! Same with gathering professions, where the benefits of grinding out those knowledge points are very noticeable - when I started on my blacksmithing in Midnight, I was constantly short on copper (another callback to Classic if I've ever seen one) and the output of each mining node felt absolutely anaemic, with many of them only yielding one piece at a time when I needed dozens to create a single alloy bar. But as I've filled out those skill trees and the yield of each type of node has increased, I could feel the pain easing, and now it actually feels like I'm already in a pretty good place in terms of raw materials, helped by the way the weekly knowledge point unlocks encourage me to keep gathering and not just stop the moment I have enough for my current project.

It's basically slow and grindy but rewards you in a way that is consistently useful throughout the expansion and to some degree even past it, now that housing exists and some decor items can only be crafted. A few months ago I levelled Cataclysm blacksmithing and now I can make pitchforks - not the most popular thing ever, and also only tangentially related to the new crafting system in particular, but it's something, and it's a big contrast to the way any gear you earn will be worse than a random world quest item by the time the point one patch hits.

I wonder if this old-school feel of the post-Dragonflight profession system was an intentional decision to bring a bit of classic flavour back to retail and appeal to different player types, or whether the devs will eventually decide that it was an accident that needs to be rectified and streamlined, considering how much pushback there has been against the way things work from more entrenched retail players.

Drinking from the (Buggy) Content Hose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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