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.

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. 

Battlefield: Barrens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The WoD Classic Question

"Will we get Warlords of Draenor Classic?" is not a question I thought I would ever be asking myself ten years ago. Hell, I didn't think we'd ever be asking it five years ago. WoW Classic transitioning into Burning Crusade Classic seemed natural. Following that up with Wrath Classic was a no-brainer. Cataclysm Classic already raised some eyebrows, because can you really call any expansion that takes place after the destruction of the old world "classic"? Anyone having any interest in MoP Classic seemed even more unlikely considering the weak reception MoP had during its first run, not to mention that retail had just had the Mists of Pandaria Remix event. And yet here we are, wondering whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be next.

I've tried to compile a list of factual pros and cons for why things could go either way:

Yes, we will get WoD Classic:

• It's a relatively low effort option. Not no effort, as it's still work to reinstate the way WoD worked in the modern Classic client, but at least Blizzard wouldn't need to expend any creative energy on coming up with anything new.
• There are still hundreds of thousands of players playing on the progressive Classic realms, numbers that many smaller MMOs would be envious of. You don't hear about them much, but we can see from activity data that they exist and are playing, which they presumably wouldn't do if they weren't enjoying themselves. MoP Classic as a whole seems to be a prime example of a quiet majority that just gets on with things and that you never hear about because they are simply content. That should be enough incentive for Blizzard to keep the good times (and people's subscriptions) rolling.
• We know that Blizzard is at least considering WoD Classic, because as part of a survey sent out around the middle of last year, they asked players where they'd want go play after MoP Classic ends. WoD Classic was one of the options, with some of the possible alternatives being a merge into retail, a MoP era realm or a transition back into a previous expansion (no idea how that would even work).

No, we won't get WoD Classic:

• From the outside, it would be a bad look. WoD is still considered one of WoW's worst expansions. (No longer the worst thanks to Shadowlands, but definitely in the bottom three.) While there is an audience that would like to revisit it for sure, the more outspoken parts of the WoW community all look down on the progressive Classic servers at this point. Most of the Classic community no longer considers them "classic enough", while they are obviously still more than a decade removed from retail as well. Cataclysm Classic already got a pretty lukewarm reception at BlizzCon 2023; I can't imagine anyone cheering for a WoD Classic if it was to be announced at BlizzCon this year. The devs must know that it would be terrible PR to potentially announce a Classic expansion and get booed, so with that in mind, they shouldn't do it. (If they go ahead with it, the announcement better be low-key and they damn well need to make sure that there'll be some other major Classic news to overshadow it.)
• While the old world has already been replaced with the Cataclysm revamp in Cata Classic, at least MoP Classic still has the old character models, right? WoD Classic would take another step closer towards retail by introducing the new character models (if we want to stay in sync with how things went during the original run). The closer the two versions get in terms of features, the less it feels like there's a point to still having this separate progression branch.
• Even if there's still a significant number of people playing MoP Classic, it's undeniably a branch of Classic that's in decline. New or returning players interested in Classic are far more likely to want to check out the anniversary servers rather than grind through 85 levels of an already disjointed levelling experience to start adventuring in Pandaland, and this is only going to get worse if more levels get added. On the dev side, Blizzard also seems to have cut back on the amount of attention they've given progressive Classic, and after the impeccably built original Classic launched in 2019, each subsequent expansion has been buggier and buggier. There was a post on the WoW subreddit three days ago about how Throne of Thunder in MoP Classic has been out for three months and still almost every single boss in there is bugged in some way.
• I know I cited last year's survey in the "yes" column already, but to be honest, you could also interpret it as a sign pointing towards no, considering that the relevant poll question had seven different options, only one of which was WoD Classic, and even that one said "if it becomes available" - Blizzard did not want to lock themselves into going down that route!

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I think there are compelling arguments for either course of action at this point, and I suspect that what will tip the scales for Blizzard will depend a lot on their internal metrics for MoP Classic, including the results of that survey.

Personally, I would actually check out WoD Classic on my hunter if it does come out, simply because WoD is one of those expansions I didn't play back in the day and going back to do some of the content in retail just hasn't been the same. It's definitely more insightful and authentic to do either a Classic or a Remix run. I don't think I'd play it for long, but I'd at least take a look.

On the other hand, I can't say that I'd be sad if they decided to call it quits on the progression servers at this point either, and I would also be fine with my hunter being merged into my retail character stable (or even going back in time to a previous version of Classic I guess, if that somehow becomes a thing).

Running Out of Steam in MoP Classic

I got back into MoP Classic around Christmas one and a half months ago, and while I was initially surprised by how much fun I was having, it looks like my enthusiasm may already be on the decline again.

I got to exalted with the Golden Lotus, saw the relics of the Thunder King get stolen (no surprise there) and got to defend the Vale against a big Mogu incursion with the aid of the Celestials. I'm glad I got to see all of that, but I've found little reason to keep going afterwards. There was a small incentive at least as I picked up a few Skyshards during my time doing dailies in the Vale, and I was always curious what was up with that big hostile cloud serpent that's generally un-attackable (turns out you need 10 Skyshards to dispel the shield, and then it drops a mount on defeat), but the drop rate of the shards is so low, who knows how many months I'd have to keep grinding to get ten.

There are only three or four Tillers with whom I'm not quite best friends yet (can't be long now though), and I'm close to maxing out all my cooking skills as well. Then the only thing left to do on the farm would be to keep planting crops for other Pandaria reputations, which is not as interesting. Plus I learned that apparently things like the plow, sprinkler system etc. all came in with a later patch, and having to till every spot on the farm manually every day is getting a bit tiresome.

I've also been doing the Anglers dailies for a few weeks now, and happened to fish up the Sea Turtle mount on one of these days. I don't have that in retail, so that's another +1 for having this character merged into my retail stable one day I guess.

My enthusiasm for the other factions has been more limited though. I've done a bit of work on the August Celestials, but being sent to a different corner of the continent every day gets old quickly. I also did the Klaxxi dailies for a few days but just didn't enjoy them, even though I think they're a faction with an interesting story. Just never liked the Dread Wastes I guess.

I started the legendary cloak quest chain with Wrathion, another piece of content that's no longer accessible in retail, but I've got to admit I don't find that nearly as interesting as I found exploring the old Vale. It's just so grindy, even if the devs made it a bit easier in Classic by also allowing you to progress certain steps through dungeons, without needing to raid. The first stage felt like it took forever, and then it was immediately on to "earn 1600 valor", ignoring the thousands of valor I'd already ground out previously, which just made me sigh.

I did actually get into the dungeon endgame for a bit and did every dungeon on Celestial difficulty. It took me three runs to realise I was supposed to talk to a Celestial at the start of the run to get a buff, and I only did that after I saw someone complain on reddit about stupid slackers who nerf their whole group by not picking up their buff (oops). It didn't take too long to get the hang of what the different buffs do though, and ultimately the gameplay isn't really that different from heroics.

After my initial experiences with dungeons in MoP Classic were pretty mellow, zoning into any Celestial is full rush-rush mode by this point though. The tank will pretty much always pick up all the trash at once and drag it to the next boss to AoE down. If they die while doing that, they'll blame the healer. If it's after the second boss in Shado-Pan Monastery, it's almost guaranteed to result in a wipe regardless, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. I can just about keep up with the madness most days, but I've got to admit I don't find it very fun.

Curiosity and gear were enough of an incentive at first. The special currency that drops in Celestial dungeons lets you buy pretty high level gear pretty quickly. While I didn't need any of it, it was still nice to grow more powerful, and while doing dailies it was very noticeable when my kill time on a named elite went from several minutes down to a single full skill rotation. At this point I've got 502 gear in most slots though, and while there are more things to buy, such as a goodie bag that drops rare pets and mounts, I just don't care enough about any of that.

At one point I saw a familiar name online - my 2020 guild's Scarab Lord, a fellow hunter. We chatted a bit and he's basically kept playing and raiding all this time, now a member of a guild that has also been around since Classic's launch and that I was friendly with back in the day. He said that if I was feeling lonely, I shouldn't hesitate to give the GM a poke for a guild invite.

I thought very long and hard about this. Part of me was amazed that there was an opportunity here to come back to the game after several years of absence and potentially fit right back into an old and at least somewhat familiar structure. I thought of the potential fun and companionship, and wondered whether I would maybe even want to try attending a casual raid or two. However, ultimately I decided against it. I already have enough going on in SWTOR and other modes of WoW without attempting to put down roots in MoP Classic again. I think I'll be happy to just drop it again in a few weeks to be honest. 

MoP Classic: Still the Better Housing

I expected that I'd be dropping Mists of Pandaria Classic the moment I finished my "Project Vale", but surprisingly, this has not been the case. In fact, I got back into it more vigorously than I'd been playing while just trying to get to level 90.

I think the main reason for that has been the farm. Everything associated with it, from the Tiller reputations and the vegetable-planting mini game to maxing out my cooking skills in all the different Pandaren "ways" is just plain fun to me. It helped to keep me engaged for a few months during my original time in MoP back in 2013/14 and wasn't part of the MoP Remix experience, so it's genuinely been over a decade since I last did all these things and I'm happy to do them again.

After my disappointment with retail's new housing system, it also stood out to me how the farm, to me, still feels like better housing than the new system. The farm is located in a beautiful, central zone and while it uses phasing, you can transition into your personal area without needing to go through a portal or loading screen so it's a very integrated experience. The neighbourhood feels alive with all the different Tillers visiting the Halfhill market throughout the week. And the farming gives you a reason to visit every day and spend a few minutes there, without trying to keep you cooped in all day like the WoD garrisons did. It's the reason I've got my hearthstone set to Halfhill instead of the Shrine of the Seven Stars, even though the latter is where all the portals and vendors are. It feels like home. Comparatively, retail housing allows me to place and arrange my own chairs in a dark box that's an instance inside an instance located nowhere in specific. I know what matters more to me.

Another thing that I've been working on has been the Golden Lotus reputation, because I wanted to see whether raising it would unlock some more quests that no longer exist in retail. And indeed, my first reward for doing all those dailies was to unlock even more dailies. They're still not among my favourite quests, though I did do a double take when Ren Firetongue casually suggested that Anji and Kun Autumnlight may be looking to have a threesome with me. Not something I would've expected from WoW quest dialogue to be honest!

I also unlocked a one-time quest that had me collecting three relics of the Thunder King, with the Golden Lotus deciding that the safest thing to do was to put them all into a single room in the Guo-Lai Halls. There's no way that could possibly go wrong, I'm sure!

Doing all these dailies has been pretty good for my hunter's wallet as I have very few expenses, so her savings have shot up by the thousands. I'm sure it's still nothing compared to someone who's actually played through the last three Classic expansions consistently but it still makes me feel pretty rich. I actually don't think it's as easy to make money just from questing in modern WoW, which is weird when I think about it. I've noticed that throughout the first few expansions, gold rewards from quest completions kept going up in pretty big leaps. In vanilla Classic you get about four gold per quest completed at max level, in BC that doubled to about eight or nine, I think in Wrath it was fifteen? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but the point is that rewards kept going up for several years, and then they just... stopped. Inflation kept going, and there are some quests in retail that give payouts in the hundreds and thousands, but "regular" questing is way less profitable in modern WoW than it used to be. Just something to think about.

The wider endgame in MoP Classic is of course a bit disappointing compared to modern WoW. It's basically dailies, dungeons or raiding, and that's it. I wasn't initially planning to engage with any of that beyond the dailies I'd already chosen to do for other reasons, but at some point I found myself wondering whether I had earned enough reputation with the Golden Lotus to buy a gear upgrade or two, and that quickly led me down a rabbit hole of where else you can get what gear, how crafted gear compares, how the item upgrade system works, trying to figure out what stats I wanted as a hunter in MoP, and more.

So now I've also run all the dungeons on heroic, and today I ran my first three "celestial" dungeons, the "slightly harder" version of heroics that's meant to serve as a replacement for LFR in terms of gearing. I'm not quite sure what to think of those yet. There were a lot of celestial-related fireworks going on that I didn't fully understand, with some coloured circles actually being good to stand in, but in terms of overall feel they didn't seem significantly harder than heroics. (Though there was that one time I got one-shot by some sort of explosion where I'm still not sure what caused it.)

People are definitely not as forgiving as they are in LFR though. In those three runs I was in, there were two vote kicks. I actually voted yes on the first one, because the guy had joined with res sickness, which... yeah, you shouldn't do that (though I wouldn't have initiated a kick myself). The second time someone tried to kick another hunter in the group for the reason "low", which I assume meant dps, but I voted no on that one cause it seemed mean, and it failed. Karma promptly punished me for my solidarity as the same hunter then outrolled me on all the hunter loot that dropped at the end. Oh well.

The Original Vale of Eternal Blossoms

The original Vale of Eternal Blossoms has, strangely, turned out to be WoW's most short-lived and exclusive zone. Some of us may have been sad when the Cataclysm ravaged Darkshore, but at least people had had a chance to play and explore that area in its original state for a full four years. Not to mention that it was eventually brought back via Classic in 2019.

Comparatively, the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was released in September 2012 and only got to hang around for about a year before it was destroyed, with no way to go back. Mists of Pandaria Classic revived it this past summer, but in only a few months time it's scheduled to be destroyed again, which is why I didn't want to miss my chance to have a proper look at it this time around.

I actually played for a few months during Mists of Pandaria's original run, but that was after the Vale had already been ravaged by Garrosh. I actually found that experience a little confusing. I'd heard a lot of complaints about the grindiness of the dailies for the Golden Lotus, but I never actually got to see them for myself. The faction still existed, technically, but they weren't really represented by anyone in particular. The first time I came across the Fallen Protectors encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar, it seemed strange to me that these characters were clearly people we were supposed to know, but I had never come across them even after questing my way through the entire continent of Pandaria (as it was then).

Seeing this content from the beginning in MoP Classic was actually an interesting experience. The Vale gets opened up apparently not just to outsiders, but many Pandaren get to see it for the first time as well and stream into it to settle there. Though it doesn't remain entirely peaceful for long even then, as Mogu invade from the north the moment you hit the level cap, at which point the Golden Lotus (a group that includes those who would later become the Fallen Protectors) give you dailies to fight off said Mogu as well as other, more minor threats.

In fairness, I can see why people didn't love these. Basically, you get sent to the Golden Stair in the north every day to fight some Mogu, and then get a shorter follow-up at another location in the Vale to fight off some sprites or crocolisks or whatever. As far as dailies in Pandaria go, these are not the most inspired. However, for me as someone who appreciates exploring and documenting things, it's still been interesting to see all the different quests and get to know the various NPCs.

The moment the Vale was destroyed, they were basically all killed off and their quests removed from the game. I'm thinking the devs must've still been riding high on the Cataclysm idea of "it's so boring that the world never changes, what if a bad guy blew everything up and it actually showed as blown up in game (and then stayed that way for the next decade)". It didn't really sink in until later that players weren't necessarily huge fans of that. 

Interestingly, the Vale was "kind of" restored in BfA... just so it could be assaulted by Old God forces instead every other week. However, this version of the Vale is a) still quite inaccessible, as you'll only be able to see the bronze dragonflight NPC to switch between versions if your character has done a certain amount of content in BfA (I don't know the details of that, I just know that I could only go there on my human monk) and b) not exactly the same as the original. While its general beauty is mostly restored, the old quests are still gone, and even the environment isn't exactly the same. The two giant stone guardians that were destroyed in the first assault on the Vale remain broken for example, with their broken-off pieces just a bit tidied up.

The so-called Twin Monoliths in their different states: in the original Vale (top), in the destroyed Vale (middle) and the restored Vale (bottom). 

Another interesting detail is that there are some quests that reference the Vale in quest text, such as "The Golden Dream" which is supposed to give you a vision of the Vale while questing in the Valley of the Four Winds. After it's been destroyed, the quest giver is distraught and yells "No... That's not right... It should be beautiful. It should be pristine!". What they were meant to say originally, while the Vale still is pristine... I don't know, because the Classic devs forgot to update those little details, and seemingly all the relevant quests still have the dialogue about the destroyed Vale from the start, months before it's supposed to happen. 

Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

Level 90 in MoP Classic: What Is This Place?

The other night I felt like playing a little bit of Lemix before bedtime but for some reason all the retail servers were down. I heard mutterings about a DDoS attack? Either way, to get my fix of the particular flavour of WoW grinding that I craved at the time, I instead fired up MoP Classic for the first time in a few months.

The devs went pretty wild with server merges since I last played. Fortunately Mirage Raceway is still the same as it was, so I didn't have to move my characters yet again. I do appreciate that they finally put an end to the farce that were all those single-faction PvP realms and converted them all to PvE. Now there are no more PvP servers in the EU version of MoP Classic at all, while the US only got to keep its lone holdout Grobbolus, the RP-PvP server where people actually cared about community and things other than griefing and therefore managed to maintain a somewhat balanced population. Can we finally stop pretending that the masses crave world PvP now?

I've said it before, but logging into MoP Classic feels weird every time. When I've just been playing Vanilla, it feels strange and too modern. What are all these buttons? Where is my ammo? But when I've been playing retail recently it's the opposite and actually feels quite nostalgic with its enforced ground travel while levelling and a hunter skill rotation that doesn't feel like total crap. 

When I last abandoned my hunter in Pandaria, I was mired in how tedious it felt to level to 90 (even if I wrongly noted it down as levelling from 84 to 85 in this post). I guess that just underlines how meaningless that stretch of levelling felt, just an endless bar going nowhere and taking forever to fill up. Since then, I think the XP required has been nerfed, or maybe the XP rewarded from kills and quests has been boosted - maybe even both. Either way it didn't feel too bad to work my way through that final level via a mix of questing in Kun-Lai Summit and doing chores for the Klaxxi.

 

Fun fact: While doing this, I also installed MoP Classic on my laptop, and even though Classic has been in the Mists era for more than five months now, the shortcut it created on my desktop was still called "Cataclysm Classic". Small indie gaming company and all that. 

I should be able to conclude my Project Vale soon, and we'll see what else I'll feel up to now that max level has unlocked a few more options in terms of content.

MoP Classic is quite an enigma to me in some respects. Both Redbeard and Wilhelm were grousing recently that Blizzard seemed to show little consideration for the anniversary servers transitioning into Burning Crusade, considering how closely in time the devs scheduled the TBC pre-patch to Midnight's in retail. And I don't think that perception is wrong, but I think people also have a skewed idea of where the core of the Classic population sits. Wherever I see people talking about Classic in general, it's usually about the Vanilla anniversary servers, but based on ironforge.pro at least, that's not where most of the people are! For all the talk about how few people wanted it, the numbers show MoP Classic still sporting the biggest population of them all (over 100k weekly raiders), bigger than anniversary (~60k weekly raiders), the remains of SoD and Classic era put together.

I know raiding stats aren't everything and it sure seems weird considering that MoP Classic has no buzz around it whatsoever, but it's not unheard of for lots of people to play in quiet contentment without making headlines. It really does make me wonder about that Warlords of Draenor Classic though. I keep thinking that surely that's got to be where the Classic progression train stops, but if the majority of Classic players are happy to just quietly chug along through all the old expansions that Blizzard will give them, even the ones that weren't that beloved back in the day, maybe it's still a worthwhile thing for them to do? I guess we'll find out one way or another next year.

The State of My WoW-ing

I sometimes hear people say that WoW is in a better state than ever because of how many different ways to play it there are nowadays. Not enjoying retail? Well, Classic's right there and could still be earning your sub! Love the original world of Azeroth but Classic is just a bit too same-old, same-old for you at this point? Here's Season of Discovery! And so on and so forth.

I'm going to neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I'll say that the multiple versions of WoW thing has definitely worked out well for me in terms of getting value out of my subscription, as I've at least tried almost every mode that the dev team has come out with and I tend to enjoy playing more than one of them at a time. Sadly (to me), it often seems that I'm in a minority in that regard, with most players that I talk to just sticking to the one version they prefer and perhaps even actively disliking the other versions of the game.

I've been wondering what this means for this blog, because I imagine that if readers just want to read about their favourite version of WoW, me switching back and forth between talking about very different things seemingly at random might be perceived as annoying. I'll still write what I want to write, but I thought it might also be useful and interesting to give a general update on where I'm at with each version of WoW at the moment, so you know what to expect if there's one specific mode you're waiting to hear about.

Retail (The War Within)

I'm currently doing four delves a week with the husband but to be honest not much else. K'aresh has been entertaining enough - I rescued all the wee animals and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have the same staying power for me as the final zones of the last two expansions had. Patch 11.2 also killed my desire to play alts temporarily as it broke the Altoholic addon, and the bank restructuring made all my alts' banks a horrible mess. Altoholic works again now, but those banks are still in chaos and I just can't bear to look at them much, so my alts have mostly remained unplayed.

I'm generally feeling a degree of end-of-expansion ennui, which feels a bit weird to say when Midnight is still more than half a year away, but it is what it is. I don't feel like there's much to look forward to before then. I do have a few goals I want to achieve before the expansion ends, such as throwing myself against ?? difficulty Ky'veza and seeing all of Manaforge Omega on LFR, but none of these things feel particularly urgent at this point.

Admittedly Legion Remix is coming out in a few days, but I'm not actually sure how I invested I want to be in that either. I was quite looking forward to it initially (after how much fun I ended up having in MoP Remix), but from everything I've heard since then, the Legion version is actually going to be quite different and I'm not sure whether all those changes will be good or bad for me. I'll still check it out and will probably get a few posts out of it, but I'm currently not actively hyped for it.

Mists of Pandaria Classic

My "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms" has kind of stalled because I just couldn't bear levelling from 84 to 85. Fortunately this one isn't something that needs to be rushed, as I should still have several months to complete my goal (until Garrosh destroys the Vale in Classic too). I expect that I'll still get back to it in time before then, though I still have no plans to do anything else in MoP Classic.

Season of Discovery

SoD has sadly become another abandoned project. Remember, I wanted to level up so I could see the actual new dungeon Blizzard had added to it (Demon Fall Canyon). However, Incursions apparently managed to completely sap my will to play. It's kind of weird actually, but I really did not deal well with the way they required you to completely clear out your quest log. It made me realise that I really rely on those random breadcrumb quests to give me direction. Even if I technically know in my head which zones to go to for quests at level 45 for example, having to make a choice with no quest guidance whatsoever was weirdly deflating.

I do remember that I actually got to Searing Gorge and was kind of fascinated by the new Blackrock Eruption event there, but unfortunately this was also when my OP raid gear from BFD in phase one was starting to no longer be quite so good, and questing was starting to feel like a bit of a drag. At some point I just stopped logging in.

While I wasn't playing, the devs actually added a second new dungeon (Karazhan Crypts) and an actual new raid (Scarlet Enclave), followed by an announcement that they're stopping development on SoD but also not shutting it down. It's been sitting in this weird limbo state ever since where it's technically still there and has some people playing, but much of the community considers it dead because new content is no longer being added. (The server selection screen has the largest Europen PvE server listed as low pop at this point, and according to Ironforge.pro stats, the number of people still raiding there is about half of what it is on Classic era.)

Assuming SoD does continue to hang around, I expect I will get back to it eventually to check out more of the stuff I missed, but there's also a chance that I won't.

Classic era

I've mentioned before that while I love Classic era, I've seen so much of it as this point that the novelty has kind of worn off. I still log in almost every day to do things like create Mooncloth or put items on the auction house - to what purpose, I'm honestly not sure. I guess since the population on era is not that large (especially since the anniversary servers went live), I feel like I'm still making a small contribution to the server community by keeping the auction house stocked. I'm also still keeping an eye on my guild's Discord even if I don't have anything of my own to add.

I currently find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I'd go back to playing era as my primary mode of Classic, though I guess you should never say never. It seems more likely to me that one day I will finally tire of just logging in for cooldowns and auction house business and that will be it for me then. Though that day is not yet today.

Turtle WoW

I wasn't planning to get back into the private server scene, but I've got to admit my recent exploration of Turtle WoW has had me quite charmed. I'll probably keep at it until the server shuts down or I hit max level, whichever happens first. The dev team seems largely undeterred by the Blizzard lawsuit and even posted another update on their Unreal Engine project this week. While I have no doubt that they won't have a leg to stand on under the jurisdiction of a US court, I've got to admit I do wonder a little what will happen if the stubborn head of the turtle, who is supposedly located in Russia, manages to simply evade the long arm of the law due to geography. I'm sure the lawsuit has been great advertising for them over the past few weeks, bringing in a lot of new business for the time being.

Struggling to Enjoy the Journey in MoP Classic

As far as MMOs go, my attitude has long been one of enjoying the journey above all else. I've never really been able to relate to people who just want to get to "the end"/level cap/whatever and complain that everything along the way is boring and takes too long... until I played Classic Mists of Pandaria I guess.

It's not even that the quests are bad or anything. As I wrote last year while evaluating MoP Remix, aside from some specific plot threads, they were pretty decent overall. However, Remix is kind of the problem. I "just" did all of this content about a year ago, in an environment where everything was significantly sped up, it was easy to travel around with full flying enabled from the start, and killing mobs was a breeze. Re-doing the same quests while ground-bound and taking ten times longer to kill anything doesn't feel nostalgic to me right now, it just feels tedious.

I've been trying to "ease the pain" by picking and choosing my quest hubs so that I could focus on the ones I liked best, but it's still just so. Slow. At level 86 I pushed forward to the Valley of the Four Winds and did the majority of the quests there since I remembered quite liking them (plus there were a lot of animals to skin for my leatherworking), but since then it's been nothing but a drag.

I started running random dungeons on the side but they don't actually give that much XP - which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, as I noticed that people actually kill all the bosses and let others complete their quests, seeing how those things actually contribute significantly to your XP gains. (This is a contrast to retail, where people will skip absolutely everything just to get to the end as soon as possible and get the completion reward.)

In general, those dungeons were a bit of a weird experience initially, since my brain doesn't quite know whether to file them under Classic or retail. The way people tend to pull entire rooms in one go is certainly more retail-like, but then I was actually kind of surprised when I got my first pop-up to roll for loot, since I had expected everything to be personal loot already. I even had the option to roll need on items I couldn't even use, so I was briefly startled that I actually had to pay proper attention to which button to press. That's not meant to be a complaint; it just goes to illustrate that my brain seems to have different "modes" for Classic and retail, and MoP doesn't really fit either one at the moment.

I'm currently about halfway through level 88 and it feels like I still have an eternity to go. I did actually go ahead and do the quest to open the Vale of Eternal Blossoms early, but I soon ran into a "you're not seasoned enough to help us yet, come back later" wall, so I'll save that for another post.

On the plus side, after my initial reservations about MoP gameplay changes, such as the loss of my melee weapon or the new talents, the way hunter plays has actually turned out to be pretty fun, though I'd say the rotation is starting to veer into slightly too many buttons for my liking (Cata seemed close to perfect, while now there are pretty much always one or two that I forget to press regularly). However, the fact that they actually gave hunters full non-combat stealth with Camouflage in this expansion is wild to me and super handy for many quests (though it's also so alien that I sometimes still forget that I have it). 

Also, the farm! The farm and professions were not part of Remix, so I've been enjoying growing a few vegetables every day and working on my cooking again. It's just a shame that you can't unlock the full farm plot until max-level, adding yet another item to taunt me from the finish line if only I could get there sooner. I just need to knuckle down and grind out those last one and a half levels over a weekend some time, but WoW has just never felt slower to me.

Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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