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).

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.

Casual Midnight Endgame

Considering my slow start into Midnight, I'm really having a lot of fun with it. Now that the expansion's first season has started and (almost) everything has opened up properly, there are a lot of things to do every week, without anything feeling like mandatory chores.

Story

In my post about Midnight's launch I said that "the levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years." However, it turned out that Blizzard had other plans than simply letting us forget about the story this time around, with every weekly reset continuing the storyline a bit further.

They were already kind of moving towards something like this in War Within, but back then the story updates still mostly came with the minor patches, and those minor patch updates tended to feel more like interludes or epilogues - basically, not that important.

This time around, they are all in on the storytelling though, with literal weekly updates (Remember when updates this frequent were "the dream" for many MMOs?) driving the plot forward in major ways. I've honestly been pretty impressed, not just with the update cadence but with the content of those story chapters as well. I was worried that Metzen's return would result in the plot retreading the same old tropes, but at least so far, that hasn't been the case. Instead we've just been getting all kinds of callbacks to really old (and probably largely forgotten by most of the player base) lore, with references to previous expansions being woven into a coherent picture of "now" that makes sense and explains why we are where we are.

The only problem is that the story mode for the raid once again released a full week after raiders had gotten access to the final cut scene, so there were spoilers all over the place, and trying not to be told everything about the ending was like navigating a minefield. Even people who clearly didn't consciously want to post spoilers were "vague posting" about events in very obvious ways within days of release. God help anyone who doesn't see everything the day it comes out. I wonder if that will ever get better.

Dungeons

I don't quite know how I feel about dungeons in retail right now. In old WoW, they were one of my favourite things to do, but in retail, they are nothing like the content I used to love and generally responsible for my worst experiences with other players. I had fun trying out M+ with friends for a bit in Dragonflight, but that ultimately didn't end up working out for me either.

That said, Blizzard is still quite capable of making interesting and beautiful instances, and follower dungeons have made it easier to take a look at them and enjoy them at your own pace, even if you don't have enough friends (or any) to run them with. The normal mode pugs I've done in Midnight so far have also all been really nice? Very little "bat out of hell" level rushing - in fact, quite often I'll see people who are very obviously not super familiar with the dungeon and still learning as they go, which is nice to see even if people aren't particularly chatty.

It really feels like Midnight is encouraging more lapsed players to dip their toes back into the game. In fact, I was making this observation to my husband today while healing a Maisara Caverns on my priest, and at the end of the dungeon the tank whispered me to thank me for my heals and we had the most wholesome little chat. Nicest interaction with a random stranger I've had in retail for years!

Also, I may not be feeling the M+, but I did do a few regular mythic dungeons with friends last weekend, and it was interesting to see the updates to the older dungeons that Blizzard decided to put into the mythic rotation this season. Pit of Saron is an old favourite of mine, and it was intriguing to see the mechanical changes they made to bring the bosses more in line with modern dungeons. Also, Seat of the Triumvirate was hilarious - I had minimal experience with this dungeon to begin with but I do know that L'ura was not as insane a laser show originally. We wiped quite a few times (also on Saprish) but it was pretty fun to actually figure things out together.

Delves

In War Within, delves were the shiny new feature that took several rounds of tuning to find its feet, and even longer for me to warm up to it. Since then, it's become a staple of our duo play for the husband and me, and in Midnight it's been fun to jump into things right away, knowing right from the start how everything works.

The new delves are fun, with some minor iterations that seem sensible. For example Blizzard got rid of all those various utility items that you could loot inside delves and that people either tended to vendor or forget that they even had them. The new buffs are things you click on inside the delve and you either use them right then and there, or you simply don't, which feels much more straightforward to me.

You also no longer collect keys for bountiful delves, only key shards, but they are much, much easier to get than they were in War Within, as they drop from pretty much everything, which I expect will make it easier for me to justify doing more of them on alts when the time comes.

There's also a book in the delvers' quarters that straight up tells you which delves are bountiful each day, meaning you no longer need to click your way through all the maps just to see which icons are glowing.

The one thing I'm still undecided on is Valeera as the new delve companion. I thought Brann was extremely annoying at first, plus a complete joke, but over time I started to find his antics endearing. Comparatively, Valeera is inoffensive but also kind of boring. She has voice lines for various moves, but nothing that feels super quotable. She also seems even more prone to ninja-pulling than Brann was, as she just outright shadow-steps (?) into the next group down the hallway sometimes. On the plus side, she's actually controllable via the ping system now, which I wouldn't have found out if it wasn't for Wowhead, but which is definitely useful once you know about it. 

Prey

Prey/hunts are the new expansion system that I had no particular hopes or fears for, but which has turned out to be decent fun. In a nutshell, you get sent to one of the four new zones to kill a named mob, but it's not a specific location at first. You have to do various activities in the zone to progress your hunt, and sometimes the mob will ambush you mid-combat (and then run away again once they reach half health). After a certain number of these progress events, the enemy's true location is revealed and you can go there and kill them properly.

It doesn't sound super exciting on paper, but it's a nice new twist on open world progression. Plus nightmare hunts count as tier eight delves for the purposes of filling out the Great Vault, so you can increase your number of slots without going completely nuts with delves.

Astalor, the NPC that gives you all the hunt quests, is a complete psychopath by the way, so I'm not surprised that some people absolutely adore him. A bit more concerning to me is when I see comments about how all the blood elves should be like him because they are "too nice" now. Regardless, his voice actor does a bang-up job and I've done quests for worse characters, so I don't mind. It all adds flavour.

PvP

What's this? Yes, I haven't really done PvP in WoW in a while - the last time I got really into it was while levelling my priest during Shadowlands from what I remember (I'm not counting Plunderstorm). What got me this time was a simple incentive quest to "do three battlegrounds" to progress towards a hero quality item - I mean, I didn't even have to win them? Before I knew it, I'd also picked up the PvP weekly and was checking out the weekly brawl.

I still like SWTOR PvP better, but it's made for a nice change of pace to re-visit all those classic battlegrounds as well as to discover some new ones. I was completely taken by surprise when I found out that there's actually a new Midnight battleground called "Slayer's Rise", set in Voidstorm, because I hadn't heard a single peep about it until I actually loaded into it. It's even funnier because I remember having the exact same experience in War Within, where I had no idea that Deephaul Ravine was a new expansion feature until I got put into a match there. WoW's PvP really doesn't get much publicity nowadays.

On the classic battleground front, it was fun to see that Isle of Conquest still has people yelling about glaive throwers fourteen years later, that AV is still about who can rush to the end faster, and that Warsong Gulch still sucks. Good on Blizzard for cross-promoting this content a bit with some simple quest incentives though.

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. 

Plunderstorm Redux

Plunderstorm is back (for a bit) and it's been updated. Kaylriene is quite enthused by the changes, but to me, they've been more of a mixed bag. I like that they added horses out in the open world that work like a temporary speed boost, and the fact that regular mobs respawn now is great in so far as I've been able to hit level 10 for the first time ever. (In the past, even if I lived quite long, by the end the map used to be completely scoured of all NPCs and treasures, so it was no longer possible to gain experience past a certain point.) Blizzard also added a training lobby, which is a nice enough idea but is basically just a copy of the pre-match lobby that doesn't time out.

Some new abilities were added as well, and while that's interesting in principle, it also feels to me like it's made it harder than ever to actually upgrade your weapons throughout the match as the odds that you'll just get a dozen different abilities drop at level one are also increased.

In addition, you can now queue up for Plunderstorm while you're logged into one of your WoW characters, which is a thing some people wanted I believe, but I didn't particularly care for. When I log in to play Plunderstorm, I'm often quite happy to just do that and don't want to do anything in "regular" WoW anyway, so I still prefer going in from the character selection screen as it is. In fact, I was rather miffed when I couldn't find that option anymore after a couple of days and appeared to be "stuck" being unable to change the look of my Plunder character (as you don't get access to the character customisation option when queueing from within WoW itself). It was only about a week later that I realised you could still select Plunderstorm from character selection, they just hid it away in a drop-down menu for some reason.

You also get to choose a colour-coded "drop zone" at the start of the match now, and you'd think that having more choice like that would make the game better, but to me it's honestly just made things more boring. It feels like the population self-segregates very heavily now, which makes matches a lot more predictable. As someone who's not good at the PvP part and just enjoys collecting shinies for the rewards, I tend to choose one of the "green" zones, and they do indeed tend to be pretty empty or at least few people that land there will immediately look for a skirmish. This makes it easier to get your daily objective done, but it's honestly also a bit boring. Yet if I try to "mix it up" by choosing one of the harder zones, that just means that I get ganked moments after landing and get nothing done. It makes me miss the chaos of players of different types all getting jumbled together randomly.

Fortunately I don't need to be too excited about the mode this time around, as Blizzard massively ramped up the rate of plunder acquisition, which I do think is another good thing, even if I found it slightly amusing. It's as if they really did hear all the feedback after the anniversary event about how they are always too conservative with rewards at the launch of something new and decided to go "OK, allow them to go all out and be done within a few hours this time if they want; let's see how they like it". I only play about a match a day but am able to buy something from the new Plunderstore after almost every match, and since there are more returning rewards (which I all earned last time) than new ones, I don't even have that many items left to chase after two weeks. But hey, it is what it is; I'll continue to play in small doses for the duration of the event. I just think it's actually a little less fun now than it was.

The Big Birthday Bash

I held off a little on writing about WoW's 20th anniversary celebrations in retail because they were off to a bit of a rocky start but I had a feeling that things were going to get better. And they did!

Basically, the problem during the first week was simply that acquisition of the anniversary currency was throttled to an insane degree. I have no issue with devs preventing people from being able to grind out everything on day one, but that first week, even if you did every single activity that awarded bronze celebration tokens, you still couldn't earn enough of them to buy even a single one of the reimagined tier two sets that had been promoted as the main reward to earn during the event. So that sucked.

However, Blizzard saw the feedback and immediately course-corrected in week two, massively increasing token payouts from all sources and it's been fine since then. I've acquired most of the new sets already, but there are plenty more rewards to earn and I'm having fun.

The celebratory activities are very varied and I've been kind of surprised by how... self-directed some of them are. Sure, there are plenty of quests to be completed and achievements to be earned, but there are also a lot of things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose other than to have fun - something that's quite rare in modern WoW - such as rare clickables scattered around the area that temporarily grant you the appearance of popular NPCs and allow you to say some of their voice lines. I wouldn't even have known that these existed if it wasn't for Arlaeya Explores on Bluesky posting about all the different costumes she keeps finding. When I started to look around for myself, I managed to turn my hunter into Jaina.

Most of the time however, I've been busy taking part in the more "directed" activities. First off, there are three very open and casual events constantly rotating around the area: Storytime, Mount Mania and Fashion Frenzy.

Storytime is Lorewalker Cho telling you a story similar to what you got to witness after collecting all the lore scrolls in Pandaria, while you sit in the audience and cheer or boo as appropriate. I think these are nice, it's just a shame that there are only three different ones because that makes the event become repetitive quite quickly. Hearing C'thun get called a "giant creepy artichoke" made me laugh out loud though.

Mount Mania is basically an official version of the "mount-offs" that were popularised by streamers over the years and is easily the most popular of the three activities. To be honest, I can see why! Even though there are no prizes, it's just fun to join in and see how many of the mounts that get called out you've got yourself. It's also kind of humbling as a long-time player who might feel that you've got quite a few mounts to repeatedly be reminded of just how many you don't have.

Finally, there's Fashion Frenzy, which I believe is similar to the Trial of Style. People are invited to take a couple of minutes to create a transmog that goes with a certain theme, then everyone gets to cast votes, and winners are briefly announced on stage (though again, there are no prizes or anything). This doesn't seem that popular to me, I think mainly because of the time pressure. I like me a good transmog as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't be able to throw something together so quickly. Since voting is also something that gives credit towards a quest and achievement, people also tend to just show up and throw their ribbons at random people, regardless of whether they were even trying to take part and match the theme. My priest was once declared one of the winners just for standing nearby in her tier two outfit.

But really, all that's just the "background noise" to all the dedicated events you can take part in for rewards.

The BRD raid was a nice trip down memory lane, but I was a bit disappointed to find that you seemingly can't get all the related achievements done in LFR, or at least not without great difficulty. The final fight at the Imperial seat was interesting from a lore perspective as it makes sense that Moira nopes out of watching you kill her husband again, but the devs also gave him some voice lines that feel like they are trying to retroactively make him into a more sympathetic figure. Ragnaros also gets summoned in during the fight, because I guess you can't have any nostalgia-related activities in WoW without him.

Classic Timewalking was slightly disappointing to me in the sense that most of the dungeons featured in it are just the already neutered Cata versions (though I still found all the Strat runs I'd done in Classic to be beneficial in terms of knowing what the different trash mobs do for example). They did bring back the original Deadmines though, which I appreciated, even if you can't queue for it specifically and just have to cross your fingers that the randomiser will put you in there at some point.

The biggest disappointment to me personally though was the Chromie activity that had been promoted as being about "time tours of the opening of the Ahn'qiraj gate", as it doesn't really have much to do with that at all, other than being set in old-school Silithus. It's still a fun little scenario (I particularly enjoyed the activity where you have to find the NPC that matches your class - once I figured out what I was supposed to do that is); it's just not at all what I thought it was going to be.

The thing that surprisingly caused me to fall down a bit of a masochistic rabbit hole was Korrak's Revenge, the Alterac Valley mode with vanilla mechanics, including all the different quests and NPCs. AV has always been one of my favourite battlegrounds, and one I even enjoyed in Classic (even though I think PvP in Classic in general is pretty bad).

There is a weekly quest to earn 500 honour within that battleground, but once inside I also found that some of the quests within the valley itself, such as to capture a bunker or graveyard, also award bronze celebration tokens, plus there was a ram mount to be acquired for earning 200 timewarped badges from doing quests within the valley over a longer period of time, both of which encouraged me to keep queueing beyond the requirement for the main quest.

Interestingly, it was nothing like the quick rushes I'd experienced in Classic. Instead I lost every single match I joined, and many of them took over an hour (may have been longer, since a couple of times I also just deserted after a while - something I usually never do, but I honestly hadn't been prepared for how long these were going to last and needed to do something else). It was always the same scenario of an awkward stalemate at the Dun Baldar bridge, with the Alliance occasionally pushing forward as far as Icewing bunker but then quickly losing ground again.

That's pretty old-school and I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if I had the feeling that anyone at all actually understood what was going on or cared about winning the battleground, but I distinctly got the impression that the Alliance side at least was full of PvErs who just wanted to do the quests for rewards and had no clue what was even going on. This was most obvious at the start of a match when the majority of people rode southwards to Snowfall graveyard to cap that, but then just awkwardly stood there, not even trying to go any further. Once I saw a small group of about five players dare to venture a bit further south and ran along with them to provide encouragement and heals, just for them to decide to try to take on Galvangar with five people - I even tried to warn them in chat but they clearly had no idea what awaited them inside that building and it was just pointless carnage.

Where it gets really frustrating though is when you hit that stalemate at Dun Baldar because the thing to do when that happens is to get a small group of people past enemy lines and start capping things down south - you'll probably still lose, but at least you'll get some honour and break the stalemate. However, the NPCs in this version of AV hit so hard that you can't really take anything but a mine by yourself, and often times when I would try to sneak south, literally not even a single other person would want to come along, preferring to just get slaughtered over and over by the bridge. Or on the rare occasion when someone would come along, they would once again not really understand how hard the NPCs hit and charge head-first into a group of guards just to get insta-gibbed. It's just a kind of painful and bizarre parody of what PvP is supposed to be like. I wonder what the experience is like as Horde.

Finally, there's this thing called Secrets of Azeroth or Guest Relations, which is basically like a bunch of quests without quest markers that expect you to actually read the instructions and put some clues together by yourself. On paper, that sounds like something I should really like, but in practice my experience with it has been so-so. I managed to work my way through the introductory quest by myself, just using the in-game hint system once or twice, but eventually I hit a point where I just had no idea what was going on and had to look up help. The instructions are just too vague in some parts, and I simply don't have the patience for this kind of thing any longer, especially when so much of these quests seems to require you to run around on foot (Azeroth is big, y'all) and look for tiny things to click on on the ground. When I'm not even sure anymore whether I'm even remotely in the right area, I definitely just want to get on with it at some point.

Still, all in all I've been having fun with the varied activities. What's been your favourite thing to do so far?

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

Plunderstorm

A few weeks ago, WoW released its patch 10.2.6. In a move that's very unusual for Blizzard, they kept its contents a complete secret beforehand, with the only hint that we really had being a skull and crossbones flag on the roadmap and a comment from Holly Longdale about it being accessible to both retail and Classic players.

It turned out to be a whole new game within the retail client called Plunderstorm, a pirate-themed battle royale set in the Arathi Highlands. There was a lot of hubbub around this, and I really felt like I should have something to say about it, but the truth is that everything about it was just one big "blah" to me.

The wider WoW community hyping up the mystery patch to be everything they could've ever dreamed of, just to then be very angry/disappointed when it turned out to not be that, was not surprising but tiresome.

I could understand Blizzard wanting to try something new by keeping a patch's contents a secret, but I'm not really sure why they chose to release this of all things. It has absolutely nothing to do with WoW other than sharing general assets and could just as well have been a complete stand-alone game, with the renown reward track being a crossover promotion like they've had for titles like Hearthstone in the past.

Maybe they recalled the fate of Heroes of the Storm and what it means to be more than five years late to the party when it comes to jumping on the bandwagon for a popular new genre. It's unlikely that they would've been able to make waves with "Blizzard joins the battle royale" seven years after Fortnite. Maybe it was some sort of experiment to see how far they could push the WoW client. Who knows.

I myself had never played a battle royale game before and have no real interest in the genre (plus I don't particularly care about pirates as a theme either), but figured I should at least give it a go in WoW since it was right there on the character selection screen. And once again, my first impression was mostly "blah" - I neither loved nor hated it. Plunderstorm is just a game mode that exists. Hard to make a post out of that.

However.

For some reason I've been feeling compelled to come back to it for a couple of matches at a time. The quick drop-in, drop-out nature of the game is definitely something different from my usual MMO deep-dives, and the daily bonus reward (even if it's somewhat buggy and appears very inconsistently) is a nice incentive to just have that one quick match in the morning or evening.

I like that the "lobby" the game starts in gives you the opportunity to run around and familiarise yourself with the base mechanics like star mobs, chests and abilities. And it's kind of fun to land on a star mob when the match starts and immediately get a spell and a bunch of XP. Though I find that the enjoyment quickly diminishes after I've cleared out the mobs and treasure in my immediate vicinity - as mobs don't respawn during the match, you have to roam further and further afield to find anything to interact with, either to pick up another player's scraps or to engage in PvP.

The PvP focus seems to be one of the most controversial aspects of Plunderstorm, because WoW has a lot of casual PvE collectors who don't like being "made" to PvP for cosmetics, and who I guess feel that they're kind of being "lured in" with the promise of rewards for killing spiders and looting chests, just to then serve as cannon fodder for actual PvPers.

I don't mind PvP in principle but I don't enjoy it in Plunderstorm either, because it requires aiming and dodging and I'm bad at those things. Nine times out of ten when I encounter another player I'm the one who ends up dead. I'm just not too broken up about it because most of the time when this happens, I've already "exhausted my fun" for the match anyway and am basically ready for it to be over. The highest rank I've ever achieved in a match was #5, and that was pure dumb luck as I somehow ended up in area seemingly away from everyone else for a long time.

There's been much praise for the spectator mode you enter after dying, though I'm not sure how much use it actually gets. In my very first match I did indeed stick around to spectate after being eliminated, simply because I wanted to see how the rest of the match was going to go and gain a better understanding of what was happening, but since then I just always click "leave match" immediately after dying, to either start over or go off to do something else.

I've made it up to renown rank 12 (out of 40) and there are some pretty nice rewards on the track - I've earned a mount and two pets so far for example. Apparently the event is supposed to run until June... I wonder if that's enough time to get to 40 with my casual level of play, or whether I'll lose interest before then anyway. We'll see.

More on Starting Over on Lava Lash

This is a follow-up to last week's post about me deciding to try a fresh start in Season of Discovery phase two by re-rolling on the RP-PvE server.

As mentioned, I got to 20 incredibly quickly due to the XP buff, but with basically no cash to train abilities or do anything else. So I decided that it was time to put on the brakes and take care of business other than levelling for a while, namely by doing some travelling to unlock access to additional flight paths (I hadn't even been to Kalimdor yet), working on my professions, and working the auction house to make some money.

Fishing turned out to be surprisingly lucrative here, because for some reason there didn't seem to be a lot of active fishermen about - or maybe they are all still busy levelling to 40; I don't know. The point is, I found pools of firefin snapper, oily blackmouth and sagefish everywhere, and while each fish only sold for a few silver, it added up quickly. I think fishing may actually be my highest skill right now.

I also developed a strange fascination with chests. While I've played dwarf characters before, I don't think I ever got any to a very high level, and they usually had some other form of tracking (ore or herb nodes for gatherers, different types of mobs for hunters) that took priority over using their "treasure finding" racial that highlights chests on the mini map.

My newest priest on the other hand is a tailor and enchanter, so she doesn't have anything else to pay attention to, and I've been very surprised by just how many chests there are about. I always thought I was pretty good at spotting them with the naked eye, but apparently there've always been a lot more hiding in corners and behind sheds that I never knew about. It's turned me into a proper treasure hunting fiend, as I'll randomly fight my way into buildings or caves just to access a chest at the back.

When I revisited Ashenvale, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some life had returned to the PvP event, mainly level 40s that had decided to come back for more reputation I guess. The groups tended to be about 80-90% max level characters, with the rest being made up of levellers like me that just happened to pass through the zone. I now have first-hand experience of how much easier it is to get rewarded for taking part in this event as Alliance, as I hit friendly with Silverwing Sentinels after only two battles.

I also made good progress collecting more of my runes - knowing where to pick them up along the way after already going through the whole process on Horde side in phase one made things a lot simpler. I also found out that Alliance have it significantly easier when it comes to collecting their Meditation buffs, as Meditation on the Light and Elune can be picked up almost right next to each other in Stormwind.

As one of the priest runes drops from the elite orcs in Redridge, I decided to join a group for the quests there. Even considering that Lava Lash's population is much lower than Wild Growth's, it was crazy busy there that evening, meaning we spent a lot of time just running about without being able to tag anything, so people got to chatting.

I was surprised to hear from several of my group mates that they had only just started in phase two, and was slightly amused when our ret pally declared that they were both a mythic raider and a streamer in retail. Far be it from me to doubt the truthfulness of that, but that same paladin stood out to me for not casting a single seal all evening... just goes to show again that retail and Classic are two very different games and knowing your way around one doesn't automatically translate into knowing anything at all about the other.

Not that it mattered either way... we had a good time, and me, the pally and the rogue who had started the group actually stuck together to complete a few additional quests once we were done with the elites, such as collecting pendants from the gnolls and escorting Corporal Keeshan. The whole experience had that good old-fashioned pug feel to it, reminding me of the way I first made friends in WoW nearly twenty years ago.

I also spotted some familiar guild names in town, and in fact am pretty certain that I even ran into the GM of a guild I used to be friendly with on Hydraxian Waterlords back in 2020. I just wasn't able to 100% confirm it as they were AFK when I encountered them and therefore didn't respond to my emote. It's just fascinating to me how these RP server communities persist over the years and across different versions of the game. This is one of those things I love about Classic and that the megaserver aficionados just don't get I guess.

That said, I'm feeling surprisingly little pull to get to level 40 and start raiding Gnomeregan now. I'm not super interested in raiding without being part of a group going into it together, and to be honest what I've been hearing about Gnomer isn't helping. I noted about BFD that while I thought it was fun overall, some of the bosses were kind of bordering on being "too much" for a relaxed Classic raiding experience, and from everything I've read, Gnomeregan is much harder (something that people tend to frame as a good thing, but to me it's not - supposedly it's particularly punishing for healers as well).

So while I'm having fun for now, I'm still not convinced that Season of Discovery is really "working" for me. I liked the level cap being 25, but it occurs to me that when it was raised, it was essentially like a microcosm of an expansion release... oh, you've been working on learning how endgame works and getting better gear? Forget all of it! Everything is different now! And while that sort of thing generates excitement, it can also be exhausting in a way, even more so on a sped-up schedule. I wonder how many players have already dropped off for similar reasons.

SoD Phase 2: First Impressions & Ennui

Season of Discovery's phase two launched Thursday late in the evening in my time zone. I had a quick look at the time to see whether there was enough hype to create login queues again... there was not, though it was insanely busy in Thunder Bluff when I logged in. I needn't have worried about people immediately losing interest in the BFD raid once it was no longer at the level cap, as the "Denizens of Kalimdor!" yells were going out non-stop. They had always been frequent but now they were even more so as people were running it for XP.

I didn't really try to play properly until the next morning myself. I figured maybe I could avoid the worst of the crowds if I focused on my professions before trying to level, so I went out to buy the expert cooking, first aid and fishing books. However, I then realised that the primary professions still required level 26 to progress beyond 150 skill, even in phase two, so I decided that levelling up at least once should be my main goal for the time being.

I took my priest to Stonetalon since I had a few quests from there in my log and it's usually a comparatively quiet place - but it wasn't that day. Or rather, it might have been if things were even busier in other zones, but my point is that things were pretty crazy in Stonetalon as well, with everyone fighting to tag mobs as they spawned. I even saw people looking for group for "The Den" - a group quest which I think I've never completed at level because it's part of a chain that takes you all the way to Ashenvale and nobody wants to go back to Stonetalon to find a group to finish it, but on that day, people were doing even that.

While things were pretty brutal on Stonetalon Peak, the Charred Vale was the most striking to me, because I always remember my more experienced friend warning me about the place back when I first started playing WoW - that it was densely populated with mobs and could be quite dangerous. That Friday morning, it was barren, and harpies were dying pretty much as soon as they dared to make an appearance. Still, I successfully made it to level 26 and returned to town to work on my professions a bit.

I came on again later in the early evening, and actually found two guildies online who invited me to do some dungeons with them. We did SFK twice, followed by a partial run of Razorfen Kraul, in which I at least got my Blueleaf Tubers and the goblin escort done. Apparently the place was a popular destination to level as I saw people advertise for "RFK boar farm runs", which sounded very South Park-esque. Apparently dungeon farming to level is "the meta" even in Season of Discovery, simply because the open world is too full to quest efficiently. There's something kind of sad about that.

However, already the next day, the biggest wave of power-levellers seemed to have washed over me. I took my hunter (who hit 25 literally the night before phase two released and never did get to go to BFD) on a similar quest circuit around Stonetalon and it was much, much quieter... but in an oddly annoying way because without the hyperspawns triggered by the massive crowds I actually had to run bigger circles around the area to find more of the only slowly respawning quest mobs, while my priest had just had new ones pop up in front of her over and over.

I just needed a little more XP to get her to 26 so I thought I'd do the breadcrumb delivery quest to Thousand Needles. At the Great Lift, a human paladin aggroed my quest NPC while running to the lift, just before I could talk to him , so I did a /shoo emote on her, meaning to indicate that she should just get on the lift so he would run back to his spot and reset. She then decided to turn back and kill both Horde NPCs before I could talk to them, which meant I spent the next ten minutes waiting for them to respawn. In that moment I was kind of glad there's no cross-faction communication in Classic as I definitely would have called her names.

Meanwhile, my priest was close to 27 after the dungeons from the day before, so I thought I'd pop over to Ashenvale to ding her as well. I was successful, but Ashenvale was another sad sight as I saw the PvP event come on and nobody took part on either faction. I wonder whether anyone will come back to farm more Warsong Gulch rep once the current levelling frenzy is over.

I haven't checked out the new PvP action in Stranglethorn yet but I'm also kind of scared to. When I was doing the dungeons with guildies, one of them accidentally took the wrong zeppelin and landed in Grom'gol while the Blood Moon event was on. Turns out it's so free-for-all that even the guards hate you, meaning he instantly got ganked by them and was unable to revive and get back onto the zepp. He actually had to switch to a different character entirely to be able to go to the dungeon with us as the one stuck in STV was effectively unusable for the time being.

Reddit is afire talking about the new event, though I'm not sure I entirely understand what's been happening - something about people getting insane rewards for spam-killing the same characters over and over again at the graveyard since the event was lacking anything to discourage that? I don't know, it doesn't currently sound very fun either way.

I was wondering whether the release of phase 2 would bring more of my era guildies back to SoD to check out the new stuff, but after three days, only half a dozen people or so have even logged in. The ones who are still active are talking about moving to a new guild in SoD and I can't blame them. I need to think about what I want out of Season of Discovery myself. Right now I'm just getting major deja vu, finding myself feeling lonely on a crowded mega-server like I did a couple of months after Classic's launch, though back then I was still carried along for a few more months by the sheer excitement I felt about Vanilla making an official comeback. While SoD does have some interesting new mechanics, it's not enough to make the experience completely different from what I've been doing for the last five years (gosh, has it really been that long - it has), and being on my own all the time just feels unsatisfying.

I'm even wondering whether I should go and re-roll Alliance on the RP-PvE server - it's only medium pop so that should alleviate some of my stress caused by the crowds, and relocating to Hydraxian Waterlords is what ended up turning Classic around for me back in 2020. Who says that couldn't happen again? However, even if it could, would I even want to go in that deep again? (I went pretty hard for a while once I started raiding in Classic.) I just don't know. I keep looking at SoD and thinking that everything looks so fun on paper, but I just end up feeling slightly jealous of all the people who are so obviously enjoying themselves because something about it just isn't working for me right now.

Season of Discovery Phase 2 Preview

Season of Discovery's phase two is less than a week away, and Blizzard decided that in spite of the discovery aspect being key to the concept, they didn't want us to go in completely blind. A recent news post on the WoW website goes into quite a bit of detail about what to expect. I won't go into all of it on here, but I did want to highlight a few items that I found interesting.

The Gnomeregan raid has been confirmed to come with six bosses, which aligns with the number present in the regular dungeon, which means that unlike in BFD, nobody got eaten I guess. The news post shows some of the new items to look forward to, but the only one that really stood out to me was the Automatic Crowd Pummeler. The Manual Crowd Pummeler from the regular Gnomer dungeon is a mace with three charges of an on-use effect, which due to the janky nature of Vanilla's design, is actually the best max-level weapon for feral druids - until the charges are depleted that is, at which point it's time to vendor it and grab another. This means that competitive feral druids need to spend a lot of time farming the Gnomer dungeon, which is... bizarre. The new item has a cooldown but unlimited charges, which should get rid of that meta - though it does make me wonder whether it'll still be the best weapon for ferals at sixty in SoD too.

There will be some new runes, though as far as I'm aware it hasn't been revealed how many there will be per class. I was surprised to find that I'm kind of hoping it's not twelve again. Finding new runes is fun when you just start out, but because of how powerful they are, it turns into an exercise in "needing" to acquire them all pretty quickly.

Runes aside, they'll also be introducing some quality of life spells via new spell books dropped from dungeons, such as giving rogues the ability to move combo points and enabling shamans to move their totems. I find it quite interesting how the Classic devs are trying to square the circle in SoD by keeping a certain degree of inconvenience (which was simply part of Vanilla) while also attempting to introduce some quality of life changes without making things too easy and smooth. It's interesting to watch.

They also revealed more details about the new Stranglethorn PvP event, which will apparently turn the zone into a free-for-all once every three hours (though there is also a way to opt out). Grouping is allowed, but converting to raid will apparently be punished in some way. I'll fully admit that I'm less interested in a PvP event that requires actual PvP in a vanilla setting - then again, the free-for-all nature should make it less one-sided on PvE servers than the Ashenvale event has been. I don't know, I might try it once just to see what it's all about, but I tend to quickly get tired of getting killed in open world PvP.

As an aside, they'll also change the Battle for Ashenvale to simply occur once every three hours to make it more predictable. I guess that'll make it easier to join in, though there was definitely something very vanilla-like about not knowing when the fight was about to happen unless you were already in the zone or got intel from someone else who was.

In a move that took many by surprise, the news post also announced that they'll be disallowing GDKP runs from phase two onwards - I wonder if they have enough GMs to deal with the whack-a-mole of ban-hammering that's likely to require. I don't have strong feelings on the matter as I've been lucky to always play on servers where GDKPs are not a thing - I just always hear the horror stories about how ubiquitous they're supposed to be on PvP servers ruled by gold buyers. I suppose it's at least going to be fun to watch the various types of drama that are bound to arise from this.

The news post finished with a paragraph titled "It is Not too Late to Join in Season of Discovery" - presumably a play on the meme of people asking "Is it too late to play [game]/[patch]" five minutes after it's launched. It notes that with the arrival of phase two, they'll increase XP payouts from the BFD raid and from waylaid supplies, and there'll be a general 50% XP buff up to level 25. I'm definitely glad about the buff to BFD experience, as I'd like to see it stay relevant while levelling, but I'm a little more conflicted about the general XP buff. I guess it's one way to battle the FOMO inherent in joining a temporary server like this, but at the same time, SoD is kind of meant to be about levelling, so it still feels a bit odd at the same time.

In spite of all these exciting news, I'm still not too hyped about phase two myself. Things haven't been working out too great for my era guild's little off-shoot on SoD. Basically people tended to fall into one of two categories: either they casually levelled a character just to see what the runes were all about and then decided they didn't care too much about the BFD raid, or they went all-in and farmed BFD with five alts every lockout. There are much fewer of the latter than of the former, so the ones still interested have increasingly had to look elsewhere to fill their runs and in-guild activity has kind of died down. So I'm not too optimistic that I'll actually get to experience the new content in a guild setting, and while there are pugs aplenty, wading into the giant pool of anonymity that is a mega-server holds a lot less appeal to me, even if I'm curious about the new gameplay.

The Battle for Ashenvale (as Horde on PvE)

I've had a few weeks to casually check out the current endgame in Season of Discovery at this point. One of the major endgame activities is the Battle for Ashenvale PvP event. I'm not a fan of PvP in Classic in general, but I figured this was going to be more like Alterac Valley, something with a heavy PvE focus, so I thought I'd check it out.

I also quite wanted the wolf mount that you can earn access to. It's 10% slower than a normal mount, only works in Ashenvale and offers no dismount protection whatsoever (so it disappears instantly the moment you take damage from any source), but it looks cool and Ashenvale is big. As a priest with no class abilities to boost my travelling speed, having a way to speed up my journeys from one end of the zone to the other was definitely attractive.

The general gist of the PvP event is easy enough to figure out, though I did check out the Wowhead guide after my first time to get clarification on a few points. Basically, there's a percentage counter for both factions at the top of the screen that goes up as people kill mobs and other players. Once it hits 100% for both factions, the battle starts and some special mobs spawn. Each faction gets three lieutenants across the map as well as a general. The latter is immune to damage until the former have been killed, similar to the way the turrets/bunkers add protection for the generals in AV, except there is no way to bypass them. Each of these opponents has raid boss levels of health and takes a while to die even with a full raid of forty players.

Because the objectives are spread out across the map and movement is slow (even with the mounts), realistically people have to split into multiple raids to get everything down in a timely manner and as an individual player, you won't get to see/tag each objective personally, though there are apparently people who try to do just that to maximise their rep gains.

Unfortunately, faction imbalance is a major problem on the PvE server, as Alliance traditionally outnumbers Horde 2:1, and... well, you can tell. On the PvP servers, Blizzard decided to enforce a degree of faction balancing in SoD by temporarily limiting character creation if one faction got too far ahead, but PvE has no such restrictions in place. Which is generally fair, but not so much in an open world PvP event like this.

Maybe the devs were hoping that it would sort itself out, since participation in anything PvP is obviously fully voluntary on a PvE server, and Horde has traditionally been more eager to jump into this kind of content than Alliance, however my personal experience at least hasn't really borne this out, as I've lost every single battle except for one. What usually happens is pretty much what you'd expect: Horde only gets one or two lieutenants down in the time the Alliance kills all three, so they get to the general first and win.

The one time I was in a raid that did achieve victory, it was pretty clear why: Most raids are formed at Splintertree Post, which puts them in relative vicinity of two of the three enemy lieutenants as well as the general. However, that leaves the third lieutenant on the other side of the map, beyond the Alliance town of Astranaar, which is a logistical problem.

In the one battle I won, someone formed a strong second raid at Zoram Strand, which took down the lieutenant there and then pivoted to defend the nearby Horde lieutenant. We arrived just in time to prevent him from being killed and absolutely decimated the Alliance raid. This cost them enough time that the people at Splintertree could finish the job there before the Alliance could catch up again, even with their superior numbers. I guess the problem is that this winning strategy requires people to forfeit some personal rewards in favour of the greater good, since the people at Zoram will get less reputation than the ones at Splintertree that get all the other kills, and that's simply not popular.

Even so, I'll admit it's an interesting little twist on open world PvP. We'll see what Blizzard come up with for the second phase.

Level 25 in Season of Discovery

So this actually happened before my LFR adventure in retail; I just had the urge to write about that one while it was still fresh on my mind. But yes, I hit level 25 on my priest in Season of Discovery, woo! What an achievement.

Actually, I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but I do think people overestimate just how quickly the "average" player progresses. Blizzard released a video with some SoD statistics a week ago, and in that they said that only about 10% of the population had hit the level cap after the first week, and less than 2% of characters had cleared the BFD raid. I shared this with my guildies who were already talking about how they were "done" or bored and called them filthy one-percenters.

My own journey to the level cap involved more dungeons, as I predicted in my last post about SoD. I ran Wailing Caverns twice, mostly to finish off all my quests in there, though I got lucky and also won this excellent ring off Mutanus the Devourer in my second run. As a side note, I found it pleasant how easy it was to get all those collection quests done for a change. When Wailing Caverns is just one step along your levelling journey and you want to get everything done in one run, getting enough herbs, ooze and hide drops for everyone is always a pain, but with the dungeon essentially being "endgame" you can get endless runs in which most people will already have done their quests, with way less competition for drops.

Anyway, what was truly memorable about those WC runs to me was that they were complete opposites in some ways. In my first run I had a warrior tank who was massively overgeared for the place and who was just barrelling from one pack to the next one-stop. I was trying to eat dinner at the same time as healing (don't judge me, I like multi-tasking like that) and I could hardly get a bite in because the guy just never stopped. We were done in less than an hour, and that was with one of the damage dealers being AFK for the entire run, which was another funny thing to be honest. This mage was the last to arrive at the instance and then immediately put me on /follow. I think I saw him cast a fire blast once or twice, presumably so he wouldn't be logged out for inactivity, but that was all he did until the last boss, where he came back just in time to roll need on - and win - the caster ring. I learned from this that the infamous "ledge jump" is in fact so easy that an AFK character on follow will simply walk over the gap without falling, so if you ever do fall down that hole again, know that you're worse than someone auto-running.

In my second run on the other hand, our tank was completely clueless, didn't talk, randomly went AFK a few times, and otherwise just ran off in seemingly random directions. We ended up doing the right side of the dungeon before the left side (something I hadn't seen done before), and when we returned to the druid at the entrance we realised he wouldn't talk to us because by simply following our tank's errant pathing, we'd completely missed one of the bosses. It took me to take charge and lead the group back to him to actually finish the dungeon (something I was actually quite proud of as I'm not at all good at navigating the maze that is Wailing Caverns either).

Next I was off to Shadowfang Keep, which had fewer quests but which I knew offered several juicy cloth drops. I got incredibly lucky in that regard as well, as I won everything I could possibly want in only three runs: shoulders on the first run, belt on the second and the robe on the third. I can't say that it was all well-earned either as I body-pulled and caused deaths in "that room" (you know the one) in two of those three runs.

Due to my good loot luck I was only level 24 at that point, and there was another wave of competing healers sweeping LFG, so I decided to just earn the rest of my last level via questing. While doing so, I found one more priest rune in Silverpine, which brought me up to a total of four. I didn't catch the actual level 25 ding, but I levelled up after handing in to Kadrak at the Ashenvale border as seen below.

A funny side effect of the season's timing is that everyone's running around with winter hats because there are very few useful head slots available at this level so you might as well wear the fluffy hat for fun.

What now? Well, I was keen to get into BFD, but with the imminent holidays there weren't enough guildies available, plus I had some family obligations as well, so that adventure will have to wait for another day.

I had a brief look at the Ashenvale PvP event, which seems to be occurring quite frequently and appears to be quite rewarding, but I don't know if I care enough to make it a focus. I did notice that it seems to involve shared tagging, as when I ran up to an Alliance boss and asked to join the raid group there, I was told they were full, but I was still able to contribute from outside the group and received both loot and kill credit for the boss.

At some point I'll probably want to look up the runes I'm missing and go hunt them down. There's at least one very powerful healer rune that I'll probably want to get before setting foot into the raid.

My professions are another thing to work on. While I've been levelling them as I've been going along, I'm only maxed out for my level in herbalism and cooking, so alchemy, first aid and fishing all have some ways to go to be truly useful.

And of course there is questing - Blizzard made it so that like when you quest at level 60, "unused" experience point rewards get converted into money instead, which means that completing any at-level quest at the cap of 25 rewards at least one gold, which is pretty huge. Again, I don't think I'll make a habit of grinding these, but even just doing a few adds up quite quickly. I can't see many people having issues affording their mount at level forty if they get to spend any time at all playing at the level 25 cap and accumulating quest reward money.