The War Within Recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zones of Midnight

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

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

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

Eversong Woods / Quel'Thalas

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

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

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

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

Zul'Aman

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

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

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

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

Harandar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voidstorm

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

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

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

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

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.

The Quiet at Midnight

The two MMOs I currently play have been competing for my attention particularly hard recently, which meant that WoW's latest expansion launched during a week when I was also extremely busy in SWTOR. This meant that I didn't actually play that much for the first couple of days, and am only slowly getting into it now.

Thanks to splurging on the epic edition I had early access too, something I still feel a bit uncomfortable about because I still don't like the whole notion of only the biggest spenders getting to play early. But it was a fairly trivial upgrade for me to make in terms of my current financials, and I quite liked the idea of the extra Trader's Tender and housing items (that was before housing went into early access and I realised I don't actually like WoW's housing all that much, at least not in its current state).

Anyway, thanks to the aforementioned business in SWTOR, the husband and I only made limited use of the early access, playing for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday, when EA had started on Friday. It felt like a very strange experience to me, due to how empty everything was. When we did the expansion intro event - which was pretty long - I think we saw a totality of two other players throughout the entire thing. (Which made it funny when I saw Redbeard's post a few days later in which he concluded looking at it from the outside "that most people bought Early Access".)

Someone on reddit pointed out that the new Silvermoon looks great with an Inky Black Potion, and I can only concur. 

Now, said expansion intro is phased, and there were a few more people in Silvermoon once we got there, but it was still strangely quiet. That whole experience only reinforced my earlier sensation that Midnight doesn't feel like a "proper" expansion to me somehow. I endlessly bemoan the state of Classic's mega servers because I think an open world where every square inch of landmass is permanently overcrowded with players is stupid, but an occasion as special as the launch of a new expansion should definitely draw crowds to feel exciting.

After the "proper" launch, things admittedly picked up a bit, and Silvermoon is laggy as hell whenever I fly over it, but I still feel like I don't see a lot of players out and about a lot of the time. I don't know if there's that much phasing going on, or everyone is just perfectly spread out across the long, winding path that is the campaign storyline, but I maintain that it feels strange.

Back at War Within's launch, the husband and I initially did all the quests in the first zone, and then switched to just doing the main storyline as we were already halfway to the new level cap. It then turned out that the actual main campaign was really short. This time around, we decided to just focus on the campaign from the beginning, since access to so much of endgame is locked behind completing it, and it turned out that this time around, the main story was much longer. We didn't 100% avoid all side activities, and we're both miners which also adds to one's XP gains, but I was still surprised that I was only a few bars away from 90 by the time we wrapped things up in the Voidstorm.

The levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years. Without going into spoilers, I'll say that I had fun questing with Arator and seeing his personality get fleshed out. Crazy fantasy settings aside, it also struck me as a quite realistic and relatable narrative for a young adult to have to come to terms with the fact that his parents are also just people with their own hang-ups and issues.

From a technical perspective, I was kind of impressed by how many cut scenes they included in the levelling journey - War Within already had a lot of these, but it feels like Midnight ramped it up by yet another level. Then again, it also seemed quite noticeable to me that this increase in quantity came with a bit of a drop in quality. From what I remember, most of War Within's levelling cinematics featured extremely detailed, hand-crafted animations, and while Midnight had a few of those too, there were also a lot of the more basic cut scenes that featured the old stock character animations that people sometimes clown on. I didn't mind that too much myself; I'm just saying that I found it noticeable.

On the plus side, I've appreciated the move to most of the cut scenes now being triggered by a prompt that has you talking to an NPC, which means it's clear when they're meant to happen. I say this as both the husband and I had issues in previous expansions when automatically triggered cut scenes bugged out and didn't play, causing us to be fast-forwarded in the story without any clue about what just happened.

I also have to say that there's something magical about being back in the Eastern Kingdoms, connected to the original World of Warcraft with no loading screens. There was one point in a quest where we had to go to the Eastern Plaguelands, and the husband asked how we even get there, and I responded that this had been my first thought as well since EPL is usually quite out of the way, but we're in Quel'Thalas now, so it's literally just the next zone down to the south.

Also, while I was 100% in on the Draenei at Burning Crusade's launch and never much into the blood elves, there's still something nostalgic to questing in Eversong and Zul'Aman again. Not to mention mining copper, tin and silver again, even if they have extra adjectives in front of their names now. (I had to look up what "refulgent" means.)

All in all, Midnight has still been off to a good start with me, despite the "Is this really an expansion or more like a big patch?" feeling. Ironically, I think it helped that Xal'atah didn't play that much of a role for most of it aside from in the intro, because honestly, all the stories that didn't involve her were just that much more interesting to me. As a commenter on Wilhelm's blog put it, "I still don’t understand why the angry blue orb girl wants to annihilate everything" - just...yeah, I agree. I laughed at and appreciated this line of dialogue on how we should deal with Xal in game:

Oh, and totally unrelated to Midnight itself: During this first week of the expansion, after more than a year of clearing MC almost every week, I finally got my second Binding of the Windseeker and was able to claim my Thunderfury. Definitely not the worst start to a new expansion I've had.

The New and Improved Exile's Reach

One thing that's always fascinating to me is how little the wider WoW community cares about the starter/levelling experience. I guess it's what you get when you've spent the last two decades fostering an environment where endgame is the only thing that matters, but it still takes me by surprise whenever Blizzard makes changes to what new or returning players see and I almost miss it just because of how little publicity it gets.

One such change that actually already happened a whole patch ago now was a revamp of Exile's Reach, to improve the transition from the tutorial island to the Dragon Isles levelling campaign. I don't know why I suddenly remembered about that the other night, but I decided to start up my US trial account again to make another alt there and see what's new.

I stared in wide-eyed surprise when my little troll hunter loaded in on the boat and instead of finding myself face to face with Warlord Grimaxe, I was greeted by Thrall himself. (I think for Alliance it's Jaina.) Not to mention the two dragons gliding casually alongside the boat, Kalecgos and Wrathion. (Warlord Grimaxe was still there by the way, but as more of a background character.)

You can't see Wrathion because he was behind me, gliding along on the other side of the boat. 

The framing is still that you're looking for a missing expedition, but not just any expedition now, but one that was on its way to the Dragon Isles. That... actually works surprisingly well.

You still go through the whole shipwreck routine (Thrall's control of the elements really isn't what it used to be) and all the other minor NPCs you meet along the way are also still there. Grimaxe's daughter also shows up at some point but without any fanfare - instead the person who needs rescuing from the big bad ogre is Wrathion.

The only gameplay change I noticed was that when you get out of the spider cave, the game forcibly breaks your gear. As someone who's kind of OCD about repairing I noticed that immediately, and though I was confused about what had happened, I instantly stopped by the repair guy to get it fixed. Funnily enough, the next quest I was given then said something like "Oh no, your gear was damaged during your last adventure! You should repair it!" and then everything made sense. I guess that's not a bad thing to add to the tutorial.

The final confrontation in the ogre citadel has also been changed, as you no longer need to prevent the raising of an undead dragon, but instead rescue Kalecgos from being mind-controlled. (Though Blizz hasn't been 100% thorough with cleaning up the NPC chatter, as I encountered at least one instance of a character still talking about the raising of an undead dragon.)

After this, instead of a group of Alliance/Horde arriving on gryphons/wyverns to whisk you away to the capital, Kalec offers you a ride to the Dragon Isles, completely skipping the introduction to Stormwind or Orgrimmar. That definitely made me raise an eyebrow, but I can't objectively say that I think it's a bad change. My own nostalgia just wants those places to feel important, but truth be told they haven't been core to the retail experience in many years.

A few months ago I winced at this reddit post illustrating how someone can get very invested in the modern game without having the slighest clue about many classic locations. When I shared it with my guild, the guildie who's gotten the most into raiding and M+ in WoW revealed that he had no idea either where or what Thunder Bluff even was. There's a part of me that wants to grab players like that and shake them, shouting "These places are amazing, you've got to go there and see them!" but realistically, the modern game doesn't work that way.

And in fairness, seeing all the old stuff that people loved in the past is not necessary to fall in love with WoW. I had never played any of the Warcraft RTS games when I started playing in 2006, so I had no idea about who Arthas was or any of the lore behind anything, but I was fine and had fun learning as I went. It seems fair to posit that players new to retail WoW in 2026 can also be plopped directly into newer content without having all the background on anything, as long as the new stuff is interesting and somewhat coherent. And I think the Dragon Isles are pretty good for that. You could do worse than leading players into that as their first adventure.

Of course, they'll get to explore a world that is very different from how Vanilla was twenty years ago. In the classic world, it took a long time to encounter your first dragon, which is very different from buddying up with allied dragons from level one. And that does feel a bit weird to me, but to be honest that's just where the game's lore is at right now. It doesn't have to be bad; it's just different. (Though I do think it's a bit funny that your first lesson about dragons is basically that they're not very impressive and will immediately need rescuing from random ogres.)

Anyway, I cheated a bit and made a quick trip back to Orgrimmar for my own peace of mind, and also detoured to Valdrakken to pick up some professions. As someone who always enjoys levelling professions I bristled a bit at their complete absence from this tutorial, but then they were always treated as a lower priority feature. And there is a brief intro to them in Dornogal if I recall correctly, which might be a better time for it nowadays so as not to front-load too many systems I guess. Anyway, after that I continued my journey across the Waking Shores as seemingly intended. There's another Winds of Mysterious Fortune event going on right now, so gear drops were aplenty.

Learning how to ride my red protodrake felt a bit weird now that Blizzard basically took away the whole skyriding mini game and it's just pressing buttons on cooldown, but oh well. I guess it's still not bad to ease first-timers into it slowly.

The one hitch I encountered was that I was unable to do Ruby Life Pools as a follower dungeon when I got there. I'd get the loading screen for the instance, followed by the Dragon Isles loading screen, and then I was back at the entrance with a note that I'd been removed from the group. Are free-to-play players not worthy of being boosted through dungeons by NPCs? I found some reports of other people encountering the same issue and finding it odd, but no real confirmation on whether it was an intended restriction for trial accounts or a bug, and whether there's anything you can do about it.

Regardless, I soon hit level 20, the cap for free accounts, and stopped playing. With world scaling I could technically keep going for a while longer I suppose, but I don't think I care enough about seeing the new solo version of the Raszageth fight they supposedly added for levellers as well.

Still, all in all I was kind of impressed, honestly. Obviously the real judges of whether this new experience is any good will be genuinely new players, but it did seem like a real improvement to me. I was sceptical when I first heard about it because I thought it sounded cheesy to shoehorn all these important NPCs into the starter experience for seemingly no reason, but it actually works alright in context. Thrall gave players a quest at level ten in Vanilla as well, so it's really not that strange.

I feel like the changes embrace retail WoW as it is - when you have more of a focus on stories involving named NPCs for example, it makes sense to introduce them earlier on, even if it's in the context of a minor, relatively inconsequential adventure. There's time to learn more about them later, but it makes for a better starting point. And the whole skipping Stormwind and Orgrimmar bit really hurts me as a veteran player but is true to the reality that these old capitals aren't places where anyone spends a lot of their time nowadays - better to just lead the newbies straight to the hubs where there are actually other players.

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.

Bringing Order to the Isles

There's a little more than a week left in Legion Remix, and a few days ago I finished my last achievement for this special mode. According to Data for Azeroth, Bringing Order to the Isles is now the rarest achievement I've got to my name, with less than one percent of all accounts having earned that one. That's rarer than even some of the old achievements I have that are no longer available, such as Champion of Ulduar or The Ancient Keeper, though I expect a few more people will get those last few quests in and tick the box before Lemix ends.

Bringing Order to the Isles required completing all class order hall quests for all classes, meaning both the basic campaign and the quest chain for the special class-specific mount. I had a lot of thoughts on these but I think I'll save those for another post because obviously twelve different storylines and mounts are a lot to talk about!

For this post I'll limit myself to the general experience of playing Legion Remix, especially compared to MoP Remix. Here's my final roster of timerunners and their /played time:

• Kinta, blood death knight: 4 days, 18 hours
• Flerence, havoc demon hunter: 14 hours
• Clar, mistweaver monk: 10 hours
• Axal, discipline priest: 12 hours
• Floo, fury warrior: 6 hours
• Bith, beast mastery hunter: 10 hours
• Bosan, retribution paladin: 14 hours
• Fangry, feral druid: 8 hours
• Whie, affliction warlock: 11 hours
• Tenderpaw, assassination rogue: 9 hours
• Rockpaw, elemental shaman: 7 hours
• Emb, fire mage: 6 hours

I felt a bit stumped initially, having to create twelve new characters when I had just levelled one of each class to 80 this expansion, but eventually I simply opted for some race/class combos that I'd never played before. Coming up with a fitting transmog for each one was actually the hardest part. As you can see, comparatively little play time was required just to level up and get through all the class order quests, with my death knight main being the only one with a significant /played time due to the fact that she did all the zone storylines, dungeons, raids and other achievement-related activities. And yes, I mained a tank again, how strange. It wasn't a choice with a lot of intent behind it; it just kind of happened that way.

Overall, the experience of levelling twelve new alts in such a short time frame felt weird. It's not that it's difficult exactly, what with how fast it all was, but from a gameplay experience it was honestly kind of terrible. I quickly gave up on even trying to sort out my action bars or understanding my talents, because it was all flying past way too quickly anyway. I just tried to remember a handful of buttons on each character and that was it. I'm someone who very much enjoys levelling alts in general, but the way Blizzard actively encouraged you to pump out new ones at speed in Lemix just felt weird. There isn't even a semblance of RPG left in playing that way, you're just trying to catch them all like some sort of Pokemon trainer, while also collecting and discarding shinies like you're in Diablo. It's bizarre.

In general I think I preferred the way the Remix experience was a bit more free-form in MoP last time around. I'm sure all the new structure they introduced for Legion helped with player retention, as the staggered content releases forced you to come back every so often if you wanted to see and do all the things, while the endless infinite research assignments for gear tried to hook into that part of your brain that likes to do dailies, way harder than anything in MoP did. And it worked, including on me! But it also shifted the experience towards being a bit more chore-like as opposed to the way MoP Remix just gave you all the content and was like "have fun, you figure out what you want to do".

And well, there was the whole "levelling twelve characters" side of it of course, compared to the five I chose to level up in MoP. It's weird because the moment I learned that Lemix was going to be a thing, doing exactly this in order to see all the class order halls was something I immediately considered, but only as a kind of "wouldn't it be crazy if I went that hard" type of idea. The fact that Blizzard put levelling one of each class in with the standard achievements for this event felt like it shifted the goal posts in way that I didn't really enjoy, and it's not something I'd ever want to do for a limited-time event like this again to be honest. They asked me to play this one a lot, and I did, but now the only direction for my investment to go in future Remixes is down.

But I guess that's Legion in a nutshell, isn't it? I already observed previously, after levelling through it for the first time in Chromie Time, that I could see why people loved it so much when it first came out, what with the expansion's coherent theme and steady progression with ever rising stakes. Revisiting Suramar was a delight, as I genuinely enjoyed seeing that story and all its characters again. (I love Oculeth!) But after Argus... where was there even left to go?

Doing all the class order halls this time around only drove home just how badly Blizzard screwed this up, actually. It kind of reminded me of how Bioware more or less made you the most powerful person in the galaxy during SWTOR's Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. It was insane, something that was always going to be a terrible idea in an MMO, even one with a personal story in which you are the hero, because it was a high that wasn't sustainable and climbing back down from that peak was always going to feel bad. (People still grouse about it ten years later.)

And Legion (which actually came out around the same time) did a very similar thing with the artifact weapons and class order halls. I'm not sure the quest to deplete your artifact weapon is still in the game, but basically giving you the Ashbringer and then making you throw it away was always going to feel bad, no matter how they spun it. But the class order halls are just as bad in my opinion! These should always have been a permanent feature, not something for one expansion only.

For any character that was actually played during the Legion expansion it must have felt utterly insane to, I dunno, ascend to Skyhold in the heavens (as a warrior) and then just... stop going there once BfA came around. Same with the "Highlord" paladin no longer caring to hang out under Light's Hope Chapel. It's just nuts that they built the player character up to this level and then just shrugged and expected you to move on from it without a second thought.

I guess in that way, Legion Remix mirrored the vibe of the original expansion. All those achievements to level one of each class made sense in the context of all the unique class-specific content, but no other expansion has that much of it, so it wouldn't make sense to ask people to do it again in whatever comes next, and I expect it will feel somewhat less exciting. My bet is on a Wrath of the Lich King Remix next, to get us ready for returning to Northrend in The Last Titan (the expansion after Midnight). 

Legion Remix: What Am I Even Doing?

Legion Remix continues to enthrall retail WoW players, and that includes me. The other week I went to K'aresh for a bit and it was like a ghost town. Rares I'd never seen before were up everywhere, only surrounded by tumbleweeds. Meanwhile in Lemix, seemingly every part of every zone is popping, as are all the activity queues.

Almost a month in, I'm working on levelling my third character, but I'm also feeling a bit lost. Looking back at how I wrote about MoP Remix last year, I actually had similar feelings back then, though I eventually found purpose in replaying all the Pandaria story quests, selective hunting of achievements, and grinding Bronze to be able to buy all the cosmetics.

I thought I'd just do the same thing again this time around, but the changes made to the system make everything hit differently. I feel like I'm getting showered in Bronze as a mere side effect of everything else I'm doing, and I've actually been holding off on buying too many things as I know that some rewards can be earned by simply playing too, and I want to avoid spending currency on an item that I would've gotten naturally a week later anyway. (I read several comments from people who fell into this trap.)

In terms of doing the story quests, the husband and I made our way through the original four zones as well as the entirety of the Suramar campaign, which meant we were "caught up" until today's patch release opened up the Broken Shore. I'm actually not sure how I feel about the more staggered content release cadence they are doing for Legion. I kind of liked how MoP Remix was just completely open from the beginning and everything felt like you'd simply get there when you got there, but I figured maybe slowing some of the rushers down a bit this time around wouldn't be so bad to maintain interest in Legion Remix for a little longer. Now that I'm seeing it in action though - I don't know, it feels like instead there is this unspoken pressure to always do the newest bit of content quickly while everyone else is there, because in two weeks everyone will have moved on again. It's probably only in my head, but either way I'm not sure this change actually feels like an improvement to me personally.

The fact that there's an achievement for levelling one of each class during Remix, combined with my interest in seeing the different class order halls, has made me consider making that a personal goal for myself, but I'm still not 100% sure I've truly got the motivation. Yeah, seeing different class order halls is cool, but the shtick of being made "leader of your order" or whatever less than an hour after creating your character just grates a bit, even with the humorous explanation given by the infinite dragons. My most recent alt is a monk and having famous NPCs like Chen Stormstout or Taran Zhu fawn over a derpy little level 30 vulpera as "Grandmaster" just feels wrong.

Everything's also flying by so fast it kind of makes my head spin. Does playing a few hours to make a number go from 10 to 80 at super speed even still count as "levelling"? Can I really think of these new alts as characters when they have so little history and have had no real adventures of their own? They feel like dress-up dolls for different transmog sets more than anything else.

It kind of highlights a problem I have with retail WoW in general: that it gives rewards too quickly and for too little, to the point where they start feeling a bit meaningless and I eventually get sick of them. I used to have a similar problem back when I played Neverwinter, whenever they'd have some sort of bonus event and I'd grind like crazy until I just felt burnt out. WoW does something similar to me nowadays, where they'll provide loads of activities that are quick and rewarding, and I keep thinking "wow, that was fun and took no time at all, I should also do that on my alt" or something along those lines, but even a quick task starts to take up significant amounts of time once you repeat it ten times, and eventually I hit the point where it just becomes too much and too repetitive, so that I end up needing a break. It's like when someone gives you a cookie and at first you just think that's nice but if they then expect you to eat twenty more you'll just want to get away from the craziness eventually.

Remix is like that too, only dialled up to eleven. I definitely enjoy it in small doses, but I'm honestly not sure I can deal with the way it attempts to inject dopamine straight into my veins seemingly every five minutes.

Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience

I've mostly written about Turtle WoW in terms of their custom content and how it compares to real Vanilla WoW, but I wanted to also dedicate some time to writing about mechanical and quality of life changes they've made to the game because I think they've made some interesting decisions in that area.

To begin with, what we call "Turtle WoW" actually runs three servers in the West at the moment, two designated as RP-PvE and one PvP. (There are some Chinese servers as well, but I don't really know much about those.) I actually find it interesting that there are no "normal" PvE servers - you've got to be accepting of roleplaying or GTFO. Now, I don't know how much RP actually happens on these servers - I've occasionally seen people that looked like they might be roleplaying but nothing I could identify as such with certainty. However, it sends a message that the devs support RP and immersion and I kind of like that. It strikes me as a virtual application of the broken windows theory - show that you care about the small stuff and it makes a better environment for everyone.

My hunter is on the older of the two PvE servers because I wanted to avoid the new server crowds on the more recently launched server. It's still plenty busy where I am and I've had no issues finding people to group with.

I also accepted a random guild invite at one point just because I thought the name looked kind of neat and I was curious whether there were any new guild-specific features to discover. The answer to that was yes. I wasn't surprised that guild banks are a thing, considering that's one of those features that everyone but the most hardcore Vanilla purists would be quite happy to import from Burning Crusade, however my ears perked up when I saw people mention a "guild house". My first thought was, WTF, Turtle WoW has housing? How come nobody mentioned that before? Well, the reason is that it doesn't really. What it does have is the ability for a guild to designate an existing inn as their guild's "base of operations" so to speak, and your guild tabard then serves as a second hearthstone to that inn. In that same building, you also gain rested XP at a heavily accelerated rate, similar to what you get while standing under a tent. It may not be "housing" but it's still a neat feature. 

Speaking of tents, I previously mentioned benefiting from the rested XP boost of a tent in Darkshore, but I didn't go into any detail about them (to be fair, at the time I also didn't really know much more about them than that standing under one was beneficial). The Turtle devs added a secondary profession called survival, which is not very fleshed out to be honest - but it does allow you to craft this item called Traveler's Tent, which you can plop down anywhere in the world to let people benefit from a quick boost to their rested XP. There's a two-hour cooldown on crafting them and you can only carry one at a time, so you can't spam them, but there's pretty much always at least one active right outside the gates of Stormwind.

It's a lovely way of encouraging player interaction and makes breaks feel more meaningful, but I also like that it's just one more way in which Turtle WoW let's you fine-tune the rate of your XP gains. Basically the tents allow you to almost permanently have an XP boost up if you want it and plan for it, but there are also levelling challenges that intentionally reduce your XP, and you can toggle XP gains on or off entirely via your portrait at any time. Giving players this much agency about just how fast or slowly they want to level has felt very refreshing to me compared to Blizzard's accelerationist approach that likes to just apply huge XP bonuses to everyone to get them to the end already. In Turtle, I made a lot of use of tents earlier on when I just wanted to get to the newer content, but recently I've stopped as I started to feel like I was going too fast. I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that not all players like to level at the same speed, and that even the same player may prefer to go slower or faster at different points depending on their mood.

Aside from obvious XP adjustments, other changes to questing make it feel smoother and more fun than in "normal" Vanilla, without jumping straight to the extreme streamlining that was introduced in Cataclysm. For example, just the addition of all these new zones with things to do helps to ease any potential stresses about where to go and how to get to the next level. I often hear people say that back in Vanilla, there weren't even enough quests to get you to max level so you had to grind mobs to get there, which was never my own experience. What is definitely true though is that as the available quests become more sparse, you spend more time running around for fewer rewards, and if it's not your first character, you'll be going through a lot of the same quest lines and zones over and over.

On Turtle WoW, due to my exploration of their mid-level custom zones, my hunter is approaching 40 without ever having stepped foot into the Scarlet Monastery or having done any questing in any of the traditional level 30+ zones. It's kind of remarkable what that does for pacing and personal motivation, as this freedom to go to half a dozen different places helps maintain that early explorer energy you have coming out of the starting zones, and you never get that feeling of "oh well, guess it's time for [insert zone you're not particularly fond of] because there's not much else left to do in my level range". It genuinely made me wonder for the first time how WoW's history would have gone differently if they had made the first expansion a lateral one instead of adding ten more levels on top.

Another thing that contributes to a smoother questing experience is a change that took me some time to notice - that quests never go grey; they always stay green. (Or rather, I technically don't know about never at this point, but as I mentioned I'm getting close to 40 and haven't seen one go grey yet.) In line with that, the exclamation marks for low-level quests never disappear, which I feel sends an interesting message: that it's more important to make sure players know where there are stories to see than that they only see what gives them the best XP per hour for their level. I've gone back and done some random low-level quests a couple of times, and while a level five quest won't move your bar much past a certain point even if it's technically green to you, it still felt nice to me. I also noticed that this gets rid of the sometimes disappointing experience of completing a green quest, levelling up before you hand it in and then seeing it go grey and close to "reward-less".

Also filed under "subtle but interesting levelling changes" we have rented mounts. I've written about the turtle mount you can get at level 18, but at some point I also started to occasionally notice low-level players riding around on slow horses with odd tooltips on their buff bar. I eventually figured out that at the gates of some towns, you can rent a mount for a few copper, which then puts you on a horse for five minutes. This may not sound like much, but again, if you're a lowbie wanting to get from Menethil harbour to the other side of the Wetlands, it's actually a worthy investment! It's just another small thing that gives low-level characters more options without completely trivialising travel.

Another unrelated quality of life change that surprised me and made me think "it's actually weird that Blizzard never did this" is changed icon art for some items. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect every single item in the game to have unique icon art and for the devs to never recycle anything ever, but there have definitely been instances of this that tend to feel worse than others. For example the drinks Bubbling Water and Morning Glory Dew share the same icon, but while one is only useful for characters around level 20, the other is an endgame consumable. I have definitely been in situations where I got these mixed up in my bag, sometimes with even more items that share the same icon.

Not on Turtle WoW though, as they gave Bubbling Water a new, different icon. Same with all the spices on the trade goods vendor - I remember back in the day I used to buy the wrong spices by accident a lot, because it was just so easy to get them mixed up since they all look the same. This is a lot less of a problem on Turtle WoW, with each spice packet having been given a different colour. Again, I'm kind of surprised Blizzard never seems to have given this any thought, especially after I heard stories of people using recycled icons to scam people in retail. (The specific case I heard about was during BfA when someone would make people believe they were buying valuable Midnight Salmon but would then trade them comparatively worthless Darkmoon Daggermaw at the last second.)

The way things look makes for a good segue to the subject of transmog, which is another thing that Turtle WoW has. Personally I'm someone who enjoys transmog in retail, but at the same time I like Vanilla not having it as I do think it changes the feel of the world around you, so I was quite surprised (and initially a bit put off) that this was a feature that the devs included. However, as I've learned more about it, I've been finding it kind of interesting.

In a nutshell it does not work like in retail where you can transmog very freely by simply paying some gold. Instead every piece of gear requires a special token to change its appearance. These tokens can be bought in the cash shop (naturally) but they can also be acquired via certain material hand-ins and as drops from higher-level dungeons. This means that the feature is generally not used much by levellers and more of a sign of prestige at high level. As a result of that, most people ambling about in town look like you'd expect random Vanilla WoW levellers to look, and only the high levels stand out through their transmogs, and only a very small number of them are ridiculous Playboy bunny style outfits. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this in the long run, assuming that the population at high level and the number of ridiculous outfits increases, but at least superficially this system seems to strike an interesting balance between giving people more options to change their appearance while also preserving a good-looking outfit as something to aspire to.

Finally, the last thing on my list of changes to discuss (for now) is the day/night cycle, which was again something that I only became aware of slowly over time, after first getting confused because I noticed that it wasn't what I expected but couldn't quite figure out yet why that was. Basically what Turtle WoW has opted to do is to treat Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms as opposite sides of the planet - meaning when it's night time on one, it's day on the other. I'm not sure of the reason behind this change to be honest. In retail we're not even 100% sure that the map of Azeroth we use is actually showing us the entirety of the planet. I remember there's a globe decoration in Halls of Lightning that people used to cite as "proof" for a while that the continents we know are all there is, but nothing has ever been stated explicitly and you'd think that if there was nothing in the way, there'd be some boat routes connecting the western part of Kalimdor with the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. Either way, the Turtle WoW devs have locked in on the map we know being all there is to the planet.

There may be more interesting things to discover but these were just some that stood out to me. Most of them are positive in my book, and whatever else you may think of Turtle WoW, I think they've displayed a great understanding of how certain aspects of Vanilla can be improved without harming the overall experience. I wish the WoW Classic dev team was similarly creative with their innovations instead of just coming up with new ways to tweak dungeons and raids.