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.

My 5 Favourite Things about Dragonflight (so Far)

Dragonflight has been out for more than three months now, a point by which you'd expect the "new expansion honeymoon period" to be over. Personally I'm still having fun with it though, and I thought I'd make a little list of the things I like the most and that still keep me entertained.

1. Photography world quests

It's my understanding that these are modelled after a game called Pokemon Snap? I've never played that, but I really enjoy these. The one with the balloon is a bit annoying because of how fiddly it is in terms of targeting, but I love riding the rafts down the various rivers and just taking in the wildlife. It's a cute and chill non-combat pastime.

2. Climbing world quests

Speaking of non-combat pastimes, I also like the climbing mechanic. It's a bit of a funny thing to introduce in an expansion that's so focused on flying, but it works. The only annoying thing here is when a world quest bugs out and one of the early rocks goes missing so that it becomes impossible to complete. I thought Blizzard had finally fixed this but then I encountered it again just this past week so it still seems to be happening intermittently.

3. The Iskaara Community Feast

I'm always a bit sceptical of crazy open world events, because while they do have a certain appeal, I find that the chaos gets old pretty quickly, for me personally at least. I generally prefer my group content to be a bit more organised. However, the community feast manages to straddle a peculiar line between being complete mayhem yet also very structured. The way everyone piles on top of each other and spams AoE gives it the appearance of complete chaos, but in reality we're all just waiting for Big Kinook to give us another personalised task, and it's always fun to see what he'll ask of you next.

4. Dragon riding in general

I've made a whole post about how pleasantly surprised I've been by Blizzards pivot towards embracing flying this expansion, and it hasn't gotten old yet. I still enjoy discovering new things wherever I land, and I always do the racing world quests when they're up. I hope to eventually achieve gold on all of them, but I'm seeing that as more of a long-term goal for the expansion that I don't need to rush.

5. Alt friendliness

Coming from SWTOR, calling anything in WoW alt friendly feels like a stretch, but by WoW standards I've been pretty impressed by how many things are unlocked account-wide by your first character and how much freedom you have to play your alts on the Dragon Isles in different ways. It could still be better - grinding Renown on every character still seems unnecessary to me even with the 200% reputation boost you earn after a certain point - but it's pretty decent. The fact that I have been having fun working on some alts already even with my rather casual play pretty much speaks for itself.

Lonely in a Crowd

Burning Crusade is mostly remembered for its intricate raid attunements and the raids themselves feeling pretty hard at the time, but the classic version has been a reminder for me that it actually also did loads to expand the endgame for non-raiders. I've said before that I defy the notion that the vanilla endgame was all about raiding, but I'll fully admit that most activities outside of raiding didn't reward great gear and were mostly pretty undirected. This changed massively in Burning Crusade.

Regular quests were increased in number and gave more and better rewards, so that you had lots left to do after levelling up and could fully kit out your character in a decent set of gear purely from quest rewards. Once you were done with that, the game introduced what would soon become a staple of the whole genre: the daily quest, a straightforward, repeatable source of money if you had no other quests left to do and didn't really know how or care to make money by farming materials for other people.

Reputations went from a somewhat random feature that didn't really do much or anything at all in most cases (What was meant to be the point of Steamwheedle Cartel reputation anyway?) to a massive gameplay focus, with lots of new reputations that had vendors in obvious locations and offered amazing rewards at higher reputation levels.

Crafting became insanely powerful - I heard someone say the other day that they thought crafting in Burning Crusade was the best that WoW's crafting has ever been and I'm not sure many people would agree with that, but it did allow you to create gear that was as good if not better than a lot of raid gear if you were willing to invest the time into grinding out those skill levels.

Dungeons became more accessible, straightforward and farmable, and heroic dungeons were meant to offer a proper alternative to raiding.

Sadly I've come to realise over the past month that I don't care all that much about any of that in isolation. I mean, it's fine, these things are good ways to pass the time if you have nothing else to do... but frankly, I do have other things to do. I'm finding myself oddly close to my position back at the start of 2020, when I felt like I was "done" with levelling my night elf hunter and could only get myself to log in sporadically to work on some random goal or other.

But Shintar, you might say, I thought you were hyped for doing BC dungeons with your guildies? Whatever happened to that? Aren't you all caught up now and able to run with the other 70s? The answer is... that it's not what I expected.

Simply put, people aren't running dungeons the way they used to. I remember BC dungeons as these adventures with my friends that we did just because it was fun and to maybe help a particular person get a piece of gear or complete a quest. I don't remember them as these hyper-efficient affairs that are focused on checking as many boxes in as little time as possible, so I'm not nearly as charmed by hastily assembled pugs that are in and out within less than an hour and then never speak to you again. Or even runs with guildies that just want to repeat the same dungeon five times in a row to reach some goal of theirs as soon as possible and then want to move on and never come back. Yes, it gets things done, but it lacks soul.

I knew that WoW evolved towards appealing mainly to achiever types over the years, but I guess I'd never realised how much of that already started in BC, probably because player attitudes took a while to change. As someone who identifies primarily as a socialiser/explorer, it's just an incredibly sad affair. The best time I've had playing Classic BC in the last couple of weeks has been when I did the Blade's Edge quests with a friend. It was not efficient and way down on the totem pole in terms of upgrading my character's gear (earning some gold is always useful I guess, but not exactly a priority when you're not saving up for a specific upgrade), but it was fun. We read the quests, were surprised by things we didn't remember (very well) and joked about how much sense the tasks we were being given made or didn't make in context. I'm just not sure that sort of quest session every once in a while is going to be enough for me.

I've really been struggling to articulate this as well... I've had this cloud hanging over my head almost since BC started, but I thought that maybe it was just the changes happening to the guild and feelings of FOMO. But honestly, I wasn't nearly as fazed by player churn back in Classic, and in regards to the FOMO I sadly had to realise that catching up didn't help. I thought I wasn't getting to experience the things I wanted to experience because I was falling behind, but the truth is they weren't going to happen anyway.

Nobody was dying for me to join them at 70. Everyone's busy working on their checklists, and when it comes to dungeons, it's a dog-eat-dog world for damage dealers, where if you want to get into any runs, you have to be online 24/7 in order to be able to shout "me" within seconds as soon as a tank comes online and a dps spot opens up somewhere. From a utilitarian standpoint, I'm but one in a now endless sea of FOTM hunters. It's a bit of a running gag in the guild that people can't even remember my name and will call me by some other hunter's name, and I know that it's not malicious, but right now, on top of everything else... it does kind of sting.

I guess it turns out that my friendships with most of the guild apparently aren't as good as I maybe thought they were. This isn't to diss anyone or make them feel like a bad friend, because it's normal for bonds to strengthen or weaken as people's paths cross and diverge. It's just that... original Classic had us on the same wavelength a lot more often I guess. With all the "good stuff" requiring lots of people, there was nearly always room for more. Now whenever I log in, everyone's always already busy chasing some of their many personal goals, and while I'm sure many people would absolutely be willing to group up with me if I asked emphatically enough, I don't want to drag anyone away from what they really want to do, because getting my own objectives done over theirs isn't the point.

I am oddly reminded of the early days of Cataclysm, when I found myself somewhat frustrated by the fact that while the new dungeons were great fun in a guild group and often less so in pugs, everybody just pressed the dungeon finder queue button the moment they logged in because waiting for other guildies to come online was inconvenient. It was particularly tragic when we had what would have been a full guild group online within ten minutes, but of course the queues for tanks and healers were shorter than that so the people playing those roles had already been whisked away to some random pug. There may not be a dungeon finder in Classic BC, but with how focused and efficient modern players are, the LFG channel hardly takes much longer a lot of the time.

We'll see how 25-man raiding goes, which is supposed to officially kick off this week (somehow I managed to make it into the core team by the skin of my teeth). I also retain some hope that maybe things will settle down a bit over time as people run out of things to do (as weird as that may sound). As I mentioned before, things seemed pretty crazy at Classic launch as well; I just wasn't that close to the endgame part of that so I don't really know what it was like. Maybe everyone was also always busy spamming Stratholme for their pre-BiS gear? I don't know. It does seem like BC will continue the trend of giving people lots of solo goals to chase though, what with the introduction of more dailies/reputations with every patch as well as new tiers of badge gear. Plus anyone who seemed to be getting close to being "done" with things on their main so far has then immediately started all over again on an alt.

I'm just kind of sad that this is where I find myself one month into the Classic expansion I was looking forward to the most. I don't want to blame my guildies for enjoying the game in a different way than me. And blaming Blizzard for making the content more solo and small-group focused (more than a decade after the fact no less) seems silly. The obvious solution would be for me to be online more, put myself out there and work on earning more of my guildies' time to be more than just another nameless hunter, but... I just don't have that kind of time and energy anymore. I thought that after nearly a year in the guild I had earned some recognition, but it seems Outland means starting over from scratch on that front as well and I just... can't.

Slay the Undead or Be Slain by Them

Sooo... Naxx is out and the undead are invading. What have I been up to?

I mentioned previously that I'd bought the materials to buy the raid attunement at honoured level with the Argent Dawn, but I'd heard that the Scourge invasion event was pretty good for reputation so I wanted to give that a go before actually completing the attunement quest. It wasn't really as good as I had hoped, but killing the mobs does give reputation until you reach revered, and teaming up with a bunch of guildies the rep gains kept coming in pretty quickly. I ended up grinding like mad with a rotating roster of guildies for about one and a half days until I hit revered, at which point I bought the attunement for a reduced price and was properly pleased with myself.

The next best thing about the whole event was helping out a guildie who plays a priest and who had been very downtrodden about only having just hit honoured, at which point the attunement was still too expensive for him. I coaxed him into coming along to farm invasions and before I knew it he was farming them harder than I was, meaning that he also managed to hit revered and get attuned just in time for our first Naxx run on Monday. That just made me happy in a "knowing I actually made a difference" sort of way.

In general, the event brought back a surprising amount of memories. I always say that I don't recall anything about the much-praised zombie invasion event that occurred in the run-up to Wrath, but floating citadels and mobs dropping runes? I remember seeing those at the end of BC and farming them in Blasted Lands. Funny how people rarely talk about that part of the Wrath pre-expansion event replicating the original Scourge invasion.

Monday night we went to Naxx for the first time and it went... okay-ish I guess? My guildies had all been going nuts farming herbs for potions in the run-up to the patch, especially with an eye on Loatheb, but I was saying to one of the raid leaders that I considered that premature because we definitely weren't going to get to Loatheb on the first night anyway. I was told not to be so pessimistic. If you'd asked me to bet, I would have hazarded that we'd maybe clear the spider wing on our first night and possibly kill Noth as well. Four of the easier bosses out of a total of fifteen seemed pretty reasonable for our level of casualness.

As it turns out though, that estimate was still too optimistic, as we finished the night with only two boss kills under our belt. I guess it's a plus that we avoided dying to the first trash pull (after this hilarious video made us all super paranoid), but Anub'Rekhan still took us five attempts to down, and was then followed by more wipes on Faerlina's trash. The Grand Widow herself was a one-shot, interestingly enough, but then we didn't have that much time left by the time we got to Maexxna and just wiped on her twice before calling it a night.

Tonight we returned to a freshly reset instance. Anub only took two tries this time, but Faerlina was suddenly a major struggle for some reason and we wiped twice before getting her down with only a handful of people left alive. The raid leader decided that since we were somewhat short on healers it was better to try Noth instead of Maexxna, and we got him down on the second try. The rest was more dying to trash.

And.... I don't know how I feel about all of this!

I know I don't quite share the excitement of some officers who seemed to be having the time of their lives, but I didn't exactly have a bad time either. The company was enjoyable as usual and the general mood positive, and I'm not someone who minds wiping (or else I wouldn't be running the endless progression reset treadmill in SWTOR). Frankly, that one time when one spider patrol after another respawned right on top of our heads after we were only just trying to recover from the last one was friggin' hilarious, and our struggle with the gauntlet to Heigan was pretty epic as well.

Buuut... I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but I guess I thought we were a little better than this? I suppose since I joined the raid group with AQ40 already on farm I didn't really know what to expect on progression and my expectations were a bit too high. Seeing us wipe so many times on bosses like Anub and Faerlina does make me a bit worried when it comes to the more difficult fights in the instance. Plus I'm not a huge fan of 30-40 gold repair bills per night. Yes, I'll fully admit it: I'm spoiled as a hunter and used to being able to avoid a lot of repairs by using my feign death ability, but the fights in Naxx make it hard. I just don't like the idea of having to start farming purely to keep up with my repairs. Finally, I'm a bit worried about the general health of the raid group - the roster seemed to have recovered to a pretty healthy level a couple of months ago, but lately it's been feeling somewhat anaemic again, leading to us permanently undermanning things, which isn't helpful when it comes to progression either.

Sooo... I guess we'll see how things go from here. One thing that stuck with me was a conversation we had on the way to Maexxna when we were talking about some of the more hardcore guilds on the server putting in crazy hours in order to be able to claim realm firsts, when the guild mistress said that the difference between us and them was that we were used to wiping. This elicited some chuckles, but there is a truth in there in that familiarity and generally being comfortable with wiping makes it less of a problem in a way, whereas in a guild of min-maxers expecting smooth kills it's more likely to create resentment and drama. Looking at how Naxx has been going so far I guess I'll soon find out how resilient the Forks really are.

Casual Endgame Goals

A few years ago I wrote a post explaining what you could do at endgame in Vanilla besides raiding. I'd like to catch you up on how I've been doing with these goals on my hunter in Classic.

Pet Care

Actually, let's start with a bullet point that wasn't on my list back then because it's hunter-specific. As I mentioned previously, my pets really started to fall behind my hunter's level in the fifties, so one of my first goals was to get both of them up to level 60 too. Boy, did that ever take a long time! Nearly three weeks of real time and more than 40 hours of /played in fact. I suppose it could have been done faster if my focus had been on grinding level-appropriate mobs, which is the one and only way of funnelling XP into my little companions, but I was doing a lot of wandering about and doing quests, which obviously benefitted them very little.

They are however both caught up at last, and I also went out into the world to learn higher ranks of Bite and Claw to teach them. Though the highest rank of Bite can apparently only be learned from worgs in Blackrock Spire... I said bollocks to that and settled for the rank below that. Similarly Lightning Breath rank 6 can only be acquired from a Son of Hakkar in Sunken Temple, though that seems a lot more achievable and I'll need to make some time for it one of these days.

Questing

As mentioned in my previous post, regular solo questing has actually been a bit of a challenge because of my quest log being so chock full of dungeon quests, but I have slowly been chipping away at various solo quest lines, especially in the Plaguelands.

There are a number of quests that unlock interesting quest rewards, keys or attunements that I'd quite like to complete just so I can say that I've done them, though I also just generally enjoy questing for its own sake. My most noteworthy quest achievements so far are that I've acquired the key to Scholomance and attuned myself to the Molten Core (though the latter obviously required a group).

Reputations

Just like on my pally back on Kronos I started off grinding Timbermaw rep because I wanted to get to neutral. Those two quest items you pick up and that you can't hand in before then really bugged me! At times I felt quite discouraged by how overfarmed all the furbolg camps were, but eventually I got lucky when I had some free time outside peak hours... plus I did some farming just after the release of AV, when everything out in the world was a bit quieter than usual. There was no immediate incentive to push beyond neutral though.

My reputation with the Argent Dawn is up to friendly simply because of all the undead I killed with my Argent Dawn Commission equipped while questing in the Plaguelands - this is one reputation that feels like it should mostly take care of itself as long as you stay busy in the area and keep running Scholo and Strat.

I haven't started on the Thorium Brotherhood yet and am not sure if there's really any point in doing so either, but I'd quite like to be able to dump all that Dark Iron Residue acquired during my BRD runs somewhere other than the auction house.

I also did the intro quest for the Hydraxian Waterlords, but I'd have to actually go to MC now to continue working on that rep.

Earning Money

Acquiring an epic mount doesn't feel nearly as urgent as the level 40 mount felt to me, maybe because there is a lot less peer pressure. While it seems to me that epic mounts are much more common in Classic than they were back in Vanilla, there are still plenty of people riding around on the slower mounts. Still, it's a goal to work towards in the long run. I'm about halfway there right now, with most of the money having come from questing. (Classic fortunately already has that mechanic that converts excess XP rewards into gold at max level, something that Vanilla didn't have at the very beginning.)

Professions

I figured that mining would mostly take care of itself, and it kind of did, but I was still surprised by how long it took me to hit 300. I didn't remember Thorium being quite so rare, to the point that even endgame zones like Silithus or the Plaguelands are actually filled with more Mithril than anything else. And even when you do find a Thorium node, small ones are usually gone after a single hit and even the so-called rich ones sometimes already disappear after only two taps.

My engineering is up to 285 and the last fifteen points seem very doable if I could only find some more Thorium (see above). And that's considering the very humble amounts required for engineering! I feel bad for the blacksmiths who need hundreds and hundreds of bars to level up.

In terms of secondary professions, first aid has been maxed out for a while, and cooking and fishing are close. For the latter two it's just a matter of taking the time to actually get that final stretch done.

Alterac Valley

I haven't been back since hitting honoured for the arrows, and I already wrote about what I did before then in this post.

Dungeons

Considering my casual playstyle and that I'm not really aiming to do more than one dungeon a week at max, I'm pretty content with what I've achieved so far. Obviously I've run BRD a couple of times, but I've also done Dire Maul West, Scholo, Strat Live and UBRS. The latter was more of an accident than anything else, since I had joined a guild group to kill an elite quest mob, and before I knew it they'd turned the whole thing into an UBRS run to which I just happened to come along because I was already in the group!

In order to be able to say that I've done it all at least once I still need to do Dire Maul East and North, Strat Undead and LBRS. But of course there'll be reasons to re-run the others too... for example I have a quest to rescue Princess Moira from BRD now - yep, the Horde wanted her alive back in the day too, to improve relations with the dwarves. Who knew?

Addendum

Looking at this list after writing it, I find it striking that "getting gear" doesn't feature as a primary goal anywhere. Sure, a lot of these activities will also yield gear as a side effect, but I feel in no hurry to chase any specific drops. I guess I'm just assuming that better gear will come naturally as part of doing all those other things, and it has worked reasonably well for me so far.

Casual Vanilla Endgame

People sometimes say that there was nothing to do in Vanilla WoW at level 60 except raiding. This is not true, but I think the reason people believe this is mainly that they don't understand or remember just how different Vanilla WoW was to current WoW. Mainly, there are two points to consider: Firstly, while it's true that the very best gear in the game generally came from raiding, upgrades were gradual and felt rewarding every step of the way, so just improving your gear via quests and dungeons could keep you busy and felt satisfying for quite a long time, even if you never got best in slot. Secondly, many activities that made up endgame in Vanilla still exist in WoW today but just wouldn't be considered endgame because they take little to no time these days.

Questing

First off, there's simple questing. I mentioned that I hit 60 in Winterspring, but there were still quests to do there, and I still haven't even been to Silithus except to pick up the flight path there. The last time I played retail WoW, in late Mists of Pandaria, I ran dailies with my pet tank there, and we could knock out a daily hub in five to ten minutes. In light of that, the idea of regular, non-repeatable quests keeping you busy and engaged for long enough to count as "endgame" seems kind of bizarre, but it's true. With combat taking so much longer as well as travel and other obstacles in the way, just working on clearing out your quest log could keep a casual player busy for weeks. At the same time it was worth doing not just to learn more about the world, but also to earn money. In a time when inflation has run rampant in retail, to the point where it's not unusual for people to trade in hundreds of thousands of gold, it's hard to remember a time when every piece of gold was precious and required hard work. Some classes also had interesting and unique class quests to pursue at level 60.

Reputations

Reputations in Vanilla mainly meant grinding, which I'm not necessarily a fan of, but as one option of many it absolutely has its place. Right now for example I'm working on my reputation with the Timbermaw, which kind of ties in with the first point as I have two quest items in my bags that I won't be able to hand in until I've reached at least neutral with them. It's slow-going and the last time I checked I still needed to kill over 150 furbolgs to reach my goal, but the nice thing about grinding is that you can do as little or as much of it as you like, at any time. Personally I've settled on simply doing one round through the Deadwood camp whenever I'm landing at the nearby Alliance flight point, and I'll get there when I get there.

Earning Money

Both of the above will earn you money as you go along, but it can also be a goal by itself, for example by going out to collect crafting materials which you can then sell on the auction house. Everyone dreams of having an epic mount one day, but a thousand gold was a lot of money in those days and took some work.

Professions

I've written about my epic journey to becoming an armorsmith, but of course levelling my blacksmithing hasn't ended there. I'm currently sitting on a skill of 278, and with every skill-up requiring more than twenty thorium bars, it's slow going. However, every single item I craft is actually useful and I can sell it (even if the profit isn't great). I haven't focused on it specifically, but I do mine thorium everywhere I see it and so keep chipping away at that skill bar slowly but surely. Likewise, all the other crafting professions and even the secondary professions all have specific requirements to get them maxed out that aren't as simple as loading up your bags with mats and going AFK at the forge.

Alterac Valley

Even if you're generally not a PvPer, Alterac Valley weekends are a chance to hop in and engage in some casual PvP even if it's not usually your cup of tea. There are some nice gear rewards to be had, and if your urge for PvE is too strong, there are also PvE quests to be done in the Valley. With the large number of people participating and the battleground being accessible from level 51, it's simply accepted that not everyone will make a meaningful contribution to the actual battle, so feel free to have fun your own way. Personally I was in an AV match today that lasted two hours and 41 minutes (I was there for the entire duration)... let's just say: it was certainly an experience.

Dungeons

And finally... should you be able and willing to take the step up, there were of course the five-man dungeons. While their length made them less casual-friendly than dungeons in WoW are today, even a casual player should be able to make it at least into the occasional dungeon run. Apart from gear there is also a lot to see here: There's Blackrock Depths (which nobody really runs in its entirety in one go, so it will probably take you several runs just to see all the bosses), Scholomance (which has the added complication of requiring a key), Stratholme live and undead, and the three wings of Dire Maul, all asking you to come back repeatedly, not just for gear drops but also to unlock more stories.