Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

Only a few days ago I responded to a commenter that I didn't care about the beta, but I did preorder and have access to it. So naturally, after spending the last few days hoovering up every possible tidbit of information about Forever that I could find, I was very tempted to at least take a look at it myself. Not to play "properly" mind you, I'll still leave the actual testing up to others... but just to have a bit of a look around, you know? Check out those graphics updates and new UI options, to see what those look like.

The first thing I heard was that there were queues, up to 40,000 people strong from what I've read, though the highest I saw myself was 20k. A few days ago I saw a conversation about Forever's launch on reddit where someone claimed that "modern WoW doesn't have launch queues anymore", which made me chuckle at the time. Maybe "modern" WoW doesn't, but that person has clearly never been part of a Classic launch. And this wasn't even the real launch, just a beta test!

There were some issues with lag and disconnects, which were worse for EU players and which eventually led to me learning that WoW betas always take place in the US region. This surprised me only because of how strict they have been about needing to maintain the regional divide everywhere else, which made me think that there were some legal or technical issues that were simply insurmountable. So you're saying all I needed to do to potentially play with American friends is play a beta? Weird.

Anyway, needless to say, things were busy in the starter zones. Night elf, human and tauren were all bustling. I decided to take my tauren up for a run first to see the lay of the land and was delighted to see the new Plainsrunning racial in action. Unlike the original plan for Plainsrunning that was then dropped for Vanilla, this is not meant to replace a mount but instead lets you slowly build up to 30% movement speed increase as long as you keep running, which I imagine will be great for lower-level characters without a mount wanting/needing to traverse the world.

I also came across this new functionality, which they explained was added to help out hardcore players in particular, because it sucks to die when everything around you resets unexpectedly and you're suddenly surrounded due to no fault of your own.

You could argue that it's a bit immersion-breaking, but I think this is an important enough feature that it's worth it, and I'm actually hoping they'll add this to retail as well. I've had so many rage-inducing moments in retail when I was working on some kind of event that needs build-up, or fighting a tough rare or something, and then just as you're about to finish, with the last mob at 10%, everything around you just disappears because you've been phased into a different version of the world. Always hate that.

Anyway, to get back to Forever, the view towards the north of Mulgore was genuinely stunning because you could see all the way up to Mount Hyjal. I imagine the world will feel kind of different with Nordrassil always looming in the distance wherever you go.

That said, in places the updated graphics looked a bit... weird to me, in a way that I found hard to describe. I ran around Elwynn Forest and Stormwind as well to take some shots there, and then took pictures of the exact same scenes in Classic era to compare them. Take this shot of northern Elwynn Forest, just out of Northshire:

Forever

Classic Era

The shadows in Forever are obviously so much more sophisticated, but it also makes everything look so much darker. And I don't know, is Elwynn Forest of all places meant to be this dark? I'm sure there'll be people who'll answer "yes, it was always a little bit ominous" or something like that, but I always remember it as pretty bright and sunlit, so this change just seems a bit strange to me.

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

I put Classic era first for this one to show that the top of the keep always looked like ass in Vanilla, it just wasn't that big a deal because with the shorter view distances it was always meant to just kind of be this vague silhouette that blends into the background. 

In Forever, the updated lighting somehow manages to give everything more definition, which looks great in the foreground, but it also has the same effect on the towers in the back, basically putting a big highlight on just how terrible they look. Which is awkward! I wonder if they'll do any extra work on updating stuff like that. Either way, it'll take some time to get used to.

I've had similar struggles with the models. I did play around with the SD/HD toggle a bit and it honestly made me feel a bit confused. I love all the old models, but with so much of the environment managing to look more high res somehow (even if it's technically the same old assets), they look a bit out of place at times. But when I toggle HD on, I'm reminded of how much I dislike the new models for some races (hello there, tauren). It's almost like I'd need the toggle to be per character instead of account-wide, so I can see the world in SD when I need a specific character to be that way, and HD when I'm happy to see the newer models. I'm guessing that'd be too complicated to do though. It's just something that'll take a bit of getting used to I guess.

Hope You Like Snakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Second Look at Housing

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Checking in on Hardcore

I hoped that merely writing about my current feelings about Classic would be enough to calm that particular itch until BlizzCon, but that hasn't been entirely the case. After mulling things over for a bit, I decided to log into my hardcore priest for a bit, whom I last played over two years ago.

The first thing to note is that I had already played her a bit more back then, by which I mean more than I actually wrote about at the time. I don't recall why I didn't post about it right away, but I did save a screenshot of me being in a group in Wailing Caverns to remind myself that I did in fact end up running it. I don't know why I stopped playing after that, considering that being unable to get a group for Wailing Caverns was the main reason I cited for losing interest at the time, but I guess it doesn't matter now.

What I did capture in the screenshots I saved was that I had a druid tank who wore the Arena Grand Master trinket - an item that requires you to get the treasure from the centre of the Gurubashi arena in Stranglethorn Vale twelve times. That's not something many characters will ever get, never mind a lowbie on a hardcore server - he'd clearly been twinked in some way. I think the dungeon run was pretty quick and smooth as a result - I certainly don't remember anything like the nerves I felt while trying to keep everyone alive in Ragefire Chasm.

But as I said, all that was two years ago already. What did I find upon logging in this time? A very empty Orgrimmar for one thing, which immediately made my heart sink. I did recall that Blizzard had launched a "fresh" hardcore server at some point (completely unnecessarily, in my opinion), and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in the two original servers becoming pretty depopulated. They are not dead by any means... but very quiet. Gone are the days of world buffs dropping on massive crowds in Orgrimmar every day.

While I do see other levellers around, the make-up of the population is... odd. When I did a /who for my level range, the vast majority of characters were hunters, and when I opened the LFG tool, again, I had to scroll past something like ten hunters before I even saw another class looking for a group. I get that they are probably a popular class for hardcore, but just how dominant they are on Nek'rosh now feels abnormal and weird, and doesn't give me much hope for being able to find dungeon groups.

Lonely at the zeppelin 

Checking on what I had in my quest log, I had some quests pointing me towards Stonetalon Mountains, which seemed like a fun and safe option to start on at level 22. And it was. I gained about two levels doing various green quests and never really found myself in any danger. The scariest thing I did was solo Besseleth, but even though I was out of mana at the end, the fight never really got too scary.

I also did a bit of work on my professions on the side, picking more flowers, making potions and pausing at various fishing pools. And I'm a bit embarrassed to admit... I may have been affected by primarily spending my time in retail for months now, but I kept thinking that it was all a bit slow and boring. By the third time I was running up and down the full length of Stonetalon on foot with no speed buffs I found myself wishing for a mount. It just felt lonely and I wasn't particularly excited by any of it.

Nonetheless, I pushed on for a little while, mixing it up a bit by also questing in the southern Barrens and Hillsbrad, but I just didn't feel any of the old magic. I guess I can say that I hit level 25, which officially makes this priest more long-lived than Lossy the mage was, having died at level 22, but I don't think I'll keep at it for now. I've had a taste of Classic and at least this particular experience wasn't actually the flavour I was looking for. We'll see what September brings.

My Midnight Season 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My warrior tank's final M+ scorecard

My hunter's final M+ scorecard

My holy priest's final M+ scorecard

Pent up Classic Energy

I haven't written much about Classic in recent months, but I'm still thinking about it a lot. Especially in the shower for some reason.

You know how your brain will sometimes form somewhat random but extremely strong connections between things that aren't necessarily related? Like a certain smell instantly taking you back to a moment from your childhood, or a song always making you think of a specific person you once shared it with. I have something like that going on with WoW Classic, specifically the Barrens and Wailing Caverns, as memories of them come to mind every time I take a shower and wash my hair on a warm, sunny day.

I'm not sure why that is - I just know that when Classic launched back in 2019, I binged on it pretty hard for the first few weeks, which included thinking about it basically all the time, even when I wasn't playing - including in the shower I guess? Since I rolled several Horde characters back then, I also must have spent a fair amount of time in the Barrens, including running Wailing Caverns over and over, which logically would then have been something I was thinking about a lot. And I guess it must've still been warm and sunny in September 2019? Like I said, it's pretty random, and it does crack me up a little every time I shampoo my hair and suddenly remember that time I grouped with an undead priest outside Wailing Caverns.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent to start with, but I'm generally thinking about how I just kind of miss Classic right now. I find retail fun in its own way, but it simply doesn't scratch the same itch. At the same time, there's no Classic mode I really want to get into right now.

I did log into MoP Classic after the launch of patch 5.4 and checked out the Timeless Isle for a bit, but I was quickly reminded of just how many hours I spent grinding there in MoP Remix almost exactly two years ago now, and I just have zero appetite for doing all of that again, and more slowly at that.

Sometimes I cast my mind towards Season of Discovery and wonder whether I should go back and pursue some more of the goals I originally had for that mode before it potentially goes away... but the feeling just isn't there.

The anniversary servers seem weirdly alluring right now, mostly because I keep seeing people on my Battle.net friends list playing there, and I just miss that Burning Crusade feeling a bit. It's so weird now: I used to say that BC was my favourite expansion, then Classic came and ruined a lot of that for me because of how differently people were approaching it in the modern era, but with some distance I'm once again reminded that there were also vibes and content there that I still genuinely love.

I just don't want to get into the cesspit that are the anniversary servers, so I'm vainly holding out hope that maybe Blizzard will make Burning Crusade era servers this time around when Wrath of the Lich King comes around again. I was so disappointed when there was no interest in that back in 2022, but in fairness, at the time Classic era still looked pretty dead and I reckon there were probably people both in the community and at Blizzard who wondered whether having these era-locked servers at all had maybe been a mistake. But as mainline Classic progressed further into more expansions, the era servers truly came to life and have managed to maintain a healthy population ever since, even if it ebbs and flows a bit depending on what else is going on with other versions of Classic. Plus if it's true that Blizzard is planning to make a fresh set of servers go through the first three eras of the game every few years (as indicated by the leak), having both a BC and Wrath era server as final destinations for some of these characters would simply make sense to me. Or are you telling me that people would prefer to go through anniversary editions of Cata and MoP Classic?

Regardless, the demand for BC era might still not be quite there yet, and even worse, as WillE has suggested recently, it might actually be in Blizzard's best financial interests to not have them. Sure, they'll lose a few subs from people who don't want to progress into Wrath or whatever, but at the same time BC anniversary has apparently been extremely successful in terms of selling boosts, which can probably at least partially be blamed on the fact that there were several years when there was no way to play BC Classic officially and people had time to miss it.

So I know I'm probably going to be disappointed on that front, but I just can't help hoping. If BC era ever became a thing, I'd definitely roll up a character there to see whether I could find a BC-focused community with similar chill levels as the guys and gals on Classic era.

One way or another all the Classic news will be coming out at BlizzCon in a bit over a month, including the reveal of whatever Project Camelot turns out to be exactly - and whatever it is, I'll definitely want to check it out just to see what it's all about. So I'm kind of sitting here, thinking I might as well save that desire for Classic for the big reveals and new opportunities that will become available soon - but that doesn't mean that I don't still miss it in the meantime.

Midnight Profession Goals Achieved!

The other day I was very pleased to finally get this pop-up:

For the uninitiated, that's the achievement for raising every primary profession in Midnight to (the max skill level of) 100. (In case you're wondering, this is now my new 7th rarest achievement according to Data for Azeroth.)

On top of that, all my profession alts now have the purple version of all their profession tools and accessories. I actually made a little spreadsheet to keep track of that, and yes, it took a crapload of Abundance runs - but that wasn't a problem for me because I enjoy the Abundance event! In fact, I'd already gathered all the rare materials I needed from that a while ago; the thing holding me back on the last few crafts were other materials and concentration.

In general my attitude to this project was that I wanted to do it all "in house" with my alt army supporting each other and with minimal purchasing of mats or reagents off the auction house. At the same time, I also wanted to avoid crafting crappy or useless items just to skill up, which slowed me down some more as it often meant spending more time and resources on more expensive/harder-to-make items for skill-ups.

In that regard, the easiest crafting profession to level was engineering - I didn't start playing my engineer until quite late, but skilling up was so fast and easy that she soared right past the progress of several of my other crafters in no time. Especially compared to blacksmithing, all the crafts were so much cheaper in terms of mats, and engineers make a ton of profession tools (which were my focus) so she had lots of things to craft that gave multiple skill points each per craft.

Hardest for me personally were probably inscription and jewelcrafting, due to how many steps the mats for my desired items had to go through, with each step requiring use of concentration to get a good result, e g. prospecting ore to get gems, crushing the gems for shards, turning the shards into lenses and so on.

There seem to be certain "break points" with these where you can suddenly get the high quality result by simply using high quality mats - without having to use concentration on top of it - which speeds things up considerably, but I was probably assigning my points badly for those and it took a while to reach them.

Of course that doesn't mean that I'm "done" with professions - there are plenty of knowledge points left to earn in order to fully populate the various spec trees, but I've got to admit that's less interesting to me now, as I no longer have a specific personal goal to work towards, so it's just a matter of more gathering/grinding and fulfilling patron orders that aren't too expensive as and when they pop up.

Still, this was one of my major goals for Midnight, and since professions don't reset seasonally (please Blizzard, I'm not trying to give you ideas), there won't be as much to do on that front as the expansion progresses. Presumably there'll just be a couple of new recipes to collect in 12.1 and 12.2. 

The War Within Recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Is Fishing So Weird Now?

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

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

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

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

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

Common:

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

Uncommon:

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

Rare:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Infernal Blue Dot

Believe it or not, I'm pretty happy with what Blizzard is doing with WoW right now. Do I love and agree with every single decision they make? Of course not. I think the anniversary servers are everything I don't want Classic to be for example, but I just don't play there. There's enough going on that I can just focus on the things I enjoy and get good value out of my subscription.

I'm also not exactly a hater of cash shops. If given the choice, I'd rather MMOs didn't have them, but I know that money needs to come from somewhere, and as long as they don't actively annoy me, I'm like... fine, do what you must. Sometimes I'll even buy something myself.

However, there's something Blizzard did to their cash shop recently that annoys me big time, and as far as I can tell I'm literally the only person on the internet bothered by this. It may be that the search term "Blizzard shop blue dot" is too vague, but I've also tried different variations of the search, even different search engines - and yet, I couldn't find a single reddit or forum post talking about this. And by "this", I mean what you can see below:

Basically, a couple of patches ago, Blizzard decided to add a fake notification to the shop button every so often, to make you click on it and open the shop if for no other reason than to make the highlight go away. And yes, it is indeed a fake notification as it doesn't even only appear when there are new items in the store. Sometimes they've rotated what's on the front page, but even that hasn't consistently been the case when the blue dot appears as far as I can tell.

The reason I hate this so much is that I strive to be an inbox zero person. I don't always succeed, but I do try to keep my emails and notifications clean, and it doesn't take much for me to take the sledgehammer out and revoke all access for an app or company that's consistently bothering me about nothing just to get my attention. It's what first made me hate Facebook, when they started sending me daily "notifications" about stuff like "a person made a post", which was absolutely not notification-worthy.

I know that not everyone is sensitive to this kind of stuff - when I look over my husband's shoulder he always has 99+ unread notifications on YouTube and Discord and seems completely unfazed by that. He's fine with ignoring all attempts by anyone to get his attention. However, that I literally couldn't find a single other person talking about this is still wild to me. I tried to see whether there's maybe an addon to "mute" shop notifications but had no luck on that front either.

If you have any knowledge of how to make this go away (other than replacing my UI entirely), please let me know!

Midsummer & Darkspear Dashing

I've said in the past that I tend to run somewhat hot and cold as far as WoW's in-game holidays are concerned. Sometimes I'll really get into one, but most of the time I'll largely forget that they exist. Even if I do notice the seasonal decorations, I'll usually just go "huh, it's Brewfest again, is it" and then do exactly nothing about it.

Right now, Midsummer/Fire Festival is on, and I was going to ignore it once again, but then I heard Taliesin on the T&E podcast talk about how there was a new quest line that was very fun, so I decided to check that out.

And indeed, it was quite fun! There's a new daily quest to fly through flaming blossoms above Silvermoon or your faction capital, but it also comes with a one-time chain that sends you flying all over Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms while a Fire Festival NPC tells you about a bit of human, dwarven and tauren lore related to the festival.

I then went back to also do some of the old dailies and slay Ahune, the Frost Lord ("The ice stone has melted!" will forever be a meme to me.) While doing the torch-tossing and catching dailies, I was surprised to see that at some point, Blizzard apparently decided to simplify these - the tossing quest has about three times as many markers going up now, allowing you to finish it much more quickly than in the past, and during the catching quest I noticed that my torch's shadow was very visible and I could no longer see other people's torch shadows, which was what used to make the quest difficult to complete in the past (since you could get confused, accidentally run after someone else's torch and fail - it used to be a hot tip to do this daily on the Exodar where nobody else was there to distract you).

I then did the same dailies in MoP Classic for comparison, but I couldn't really tell whether that expansion already had the update for the catching quest or not, as nobody else was around doing the quests when I was there. I also queued for Ahune there and the wait seemed to take forever compared to retail. When I finally got a group I found that the boss was hilariously undertuned, to the point that you could nuke him down from range most of the way right through his damage reduction. In general, the experience in MoP felt weirdly lonely. I always like to point out that MoP Classic still has a lot of players, but it does seem very raid-loggy. You don't really see a lot of players out and about doing lower-level or more casual content much.

Anyway, aside from Midsummer, there's also a two-day "micro holiday" this weekend. I'm even worse with these than with the regular holidays, in the sense that I don't think I've ever actually taken part in one other than free t-shirt day, which I just happened to notice in Stormwind at the time and which really grew my shirt collection.

The news about this newest addition caught my attention because it's called "Darkspear Dash", featured lots of rainbows and I saw some comments about it being a case of Blizzard adding support for something that was previously a community event. I think the main reason I lingered on the news was that it actually confused me at first: Wasn't that event the running of the gnomes? Why make the official version trolls instead?

Fortunately the answer was only a quick Google search away. The running of the gnomes is in October, for breast cancer awareness, and already has its own micro holiday (the Great Gnomeregan Run). The Darkspear Dash was in fact dreamed up by the same person, but it's on Horde side with trolls (they have a bit more explanation for "why trolls" on their website) and benefts the Trevor Project instead. Mystery solved!

I then heard a few more people talking about taking part and thought "eh, why not". My old main was a troll after all, even if she's only level 32 these days. So I logged her, found the starting point on the Echo Isles and went for a run. Blizzard really was quite considerate of runners' needs, with a barber and a transmogrifier right next to the starting line to make sure everyone can look their best while running. While you can technically fly to go as fast as possible, I opted for my old ground mount myself, a compromise between wanting to enjoy the experience and not wanting to be too slow.

For most of the run I was by myself - in the Plaguelands I saw someone on a Brutosaur behind me for a bit, but they fell off the horizon again after a while. At the entrance to Eversong I ran into two other players, one of them on foot, and we slowed down for a while to all run together. At one point I had to AFK for a bit and set myself to auto-run, and when I came back I was dead in a ditch, eaten by one of those nasty skull level cats in new Eversong. Oops! No big deal though, I just picked myself up again and rode the rest of the way by myself again. It did make me think that I really should level an alt through the Midnight story on foot because the views are so much more impressive at ground level.

Anyway, that would've been it, except... in the late afternoon I spotted someone on Bluesky posting about the fact that the actual community run (which still exists as well) was about to start on Argent Dawn-EU. Apparently this year was also going to be the first time it happened on the EU servers! I looked at the clock and went "snap, that's in only twenty minutes"... and remembered that I did in fact also have a low-level troll alt on Argent Dawn, from back when Cataclysm first came out. So I logged into that one and made my way to the Echo Isles a second time.

What a difference that was! This time the place was absolutely packed, with people spamming rainbow toy effects everywhere. I made use of the transmogger to make my Cataclysm levelling gear look a bit more put together and the barber to change my cat form back to its old colour (at some point my troll druid's cat form had turned white and I don't know why, I just know from screenshots that this wasn't her original colour).

The run was originally meant to start at 5pm my time, but minutes before the scheduled start, some yells were going out that the launch was supposed to be delayed. Clearly not everyone got the memo though as a large crowd still set off at the original time. As someone commented, people getting spread out a bit might not have been the worst thing as it should make the experience a bit less laggy. I set off at the new start time with a still pretty sizeable crowd, though we got more and more spread out over time. By the Plaguelands the trail of runners was spread thin enough that I was largely running by myself again, though I could still see more runners behind and ahead of me this time.

On my first run I'd simply followed the road to new Silvermoon, but this time around I learned that the event was inclusive to people who didn't have the expansion and that you could also go through the portal to old Quel'Thalas and finish the race there. Instructions from the organisers were to go through that portal, so I opted for the alternative route this time. I was happy when I reached the goal in Silvermoon, where it was properly crowded again and people were partying. All in all, a really fun and wholesome experience. 

My Raiding History, Part 5: WoW Classic

When I updated something on my about page the other day, it occurred to me that the series about my raiding history that I have linked on there and which I wrote in 2020 is actually missing a fifth installment about what happened after that point. There's no time like the present, so let's get on it now!

Everything I said in part four about how I realised that I mainly raid for social reasons and how that's why I still I raid in SWTOR is still true, but something else happened in the meantime: WoW Classic.

I started playing Classic at its launch in 2019, but I once again had no interest in raiding there initially. I just rolled up some Horde characters on the EU's biggest PvE server with a couple of friends from back in the day, hoping to revel in a bit of nostalgia. Unfortunately said friends all dropped out pretty quickly, which left me feeling somewhat lonely on a server that at the same time felt unpleasantly crowded to me personally.

I ended up re-rolling a night elf hunter on an RP server, where I was happier - while I still played by myself, the medium population and general vibes felt noticeably nicer to me. However, my interest started to falter again when I approached max level for the second time and started to run out of things I wanted to do - until I ended up joining an explicitly casual pug for Zul'Gurub one weekend, a raid I knew very little about at the time. It went so well that I returned the next week when the opportunity arose and won lots of loot.

Soon afterwards, a random paladin ended up chatting me up in Ironforge (which I still think was because of that raid gear) and I found myself invited to a raiding guild, where I quickly became swept up in the manic scramble to get someone the Scarab Lord title. I had an insane amount of fun taking part in the server's gate opening event, and my new guild just generally made me feel extremely engaged with the game again. Soon I started to join their raids as a social member and even though I was extremely reluctant at first, they eventually convinced me to become a proper progression raider as well. (It seems a bit strange in hindsight, but they really wanted more hunters at the time for some reason.)

I learned that I really loved 40-man raids and was very motivated to contribute as much to the good vibes as possible, even if what was required of everyone was very little. I spent several months primarily raiding AQ40, yet it felt like barely any time had passed when Naxxramas was released. I also geared up my paladin alt to serve as back-up healer for some bosses there that were more healing-intensive than others. Overall, Naxxramas was more challenging than expected for a bunch of casuals like us, and we ultimately ended up killing Kel'Thuzad only once, in the week before the Burning Crusade pre-patch, though in a way that ended up being a nice capstone to the experience. (I just felt bad for the people who had been on the bench that night and never got to take part in a kill.)

I was very excited to continue into the Burning Crusade, since that had been the golden height of my original WoW raiding, but boy, did I end up being disappointed on that front. The downsizing from 40-man to 25-man had wreaked havoc on many guilds when it happened the first time, and BC Classic was no different. As the roster was trimmed down, many more casual and less optimised members were no longer welcome, and others just drifted away on their own. Everyone who remained suddenly seemed a lot more hardcore and less interested in just hanging out, which left me feeling very frustrated.

We did clear tier four pretty quickly, but I was just not happy raiding anymore and stepped down. I took a break for a couple of months, but then ended up returning during tier five, when a lot of the initial excitement had worn off and people seemed to have chilled out a little.

Unfortunately then Blizzard decided to inject some drama from their end instead by axing the RP server we were on, which resulted in a huge emotional rollercoaster for me. I eventually rejoined my guild on its new regular PvE server home, but a couple of months later, early into tier six, the guild suffered a sudden death anyway. I continued playing for a few months, but once I found out that everyone would be forced to transition into Wrath of the Lich King (which I really did not want to replay), I lost all interest in that version of Classic.

However, after a few months away I felt the itch again and decided to start exploring the vanilla Classic era servers instead, which were considered very dead at the time. (I had paid to clone my entire stable of characters during the BC transition.)

I quickly found myself invited into a guild on Horde side, and almost immediately hopped right back into 40-man raiding there, again as a hunter. I ended up raiding with them for a little over a year and it was a lovely time, though I made a point after the emotional intensity of my BC Classic adventures to not get quite as emotionally entangled. Progress was really hard and slow at times, largely due to a lack of numbers, and I never actually got to fully clear Naxx with them (though they did go on to do so without me later). I still check in on their Discord every so often and am happy to see that the guild is still going strong years later.

The main reason I stepped down from raiding on era was simply a lack of time. When I first started raiding in Classic, it was the height of the pandemic and my employer had everyone working from home full time, which meant that I had a lot of extra free time from not having to commute to London. Even so, I was still working, so I'm honestly not sure in hindsight how I mustered the energy to raid almost every single day of the week (as I was still playing SWTOR as well).

My job kept us working from home longer than most, but by late 2023 I did have to return to the office at least twice a week, and those days coincided with my Classic era raiding days, which was one of the main reasons I stepped down.

That said, I still miss it sometimes, because those chill 40-man raid vibes are just something else. I know why many people hate the format, and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the poor officers who have to organise it all, but as a mere participant it's a unique experience that I've loved more than once now. A friend in retail keeps asking me whether I want to come along to some raids with the guild he's in there, but the mere question always makes me recoil a little because while I've come to enjoy many parts of modern WoW too, raiding is still not one of them and I don't think it has anything to offer me on that front. Those impeccable Classic vibes though... the memories still make me sigh wistfully and just re-reading some of the posts I linked about the subject here hit me right in the feels. I just don't think that I have enough time for it now. Maybe one day if circumstances change again.

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.