Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Anniversary Success

After the bad pug story from a few days ago, today I have a tale of a good one! From retail even...?!

However, first things first: The big event for WoW's 20th anniversary finally came to an end this week. I wrote about what I thought of all the different activities involved back in early November, including the fact that currency payouts were initially very restricted. Once the devs fixed that, I kept collecting celebration tokens for about a month until I'd gotten everything I wanted, and then I kind of lost interest.

That was until someone reminded me at the end of my Christmas holidays that the event was almost over, and I decided that I'd probably like to still polish off the remaining achievements that I hadn't completed yet. These basically fell into two categories: Secrets of Azeroth and the BRD raid.

With the Secrets stuff, I'd done a few of the Guest Relations quests but stopped at some point because I'd found them too tedious to figure out. This time around I just looked up some guides and powered through everything that was left with instructions up on my second monitor. So many of these puzzles were just way too fiddly and obscure. Ticking all the boxes still took some time (the story quest about the feast recipe for the pirates was absolutely diabolical, especially if you didn't want to just buy all the ingredients off the AH) but I got there over the course of one day, finishing off my hunt for crates in the early hours of New Year's Day.

The issue with the raid was that I had done it multiple times on LFR, but the two achievements for it required you to go into areas where a raid finder group usually wouldn't go, so I figured my only chance to get them done was to join a normal mode pug. Even though I hadn't set foot into anything beyond LFR since mid-Cataclysm (not counting the craziness of Pandaria Remix), I strangely enough wasn't too worried about that, as I'd repeatedly heard from credible sources that normal mode raids these days aren't really much harder than LFR. I invited my husband into a party on New Year's Day and suggested that we look to join a BRD normal raid together.

We only had one problem: there wasn't a single listing for BRD that evening, just Nerub-ar Palace runs as far as the eye could see. So I decided to be brave and simply create my own raid. I named it "BRD normal full run" and set the description to: "Let's get those achievements!"

You might think this foolish, considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had faith that at least a couple of people willing to join our pug would know what to do and would speak up if we went grievously wrong. And... it worked out alright! After accepting absolutely everyone that applied over the next fifteen minutes or so, I realised that we were still a tank short, so I relogged from my evoker to my own prot warrior because I'm a glutton for punishment I guess I also had faith that the other tank would know what to do. First thing I did on zoning in was to hand them raid assist and they did seem to take charge quite happily, so all I had to do was help with rounding up adds, soak damage and taunt swap where appropriate.

We did have a couple of wipes, and one guy left after the first three bosses, but overall we progressed at a good clip, and my description had clearly attracted the right kind of people as at least half the raid piped up about missing the exact same parts of the achievements that we also needed and everyone gently herded each other towards them when we got to the right area.

It was also quite apparent that at least a few of our dps were even more clueless than I was (I'd at least watched a brief guide!), which usually became evident when someone was targeted by a soaking mechanic and ran for the hills to die alone in a corner instead of stacking up to survive. However, we were generally able to power through those losses just like you would in LFR, and the couple of times when things got too crazy and we wiped, someone did indeed speak up to inform us about just what had gone wrong, and people listened and did better next time. Everyone was friendly enough, and when we finished it was all "gg"s and thank yous.

I won't lie, I felt kind of proud that my first normal raid, my first pug raid, and my first raid organised by me - all rolled into one - went so well. Sometimes someone being willing to start the group is really all it takes.

The Big Birthday Bash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radiant Echoes: A Love Letter to Azeroth

Due to my current lack of excitement for War Within, I also ignored the pre-expansion event for its first week or so. It didn't help that what vague mutterings I caught about it usually complained that it wasn't fun for some reason or another. The other night though, I figured that I should really go and at least check it out, even if I wasn't that interested in farming it. I've taken part in the last two pre-expansion events, and it would have felt weird to miss this one entirely while I have an active subscription. Plus people were saying that it had been vastly improved since its underwhelming launch.

And I've got to say: I was positively surprised - except for the fact that the intro quest seems to be a bit buggy for max-level characters and doesn't always appear. Since it's supposed to be auto-granted, there's nothing you can do if it just fails to show up. But I just looked up where I was supposed to go on Wowhead and off I went.

The event, called Radiant Echoes, once again takes place in three older zones: Searing Gorge, Dustwallow Marsh and Dragonblight. The active zone rotates once an hour, and the general gist of the event is that you deal with manifested "memories" (which are basically group world quests) to fill a bar, and once you've done enough of them a big boss spawns (a memory of Rangaros, Onyxia and Arthas respectively). Then the cycle starts all over again.

I'll admit that doesn't sound very exciting on paper, but clearly a lot of love has gone into designing the memories, as they tend to reference a piece of classic content beloved by the community that takes/took place on the same continent as the active zone. So in Searing Gorge for example, you fight echoes of Hogger and Hakkar, hunt down Stranglethorn pages and relive the battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore. In Dragonblight, there are memories of the Argent Tournament and Thorim, so sometimes you hear shouts of "You face Jaraxxus, Eredar Lord of the Burning Legion!" and "In the mountains..." overlapping each other, which always cracks me up.

I had a good time doing a round of all three zones, but wasn't really that fussed about the gear rewards. One thing I noticed however was that a lot of people seemed to use the event to level alts, which is not usually something I want or need, but I realised only the other day that there's exactly one healing class I don't currently have at level 70: the paladin. I didn't want to make another Timerunner since I have a whole bunch of low-level paladins already, but what if... I took one of those existing lowbies through the event? Just to see what it was like? With everything being cross-server now, I could take any character from my old stable of alts and it would be able to play with my friends on any server in the future.

After brief deliberation, I decided to pick a level 25 dwarf paladin from my old Alliance server Darkspear. I chose the free gear upgrade and spent a few minutes feeling confused by the contents of her old bags, as they contained quite a bit of Outland stuff and I had no memory of taking her there whatsoever. She also had exactly one quest in her log, to kill two bosses in BRD. Okaaay?

At least the event intro quest worked fine on a low-level, which is how I learned that I'd been wasting a lot of time travelling to the different zones the old-fashioned way, as there's a temporary portal to Legion Dalaran right next to the Stormwind auction house, and within Dalaran itself there are three two-way portals to the relevant zones all right next to each other that also show you which zone is the currently active one and for how long.

I started my journey in Searing Gorge and rotated through the zones almost every hour, though I took breaks. I learned a lot of things that way:

• The first "cycle" of memories followed by a boss kill within the hour is always by far the fastest one, with huge crowds completing some of the memory world quests in a matter of seconds. I think this is because it's an obvious starting point, and it's easier to decide to take a break later in the hour. While groups kept working on the memories throughout the full duration of the zone being active, they definitely became a lot smaller over time.
• You get occasional gear pieces as rewards while taking part in the event, but for some reason they have a really low item level up to level 60 and are completely useless other than for transmog. This also means that - as usual - you become weaker and weaker as you level up. I initially thought that the people I could sometimes see just hovering on their flying mounts above the event area were "leeching" a bit, trying to get credit without doing anything, until I realised that many of them were levellers that were scared of getting into the fray as they had to worry about dying to something as small as a random knockback due to how squishy they were (something that happened to me multiple times as I got higher up in levels). 
• On top of that, phasing shenanigans can also screw you over. At one point things were rolling along super smoothly in Dragonblight when I flew to the next memory, landed... and found myself completely alone. I flew around to check on the other world quests, but none of them had any real activity, and all I saw was a couple of other levellers that seemed equally confused about where everyone else had gone. I don't know why the game thought that it was a good idea to separate us from the rest at that point. I followed the advice on reddit to go back to Dalaran and relog in hopes of landing in a better version of the zone on returning.
• There is a clear hierarchy in terms of how popular the various memories are. I've completed every single one at least once, but the single boss ones are easily everyone's favourite because they go fast, and they are pretty safe for even the squishiest leveller to take part in, as you just have to hit the boss briefly and stay out of bad stuff. The ones with lots of items to click on and mobs to fight are less popular because they're comparatively slow, and aside from the one with the frogs in Dragonblight, there are no real "non-combat options". Even the ones that look deceptively peaceful at first glance, such as the one to wake lazy peons, feature random mob spawns that attack you... which once again, is very dangerous if you're a squishy leveller as that random scorpid that suddenly aggros on you might well kill you.

Anyway, I didn't keep close track of how much time I spent on all this as I didn't remember to check the character's /played until after I'd started, but I think she was on about two and a half days of play time when I began my little experiment, and hit 70 after about five hours of grinding the event. She also earned just short of 50k of the event currency in the process. That strikes me as... pretty fast! It's not something I'd want to do over and over again, but it was interesting to do as a one-time thing.

Kalimdor Cup

My play time rotates a lot at the moment. One week I'm all about Classic, then something in retail grabs my interest, then SWTOR is king again. One activity that had my attention in Dragonflight the other week was a limited-time event called the Kalimdor Cup. I worked really hard to finish all my goals related to it before it was supposed to end - naturally Blizzard then went ahead and extended it by another week. Oh well.

When I first heard about this event, I thought it meant that Blizzard was going to unlock dragonriding in the old world sooner than expected, but that was not the case. As it stands, you still have to flap to all the race locations in Kalimdor the old-fashioned way - it's just that when you talk to the NPC that starts the race, you're put on a generic dragonriding mount and off you go. A few seconds after you finish the race, it disappears and you get teleported back to the starting point.

I still really enjoy dragonriding... though my attempts to get gold on all the advanced courses on the Dragon Isles haven't got very far. I remember falling down that particular rabbit hole one Saturday morning and it felt like three hours later I'd managed to complete only one zone - I like dragonriding, but not that much. With that in mind, I only aimed for gold on the basic races of the Cup and only did the advanced and reverse versions once or twice before moving on. I first did all the races on my evoker main, and then went back to do the intro quest on a few alts in order to get enough currency to buy all the cosmetic rewards. I think the cosmetic gear set looks pretty nifty, though it looks to me like it's made for a dwarf.

Thanks to Kamalia highlighting that the races also give a bit of XP, this served as an incentive for me to also do them on my hunter to level her a bit more without repeating the same stuff on the Dragon Isles yet again.

I really liked the way this event made you revisit the old world, and there was something quite peculiar about dragonriding across the old zones, an added perspective to just how large the Dragon Isles are and how comparatively small these old zones are, when you can basically do a race around the whole map in a minute and a half. It's such a weird contrast to zoom through Frostwhisper Gorge in what feels like the blink of an eye when I think of riding around Winterspring on my hunter in Classic to mine Thorium, how long it takes to get anywhere, and how every nook and cranny of the environment feels important.

The one that tickled me the most was probably the race around Ahn'qiraj, which effectively does a round of the open world version of the AQ20 raid. It says something about the scale of those old raids that this didn't feel all that restricting, even going at dragonriding speeds. Apparently an Eastern Kingdoms Cup and an Outlands version are already confirmed, and even more might be in the works. It's a relatively low-effort way of giving some purpose to old zones and I like it.

More on Dracthyr and the Pre-Patch Event

I'm still playing Classic era primarily, however things are just kind of quietly chugging along there at the moment, so the new and (partially) time-limited stuff happening in retail is more interesting to talk about for now.

I've had opportunity to practice playing my evoker some more, and it's turned out to be pretty fun. I finally seem to be getting the hang of soaring, and it's fun to ride a flying mount up to the nearest elevation and then shoot like an arrow across multiple zones.

I also ended up healing the new Uldaman dungeon twice - both times we four-manned it with my husband and two friends. The first time around we went in without a tank as well, which was a bit chaotic and resulted in quite a few deaths, though we did successfully complete the instance anyway. It was certainly good healing practice! The second time around my husband played his demon hunter so that we would have a proper tank, and that just made it super easy.

The only times I really struggled with healing were when there was AoE damage going around and the group was spread all over the room, but I guess that situation is awkward for any healer. In general though I've been enjoying figuring out how to heal as an evoker, with lots of dashing about and trying to aim the different shapes of AoE heal correctly. It's a bit more "action-y" than I'd usually like and actually reminds me of some videos I saw of Wildstar back in the day - I could see that being quite stressful in harder content, but in the context of an easy dungeon it was certainly fun.

I'm also liking my dracthyr's look more over time - I particularly like how her visage form turned out, and dracthyr get this cool ability called "Chosen Idenity" which when activated, automatically puts you into your visage form whenever you're not in combat. Certainly feels a lot less weird to be riding a dragon mount as a humanoid than as a dragon person for example! They really should add that feature for worgen too - would make it a lot less awkward to shapeshift into humanoid form more often that way.

We've also been checking out the pre-patch Primalist invasion event. In the run-up to the pre-patch I'd heard people express hope that these would feel similar to the Legion invasions that preceded the Legion expansion, and which seemed to be quite popular at the time. I wasn't playing retail back then, but I do remember people talking about that event quite fondly. It always sounded like those invasions were quite ubiquitous too, though I just checked and in this post by Bhagpuss from back then he clarified that the Legion invasions also only happened in six zones - still, that's three more than the current event.

My own closest point of comparison are the elemental invasions that preceded Cataclysm, which I also remember with some fondness. The current invasions are okay, but nothing to write home about in my opinion. At first there's something fun to the zerg, but the longer it goes on, the more boring it gets. You basically just spam AoE onto endlessly respawning opponents until you get bored; there's no real ebb and flow to things other than the occasional boss event. Plus I guess it doesn't help that the three zones chosen for invasion are the Badlands, Northern Barrens and Un'goro. I mean, who gives a crap about the Badlands? Let the Primalists have them. Rewards aside, I can't say that I feel very inspired to defend the place, not like I was when elementals invaded the capitals pre-Cataclysm. I'll just keep going there a few more times to earn a few more of the rewards before the event goes away I guess.

Wind and Fire

Stepping down from progression raiding was an immediate relief in so far as I went from constantly worrying about what I should be doing whenever I logged in to simply thinking about what I'd like to be doing that day.

Items on the "should" list included things like:

• Hit LFG for Mechanar and Botanica runs, to work on completing my Beast Lord set, which is best-in-slot for hunters until Black Temple or something silly.
• Farm Primal Air to finally get my gloves enchanted.
• Prioritise levelling my druid's alchemy to build a sustainable consumable pipeline for myself. (I said this in OG Classic but it's still true in BC - people who have a herbalist or alchemist can't really appreciate what a PITA consumable requirements can be if you can't get anything yourself but instead have to buy everything, all the time.)
• Figure out what I need to do for my Eye attunement and work on it.
  

None of these are things I definitely don't want to do, but only in moderation I guess? So I'm glad that I can now just do some quests or putz around, levelling fishing on an alt without feeling like I'm not being a "proper" raider because I'm not putting in the time to make my character the strongest she could be.

One thing that had been bothering me for a while and that I really wanted to rectify was that I still only had the slow flying mount. People who only played later expansions or retail probably have no idea just how slow "normal" flying used to be in BC. It's slower than your epic ground mount! Which often means that it's not actually any faster to go as the crow/gryphon flies than to take the scenic route via a flight path or even to follow a path on the ground.

It's not so bad when everyone's in the same boat, and I remember back in the original Burning Crusade, people with epic flyers were a rare sight during the early phases. This time around though, it seemed like everyone else was buying their epic flyers the moment they hit 70, seemingly without effort. (Obviously I wasn't the only exception... but the trend has pretty much been the reverse of back in the day, in that people crawling along on basic flyers stick out as rare oddities.)

This made me feel envious and I wanted to fix it... but I'd also set myself the extra challenge to go straight for the Cenarion War Hippogryph (the only appropriate mount for night elves in my opinion), which would also require me to hit exalted with Cenarion Expedition and raise an extra 1600 gold on top of the "regular" cost of epic flying.

Free to spend some time and money focusing on this particular goal, I was pleasantly surprised to read on Redbeard's blog that the Fire Festival was a great way of making money. (I feel a bit bad linking to that post like that because it was really about something completely different and that was only a side note, but it was where I first heard it mentioned...)

And what a way it was! Just visiting beloved locations in the old world (of which I hadn't seen much since BC's launch) and clicking on bonfires to be rewarded six to twelve gold for each. I don't remember that being a thing back in the day, but sometimes it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. My main visited all of them over the course of a few days and racked up several hundred gold that way - I stole the flames from the enemy capitals as well while I was at it and didn't even die once. Good fun!

This just happened to coincide with a heroic Slave Pens run finally pushing me over the edge for CE rep as well, so it "finally" happened:

With that major gold sink taken care of, I checked on my alts. My mage and druid didn't even have epic ground riding yet, but I'd forgotten that the price for that had also been reduced with BC, so I was pleased to have both of them be able to afford that right away as well.

Then I just kept doing the torch tossing/catching dailies in Stormwind for the rest of the event, because I found them a fun little mini game and they rewarded 24 gold for about five minutes of effort a day. 

There are plenty of other things left for me to do besides running Karazhan with my guildies, but I'm glad to be rid of that feeling of urgency. One thing I always wanted from Classic was the knowledge that the game I enjoyed wasn't going to go away in a few months or years and that there should be no need to rush to complete your goals. It's odd how easy it's been to get caught up in the rat race anyway.

A Confusing Retail Journey

Pretty much as expected, my interest in retail is already fading again, but the husband seems to be quite keen on it so we're still doing some questing together. Yesterday was also the last day of Hallow's End, and I had a couple of event quests left in my log that I hadn't finished yet, so I decided to do that. What followed was pretty much a perfect encapsulation of how foreign and confusing retail feels to me nowadays.

The two quests I had were Hallow's End Treats for Jesper and A Time to Lose. The former requires you to visit NPCs in Stormwind, Ironforge and Darnassus (yes, really), and the latter asks you to put out the Horde's Wickerman at the entrance to the Undercity.

I started in Stormwind and then realised that due to my monk having been ferried straight to Kul Tiras after Exile's Reach, she had zero flight paths unlocked anywhere in Azeroth. No biggie though, she'd unlocked the ability to fly on her own at this point, so I put on auto-run/fly and set off northward. Making it to Ironforge and finding the relevant quest NPCs there was easy enough.

After that I continued northward to Tirisfal. I actually saw the Wickerman but there was an optional objective to speak to Ziodormi to "visit Tirisfal Glades in the past". I'd read somewhere that the zone had been revamped after the BfA intro that saw the Alliance attacking Undercity and now existed in two versions, and that a member of the bronze dragonflight could be consulted to allow players to switch between both states.

As there was no quest marker for this optional objective however, I got a bit lost and eventually had to consult Wowhead. I couldn't find the NPC in the location described there either, however there were helpful comments talking about also being unable to find her, and finally one that stated that you had to be in the past version of the zone to be able to see the Wickerman and do the quest. At this point it dawned on me that I was apparently already in the past by default... just with no option to go into the future. Or at least the whole Battle for Lordaeron scenario had not been part of the new levelling experience; I'm not sure if you can still go back and do it later. Either way, I accepted that the optional objective was clearly not for me, doused the Wickerman and moved on.

This is where things got tricky because I realised that to complete the second quest, I'd have to move to the western continent. My last memory of retail was that they had changed the boats in some manner that confused me, but I flew back down towards Menethil Harbour anyway. As I picked up the flight point there, I was reminded that it's been underwater ever since the Cataclysm and that boats were redirected to the (then new) Stormwind Harbour at that point.

So I continued my trip back down the map and flew around the waterfront in Stormwind for a bit. There were some boats parked there seemingly as decorations but I couldn't find anything that I could clearly identify as a functional pier. I tried looking for an NPC that would tell me what boats were going where since I remembered that being a thing at one point but had no luck on that front either.

Remembering the portal room in the mage tower, I decided to try my luck there instead and found a portal to the Exodar. Close enough!

From the Exodar, I rode to the Azuremyst Isle pier, where I was greeted by... another portal? This one lead to Darkshore, so once again I clicked on it. It took me until my arrival there to remember that Darnassus does in fact not exist anymore in retail, and that Darkshore, too, has undergone a transformation in the latest expansion. Fortunately I had no trouble finding the time-travelling person in this zone, who sent me right back to the Cata version of Darkshore, from which I could then fly to Darnassus, casually defying space-time to have a cheerful innkeeper there hand me some marzipan.

At that point I was glad that my hearthstone was on cooldown, because hell if I knew how to get back to the Eastern Kingdoms manually.

I don't know if my scattered memories of how things used to be are actually helpful or more of a hindrance at this point... but navigating a world with all these portals, no directions, and now also time-travel on top honestly seems pretty confusing to me.

Love Is In My Bags

I'd forgotten just how chock-full of seasonal holidays WoW is this time of year, even in its Classic incarnation. After just wrapping up the Lunar Festival, we transitioned straight into WoW's version of Valentine's Day, called "Love Is In The Air".

I have to confess that I had little to no memories of this particular holiday, so my first reaction upon talking to an innkeeper about the event was confusion. I proceeded to Wowhead, where they had a guide up as usual. This alleviated my confusion somewhat, but still left me with a feeling of: "Really? That is it?"

I proceeded to dig through this blog's archives to check whether I'd had anything to say about this holiday in the past and found this post, which was written during Wrath but before the holiday had undergone its first major revamp, and in which I described it with the words: "card collections and poetry collections and food collections and bracelets and candy hearts and rose petals and aaaargh", which sounds about right.

In short, it's a holiday dominated by temporary "fun" items and buffs. The buffs aren't bad (I presume) if you're a raider for example, and make sure to buff yourself just before the start of a raid (Classic buffs are very powerful), but for someone like me, who's more casual and quite likely to lose a lot of any given buff's duration to idling around in town it's not that exciting.

And all the "fun" collectibles that you're supposed to gather from the NPCs are just bad when bag space is such a scarce resource. I seem to remember that even back in the day I tended to chuck anything and everything that wasn't immediately useful because I didn't want to put up with this much junk.

So I think I'll largely pass on this one for being too annoying and not sufficiently rewarding to me. That said, I feel a certain admiration for the way old Blizzard really tried to make every holiday feel different back in the day, even if this one is a bit of a miss for me personally. I can't say I ultimately preferred the way they later homogenised them all to be about gathering a currency to buy rewards and killing a special boss once a day.

Also, I do love watching people unironically ask in general chat whether anyone can cure their heartbreak, and gaining buffs like "The Power of Friendship". If nothing else I feel vaguely compelled to always make sure to have some Unbestowed Friendship Bracelets at hand, just so that I can mend any broken hearts I might come across. It's an interesting dynamic, NPCs making your character sad and fellow players cheering you up. It certainly gives the event a unique atmosphere.

Celebrating the Lunar Festival

It's time for another seasonal holiday in WoW, and while I completely ignored Christmas even in its Classic incarnation, the Lunar Festival has long been a favourite of mine. To be honest, I was kind of surprised myself when I read that old post of mine, because I thought I remembered not being all that impressed by this event in my early days. I guess I came to appreciate it more when everything started to become "achievified" during Wrath and the Lunar Festival hadn't been too badly affected yet.

Fun fact: While the Lunar Festival is obviously inspired by the real life Chinese New Year, I was completely oblivious to this for the longest time. After all, the event is centred on Moonglade and I thought it made perfect sense that the night elves would worship the moon and have a whole celebration dedicated to it.

Anyway, I initially wasn't too excited to be accosted by an event NPC in Darnassus (I was playing my new nelf hunter at the time) but after having visited a couple of elders it occurred to me that in Classic even the "measly" 50 faction rep you get per visited elder is not a bad reward. After all that's how much you get for handing in a full stack of Runecloth to a quartermaster, and I do have this distant dream of my tauren hunter riding a wolf one day...

So I've started taking her on a bit of a tour. I even rode the boat to Darnassus to visit Elder Bladeleaf in Dolanaar! I was quite nervous riding through Darnassus (so much so that I completely forgot that there was also an elder in the city itself), because while I tried to be inconspicuous, a kodo with a big red nameplate above its head is kind of hard to miss. Several Alliance players ran along with me but didn't do anything other than emote at me (much to my relief) but just when I thought that I'd made it, a human rogue rode up to me and killed me. Because it's always a rogue, isn't it? However, as that remained my only death during that particular trip, I still considered myself lucky.

I also travelled to Moonglade to take down Omen. He's kind of a proto public event, as completing the quest doesn't require you to have the tag for him, only to bask in the moonlight that comes down after his death. That said, even that is deceptive, as it's apparently buggy or something and doesn't always give quest credit. You may have to click off the buff and allow it to be reapplied multiple times, like I did. Still, since you can just run along with a friendly Alliance raid and let them do all the hard work, it wasn't too much of a hassle to go back and do it a second time.

Like Hallow's End, all of this is reminding me that I wasn't always as cynical about seasonal events as I am now. Just another reminder that in many ways the good old days really were more to my liking than many of the game's modern innovations.

Classic Halloween

It's Hallow's End in World of Warcraft, and I can't help but notice how quaint the celebrations are in Classic. There are some seasonal decorations in places, such as the giant pumpkin at the entrance to the Undercity, but they are not as ubiquitous and over the top as in the live game.

There are a couple of simple quests to do that don't reward anything too exciting, some temporary buffs to pick up, and you can bob apples or trick or treat at innkeepers for a silly temporary costume or some free food, with the latter being something that's actually not to be sniffed at in Classic.

Overall though, there's no pressure or urgency, no achievements or cosmetics to grind. The event's only real purpose seems to be to have a bit of fun and set a certain mood, mostly through the temporary costume buffs filling the cities with ghosts, pirates and leper gnomes.

It's quite a stark contrast to how most modern MMOs handle seasonal festivals, and I like it. Similarly to how people complain about many public holidays being too commercialised these days, focused on selling expensive chocolate in seasonal packaging above all else, I dislike it when MMOs use a seasonal event as an excuse to make people do more of the same stuff they already do all year anyway (usually grind special currencies and cosmetics), but with a "limited time only" urgency message attached just to get you to log in every day.

The events I don't mind so much and even like tend to be the ones where some unusual activities are on offer that I happen to enjoy and don't usually get to partake in, such as racing on ice in Neverwinter's winter festival or herding chickens during the same game's summer festival, because I like doing them for the sheer fun of it and for a change of pace.

I get that big and noisy events can serve as an incentive for inactive players to come back, but if I'm already playing your game and enjoying it, trying to sell me on it again while I'm already happily playing what's there tends to feel a bit like overkill.

Monday Random Thoughts

I hope the Grumpy Elf won't mind me stealing one of his frequently reused post titles... but it is Monday, and I have a couple of things to talk about that don't really warrant posts of their own.

First off, I was vastly amused when I saw this in chat on the Silvermoon server (where my little Draenei alt lives):

For all the complaining people do about the evilness of random lockboxes, they are apparently popular enough that people feel the need to make their own if a game doesn't provide them. I wonder if someone at Blizzard is watching and taking note of this demand... No, don't answer that; I'm aware that this type of gambling is more likely to break some kind of in-game rule than be adapted as an example to follow.

Speaking of my Draenei alt, I was questing in the Plaguelands with her and thinking about how despite its age and many issues, WoW is still amazingly beautiful and atmospheric in many places. Of course, then I approached the dead town of Caer Darrow and...

HI LOL LOVE IS IN THE AIR! This is just one reason I hate all those seasonal festivals in WoW. There is room for silliness in the game of course, but the way it has become ubiquitous and unescapable, even in places where it really hurts the setting - that annoys me. It makes the world feel ridiculous when it really doesn't have to be.

Speaking of ridiculous things, the amount of self-healing tanks and dps do in this game nowadays has become a joke. I've been thinking about that for a while, but it really struck me the other day when I managed to get stuck and found myself unable to die.

Continuing my little side project of showing my pet tank all the old raids he never saw, we decided to venture into Ulduar. I was a bit rusty on tactics and didn't explain some things very well, so I ended up trapped by a constrictor tentacle on Yogg-Saron and Pet Tank died. Oh well, we'll just wipe up and try again - or so I thought. Only one problem: I couldn't die. My sanity didn't go down any further, Ysera's Gift kept healing me, and I was stunned and unable to do anything. My pet tank eventually left the group to get his corpse kicked out of the instance and I Alt+F4ed out of the game. When I started it back up a few minutes later, guess what? I was still alive and trapped by that bloody tentacle. There were tentacles everywhere and yet they couldn't kill me.

Once I surpassed about a dozen debuffs, my health finally started to dip... just for Hodir to save my life with his flash freeze, and the moment it wore off I was immediately back in a constrictor. I've never missed SWTOR's /stuck command so badly (which allows you to "commit suicide" while in combat). Eventually I managed to achieve death by immediately clicking the flash freeze away the next time it saved me and instantly jumping towards a crusher tentacle so it could whack me dead. Death never felt like such a relief before.

Finally, on a more positive note, I've had some more fun on the Timeless Isle. I found a treasure-hunting quest in a mound of dirt, and when it became obvious that it was directing me towards the one part of the island I hadn't been to yet (across the broken bridge), I finally got off my butt to find out how to get there.

That bridge is a funny thing to the ignorant new player. You watch others run up to it and just fly across, as if by magic! If you're anything like me, you might think: aha, so it's like an Indiana Jones leap of faith thing; I just have to run straight off and... oh, guess not.

I don't expect to get a legendary cloak any time soon, and while there was an option to get across with a vendor-bought glider, I'm too attached to my timeless coins for other purposes, so I was delighted when I found out that there is actually a way to get up there for free: attack a passing albatross until it grabs you, then just hang in for the ride! It's such a silly thing, but in this case I really enjoyed it. It's nice to have an option to get around for players that aren't as advanced, even if it's slower and more of a hassle.

Another thing I found on the Timeless Isle was a quest for a "secret" noodle recipe. It's really old school, requiring you to run back and forth a lot and to complete two dungeons. It amuses me how Blizzard has repeatedly sworn off that kind of design, yet every now and then they still put stuff like that in. Anyway, it was quite fun, until it cumulated in another solo scenario, which required me to... serve noodle dishes to pandas. It's actually pretty fun as a mini-game; it just seemed kind of bizarre to me since I don't recall ever seeing anything this blatantly "gamey" in WoW before, for all the gamification it has suffered over the years. In fact, it reminded me a lot of an old C64 game I used to play, called Tapper, that required you to rush back and forth behind a bar to serve drinks to impatiently approaching customers. Just... weird. The only thing that drives me crazy about it is that the background music is the same little ditty that plays in all the Pandarian inns... and which is my least favourite bit of Warcraft music ever.

Pilgrim's Bounty and Cooking

Cynwise said something funny in his guide to this year's Pilgrim's Bounty: "doing those first 350 points any other way is just silly". I have to admit that at first that comment actually stung me a little. Why is it silly? I love cooking (in game; in real life I'm terrible at it), and have done so pretty much for as long as I can remember. I remember being a level six noob with barely half a clue about anything in the game and eagerly cooking up Herb Baked Eggs and Kaldorei Spider Kabobs. At around level thirty or so, my friend who was wisely levelling her cooking and fishing in sync gifted me a stack of Sagefish Delights one day and I was like, OMG, eating these gives me an mp5 buff? Crazy! I also have fond memories of winning the recipe for Runn Tum Tuber Surprise in Dire Maul East and being told that I was extremely lucky.

I've always loved cooking for how it was a profession that benefited from almost everything I enjoyed doing in the game anyway. Explore and find a vendor in a remote location who sells an interesting recipe, hoard anything that might look useful to find out later that you can turn it into a tasty meal with the right recipe, quest to raise your cooking skill beyond 225, and so on and so forth. It always felt very engaging to me, and to this day I've maintained one to two tabs in my private guild banks that are devoted to nothing but raw cooking materials, gathered in one place to redistribute them to alts for later use.

However, looking at it honestly, I had to admit that I've really been struggling to level cooking on my new alts whenever I tried. With the new levelling system, you zoom from one place to the next and past many zones so quickly that you might never even see many recipe vendors, and you end up killing fewer mobs that might provide you with raw materials as well. Having alts "help each other out" seemed to have a very limited effect too, as I found it hard to keep track of who needed which recipes (Altoholic is supposed to track that in principle, but for me at least its profession tracking has been buggy for ages), and somehow pretty much every character seemed to run into the same skill point humps, needing stacks upon stacks of the exact same raw foods and I never had enough. As much as I used to love it, it had become annoying in its current incarnation. It worked when levelling was slow and had you traipsing all over Azeroth, but in this brave new world... not so much.

So I thought what the hell, might as well get it done, and so I've been spending a good chunk of the past two evenings cooking up Pilgrim's Bounty foods on various alts. (I still have a couple left, but we'll see whether I get around to them tomorrow.) I didn't just level my cooking either; basically I did the following things on all of my characters:

- I did the quest line that sends you back and forth between the cities to deliver different foods to different places.
- I ate at a Bountiful Table to complete the Share a Bountiful Feast quest and did Sharing is Caring while I was at it.
- I completed each of the dailies at least once, which was easy enough since I was cooking up lots of food to level my skill anyway, and got the Pilgrim's Progress achievement on the side.

If there were other people at the table with me, I threw food at them for "FOOD FIGHT!", but I didn't hang around to wait if nobody else was eating. Fun fact: even though I've been participating in this holiday in some form or another ever since its inception, it took me until this year to figure out how this achievement actually works. I used to think that it was just a random chance whenever you hit the button to share food. D'oh.

I also got The Turkinator on lots of characters, though not all, as I didn't fret about it if I had a streak of bad luck. As long as I got enough turkeys to do my cooking I was happy.

I only did Pilgrim's Pouch on one or two characters as I considered getting to the Exodar too much of a hassle in addition to the repeated back and forth for the quest line (most of the alts that needed skilling up were Alliance). This rang particularly true after I tried to take the portal to the Exodar from Darnassus one time and accidentally sent myself to the Blasted Lands with my hearthstone on cooldown. Arrrgh.

However, even without such mishaps these little adventures turned out to be quite a time-intensive endeavour, with each character needing about an hour to complete the whole tour, mostly due to travel time and the time it took to gather sufficient amounts of turkeys. It was all pretty relaxed though, and I watched some tv on the side and went AFK while on flight paths. Missing the boat over and over again also gave me happy flashbacks to my newbie days, though I never fell into the water.

The only thing that really got on my nerves was, funnily enough... people standing in the fire. Seriously, you don't need to stand in the cooking fire to use it! I noticed that it was mostly max-level characters in raid gear who were doing that, which then made me wonder whether it's some kind of subconscious way of being rebellious? An "I have to move out of the fire all the damn time, this one's not hurting me so I'll stand in it all day long" kind of thing? The thing is, I don't really care whether they stand in the fire in their raids or not, but being audio-spammed with incessant "oof oof oof" sounds gets annoying really quickly. This then got me thinking whether bad stuff on the ground wouldn't be easier to avoid if it always made your character make that sound... you might find yourself moving out of sheer annoyance, or else your guildies would at least yell at you for the same reason. (I vaguely recall a bug in DBM during ICC I think it was, where it kept making a warning noise on Blood Princes even if other people were moving with the shadow prison debuff... you bet that had me shouting at them!)

4.2 - First Impressions

For some reason I always seem to come up with a whole lot of post ideas shortly before a major patch comes out, but then once the patch actually hits I can't think about anything but the new content and end up discarding them. So, to immediately get it out of my system, my initial thoughts on 4.2: (Don't read on if you're concerned about quest spoilers.)

I wonder how many people besides me immediately stopped at the character selection screen and started shuffling. Being able to change the order of your characters is one of those small quality of life changes that just feels like it's been overdue forever. I don't care about visually preserving the order in which I created my characters, I just want the ones I play more often to be on top, damn it! I was very happy to finally be able to do that.

Not everything in the new patch is for max-level characters only. One of my guildies immediately found this little gem for level tens and up for example, which rewards you with a balloon that counts as a non-combat pet and has a rather amusing ending if you hang around to watch after handing in the quest.

Probably not a patch feature, but my guildies only discovered today that doing Ahune in a guild group counts as a full dungeon run for the purposes of the weekly guild challenge. We swapped alts in and out to get goodie bags for all of them and earned over a million guild experience in about ten minutes. I'm not sure that's working as intended, but if it is that's a handy way of racking up the XP in a short amount of time.

Starting work on the new dailies in Hyjal didn't feel very exciting, but I guess it simply takes some time until you get to unlock more. We'll see what things will look like in a few weeks. For now, I don't consider it a problem.

Now, the Thrall quest line was a lot more interesting. I was surprised to see Nozdormu in humanoid form for the first time and immediately decided that he must be evil. Don't get me wrong...

... he looks pretty badass for a man elf dragon, but... he's got a goatee. An evil goatee. He clearly can't be up to anything good.

During the initial cinematic I couldn't help but giggle at Malfurion's reaction to the intruders basically being, "I cast roots on all of them!" Sorry mate, but I can see why Staghelm had trouble taking you seriously there.

The following quest takes you all over the world, to Uldum, Vashj'ir, Deepholm and the Firelands, which would feel quite epic except that Aggra magically teleports you everywhere. I really felt rather torn about this. Part of me was definitely glad that I didn't have to manually go to all those different places just for one quest, but on the other hand I didn't really feel as if I was going anywhere. That's the eternal dilemma with features like this, isn't it?

Blizzard's new phasing-but-not-quite worked very well in my opinion, as you could see all the other players around you and it felt busy, but the NPCs still changed for you personally, depending on which part of the quest you were on. I also thought that the mechanics of the elemental fighting quests were very well suited for the patch day crowds, as mob tagging wasn't really an issue and your "kill credit bar" or whatever you want to call it kept building up as long as you did at least some damage to some mobs. I can imagine it feeling a bit slow though if you end up doing it later when there aren't as many people around.

The only thing that really caused me any grief were other players, as lots of Alliance on my server decided to turn their PvP flag on, and as the elementals were dying in seconds and everyone was maniacally fighting to get a hit in, it was way too easy to hit another player by accident and get flagged without meaning to. I accidentally hit a draenei death knight with a smite during the Firelands portion of the chain myself, which promptly caused him to come over and gank me, so I lost my entire quest progression of what felt like several dozen kills (the bar resets if you die) and then had to take an enforced break of five minutes while waiting for my flag to wear off. Yeah, that wasn't that much fun. When I did the chain on my hunter, my pet randomly decided to go after an Ally as well, without any direction from me, and got me flagged this way, though I managed to escape death that time. It was still annoying. I guess one person's fun world PvP is another one's obstacle.

Also, was I the only one who wondered about Aggra's totems during the Firelands part of the chain? Where the hell does she keep totems that are twice as tall as a tauren? It's funny how some NPCs and items in WoW have increased in size over the years, for no apparent reason other than to make them more obviously visible to players. Most of the time I don't even think about it anymore and just accept that Tirion Fordring is a giant for example, but those totems gave me pause for some reason.

The entire quest chain gives Thrall some interesting characterisation in my opinion, as you basically find out about his most secret thoughts about a lot of issues. A lot of it wasn't exactly unexpected, but I was actually pleasantly surprised to hear that he's had doubts about Garrosh messing up the Horde as well.

And Aggra... well, I'm kind of in two minds about her. I haven't read The Shattering yet so I don't know how she gets introduced, but looking only at the game, she's basically this complete nobody that very obviously only gets shoved into our faces to be Thrall's love interest. I didn't mind her at first, but her new 4.2 voice really grated on my nerves, as it sounded unnecessarily sultry, whiny and somehow entirely un-orcish to me for some reason. On the other hand she's kind of cool, and manages to display some character even while under duress, occasionally snarking at Thrall even while she desperately fears for his life.

The only thing I didn't get was why the big ritual for which we were called to Hyjal in the first place wasn't completed after we saved Thrall. I thought it was supposed to be important?

The quest reward cloak you get at the end is very nice, though I couldn't help but feel like there was suddenly a certain cloak overload going on. Epic cloaks for justice points, cloaks from Ahune, cloaks from this quest, and did you see the first rep reward from the Avengers of Hyjal? Yep, more cloaks.

Speaking of the Avengers of Hyjal, in the evening my guild had its first Firelands raid. I took one step inside and immediately felt like I had ended up in Molten Core 2.0, with the only major difference being that it's open to the sky. But otherwise it's all there: flamewalkers, core hounds, molten giants - lots and lots and lots of them. I guess it's been a while since we last had a raid instance with silly amounts of trash, so fair enough. What with it being our first time, we didn't mind that much anyway because it was all new and amusing to find out about the mobs' different abilities, such as little turtles punting the tanks halfway across the instance.

Our raid leader decided that we should start off with Shannox, aka the guy whose face they pasted onto the tier twelve hunter helm. He doesn't actually appear until you've killed a certain minimum amount of trash, and then he keeps patrolling the entire zone, with each round taking about four minutes. This certainly made for a very different kind of boss fight, as we basically waited in the area that we had cleared out for the fight every time, discussing tactics until he came around again, and then everyone scrambled frantically to be ready immediately while the tanks had to make a good run for it to catch him in time since he moves quite fast. I can foresee a lot of whining about that on the forums and wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard ended up changing it. I think it would be a shame though, because while my first reaction was to find it quite annoying, it also feels a lot more dynamic. Why should all bosses just stand around, waiting for us to kill them?

We didn't make much progress on the fight, but considering that there are only seven bosses in there, I would have been disappointed anyway if the first one had fallen over immediately, on our first night of attempts.

School of Not-So-Hard Knocks

Let me start off by saying that I think that the School of Hard Knocks is a very badly designed achievement. I thought so when I first saw its requirements; I thought so even more when I read people's accounts of how it was giving them a terrible time year after year. One of my friends even quit the game for several months after he had failed to get the achievement despite of hours of trying. For these reasons I decided that I wasn't even going to bother; I wasn't going to support what I considered an inane achievement by working towards it. I got all the other Children's Week achievements, just not this one.

But.

This year, I read this post by Vidyala and these posts by Cynwise, and they gave me reason to pause. Cynwise in particular impressed me, because here we have someone who is a dedicated PvPer, the kind of person whom you'd expect to hate this achievement the most, seeing how it fills up the battlegrounds with tons of people who don't actually want to pvp... and yet he has retained an amazingly positive attitude towards the whole thing, and not in a "yay, I get to gank some noobs" kind of way either. Not only is he encouraging people, telling them that it's all very doable, he also comes across as believing that it's doable without actually hindering your own team - the one fear that has been putting me off this achievement more than anything else.

So I decided to give it a try after all. I'm not completely inexperienced in PvP and actually have pretty decent gear for current levels, so it's not as if the battlegrounds themselves scared me. But some of those tasks required for the achievement... returning the flag in Warsong Gulch? I'm a healer, for god's sake, my job is to protect our flag carrier, not to chase the enemy. Can my role in the battle be any more diametrically opposed to what Blizzard wants me to do? How stupid. But well, no harm in trying, and I vowed to myself that I would not do anything outright stupid just to gain those achievement points. I wanted to see if it was indeed possible to get it done while playing the "proper" way.

Unsurprisingly, Arathi Basin was by far the easiest one, as base assaults are something that happens frequently throughout the game and no class or role is at a massive disadvantage while making them. In fact, I only had to ride straight out of the gate and up to the farm flag. Only one other person tried to go for it, and I managed to start capping about half a second faster. Done! I hung around for the rest of the game of course, and it didn't seem much different from the way Arathi Basin matches usually go. Bases changed ownership reasonably often, but then they always do. And Horde won, as we almost always do in this battleground. Nice.

Alterac Valley was one that I expected to be very difficult, considering that there are only four bunkers to assault, they rarely get retaken, and there were thirty-nine other people in the battleground who might potentially be competing with me. To make things even worse, Healbot pretty much crashed my game the moment I zoned in, since it couldn't cope with so many people in one place after the recent patch. By the time I had managed to disable it and the game was in a playable state again, the rest of the team was already halfway across the map. Not good.

I more or less got trapped in a defensive position, dying a few times and feeling rather unhappy when it started to look like it was going to be another one of those games where the Alliance perpetually choked everyone trying to go north off at Iceblood, slowly grinding the defence into paste as they advanced towards Drek'thar. Never mind achievements, that kind of thing is just painful.

However, after a while I noticed that the Alliance assault didn't seem to be as fierce as usual, and both towers and bunkers kept getting retaken. Of course! All the orphan minders were going towards the enemy objectives to get their 'cheeves done, and all the serious PvPers were suddenly playing defence because it meant that they got to gank clueless achievement hunters, which meant that nothing much actually got done on either side.

Miraculously I managed to slip through a hole in the Alliance force at Iceblood, with only a lock throwing a couple of dots on me, and made it towards mid-field. I was actually approaching some bunkers! Of course I then got ganked at the next choke point at Stonehearth, but since the Horde held Snowfall for a change I at least didn't get thrown back all the way down south. Eventually me and a couple of other Hordies managed to break the resistance at Stonehearth, and suddenly the world was open to me. Too bad that both Stonehearth and Icewing bunker were already tagged and swarming with people... but lo and behold, both Dun Baldar bunkers were still bright and blue.

I didn't really think that I would stand much of a chance on my own, but since I'd never know if I didn't try, I decided to simply ride up to Dun Baldar. Much to my surprise nobody bothered me on the road, and to my delight I found that all the archers in the bunkers had already been killed during a previous assault. A lone mage took a few shots at me but then turned away again - I don't know if she decided to just let me do my thing or got genuinely distracted by something else. Either way I had Dun Baldar north all to myself, and managed to assault it shortly before my side suffered a crushing defeat, as usual. Still, getting that part of the achievement done on the first attempt was a pleasant surprise!

Eye of the Storm was where things got harder. I half expected my entire team to go straight for the flag, but instead they decided to all crowd onto one base, which I found plain odd. The best theory that I could come up with was that we did indeed have a lot of PvP-inexperienced achievement hunters in that battleground, but that they had read somewhere that you couldn't run the flag without having at least one base, so getting exactly one base was what they focused on first. After we capped that one base, everyone kind of dispersed into all directions, and I found myself getting stunlocked and ganked by about four people at once every time I resed up anywhere. Looking at the scoreboard I got the impression that we were fighting a partial premade that had identified me as the only healer on Horde side and was thus having a field day. It wasn't encouraging and I decided to take a break from EotS for a bit.

When I tried again a bit later, people started out doing that single-base-capping thing again, but I managed to lure a couple of them towards the Draenei Ruins and soon we were holding at least two bases. I stayed there for a while, pondering how I was ever going to cap a flag when bases needed defending and so few of my team mates seemed to be willing to do it, when I saw a gnome mage emerge from the kerfluffle in the centre, trying to carry the flag north towards the Mage Tower. However, he had about half of the Horde team hot on his heels and it was obvious that he wasn't going to make it. I mounted up quickly and rode over. He blinked one last time to escape his attackers in melee, but a couple of ranged shots finished him off mere seconds later and he expired right at my feet. I picked up the flag and quickly ran back towards the Draenei Ruins, with my fellow Hordies who had also been trying to get the flag providing a magnificent meat shield. One cap later, I could tick the third item off my list. As the cherry on top, we won that match as well.

This only left the dreaded Warsong Gulch. I really couldn't see how I was possibly going to pull that one off as a healer, but then I hadn't expected Alterac Valley and Eye of the Storm to be so forthcoming either, so I was strangely optimistic. In my first match I simply rode towards mid-field with the majority of my team and assisted them with killing Alliance there for a bit. However, after a few minutes I noticed that nobody had bothered to pick up the flag on either side. A quick look at the map revealed that aside from the people engaged in mid-field, everyone else was camping the flag room, waiting for an enemy to try anything so that they could gank them and get the achievement. Presumably the Alliance was doing the same, so of course nobody was making any progress whatsoever. /facepalm.

Staying true to my vow to play properly, I decided that if nobody else was going to go for the flag, I was going to do it. The Alliance defenders appeared to have fallen asleep out of boredom, so I managed to run the flag and cap it without anyone bothering me much. Of course, when I tried this for the second time, everyone had woken up and soon the entire Alliance team was forming a big dog pile on top of my dead body. Oh well, at least someone on their side got their achievement I guess? At this point a friendly resto shaman decided to join me in my efforts, and together we managed to run the flag another two times despite more enemy attempts to stop us, seeing how they weren't particularly good or coordinated. I was quite content to end the match with a crushing 3-0 victory, even if I had got nowhere close to actually returning our flag.

During my next WSG match, I was pleased to see that the entire team actually left the flag room at the start, deciding to take the battle to the enemy instead of sitting around and hoping for some sort of miracle. I briefly helped the skirmishers in mid-field again but quickly noticed a lonely paladin making an attempt at grabbing the enemy flag. I felt conflicted for a moment, seeing how supporting the pally would only take me further away from any enemies that might potentially pick up the flag, but my rule to not play stupidly for the sake of the achievement still stood, so I joined her and helped to keep her alive.

As we were making our way back to our base across mid-field, I suddenly spotted a gnome mage - once again - trying to carry the Horde flag away. He was about to pass us on a parallel course only a few yards away, and I immediately had a flashback to Eye of the Storm as I saw the majority of my team working hard to bring him down. (I wish people were this focused on returning the flag during the rest of the year!) Since the paladin seemed safe for the time being, I ran over again... and yep, the mage blinked out of range of the melee just like in EotS, preventing them from getting that final grab in, and died right at my feet. One quick click later, both School of Hard Knocks and For The Children flashed up on my screen - after only six battlegrounds in total.

The pally and I continued to run the flag, and only on our last run did I notice the sad human hunter that had been in the Alliance flag room all along - that is to say, I had noticed him there before, but it took three assaults on his base for me to notice that he wasn't even attacking. Instead he kept spamming a macro asking people to /wait and /point-ing at his orphan. I felt very bad as I saw other people killing him mercilessly and making fun of him, and I barely had time to emote a /sorry to him before he died. If I had got that last flag I would have dropped it once, just for him, but the pally beat me to it again and had no interest in helping the poor guy out. I generally agree that battlegrounds are for fighting, not for co-operating with your enemy, but I'm also a hopeless sap. Here's to you, human hunter; I hope you got your achievement eventually and that it wasn't too painful.

Conclusion: Cynwise was right, it is possible to get those achievements while working at winning the battlegrounds at the same time, though I think that while doing so I probably used up my entire supply of good luck for the rest of the year, what with getting it all done so quickly and often against the odds. I should probably play a couple more matches before the end of Children's Week, just to make a point of helping other people get their achievements, in the interest of balancing my cosmic karma.