K'aresh and the Story of the War Within

Patch 11.2 arrived about one and a half weeks ago, and with it the final major story update for the War Within. That still feels weird to think about, considering the Midnight expansion announcement is still a few days away. I mean, we know that there'll be plenty of content to tide us over until 12.0, from Legion Remix to the release of housing, but it still seems odd for the War Within to just kind of end where we are now.

K'aresh is a nice enough zone. It recycles the city of Tazavesh from Shadowlands, which I don't have any particularly strong feelings about as I only ever did the associated dungeon one or two times. The wider zone with its purple tinge, floating rocks and eco-domes is strongly inspired by Netherstorm, which makes sense and is another thing I'm quite happy with. The large areas of desert and packs of devourer mobs also recall Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis for me, and look, I know everyone loves to hate on Shadowlands but Zereth Mortis was a great zone and I don't mind being reminded of it either.

I also liked the storyline well enough (I have yet to kill Dimensius and see what comes afterwards). I wasn't a fan of Xal'atath constantly crooning at me that I was her champion (though this meme on reddit made me chuckle) but the return of Ve'nari's sass gave me life and was good for some genuine laughs. (When she ended that one quest with "Now get some stygia... I joke.") However, I'm also left with a certain feeling of "Why are we here?".

I'm not saying there's no connection at all between the War Within's patches, obviously Alleria chasing Xal'atath has been a through line. But should it have been? The hook at the start of this expansion was that Thrall, Anduin and other important characters were hearing the call of Azeroth's world soul, and that something was seemingly wrong down there. We descended deep into the earth, learned about the earthen and world soul "shards" like Beledar. We met the Haranir, who also seemed to have a connection to Azeroth itself and were worried about corrupting influences. Undermine was admittedly always going to be a bit of a mid-expansion side quest, but it wasn't so far off that we couldn't have pivoted back to focusing on the world soul after that. Dataminers have reported that there was a planned zone called the "Rootlands", presumably under Azj-Kahet, which would have made sense as a final destination for us to find out just what is going on inside Azeroth.

However, instead we chased Xal'atath to K'aresh because suddenly it's all about the return of Dimensius the All-Devouring and the call of Azeroth's world soul seems all but forgotten. Now, considering that War Within and the next two expansions are meant to form "The Worldsoul Saga", we're probably not all done with world soul business, and I really hope that we'll get back to it - but right now, this doesn't feel like the first part of a trilogy but rather like something that was meant to be a stand-alone expansion and was cut off at the knees at the last moment to pivot towards a completely different plot.

Now, this does kind of mesh with how Chris Metzen said that large chunks of War Within were already done when he rejoined the team and had to be somewhat retooled to fit the new Worldsoul Saga narrative. He also indicated that he almost expected people to possibly feel a bit unsatisfied with War Within on its own, while promising that it would all pay off later.

I really, really hope that he is right, because at the moment I can't say that I'm really sold on this story. It's one thing for part one of a trilogy to have a bit of an open ending hinting at bigger thing to come. At the end of Fellowship of the Ring, we know that we're not done, but we do know where we're going and have been witness to some pretty exciting adventures relating to that.

The War Within has not given me that vibe. I know that the next expansion will be about elves and the void only because Chris Metzen said so, not because the War Within has really built either of those subjects up to be a major theme (until the sudden pivot with this patch that is). It's just been very focused on Alleria and Xal'atath as characters, and to be honest I kind of feel like that's been a mistake. You may blame part of that on my general dislike of Xal'atath, but I have no issues with Alleria - it's just that I don't think you can place something like a WoW expansion on the shoulders of two NPCs. Their personal struggles can be part of the larger story, sure, but I don't think they're strong enough to form the framework that's supposed to hold everything up.

I enjoy hearing tales about the adventures of different denizens of Azeroth - I did so in Vanilla too; and I'm fine with the additional bells and whistles of voice acting and cut scenes. But in my opinion at least, WoW is at its strongest when the focus remains on the big picture and the world as a whole instead of one specific character's journey, and I'm just not seeing that right now. People have ragged on Dragonflight's story a lot, but even if you want to make fun of Alexstrasza being kind of useless and other NPCs being flat in their characterisation, it was all extremely cohesive thematically, focused on the Dragon Isles, the dragon flights, the primalists and all their minions and allies, which made it easy for me to overlook the flaws in individual storylines.

War Within on the other hand reminds me strongly of BfA, which started off with this strong Alliance vs. Horde theme, including a very personal and powerful narrative for Jaina, but then we were suddenly spending our time on mechagnome island and under the sea, and next it was all about uniting to fight old gods and wait, what? Metzen may have big plans for the Worldsoul Saga, but I don't think it bodes well that the way he decided to build the first part of this trilogy is superficially indistinguishable from an expansion where the story just felt non-cohesive and random at times. We'll see what we'll learn from the Midnight expansion announcement next week.

WoW's Post-WoD Sub Numbers

Blizzard infamously stopped publishing WoW's active subscriber numbers during Warlords of Draenor, after they had fallen to less than half of their previous peak of 12 million. Since then, there's often been speculation about how well or badly the game is doing, but ultimately we didn't have access to any real data to back this up.

Apparently this changed this week, as Franchise Manager John Hight gave a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference called "The First 30 Years of Warcraft: The Making of a Game Universe" on Wednesday. There isn't a recording available online at the time of me writing this, but apparently some photos of his presentation were leaked, revealing some surprisingly open admissions of failure in regards to Shadowlands and showing a graph of overall subscriber trends since the launch of the Legion expansion.

Now, this graph didn't include numbers, but YouTuber Bellular matched the graphic up with information from previous public earnings reports to make some pretty convincing guesses:

Screenshot from the video "Report: WoW's Actual Subscriber Count & Blizz's Official Shadowlands Post-mortem"

There are a lot of interesting tidbits to take away from these numbers:

• Even at its lowest of lows, WoW still had 4 million subscribers, easily eating any other classic MMO's lunch. The game still sporting 7 million subscribers as it's approaching its 20th anniversary is actually pretty insane.
  
• That lowest of lows happened after the launch of BfA, but subscriptions then surged again with the launch of Classic, reaching a peak of over eight million, which was the highest number they had seen since the release of Warlords of Draenor.
• Shadowlands did indeed drop off very hard (a slide in Hight's presentation specifically calls this out) and was presumably only saved from dropping even lower than BfA due to the fact that overall subscription numbers were still propped up by Classic.
• Dragonflight had an unexpectedly weak launch, but has had "record post-launch stability and growth", with current sub numbers actually exceeding the ones seen at the expansion's release. Classic is presumably still helping to some degree though, so it's hard to say how Dragonflight has performed on its own. Regardless, there's a clear recovery going on compared to the doldrums of 2022.

Thoughts on the Level Squish and Chromie Time, Three Years Later

I wasn't planning for this to be my first topic on the blog in the new year, but Wilhelm made an interesting post two days ago that I wanted to bounce off of. It's called "The Shadowlands era Level Squish was a Bad Idea" and well... it's right there in the title what it's about. There are a couple of misconceptions in there, seemingly caused by Wilhelm not having played retail in a while himself, but his general point, that he thinks the level squish ultimately wasn't all that, is completely fair. I already responded in a comment, but I wanted to spin my thoughts into a full post here as well.

Do I think that the Shadowlands level squish and the introduction of Chromie time were a success? Well, they made me log back into retail for the first time in many years back in 2020, and I've clearly had some fun with it since then. Mission success on that front! But of course, it's not that simple.

From my point of view there were two main reasons for the level squish and the introduction of parallel levelling paths by Blizzard:

1. The ever-increasing level cap was getting too daunting for new and returning players and they wanted to lower that number. Slashing the overall XP required to earn those levels only does so much after a while.
2. Narratively, the levelling experience was increasingly becoming a mess. With all those expansions stacked on top of each other, combined with the constantly decreasing XP requirements to out-level each expansion, players were getting whiplash from how quickly they were supposed to change tracks from one level to the next, and without ever getting a resolution to anything. The hope was that by just allowing people to level in a single expansion, that expansion would be able to present at least a somewhat coherent story.

I think as far as point one goes, it was definitely a success in the short term at least - though with each new expansion once again adding another ten levels on top, one has to wonder whether the devs have any kind of long-term plan to avoid running into the exact same issue again in another few years.

The second point is... iffier. As it turns out, they lowered XP requirements so much, that you'll still hit the end of Chromie time before completing even the one expansion of your choice, but at least you have more options in terms of where and how you want to spend your time there. Also, even if the tuning had worked out in such a way that you actually completed all of your chosen expansion's zones before being shunted into the newest content, you still wouldn't really know the resolution to the story as that's usually contained in a raid.

Oh, and it turns out that WoW's expansions really weren't designed to be parallel levelling paths in terms of narrative. Anything from WoD onward (if not earlier) tends to start with a bombastic intro featuring NPCs you're supposed to know and that hail you as a hero of many campaigns, which doesn't really make any sense if you're only just fresh off Exile's Reach. I wouldn't say it's any worse than the old mess, but I'm not sure it's really any better either.

Also, one of the most baffling things about Chromie time to me, at the beginning, was the way it just ejected you the minute you hit the required level for the next expansion, with no consideration for what you might have been doing at the time (I talked a bit about that experience in this post). I don't know how the devs ever thought that was a good way of handling things and I think they got a lot of complaints about it, so the experience has been somewhat smoothed out since then.

When I last encountered this situation myself, I actually got a quest from Chromie asking me to come back to the normal timeline a level before it would've kicked me out, to encourage you to voluntarily exit Chromie time beforehand. The husband has levelled an alt even more recently, and according to him you don't get kicked out at all anymore now, things just suddenly stop giving XP the moment you ding - which remains a little weird to me but still seems like an improvement.

Still, I wish they would just open the whole thing up even more. Specifically, I'd like Chromie time to be open to all levels, including max-level, and it should just be one unified layer where everything scales to your level, instead of having separate ones for each expansion. Fun fact: if you queue for a random dungeon in Chromie time and don't get a group within five minutes, you'll get a pop-up saying "This search is taking a while. Expand your search to dungeons from other expansions?", to which the answer is pretty much always yes. Why not allow people to queue up and play that way to begin with?

You could argue that this won't help with new players' narrative confusion, but the way I see it, it could hardly make things any worse right now. At least they could continue to explore along whichever path interests them without arbitrarily being shunted off elsewhere at certain levels. (Plus, players being confused/overwhelmed by everything the game throws at them isn't limited to new players and old content anyway. I think it says a lot that this meme was the most popular post in the wow subreddit last year according to the community's 2023 recap).

In general, I think the devs still need to work on granting their players more freedom and being less prescriptive. Obviously it's a game designer's job to impose rules, but they should aim to achieve this by organically leading the player down a path that is fun, not by boxing them in and threatening to smack their fingers every time they dare to stick their nose over the railing. I get that this must be challenging with the WoW community in particular, considering how min-max-focused it can be, meaning players will absolutely do stupid and un-fun things if they turn out to be unexpectedly efficient. But sometimes... people really just want to do something a bit different from the current prescribed path, and why not let them? If someone wanted to level to 70 purely by playing Legion content for example, instead of going through the Dragon Isles for the tenth time in a row, who would be harmed by letting them do that?

I suspect that internally there is a lot of baggage associated with WoW's old content. The devs currently do try to keep it functional at a minimum level but since it's considered deprecated and not really relevant, only the most egregious issues with it get addressed and even that without any kind of rush. I remember when the husband and I played through Legion for the first time, he got stuck on his class order hall campaign since it required him to get an item that had just been removed in a recent patch, but the quest hadn't been updated to take this into account yet. I think it took several months until he was able to continue that particular quest line. There are countless minor oddities like that which just get ignored.

If they started more openly supporting the "legacy" content as something for people to still do at max level, it would probably take away time and resources from actually working on new and fun things (not just for us, but also for them!) and likely open up ten new cans of worms in terms of balance. If everything scaled to max level in terms of gameplay and basic rewards (I'm talking gold rewards and greens, you can keep the best stuff for the current expansion), you might suddenly be dealing with issues like demon hunters being OP in Wintergrasp, Mists of Pandaria dailies being too rewarding compared to the ones in the latest expansion, or WoD's garrisons unbalancing the economy (again). And who wants to deal with any of that?

Still, I'll keep dreaming. The WoW team has shown a lot of growth in Dragonflight, including a willingness to step away from old paradigms. And I honestly think that the world in WoW is still great. There are so many fun things to do that new players will never even know about. I'm not expecting the game to completely change its stripes and suddenly care more about levelling than about endgame... but there are a lot of improvements that could be made even so.

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.

D(ragon) Day

So, the release of dracthyr evokers in the run-up to Dragonflight has been... interesting. I was honestly pretty hyped about it. It's been a long time since I was part of this kind of event in retail WoW, and I had pretty fond memories of the community buzz in the days immediately after the Shattering for example. Things didn't entirely turn out the way I'd hoped though.

First there was the confusion about when exactly the unlock would happen. Blizzard had been advertising the 15th for ages, and I already had the day off work for unrelated reasons, so it didn't even occur to me that this might not be one of those world-wide launches - as it turned out, there were no dragons yet for EU players on the 15th, and of course the next day was an office day for me, which left me with minimal time to spend on anything other than commuting and work.

Still, I managed to at least log into the game early in the morning to create my evoker. I had actually done some preparation for this, as I found a tool on Wowhead that simulated the dracthyr character creator. I know that I can get pretty caught up in character customisation, and with the dracthyr having more customisation options than any previous race, I wanted to familiarise myself with all the different options in advance. I was just confused because when I tried to use the option to save my creation, Wowhead kept telling me that my dragon needed more clothes, which made me wonder whether it was mandatory to equip a minimum number of the cosmetic armour pieces that are available for the class (it was not). In the end I just took a reference screenshot manually.

Anyway, thanks to this I had a picture to speed up my decision-making on Wednesday morning, though since I hadn't yet looked at the visage form options at all, the process still took me more than twenty minutes. Still, I managed to at least finish my character before having to dash off to work. Thus, "Shindragosa" was born.

The husband and I then sat down to play together late in the evening, but again things were not off to a good start as I was greeted by the error message "cinematic not available" upon logging in, so I had to immediately set off to YouTube on my second monitor to figure out what the hell my character was supposed to have seen before even starting. While I was doing that, the husband was struggling with a different dilemma - for him the cinematic had played - at least partially - but then he got stuck in the room you spawn in and found himself unable to get out. I googled that issue as well, and the common advice seemed to be to "restart your game five or six times". This did work eventually, but basically, just getting both of our characters out of the very first room took us something like ten to fifteen minutes.

After that, things continued somewhat more smoothly, though the area felt very quiet. I'm guessing this was done intentionally via phasing, as we did see more players once we got out of the first building, but if there had been a big rush earlier in the day, we had clearly missed it.

The Forbidden Reaches were fun enough as a starter zone - mostly WoW standard questing fare interspersed with a few (working) cut scenes, but our real focus was on our soar ability and using it to fly around a bit whenever it was off cooldown. There's a quest at the very start where you can practice soaring with no cooldown and I would have liked to spend some more time on that, but the husband just wanted to move on so I did too, without ever really getting the hang of it. The two times or so when I got it to work properly after that it felt great, however most of the time I just lost momentum way too quickly and dropped like a rock. Needs more practice.

Towards the end of the area quest line there was another "cut scene not available" failure, this time affecting both of us, and we were very confused as a battle we'd been fighting just phased around us and things had clearly gone to shit in some way but we didn't know how or why. Again I looked it up on YouTube and that one was definitely a very important cut scene!

Eventually we made it to Stormwind and did the intro there (I thought Wrathion's introduction was laugh-out-loud funny, not gonna lie), but we felt it was too late to look at the elemental invasion event or do the dungeon quest we'd been given. Guess that one's for another day.

In terms of play style I don't know yet whether evoker will be for me or not. The pacing of skills in the starting zone felt very good, but then you come out of there and the game's like: "Here, have fifty talent points or so and another ten abilites to place on your action bars! Hope you enjoy reading tooltips!" and I really can't judge that without actually trying some of those new skills properly first.

Some #WarcraftStories

Okay, so technically the hashtag is #WarcraftStory, in the singular, but that's an unimportant detail.

This morning I checked my Twitter timeline to see people responding to the official Warcraft account with Tweets in the format of:

Character name
Server name
Region
#WarcraftStory
@Warcraft

Because apparently Blizzard put some sort of bot in that would respond to your Tweet with an image of your character and two paragraphs of text characterising you in some way based on selected stats from your Armoury page. Rohan wrote a little post about it as well.

This looked fun and I immediately had to try it for myself, inputting my current monk main, which resulted in this:

I'm not a pet collector so I didn't think my number of pets owned would be remarkable in any way, but maybe it is? I also actively avoid killing critters generally, so I was a bit surprised to see that get called out. Damn AoEs I guess. (I also wonder if mawrats count as critters.)

Then I decided to do my husband's demon hunter:

Note that neither of us raided in Mists of Pandaria, so I looked at that and went, "You been farming those MoP raids, huh?" to which he responded with an amusingly embarrassed look.

Then I put in a friend who's kind of hapless when it comes to WoW and whom we just drag around a lot:

We all had a good laugh at him being labelled as a "dungeon specialist" when he's barely done any (though 52 is more than I would have expected). The only reason he's got four Vault of the Wardens runs is some bad RNG when we took him timewalking one week. Also, you can tell that neither my husband nor said friend care about transmog. It always offends my eyes a little.

Next I decided to put in my old main from original Burning Crusade to Cata, wondering whether she would throw up some raid stats. But no, this one focused on PvP and emotes:

I kept trying more alts, but sadly after that the bot's creativity seemed to run out, as they were all more or less repeats of the pet/critter combo. Those 307 pets must be really extraordinary... or maybe all my alts are just considered very boring, and since the pet counter is account-wide, it overrides everything else.

Looking at some of the other images posted on Twitter, the bot did seem to favour stats for the harder Shadowlands content somewhat, using those to go into more detail when available. When I told my husband about that, he asked that I do some of his alts, since he didn't have impressive numbers of mounts or pets and expected more character-specific results. However, what we really got out of the exercise was that he can't remember the names of his own alts.

"Do my warrior! It's Jogern, J-O-G-E-R-N!"

"I don't know what that is, but it's not a warrior. Is it a priest?"
"Oh, it's my warlock!"
"And he's a supporter of public transportation, apparently."

Ultimately his alts weren't much more interesting than mine though, as they were all labelled as "dungeon specialists". Still, it was a fun little exercise, and I had a few more friends ask me to "do the thing" with their characters too. This is the kind of silly fun that works really well on social media. I was reminded of how we used to call this sort of stuff "memes" back in the aughts, before the word took on the meaning it has today. ("I just did this WoW story meme and got this result! Let's see yours!")

Talent Turmoil

In retail news, this week saw the launch of the first of two pre-patches for Dragonflight, with the major features of this one being the new default UI and the new talent system. I avoided logging in for a few days because I had other things to focus on, but also because talent revamps are always kind of off-putting to me, even if I think that this particular talent redesign looks pretty good on a conceptual level. I just hate that feeling of logging in and suddenly not knowing how to play my character anymore and having to read a hundred tooltips to figure out what's going on now.

The new UI took some getting used to as well, though it wasn't too bad. The new user interface editor reminds me a bit of the one that SWTOR has had for about a decade (yes, I'm throwing shade) and was intuitive enough to fiddle around with, even if the new default layout with three action bars in the centre of the screen will take some getting used to. There are also some items that look like they can't currently be changed - for example the bag UI and its adjacent buttons are absolutely tiny now, even on my old 21" monitor.

I did eventually bite the bullet and took some time going through the talents for my monk, holy priest and feral druid at least. I like that the new talent UI makes it easy to change your choices around (and apparently also makes it easier to share builds with others) and that there are a lot more abilities that are optional. I know there'll be a best build for raiding as usual, but for me as a casual, I quite like the idea of being able to skip something like a snare or a survival cooldown if I never really use those things, and instead being able to invest extra points into a bit more hybridisation, e.g. to have more healing power on a dps or more dps on a healer. Though I do wonder how they decided on the default talent distribution for returning players - I was rather baffled when I found that my feral druid suddenly had moonkin form for example.

Either way I reckon it's going to be a slow process to get used to all the changes, especially as someone who doesn't play retail that much or that often. Sadly trying to practice my new spell setup in a live environment didn't work out very well either - I queued for an epic battleground on my holy priest and got into a Wintergrasp match which then proceeded to crash my game every two minutes (and supposedly did the same to everyone else in the battleground). Looking at the forums this is apparently a known bug. Nice to see that the old mantra of "Happy Patch Day" and having to be ready for stuff to break in very random ways still rings true even in 2022.

Fun with Retail PvP

I've never been what I'd call a "PvP person" when it comes to MMOs. By that I mean the type of player who constantly has their PvP flag on, can frequently be found inside instanced battlegrounds or arenas, or loves to seek out fights in the open world. However, neither have I been truly averse to PvP.

I think in WoW I dipped my toes into Alterac Valley fairly early on, but my first real attempt at doing more PvP didn't come until Burning Crusade, when a guildie of mine was looking for a 2v2 arena partner. We played together for a bit until we stopped gaining ranking, by which point it was time to admit that I was holding him back and he found someone else to play with. I don't recall doing a lot of PvP during Wrath outside of joining for Wintergrasp sometimes, but during Cata my ranked battleground team actually became one of my main raisons d'être for a while, until I quit WoW altogether for SWTOR (but also, I had once again reached the point where my performance was holding others back). In SWTOR I enjoyed the casual PvP right from the start and it has been a staple of my in-game activities ever since.

In Classic I tried PvP again but found it to be horribly unbalanced and not very fun, a perception that didn't really change when I gave it another try in Classic BC. However, a few weeks ago I started dipping my toes into casual retail PvP, and to my surprise it's actually been kind of fun.

A rare Alliance win in Deepwind Gorge, aided by the warrior who kept guarding the market with me all match.

The catalyst for this change was that my Lightforged Draenei priest, whom I'd been levelling through healing dungeons, hit Shadowlands and I didn't really want to deal with nothing but Shadowlands dungeons for another ten levels. They're alright, but I've honestly seen enough of them in the past two years. I didn't really want to solo quest or do Torghast as holy either, so I decided to give battlegrounds a try, since those are suggested as an alternative levelling path for Threads of Fate, and there's a daily quest to win one battleground that awards a piece of gear and a decent chunk of XP.

I've also become a bit more interested in collecting transmog sets in the last few months, and apparently a lot of old sets can now be bought from various PvP vendors if you've got the correct currency, so that served as an additional incentive.

I complimented this hunter on their pet naming.

Anyway, as someone who hadn't really done retail PvP since Cata, there were quite a few changes that I had to take in. You queue for PvP with a role now, and you do get scaled up in the levelling brackets so that everyone's the same level. Those features have probably been there for a while, but it was my first time really seeing them.

Battlegrounds are now split into normal and "epic", with the latter including things like Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest, but in the levelling brackets not many people seem to queue for the latter so that I only got into a few "epic" matches. Mostly they were Ashran, the addition made during Warlords of Draenor that I was completely unfamiliar with. To be honest I'm still none the wiser in terms of how it's supposed to work as most of my time in there was spent in giant slug fests on the main road, during which the Horde would push us further and further back until we lost. But hey, Jennifer Hale does the voice-over for the intro!

There were also a lot of changes to the rotation of the regular/smaller maps. I only found out in the context of people talking about Wrath Classic that Strand of the Ancients was removed from retail some time ago because apparently everybody hated it, but in turn a whole bunch of new battlegrounds have been added since I last played: Mists added Temple of Kotmogu, Silvershard Mines and Deepwind Gorge, and Legion added Seething Shore. I quite like Temple of Kotmogu as it's fast-paced, objective-focused and easy to understand ("u have more ball u win" as someone put it in chat the other day). Silvershard Mines I'm a bit ambivalent about, and Deepwind Gorge is basically Arathi Basin 2.0, which means that Alliance loses a lot and I'm not a fan, even if the map layout at least seems a bit more balanced. Seething Shore seemed to be another very fast-paced and objective-focused map, which I thought was quite enjoyable the couple of times I've been there.

The different ways in which people explain Temple of Kotmogu in chat are always fun.

It was interesting to me that I found myself making comparisons to SWTOR a lot, and I do think that Bioware had the right idea with the changes they made to the WoW formula such as giving tanks an actual role in PvP, adding a built-in stun breaker instead of requiring you to earn a piece of gear for it, and having interrupts be less powerful, as it can be quite frustrating at times to get crowd-controlled, locked out of casting spells and silenced in quick succession.

Still, casually doing the daily PvP quest once a day has been pretty fun and my win-loss ratio hasn't felt too bad. People running around like headless chickens and fighting on the road are still a thing, which still frustrates me in the base-capturing battlegrounds (especially in those Arathi Basins where we only cap two bases at the start and then people instantly start quitting and yelling about how everyone but them is stupid, and then it just snowballs from there) but in a way the addition of more maps with mobile or changing objectives has kind of helped to alleviate the issue a bit because it makes it so that running around a lot and fighting in different locations can actually be a good thing.

Anyway, I got my priest all the way to sixty that way (which means that I now have two priests at max-level... at least the way I play retail is still living up to the blog's name to some degree) and I've also done a few battlegrounds at max level, during which I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I could get a full set of at least basic PvP gear and that I didn't feel horribly underpowered as a fresh sixty. I might keep coming back to this at least every now and then.

Musings on Shadowlands from a Casual Returner

I knew that it was a smart business decision by Blizzard to put Classic and retail on the same subscription when it was first announced, but I didn't think at the time that this was going to be very relevant to me (though I did comment in that linked post that I might "check out some of the new quest content while I'm subbed for Classic anyway").

What I didn't expect was that my husband had apparently secretly been pining for me to give retail another try, so when curiosity about the Shadowlands level squish and Chromie time got the better of me and got me to reinstall it, he pounced on the opportunity to play with me. We had done some levelling together during Mists of Pandaria many years ago, but I got bored after a few months, unsubscribed and concluded that the game just wasn't for me anymore.

But with Shadowlands... things have been different. I don't know if I would say that it's a better expansion than Mists of Pandaria, but the fact that I'm primarily subscribed for Classic has made it easier to drop in and out of retail without having to worry about justifying the subscription. This means that Shadowlands is the first retail expansion since Wrath of the Lich King that saw me subscribed and playing for its entirety (I'm assuming for now that I won't suddenly end up cancelling before Dragonflight).

This is kind of funny to me because it's also been my impression that community reception of Shadowlands hasn't been great, though I'm not sure how many people consider it "bad" exactly. For a long time there was this idea that WoW alternated between good and bad expansions, kind of like Star Trek movies and versions of Microsoft Windows. By that logic, Mists of Pandaria was good, Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, BfA bad, and Shadowlands was supposed to be good again but didn't live up to that expectation.

Do I think that Shadowlands was a good expansion then? Kind of, but I'm honestly not even sure what to compare it to. I used to feel bitter about retail because of everything it had turned into, but the creation of Classic largely neutralised those feelings, because now I can go back, and retail is just this "other version of WoW" that also exists and I'm okay with that. I treat it entirely differently, like a free-to-play game that I just dip in and out of, and so I don't have the same expectations and don't hold it to the same standards I would have had ten years ago. But then I also wonder: Does my opinion even matter? Saying that Shadowlands managed to clear the bar of ultra-low expectations set by a very casual returner isn't really saying very much, is it?

Regardless, I thought I'd jot down some of my final thoughts about Shadowlands, with the caveat that these are opinions coming from a very casual point of view, and I completely understand that more invested players have reasons to feel differently about some of these things.

First, let's talk about the world and zones. I do love my home of Bastion and its ethereal beauty, and I recently talked about how I think Zereth Mortis is very pretty, but all in all I've found Shadowlands a bit disappointing in terms of zone design. All the zones I didn't mention were "meh" at best for me, and I absolutely loathed the way verticality was done in Revendreth, even after unlocking flying. The fact that each zone was its own little "island" made the world feel kind of small, and having your home base in your covenant sanctum while having to go to Oribos for amenities and then still having to go to Stormwind for auctions felt unnecessarily inconvenient and awkward. Oribos as a hub city also never really grew on me. I appreciated that unlike in Boralus, everything was very clearly laid out, but I guess something about the whole city effectively being a giant indoor environment made it feel a bit oppressive.

I thought the theme of Shadowlands was very interesting to begin with, and I liked the way the levelling storyline introduced you to the different afterlives. I thought that had a lot of potential, and with so many important characters in lore that are already dead, there was a nearly endless supply of story threads to pick up and utilise if desired. Unfortunately Blizzard didn't really end up doing a lot of that. Instead we were mostly focused on the soap opera of Sylvanas and her victims, and the Jailer being the blandest of bland big bads, with the realm of death becoming just another generic backdrop for this.

I'm not mad about that, just a little disappointed, and I suspect that in terms of storytelling, Shadowlands will be relegated to a similar level as Warlords of Draenor, aka "that was an alternate timeline/dimension, we prefer not to think about it anymore". Honestly, they pretty much have to do that, because otherwise every future story death is going to be cheapened by a feeling of: "No worries, see you soon in the Shadowlands!" In hindsight, unravelling the mysteries of death in Azeroth so thoroughly may not have been the greatest idea from a lore point of view...

Covenants I really liked, and they are one of the systems where many of the criticisms levelled against them kind of made me roll my eyes. Did covenants have to be tied to abilities that affect player power? Probably not, but I don't think it was that big of a deal either. I was mostly annoyed by all the commentary about how covenants were bad because obviously nobody would choose RP flavour over maximising their output, so as someone who did exactly that with all of her characters, my opinion was mainly that the people who kept claiming that players like me don't exist can sod right off.

I also quite liked anima as a resource... at the beginning it was kind of annoyingly hard to come by, even if that fit with the theme of there being a drought, but I listened to the people who said that this was clearly a system that was meant to be used over the course of the whole expansion, and treating it as such worked really well for me, as it started out slowly and ramped up over time. In Zereth Mortis anima flows freely by now, and I kind of have it as a low-key goal to buy all the anima cosmetics for my main by the end of the expansion and then finish with a full reservoir.

Soulbinds and conduits were just unnecessarily complicated, made little sense lore-wise and I largely ignored them as a result, just setting some sort of default whenever they became available and then leaving it at that forever.

I liked Torghast because I never really cared about legendaries (and therefore never felt pressured into doing it for materials), plus it was a great duo activity for me and the husband. It was very fun to see how we'd get overpowered in different ways on each run as we ascended the tower, though regular runs tended to end too soon to let you really get the most out of it, meaning that Twisting Corridors was probably the best mode in terms of raw gameplay fun, while also giving almost zero rewards for some reason. I will say that most of the changes Blizzard made to Torghast throughout the expansion, such as adding a timer, were not improvements in my book and sidegrades at best. 

In terms of everyday activities, I was once again kind of confused by the criticisms I saw in some corners about there being nothing to do, that there were too few world quests and that they took too long. When an activity takes a couple of minutes at most and people already consider that too long, players' attention spans are even shorter than I feared. Personally I liked the variety and that there were a fair few that didn't necessarily require combat, and I was also quite content that there weren't a billion things to grind every day - which was definitely a criticism I had seen levelled against Battle of Azeroth.

Whatever the current solo power grind was for each patch usually kept me entertained for a few weeks at least - covenant callings, Korthia dailies, Zereth Mortis, but I'm at the point where I know that there is no point in doing these things longer than they are fun, because any power rewards will be totally obsoleted by the next patch anyway. Zereth Mortis has actually had surprising staying power for me as I maxed out the Cypher of the First Ones, bought all the toys and stuff from the Jiro vendor and still keep coming back for more because it's just so relaxing to fly circles around the zone.

As far as WoW's "core content", dungeons and raids go, I didn't do much of it. I mean, I did all the base expansion dungeons on normal and heroic, but those modes don't really "matter" for anything nowadays since it's all about Mythic+. I still need to check out Tazavesh one of these days... and in terms of raiding, I wrote about doing LFR for the first two raids and what an experience that was. The last raid is still on my bucket list. But beyond going once to see the sights, that content isn't really of interest to me at this point.

Reading all this back, I guess it sounds more mixed than positive, but the proof is in the pudding and fact is that I have continued to log in and play casually all throughout this expansion, sometimes even without my husband, which is the real litmus test for whether I'm enjoying myself or not.

Zereth Mortis at Last

It's hard to believe that Zereth Mortis was released in February, considering it took the husband and me this long to finally check it out, but that just seems to be how we roll. Part of his initial hesitation to jump into it was caused by the fact that we'd levelled as a warrior and monk duo until now, but he had come to enjoy the demon hunter play style more and wanted to make that his new main (yet at the same time didn't feel quite ready to do so yet).

In the end it was last week that we finally set out as monk and demon hunter duo to check out the last zone added for Shadowlands. It took us about two weeks of real time to get through all the story (and to do the weekly twice while we were there), with one particularly intense play session on a Saturday afternoon taking up something like six hours.

And it was enjoyable! I quite liked Korthia until we got dispirited by the grind, and Zereth Mortis functions in a similar way but in a prettier environment. Now that I've finally seen the basic workings of Warlords of Draenor, I can really see how Blizzard's approach to these zones evolved over time: Burning Crusade first added the concept of a faction offering daily quests, which remained their go-to way of keeping players busy with only relatively minor changes for the next three expansions, until Mists of Pandaria caused backlash with its "daily overload". This in turn then resulted in Blizzard trying something completely different with the Timeless Isle and just letting people look for treasures and rare mobs with little to no direction there.

As that got what I think could be called a mixed reception, they went back to dailies with WoD, but left in the treasures and rares, and also experimented with these things called "bonus objectives", which were basically story-less area quests that just magically deposit rewards in your bags if you killed enough mobs in an area to fill a bar on your quest tracker. As these proved pretty popular, they decided to merge dailies and area quests into world quests for Legion and BfA... though there seemed to be some demand for dailies to make a return, as they did so in the later half of BfA, meant to work with world quests in a synergetic way. And that's kind of where we are in Shadowlands, and I have to admit it works.

In Zereth Mortis, a small number of dailies and world quests provide a basic framework to answer the question of "What should I do today?" when you first enter the zone on any given day, and then the dynamically popping treasures and rares provide additional busywork to extend your time in the zone. As an example, today I arrived in Zereth Mortis with the intent to just do the puzzle world quest and nothing else, but just on the way there I found myself stopping multiple times to loot chests, then a big rare popped and I flew over there to kill it, so all in all just "doing that single puzzle quest" actually ended up taking up quite a bit of time, but in a fun way.

Of course I say all this, having unlocked flying. The flying unlock for Zereth Mortis is pretty reasonable by the way: Just running around and doing the story we ended up ticking all but one of the boxes for it - the thing we were missing was an achievement to find a number of hidden scrolls (of which we had only found a few), but it was easy enough to look up a guide for where the remaining ones were hiding.

While we were still ground-bound it was a bit more of a mixed experience, not because I have any issues with ground-bound adventuring in general but mostly because of how many chests were only accessible by overcoming jumping puzzles of various difficulties - if you were a monk like me that is... my husband's demon hunter would just double jump and be done, which caused a fair amount of friction between us.

I got a pair of gloves early during our questing which had a special on-use teleportation effect that helped a little, but it also had a very limited range and a cooldown, so there was more than one occasion when I was waiting for that ability to come off cooldown to be able to make one final jump, just to have the chest I'd been working towards despawn. I have to admit this really made me miss the way SWTOR has a larger variety of tricks available to help other players overcome obstacles like that, as there my husband's character would've likely been able to pull me up in a similar situation.

There was also that one time where I died after a quest had teleported me to a location high up in the mountains, and since my ghost could neither fly nor use the teleporter, I was initially a bit lost as to whether it was even possible to revive without talking to the spirit healer. Fortunately a quick Google search revealed that I wasn't the only one to ever run into this problem, and I learned that my character's corpse had automatically been deposited in a different cave at ground level.

But anyway, that's all behind us now... here are a couple more things I really liked:

The overall zone story was surprisingly enjoyable. WoW rightly gets flak for the sometimes nonsensical nature of the plots for its big NPCs, but the more down-to-earth questing has always been at least okay in my opinion. I liked the concept of the Enlightened as these ultra-capitalists having found something close to religion, and I liked the little side story of that one Broker trying to get his friend to come back and slowly gaining insight into why she doesn't want to leave. Firim is a fabulous character too - great voice acting, and I liked the combination of a scientist character full of awe and love for the objects of his study.

Pocopoc, the little robo-dude that becomes your companion throughout the zone, is basically a Disney animal sidekick and I'm okay with it. He's cute and I love the little customisation options.

Have I mentioned yet that I also really like the zone as a zone? I appreciate the combination of pretty greenery with a bit of desert (which is attractive in its own way), and I also like that there are quite a few neutral mobs, meaning that there are areas where it's quite safe to roam without getting attacked every two meters. I still think the devs deserved to be memed on to some extent for hyping it up as being this alien and exotic place (e.g. water "unlike any water that we've seen before"), but it is a pretty zone.

More Retail Levelling

With my hopes for and interest in Classic at an all-time low, I've been spending more time in retail, including on new alts, even if that has meant finding more random low-levels to delete so as to not run up against the account-wide character cap.

Levelling in post-level squish WoW remains kind of weird to me because it just goes so fast. I generally consider it a good thing to have options while levelling, but when you have over a hundred zones to choose from as quest destinations and then end up hitting level 50 and the "Shadowlands wall" after completing only two or three of those zones (slightly more if you limit yourself to the old world, where zones are smaller), it just feels weird and at least to me, kind of unsatisfying. Maybe I'm too much of a completionist - but being max-level, with most of the game's content already behind me without ever having touched it feels a bit bad. Sure, nothing's stopping me from going back and doing all those grey quests to pass the time later on, but it just feels badly balanced somehow.

Even funnier, as little quest content as you need to do to level to 50, if you ever set foot into a dungeon, questing will suddenly manage to feel slow in comparison, because a random dungeon can net you a level in about fifteen minutes. The mob killing and available dungeon quests give some XP, but the XP reward for simply choosing the random option in the dungeon finder easily doubles your overall gain, which is what makes it so fast.

Dungeons also have the advantage of having a decent chance of rewarding you with a piece of gear or two each run. When sticking to questing, I've found it a bit of a struggle to keep my gear up-to-date, which is extremely ironic considering that "not enough useful quest rewards" was one of those old world problems that the Cataclysm revamp was supposed to fix - and did fix at the time, but considering how quickly completing quests advances you towards the level cap now, only getting a green every fourth or fifth quest just isn't good enough anymore. My new rogue in particular really struggled with this, as she's dagger spec and for some reason most quests would insist on awarding me maces - if they rewarded a weapon at all. I think it took until her thirties until she finally replaced her dagger from Gilneas.

My husband and I also decided to take our panda duo to level 60. While we're not finished with Draenor, we're overlevelled for the content either way and can keep coming back to it at a later time as and when we feel like working on it. The Threads of Fate option had Torghast added to it in a recent patch, something I was quite excited about, considering that the hubby and I had rather enjoyed doing Torghast together on our other characters, but the experience was a bit lacklustre. The XP rewards from it drop off rather sharply as you go up in levels, but more importantly it still doesn't reward any gear even while levelling, which means that you can only do it as an occasional side activity but otherwise have to continue focusing on regular Shadowlands content for levelling, so as not to get too underpowered from scaling as your level goes up but your gear doesn't.

It just seems bizarre to me how on any given character, 99% of levelling content up to level 50 goes unused now, but then at 50 the game funnels you into doing the same Shadowlands levelling content you've already done several times before, struggling to present it in slightly different ways so as not to drive people crazy from the repetition. If only there was a really obvious solution to that, such as letting you level all the way to 60 in any content...

Random Retail Ramblings

Last night I had a random idea for an alt in retail, so I started playing around with the character creator. A bit of fiddling was required until I found a suitable name that wasn't taken (the way WoW's character creator gives feedback on that while you're typing is very good by the way); then I hit finish... and was presented with the following error message:

You already have the maximum number of characters allowed on this account.

While I've been vaguley aware of this limit of fifty characters per account for a long time, I never expected to actually run up against it myself in a million years. My immediate reaction was to go back to the server selection screen and add up the numbers myself. Yes, I had ten characters on my old Horde server, ten characters on my old Alliance server, plus obviously a few characters on Azjol-Nerub, where I'm playing with my husband nowadays, but that's barely halfway there!

The numbers didn't lie though - apparently I'd amassed so many random low-levels across a number of different servers over the years (to say hi to friends there, take part in projects/events etc.) that I had indeed hit fifty. Interestingly, for all the interest in monetisation, additional character slots are not something Blizzard sells even to this day. Fortunately I had no particular qualms about deleting a random level three druid that I could barely even remember making to free up some space, so I could then go ahead and create the new worgen rogue I'd actually wanted to make.

This was my third time through the worgen starter zone, and it was shockingly lonely despite of cross-realm zones. This isn't some sort of "game is dead" dig - the worgen starter experience moves you around a lot and involves a lot of phasing, so this wasn't entirely unexpected, but still... I remember running into a total of three other players during the entire two play sessions I spent on this little adventure, and none of them stayed within my sights for long.

By the time I was finally ejected from Gilneas, I was level 17, which is about where you'd end up back in the day as well but which still feels mildly insane to me now that the level cap has been squished down to sixty. After a bit of musing about how much it must suck to roleplay a Gilnean in lore right now (you lose your home to the Forsaken, carve out a little niche among the night elves, and then their whole tree gets burned down by the Horde as well), I ran into my usual troubles figuring out how to travel cross-continent in retail.

It wasn't lost on me that it was quite ironic that my attempts to google advice on this mostly resulted in results for WoW Classic. I know my way around Classic, thanks; things make sense there! Say what you want about boats, there's a lot of logic in reaching a shoreline, seeing a port, and taking a boat from there to somewhere beyond the water. Portals may be convenient but they can be anywhere and lead to anywhere, so there's no natural rhyme or reason to where you can find a portal to go to any particular place in WoW (with the exception of the big portal room in the Stormwind mage tower). Fortunately I eventually found a portal to Stormwind regardless.

Every time I play an alt in retail it strikes me that there's still a lot of "world" in World of Warcraft but that the game just has zero interest in making you engage with it. The best way for things to make some semblance of sense for new players is to put them through a very curated experience that just ignores everything pre-BfA (which is what Blizzard has done with Shadowlands) and it just seems like such a shame when I suspect that it's precisely all this older stuff that keeps many people subscribed long term, even if that content doesn't reward relevant gear anymore. Or at least that's what I'm seeing with my husband, who spends hours going through old quests and grinding old reputations and achievements for completion's sake. And there are certainly only so many hours in the day that I want to spend exclusively on the newest expansion content myself.

What's the point of Classic now?

I'm still logging into Classic regularly, but it's mainly an exercise in going through the motions, such as to use my daily alchemy transmute. Even though the Sunwell patch dropped this week, I've had no desire to go to the Isle of Quel'Danas at this juncture.

I keep clinging to the notion that Blizzard could still change their minds about the continued existence of BC Classic servers, but having followed the relevant forum threads I'm not hopeful, and then I wonder why I even bother if all my characters are effectively going to be deleted in a few months.

I went back to some of my early posts about Classic and it struck me as almost tragic to see how much things have changed since then. My excitement for Classic was based on a simple premise: Blizzard letting us continue to play our favourite expansion forever. Sadly I couldn't find the link (if you know where to look, please share in the comments) but I distinctly remember an interview about Classic not long after its original announcement where someone from Blizzard (I think it was Ion but not 100% sure) said something along the lines of them realising that there was a huge passion for Classic and that they were going to honour that by recreating it and maintaining it effectively as a museum piece, even if only a small number of players were interested in playing it continuously.

Now, to be clear, I know they never claimed that they were going to do the same for later expansions, but I don't think I was unreasonable in taking it as a general expression of sentiment and to think that they were likely to approach classic versions of other expansions in a similar way. Their current attitude towards BC isn't just a slight deviation from what they said back then - going "well, we're not going to maintain it because we don't think enough people are willing to pay for it" is a complete 180 degree turn! They effectively built Burning Crusade Classic just to close it down again after less than two years.

And again, I'm not saying that progressing into Wrath of the Lich King is inherently wrong. I get that this is something that a lot of people want. It's just not what I wanted, and Blizzard certainly didn't make it clear that this was going to be forced on me when I opted to move my characters forward into Burning Crusade less than a year ago. For me, the promise of Classic was that it would allow us to go back and re-experience content and the world as it was, without having a deadline looming over our heads when it would all go away again. And no, of course a "stagnant" MMO like that wouldn't be as busy with people grinding frantically as a constantly evolving game, but that's kind of the point. Classic era is quiet, but it is being played by people who are enjoying themselves and re-running the old raids just for fun. All I wanted was the same opportunity for BC.

If Classic is just turning into a bunch of progression servers, that's - to me - worse than retail. One of the things that put me off back in Cataclysm was how blatant a treadmill the game had become and how fast it expected you to move, to the point that it would basically push you forward forcefully if it considered you too slow. New content was no longer an open invitation to do more, it became a mandate. The way the Classic team has been rushing to push out the last few Burning Crusade patches already replicates that feeling pretty perfectly.

Meanwhile, Shadowlands has had the slowest patch cadence ever, something that a lot of people have been complaining about, but which at the same time makes it extremely casual-friendly because you have loads of time to complete your goals. The irony of that is not lost on me.

Pandas of Draenor

Just as I was starting to wonder whether I still had enough of a reason to stay subscribed to WoW, my husband came in clutch for Blizzard by expressing a desire to pick up retail again, now that our new-expansion gearing frenzy in SWTOR was coming to an end for the time being. Much to my surprise, he wasn't that keen on going to Zereth Mortis yet, but wanted to roll up a new pair of characters, this time to level through Warlords of Draenor.

After a bit of discussion about what to go for, we ended up with a pair of pandaren, him a brewmaster monk, me a discipline priest. I've certainly come a long way from being notably underwhelmed by the Mists of Pandaria announcement, to finding the expansion itself kind of neat, to actually playing a pandaren myself!

I had never played through the pandaren starting experience before and found it enjoyable enough, though I did get a bit of a sense of déjà vu towards the end, which makes me think that I must have watched a playthrough of the zone on YouTube at some point many years ago.

And then we were off to Warlords of Draenor, the one remaining expansion from which I hadn't played any content before, though it does of course have a strong reputation. I remember when it was first announced I was actually kind of intrigued and considered checking it out, but that interest didn't last long. I also recall watching my husband play through the content on his own at the time and commenting how ridiculous it was that all the orc warlords appeared with their names floating next to them in giant letters - I guess Blizzard didn't think people would be able to tell them apart otherwise. My opinion on this was unchanged when we got to that part ourselves.

The introduction to Draenor in general is a fast-paced adventure that feels super odd to jump into story-wise with the new levelling system. A moment ago we were noobish pandas only just earning the right to leave the Wandering Isle for the first time, the next Khadgar greets us as famous champions who are Azeroth's only hope. I know that opting into Chromie Time includes implicit acceptance that the timeline won't really make sense, but this just seemed like a particularly extreme contrast. There also isn't any real context for why we suddenly have to go through the Dark Portal, it just feels very rushed and out of nowhere. Also, speaking of Khadgar: I thought he was kind of funny in Legion, but here the first impression he makes is actually one of being rather cold and uncaring... not a fan.

After the intro we were off to Shadowmoon Valley to start building our garrison, another feature that was reported on a lot back in the day. My husband seems to be very fond of it (he has several across his stable of characters) but he does love base-building games in general. I was a little overwhelmed at first to be honest, especially with him going on about all the things I "should" be doing to upgrade my garrison asap. The process looks like it must have been sped up a lot compared to back in the day, but it still costs resources - in fact it's ironic that the garrison had a reputation for being a massive gold generator when WoD was current but now seems to have been reduced to a gold sink instead - my husband confessed that he sent his new alt several tens of thousands of gold to be able to upgrade his buildings asap. As I've refused to do this so far, my own garrison is still extremely basic as my panda priest has only earned a few hundred gold throughout her questing so far.

At the time of me writing this, we've only done a few quests in Shadowmoon Valley plus one random dungeon and we're already level thirty, so I anticipate that just like with Legion, we'll hit fifty very quickly and will then continue running through the rest of the zones overlevelled, one-shotting everything for almost zero XP just to see the story.

While it's been fun to level with my husband again, I have to admit that the expansion content itself hasn't really grabbed me yet. The Alliance garrison being situated in a zone where it's basically always night is an emotional downer for me, and I struggle a bit to care about what we're doing. I think it's a mix between the whole alternate timeline thing and the story just not establishing very well what our motivations are. It was one thing to stop a sudden and barely explained invasion in the intro, but what exactly our beef with all the orcs is now that we're settling down on Draenor ourselves feels a lot more fuzzy. I was always told that the hate for WoD mainly came from the fact that it had little to no content added after launch but that the levelling experience was fine, but to be honest it doesn't really strike me as all that great so far either. We'll see whether that opinion changes as we explore further.

Oh, and as a fun little aside: I'd only been playing my new panda priest for a few hours when a friend whispered me on Battle.net:

Him: Did you really name a character Pishin? [Panda-Shin... get it?]
Me: Please don't tell me it means something bad!
Him: Oh no... OK, my lips are sealed.

At this point I put "Pishin" into Google of course... first result was a city/district in Pakistan, that didn't seem so bad? However, a bit further down the page I found "(Scots): urine, piss" - and of course the friend mentioned above is Scottish. Sigh!