First Thoughts About Legion Remix

Legion Remix is here and I've finally had a reason to spend more time in official WoW again. As mentioned in a previous post, I wasn't quite sure what to expect - while I enjoyed MoP Remix, the news I'd seen coming out of the PTR about this new installment didn't sound particularly encouraging, and unlike many, I don't have any nostalgia for Legion since I wasn't subscribed for that expansion. I only experienced its story for the first time about four years ago, when the husband and I levelled a pair of demon hunters through Legion Chromie Time, and while I came away with a vague feeling of "I can see why people enjoyed this at the time", it's not the same thing as when you were there yourself.

Anyway, last week "Lemix" finally arrived, and it's been pretty fun! In a departure from our usual tendency to roll tank/healer duos, and considering how superfluous I'd ended up feeling as a healer in MoP Remix, I created a Kul Tiran blood death knight as my first character, and my husband accompanied me as a gnome warlock. I'd forgotten just how fast you fly through the levels in Remix, and we levelled this first set of characters all the way to the cap right there on that first weekend.

When you have to sit down to be at eye level with your spouse. 

I will say that I was also reminded of some of the things that I didn't like about the last Remix at the beginning - the sheer speed of progression is extremely good at/bad for making you feel larger than usual levels of FOMO, because you log in for the first time on day three and people who've had nothing else to do during that time are already running around one-shotting everything, making you feel like you're hopelessly behind and will never catch up. But of course that's not true - progression is very quick for everyone; I just can't deny that it's a bit intimidating at first. Never mind the prompt on the character selection screen that constantly tells you that there are only X days left in Remix.

I'd also forgotten about my ambiguous relationship with the dungeon rushing meta. Sometimes it's funny to zone in and see some demon hunter just zoom ahead and kill everything before you can even get anywhere close. Other times though it just feels tedious to spend the whole dungeon jogging after someone else, unable to actually contribute anything and possibly not even getting any loot (the Postmaster will only recover certain types of items). It just requires a certain mental adjustment that whenever I zone into a pug instance, I can't expect to have much fun and have to accept that I'm just gonna be in and out to get something specific done/get my participation medal.

(The glorious exception to this that actually made me squee with delight was the Court of Stars run in which I was the one to successfully identify the spy at the end. People have explained to me in the past how that puzzle works, and I figured I'd understood it, but in practice I'd just never been the first one to find and talk to the right NPC. Actually having that honour for the first time felt weirdly validating and exciting.)

Anyway, I'd like to talk a bit about what's the same and what's different in Legion Remix compared to the MoP variant.

Lore-wise, the Infinite Dragonflight is experimenting again and we're time-travelling to help them out. I think the quest writers must have had a lot of fun coming up with explanations for certain mechanical changes that poke fun at the game while also making a weird kind of sense in-universe. Legion is one of those expansions where everyone addresses you as "champion" because the presumption was that your character would've levelled through the five previous expansions and defeated all kinds of potential world-ending threats. How do you reconcile that with dropping a freshly created level 10 into the storyline at this point? Your Infinite Dragonflight companion has answers:

Even better is what happens a bit later, when you get various quests to do table missions in your class order hall, and she outright says: "Like Eternus mentioned before, this experiment will eventually end. So, we have to be wise about how we spend our time." And then the quest just auto-completes. Considering they included these kinds of mobile-style waiting games in four expansions until they eventually left them behind with Shadowlands, it just cracked me up to have your in-game guide effectively admit that these systems are a waste of time, never mind.

Gear-scrapping and Bronze dropping as a currency everywhere are back, though the latter can no longer be used to increase your item level and only serves as currency to buy cosmetics this time, something that many people requested after the last Remix. I'm actually not sure how the gearing up works this time around. I tried to read up on it but found even the guides a bit unclear. It doesn't seem to matter though as simply doing various bits of content every so often rewards me with gear boxes that increase my item level ever so slightly, so I guess I'll just keep doing that and maybe it'll become more clear over time.

Instead of a magic cloak that constantly increases in power, we got the Legion artifact weapons growing with us this time. This generally seems to work well, except (in my opinion) for the missions to acquire the artifact weapons for your other specs, as these force you to respec and unequip your current artifact, making you feel terribly weak for the duration of those quests. There's also no power transfer to alts this time around, not even a little bit, with the exception of the event's XP bonus.

Things that are new are "heroic world tier" and obelisks, which are basically temporary power-ups that sometimes appear after you kill things in the open world. The latter led to one of my most memorable Remix experiences so far as it turns out there's at least one type of obelisk that doesn't actually power you up but summons a doomguard instead that you have to fight. Worse, these have a variety of different abilities, one of which involves them turning the floor to lava instantly and this floor then doing insane damage - that exact encounter and ability were what caused both of us to die for the first time and it was quite amusing and surprising. (For real though, I feel that particular ability needs a nerf. At least give it a cast time so you have a chance to start moving without the floor just disappearing from under your feet instantly.)

Heroic world tier is basically a separate phase of the world where everything has more HP and hits harder. I think you also earn more rewards but I'm honestly not even sure. The husband and I just accepted the prompt to try it out when we were level 30 or 40 and then continued to spend most of our time in there as it made playing as a duo feel a lot more beneficial and rewarding. I hope that this is a sign that my dream of a simple two-phased Azeroth is something they are at least considering for the future. (I'd want one version where you can simply out-level things if you want, and one where you are always in sync with the world, regardless of where you go, instead of the limitations of all the different Chromie Times.)

With enough random buffs applied, even regular mobs can suddenly turn into what feels like world bosses. 

After rushing our first characters to the cap, the husband and I are now as usual butting heads a bit about how to proceed. He just wants to binge nothing else while I still want to do other things on the side (such as work on my seasons objectives in SWTOR), even if I'm enjoying myself.

I'm also a bit uncertain just what kind of goals I want to set myself in this Remix. We'll work our way through all the quests for sure, and ultimately I'd like to buy all the rewards from the vendors, but that's not something I'm too worried about at this point, especially as some of them can also be earned directly from gameplay, so I'd like to see where that gets me first.

I'm actually also not that fussed about making my character super powerful to be temporarily OP, but more interested in the class-specific bits of the story I haven't seen before. Legion is an expansion with an unusually high amount of unique content for each class, and I only ever played through it as a demon hunter before. I get the impression that these class order hall stories contain a lot of "side lore" about more minor NPCs, which is very much my kind of jam.

I remember at the start of Shadowlands for example, I was surprised to see the former Inquisitor Whitemane among the ranks of the Ebon Blade death knights, wondering when the heck that happened. I haven't completed my death knight's order hall story yet, but I have found out the answer to that question, so that was very interesting to me.

But do I really have it in me to level another character of every class just to see all the order halls? Even if the process presumably speeds up a lot as your account-wide XP boost grows (I saw on reddit that people have already found out that it caps out at 400%), that still feels like a considerable effort. I'm just going to roll with it for now and we'll see.

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.

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?

Pandaria Remix Impressions

Pandamonium Mists of Pandaria Remix launched last week, and it's been an... interesting experience. The husband and I were quite keen on another opportunity to level a pair of characters together in a different context and agreed to create a shaman/druid pair. Even though I knew what I was getting into, I was rather startled by the height difference between us when I first logged in. Also, neither of us could believe that he managed to snag the name "Bearie".

Timerunning characters start out at level ten on the Timeless Isle, where you're given a few introductory quests to explain the most important Remix-specific mechanics to you as well as a bit of lore to justify the whole thing, though I didn't pay too much attention to the latter to be honest. Something something time travel... I'm just treating it as a spiced-up version of Chromie Time.

Then you're spat out at the start of the Mists of Pandaria campaign and off you go! If questing is what you actually want to do... because the dungeon finder also unlocks almost immediately, including heroic dungeons, which struck me as kind of absurd, but I figured maybe jumping into those straight away makes more sense if you're on a subsequent character who has some bonus cloak power right from the start.

We did however jump into normal dungeons right away, and did also try some heroics later. Mostly I was reminded of how odd it is that places like the revamped Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery are considered Pandaria dungeons when they have absolutely nothing to do with that continent; they just happened to be redone during the Pandaria expansion. Gameplay was enjoyable as at least initially, enemies actually seemed a bit tougher than in regular retail dungeons, and we actually wiped a few times when we over-pulled. Overall though, incoming damage seemed a bit confusing and random, with my husband's bear sometimes going for long stretches seemingly without taking any damage at all, and then suddenly requiring spam-healing while his health bar bounced up and down like a yo-yo. I don't know if that has something to do with the mode's special gems or is just scaling strangeness... I forget that compared to other MMO devs, Blizzard are actually comparatively inexperienced when it comes to scaling content to groups of all levels, and I read accounts of raids getting wiped by certain mechanics doing way too much damage if they target characters of a specific level, as well as general complaints that characters get significantly weaker as they approach the level cap, which would certainly be on brand for Blizzard's current approach to scaling.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. While we spent a lot of time in random group content (including scenarios and raids, which are actually levelling content in Remix), we also did some questing, which triggered a peculiar kind of nostalgia in me. I only played Pandaria during its original release for less than six months, and while it was better than I'd expected it to be in some ways, I wasn't all that impressed in others. At the time, it basically just reaffirmed to me that retail WoW was a completely different game from the one I originally fell in love with and that I was happy to move on. On the other hand though, the whole reason I picked up MoP to begin with after originally swearing off WoW in Cata was that my husband wanted us to play together (at the time, we had only just become a couple, I was unemployed as a result of my move, and it was something to do together), and revisiting that part of the game rekindled fond memories of the early days of our relationship. I was kind of surprised by how well I still remembered certain quest lines even though I only went through them that one time over a decade ago.

Whenever my husband and I take on a project like this, his passion is like a sprint while mine is more of a marathon, which leads to a certain degree of conflict, as he wants to play 24/7, while I still want to do other things on the side even when I'm having fun with the new project. We probably would've hit level 70 already if he hadn't caught a bug that kept him from wanting to play games for a few days. As it is, our characters are "only" in their 60s... after clearing only about one and a half zones worth of quests, but the group content pays out well in terms of experience gains and power.

When you first start out, levelling doesn't feel that different from "normal" retail in terms of speed and power, but the XP bonus on your special cloak adds up over time, and gear pieces come with more and more gem slots that allow you to equip wacky extra effects, ranging from extra movement abilities to all kinds of passive shields and sources of damage.

And it's... been surprisingly fun! I say surprisingly because I've long given WoW grief for making the levelling process too fast. The reason for that is that I feel - based on how WoW itself trained me to view things back in Vanilla - that levelling should be about more than just making your numbers go up. In the original game the process synergised well with exploring, doing professions, running dungeons... basically doing a little bit of everything. As levelling was sped up, all of that fell by the wayside, but I still wanted to do it, and that conflict between my desire to see more of the world and the game always pushing me onwards long before I felt ready to move on lies at the heart of my frustrations with modern WoW's levelling.

With that in mind, I was kind of positively surprised by Remix's approach to this, which is to simply remove all worries about out-levelling content and get rid of all distractions. The scaling may be a bit wonky in places, but everything is scaled from 10-70 (with the exception of some dungeons and raids not unlocking until you're a bit higher level), so you can level any way you want and still continue to earn rewards from all the content once you hit 70.

The game starts you out with huge bags so you'll never have to worry about pausing to make room (though the sheer amount of gear that is showered upon you does require the occasional bag clearing break - however, you never need to look for a vendor, as you can dissemble everything at any point, anywhere). There is no loot other than quest items, Remix-specific gear and Bronze, the special currency, so you never have to think about what to vendor and what to mail to an alt. The auction house and mail are entirely disabled, in fact. So are professions (with the exception of fishing for some reason, though this also only just yields more Bronze), which was initially a bit disappointing to me as I was hoping to pick flowers and skin things while making my way through the zones - even if the materials were just going to be virtually worthless MoP-era stuff - but it certainly helps to keep you focused. Daily reputation grinds are also removed or drastically reduced - our Order of the Cloud Serpent egg literally hatched the same day we picked it up instead of requiring days and weeks of care, and the farm at Halfhill is entirely inaccessible from what I understand.

It's a strange case of "less is more" for me, where even though I like the traditional approach of having all these different things to do and think about, it's not much fun if the game doesn't really support that way of playing anymore, so I was surprised to actually find myself appreciative of the devs simply taking all that stuff out of Remix. It's like they were going "Look, we're not even gonna pretend that there's any point to levelling professions here or whatever... just focus on the stuff we did put in for you to play around with" and I can actually respect that.

I initially wasn't planning to level more than one character through Remix, but considering how fast our shaman/druid duo has been flying through the levels and that there are almost three months of the event left, I might end up going through it on another character or two. I'm also planning to keep playing my shaman at the level cap though, to revisit more of the content while earning more Bronze to buy transmogs and mounts.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in week one around an "exploit", as seems to have become the norm with these new event/server launches for Blizzard. Frogs on the Timeless Isle were apparently insanely good for farming Bronze and stats, allowing people to power-level their cloaks to have stats in the thousands within a day. Blizzard quickly hotfixed this of course, which then led to a bit of an outcry from people who were complaining that they could now never "catch up", which was just absurd to me, considering that there is absolutely nothing competitive going on in Remix. Any power gains are only temporary for the duration of the event and won't carry over into regular retail, and PvP is another thing that's entirely disabled, so an overpowered "frog farmer" literally can't hurt you. If anything, having a character like that in your group benefits you... I had to laugh earlier when I queued for an LFR wing and was baffled to see all the bosses die within seconds - the entire thing was done in something like five minutes, most of which was taken up by NPC roleplay conversations. I loaded up Recount to see what was going on and in our 20+ person raid group, one guy had done 70% of the overall damage, another had done about 20%, and everyone else was sitting somewhere between 0 and 1%. Froggers I suppose! I just thought it was incredibly funny and was rather amused to be given such a "boost".

I can understand why Blizzard wanted to stop everyone from getting so insanely OP within less than a week, but I personally saw no harm in letting those who already had it keep their power - but I guess that might've been too much fun, so those cloaks are due to be nerfed now and everyone else will just get some bonus Bronze. Either way, I'm enjoying the mayhem.

Pandamonium and Wondering about the Future of Classic

Not content to baffle the WoW player base with the release of Plunderstorm, Blizzard surprised with another announcement of a new game mode three days ago: WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria, coming with patch 10.2.7 later in the spring. This seems to match what was previously called "Timerunning: Pandamonium" on the 2024 roadmap for WoW. That name was already a pretty big hint towards what it was going to be: something similar to Timewalking and something to do with pandas (even if the complete alien-ness of Plunderstorm combined with some additional datamining also led some people to speculate that it could be something else entirely).

The release of the previously linked article confirmed that it is indeed something similar to Timewalking and something to do with pandas, namely "a time-limited event which allows players to re-experience the entirety of the Mists of Pandaria expansion at an accelerated rate from level 10 through 70". There is still a lot we don't know and quite a few details left to be clarified, but we do know that it will require you to create a new character and that there will be a lot of special loot exclusive to this mode/phase.

Most of the reactions I've seen to this have been positive, and I've got to admit I'm kind of excited myself. Blizzard's still doing its usual thing of trying to bank on FOMO, talking about how fast levelling will be and spending a lot of time promoting rewards that I don't really care about, but I'm still looking forward to this event for a number of reasons:

• I always say that retail WoW has this huge world and wealth of old content that is severely underused, so them actually making an event focused on re-using an older expansion will always be a good thing in my book.
• I only played for a few months in late Mists of Pandaria, when quite a few bits of content had already come and gone, making the post-launch questing experience a bit disjointed. I have some tentative hopes that this event will give me a chance to get a more cohesive picture of the expansion (though some early clarifications are already tempering my enthusiasm in that area - e.g. we still won't get to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms how it was before it as destroyed, and the legendary cloak quest line - which, from my understanding, was Wrathion's in-game debut for non-rogue players - will not be reinstated).
• It's an event focused on levelling and doing content of all kinds, which sounds like a great opportunity for my husband and me to roll up another levelling duo and have some quality play time together.

While it's officially an experimental, limited-time event, it's also not hard to see how the reception of this "Remix" could have a big impact on the game going forward. Some ideas that I've seen thrown around are:

• Maybe there'll always be an event revisiting an older expansion during the content gap before a new expansion in the future.
• Maybe this will be a template for how to improve Chromie Time.
• Maybe the option to replay an old expansion like this will simply become a permanent feature if enough people like it.

I would happily take any of these to be honest, and based on the positive reception I've seen so far, I think this event will absolutely be a success. For as much as certain parts of the player base and dev team have pushed for retail to focus on endgame at all times, there are still a lot of players who enjoy levelling in some form or another and/or who have nostalgia for older content that isn't currently being catered to in Classic.

Speaking of Classic though, I find it very curious that Blizzard would choose to have a nostalgia-filled event focused on the Mists of Pandaria expansion at a point in time when Classic Mists of Pandaria is presumably less than a year away. Yes, you read that correctly. We didn't just get a launch date for Classic Cataclysm the other day, but also a timeline that sees the expansion already hitting its last patch in January 2025. And here I thought they were going fast by making us go through each Classic expansion in less than two years, never mind less than a single year!

Most people seem to have read that as "haha, they just want to get to Classic MoP quickly", but I'm honestly not so sure anymore. I know that the Classic and retail player bases are not the same, but based on my own anecdotal experience at least, they're also not as totally separate as social media would sometimes have us believe, with many players happy to dip into both every now and then, even if there is one version they prefer. With that in mind, having a retail event that focuses on levelling through Mists of Pandaria, just to follow it up with the launch of Classic Mists of Pandaria six months later seems positively insane. No, it wouldn't be exactly the same, but way too similar to not feel repetitive to anyone who took part in the former.

This morning I was also hit by just how much the Classic player base has shrunk again throughout Wrath of the Lich King Classic, as a guildie pointed me towards forum threads about upcoming realm consolidations for both Europe and the US. I was struck by the fact that Nethergarde Keep, the server to which I was "forced" to migrate during Classic Burning Crusade and which at the time had about three times the population of Hydraxian Waterlords, is now also on the chopping block for being too small.

It looks like "regular" Classic will be down to about a dozen servers worldwide come Cataclysm, and almost all of them single-faction. I was shocked to see that even the PvE servers are not immune to this madness, as even the Wrath version of good old Pyrewood Village is 97% Alliance now. I thought things were already bad two years ago, but they are so much worse now. "Progressive" Classic is a mess with a declining player base, going into a controversial expansion that is unlikely to reverse that trend.

Before the official announcement of Cata Classic, many of us were wondering how far the Classic train could realistically go, as Wrath of the Lich King seemed like a natural end point. Once the continuation into Cata was confirmed, I saw a lot of comments along the lines of "well, then Classic MoP is a given" or that they could definitely keep going until Legion at least. However, after seeing those Wrath Classic population numbers and the timing of this "WoW Remix", I'm not so sure anymore. There is nostalgia for the (comparatively) more recent expansions, yes, but maybe Blizzard have decided to try and cater to that in retail instead of investing more money into rebuilding old expansions exactly as they were for a continually shrinking player base.

To be clear, I'm not implying that Classic as a whole is failing. While it was ultimately a disappointment to me personally, Season of Discovery still seems to be doing well. The "problem" is that it actually seems to be doing better than "regular" Classic by quite a margin, so I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard decided to stop adding more old expansions to the Classic train and pivoted towards more seasonal servers or maybe even re-starting the Classic cycle from Vanilla again, while trying to pull players with nostalgia for the later expansions into retail instead, with dedicated time slots where those expansions are highlighted for replay.

Why Is the Retail Dungeon Experience so Terrible?

I think you can tell from the way that I've been talking about retail WoW for the past few years that I'm actually feeling pretty positive about it nowadays. It's not my favourite MMO, but there are enough things for me to like about it.

With that said, I hope it's clear that I'm not blindly hating on retail when I say: For all the things it does well, it amazes me how utterly horrible retail's casual dungeon experience is nowadays. (I'm specifically singling out the easier difficulties here because regardless of what you or I think of Mythic+, I think we can all agree that it operates on a different level from regular dungeons at this point, with very different incentives and goals.)

What do I think makes for a good dungeon experience? Well, presumably not everyone will agree with my definition, but personally I'd break it down into four major points:

• Exploration: Interesting/unusual environments, mechanics and monsters.
• Gameplay: Taking on tougher enemies than you would usually be able to in the open world. Getting to play with other people and experiencing synergetic group play that allows you to use abilities and skills you don't necessarily get to use in the same way while soloing.
• Rewards: Quests that give you some nice one-time rewards. Bosses that drop loot that's better than what you'd get from a solo mission. Increased XP gains from taking on tougher enemies as a group.
• Socialising: Meeting new people and having a good time hanging out together.

But yes, I know modern WoW players don't like to stand around and admire the scenery, or to chat while using the dungeon finder. So we're just going to ignore the first and last point. I'll be content if I can tick the gameplay and rewards boxes as described. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Well, in modern WoW it apparently is, because your gameplay will be jogging after a tank who just runs like hell while spamming AoE abilities (with you occasionally being able to hit a dps button if you manage to stay in range long enough) and your reward is going to be the dungeon completion XP at the end. You want to do quests? Kill bosses? Puh-lease.

I honestly thought I'd come to accept the ways of retail dungeons by now and that I'd lowered my expectations enough to not be disappointed by every pug, but every time the game lures me into queueing for a random normal or heroic dungeon with some new incentive, I encounter new ways to be let down by the experience.

For example, while levelling some of my low-level alts through different expansions, I'd pick up quests that asked me to do a specific dungeon and then queue for that. My expectation was pretty much nothing but a quick run of the place, but I still managed to be surprised when it turned out to be a quick run of avoiding most of the dungeon. I know people always hated out-of-the-way bonus bosses and all that, but nowadays literally everything possible gets skipped, even bosses that are right on the main road so to speak. I didn't even know that you could totally ignore the second and third bosses in Underrot and Freehold for example. Now I know, and it meant I got minimal loot and experience out of those dungeons.

As for the matter of quests, I have a new favourite story illustrating the utter absurdity that is going on right now. It happened to me during Wrath of the Lich King timewalking the other week. I got into an Utgarde Keep on an alt that had never done it before, so I made sure to pick up all the quests at the entrance and off we went. Knowing well that people were impatient, I mounted up and raced back to the quest NPC the moment Ingvar died, but someone immediately initiated a role check to queue for another dungeon. I didn't respond because I just wanted those thirty seconds to hand in my quests. Next thing I knew, I'd been wordlessly kicked from the party, and the timer to get ported out was apparently shortened to only ten seconds or so, so I was booted back to Valdrakken before I could actually reach the NPC. Yes, I got kicked from the group after the dungeon had been completed, because taking thirty seconds to hand in my quest was considered an unacceptable delay. I then had to manually travel back to Northrend and inside Utgarde Keep to hand in, which probably took longer than the entire dungeon run had taken.

And I'm not attributing that to "people being toxic" or anything like that - okay, I think the kick in that story was kind of mean, but more generally, WoW's design decisions kind of push people into this kind of behaviour. Why would long-time players levelling their 50th alt care about killing bosses for loot drops when they are fully kitted out in heirlooms? Dungeon quests are basically not a thing at max level nowadays (you literally can't get quest credit in M+ dungeons for example), why would anyone think of their group mates having quests to do in a random timewalking dungeon?

More importantly though, I think there are two major problems with WoW's dungeon system while levelling and playing casually, and these are things I've seen occur in other MMOs as well, to similar results:

1. The game allows characters, especially tanks, to become way too powerful relative to the content, to the point where they can easily solo the dungeon with zero regard for the rest of the group. The group gameplay falls apart at this stage because there isn't really any, all you have is the tank dragging a mob train along with them while sprinting to the end, possibly annoyed by the dps and healers slowing them down. You can't have rewarding group gameplay when players are made to feel like they are just a nuisance to each other.

2. The incentives for random dungeon completion are way out of whack compared to anything else. If you're levelling, the XP bonus for doing a random dungeon will be bigger than everything you get for actually doing things inside the dungeon (kills, bosses, quests etc.) put together. At max-level, the problem persists when you have timewalking weeks where you get rewarded with heroic raid-level gear for getting completion credit for five dungeons, never mind what you actually did inside those dungeons. It's all in reaching the end as fast as possible and at all costs, with little to no reward for the actual process (and since the gameplay is shite as per point one, there's no incentive in prolonging the process "for fun" either).

What you're left with is with a dungeon experience that doesn't reward anyone but those who don't actually care about grouping or gameplay and who just enjoy using the XP hose to level their alts. If you mention this anywhere on a forum or social media, people will come back with comments like "but that's just how it is" or "who cares anyway, the real game is M+", discarding the interests of new, returning and more casual players alike.

It just baffles me that as someone who used to adore running dungeons when I first got into WoW, and who still enjoys this sort of group content in Classic and SWTOR, I find modern WoW dungeons pretty unbearable when not running with a group of friends. I'll still get lured in every now and then for the sake of the extremely overpowered rewards Blizzard likes to hand out, but every time I am reminded of just how not fun it is nowadays.

This topic has been sitting in my drafts for a while, but the reason I wanted to actually finish and publish it this week is that the latest patch brought in a feature called follower dungeons, which allows you to run Dragonflight levelling dungeons with a group of NPCs instead of pugs. I haven't tried it yet, but I've seen enough reporting about it to know that it's nothing like running with actual people in the modern game. The NPCs adjust to your pace and the tanking one will even tell you that they're waiting for you to get some mana back if you go OOM. Basically, they're more like dungeons used to be.

I think this is a net positive for the game and will be welcomed by many, but at the same time I can't help but see it as a tacit admission by Blizzard of what an utter mess they've allowed normal and heroic dungeons to become, a system that is actively hostile to anyone not deeply invested in what little benefit it still provides. Giving everyone but the speed-runners a new mode where they can have a chiller experience does help, but it also kind of looks like regular dungeons are basically being abandoned to being nothing but an XP hose for power levellers. I do wonder whether increased segregation of the player base is really the best long-term answer here.

Timewalking to an Unexpected Achievement

I only talked about timewalking on this blog once before, a little over a year ago. As I noted then, it's a feature I quite like, as it's one of Blizzard's (generally limited) efforts to let people enjoy old content as part of their normal gameplay. Sure, a group rushing through a heroic in ten minutes while AoEing everything along the way is not necessarily anything like the way that dungeon was experienced when it first came out, but it's still better than running it solo while over-levelled and just one-shotting everything. At least you get to see mechanics sometimes.

Last week was Cataclysm Timewalking, and there was a quest to run five of them for a gear reward box, so our little retail-playing friend group signed up for a full tour. It went well and I was actually reminded of how much I enjoyed the Cata dungeons at launch, so I decided to do the run-five-timewalking-dungeons quest on my demon hunter as well.

I've kind of reached the point where I'm reasonably confident queueing up to pug certain content in retail. I still think that the way people rush through dungeons is less than ideal, and makes for a terrible new player experience in particular as it means newbies just spend their time racing after the more experienced players without having the slightest clue about what's actually going on (thematically or mechanically). However, if you know the content you're queueing up for and mentally prepare yourself for the experience, it's generally tolerable.

One of the dungeons my demon hunter got thrown into was Lost City of the Tol'vir. The group rushed through AoEing everything as you'd expect, while I reminisced about how deadly many of those pulls used to be. However, when we killed the last boss, Siamat, something unexpected happened: I saw the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement pop up, as well as a notification that I'd just earned the Volcanic Stone Drake mount.

I was briefly baffled but didn't have time to think about it too much, as I had to leap off the boss's terrace to quickly hand in the dungeon quest I'd picked up at the entrance (what with it being my demon hunter's first time there), and the rest of the group was already hitting the re-queue button.

It was only after completing my five runs that I could really sit down and take in what had happened. WoW's achievement system is a bit confusing with the way it mixes character-specific and account-wide achievements in some situations but not others, and my first thought had been that surely I just got some sort of character-specific achievement on my demon hunter that I'd already earned on another character. I even logged into my old troll priest, the original Shintar, to check her achievement log for comparison.

What I found though was that it was indeed true that it was my demon hunter who had earned me the Volcanic Stone Drake. Looking back at the various achievement dates, it looks like I made a bit of a push for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero in early 2011 and did in fact get all the achievements bar one: Headed South. I don't know why I didn't get that one in specific - I can only guess that it must've been challenging in some way, even if many of the Wowhead comments claim that it's super easy and barely an inconvenience. And then I never went back to try again even though I continued to play Cataclysm for another year after that.

Either way, getting that last achievement purely by accident twelve years later, in a timewalking pug that was just steamrolling the content, created a very brief flash of a connection to past me (who actually cared about this stuff) and made me feel very, very odd.

Retail Bullet Points

I haven't written about it in more than two months, but I thought it might be worth noting that I'm still playing retail on the side. Let's summarise the sorts of things I've been up to under different headers.

Playing the table game

The thing that actually keeps me logging into the Shadowlands client on a daily basis is, funnily enough, the adventure table. Ever since WoW introduced these tables reminiscent of mobile games back in Warlords of Draenor, I've heard people express nothing but scorn for them (at best they've seemingly been a feature players can just about tolerate), and to be fair, I didn't exactly love the first iteration of the system that I myself encountered in BfA content either. The table in the Legion class order hall was a bit better, but I've got to admit, I really like the Shadowlands version. I'd never played an auto battler before and only really knew about the concept from Wilhelm's posts about them, but I honestly quite enjoy it!

I do still have the casual long-term goal of maxing out my main's covenant sanctum features (something that I'm sure more regular players finished months ago) and I like the slow and steady trickle of anima that some of the table missions provide. I enjoy choosing which ones I want to do on a given day and then sorting my companions into optimised teams for each one. I love the collectible aspect of recruiting new companions and I love making their numbers go up, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose.

I even tried to install the WoW companion app on my phone to manage my table through that, but it crashed every time I tried to log in so I eventually gave up. The only result of these login attempts was that according to my launcher I now apparently also have a US trial account for retail...

Korthia & Zereth Mortis

For a while, the husband and I kept going to Korthia once a week even after we'd unlocked the last bit of story, but our interest didn't last very long. Initially it was nice to be able to upgrade our gear by doing dailies, but the pace soon slowed to an absolute crawl, to the point where we weren't able to buy even a single upgrade per week, and that kind of made us lose interest. Why spend this much time grinding for gear that'll surely be replaced by the most basic rewards in 9.2?

Speaking of the latter, I'm sure we'll check it out and it will be fine, but the 9.2 developer video really was quite embarrassing. I got the feeling Blizzard was genuinely trying to do something different with it; e.g. I don't think they were featuring female devs "just for show" or anything like that, but it was just. So. Bad. Seriously, who signed off on lines about water "unlike any water that we've seen before", or extended talks about how unique everything about this new zone is, coupled with shots of a snail and a chicken? They really deserved all the memeing that people did about that.

Torghast

Back in July, I wrote that the changes to Torghast didn't really impress me but that I could see the husband and me playing around with them a bit. For quite some time, we didn't. However, one of the changes introduced with patch 9.1.5 was that the weekly quest to rescue souls could now also be done in Torghast... and as that aligned with my desire to work on my covenant sanctum, I decided to give it a go again.

Since then the husband and I have been running a couple of Torghasts a week, with me swapping between my monk and my demon hunter, and it's actually been decent fun. Once we got a bit more comfortable with not worrying about deaths anymore and going faster, we eventually managed to achieve some flawless runs - though I do think it's annoying how heavily the score is weighted towards beating the timer - if you do so by a large enough margin, little else seems to matter.

At some point it struck me that I should use some of all this currency that I'd been gathering to upgrade my monk's legendary... and got supremely annoyed by both the gold cost involved in the process and the utter unintuitiveness of the user interface, which actually resulted in me buying the wrong materials at first. After that I quickly discarded any thought of getting a legendary for my demon hunter too because it just seemed like too much of a hassle.

I will say though that it's funny to me how my relationship with Torghast illustrates the many ways in which I'm seemingly the total opposite of the current retail player base. From everything I've read, they just wanted their legendaries and were annoyed at having to deal with "Chore-ghast" to get them... while I find the gameplay decent fun and then basically toss the gear-related rewards because they are uninteresting to me.

Guildies & Levelling

In September I mentioned that we'd formed a levelling group with some guildies from SWTOR. One of them dropped out after a while, but with the two that remained we did pretty well, completing all the original dungeons, all the Cataclysm ones and most of the Wrath ones, which has taken our alts close to fifty.

Our experience with the last Wrath dungeons was really odd though... we went into Forge of Souls manually with a group of four, something we'd done before with other instances, and got absolutely destroyed on the first boss. Being one person down means lower dps and all that, but we didn't even get close to having to worry about that because his constant AoE damage would just delete us. Somewhat bewildered, we exited and went to try Trial of the Champion instead, where we made it through the jousting event, but then wiped over and over on Argent Confessor Paletress, whose spammable main attack would shave off 70% of a person's health with each hit. I tried to research this online but couldn't find anything about scaling problems with these dungeons, only confirmation that the damage we were seeing was definitely off and we weren't just being bad. We haven't really decided how to proceed after that.

Timewalking

Another thing we've been doing whenever it's been on has been timewalking, something that hadn't yet been added to the game the last time I played retail before our current stint with it. It's certainly been odd for me whenever Burning Crusade timewalking is up, to see the contrast between doing e.g. heroic Shattered Halls in Classic and then the timewalking version in retail. It's no comparison of course, the retail version is still ridiculously easy when you look at them side by side, but the attempt at scaling the dungeons to current power levels is at least something. As an evergreen feature that provides almost nothing but cosmetic rewards, it's also quite at odds with the modern WoW team's usual priorities. I wonder how popular it is with players? It certainly strikes me as one of the modern game's better additions, and to be honest I don't know why they don't do more with this scaling tech.