The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.

The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.

Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs, and the family of blacksmiths down south.

What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd. 

There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.

At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.

One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.

Turtle WoW Dungeons: Crescent Grove vs. Stormwrought Ruins

Let's talk more Turtle WoW while it's still around, shall we? Next on my list to explore and write about were the two custom dungeons Crescent Grove and Stormwrought Ruins.

Crescent Grove is a level 32-38 dungeon located in southern Ashenvale. I actually played through this one last year already, and did originally mean to write a post about it at the time - but then it turned out to be kind of boring, and I was like "wow, this is not enough material for a post, I'll have to bundle it up with whatever the next dungeon on the list is and write about them together". And then I lost interest, naturally.

To be clear, Crescent Grove is not a bad dungeon. I had a perfectly fun time running it with a friendly pug. It just seemed pretty uninspired, especially after my previous experience in Dragonmaw Retreat. I couldn't help but think that it must've been one of the first dungeons the Turtle WoW devs built by themselves, as it actually didn't feel very dungeon-like and nothing about it felt in any way original. To me it kind of felt like someone was just familiarising themselves with the devs tools and played around with Ashenvale assets, adding a little vale to the map where they tried out all the different environmental textures available in the zone and populated it with matching mobs, such as furbolgs, satyrs and demons.

I checked the Turtle WoW Wiki and according to that, Crescent Grove was added at the end of 2021 - compare that to Dragonmaw Retreat coming out in 2025. It makes sense that they would've learned some things about how to do more interesting things with the tools available to them over the course of four years.

Stormwrought Ruins on the other hand, a level 35-41 dungeon, came out in the same patch as Dragonmaw Retreat, and boy, does it show. The first time I zoned in and opened the map, I was stunned by how massive it was. It's not quite as sprawling as BRD, but in terms of number of bosses it certainly comes close.

I'd been aware from the group finder that it had two Stormwrought instances listed, Castle and Descent, but I hadn't realised that it was effectively one giant dungeon that they'd just split into parts for the sake of the queue. I was quickly introduced to how that worked as the first group I got into only wanted to do the higher-level half and headed straight for the back door, even though I'd specifically queued for the first half. I didn't feel like I was in a position to complain and was just happy to take in whatever sights they were willing to show me.

Like Dragonmaw Retreat, Stormwrought Ruins goes extremely hard on the ambience. The custom music featured what sounded like church bells, choirs and... synthesisers? I don't know, music is not my area of expertise. But it was very loud and basically screaming "epic and scary stuff is happening here" (you can listen to some of it on this playlist).

Like everything else on Turtle WoW, all the environments and bosses were strongly reminiscent of existing dungeons, but unlike in the Crescent Grove example above, existing assets were put together in a way that still felt refreshing and new, even if it was clearly a derivative creation. The first half set in the castle reminded me of Shadowfang Keep and Scarlet Monastery in places, which makes sense when you think about it. That didn't change that the Duke's throne room looked pretty cool and impressive.

Also, the mobs were mostly (Stormreaver) orcs, which did make for an interesting combo with the human architecture. One of the bosses was Oronok Torn-Heart, and I've got to admit that with this one, I definitely felt a bit bad about killing him, recalling his canonical retirement in Outland as a peaceful boar farmer.

The mid section of the dungeon, where the two halves meet, is dominated by wetness and fungal decay, reminiscent of Maraudon or the Naxx plague wing. There's a room with a death knight boss that was pretty intimidating.

You encounter members of the Shadow Council as trash mobs throughout, but the final section of the instance is dedicated to them in specific being, well, horrible, conducting human sacrifices and shit. The penultimate boss was a giant red blob called "Remains of the Innocent" and there's a quest that has you confirm that this used to be the missing son of a grieving mother in Northwind. It strongly reminded me of Scholomance, but even that has less of a downer ending, because at least you give the ghosts some peace at the end.

The second group I ran with did the full dungeon from start to finish and it took us something like two and a half hours. At the end, people wanted to pose for a screenshot together, which I thought was cute. A true adventure! In both runs, the more experienced players had been more than happy to explain to us newbies how everything worked as well, which was very much appreciated.

The Twilight of the Turtle

When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.

Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.

After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected. 

I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.

In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.

I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.

It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.

When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.

Turtle WoW Is Shutting Down

This morning I woke up to the news that the owners of Turtle WoW have officially announced that the servers will be ceasing operations after the 14th of May. This shouldn't really have been a surprise, but I've got to confess: considering that the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them broke close to eight months ago at this point, I wasn't ruling out that they would manage to get away with it somehow. Unlike other private server operators whom I've seen fold instantly the moment Blizzard's lawyers as much as looked at them, the Turtle team certainly gave evading the law a good shot. They made adjustments to the website, changed domains, and the owner supposedly deleted her old Discord account and created a new one in an attempt to not be pinned down.

All that said, it looks like the lawyers caught up with them in the end, somehow. I'll reproduce the Turtle WoW team's statement in full, since their website will eventually go dark and disappear:

Hello friends,

They say it's the journey, not the destination. How long must a journey last to be remembered fondly and warmly? We don't know. We only know that ours is coming to an end.

After almost 8 years online, Turtle WoW is heading towards shutdown. The final day of operation will be May 14, 2026, and the servers will go offline at 12:00 AM on May 15th.

Working on Turtle WoW has been the highlight of our lives. It has been an honor to build with you and for you. Whether you were exploring new stories, leveling, raiding, PvPing, roleplaying, or just enjoying a quiet moment in the world, seeing how much this game means to you has been our greatest privilege.

The adventures you had, the battles you fought, and the friends you met are what made it all worthwhile. We hope you will cherish those moments. What we leave behind are fond memories of an 8-year-long journey, and we hope you'll remember it every now and then.

Until the project's final day, we'll keep technical and in-game support active for everyone who keeps playing. All realm timelines will be immediately shifted to the final progression patch for those who want to see the new raids before the project's sunset.

We've turned off all donations until the end of the project and want to thank you sincerely for supporting us over the years.

Our website, forums, and social media will also be closed on October 16th.

Finally, we want to thank our incredible team.

Thank you for playing.

Thank you for being such a wonderful gaming community.

Thank you for your creativity and talent.

Thank you.

I logged into my high elf for the first time in a while and found that I hadn't been removed from the guild I was in despite my pretty prolonged period of inactivity. Some people were talking about where to play once Turtle WoW is gone, but others were continuing business as usual. I also saw a stream of announcements of level 60 hardcore characters dying, which I can only assume were people deciding to go out with a bang before the server shuts down, though doing so almost a month in advance seems a bit premature to me.

I'm thinking about going back to complete a couple more goals before the shutdown, such as actually hitting level 40 and buying a mount. I'd been playing with the idea for a while but it was kind of lacking in urgency. Now that the shutdown is final, it's now or never. We'll see where it ends up in my priorities over the next month.

And of course there's always a chance that the whole project will eventually pop up again somewhere else under a new name, which is not unusual for WoW private servers. I've also seen mutterings on reddit that the Chinese and South East Asian servers (seeing how Turtle was operating globally) might be staying up. Still, even if that's true, losing the English-speaking servers is certainly a blow.

They had it coming, but I still feel a little sad. Both things can be true at the same time: that Turtle WoW was blatantly profiting off an IP they didn't own, and that the people behind it were genuinely passionate about their product and had some great ideas. 

On Writing a WoW Blog in 2026

This is going to be a post about blogging, so if that doesn't interest you at all, feel free to skip this one.

When I created this blog during the height of Wrath of the Lich King, blogging was a popular thing to do in general, and there was a thriving community of bloggers writing about World of Warcraft in specific. Even though I didn't have a huge number of readers even back then, I very much felt like part of a community - we'd all constantly link to and respond to each other, and it just felt very cosy.

When I returned to WoW (Classic) in 2019, that community no longer really existed in the same form, and the world had moved on to YouTube videos and streams. I think when people talk about "content creators" these days, most of them don't even consider that said content could be in written form as well. I found all that a bit sad, but as I was blogging primarily as a means of self-expression and documentation, it just was what it was.

That doesn't mean that I don't want people to find this place if they are actually looking for content like this though. At some point I noticed that Google was missing a lot of this blog's content, so I tried to kick it into indexing more of it. This has worked to some extent, though according to Search Console it's still only indexed about 500 pages when I've produced nearly twice that number of posts on here.

Anyway, in recent months Google started sending me little congratulatory notices about my "search impact", saying that my content was attracting more and more clicks through Google each month. Curious, I started looking into this a bit more. I'm not going to cite any exact numbers, because Google Analytics and Blogger's own internal metrics are always miles apart despite being owned by the same company, but they do agree about the general trend of what gets the clicks/views.

Here are my top ten most viewed blog posts from the last twelve months, according to Blogger:

1. Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon
2. WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006
3. Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail
4. Connected Realms Are Confusing
5. Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience
6. The Island of Balor
7. Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?
8. I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down
9. Exploring the Forests of Northwind
10. A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Basically, six of them are about Turtle WoW, and the other four are either about Classic or at least have some connection to it. (The fishing tournament post for example is about how to win "in retail" but it's from the perspective of a Classic player, trying to figure out what the differences are. Also, only Classic players actually call it "retail" in everyday conversation.)

As I've actually been spending less time playing and writing about Classic recently, I find that very interesting. I guess it makes sense that my posts about new retail content don't get that many views because there's huge competition on every topic and people don't care about the thoughts of some random casual.

I'm guessing the Turtle WoW posts are so high up because there's not nearly that much content about it out there. With so much content creation being done professionally these days (as in, to earn money and make a living), tying one's income to a private server that's actively under siege would probably not be a good idea, and anyone creating content for "official" WoW who wants to remain in good stead with Blizzard will have reason to avoid going into private server topics in too much depth. But it's interesting to see in actual numbers that it's clearly an underserved niche with some demand.

Official Classic does have its own content creators, but many of them follow the same "style" as retail, making videos and guides about how to make the most out of the newest patch, and considering Classic's overall development over the last year, there isn't much for them to chew on. I really used to enjoy WillE's videos about Classic for example, but he's clearly just waiting for the mythical Classic+ at this point and doesn't seem to have enjoyed anything that's actually going on in Classic for a while. Now he's just regurgitating all his old videos from the first time BC Classic came around, since that's hot in the algorithm right now due to the anniversary servers and presumably secures his pay check.

Which is to say that I think the Classic content scene has less going on right now as well - though I also think that players who actually enjoy Classic for its old-school feel, the ones who actually read the quests and so on, are probably also more open to still reading a blog than your average audience.

That was actually another nice thing about Classic era - it's so small, nobody can make a living creating content about it, so anything that people did make was purely a passion project, and again, because it's such a small niche everyone kind of knew everyone else. (Just another reason why it's a bummer that I kind of got bored with it gameplay-wise.)

Anyway, I'm actually not sure how to best conclude this post. There isn't really a point other than that there's still a niche for blog content about niche WoW topics, and that there are still people out there interested in reading about Classic and Turtle WoW. If getting more views was my primary purpose, I should write more about those subjects I guess. However, since I'm just a human shouting into the void for my own entertainment I'll continue to write about whatever WoW-related thing happens to rattle around my head in any given week. (Though yes, that will also include more Classic posts at some point.)

Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience

I've mostly written about Turtle WoW in terms of their custom content and how it compares to real Vanilla WoW, but I wanted to also dedicate some time to writing about mechanical and quality of life changes they've made to the game because I think they've made some interesting decisions in that area.

To begin with, what we call "Turtle WoW" actually runs three servers in the West at the moment, two designated as RP-PvE and one PvP. (There are some Chinese servers as well, but I don't really know much about those.) I actually find it interesting that there are no "normal" PvE servers - you've got to be accepting of roleplaying or GTFO. Now, I don't know how much RP actually happens on these servers - I've occasionally seen people that looked like they might be roleplaying but nothing I could identify as such with certainty. However, it sends a message that the devs support RP and immersion and I kind of like that. It strikes me as a virtual application of the broken windows theory - show that you care about the small stuff and it makes a better environment for everyone.

My hunter is on the older of the two PvE servers because I wanted to avoid the new server crowds on the more recently launched server. It's still plenty busy where I am and I've had no issues finding people to group with.

I also accepted a random guild invite at one point just because I thought the name looked kind of neat and I was curious whether there were any new guild-specific features to discover. The answer to that was yes. I wasn't surprised that guild banks are a thing, considering that's one of those features that everyone but the most hardcore Vanilla purists would be quite happy to import from Burning Crusade, however my ears perked up when I saw people mention a "guild house". My first thought was, WTF, Turtle WoW has housing? How come nobody mentioned that before? Well, the reason is that it doesn't really. What it does have is the ability for a guild to designate an existing inn as their guild's "base of operations" so to speak, and your guild tabard then serves as a second hearthstone to that inn. In that same building, you also gain rested XP at a heavily accelerated rate, similar to what you get while standing under a tent. It may not be "housing" but it's still a neat feature. 

Speaking of tents, I previously mentioned benefiting from the rested XP boost of a tent in Darkshore, but I didn't go into any detail about them (to be fair, at the time I also didn't really know much more about them than that standing under one was beneficial). The Turtle devs added a secondary profession called survival, which is not very fleshed out to be honest - but it does allow you to craft this item called Traveler's Tent, which you can plop down anywhere in the world to let people benefit from a quick boost to their rested XP. There's a two-hour cooldown on crafting them and you can only carry one at a time, so you can't spam them, but there's pretty much always at least one active right outside the gates of Stormwind.

It's a lovely way of encouraging player interaction and makes breaks feel more meaningful, but I also like that it's just one more way in which Turtle WoW let's you fine-tune the rate of your XP gains. Basically the tents allow you to almost permanently have an XP boost up if you want it and plan for it, but there are also levelling challenges that intentionally reduce your XP, and you can toggle XP gains on or off entirely via your portrait at any time. Giving players this much agency about just how fast or slowly they want to level has felt very refreshing to me compared to Blizzard's accelerationist approach that likes to just apply huge XP bonuses to everyone to get them to the end already. In Turtle, I made a lot of use of tents earlier on when I just wanted to get to the newer content, but recently I've stopped as I started to feel like I was going too fast. I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that not all players like to level at the same speed, and that even the same player may prefer to go slower or faster at different points depending on their mood.

Aside from obvious XP adjustments, other changes to questing make it feel smoother and more fun than in "normal" Vanilla, without jumping straight to the extreme streamlining that was introduced in Cataclysm. For example, just the addition of all these new zones with things to do helps to ease any potential stresses about where to go and how to get to the next level. I often hear people say that back in Vanilla, there weren't even enough quests to get you to max level so you had to grind mobs to get there, which was never my own experience. What is definitely true though is that as the available quests become more sparse, you spend more time running around for fewer rewards, and if it's not your first character, you'll be going through a lot of the same quest lines and zones over and over.

On Turtle WoW, due to my exploration of their mid-level custom zones, my hunter is approaching 40 without ever having stepped foot into the Scarlet Monastery or having done any questing in any of the traditional level 30+ zones. It's kind of remarkable what that does for pacing and personal motivation, as this freedom to go to half a dozen different places helps maintain that early explorer energy you have coming out of the starting zones, and you never get that feeling of "oh well, guess it's time for [insert zone you're not particularly fond of] because there's not much else left to do in my level range". It genuinely made me wonder for the first time how WoW's history would have gone differently if they had made the first expansion a lateral one instead of adding ten more levels on top.

Another thing that contributes to a smoother questing experience is a change that took me some time to notice - that quests never go grey; they always stay green. (Or rather, I technically don't know about never at this point, but as I mentioned I'm getting close to 40 and haven't seen one go grey yet.) In line with that, the exclamation marks for low-level quests never disappear, which I feel sends an interesting message: that it's more important to make sure players know where there are stories to see than that they only see what gives them the best XP per hour for their level. I've gone back and done some random low-level quests a couple of times, and while a level five quest won't move your bar much past a certain point even if it's technically green to you, it still felt nice to me. I also noticed that this gets rid of the sometimes disappointing experience of completing a green quest, levelling up before you hand it in and then seeing it go grey and close to "reward-less".

Also filed under "subtle but interesting levelling changes" we have rented mounts. I've written about the turtle mount you can get at level 18, but at some point I also started to occasionally notice low-level players riding around on slow horses with odd tooltips on their buff bar. I eventually figured out that at the gates of some towns, you can rent a mount for a few copper, which then puts you on a horse for five minutes. This may not sound like much, but again, if you're a lowbie wanting to get from Menethil harbour to the other side of the Wetlands, it's actually a worthy investment! It's just another small thing that gives low-level characters more options without completely trivialising travel.

Another unrelated quality of life change that surprised me and made me think "it's actually weird that Blizzard never did this" is changed icon art for some items. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect every single item in the game to have unique icon art and for the devs to never recycle anything ever, but there have definitely been instances of this that tend to feel worse than others. For example the drinks Bubbling Water and Morning Glory Dew share the same icon, but while one is only useful for characters around level 20, the other is an endgame consumable. I have definitely been in situations where I got these mixed up in my bag, sometimes with even more items that share the same icon.

Not on Turtle WoW though, as they gave Bubbling Water a new, different icon. Same with all the spices on the trade goods vendor - I remember back in the day I used to buy the wrong spices by accident a lot, because it was just so easy to get them mixed up since they all look the same. This is a lot less of a problem on Turtle WoW, with each spice packet having been given a different colour. Again, I'm kind of surprised Blizzard never seems to have given this any thought, especially after I heard stories of people using recycled icons to scam people in retail. (The specific case I heard about was during BfA when someone would make people believe they were buying valuable Midnight Salmon but would then trade them comparatively worthless Darkmoon Daggermaw at the last second.)

The way things look makes for a good segue to the subject of transmog, which is another thing that Turtle WoW has. Personally I'm someone who enjoys transmog in retail, but at the same time I like Vanilla not having it as I do think it changes the feel of the world around you, so I was quite surprised (and initially a bit put off) that this was a feature that the devs included. However, as I've learned more about it, I've been finding it kind of interesting.

In a nutshell it does not work like in retail where you can transmog very freely by simply paying some gold. Instead every piece of gear requires a special token to change its appearance. These tokens can be bought in the cash shop (naturally) but they can also be acquired via certain material hand-ins and as drops from higher-level dungeons. This means that the feature is generally not used much by levellers and more of a sign of prestige at high level. As a result of that, most people ambling about in town look like you'd expect random Vanilla WoW levellers to look, and only the high levels stand out through their transmogs, and only a very small number of them are ridiculous Playboy bunny style outfits. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this in the long run, assuming that the population at high level and the number of ridiculous outfits increases, but at least superficially this system seems to strike an interesting balance between giving people more options to change their appearance while also preserving a good-looking outfit as something to aspire to.

Finally, the last thing on my list of changes to discuss (for now) is the day/night cycle, which was again something that I only became aware of slowly over time, after first getting confused because I noticed that it wasn't what I expected but couldn't quite figure out yet why that was. Basically what Turtle WoW has opted to do is to treat Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms as opposite sides of the planet - meaning when it's night time on one, it's day on the other. I'm not sure of the reason behind this change to be honest. In retail we're not even 100% sure that the map of Azeroth we use is actually showing us the entirety of the planet. I remember there's a globe decoration in Halls of Lightning that people used to cite as "proof" for a while that the continents we know are all there is, but nothing has ever been stated explicitly and you'd think that if there was nothing in the way, there'd be some boat routes connecting the western part of Kalimdor with the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. Either way, the Turtle WoW devs have locked in on the map we know being all there is to the planet.

There may be more interesting things to discover but these were just some that stood out to me. Most of them are positive in my book, and whatever else you may think of Turtle WoW, I think they've displayed a great understanding of how certain aspects of Vanilla can be improved without harming the overall experience. I wish the WoW Classic dev team was similarly creative with their innovations instead of just coming up with new ways to tweak dungeons and raids.

Turtle WoW: Can't We Be Friends, Blizz?

I haven't played much Turtle WoW over the past few weeks as life has been quite busy and my limited WoW time has been fully taken up by Legion Remix. That's not to say that I lost interest in the private server though - I still have two unfinished drafts about it in the works, and I was expecting to have even more material once I got back into playing. My initial sense of urgency had just been somewhat diminished due to how unbothered Turtle WoW leadership seemed to be by Blizzard's lawsuit. Sure, it was probably going to be trouble for them, but they seemed to be pretty confident that they'd be able to keep going somehow.

Things changed over the course of this week though. As of my writing this, Turtle WoW is still up and running, but they are clearly feeling the squeeze. Turtle staff member Akalix, who Blizzard identified as "Lead of Marketing" in their lawsuit and who's actually a US resident, has had to lawyer up and is obviously feeling the pressure, as Blizzard is looking to subpoena various websites to get more information about the individuals they are suing. I've seen reddit comments saying that the initial defiant reaction to the lawsuit has been deleted and that the primary server owner deleted her old Discord handle and adopted a new one, presumably in an attempt to evade legal discovery. (I'm not on their Discord, so this is all rumours to me, but it sounds credible enough.)

A week ago, she also posted a lengthy open letter to Blizzard on the Turtle WoW forums. I tried to archive it but the Internet Archive couldn't capture it for some reason, so if the Turtle WoW site goes down in the future, there are also screenshots of the letter in this reddit post. To summarise it in a nutshell, it talks about how much the Turtle devs love World of Warcraft and how much players love what they've done with Turtle WoW, sooo... can't we just all be friends? Other games allow mods and stuff, right?

If I'm sounding a bit flippant, it's because I don't think they make a very strong case. It's particularly ironic that they cite Everquest's Project 99 as an example of a licensed fan server when Daybreak just shut down another EQ private server that - like Turtle WoW - was making money of its services. Even if I try to look at this open letter in the best possible light, assuming that the sentiments expressed in it are completely genuine and that someone at Blizzard might actually be willing to listen, I just don't see how any sort of official collaboration between Blizzard and Turtle WoW could possibly work, considering what Turtle WoW is. They more or less admit that what they are doing is illegal ("Blizzard does not yet have a framework that allows projects like ours to operate without risking legal conflict") and since they don't have a leg to stand on, it just comes off as a weak appeal to Blizzard's good graces (yeah, right).

This definitely feels like a pretty desperate move that could also be seen as an attempt to drum up some public support more than anything else, but I don't see anyone's opinion on the matter being changed by this, no matter whether they are currently cheering on Blizzard or crossing their fingers for Turtle WoW.

After what I've seen from playing on the server myself, it'll be a shame if all the work they put into things like custom zones would be lost, but they really brought it upon themselves by leaning so heavily into their microtransaction store "donation rewards" and openly taunting Blizzard on social media. I also noticed how for all the pleading that was done in the letter about how they'd be willing to make adjustments to be compliant with any rules set by Blizzard, giving up monetisation is not something that's mentioned. Maybe I should get back to levelling my high elf hunter while I still can...

The Island of Balor

After finishing Northwind, my Turtle WoW hunter continued straight on to the private server's next custom zone, which is in fact designed for the same level range: the island of Balor.

Balor is located west of Stormwind, roughly where Vashj'ir is placed in retail. However, design-wise it's got more in common with the more northern Tol Barad, in the sense that both are fairly dreary islands full of ruins and ghosts. That's not to say that Balor is Turtle WoW's version of Tol Barad though - reading around a bit, I found out that the inspiration for it actually came from the map of Azeroth in the Warcraft II manual. It has an island called Balor right there! Honestly, that only increased my respect for how well the Turtle WoW devs know their Warcraft lore.

In terms of what it offers in game, I'd heard mixed opinions about this zone. Some liked it, but a common criticism was that the quests required too much running around, or even swimming. The latter would then usually lead to someone pointing out that there's a vendor offering swim speed potions, which should alleviate that particular issue. I'm glad I knew about this going in, though I'll say right off the bat that I don't think the swim speed potions were that much of a help, at least not the first time around. They seem to count as conjured items specific to the zone or something, so you can't stock up on them if you ever plan to hearth out, as they'll just vanish the moment you do that. They also last only five minutes, which is fine if you know that you need to swim from one end to the island to the other with no interruptions, but in the early stages where you might pause at various points to pick up quests or just explore, you'll just end up wasting a lot of the timer on the effect.

Anyway, let's back up for a moment: What is Balor? One of the quests in Northwind actually teaches you a lot of lore about the island if you pay attention. It's basically an off-shoot of Stormwind that got rich from the local gold mines, but then something bad happened there and we're not sure what. As Alliance you start on a little bit of rock off the main island, where SI:7 has erected a base, and from there you basically set out to explore.

The main island is indeed a royal pain to uncover, with steep cliffs all around so that you can only actually go inland at around four different points on the map. The actual land mass then follows a similar pattern of steep, winding paths that make you loop around a lot with minimal shortcuts. I can see why people would find that annoying, but I actually kind of loved it because it made the place a proper challenge to fully explore. Just when I thought I'd already been absolutely everywhere, I made it to the very end of yet another narrow path to find a little camp with a dwarf and a night elf quest giver in it. It was delightful!

(Side note, after being unable to fish in Northwind, I was also pleased to find that fishing worked in this zone, and there were plenty of pools to both level up my skill and add to my gold stockpile.) 

Mind you, all this did make my first-time questing experience extremely slow and inefficient. For example I got sent into the exact same cave to kill the exact same demons twice in a row - if only I had known and had picked up both of those quests at the same time! I imagine that if one were to come back on an alt and with knowledge of what to do in what order, things would speed up by quite a lot, but it's probably still one of the less efficient zones in terms of XP earned for time spent. It does however get an A+ from me for exploration and vibes, which I think is worth a lot by itself.

If I had to describe the overall feel of the zone, I'd say it's as if Deadwind Pass and Swamp of Sorrows had a baby. Everything's grey and wet and broken. I'm actually not sure we ever learn what exactly ruined everything on the island. There are Stormreaver orcs everywhere, so presumably they played a big part in it, but there are also demons and undead and at least one quest giver talks about a deeper corruption of the land, so there might be more going on. I'm okay with not knowing for sure either way, as it just adds to the island's air of mystery.

I felt the need to look up the Stormreaver clan since their name didn't ring a bell, and apparently they are another thing from Warcraft II, though most of them supposedly died at the Tomb of Sargeras. A survivor and hermit called Dark'thul made an appearance in Warcraft III and Legion, and can also be found in a hut far off the main coast of Balor in Turtle WoW, where he gives you some quests.

I'm not sure I understand how all of this ties together lore-wise, but the zone still gets two thumbs-up from me. If I had to criticise anything at all, it would be that at least one of the Turtle quest writers clearly has a thing for body horror (which comes out in the descriptions of several dying or dead people you encounter on your journey across the island), which I honestly thought was a bit much. 

Exploring the Forests of Northwind

My hunter on Turtle WoW reached the first of their mid-level custom zones recently. According to their wiki, the zone of Northwind is designed for characters of level 28-34.

Located just north of Stormwind, it can basically be summed up as "similar to Elywnn Forest, but more autumnal and higher level". I do think the location for this zone is an excellent choice as that whole area is basically a big chunk of nothing on the post-Cataclysm version of the Eastern Kingdoms map. I made a point of going there in the official game to take a screenshot for comparison purposes, and it's literally a huge swathe of boring mountainside separated only by a small nondescript sea inlet.

Though taking this screenshot at sunset did manage to make it look a lot better than it really is.

Northwind on Turtle WoW has a lot more interesting things going on. My description above is a bit of an oversimplification, as there's also a jousting tournament area and a quarry with Dark Iron dwarves for example. But the general vibe is definitely very similar to Elwynn: a lush forest dotted with human settlements and populated by bears, wolves and boars.

Weirdly, this was another thing that once again made me appreciate Blizzard's artists more because even after ten expansions of adding new terrain, they are still very good at making each zone visually distinctive with new assets and different creative directions. (That's why WoW GeoGuessr is so much fun!) Even if some zones obviously have similarities at this point, I don't think the Blizz devs have ever created a zone that's as obviously just a derivative of another zone the way Northwind is of Elwynn Forest.

That said, obviously part of Turtle WoW's charm is that everything they add is "more of the same" in a way, and I thought the zone was very beautiful and enjoyable to quest in. (It does have unique music too.) I did particularly enjoy the thought put into the lore and how a zone in that location would connect to everything around it.

My favourite bit was probably this mini garden/nook (there's probably a better English word for this that I'm not aware of) that featured a statue of Tiffin Wrynn and has you meeting her elderly mother, who still grieves for her daughter and asks you to carry a gift for Anduin to Stormwind Keep as she's not allowed to see her grandson. That hit kind of hard for me because Queen Tiffin is such a minor character in Warcraft lore, seemingly only created in order to die and give Varian something to brood over, it had never even occurred to me that she should probably have some other surviving family members, or to wonder how they might relate to Anduin.

A lot of non-quest NPCs also offer additional chat options to flesh out their characters and paint a richer picture of the zone, and I thought the whole thing felt significantly more coherent than the Thalassian Highlands.

As for some negatives: Why are all the boars aggressive? Boars are usually neutral mobs in WoW unless they are corrupted or diseased, but for some reason all the boars in this forest hate people and other animals, and you'll soon learn to loathe the sound of their angry squeals as you get attacked by one for the 50th time while just trying to pass through. I've seen people meme about this in general chat too, so I know it's not just me.

The bodies of water in the zone are clearly unfinished in some way, because when you dive into one... you don't get a breath bar! It's apparently a magical forest where everyone can just breathe underwater. Also, while they actually remembered to add fishing pools here (unlike in Thalassian Highlands), you still can't fish - or at least I couldn't, as I'd just get an error whenever I tried.

The worst part of it all though was undoubtedly the Dark Iron quarry in the north-eastern corner. I don't know what they screwed up there with the terrain building, but I struggled with mobs evading, falling through the floor, attacking through walls and the like repeatedly, to the point that it made the whole place a royal pain in the arse to quest in.

Another problem I had was that one quest I had in that area was just to search the quarry and return with anything useful I find, with no further details. At first I thought that I'd be looking for a piece of parchment on a table or something, but after searching the whole area and coming away empty I resigned myself to looking it up outside the game. I found that I was actually looking for a drop from an "Overseer Bragordi", which it turns out I had never come across because she was basically constantly dead. I more or less found her by accident eventually because I loitered near a few other players for a minute and it turns out they were sitting around specifically to spawn-camp her.

This lack of clear directions (this wasn't the only quest this applied to) was generally a weirdly double-edged blade from my point of view. The issue was also exacerbated by it turning out that Northwind was actually Turtle WoW's most recently added zone - there are some help resources for Turtle WoW questing available after how long they've been online, but naturally there wasn't much for their newest release yet.

Sometimes it was just frustrating, like in the above mentioned example. Other times I was actually quite satisfying - there was a quest to find a Defias hideout for instance and I was so chuffed when I found the guy's tent on the shore of a lake in a hidden valley because of course it makes sense that a secret hideout is well hidden and I actually felt quite proud of myself for finding it.

Yet other times it could lead to unexpected adventure and interactions. There was one quest that instructed me to pick some herbs similar to Wintersbite, herbs that were supposed to grow "along the snowy ridges to the north". I understood that to mean that the plant would grow in the snow (like Wintersbite) and wondered how to get up there, as the only snow was on top of the mountain and the cliffs were very steep. I wandered up and down the zone looking for a hidden path or something, and even tried to climb southward from Dun Morogh, all to no avail. I also asked for advice in several chats without ever getting a reply.

Finally, when I teamed up with a paladin for the local group quests and the other player showed as having already completed that particular quest, I asked them directly what they had done, and it basically turned out that I had been massively overthinking the whole thing - the flowers were right there in the grass and looked more like Peacebloom; I had just been so fixated on needing to get to the snowy area that I'd completely missed them. So that was kind of annoying, but ultimately arriving at the solution with the help of another friendly player was kind of nice. Either way not an experience you're likely to ever have in official WoW content nowadays, considering how thoroughly everything gets datamined and mapped out before it even launches.

One last thing I noted, since my character is a miner: the distribution of ore nodes was strangely retail-like, with the whole zone yielding nothing but iron. From what I can tell, the other custom zones around this level are the same. In Vanilla, different ores are always mixed together, which makes it much more challenging to farm just one specific type. As it is, Northwind is an easy zone in which to level your mining skill, but you can tell that its existence has somewhat devalued iron, as it was going for so little on the auction house that I just had to vendor hundreds of bars. Meanwhile copper is quite expensive for its low level, so it seems to me like the economy obviously would have benefitted from a more true-to-Classic approach here by having the zone yield a mix of copper, tin and iron together.

The State of My WoW-ing

I sometimes hear people say that WoW is in a better state than ever because of how many different ways to play it there are nowadays. Not enjoying retail? Well, Classic's right there and could still be earning your sub! Love the original world of Azeroth but Classic is just a bit too same-old, same-old for you at this point? Here's Season of Discovery! And so on and so forth.

I'm going to neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I'll say that the multiple versions of WoW thing has definitely worked out well for me in terms of getting value out of my subscription, as I've at least tried almost every mode that the dev team has come out with and I tend to enjoy playing more than one of them at a time. Sadly (to me), it often seems that I'm in a minority in that regard, with most players that I talk to just sticking to the one version they prefer and perhaps even actively disliking the other versions of the game.

I've been wondering what this means for this blog, because I imagine that if readers just want to read about their favourite version of WoW, me switching back and forth between talking about very different things seemingly at random might be perceived as annoying. I'll still write what I want to write, but I thought it might also be useful and interesting to give a general update on where I'm at with each version of WoW at the moment, so you know what to expect if there's one specific mode you're waiting to hear about.

Retail (The War Within)

I'm currently doing four delves a week with the husband but to be honest not much else. K'aresh has been entertaining enough - I rescued all the wee animals and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have the same staying power for me as the final zones of the last two expansions had. Patch 11.2 also killed my desire to play alts temporarily as it broke the Altoholic addon, and the bank restructuring made all my alts' banks a horrible mess. Altoholic works again now, but those banks are still in chaos and I just can't bear to look at them much, so my alts have mostly remained unplayed.

I'm generally feeling a degree of end-of-expansion ennui, which feels a bit weird to say when Midnight is still more than half a year away, but it is what it is. I don't feel like there's much to look forward to before then. I do have a few goals I want to achieve before the expansion ends, such as throwing myself against ?? difficulty Ky'veza and seeing all of Manaforge Omega on LFR, but none of these things feel particularly urgent at this point.

Admittedly Legion Remix is coming out in a few days, but I'm not actually sure how I invested I want to be in that either. I was quite looking forward to it initially (after how much fun I ended up having in MoP Remix), but from everything I've heard since then, the Legion version is actually going to be quite different and I'm not sure whether all those changes will be good or bad for me. I'll still check it out and will probably get a few posts out of it, but I'm currently not actively hyped for it.

Mists of Pandaria Classic

My "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms" has kind of stalled because I just couldn't bear levelling from 84 to 85. Fortunately this one isn't something that needs to be rushed, as I should still have several months to complete my goal (until Garrosh destroys the Vale in Classic too). I expect that I'll still get back to it in time before then, though I still have no plans to do anything else in MoP Classic.

Season of Discovery

SoD has sadly become another abandoned project. Remember, I wanted to level up so I could see the actual new dungeon Blizzard had added to it (Demon Fall Canyon). However, Incursions apparently managed to completely sap my will to play. It's kind of weird actually, but I really did not deal well with the way they required you to completely clear out your quest log. It made me realise that I really rely on those random breadcrumb quests to give me direction. Even if I technically know in my head which zones to go to for quests at level 45 for example, having to make a choice with no quest guidance whatsoever was weirdly deflating.

I do remember that I actually got to Searing Gorge and was kind of fascinated by the new Blackrock Eruption event there, but unfortunately this was also when my OP raid gear from BFD in phase one was starting to no longer be quite so good, and questing was starting to feel like a bit of a drag. At some point I just stopped logging in.

While I wasn't playing, the devs actually added a second new dungeon (Karazhan Crypts) and an actual new raid (Scarlet Enclave), followed by an announcement that they're stopping development on SoD but also not shutting it down. It's been sitting in this weird limbo state ever since where it's technically still there and has some people playing, but much of the community considers it dead because new content is no longer being added. (The server selection screen has the largest Europen PvE server listed as low pop at this point, and according to Ironforge.pro stats, the number of people still raiding there is about half of what it is on Classic era.)

Assuming SoD does continue to hang around, I expect I will get back to it eventually to check out more of the stuff I missed, but there's also a chance that I won't.

Classic era

I've mentioned before that while I love Classic era, I've seen so much of it as this point that the novelty has kind of worn off. I still log in almost every day to do things like create Mooncloth or put items on the auction house - to what purpose, I'm honestly not sure. I guess since the population on era is not that large (especially since the anniversary servers went live), I feel like I'm still making a small contribution to the server community by keeping the auction house stocked. I'm also still keeping an eye on my guild's Discord even if I don't have anything of my own to add.

I currently find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I'd go back to playing era as my primary mode of Classic, though I guess you should never say never. It seems more likely to me that one day I will finally tire of just logging in for cooldowns and auction house business and that will be it for me then. Though that day is not yet today.

Turtle WoW

I wasn't planning to get back into the private server scene, but I've got to admit my recent exploration of Turtle WoW has had me quite charmed. I'll probably keep at it until the server shuts down or I hit max level, whichever happens first. The dev team seems largely undeterred by the Blizzard lawsuit and even posted another update on their Unreal Engine project this week. While I have no doubt that they won't have a leg to stand on under the jurisdiction of a US court, I've got to admit I do wonder a little what will happen if the stubborn head of the turtle, who is supposedly located in Russia, manages to simply evade the long arm of the law due to geography. I'm sure the lawsuit has been great advertising for them over the past few weeks, bringing in a lot of new business for the time being.

Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon

I would describe my early dungeon experiences in Turtle WoW as "okay" for a Vanilla environment - neither worse than nor significantly improved compared to playing on official Classic servers. I knew that they had added entirely new dungeons to the world though, and I was very curious about those. I became aware of the first of these being called Dragonmaw Retreat, located in the Wetlands and designed for characters around level thirty.

As I was slowly getting the hang of the way the automated group finder without teleportation worked, I made a point of only putting myself in the queue when I was at least vaguely in the vicinity of the dungeon and not doing anything that couldn't easily be interrupted, so that I could pack up and start legging it to the instance at a moment's notice. I had picked up several quests for Dragonmaw Retreat by the time I got there and was very intrigued to find out what awaited me.

The healer in my first run warned me that it was going to be hard, and at the start of my second run someone cautioned everyone that the dungeon was quite long, wanting to double-check that all party members had sufficient amounts of time for the run. It wasn't all trepidation though: the aforementioned healer in run #1 also gushed about how cool and beautiful the dungeon was, comparing its vibe to Lord of the Rings.

The inspiration for that remark was hard to miss, considering we were soon climbing a long flight of stairs reminiscent of the way the Bridge of of Khazad-dûm was portrayed in the Fellowship of the Ring movie.

I was pretty impressed by the dungeon in general. Mind you, to me as someone who's spent way too much time in the vanilla World of Warcraft at this point, it was still quite obviously custom content that didn't quite have Blizzard's level of artistic polish: Everything seemed just a tad too big, too straight, too symmetrical and simply lacking in detail (in a way this exercise has given me a new appreciation for just how much work Blizzard's artists put into these things) - but it wasn't off by much, and I could imagine a more casual visitor who's unfamiliar with many of WoW's dungeons perhaps being unable to tell that this wasn't in the original game.

Lord of the Rings comparisons aside, the dungeon's general vibe reminded me a lot of Lower Blackrock Spire, with a dashing of Blackrock Depths sprinkled into the mix perhaps. At one point we tried to jump across a gap in the stairs, but only the healer and I made it, while everyone else landed on a ledge underneath. When trying to get down to their level, both the healer and I then missed that jump and ended up going splat on the ground below, followed by a corpse run back... I thought that was very authentic to the Vanilla WoW experience for sure.

Difficulty-wise, everything hit very hard, as noted in my last post about how dungeons feel kind of overtuned on Turtle, but oddly enough I didn't mind here at all. I guess it felt more disruptive in the Deadmines, which I've run so many times that I'm very familiar with what to expect. With this being new content, I had no preconceived notions of what it should be like, and it was easy enough to accept that mobs hit hard so you have to pull carefully, which to be honest tends to be my personal MO most of the time anyway.

The bosses were all fairly straightforward affairs with usually just one real mechanic each, e.g. an add summon or a fear on a cooldown. (They also had voice lines, and one orc in particular had such an over-the-top death gurgle, it made me laugh out loud.) The biggest challenge was usually just to get to the boss without accidentally pulling additional trash, and honestly that's kind of how I feel like it should be in a Vanilla environment. I don't know why the Blizzard devs seemed so enamoured with stuffing the updated fights in Season of Discovery with extra mechanics (which were usually still too boring for retail raiders, but disproportionally demanding compared to Vanilla content). 

Speaking of just getting to each boss though, another thing that was interesting was that the last two bosses were hidden behind a locked gate, and to unlock it you needed to create a key from two fragments found within a dungeon. One can be looted from a chest and the other is a guaranteed green drop from one of the earlier bosses. In my first run, everyone greeded on the green drop but we didn't keep track of who won it, and when we got to the gate, everyone insisted that they hadn't been the one who won the item. This meant we had to abandon the dungeon at that point as we couldn't proceed to the last two bosses.

I initially thought that perhaps this key was a temporary item that you had to assemble every run, kind of like the head on a pike in Lower Blackrock Spire, but later I learned that no, it actually translates into a permanent key, as on my second run the tank already had it and told us not to worry about the drops, which I thought was interesting. The key fragments also don't bind and can be bought and sold on the auction house, though you need to be inside the dungeon to assemble them.

The last bit of the dungeon hidden behind that gate was definitely the most interesting and impressive part of the experience, as you end up in this giant hallway in which a corrupted red dragon patrols, and you need to sneak around and kill six enchanters around the room to bring down his 95% damage reduction shield. That definitely felt very vanilla.

The very last boss turned out to be Zuluhed the Whacked, which made me go "oh, I know this guy", though it took me a moment to recall that in official WoW lore, this particular orc leader went to Outland and enslaved the Netherwing there. Not sure it's an upgrade for him to become a mid-level dungeon end boss instead, but it was a cool reveal nonetheless.

Also, shoutout to Hoodedmon the troll shaman, who was our tank on the second run and did a bang-up job both with the tanking itself as well as providing general leadership and explanations of what to do. He was also the first shaman tank I encountered on Turtle WoW, which wasn't that new a concept to me considering they were a big hit in Season of Discovery, but I hadn't realised that specialisation was available on Turtle WoW as well.