Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forever

Classic Era

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

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

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

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

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

That Infernal Blue Dot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part. 

Comparing Zekvir and the Underpin

Towards the end of War Within season one, I made a whole post about my journey into Zekvir's Lair, from being largely oblivious to what it was all about to finally beating him on double question mark difficulty. I figured that season two was going to be less exciting now that I knew what this whole challenge mode thing was all about, and that turned out to be true, but that's not to say that it wasn't interesting at all.

Fighting the Underpin (the season two delve boss) on normal mode did admittedly turn out to be a bit underwhelming, as I defeated him on my warrior on what I think was only my second or third attempt. I wouldn't say that's because he was much easier than Zekvir though, it's just that it made a big difference that I actually had some gear from the previous season as well as a better idea of what I was doing.

The Underpin also seemed to be a lot more imbalanced in terms of how the fight played for different roles, and playing tank was actually one of the easier ways to do it. Based on how easy of a time I'd had, I immediately jumped back in on a healing alt and was horrified at how different an experience it was. I think I wiped about half a dozen times and then just gave up, because it was impossible for me to break his healing shield with my piddly healer dps, and dps Brann's AI was seemingly not smart enough to help me focus on the shield, instead getting distracted and shooting at adds instead. I was really put out by that and there was little helpful advice on this problem to be found online at the time, so I kind of just left things there and largely forgot about the Underpin again.

But of course! We're now at a point where the next major patch is barely two weeks away, bringing with it a new season and the removal of a bunch of content and achievements that are currently still live. With my FOMO kicked into overdrive, I remembered that I had yet to beat the Underpin on hard mode, and that I should better get to it.

I don't know exactly how long or how many attempts it took me, because the attempt counter is part of Deadly Boss Mods, which for some reason I just couldn't get to work on this encounter. Reading around, it sounded like there should've been a module for it, but even though I had the latest version installed, the Underpin just wasn't on the list of available delve fights in the addon. I made do anyway.

I still spent more than a few hours wiping on ?? difficulty and trying to improve my gameplay, but compared to the weeks-long project that was Zekvir ??, I got there relatively quickly. I wouldn't say the fight is necessarily easier than Zekvir, but it helped that this one actually played to the strengths of my warrior main, and that she was about as well geared by this point as a character not doing M+ or raids can be (not counting her cursed boot slot). This meant that unlike last season, I didn't have to worry about learning to play a different class/spec or gearing up an alt.

I managed to record my victory again and uploaded it to YouTube since I did the same last season:

You can see that I was still far from perfect, and there's one point around the 4:11 mark where I ate a huge chunk of damage that probably would've been a one-shot in lesser gear or on a non-tanky spec. But still, it was good enough and I'm happy that I was able to check this particular achievement off my list.

So how do I think the Underpin and Zekvir compare? Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted. Thematically, I found Zekvir kind of annoying and loved the Underpin. Zekvir wipes were really frustrating to me because I hated the way he went "Yeees, she will be pleased" whenever I died, because I didn't want Xal'atath to enjoy my wipes! (I guess that's a credit to Zekvir's voice actor though.) Meanwhile the Underpin was the complete opposite in that I loved the goofy music and all his silly voice lines. ("Tick tock, tick tock, ya interlopin' mooks!" is without a doubt my favourite.)

Also, it may sound a bit lame, but I can't deny that I liked the fact that he didn't take me as long to kill and that the fight was actually very doable on my main, even if that feels more like luck on my part than anything to do with good balancing and encounter design (refer to my horror at what it felt like to do even the normal fight as a healer as mentioned above).

Purely in terms of mechanics, the Underpin was a lot more messy and random, which I don't necessarily consider a good thing, though it did feel to me like there was also a bit more leeway there than there had been on Zekvir - on the latter, a single mis-timed interrupt could mean that it was a wipe. I did enjoy that the Underpin's "dance" was a little less rigid and more fluid in comparison.

That said, one thing it really suffered from was the fact that it forced you to spend a lot of time fighting your UI instead of the boss. The mechanic that requires you to kick bombs into the adds is just extremely clunky, as it's literally impossible to mouse-target them sometimes due to boss and camera positioning, meaning you had to enable the "interact key" to be able to kick blindly sometimes, and even then - well, it's right there in the last sentence, kicking the things around blindly was not very satisfying or fun.

Nonetheless, all in all I still enjoyed this encounter as well, and I've now made it my new goal to at least do the normal mode on all classes again, like I tried to do with Zekvir. I do kind of have to wonder how sustainable this "delve challenge boss" model is going to be in the long run though. I mean, isn't it bound to get kind of repetitive? I suppose you could say the same about raids, but at least there you have different roles and a much larger number of players to mix things up mechanically, while any fight that's meant to be something to do for solo players of any class is by necessity always going to be much more limited in terms of what it can demand. 

Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Checking in on Cataclysm Classic

Back in October, in a post about why Classic wasn't really vibing with me at the moment, I noted the following: "If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state." As far as I can tell, MoP was the last expansion in which Blizzard permanently replaced a zone with an updated version, as in the years since, they've opted for the Bronze-Dragonflight-sponsored time travel option instead whenever they made major changes, which allows people to still access the old zone if they want to.

Since I made that post, Mists of Pandaria Classic has not only been announced, but also had a public beta and is currently scheduled to go live in mid to late July. As I hadn't forgotten about that goal of mine, I decided that it was about time to re-download Cataclysm Classic and get a character expansion-ready.

For those of you not keeping track, I last played "progressive" Classic at the end of TBC. I checked in extremely briefly both at the start of Wrath Classic and at the start of Cata, but did not feel drawn to either expansion. This meant that my characters were server-transferred last year as part of the latest round of soft server consolidations, but other than that, my hunter Tiirr (now with two Is and two Rs) was still level 70 and sitting in Shattrath.

I took the portal to Stormwind and started doing some maintenance to get her into a playable state. As an aside, I was surprised by how busy things were in Stormwind (and that's on a server that was flagged as having a medium population). Classic Cata is the currently live version of Classic that I've been hearing the least about in terms of people actually playing it, but clearly it still has its audience. Ironforge.pro has registered slightly fewer than 100k characters raiding in Cata Classic last week, which is about the same number as on the vanilla Classic anniversary servers. So for all the scoffing I've seen about how Cata is where the real Classic ended and surely nobody actually wanted it, there do seem to be plenty of players who've been happy to play it anyway.

Either way, my primary task was to get my bags in order. All my mounts and pets could be added to the new collections interface to no longer take up bag space. Toys were eligible too - the first time around, those didn't became part of collections until Warlords of Draenor, but in progressive Classic that part is already there. Likewise, the transmog interface is the one that was introduced in Legion, and the auction house is the new one that was added in Battle for Azeroth. I swear, this is going to make it harder than ever to remember which features were introduced in which expansion.

Anyway, other bag slots were freed up from selling items that had been turned into vendor trash, such as all my arrows, or things that were simply no longer relevant to a hunter in Cata, such as pet food and mana potions. One bag was filled with a bunch of random keys tied to various BC quests that I wasn't even on... I can only guess that those had been on my keyring when that was removed. Either way, more stuff to destroy. A few items, such a stacks of cloth, I decided to actually list on the AH since there were presumably still some people interested in them.

I had to visit the flight master to unlock flying in Northrend and the revamped old world. (Fortunately the ramp I was jumping off when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fly yet without this wasn't very high.) I stopped by all the profession trainers, as well as - after some initial confusion - my class trainer. (For some reason I'd had it in my head that Cata was also the expansion where they removed the need to train abilities, but no, that actually happened in Mists.) I dragged abilities from my spell book back onto my bar and spent my pet's talent points.

My hunter herself had no spec either, and my first impulse was to go Marksman as usual - but then I read some of the talents and went "eurgh" - right, Cata was when I went Survival, back when that was still a ranged spec, so I opted to revisit that particular setup. Still, I was kind of surprised by how incredibly boring all the talents looked, as I seem to remember quite liking the condensed talent trees during original Cataclysm.

Finally I was ready to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Northrend. It sent me to Borean Tundra when I would've preferred Howling Fjord, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't even remember where to board the right boat for that. So I just hopped onto the next ferry leaving Stormwind to start in the Tundra.

I miss boats being relevant. They are slow but they really force you to immerse yourself in the world for a few minutes in a way that portals don't.

I decided I could be picky with which quests to do, so I only did about a third of the zone (if that) and also made a trip to Dalaran and Howling Fjord to pick up some flight paths. Unsurprisingly I suppose, this was enough to net me two levels in that single play session. The Wrath portion of the levelling curve was presumably nerfed again with the release of Cata, there's another bonus XP event going on right now, and I was fully rested. Still, considering I'm not here for Northrend or the Shattering, I found the levelling speed heartening and it made the prospect of making it through the last two expansions I'd skipped less daunting. I expect that 80-85 might still be a bit of a pain unless they nerf it with the pre-patch or something, but we'll see. I'll probably do Vashj'ir since I haven't done that zone in ages... but first I need to actually make my way through Northrend.

Happy (Character) Sorting Day!

I take a probably somewhat unusual pleasure in sorting things. I think it's something I inherited from my father, who was a "spreadsheet guy" before electronic spreadsheets were a thing. He was a collector of many things and he liked to keep them meticulously sorted. For example he used to record songs from the radio on cassette tapes, and movies/shows on TV on VHS tapes, and for both he kept detailed directories of what was stored where. Child me chose to imitate him by neatly cataloguing my own possessions, from my own cassette tapes to stuffed animals to books.

What does that little story have to do with WoW? Well, today's patch introduced a new option to sort your characters, and that delighted me so much that I haven't really gotten around to doing much else yet.

My "old mains" campsite, featuring (from left to right): the night elf priest that was my first ever character to level cap, the Horde troll priest who coined my online nickname of now two decades, the human paladin that was my first character ever, and the human monk that was my main throughout Shadowlands.

As a reminder, the introduction of Warbands in the War Within prepatch merged the character selection screens for individual servers into one big character selection screen. While most changes that have come with Warbands have been great, I thought this particular one was a bit of a mixed bag. At first, seeing all those old alts again was kind of cool and nostalgic, but in everyday play it got a bit annoying to have to deal with such a long list of characters. Sure, you could sort them, but there was still a lot of scrolling to do if you had a lot of alts like I do.

Well, since today's patch you can sort your characters into "warband camps" of up to four characters, which makes things a lot more convenient. I spent about fifteen minutes just creating groups and moving characters around before even logging in properly. My only disappointment was that you can't move the groups themselves around once created, so if you ever decide that one should move up or down, you have to delete/rename the existing groups and then manually shuffle the characters inside them as well.

I even took to reddit specifically to check out how other people were organising their campsites, and it's honestly been quite interesting. As you can see in the screenshot below, my own camps are primarily sorted by level progression and emotional connection. The ones named after servers are basically "those old Alliance characters from back when I played on Darkspear" and similar groups.

But other people took very different approaches. Some were sorting by play style (melee vs. ranged), some by class, faction or role (bank alts, crafters). Some came up with serious RP names, some with whimsical groupings like "might delete later". I just thought it was an interesting look into how other people view their stable of alts. 

Are you also an altoholic for whom this feature has been a godsend? If so, how have you sorted your alts into campsites?

My Last Days of Dragonflight

The War Within launches a few hours from me posting this, and I'm actually looking forward to it now, having managed to overcome the worst of the pre-expansion doldrums I felt a few weeks ago. And yes, I know some people have had early access for days, but really, I don't want to talk about that. The vast majority of us were still hanging out in Valdrakken, running Radiant Echoes and what have you. (At least that was more fun than trying to tiptoe around social media without stepping into massive spoilers or bouncing into invisible walls in game where content suddenly required level 80 to enter.)

I wanted to finish up with some notes about how I spent my last few weeks of Dragonflight and how it managed to rekindle my interest in retail.

Warbands

I've said before that it was about damn time for WoW to make more things account-wide, but it took me a bit for it to really sink in just how fundamental of a change this has been - such as the fact that Warbands and cross-server (almost) everything means that all my old alts could become relevant again.

I can't be the only one who left a lot of alts behind over the years. I played on Darkspear during my early days, switched to Earthen Ring when I swapped to playing Horde, and during my most recent return to retail I got established on the Azjol-Nerub server. Every time I switched server, it meant leaving a lot of connections and resources behind, especially in terms of accumulated profession knowledge and materials.

As the realisation has slowly trickled in that all of those old characters are viable for me to play with my (newer) friends now, I've found myself actually interested in playing them again, going through old banks in search of long-forgotten transmogs or crafting materials that might be valuable (to me personally, if not necessarily on the auction house) and feeling a strange sense of reinvigoration.

Transmog farming

I think I mentioned in the past that while I get the appeal of transmog farming, I'm not really hugely into it myself. Blasting through old raids and one-shotting everything with Holy Nova in order to be able to sport some of the game's most iconic looks is kind of fun at first, but it does get boring quickly, and considering just how many old dungeons and raids there are at this point, it can also be surprisingly time-consuming.

Still, the changes to the transmog system that now allow you to add armour and weapons of any type to your collection regardless of whether the character you're currently on could use them have really upped the dopamine levels, as it will absolutely rain looks on you in every run now. This is opposed to the old slow-drip that could really limit your success, such as when you did a run on your priest just to get only plate, followed by going in on your warrior next and getting nothing but cloth, being able to claim neither for your collection.

Of course, some things are still soulbound... I have to admit I gnashed my teeth a little when I got a Garr binding on my priest and had to destroy it. But I also had fun getting adventurous soloing Cata raids for the first time. Dragon Soul and Spine of Deathwing in particular was certainly a learning experience. (If you know, you know.)

Remix characters

As MoP: Remix approached its end, activity in our little guild saw a bit of a spike as we got back together for one last hurrah and cleared mythic Siege of Orgimmar on the penultimate day of the event. I'm not going to pretend that this was some great achievement with the power levels available to us, but not all of us were that OP, and it was still a nice way of capping off the expansion.

The character conversion process from Remix to regular retail was a bit odd. Landing in Stormwind with empty bags and wearing a set of greens was not a surprise, but it was strange that Blizzard actually redid people's talents - not reset, which I actually would've understood more, but merely changed, which was just bizarre to me. It made the whole experience an odd exercise in picking out just where abilities you may have wanted had been taken out of your setup and replaced with something else.

I was also surprised to get some items in the mail that we were allowed to keep after all. I'd worked on the assumption that absolutely everything we had in our bags would be destroyed, but they did allow us to keep stuff like the bind-to-account rep tokens or various Timeless Isle consumables in the end.

Radiant Echoes

I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised by the Radiant Echoes event, and I found myself coming back to it several times. First I levelled that old paladin (as mentioned in the linked post), then I kept going back to buy all the appearances. (I didn't care about them that much but I was having fun!) Then I realised that I now had every class bar two at level 70, and combined with realisations about Warbands mentioned above, that led to me going back to level my old Draenei mage from Darkspear and my old undead death knight from Earthen Ring to 70 through the event as well. I was just having such a blast! I'm actually a little sad to be saying goodbye to that.

Mythic+ Season 4

I actually haven't done any M+ in several weeks, but I did want to mention it here because I've been making posts about my progress every season all throughout Dragonflight and wanted to at least give a brief shout-out to Season 4 as well before we move on. It was considered a bit of a "nothing" season I think since it didn't offer anything new but just brought back all the Dragonflight dungeons that people had already conquered in Season 2 and 3.

My guildies and I still had a decent time with it though, especially since we didn't actually do that much in Season 1. The new "keystone squish" worked out well for us, as we spent the first two weeks of the season in Mythic Zero just trying to remember mechanics, and this did indeed work out as I had hoped: We did some wiping and then paused at each boss to figure out what we had been doing wrong without having to worry about the pressure of a timer. I broke 2k rating again, which again, isn't exactly the biggest achievement, but we did it in only three months as opposed to the five months it took us in Season 3, so it still felt like progress to me.

In terms of the dungeons themselves, I didn't have strong feelings about any of them in the same way I had during the last two seasons. There were individual encounters I sometimes found challenging, but there wasn't a dungeon I always loved or one that always filled me with dread like there had been in previous seasons.

While I've enjoyed getting to know and understand the M+ system in Dragonflight, I'm still not sure whether I want to get back into it in War Within, but that's a can I'm happy to kick down the road for now.

Expansion Pre-Patch Day

Yesterday (or Tuesday for the 'mericans) was War Within pre-patch day. I think I saw someone say that this might be the biggest patch WoW's ever had (in terms of impact, not file size) and while that sounds hyperbolic, I can't help but wonder whether it's true. Expansions always change a lot of things of course, but moving the game towards everything being account-wide as well as making everything cross-realm at the same time really was a pretty ballsy move on the dev team's part.

I knew about the cross-realm thing on an intellectual level, but I hadn't fully comprehended what it would mean. Suddenly having all my characters from all servers in a single list on the character selection screen certainly put things into a new perspective (it even included "KauvarB87508", the level 3 shaman from Aggramar whose name was released and reclaimed at some point during my years of not being subscribed). There was something funky going on with the character previews as well... all the low-level humans and draenei showed with the same face, hair colour and hair style and all the low-level tauren were identical-looking black cows. I logged into my original paladin, the first character I ever created and whose looks I remembered well enough despite not having played her in ages, and on loading in she appeared as her normal self and the character selection screen also updated, thank goodness.

The realm list feels kind of pointless now... it seems like realms are just like a sort of "last name" that's only relevant when picking a character name now.

And of course there was the warband screen, which everyone is posting screenshots of, so let me join in:

I was kind of surprised to see my old night elf priest be one of my default "favourites", and I can only guess that this was simply based on which characters you last logged into before the patch, because I think I did log her to check something quite recently.

I have to admit I didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for spending time on actually playing though. I don't think I've ever been great with large-scale changes like this, and it's only been getting worse as I get older. Fortunately I don't use a lot of addons, so that wasn't too much of an issue, but for some reason anything but the default action bars had been disabled on every single character and needed manual re-enabling. And of course all those talent resets! Those always exhaust me.

I was also a bit wary of just how broken things were going to be. Taking into account just how massive the changes were that the devs had to make under the hood for this update, I guess we should all be grateful that things weren't any worse, but I saw things like warnings not to use the currency transfer feature (or your currency might just vanish into the aether) and decided not to get too experimental with anything myself.

Mostly I just looked around a lot. There've been a lot of small changes to various parts of the UI like updated icons, and it all looks very busy. I'm sure I'll get used to most of it over time, though I am a bit cranky that they decided to get rid of the green exclamation mark over undiscovered flight masters after twenty years. Instead, the winged boot icon over their heads has a kind of greenish tint now if you haven't talked to them before, which is much harder to spot. (That said, I'm no longer sure how discovering flight paths works anyway. On one Remix character I still had to do it, while another had everything unlocked seemingly by default.)

Dragonriding turning into "skyriding" and becoming available for all flying mounts is kind of cool but also weird. I found myself slipping into the familiar keystrokes quite easily regardless of which mount was summoned, even if it was strange to see my Sunwarmed Furline zoom and leap across the sky in ways it didn't before. On the other hand, I found that evokers' Soar now also works with steady flight, though it looks quite silly the way you wind up for a massive leap just to do a tiny jump into the air and then float around like a butterfly. I'm just not a fan of switching between the two modes being a five-second cast. I wish you could just assign different modes to different mounts to make it smoother.

I also logged into one of my Remix characters whom I'd left at level 60 and had a rather painful questing experience. In anticipation of the level cap going up again with the expansion, the patch massively slashed the experience points required from 60 to 70, and I shot up to in levels in no time... which was not a good thing in this case. People were already complaining about power scaling in Remix in that level range before the patch, but now it gets combined with WoW's standard problem of your character getting weaker if the pace of gear acquisition can't keep up with how fast you gain character levels, and by level 65 I was as weak as a newborn babe. I tried to do one of the intro scenarios to the Isle of Thunder and died on every mob pull (good thing there's no durability or repair bills in Remix). The last fight fortunately offered a protective bubble I could hide in, but the encounter still took something like ten minutes. In regular retail you could at least buy some greens from the AH in that situation, but I'm honestly not quite sure what you're supposed to do in Remix with its trade restrictions when you're too weak to fight anything. Queue for dungeons and hope that others carry you for long enough to pick up a few level-appropriate gear pieces? I don't know.

Honey, Your Changes Are Showing

I've mentioned before that Classic era is in a somewhat unusual situation, being an MMO that isn't supposed to receive updates and changes, yet that due to the fact that it shares a client and code base with other versions of WoW sometimes experiences a degree of "feature bleedthrough" as bugs. It's not ideal, but bugs happen in any game, and I guess when you're playing what's probably the least popular of all the current versions of WoW, you're not in a position to complain too much about stuff like that.

When last week's patch for phase four of Season of Discovery landed and brought some strangeness to era once again, I think most of us figured initially that it was just going to be one of those days, however a post on the official forums by community manager Kaivax quickly raised both eyebrows and hackles, as it highlighted several changes to era as intentional:

• The Guilds user interface has been updated to provide more ease of Guild management.
• Alliance players now have access to the Might of Stormwind, to a version of the Warchief’s Blessing world buff effect. This new buff is gained for turning in a new quest “End of the Dark Horde” in Stormwind and is mutually exclusive with Warchief’s Blessing.
• The Songflower Serenade and Dire Maul Tribute buffs can no longer be dispelled by enemy players.
• Druids can now train and use polearms.

The new guild UI was the most glaring and obvious change, and I've got to admit my own reaction was very much "thanks, I hate it". There's already an addon to at least partially revert to the old one, but I haven't seen an option to banish the new one from the quick bar entirely.

You see, the Vanilla user interface was very basic, but it understood what's important to people. If I'm in a guild and actually looking to interact with other players, the first thing I'll want to know after coming online is who else is online, what classes they play, what level they are and what they are up to right now (as in, whether they are already busy with something else or whether we might be able to do something together).

At the bottom you also had the box for the guild message of the day, in case there was something the guild wanted to immediately communicate to you.

In comparison, the new UI that's supposed to "provide more ease of Guild management" is dominated by guild chat, which you can already read in the chat window anyway, with the list of people who are online being relegated to a narrow column on the side that doesn't show you what level the characters are or what content they are doing. For that information, you have to go to a second tab, and the guild info hides behind yet another tab. It's cluttered and ugly and I hate it.

In retail, I've at least got some use for the fact that the guild chat in the guild window contains historical information showing chats from before you came online, as I'm in a small guild with friends there and it can be interesting to see who's been about when you haven't logged in for a couple of days. But in a large guild like I'm in on Classic era, I really don't need a backlog of people saying hi and bye, discussing trades and announcing world buffs.

Last year during the patch before the launch of hardcore, Blizzard also updated the settings UI to retail's new look and I grumbled about that, but ultimately I've got to admit I didn't mind that one too much. There were some new accessibility features in there which are obviously not a bad thing, and ultimately the game settings are not something I look at very often. The guild window is a very different matter however, as that's something I and I'm sure many other Classic era players interact with every day, if not multiple times a day, and having to deal with this new abomination is... off-putting.

I feel like user interface changes are one of those ways in which you can boil a frog, because one small change is just so easy to justify. It doesn't change the game! You can always get an addon to modify it! I didn't see anyone shed any tears over the fact that Classic launched with WoW's modern raid frame UI for example, instead of the horrible old one from original Vanilla. But this? This just hurts, man.

What about the other changes?

Adding a new quest and a new world buff for Alliance is easily the biggest change of the lot, but ironically I think that both of the world buff related changes might not have been too badly received if they had been communicated properly. Blizzard also revamped the way the PvP system works on era last year, and from what I've seen, those changes were overall pretty well received. Yes, we want era to be the museum piece, but people are not entirely blind to the fact that things are not the same now as they were in Vanilla, and that there are times when it might be a good idea to tweak something. Just not like this.

To add some more context for the world buff changes for those not in the know: people care a lot about world buffs for raiding, and Horde actually had one more world buff than Alliance. Some Alliance players would go out of their way to get it by getting themselves mind-controlled at the Crossroads via a friend or second account whenever the Horde dropped the buff, but my impression has been that this was both very niche and not all that popular. So I don't think many Alliance players are actually going to be upset about getting easier access to the buff themselves... plus from my understanding they'll still have to do UBRS for it, just like the Horde does now.

And as for the dispelling issue, apparently this has been a form of "PvP" on the PvP servers since the launch of Classic, though I've never heard of it happening on PvE. I think the problem was that people were doing it basically just to grief. If you're a shaman hanging out in Stormwind as a ghost, just to revive and spam purge on someone after world buffs drop, before you get killed again by the guards, you're not really PvPing in the classic sense - you're not winning a fight in any meaningful way; you're just eating a repair bill to make someone feel bad. So again, I can't see most people making a big deal about this. Just some context from Blizzard's end and a heads-up would've been nice.

Now, the druid change is simultaneously the least meaningful and the most worrying part of those patch notes. It's the least meaningful because I've been told by druid mains that it has zero effect on their meta. Personally I vaguely recall an occasion while levelling early in Classic, where either I or someone else was on a druid in Razorfen Kraul, and when Armor Piercer dropped, I was a little disappointed when I realised that it couldn't be used by druids in Classic. So yay for a couple more weapon options for feral druids while levelling?

The problem is that this is a class change, something that's completely unheard of on era, and one that nobody asked for. Up until now, the Classic devs have been pretty good about taking care of era even though it wasn't the most popular mode, and being respectful of the community that plays there wanting to enjoy the game in its original state. I can't blame people for being worried about the team suddenly setting a precedent for implementing random changes in era that nobody asked for, presumably just because it was more convenient to copy and paste the same settings from SoD. I hope they'll hear the loud and clear feedback that this is not something players want or take lightly.

EDIT: OMG, it's like someone is reading my blog! They actually reverted the druid change and the Alliance Rend buff, as well as apologising for the way the whole thing was handled. You can read the blue post here.

More Hardcore Horde Adventures

I've continued to level my hardcore troll priest in small bursts of activity, and she's now up to level 20.

I initially struggled with more interface problems, as I could tell that I still wasn't seeing all the death announcements, even after joining the server-wide HardcoreDeaths channel. Some googling revealed that there's an additional drop-down in the in-game settings nowadays where you need to select how many deaths you want to see, and it's set to show only those of guild members by default.

I was happy when I finally got that sorted out and could see everything, as the discourse from the peanut gallery about deaths is always interesting. There were some raised eyebrows about a wipe in Ragefire Chasm for example, and when a level 52 died to fall damage in Tirisfal Glades there were exclamations along the lines of: "Why not wait five seconds for the zeppelin to actually dock, man?!"

Aside from that, guild chat sadly remains a bit confusing because they expect you to install an addon called "Greenwall" to connect it with the guild chat of sister guilds, which I've refused to do so far because I don't like the thought of having an extra addon just for that. That said, it makes reading guild chat a very disjointed experience right now as it's very obvious that people are frequently responding to things that I'm not seeing. I might cave eventually.

I've been surprised by how regular world buffs are dropping on hardcore. I think I mentioned this before, but still... I know that people raid on hardcore, but I figured it was more of a fringe activity considering the risk vs. reward. The number of world buffs going out on the regular seems to defy that assumption though.

After accidentally picking up some buffs in Orgrimmar one night, I decided to venture forth into Skull Rock at level 12. I knew that was probably a risky move, but I was feeling brave and was hopeful that I wasn't going to be the only person there. Indeed, I ran into a male troll hunter as soon as I turned the first corner. At first we continued fighting separately, just leap-frogging each other with our mob pulls, but then I spotted the rare elite warlock around a corner and suggested we group up to kill him. We did and then continued killing more together - grouping up is such a force multiplier in era (particularly as a priest!), it never ceases to amaze me.

Just as we were about to go out, a mage entered the cave and asked to join. I invited him, but of course he was only just starting his quests. The hunter thanked everyone politely and took his leave, but I stuck with the mage to help him get his quest done too. Then a druid showed up as well! I enjoyed the grouping experience, but at that point I was getting a bit worried that I 'd gotten myself caught in an endless loop of helping out new joiners. As if he'd read my mind, the mage said that he'd stay with the druid to help them complete their quest, but that I was free to go. I thanked everyone and took my leave, happy that the most deadly place in Durotar had gone so well for me.

Up next, I started questing in the Barrens. One funny experience I had there was when I was killing centaurs around the Forgotten Pools and a death announcement popped up that "a Stonearm" had killed someone at my location. For all the hours I've spent in the Barrens over the years, I had never heard of "a Stonearm" before, and I was rather alarmed to hear that this unknown entity was apparently killing people in my vicinity. A quick Wowhead search revealed him to be a rare centaur, and about five minutes later he killed another player. I was looking over my shoulder with some serious paranoia now, wondering whether he was a patroller or something, but he was not. I eventually spotted him guarding a chest near some tents but decided not to engage after the earlier carnage. When I came past the tents again a few minutes later, someone else had successfully killed him though.

At level 15 I wanted to run Ragefire Chasm. My first attempt to find a group in the evening wasn't successful - I saw that another group was already looking for a tank, so I didn't fancy my chances and went off to do something else. This turned out to be a good decision though, because when I logged in the following Saturday morning, I didn't even have enough time to type "LFG RFC" into chat before someone had already whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go there.

It was a smooth enough run, but it also highlighted to me that healing in hardcore feels like a much bigger responsibility than usual. We had a level 18 shaman tank, which was fine enough, but there was also a level 15 warrior with a two-hander and a mage that liked to go up close to spam Arcane Explosion, and they both got aggro on more than one occasion, which resulted in sudden damage spikes on them, and that at a point when I didn't yet have Flash Heal or anything... I think I saw the mage chug a healing potion once and when the warrior got low, the other shaman in the group threw him a quick off-heal. Usually I'd be mildly offended by people "panicking" like that as soon as someone's health drops below 50%, but in hardcore I understand wanting to be safe rather than perma-dead.

We also made the most out of the experience (seeing how you can do each dungeon only once per day) and even went to kill the troggs in the little cul-de-sac to the left, something I hadn't done in donkey's years.

We'll see how things develop as I go up in levels. I do love how much everyone seems to appreciate being buffed with a priest's fortitude. I do it all the time on the road and people will often stop what they're doing just to whisper me thanks - I like knowing that those extra HP might really help someone out in the world. My next personal goal is probably going to be to get into a Wailing Caverns run, but there's no rush.