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. 

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

Retail WoW & Me in 2024

Comparing the previous post and this one, I spent about two to three times as many hours in retail in 2024 than I spent in Classic. The uncertainty in the numbers mostly comes from the fact that I revived a lot of old characters this year for which I don't know how much of their /played actually happened in 2024 vs. ye olde days, but either way, the difference is pretty stark.

I just really enjoyed both the end of Dragonflight and the first few months of War Within. Aside from running dungeons with my guildies once a week, my play style tends to be somewhat on and off - I'll go through several weeks of binging quite hard and doing something or other on every single alt, to barely logging in outside of our scheduled dungeon runs for the next few weeks after. I know a lot of Classic players tend to think of retail as having lots of daily/weekly chores you "have" to do, but from my personal experience at least that's an image that's about two expansions out of date. Sure, there are lots of things you can do, especially as a more casual player, but I've found most of it to be very low pressure nowadays.

The two events that had the biggest impact on my stable of characters this year were MoP Remix, which resulted in me levelling five new characters to the level cap from scratch, and the introduction of Warbands with the War Within pre-patch, which suddenly gave long-forgotten characters relevance again now that cross-server and -faction play is almost fully supported and they all share an inventory via the warband bank.

Basically, aside from Shinfur the monk, all characters on this list that aren't on the Azjol-Nerub/Quel'Thalas server cluster were old favourites that got a revival this year.

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker (+10)
  
• 24 days, 13 hours /played (+9 days, 18 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 83 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 73 Cooking, 144 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): Dragon Isles Leatherworking 100 (+10), 129 Classic Skinning (+129), 61 Outland Skinning (+61), 75 Northrend Skinning (+19), 23 Cataclysm Skinning (+3), 85 Legion Skinning (+4), 30 Kul Tiran Skinning (+23), 30 Draenor Cooking (+15), 300 Classic Fishing (+267, had to level that for the fishing pole, lol), 10 Cataclysm Fishing (+5), 30 Kul Tiran Fishing (+15), 855 Archaeology (+756, I randomly decided to max it out one day but gave up because of how terrible the last 50 skill-ups are) 

My preservation evoker remained my main throughout Dragonflight. With War Within, I had a feeling early on that I'd probably want to change roles in group content but I wasn't entirely sure yet, so because making decisions is hard, I still ended up levelling this character through Khaz Algar first and did all the story content on her. When there isn't new story to check out though, she's mostly chilling now.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
  
• 4 days, 17 hours /played
• War Within professions: 83 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 36 Cooking, 48 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Blacksmithing, 295 Classic Mining, 13 Cataclysm Mining

The warrior I levelled during Remix ultimately ended up becoming my new "dungeon main" as I became the tank for our little group of friends doing M+ once a week. It's been... surprisingly chill? I mean, I only play with friends, not pugs, and we only do pretty low keys - I'm sure things become more demanding in high keys, but as it is, I'm finding it to be surprisingly low-stress. I learned to tank during Burning Crusade, where threat was a bitch and losing aggro on a single mob in a heroic could result in a dps or the healer getting insta-gibbed, so just pulling and AoEing things at a good clip while also rotating through my defensives doesn't feel very demanding in comparison.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest (+10)
  
• 8 days, 9 hours /played (+2 days, 23 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 65 Tailoring, 61 Enchanting, 21 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 300 Classic Tailoring (+200), 31 Northrend Tailoring (+26), 45 Cataclysm Tailoring (+43), 74 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+10), 15 Cataclysm Enchanting (+4), 21 Pandaria Enchanting (+1), 74 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+10), 39 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23), 59 Dragon Isles Fishing (+22)

My hobby priest continues to be just that: not my main and not really played a lot in group content, but I just like having a holy priest to do stuff on.

Hekatie - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 11 days, 23 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 71 Inscription, 31 Cooking, 42 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Herbalism, 75 Outland Herbalism, 75 Northrend Herbalism, 75 Cataclysm Herbalism, 300 Classic Inscription, 75 Outland Inscription, 75 Northrend Inscription, 75 Cataclysm Inscription, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 75 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 180 Archaeology

This was one of the old characters I revived after the Warband patch and levelled to 70 via the Radiant Echoes event (you can kind of tell her age based on her having all profession skills up to Cataclysm maxed out). I wasn't actually that keen on death knights when they first came out (the first three posts about them on this blog were all about how death knights suck, lol) but I did eventually manage to get this one levelled up by the end of Wrath and then continued to have some fun playing her in Cata. In TWW so far, frost death knight has been pretty fun to play too - I wrote more about that here.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter (+10)
  
• 4 days, 15 hours /played (+1 day, 21 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 56 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 26 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 140 Classic Leatherworking (+21), 42 Dragon Isles Leatherworking (+24), 6 Outland Skinning (+6), 75 Northrend Skinning (+5), 49 Legion Skinning (+16), 175 Classic Cooking (+46), 32 Dragon Isles Cooking (+18), 76 Classic Fishing (+76), 45 Northrend Fishing (+45), 46 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

I allowed my hunter to grow her hair out this year, but that's about as exciting as things got. I wrote more about my ambivalent relationship with retail hunters in this post. I'm also a bit worried about what the new year will bring as Blizzard is currently looking to take marksmanship hunters' pets away in 11.1, which is so utterly insane I don't even know how anyone could've thought that would be a good idea. There's still time to change course, Blizz!

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
  
• 1 day, 11 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 16 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 15 Classic Skinning

It's the druid I levelled in Remix. As mentioned in this post, she's kind of "my other tank" and I haven't done much with her other than level up her gathering skills and casually gear up a bit.

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
  
• 3 days, 14 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Mining, 55 Outland Mining, 3 Northrend Mining, 300 Classic Skinning, 74 Outland Skinning (I should really go get that last skill point), 12 Northrend Skinning, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 135 Classic Fishing, 50 Archaeology

This is another old alt that got revived. I created her way back in the day, just to stall out at level 15. I then revived her in Cataclysm to explore some of the revamped levelling zones. Her professions seem to indicate that I did also spend some time in early BC content, but I've got to admit that I have absolutely no memory of that. This year, I levelled her to 70 via Radiant Echoes, and I wrote about what it was like to level from 70-80 as holy in this post.

Shinfur - ER

• Level 80 pandaren monk
  
• 1 day, 4 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 83 Engineering, 6 Cooking, 4 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 6 Classic Cooking

It's the monk I levelled in Remix! You can read more about my monk experiences in War Within here. Not much else to say about this one, other than that thanks to the inventing mechanic, engineering is by far the easiest crafting profession to level for some reason.

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue (+10)
  
• 2 day, 22 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 87 Herbalism, 70 Skinning
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 267 Classic Herbalism (+8), 100 Dragon Isles Herbalism (+13), 184 Classic Skinning (+9), 43 Northrend Skinning, 33 Cataclysm Skinning (+10), 19 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 60 Dragon Isles Fishing (+25), 116 Archaeology (+9)

It's my rogue who I still don't particularly enjoy playing but hey, I need her to be able to open lockboxes. More about my experiences with rogueing in War Within can be found here.

Willowie - QT

• Level 74 human warlock
  
• 13 hours /played
• War Within professions: 48 Alchemy, 62 Herbalism
• Other professions: none

It's the warlock I levelled in Remix! I had to relog to take this screenshot because for some reason on the first attempt, the game had forgotten that she owns an incubus and was displaying the succubus instead. Now it's showing the correct pet but I don't know what's up with his wing appearing to go behind the tree in the background?! Small indie company, as the saying goes.

I was also shocked by how many herbs alchemy uses these days. I thought I had a good number of them saved up, but then I was like: "You want me to burn how many of these for each skill-up?!" I also still have no idea how to play this one and have died to random mobs that I aggroed while picking flowers. Part of me keeps thinking that I should just bite the bullet and look up a guide, but another part remains stubborn and maintains that if a class is this clunky to figure out, maybe it deserves to be played less. Make this nonsense easier to understand in game, Blizzard.

Mehg - AN

• Level 72 night elf demon hunter (+2)
  
• 10 days, 21 hours /played (+17 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 30 Mining, 25 Jewelcrafting
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 27 Cataclysm Mining (+10), 74 Legion Jewelcrafting (I don't think this is new, I must have forgotten to write down her old JC skills last year), 100 Shadowlands Jewelcrafting, 79 Dragon Isles Jewelcrafting (+10), 83 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 75 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

My demon hunter, who was my "main alt" in Shadowlands and remained one of my most played characters throughout early Dragonflight just quietly fell by the wayside towards the end of the expansion and I've only barely started levelling her in War Within. I'm not entirely sure why, though I think at least part of it was due to how much of a pain it was to sort out her inventory and the bazillion types of different ores and gems she'd accumulated over time. Once I also accidentally clicked the "clean up my bank" button and there are few things I've done in a game that I regretted as much as that one button click. I should be in a better place now though.

Shimeri - AN

• Level 70 dwarf shaman
  
• 4 days, 8 hours /played
• Professions: none

The shaman that was my "Remix main" has oddly ended up being the last of my Remix characters to get levelled in War Within, even though resto shaman is the healer flavour of the month right now. I'll get to it when I get to it.

Daerys - DS

• Level 70 draenei mage
  
• 30 days, 9 hours /played
• Professions: 300 Classic Mining, 75 Outland Mining, 75 Northrend Mining, 75 Cataclysm Mining, 305 Classic Jewelcrafting, 80 Outland Jewelcrafting, 70 Northrend Jewelcrafting, 32 Cataclysm Jewelcrafting, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 3 Northrend Fishing, 11 Cataclysm Fishing, 7 Archaeology

This used to be my "main Alliance alt" back in the day. I wrote a bit more about her history and how I ended up reviving her for the draenei heritage quest in this post. Again, you can kind of tell that this is an old character that saw a lot of play up to Wrath from the profession skills. I plan to take her to 80 eventually.

Shinlu - AN

• Level 68 human monk (+7)
  
• 22 days, 14 hours /played (+5 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 160 Kul Tiran Leatherworking (+10), 54 Northrend Skinning (+3), 100 Legion Skinning (+20), 29 Dragon Isles Skinning (+24), 63 Kul Tiran Cooking (+15), 16 Draenor Fishing, 690 Archaeology (+12)

My old Shadowlands main still hasn't really seen much love, but apparently gained seven levels in only five hours of play time, because that's how retail rolls these days. I remember trying out the follower dungeon feature on her when it came out, but other than that I don't think I did very much, though those profession skill-ups must have come from somewhere I guess.

Tidella - AN

• Level 54 Kul Tiran shaman (+6)
  
• 1 day, 21 hours /played (+4 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 77 Outland Mining (+77), 3 Outland Engineering (+3)

Similar story here, with six levels gained in four hours of play, all of which were me going on a mining spree in Outland because I was after some old mats for some reason at that particular moment.

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 19 human paladin
  
• 1 day, 22 hours /played
• Professions: 130 Classic Blacksmithing, 121 Classic Mining, 109 Classic Cooking, 97 Classic Fishing

This is the very first character I ever created, a paladin on a German server. Like several other old characters, I decided to take her out for a spin after the Warband patch. It's kind of funny that I remember her being in her mid-20s before the level squish, but post-squish she got to quest through some of the human starter zones all over again, which was a nice nostalgia trip even with all the post-Cataclysm changes.

Eartha - AN

• Level 26 earthen shaman
  
• 2 hours /played
• Professions: none

I wasn't that keen on the earthen when they were first announced, but I did end up liking them in the story, so after I'd unlocked them I decided to make one just for the heck of it. Also, they have a racial that gives a massive boost to exploration XP... but that's a topic for another post.

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.

MoP Remix: A Retrospective

Mists of Pandaria: Remix is wrapping up in a few days, so I wanted to talk about it one more time. I haven't really written about playing it since mid-June, when I think I sounded a bit disenchanted with it after my initially very positive impressions.

I kept chipping away at it at a slow pace, however, and it soon became evident that a lot of the people who had been super intense about it in the first month (such as my very own husband *cough*) had achieved most of their goals and dropped off. This was very noticeable from dungeon and raid finder queues growing in length (one evening I queued for one of the wings of Siege of Orgrimmar as both tank and healer and had to literally wait for an hour to get a pop) and from slightly less rush-rush madness across the board. That's not to say that there were no longer any overpowered characters farming things... but somewhat fewer than I would have expected. Since the power level of the special event-specific cloak is not capped, I would have expected to see more and more powerful characters over time, but the reality seemed to be that - like when you enter a cheat code in a single-player game and get bored after the initial rush of excitement wears off - a lot of people who worked hard to max out their gear in the first couple of weeks quickly got tired of actually using it. I started to see a lot more weak alts around, and even the stronger characters weren't running around one-shotting world bosses anymore.

Nowhere was this change more apparent than in the dungeon and raid finder, which meant that queueing for group content became a wilder experience than ever. You see, with so many runs effectively involving no gameplay other than sprinting after someone who'd ground out insane power levels, roles were pretty meaningless, and it made sense to queue as everything your class could do just to make pops happen, regardless of what spec you were actually intending to play. But as the player population shifted, you'd more often find yourself in runs without anyone as seriously OP, which would then lead to mayhem and confusion.

I remember queueing into a Stormstout Brewery on my druid who only had tank talents, getting put in as a healer, and being aghast when it turned out that people in this low-level group actually needed healing (I wouldn't be surprised if the actual tank hadn't actually been ready to tank either). We very slowly made our way through the first couple of rooms with multiple deaths, until someone mercifully quit the group and was replaced by an OP paladin who then proceeded to carry us through the rest of the run.

On the other hand though, I really loved that one time when I got into heroic Blood in the Snow on a fairly fresh 70 who I thought was pretty squishy, and it turned out that the rogue and priest I got grouped with were even squishier. We wiped on the very first trash pull, and then died a couple more times for good measure before we actually got our act together and started using proper tactics, such as focus targeting, using cooldowns and kiting. That was quite exciting!

I ultimately ended up levelling five characters through Remix - which is fewer than some, but still quite a lot by my own standards. I would've had time to do more, but as I think I stated before, I just don't see the point of having an endless number of characters at the level cap that have no history, no professions and that I don't know how to play. The five that I did level all had distinct reasons for existing.

First there was my resto shaman, who ended up being my Remix "main" and who quested her way through all the content with my husband's bear druid. Choosing to be a healer soon turned out to be a disappointment, seeing how healers were pretty useless 99% of the time except to facilitate faster queue pops, but I persevered with my healing spec because I wanted to at least try to familiarise myself with the current resto shaman kit a bit.

I will say that even without upgrading my gear, just by doing all that questing and group content, I eventually reached a level where I felt pretty powerful in the open world even as a healing spec, one-shotting regular mobs and able to kill elites in a few hits. I ended up completing all the Remix-specific achievements, and since there was something pretty zen to the whole thing once I hit a comfortable power level, I even ground out some of the non-Remix-specific Pandaria achievements and rewards, such as getting the mount for 100,000 Timeless Coins or killing every single rare on the Timeless Isle (after the War Within pre-patch merged achievement progress from different characters, it turned out I was only missing a few). I also ground out the dinosaur mount from the Isle of Giants and slowly duo-ed Oondasta to death with a random worgen death knight (I hadn't planned to do it that way, but I saw him start and could tell that he wasn't going to survive on his own, so I joined in and ended up heal-tanking the fight while he just added dps).

My next three alts were primarily the result of me trying to be clever about my goal of grinding out the cosmetics (and failing). While any Remix character could buy all the appearances, drops of armour and weapons were still based on your current class, so my shaman for example could only pick up mail gear and weapons a shaman could actually equip. I thought I would be clever by levelling a class of every armour type and saving myself some Bronze by acquiring gear sets "organically". This only worked in part, however. I did get several world and dungeon sets on each character, but in general Remix didn't really seem to be optimised for organic set acquisition. For example I remember one of the mail sets just wouldn't complete, and the UI said that the only source of the two pieces I was missing was a vendor... that turned out to not exist in Remix, and I guess those pieces weren't added to the special drop tables either, so I had to take a regular character to Pandaria to buy those bits for gold to complete the set.

At least I did have a workaround for that particular problem... my attempts to collect the Throne of Thunder LFR tier set for shamans were a lot less successful, as the boots forever eluded me, no matter how many times I queued for the wing that was supposed to drop them. This was stupid in so far as the armour sets weren't even that expensive, and I honestly had enough Bronze to just buy the set after a mere couple of runs, but I still had it in my head that the "natural" way should be better than buying everything from the vendor. It just wasn't.

Anyway, I still ended up with some useful characters levelled, so it wasn't a complete loss. I already mentioned that I created a protection warrior for example. Warrior is a class I've just never got along with in any incarnation of the game, despite its popularity, so this was actually the first time I reached the current level cap with one. I also had a lot of fun charging and leaping through dungeons, though I don't think that really taught me anything about tanking, considering that "tanking" in Remix basically just meant running ahead and spamming your AoE skills, no mitigation or defensives needed.

For the leather, I ended up levelling another druid. I did already have one from the original Mists of Pandaria that's somewhere in the low 60s and that I just never bothered to level all the way to the cap, but with druids being able to play so many roles and me not being a fan of constant respecs anyway, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to make another one. I mostly played her as a bear since I enjoyed watching my husband's fuzzy bear butt and wanted to see more of that kind of thing. But again, like with the warrior... just running around hitting your spammable AoE isn't really representative of tanking.

Finally, my cloth wearer ended up being a warlock. Like with the warrior, this was the first time I ended up getting this class to the cap, but it was a lot less comfortable. I levelled as destruction and honestly had no idea what I was doing at any point. Fortunately levelling a dps class through group content in Remix required very little in terms of knowledge or skill. While she and her incubus are kind of cute (you can't see it in the screenshot, but she's got green hair under that hood), I can't see myself playing this character much in the future because everything about the modern warlock toolkit just confuses me.

So that's four characters, and as my fifth I eventually ended up creating a dps monk on my old Horde server, Earthen Ring. I had seen Belghast talk about using the event to "seed" characters on different servers in case he wanted to play with friends on those servers later, and this seemed like a clever idea to me at the time. (I had no idea that the pre-patch would effectively make servers obsolete, making the whole project pointless from that perspective.) Still, it wasn't a total loss as I also used the opportunity to check out Pandaria from Horde side, something I had never done before. I didn't do all the quests though, as I found out in Jade Forest that the neutral Pandaren quest hubs seemed to be exactly the same as for Alliance, so it made sense to me to focus on the content that had obvious faction flavour, such as the Landfall campaign and the Isle of Thunder intro. I was rather amused to see the Horde actually express disappointment about their recruitment of the Hozen once they found out that the Alliance had got the much cleverer fish people, and seeing the whole drama around the purge of Dalaran play out from Horde side was certainly interesting. Seeing Lor'themar get mad enough to chuck a park bench into a fountain was definitely... something.

All in all, I really enjoyed Remix, despite some early disappointments and the pressure of FOMO. It really hit me in this J1mmy video about WoW how he notes that MMO expansions are about more than just the lore and the quests, but about being there and having a shared experience with other people. And in that respect, roping off an old expansion and sending players off to play exclusively in that content for three months worked so much better than solo-levelling through Chromie Time and being booted out after completing two zones worth of quests. Sure, some parts of the original content were missing, and it still suffered from the standard WoW problem of it being way too easy to accidentally experience things wildly out of order, but at least it was only things from that expansion. I played in original Mists of Pandaria for a few months (which was still longer than the duration of Remix!) but there were quite a few things I didn't get to see at the time, and it was really nice to both re-experience content I'd only really seen once before and to go and finally see the things I'd missed back then, such as Siege of Orgrimmar. There were a lot of things about the end of MoP that had honestly always been kind of vague to me as I hadn't experienced them for myself and had to piece things together from later references that were rather disjointed. Being able to see the story for myself was quite enlightening.

So I really enjoyed the "time capsule" aspect of the whole thing. As for the special cloak, tinker gems and getting super OP... eh, I honestly think I could've done without those things. I mean, there were parts of it that were fun: the tinker gem that made you immune to fall damage for example definitely encouraged you to try new things, and was quite a source of entertainment whenever people forgot that they hadn't slotted it on their newest alt yet. However, I feel they also shone a spotlight on some of the worst issues of the WoW community and dialled them up to eleven, such as the widespread competitive urge to be the first to no-life it to the top, or people with vastly different power levels and goals being thrown together in group content. I remember when I first got annoyed with some of the extreme rushing in dungeons and raids that would even make you miss out on bosses, I did some searching to see if there were people talking about that topic on reddit or the forums, and some of the (often highly upvoted!) responses I saw to the mere suggestion to have some consideration for your fellow players were bad enough to make one lose faith in humanity as a whole. The saving grace was that the worst of those people also seemed to be the first ones to be done with the mode, leaving things to mellow down somewhat over time, as I already mentioned at the start of this post. Ultimately I think I would've enjoyed Remix no less if it had just been about playing through Pandaria with "normal" characters.

I would also happily take part in another Remix - WoD and Legion would be prime contenders for me as expansions I didn't play at all back in the day. Though I think I'd also enjoy a remixed Burning Crusade, just to spend some time in that content again without the weird constant pressure to keep up that defined much of my experience in its Classic iteration.

Classic WoW & Me in 2023

Alright, here it is: the by now traditional annual look at my Classic characters and what progress I made with them throughout the past year.

The first thing to note is that this was the first year of me playing Classic that didn't leave me in a drastically different place at the end of the year compared to where I was at the start of it. I was playing on Classic era at the start of 2023, and I'm still active there at the end of it, even if my activity levels have declined. That bit of stability has honestly been kind of nice, though it also makes me wonder what's in store for next year. I love Classic era for what it is and I do like my guild, but at this point, I also feel ready for something a bit different again. At the moment that's just manifesting in me playing a bit less and spending more time in retail or SWTOR, but let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if 2024 brought with it some kind of change to my play patterns again.

Classic era - Horde

Shika - Pyrewood Village

• Level 60 Hunter
• +7 days played

My hunter continued to see the most play, just living the endgame life for most of the year: farming materials and joining raids. I even got to spend some time in Naxx (as you can see from all the tier three gear she's sporting in this screenshot), something I hadn't really planned for initially. It just got too time-consuming/clashed with other things eventually.

Sadly, since I stopped raiding I've been feeling woefully unmotivated to play her, except to keep logging in and crafting/selling Gyrochromatoms and Mithril Casings on the auction house. Hey, someone's gotta supply those levelling questers!

Shilu - PV

• Level 60 Druid
• +6 days, 8 hours played
• +54 Fishing (maxed out)

As my second most played character, my druid maxed out her fishing (with me adding another Stranglethorn fishing contest victory to my tally) and spent some time healing in the easier raids, mostly ZG. She actually hit exalted with Zandalar not too long ago.

She's still sporting her original feral/resto hybrid spec but I'm not sure I used it to tank even a single dungeon this year. I've just not felt motivated to do so.

Shintau - PV

• Level 53 Shaman (+12)
• +2 days, 21 hours played
• +25 Skinning (maxed out), +33 (Tribal) Leatherworking, +37 Cooking (maxed out), +40 First Aid (maxed out), +18 Fishing (maxed out)
  

My first Classic character from back in 2019, I swear this gal is going to be the slowest levelled WoW character ever (in terms of real time passed). How is the still not 60 after all these years?! The current hump to get over is that I really want to do a Sunken Temple quest run, but... effort. I'll get there one day.

Shinny - PV

• Level 44 Mage (+8)
• +1 day, 3 hours played
• +34 Tailoring, +22 Enchanting, +37 Cooking, +1 First Aid, +5 Fishing
  

Nothing too exciting to report here. I just made some progress through questing and running a couple of dungeons when the mood struck me. I also got my mount, woo!

Fooba - Mirage Raceway

• Level 26 Warrior (+10)
• +19 hours played
• +40 Mining, 124 Blacksmithing (changed from Skinning), no change in Cooking, +12 First Aid, +6 Fishing
  

I enjoyed levelling my food bank alt for a while, and even switched one of her primary professions from skinning to blacksmithing. I also remember having a good time fury-tanking Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep. But then I just... stopped.

Gemba - MR

• Level 23 Warlock (+4)
• +12 hours played
• +32 Herbalism, +56 Skinning, no change in Cooking, +15 First Aid, +46 Fishing

My experience on my other bank alt was similar and I did play her a little, but not as much as I had planned. She still hasn't finished either of the quest chains for the succubus/incubus for example, even though I was keen to get to that a year ago.

Tir - Nethergarde Keep

• Level 14 Rogue (+5)
• +5 hours played
• +53 Herbalism, +82 Skinning, +1 Cooking, no fishing yet, +50 First Aid

My little troll rogue just did a few more quests in the Barrens; that's pretty much it.

Classic era - Alliance

My Alliance characters basically became completely neglected this year and nothing has changed about their stats compared to last year except for maybe a few minutes of play time here or there from occasional logins to check on something or other. (My hunter and paladin bounce some mails between them occasionally, and sometimes I remember to use my salt shaker cooldown on my hunter for example.)

The only characters that saw a little bit of action earlier in the year were my warrior and my priest, and the reason for this was that this was when I was at my most involved with the census project on the Classic era Discord, to the point that I also wanted to keep track of the Alliance population, and the best way to get scans (which can only be triggered by clicking about a hundred times at certain intervals) was to simply do a bit of questing every day.

Razorr - PV

• Level 33 Warrior (+3)
• +8 hours played
• +30 Mining, +57 Skinning, +12 Cooking, +46 First Aid, +4 Fishing 

I remember doing some questing in Stranglethorn Vale and I also seem to remember tanking a Razorfen Kraul with her, but I'm worried about my memories of this level range getting muddled with her "BC version".

Shintar - PV

• Level 32 Priest (+2)
• +7 hours played
• +4 Mining, +31 Engineering, +35 Cooking, +3 First Aid, +12 Fishing

Based on the robe in the screenshot I must have healed a Gnomer run, and I also have vivid memories of questing in Hillsbrad Foothills. Not much else going on though.

Isa - Gehennas

• Level 23 Paladin
• 1 day, 4 hours played
• 146 Alchemy, 179 Herbalism, 134 Cooking, 105 First Aid, 119 Fishing

Different server cluster, but since I did get her past level 20, I thought I should also give a quick shout-out to the little paladin I made on Gehennas. The "empty server experience" was fun for a little while, but to be honest I think I was hoping that things would pick up a bit with the way era was booming at the time, and when that didn't happen I eventually got bored.

Hardcore

Lossy - Stitches

• Level 22 Mage (deceased)
  
• 22 hours played
• 134 Herbalism, 82 Mining, 123 Cooking, 87 First Aid, 91 Fishing 

My stint in hardcore only lasted for a little while, but it seems only fair to give a shout-out to Lossy the mage for keeping me busy for almost a day of real time.

Season of Disovery

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 25 Priest
• 1 day, 12 hours played
• 140 Alchemy, 150 Herbalism, 150 Cooking, 129 First Aid, 122 Fishing

Finally, there is of course the new hotness, Season of Discovery. Aside from this priest, I've also created a few more alts there already, but as none of them have even hit level 10 yet, it doesn't feel worth calling them out at this point. I suspect that this might end up being my main Classic focus in 2024 (in one form or another), but only time will tell. Seeing all my era characters again does kind of make me want to play them again too...