Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Siren Isle Is a Bit Boring

I'm a bit behind in terms of talking about what's new in retail, partially because I wanted to prioritise wrapping up my end-of-year summaries and my WoW Memories series, partially because what's been going on hasn't been terribly interesting to be honest.

War Within's patch 11.0.7 came out a month ago now; the husband and I didn't bother to even visit the new place that came with it until about two weeks later, and we were basically kind of bored with it after a single afternoon of playing there. I feel a bit bad saying this because I do appreciate the way Blizzard have been trying to give us these smaller content patches with world content between the larger ones since Dragonflight, and someone clearly tried to make the best of it by coming up with all these toys and gadgets that you get to play around with on the island but it just wasn't compelling to me at all.

The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is with the Forbidden Reach, which was 10.0.7's "patch island", but still managed to have quite a bit more going on. Most importantly for me, it was an actual part of the Dragon Isles that was connected to the expansion both in terms of lore and land mass - you could fly there straight from the Waking Shores without a loading screen. Comparatively, Siren Isle is tiny and nobody really knows where it is, as you get there by talking to a goblin on a zeppelin and bam, one short loading screen later you've arrived.

You can't fly on Siren Isle, and to be honest it wouldn't make sense to do so because you'd barely be able to lift off without already overshooting it. (Edit: I just read that we'll unlock it in another two weeks, but to be honest that still feels a bit pointless.) It's a tiny, barren piece of rock without any gathering nodes and barely even any plants and animals. I read somewhere that it was actually created from an Island Expedition map built during BfA that the devs didn't end up using back then. That certainly explains why it feels so disconnected from the rest of Khaz Algar and has dead Kul Tirans on it.

When we first arrived it actually seemed crazy busy because there were constant NPC shouts all around us, but we quickly learned that the three rotating mini bosses just come with a lot of noise attached. Beyond that there are just some weeklies that basically ask you to run around the isle and kill everything in sight for twenty minutes. Woo.

Like I said, I actually feel a bit bad about being so "ungrateful" for this new content, but it's just kind of underwhelming for what it is. I guess I appreciate that the new ring with unique gems (a feature that I didn't love in the Forbidden Reach either and could've done without) at least doesn't come with quite the same level of inventory clutter as the last one.

The Zones of The War Within

This is a post that I've kind of been meaning to write ever since the expansion launched, but I wanted to take all the quests into consideration as well, and it took the husband and me some time to actually get through all the side quests, one weekend play session at a time. Then other things came up that caused me to delay publishing this... but with the expansion's first new patch zone on the horizon, I figured it was way past time for me to actually get this out.

In Dragonflight, Blizzard decided to mix things up with their zone design compared to previous expansions, designing the environment and content with flight in mind from the beginning. This was something they had never done before, but in terms of the zones' general feel, they were relatively conservative. Personally, I kind of got the impression that they were trying to earn player goodwill by creating zones that were reminiscent of a "best of" of some of the most popular zones. The rolling green hills of the Ohn'aran Plains reminded me of Nagrand, and the Azure Span definitely had some Grizzly Hills vibes. The Waking Shores were somewhat unique in their particular combination of biomes I guess, but in general, I'd describe the overall vibe of the Dragon Isles as "Remember all the places in WoW you loved in the past? This is similar, just bigger."

In War Within with its underground theme, the zone designers had to be a bit more daring, and it shows.

Isle of Dorn

First off, am I the only one who keeps wanting to call this place "Khaz Algar"? I know that's the name of all the zones combined, but in my head I keep wanting to use that name and Isle of Dorn the other way round. Anyway...

This is probably the most conservative of TWW's four launch zones, as it's basically a bunch of green hills. I don't want to downplay the designers' efforts and how they tried to add distinction to different sub-zones (the forest with the giant elite bees is definitely one to remember and navigate carefully), but at its heart this zone recalls other dwarven settlements such as pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan and the non-destroyed parts of Twilight Highlands, just with more of a titanic twist in the architecture.

It also houses the expansion's main hub, the Earthen city of Dornogal, which is very open and inviting. (My only problem is that with all the buildings looking kind of blocky and similar, I often forget where I am when I log in and need to open the map to orientate myself.) I think this was an intentional choice as the other zones have us descending into increasingly uninviting territory underground, so there's always an aspect of "coming up for air" to returning to Dornogal.

Story-wise, the zone is all about the Earthen, which I thought were going to be very boring but actually turned out to be quite interesting in my opinion. They have this theme of being machine-like and mostly speak in kind of robotic voices, but the ones that have broken free of their programming/"directives" talk in a more animated way. Also, for being this robotic people strictly bound by ancient traditions, they also have a surprisingly... twee side. There's this village called Rumbleshire whose vibe somewhat reminded me of a hobbit town, what with being sent out to look for lost rock-sheep and the like.

The Ringing Deeps

The first zone you enter as you descend down the Coreway is the Ringing Deeps, and I think this is probably my least favourite zone so far. It's still solid, but I don't consider the scenery particularly pleasant and it doesn't really have a strong unique vibe either. Of all of the underground zones this one's probably the closest to feeling like "Zeralek Caverns 2.0", just with more browns and greens instead of blues.

The dominant theme of the zone is more Earthen, who are even more robotic than their cousins upstairs and look after the ancient titanic machinery, but at this point I was just kind of like... "okay, whatever". The devs did what they could with that theme but it just didn't grab me. All the areas are more mines or ruins, and tend to feature different types of annoying wildlife including "that one area with the elites where nobody goes unless the big world quest is up", which is another thing that feels very Zeralek 2.0.

Hallowfall

This is the zone that everybody's been talking about even since before launch and I can see why. Despite being underground, it kind of pretends to be an overground zone by having a sea shore and a fake "sun" in the sky in the form of the giant crystal Beledar, which alternates between glowing with friendly yellow light and taking on a voidy, dark purple hue. I've got to admit I initially didn't get what all the hype was about because I originally only witnessed this change during the storyline, so I genuinely thought it was just a one-time event for that... but no, once I spent more time in the zone, I realised it happens on the regular and it's always awe-inspiring to hear the bells ring and the music change as the sudden darkness descends - or the relief when Beledar lights up again. It's kind of funny actually because even in its "dark" state the zone doesn't really get that dark... but all the other environmental changes combined can really send a chill up your spine.

Aside from that, I think a lot of the zone's appeal comes from its resident faction, the Hallowfall Arathi. When I first heard about these guys being a long-lost expedition, I thought they were from the Arathi Highlands... but no, apparently they're from the Arathi Empire somewhere else on Azeroth where we haven't been. An interesting example of how the game can actually make up wild new lore after twenty years but people won't mind as long as it superficially looks and sounds like something they think they already know. I can recommend this Platinum WoW video on the subject if you want to learn more.

What makes the Arathi appealing (in my opinion) is that they subtly recall beloved parts of the original game. The theme of helping farmers on the frontiers reminded me of the original Westfall even if the context was quite different, and the fact that the Arathi are basically an army of paladins wielding the light and have constructed all these grandiose buildings kind of portrays them as what the Scarlet Crusade could've been if they hadn't gone evil. I get why people dig that!

I also do like this zone both for gathering purposes as well as its general look and feel, though I've got to say that for me it really suffers from its positioning, in the sense that it's the zone that's effectively the furthest away from the capital (while Azj-Kahet is another level down, you immediately get a direct portal to Dornogal when you arrive there in the story, making it much more convenient to travel to and from than Hallowfall).

Azj-Kahet

And yes, Azj-Kahet! The best way to describe this zone in my opinion is that this is the Azjol-Nerub zone that was cut from Wrath of the Lich King, fourteen years later at last. It's big and creepy and yet has surprised me by not feeling all that hostile for being the classic endgame zone occupied by the baddies. Mob density isn't that high in these new, bigger zones, at least when compared to classic endgame zones like the Plaguelands, Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown (something I actually consider a positive) and the Nerubians are also characterised as not universally evil, but rather as suffering from leadership that has been corrupted by Xal'atath. You immediately make contact with a bunch of rebels that want to work with you to overthrow said leadership, so it's made clear that there is a lot of nuance going on with the different factions instead of all of them just being a race of baddies.

You even get to freely walk around their capital, the City of Threads... which I've seen some people compare unfavourably to Suramar, something I don't know how to rate as I didn't play during Legion and I assume that questing through Suramar in Chromie time doesn't have quite the same level of threat to it. The City of Threads isn't that bad to traverse, largely thanks to flight, but even if a disapproving guard does catch you and throws you out, it's mostly just kind of amusing. Personally I'm happy with that though - I appreciate that this endgame zone isn't overwhelmingly dark and hostile, but still a place where you can quest without feeling like you'll have to fight for your life at every given moment.

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I'm not sure how I'd rank these four zones, other than that Ringing Deeps would be last. All the others each have their own unique appeal that I appreciate, despite not being a huge fan of the underground theme. In general, Blizz have tried hard to make things fit the themes of verticality and being underground as much as possible while at the same time really downplaying those very same features, if that makes sense. All three underground zones are huge and well-lit so never feel that oppressive, and there are "slipstreams" that easily allow your flying mount to ascend from a deeper zone to a higher-up one without having to worry about vigour. (Something I totally didn't manage to figure out by myself and hadn't even noticed until someone else told me.) It's an interesting design and just about works for me right now, though I do wonder how I'll feel about it after spending the next twelve months mostly underground...

Early Musings on The War Within

The War Within's official launch happened less than a week ago, and as usual with new WoW content like this, the husband has been binging hard while kind of dragging me along for the ride, meaning that I've spent most of my limited free time last week exploring the new expansion with him.

So far I've hit level 80 on one character and started levelling a second. I'd heard in a dev interview prior to launch that they'd trimmed down the main storyline to only events they felt were absolutely necessary for players to take part in to understand what was going on, while moving a lot more optional story content into side quests. This sounded reasonable enough to me, but seeing it in action was still kind of weird.

The husband and I started with our usual modus operandi of just doing all the things, which meant that we were level 75 by the time we'd finished the first zone, and keeping in mind that access to a lot of endgame activities is tied to campaign completion, I suggested that we should just push through the main story for the remaining three zones to not delay unlocking this additional content for too long. This resulted in us gaining access to endgame at level 79, meaning that the main storyline plus all side quests in the first zone did more for our levelling than the entire rest of the storyline spread out across the remaining three zones. That was more than a little surprising, though I don't mind having to do more than just the campaign to level up.

It's not as if there is a lack of fun things to do. If anything, I'd argue that the number of indicators for things to do on your map gets a bit overwhelming, especially once you unlock world quests and all that jazz at the end of the campaign. At one point the husband and I touched down in the third zone near some farms where it looked like there were a few world quests right next to each other... but then it turned out that there were more than just a few, plus there were also bonus objectives, and rares kept spawning in, and if you lit a fire in front of any of the many farm houses an NPC would come out and offer you a daily quest - something that was only visible to the original clicker and not to other members of the group and which caused us quite an amount of confusion. We just ran in circles killing and clicking things for what felt like ages and the whole thing just made my head swim.

Overall I've been having a lot of fun though. Not that that's saying a lot - the first few weeks of a WoW expansion are always fun; the discontent with this or that feature usually follows a few months later. Still, considering I had a lot of reservations about what I'd seen and heard about the War Within pre-launch, it's not doing too badly so far. I wouldn't say that all my concerns have been dispelled - while the zones are big and beautiful for example, I'm definitely feeling that difference between overground and underground in my head, with an urge to always return to the one overground zone at the end of each session. We'll just have to see how things feel a few months into the expansion.

I looked back at my first impressions of Dragonflight for comparison, and Blizzard did sadly ditch some of the things that charmed me about that expansion from day one. I loved the boat ride to the Dragon Isles for example, but this time we're back to having to go through an auto-granted scenario, which I can already tell will either be a nuisance in the future (I think of every alt that's been auto-granted the quest telling them to go to the Shadowlands while levelling up) or make it confusing how to actually start the expansion later down the line (to this day, I don't know how you start the Legion story outside of Chromie time).

Dragonflight's sense of hope and optimism coupled with whimsical exploration is once again replaced by a sudden, potentially world-ending threat that overrides everything else. I remember last expansion I saw some lore discussion about just how the Dragon Isles "awakened" so they could be found after being hidden for so long, but this time around there's remarkably little excitement surrounding the fact that we're going to a place that seemingly hasn't had any contact with the outside world in forever. Magni just has a vision of where to go I guess, and Jaina and Thrall know where to point the boats later on in the story. The Earthen reject us as trespassers for about five seconds before we're actually all welcome and wander about as if we owned the place. It's a bit odd in my opinion how much is just taken for granted here.

The "story regression" I was worried about hasn't really been in evidence yet, exactly... a lot of the main levelling storyline actually had a similar vibe to Dragonflight, with conflicts between factions needing to be resolved and people talking about their feelings. The intro scenario though was chock-full of throwbacks to tropes I can't say I've missed, such as having a bunch of death and destruction for shock value, our characters being dumb and accidentally helping the baddie do something awful, and a well-established, powerful character suddenly being completely useless in the face of the newest villain to show how cool the latter is.

Still, overall I enjoyed what I've seen of the story content so far, though I can kind of see at this point why some of it may be a bit too touchy-feely for people's tastes. In Dragonflight, the storyline for the black dragonflight was one of my favourites, as I thought it painted an interesting picture of the messy nature of people trying to change and improve, and the dynamic of Wrathion and Sabellian as both allies and rivals was really interesting. But there was still a plot beyond that, such as the question of who should become the new leader of the black dragonflight, and just what Deathwing had been up to in Aberrus.

In War Within so far, both Alleria and Anduin have an emotional journey in the early questing, but there's very little meat to that part of the story beyond their feelings (if that makes sense) which did feel a bit weird to me. I much preferred spending time with Moira and Dagran, because while they also had a few emotional moments, they were also curious and engaged with the world around them, actually doing stuff and driving the plot forward.

I have been kind of surprised to see a lot of content creators and people on reddit praise the new story to the heavens because while I think it's been engaging and fun enough so far, it doesn't feel dramatically different to me from anything that came before. I've been rather bemused to see Preach for example talk about how this expansion is going to be different and the story is so worth it if you can only prevent yourself from skipping everything... like, are you saying you've been skipping those previous expansion stories that you've done so much complaining about? No wonder you're not enjoying what you're not actually paying attention to; any story is better if you actually engage with it...

I'm very curious to see how reception of The War Within is going to evolve over the coming weeks and months. In some parts I'm seeing huge hype, but I'm also seeing some pushback against it, and anecdotal reports of people's friends lists remaining empty as fewer people have decided to come back for this expansion than for the last one. In the week or so leading up to launch, I was getting absolutely bombarded with marketing for the expac, with every other reddit ad encouraging me to "play The War Within now", and I'm still seeing those ads a week later, while we haven't heard any proud announcements from Blizzard about what a great launch the expansion had.

I thought the call of Chris Metzen would surely bring a lot of old-timers back (and maybe it has; I just don't know), plus Dragonflight's overall good reputation should've gotten the word out that retail WoW has been in a solid place gameplay-wise for a couple of years now. But maybe there's just too much of a divide now between entrenched players loving their new Warbands and those who cynically left during BfA and Shadowlands? The people who are actually playing mostly seem to be having a blast, but is that good enough at this point?

Guardians of the Dream (Casual 10.2 Review)

Coming back to retail, one thing I really miss about the old days is the community interactions around newly released content. There's still plenty of WoW content being created, but as far as I can tell it's almost exclusively guides or speculation about the future, such as when and what the next patch will be. I miss the days when everyone would gather around the watering hole in comment sections to share their thoughts about the newest current content for example.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that patch 10.2 came out a couple of weeks ago and I basically have no idea how it's been received by the wider player base. Now, I've had to do some spoiler-dodging since I don't want to see the end-of-raid cinematic until I can see it in game for myself, which won't happen until the new raid is fully unlocked in LFR, and that's something that won't happen for another couple of weeks. But there's plenty of other stuff people could be talking about, and I haven't really seen it.

The first thing that really struck me when entering the new Emerald Dream zone for the first time was that there was a loading screen - which isn't really unusual, and we are entering an alternate dimension of sorts, but considering how smoothly all the other Dragonflight zones have been connected until now, it still felt a bit jarring. I guess I would've expected to be able to just fly though the portal seamlessly.

The zone itself is gorgeous and the predominant shade of green kind of reminds me of Zereth Mortis for some reason, which isn't a bad thing, as I quite liked that zone too. Except instead of being slightly alien and filled with strange tech, the Emerald Dream is flowery and druidic.

I have slightly mixed feeling about Amirdrassil, the new world tree central to the zone. I thought the story decision to burn down Teldrassil for shock value in BfA was bad, and the night elves kind of "deserve" a new home... but going from planting its seed mere months ago to having a ginormous tree so quickly feels a bit weird and unearned to me. I know magic is a thing in this world and all, but they don't even attempt to give any sort of explanation for it.

I would also say that the whole story up to the raid is a bit... cheesy? I don't expect particularly deep writing from WoW, but this was somewhat flat even by that standard. I will say that the big battle leading up to the raid had something going for it though. The husband had a good laugh blowing the Horn of Cenarius next to every single NPC to see what they would say, and while he joked about the reinforcements appearing "like the Avengers", I've got to say I appreciated that all those powerful characters actually did show up to help defend an important objective... unlike past expansions, where you'd wonder why e.g. someone like Jaina was a no-show when it came to defending the freaking planet against the Legion.

All that said, I really love the general activities in the zone so far. It's funny because my husband had a peek before we started questing there together, and he commented that the events in it seemed kind of boring to him but he had a hunch that I would like them, and he wasn't wrong. The zone's big public event, called the Superbloom, basically involves following a giant walking tree around while clicking on all kinds of shinies on the ground, with the latter being one of my favourite things to do in any MMO.

I also love the mechanics of the dream seeds. Again, the husband said he found it boring to just plant a seed and wait three minutes. But you don't have to just stand there, you can always collect more shinies around the plant during that time! I think it's pretty ingenious design to be honest, the way the various sources of dew drops appear the moment the plant starts growing. Also, while you can technically plant and boost a seed to its maximum capacity by yourself, it's quite resource-expensive to do it that way, so casual collaboration is heavily encouraged and pays off handsomely. I could happily fly in circles and contribute to other people's seeds for hours.

Speaking of flying, fully exploring the new zone unlocked regular flying on the Dragon Isles, and I've got to say it's been nice to have it available as a supplementary mode of transport. I still use my dragonriding mount most of the time because of how much faster it is, but it's handy to also have the regular flying mount on hand for certain occasions where you want to perform a precision landing on a small branch for example, or if you want to quickly hop around short distances between nearby objectives (such as several gathering nodes), for which mounting and working up momentum on your dragon would be overkill.

We're supposed to be getting more content before the next expansion, but this is supposedly the last major patch. I've gotta say there are worse places to spend the better part of the year waiting for the next expansion.

Kalimdor Cup

My play time rotates a lot at the moment. One week I'm all about Classic, then something in retail grabs my interest, then SWTOR is king again. One activity that had my attention in Dragonflight the other week was a limited-time event called the Kalimdor Cup. I worked really hard to finish all my goals related to it before it was supposed to end - naturally Blizzard then went ahead and extended it by another week. Oh well.

When I first heard about this event, I thought it meant that Blizzard was going to unlock dragonriding in the old world sooner than expected, but that was not the case. As it stands, you still have to flap to all the race locations in Kalimdor the old-fashioned way - it's just that when you talk to the NPC that starts the race, you're put on a generic dragonriding mount and off you go. A few seconds after you finish the race, it disappears and you get teleported back to the starting point.

I still really enjoy dragonriding... though my attempts to get gold on all the advanced courses on the Dragon Isles haven't got very far. I remember falling down that particular rabbit hole one Saturday morning and it felt like three hours later I'd managed to complete only one zone - I like dragonriding, but not that much. With that in mind, I only aimed for gold on the basic races of the Cup and only did the advanced and reverse versions once or twice before moving on. I first did all the races on my evoker main, and then went back to do the intro quest on a few alts in order to get enough currency to buy all the cosmetic rewards. I think the cosmetic gear set looks pretty nifty, though it looks to me like it's made for a dwarf.

Thanks to Kamalia highlighting that the races also give a bit of XP, this served as an incentive for me to also do them on my hunter to level her a bit more without repeating the same stuff on the Dragon Isles yet again.

I really liked the way this event made you revisit the old world, and there was something quite peculiar about dragonriding across the old zones, an added perspective to just how large the Dragon Isles are and how comparatively small these old zones are, when you can basically do a race around the whole map in a minute and a half. It's such a weird contrast to zoom through Frostwhisper Gorge in what feels like the blink of an eye when I think of riding around Winterspring on my hunter in Classic to mine Thorium, how long it takes to get anywhere, and how every nook and cranny of the environment feels important.

The one that tickled me the most was probably the race around Ahn'qiraj, which effectively does a round of the open world version of the AQ20 raid. It says something about the scale of those old raids that this didn't feel all that restricting, even going at dragonriding speeds. Apparently an Eastern Kingdoms Cup and an Outlands version are already confirmed, and even more might be in the works. It's a relatively low-effort way of giving some purpose to old zones and I like it.

The Returning Player's Plight

It's strange to think that Classic turns four in less than a month, and even stranger to think that I've also been playing retail again (if casually) for almost three years now. I originally started playing WoW in October 2016 - add three years to that and you're about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King. By that point, the game had had a huge impact on me but was also changing a lot already.

Things are certainly very different now, as the last three years of dabbling in retail haven't felt like a big deal at all. What's also interesting to me is that I still struggle to feel properly at home there, even after three years of refamiliarising myself with it. My returning-to-retail journey has been a long and slow one, from the initial desire to just have a quick look at some new stuff and being confused by everything, to falling into a routine playing with my husband with only moderate enthusiasm for the game itself, to slowly starting to work on some goals of my own. However, even now, with me logging in quite regularly to do my own thing without the husband, just for fun, I remain somewhat detached. Even after three years, I still feel like a "returning" player, perpetually confused by the fact that things aren't the way I remember them.

This probably isn't a problem for the average person, but for me those early years in WoW really made a huge impression on me and shaped my ideas of how a lot of things "should" work. This is very apparent when it comes to classes for example. I don't think it's a coincidence that the classes I've played the most since picking up retail again are monk, demon hunter and evoker - all three of which didn't exist yet when I last played WoW in the past. (Okay, monks technically existed during my stint with Mists of Pandaria, but I never played one so I still knew nothing about them.)

It's much easier for me to accept the way a class works nowadays when I've never known it any other way. With pretty much every other class, there's always that feeling of things being slightly off, as I find myself looking for abilities that are no longer there, keep forgetting to use (to me) new abilities and just generally get confused by things not working as I remember them. It's honestly been surprising to me just how strongly some of those ancient memories are influencing my perceptions, even on classes I barely even played back in the day, such as warrior or warlock.

The world of Azeroth has also changed in a lot of ways that makes it confusing to navigate sometimes. This post from 2020 mentions a lot of them, and while I've gotten a little better at finding my way around, it's still an issue for me three years later. On the day I drafted this I was playing a Horde alt for example and found myself wondering where to find the portal room in Orgrimmar. Can you ask a guard where it is? Nope. I tried to instead ask for directions to a place which I knew would require a portal to get to, which did prompt them to mention its existence, but still with no map marker or directions. As it turns out, I had to ask for one specific location that is accessed via the portal room and that then also prompts the guard to tell you where it is.

Or there's that whole zone phasing thing. I appreciate that Blizzard didn't want to do another Cata and just remove old zones whenever they made major changes to them, which is why they introduced the "bronze dragon phases you between different versions of the zone" mechanic, but it's still sooo opaque. I remember flying to Uldum during the Fire Festival on a level 49 alt, clicking on one of the bonfires, levelling up, and having the zone phase around me, with the fires suddenly disappearing before I could click on the second one. I thought I was lagging out at first! It took several relogs and some googling for me to figure out what was going on, that the game had decided to automatically switch me from Cataclysm Uldum to BfA Uldum the moment I dinged, and that the bonfires only existed in one version but not the other.

It's these kinds of things that make me feel tired and estranged from the game. These aren't fun little secrets to uncover, just messy systems that really make you feel confused about what's going on.

The reason I've been thinking about the "returning player experience" recently is that Blizzard added a "welcome back gift" in the latest patch that can be applied to any character of level 60 or lower that hasn't been logged in for at least 60 days. This is independent of your subscription status, so it also showed up for a bunch of my old alts.

If you do pick the "gear upgrade" option, the character is auto-equipped with a level-appropriate set of gear, four 22-slot bags, and teleported to their capital city. Unless you were in BfA or Shadowlands, you also get the option to fully wipe your quest log. Any old gear, old bags, and anything you had in your inventory appear in your mailbox instead.

I tried this on some old alts just to see what it's like and... I can see it being useful. It's not been that much of an issue for me in WoW personally, but as a general rule, a cluttered inventory can indeed be off-putting when returning to an MMO you haven't played in a long time. I don't like the quest-clearing myself since I do like the way my log helps me remember where I last left off however many years ago, but it's fine since that step is optional.

The free gear is an interesting workaround to deal with the broken level scaling and the way many returning characters will find themselves way too weak to fight anything (I've found out that this hasn't just been a problem for me) but I wonder if it's enough of a band-aid. To use a personal example again, I used the gear boost on a level 10 void elf mage that I had literally just created and never played. The starter gear with which she was originally spawned was replaced by much more powerful items, and as I ran around doing my first few quests, I was effectively one-shotting many mobs. However, as my level increased and I didn't get gear upgrades from quests equally as fast, I quickly started to feel weaker again, taking us back to the same old problem of the triad of levelling, gear acquisition and scaling being somewhat broken for players without heirlooms right now.

It's nice that they're trying to be more welcoming to returning players, but at the same time I feel like this is barely scratching the surface of the kinds of obstacles you're faced with if you skipped a few expansions.

Musings on Shadowlands from a Casual Returner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shadowlands Are Interesting

The husband went ahead and gifted me Shadowlands for Christmas, though he acknowledged that this was more a gift for himself than anything else, since me having the expansion gave him an excuse to keep me playing retail with him for longer. As a result we've slowly been chipping away at the levelling story of the newest expansion once or twice a week.

And it's been enjoyable enough. I'm not sure it would keep me engaged on my own, but as something to play together it's been nice. Blizzard has gotten a lot better at getting rid of the sorts of little nuisances I remember encountering when playing as a duo in the past, though they aren't completely gone.

I've also mellowed a lot in my attitude towards retail. I remember feeling a certain bitterness towards it in the first few years after quitting - not because I hated it or anything like that, but there was a sense of: Why did this new game which is not as fun to me have to replace the game I liked much better? Now that Classic is a thing though, I find it much easier to just accept retail as its own thing, since it exists beside my preferred version of the game instead of having completely replaced it.

Shadowlands' setting also helps because it's literally a whole other plane of existence, so there's none of that nagging "this isn't the Azeroth I remember" feeling that I occasionally get in other content when playing retail. In other words: I can buy the idea of the Shadowlands existing as Azeroth's afterlife even in Classic times, if that makes sense.

I also just like what they've done with the afterlife theme, with each zone being an interesting amalgamation of ideas borrowed both from Azeroth and real life religions.

The home of the Kyrian is probably the closest to what we think of as "heaven", what with all the clouds and angelic beings, but the whole idea of transcending your mortal life by letting go of it is an interesting twist (if this was also inspired by a real religious idea I don't know what it is, but I'd love to know). I've seen a lot of people say that this put them off the Kyrian a bit, that it makes them appear somewhat cult-like and like they want to turn everyone into drones etc. but that's not been my impression at all. It's mentioned during the questing that memories aren't completely erased but rather stowed away in a sort of archive, and the whole idea of basically being able to empty your mind makes me think of the process as a kind of supercharged state of meditation.

Really, the Kyrian's main downside is the usual problem you get when you have a bunch of lawful good characters in one place: Things get a bit dull. From that point of view I can't even blame the rebels for wanting to shake things up, hah! Still, the Kyrian are very much your classic good guys, though I didn't actually fully appreciate this until I got to Maldraxxus - there's a quest there where you rescue a Kyrian prisoner of war and in this different setting his purity and kindness really stood out. Speaking of Maldraxxus...

I didn't expect to like the Necrolords, because despite of Draka's cinematic being quite intriguing, it's basically a zone full of Scourge lookalikes. They did grow on me somewhat though. In many ways they are the complete opposite of the Kyrians and their striving towards transcendence - they stick to their memories and decaying bodies until the very end. I thought it was interesting that a lot of Maldraxxian enemy NPCs shout something about wanting to be remembered as you kill them. As a result I liked a lot of the friendly NPCs here as even the relatively minor characters had a lot of personality, even if the zone as a whole remained visually unappealing to me.

Ardenweald was another interesting one - the first few quests have you encounter a weird mish-mash of faun-like creatures, squeaky-voiced fairies and walking trees that look like they escaped from some anime. At first it feels a bit as if you just entered the land of twee, but the more serious themes of the drought and sacrifice come up quickly and despite of being seemingly at odds with the silly nature of many of the NPCs it all just... works.

The theme of the Night Fae zone is a cycle of rebirth, and I found that in a way, that ultimately made them the most relatable covenant to me. If life and afterlife are all part of the same cycle, they are equally important, and this is evident in the way the Night Fae deal with a constant fear of loss and struggle to preserve (their after)life against encroaching threats just like living people do. I actually found the main story arc here really touching, and I didn't even play Legion (which it strongly ties into).

Revendreth was probably the zone that I felt the most "meh" about - which is a shame in a way, as I did like the concept of purgatory but with gothic vampires. Unlike in Ardenweald, the tone always felt a little off to me though, as - at least for me - the serious theme of redemption didn't really mesh with the way the Venthyr are portrayed as snotty aristocrats and mostly rather unlikeable. Or maybe that was just a side effect of the plot forcing you to help the very obviously evil guy for half the zone.

I ended up choosing Kyrian as my monk's covenant because it seemed the most appropriate for her class, even though on a personal level I liked the Night Fae a bit more. I could see it being fun to have an alt in every covenant though, just to experience the different stories there.

Playing the Previous Expansion

While everyone's talking about Shadowlands, I've slowly been making my way through Battle for Azeroth for the last couple of months. As I expected, the endgame didn't really hold my interest on a personal level after hitting 50, but the husband got really into playing retail again so I've been putting some time aside every week to play with him and we've been making our way through the old BfA content together. We're not fully "done" yet, but let me give you a brief overview of my thoughts so far:

World

The BfA zones are all pretty enough, but I feel like I've rarely had time to look at anything properly as the intended content pacing is quite quick and the husband is always rushing me from one place to the next. I also have mixed feelings about Boralus as the main hub for the Alliance. It's a lovely, sprawling city, and the music there is very catchy, but trying to navigate it on foot does my head in, what with all the weird walls and stairs. I'm not good with three-dimensional cities. (Though I heard the Horde capital is even worse.)

Base Quests

I liked the three Alliance zones well enough. The side quests were mostly easily digestible fast food that entertained in the moment but was quickly forgotten afterwards, but the overarching storylines were more engaging. I really loved the story of poor Lucille Waycrest: There's a young woman who's had absolutely everything go wrong in her life and yet is still going strong. The story arc focused on Jaina and her family was also very touching. Blizzard's writing (rightly) gets accused of often feeling like characters only take certain actions because the plot demands it, not because it really makes sense for them to do so, but this was a good example that shows that their writers are capable of character-driven storytelling if they really put their minds to it.

War Campaign / Ongoing Story

The ongoing story after that has felt a bit... scattered. Coming to the party late, it can be hard to tell in what order certain quests are supposed to be done in, though this isn't a problem unique to WoW. At least they are finally adding indicators for easy identification of the main story quests in Shadowlands from what I've read. It's also my understanding that there are parts of the story that kind of rely on you having played the content for both factions for it to really make sense. I can only guess that's the reason why some plot points seemingly appeared out of nowhere at times.

Nazjatar & Mechagon

These new zones added in the mid-expansion patch were a big deal at the time, but honestly, based on everything I'd heard about them I kind of expected... more. Neither map is particularly exciting, but I like the tone and more open-ended structure of Mechagon much more than the dreary underwater dailies of Nazjatar. When I was dragging my feet particularly badly at one point, the husband decided to acquire the Sandstone Drake mount, which allows him to turn into a dragon and carry me around on his back. This has been very handy as he's already unlocked flying in BfA while I haven't. As he whisks me away over various obstacles in Nazjatar in particular, I can only imagine how unbearably annoying that zone must have been to deal with on foot. 

There's also this mechanic in Nazjatar where you level up some bodyguard companions that accompany you during your questing, but this seemed like a terribly wasted opportunity to me. While you get some different dailies based on your companion choice, the quests don't really have any logical connection to that companion so it feels like just another layer of randomisation.

World Quests

I had no first-hand experience with world quests before BfA, since they were introduced in Legion and I hadn't played retail since MoP. From hearing other people talk about them though, I'd kind of assumed that they were similar to dynamic events in other MMOs. Very wrong! As it turns out, world quests are just like regular daily/repeatable quests, only you don't have to remember where to go since they are shown on the map, and you don't have to find and talk to any quest givers as they'll basically yell at you as soon as you're in the vicinity and the objectives appear on your tracker automatically. You never have to worry about doing hand-ins either as everything just auto-completes. In a nutshell, they are like regular quests but for people with short attention spans and bad planning skills. I kind of fail to see what was considered so revolutionary about this.

Borrowed Power Systems

Unlike when Legion turned into BfA, Blizzard didn't actually get rid of the expansion's big power systems this time around, so the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite continue to be a thing. Once we started on Nazjatar we also unlocked essences, and I'm guessing corruptions won't be far behind (unless those were removed). On a casual level, none of these actually feel too bad, and the Azerite rewards from questing have been sufficiently generous that my Heart is already past the effective max-level of 80. It does however all feel incredibly unnatural and bolted-on. I joked about the whiplash I got from being summoned by Magni the moment I hit level 50, but this only continues as you progress through the story as you keep getting sent back to the Chamber of the Heart for NPC exposition about why you should care about this or that new upgrade. So my totally-not-expert opinion is that maybe people would have hated all this stuff less if it had made more sense in terms of the game world instead of feeling like you're being pulled out of the overarching storyline in order to do homework, but what do I know.

Warfronts & Island Expeditions

Two of BfA's major features, yet nobody seemed to care about them much from what I could gather. They weren't exactly hated, people just found them boring and couldn't really be bothered. I did each one twice and can only concur after that experience. Island expeditions are just a random rounding up of mobs and clicking on stuff on the ground in an instance, exactly the same way you would do in the open world. Warfronts felt like they had some depth that could potentially be intriguing if you actually took the time to learn how everything works, similar to the side quests in old Alterac Valley, but with no real threat or fear of losing there isn't much incentive to perform and I basically just ran around exploring most of the time until the match was over and I got kicked out.

Dungeons

WoW being WoW, there have been quests sending us to dungeons. The first of these was for Freehold, which we did with three pugs through the dungeon finder. We promptly got grouped with some guy who kept yelling at the husband and called him an idiot for pulling an extra trash group or something (it wasn't even clear what was getting him so worked up as we weren't having any issues). After that I refused to pug more. The husband was actually less offended by the whole experience than I was and kept saying that it didn't matter, but I say there are so many more fun things to do both in this and other MMOs than put up with that kind of crap. The husband ended up coaxing two of our SWTOR guildies into trying the game, and with how quick and easy it is to level nowadays they were soon drafted into helping us out with our dungeons quests. (I filled the fifth spot with various people from my existing friends list.)

Most of these runs were fine, if easy. Then we had to do Siege of Boralus, which is only available on heroic difficulty. Now, my understanding was that heroic is still supposed to be relatively easy as there are still several steps above it in the form of mythic and M+ but we found it quite a struggle and wiped a lot. The last boss fight in particular, where you have to run around and nuke down different types of tentacles while also staying out of bad stuff, took us quite a few tries. We got there in the end and felt quite accomplished to be honest, but at the same time we were also exhausted from what was supposed to have been a fairly easygoing and casual dungeon run. I don't know if it's just that we didn't have enough of a clue, were undergeared, or maybe we're just all bad players based on modern WoW's standards. (Edit: Just today we four-manned Operation Mechagon and didn't have nearly as many issues there, so maybe it was just that dungeon.)

Raids

Despite of having been given some quests telling us to do the BfA raids, we haven't done any of the them so far, as LFR is locked to the new max-level. I don't know if there's even a way to see the BfA raid content now if you aren't able to outlevel it to the point of being able to solo it. But eh.

New Old Levelling

When I fired up retail for the first time in years last month my main goal was to check out the revamped levelling experience, but then our trip to 50 through BfA ended up being so quick that you could blink and miss it, and the husband got all caught up in continuing to play at endgame, so I haven't really been giving the whole levelling thing as much attention as I'd originally wanted to.

However, I've greatly enjoyed reading about both Bhagpuss' and Wilhelm's sometimes very confused experiences with levelling since the level squish, so I thought I should really go back and have another look at it myself as originally planned. So I returned to the random Draenei shaman I created a month ago and continued levelling her through Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isle.

The Draenei starter zone has been a really interesting place for me to observe the changes, as I'm very familiar with it due to it being one of my favourites, and it's currently the oldest starter zone in the game, dating all the way back to 2007 - minor updates not withstanding (I keep being surprised by how many old and common creatures, such as bears and naga, have received graphical updates since I last played).

I finished Azuremyst Isle at level 15 and Bloodmyst at 27, and it was quite an interesting journey. Bloodmyst in particular used to have a very carefully designed flow, with higher-level quests gradually unlocking as you completed the lower-level ones first. With the new system, I was immediately greeted by a forest of exclamation marks on arrival, as I was instantly eligible for most quests bar a few that are part of chains, and it didn't matter what order I did them in as all the enemies always scaled to my level anyway.

Initially this felt pretty liberating, and I found myself forced to return to town due to the bag space needed to carry all the quest items more than anything else. However, towards the end it actually got a bit annoying as those quests that were parts of chains ended up sending me back and forth all over the place. In the old levelling flow they would have unlocked at just the right time to combine them with other quests of the same level so that you could clear out each area in one go, but this guidance was missing now. (And while I'm very familiar with the zone, it's not as if I had every single quest's original level and order perfectly memorised or anything.)

After the first ten levels or so, combat moved away from the boring "two-shot everything without losing mana or health" model and I actually found myself starting to use different abilities, which was nice! However, I also felt like I was getting weaker as I levelled up, with mobs seemingly taking off larger and larger chunks of my health and forcing me to use my heals more often, which felt less good, especially if it was the same mobs I'd fought before and they'd actually put up less resistance earlier. I guess it didn't help that useful quest rewards were pretty sparse in these zones, meaning that my gear fell pretty far behind after a while.

Still, I only died twice - once to fall damage after a badly judged jump (d'oh), and the second time after my first encounter with a Myst Leecher. I immediately remembered Rohan mentioning that the damage from some bleed abilities felt off to him in the new level scaling, and I can only guess that these spiders' poison falls into the same category as I soon learned that I had to keep spamming heals on myself for the remaining duration of the poison debuff even after the mob was dead. (I don't know how you're supposed to survive these if you don't have self-heals...) Also, this was when I learned that shamans in retail apparently can't cure poisons anymore; FML.

Leaving Blood Watch, I followed the old breadcrumb that gets you in touch with the night elves and used to send you to Auberdine, curious to see what had been done with that, but it just... dies. This huntress tells you that sure, she can send you to Auberdine, and then nothing. However, there are Hero's Call boards everywhere, and I used one of those instead to pick up a breadcrumb to see Chromie. Fortunately there's a portal to Stormwind in the Exodar now, and the guards even point it out if you know how to ask the right questions. I suppose I'll be off to Outland next.

Another subject I just wanted to mention briefly were professions. I noticed that for all the hand-holding the game tries to do in Exile's Reach when it comes to many aspects of the game, any mention of professions is conspicuously absent. I trained skinning, leatherworking and the still available secondaries anyway, but boy is it all a mess. There are different tiers for every expansion now, which makes some sense I guess, but the UI for keeping track of what's what is pretty horrid. I also don't know how you're supposed to farm the right type of skins now as the mobs level with you, so once they are high enough level to drop medium leather, you're just out of luck if you still needed light leather I guess? And here I thought the regular levelling was confusing...

Strange New Retail World

This week the Shadowlands pre-patch dropped for retail WoW, and my feed of WoW blogs is full of people complaining that it's a "nothing patch" for them. Of course, for people who don't own the current expansion it's an exciting time because it means that BfA is now accessible to all subscribers without an extra purchase, and without all the grindy crap to boot.

As I mentioned back in July, I was quite interested in the new starting zone and general changes to the levelling experience. It's not the sort of thing for which I would resubscribe, but since it basically comes "free with Classic" for me I thought that I might as well have a look.

I started by rolling up a Draenei shaman on Azuremyst Isle and revelling in the general confusion of someone who hasn't played retail since Mists of Pandaria. For example the intro cinematic had been updated to narrate about the Draenei's current status post-Legion (I think?) but the quests were still the same old "we just crash-landed here". I also kept looking at my mana bar, daring it to move when I used abilities, but it seemed impossible to make it budge in any meaningful way. There was a first aid trainer that only had tailoring recipes on offer since first aid doesn't exist anymore as far as I can tell. And so on.

By the time I reached Azure Watch, I was level 7 just like in the good old days, but considering that the level cap has now been squished to 50, this seemed kind of unsettling. It doesn't feel like Blizzard really tuned the XP gains in the old zones much at all. I wonder if you still end up being level 20+ by the time you finish Bloodmyst Isle?

I didn't get to find out, because by that time my husband had reinstalled WoW and we were off to our scheduled duo levelling adventure - eventually. The first few days after the patch the EU servers were plagued by login issues (my Classic guild had to cancel its Wednesday raid night since half the guild couldn't even log in), but eventually we managed to roll up a pair of humans on Exile's Reach. He made a warrior because he always defaults to tanky classes, and I made a monk because I'd never played one and this seemed like the best setup to avoid feeling like the class I was playing was all wrong (compared to how I remembered it).

I originally thought that I was going to make a whole post about Exile's Reach, but to be honest I don't have that much to say about it. From what I can tell, happy retail players seemed to praise it for being more in line with the way questing works in the modern game, while salty Classic players considered it a somewhat dumbed down/childish experience. From what I can tell, they are both right? It's a fun little romp that gets you to level 10 quite quickly, but it's also very "generic tutorial level" if you get my drift, and the writing is super on the nose, seemingly assuming that WoW players are unable to pay attention to or retain anything for more than five minutes. (Take a shot every time the Garricks reference their familial relationship for example, just in case the player already forgot again that they are mother and son.)

We had originally planned to level the rest of the way by revisiting Wrath of the Lich King, but the new starter experience segues so smoothly into the BfA intro that we just rolled with it, as it was new content for both of us anyway. (The husband actually played through the BfA story at launch, but only on Horde side.)

The start felt like quite a long stretch of just passively watching cut scenes and listening to NPCs talk, which made us a little stir-crazy, but ever since we've been set loose to make our own fun it's been an enjoyable enough experience. They really weren't kidding about the increased levelling speed though - after about 8 hours of casual play, our duo is already level 26. At this rate we might even hit the new level cap of 50 before the weekend is over! We'll see what happens then.

Level 60 Hunter, Round 2

My night elf hunter hit 60 today, hurray! In real world time, it took me a while to get there (almost six months), but in terms of /played the journey was actually about 16 hours shorter than on my tauren hunter. I guess not worrying about mount money this time around really paid off?

She dinged from handing in a quest in Eastern Plaguelands, though she hasn't actually done anything in that zone yet... the quest in question originally came from Winterspring and I only handed it in because the quest items took up four bag slots and I really wanted to get rid of them. Silithus is also still completely untouched. Once again, I can't really relate to people running out of quest content at the higher levels (though being rested a lot of the time definitely helps).

I already did a partial review of my levelling journey when this one hit level 40, so I'll just post a few more screenshots that I've taken since then:

I am easily amused, as evidenced here by me feeling the need to screenshot mine and another hunter's pets being shrunk by a curse in Uldaman. I'm pretty sure I have a similar screenshot of characters being affected by this in my original screenshot folder from Vanilla, because some things never get old.

In southern Stranglethorn, in the hills with the Venture Co. miners that throw explosives, I ran into a priest called Love who got herself into trouble with an accidental overpull. It was a situation I could relate to very well, so I quickly swooped in and saved her, which resulted in several grateful emotes. Being loved by Love tickled me.

Still the best escort in the game. Also, I actually managed to get my mechanical chicken this time around! On my tauren I remember the Tanaris beacon dropping once when she was still very low level and I was low on bag space, so I didn't pick it up at the time, figuring it would drop again soon enough, and then I could never get it to drop again, meaning I missed out on the third chicken escort you need to complete to get the pet. You bet I didn't make that mistake again.

Just as I was starting to wonder whether everyone's just that good in Classic and that's why we never wipe in any of the dungeons anymore, this Zul'farrak pug managed to wipe to Antu'sul in a pretty spectacular manner.

I remember this quest in Azshara being quite a pain back in the day because - being unsure of just which island I was supposed to go to - I spent a lot of time swimming around the coast in confusion. Fortunately I knew what to look for this time around. Also, while I recognise Xiggs Fuselighter as an obvious Star Wars reference now, I totally didn't get it back in the day and that makes it okay and not annoying in my book.

After the poor show I was treated to after saving Sharpbeak on private server Kronos a few years ago, it was nice to see him get rescued properly this time around.

Speaking of things that Kronos got wrong: Rexxar doesn't aggro on Alliance players! I'll never forget him and Misha chasing me halfway across Desolace on Kronos and how annoying that was...

In the ruins of Andorhal I found my first epic of Classic, but it was sadly underwhelming. I think I ended up selling it for twelve gold or so...

Wilhelm commented on this the other day, but it's always funny to get stuck in "rush hour" when you end up on the same boat as some guild on its way to Onyxia's lair (presumably). Makes the server feel very alive.

Talking about my tauren's levelling journey, I noted that Un'goro had been strangely devoid of devilsaurs, presumably hunted to extinction by keen skinners and leatherworkers. I don't know if this is less of a thing now with even better gear in the game or whether it's just because Hydraxian Waterlords has always been a bit quieter, but either way Un'goro wasn't nearly as empty there and I had to dodge out of the way of roaming devilsaurs more than once. One time I even ran into King Mosh himself.

Flying up and down the coast of Kalimdor I got to find out what happens if you get disconnected mid-flight - I thought you would appear at the nearest flightmaster or something, but nope - I reappeared in mid-air without a gryphon upon reconnecting and ended up plummeting onto what I think is an otherwise unreachable plateau in Stonetalon Mountains. I had a bit of a look around and then hearthed out, since I was nowhere near where I wanted to be and there didn't seem to be a safe way off.

I had virtually no memory of this escort quest in Felwood; I suppose I might have done it back in Vanilla but I'm pretty sure I didn't run into it on Kronos. Pretty sure I would have remembered the giant tree...

We'll see what I'll decide to focus on next.