The Zones of Midnight

Back in November 2024, I wrote a post called "The Zones of The War Within", in which I shared my thoughts about the previous expansion's environments. It didn't get any comments, but it was one of those posts that felt really good to write because my sentiments about those zones were very strong and it was nice to get them out of my head. Unsurprisingly, I have the urge to do the same for Midnight.

Like last time, it took a bit to get here largely because the husband and I were very slow to complete the last few side quests (which I also wanted to include in my assessment). We breezed through the first three zones in what felt like no time, but then we got all caught up in gear and achievement grinding, so it took us a very long time to go back and finish up Voidstorm. (We LOLed when we found out that we really should've clicked the research console there months ago. Why did that quest not have a purple triangle?)

Anyway, it's done now, so here are my thoughts:

Eversong Woods / Quel'Thalas

This zone and the expansion's capital, the revamped Silvermoon, are without a doubt the crown jewels of Midnight. Look, I don't even feel particularly nostalgic about the original Eversong Woods and Ghostlands (they are alright, but not among my favourites), but this zone was updated with so much love and to such gorgeous results, it makes me really excited to see what the environmental artists will end up doing with Northrend for The Last Titan.

There's a video on the official WoW channel about what happened behind the scenes for this update to happen and I can only recommend it. It also taught me how I can tell while flying whether I'm accidentally entering the Horde area!

Quest-wise, I like how the side quests give us a glimpse into what life in Quel'Thalas is like nowadays and how the blood elves have evolved over the years. There's still a bit of that old arrogance but there's also a genuine desire for a fresh start and appreciation for the fact that a ravaged land that was thought to be destroyed forever has slowly been healing after all.

The only even slightly negative thing I have to say (if you want to take it that way) is that you can still tell that these zones weren't originally designed with flying in mind. This means that while flying over Eversong, the view largely consists of low forest canopy and not much else, and Silvermoon is still as awkward to navigate as it was back in the day. The new central plaza and its surroundings are alright because they are a lot more open, but in general it's not one of my favourite capitals in terms of ease of use.

Zul'Aman

What blew me away about this zone was just how big it is. I kinda figured that the original Zul'Aman by itself wouldn't cover enough ground to make for a proper modern WoW zone and that they might have to add to it, but even so the original area (now called Atal'Aman) is actually only a tiny part of the Midnight zone. It was awe-inspiring to me how much and how beautifully the zone designers expanded on that, with all those mountains and tall trees. I'm partial towards lush green zones, so this one's right up my alley in that regard. The music is catchy too. (Once while flying over Atal'Aman I started to sing along with the choral bit and the husband immediately told me off for my bad singing. "But you still recognised it!" I said.)

Story-wise, I was generally happy with the troll stuff, though they do seem to have an above-average number of severely dysfunctional families over there...

The only (again) slight downside to doing anything in this zone is that due to Harandar and Voidstorm having portals in the capital, business in Zul'Aman requires the biggest travel times in the expansion right now. I still like going there though because it's worth it.

Also, I was immediately intrigued by the mysterious island across the sea to the east that you currently can't access, and rumour has it that it will be the point one patch zone. I hope that's true. 

Harandar

Hardandar, weirdly, turned out to be the biggest letdown of the expansion for me so far. It's visually beautiful for sure, but the way they handled its introduction and story kind of diminished the experience in my opinion.

There was datamining back in War Within that revealed that apparently Harandar was originally meant to be a patch zone for that expansion and would've been accessed via the roots in Azj-Kahet - and honestly, I wish they had still introduced it like that in Midnight, because descending deep into the earth like that would've felt very cool. As it is, Orweyna just pops a portal out of the ground and off you go, which results in Harandar feeling like it's not a real place on or inside Azeroth. Sure, there's all these world tree roots coming from the ceiling, but without any real sense of place they don't feel "real" to me somehow.

There's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like an underground zone and everyone's really blasé about that. It's like the devs saw how much everyone loved Hallowfall (where the fact that there was a fake sun in the "sky" was a big source of wonder and a notable plot point) and decided that they could just repeat the same thing with any other underground zone without explanation. Why does the whole zone feel like it's just floating in space? Why is it so bright? Nobody seems to know or care. If you do the Haranir lore quests, there is one eventually that explains that it used to be dark after the goddess' departure and then one day light magically appeared, but that's a rather weak explanation in my book.

The Haranir in general feel like the opposite of the Earthen to me - I expected the latter to be quite boring but they actually ended up being interesting and charming. The Haranir I thought would be quite interesting based on what we saw of them in War Within - how extremely reclusive they were, to the point that Orweyna and Hannan made themselves outcasts by just venturing outside their home and talking to other people. But then in Midnight they are just a little unfriendly towards strangers for all of five minutes and then everyone gets along just fine anyway.

Aside from their adorable druid forms, everything about the Haranir just feels so generic. My husband, who's notoriously bad at remembering fantasy names, kept calling them "the other trolls" when we first worked our way through the zone because to him they were just a slight variation of what we'd just gone through in Zul'Aman, and he sadly had a point.

(Also, one more minor thing, but we had this whole emotional cut scene in War Within when Orweyna says goodbye to Hannan, and then we return to Harandar and they barely talk to each other and instead she seems to have an old crush on some other guy suddenly? What the heck was up with that?) 

Voidstorm

Midnight's (current) final zone is one I feel kind of "eh" about, I think largely because I'm a bit tired of purple environments. Maybe I would've liked it more if we hadn't just finished up War Within on K'aresh, which was also purple and rocky. The two zones are by no means identical, and the environmental designers clearly did their best to still give the Voidstorm a unique look - I do like the chasms with the red hues for example, they bring blood to mind and add to the eerie atmosphere. Still, overall I just don't find it that appealing.

I'll say that I did enjoy the side quests and how they drove home that everyone in this zone basically becomes either vicious or depressed, including the back story of how it was once a thriving planet that was destroyed by one of its own people.

Also, like with Harandar. I feel like this zone might've benefitted from having a more connected introduction. Personally I think we should've just flown straight into the storm above the Sunwell during our first attack instead of all that faffing around with building a portal! I didn't think it detracted as much here though, because Voidstorm is on another planet so it was always going to involve teleporting at some point.

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Overall WoW's team of environmental designers continues to deliver outstanding work as always, but I've got to admit that after the lengths Blizzard went to in Dragonflight and early War Within to make the world cohesive and avoid loading screens, it's felt a bit jarring to have two out of this expansion's four launch zones be hidden behind portals with no other way to access them. To me at least it makes the world of Midnight feel somewhat smaller than the last two expansions, even though I have no doubt that in terms of overall landmass built there's little to no difference.

Turtle WoW's Version of Gilneas

I said I had one more post about Turtle WoW's custom content coming up, and this is it - about the Turtle WoW version of Gilneas. I'm glad I still managed to make it to this zone before the shutdown (it was designed for levels 39-46) because it was uniquely interesting in the sense that it was the first custom zone I encountered that had a direct retail counterpart.

I mentioned in my post about Grim Reaches that in terms of location and vague themes it had connections to retail's Twilight Highlands, but they weren't exactly the same zone. Gilneas though, that's the same place at its core as in retail: the werewolf-infested kingdom beyond the wall, ruled by Genn Greymane. Somehow, that made the differences all the more fascinating.

As I hadn't come across a breadcrumb quest to lead me to the zone, I simply rode over to the Greymane Wall from Southshore and stepped through the now open gate, bursting with curiosity. Visually, it was very much a continuation of Silverpine with slightly fewer trees.

The first quest hub I encountered was a refugee/rebel camp whose residents needed help with fending off the local wildlife and gathering food - pretty standard fare, but it did make me wonder what these people were fleeing from/rebelling against. My eyebrows shot up some more when further down the road, I encountered hostile mobs with names like "Greymane Enforcer" - followers of Greymane are the bad guys here?! What the heck is going on?

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long to find out what was happening, as the town of Ravenshire contained an NPC called Lord Darius Ravenwood that was more than happy to provide an exposition dump about what the zone was all about. In short, Gilneas' isolation led to famine and unrest, which was only exacerbated by Genn having outsiders that were stuck in his castle whispering in his ear and ultimately led to him seizing the nobility's lands to provide food. After his wife Mia was killed in a riot, Genn completely withdrew from the public, and the population is now in open rebellion.

Now, I hated the bit about Mia dying because it seemed pretty much like a copy and paste of Tiffin Wrynn getting a rock to the head, and I don't consider the fridging of female characters a classic trope to be preserved. However, other than that, I thought it was an interesting twist. Genn is no werewolf in this alternate history of Azeroth - in fact, most Gilneans aren't.

This got me thinking about how the worgen lore in Vanilla is a bit confusing - in Pyrewood Village in Silverpine they are basically classic werewolves, living like normal humans by day, but the Scythe of Elune quest chain, somewhat contradictory to this, describes them as these demonic beings from another dimension that were summoned onto Azeroth. I can see on Warcraft Wiki that this has since been recontextualised so that the first worgen were actually druids... but regardless, the point is that in Turtle WoW's Gilneas, the worgen are still more like these strange, demonic creatures that are to be avoided at all costs, not like in Cata where they were made more obviously werewolf-like and Worgen and Gilnean became largely synonymous.

Anyway, to get back to the point - I had a feeling that Lord Darius' quest would result in more story about all that Greymane business, but I made it a priority to explore and do basically every other quest first instead, which led to some interesting discoveries.

In a crypt I found a cult of worgen worshippers that did want to become werewolves, so that idea was also present in Turtle WoW after all. It wasn't quite clear to me from the quests whether they were already capable of turning or were still working towards that part, as they were all normal humanoids and friendly towards me.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice because I so rarely look up in MMOs, but the centre of the zone was a tall tree on top of a mountain, and in a cave under said mountain I encountered the Pellars, a word I had to look up. They're kind of... nature-aligned witches friendly to the populace, but also a bit weird. One of them spoke in rhymes for example.

There was also a ruined town where the Scourge had broken through once, and a naga incursion from the south. The beach with the naga was a bit wonky as there was an invisible border where you could suddenly phase, with the current mobs around you disappearing and different ones suddenly popping into existence. It also made me realise that for all the love and care the Turtle devs put into their zone design, I don't think they were very good at beaches, as those always seemed more dull than the ones designed by Blizzard.

Regardless, I did decide to follow what I'd call the "main story chain" eventually, which tasked me with freeing Liam and Tess Greymane - yes, Liam is alive in this one! I already knew that Tess had escaped as I found her hanging out with the Pellars before I actually got sent there, but Liam was chained up at the back of a cave. Rescuing him was pretty tedious as I had to fight my way in, back out to get the key to his shackles, and then back in again - this was probably less annoying when there were more other players around than there were towards the end of my play time. I was half expecting that I'd have to escort him out as well, but escort quests are one thing I didn't see the Turtle WoW devs port over from Vanilla actually, and there wasn't one here either. Liam just finds his way to Ravenshire on his own once you've freed him.

In a nutshell, you then go on to fight some more Greymane soldiers, as well as recruiting the werewolf worshippers and the Pellars to your cause. Then you get given a quest to do the local dungeon, Gilneas City, to "save" Genn Greymane. Yes, it's in quotes in the quest text as well, which gives the game away a bit.

Unfortunately I didn't get to run the dungeon before the shutdown, but I did pop my head in the door and used my hunter's Eagle Eye to look around a bit. I could tell from the map at least that this one wasn't another mega dungeon like Dragonmaw Retreat or Stormwrought Ruins, but much smaller, so I don't feel I missed as much. I also watched a YouTube video that someone recorded of the place and it's basically a few streets full of Worgen and then a tower in which you kill Genn, who I presume has gone mad with grief or something (still not a werewolf though).

So I ultimately didn't get to see everything the zone had to offer - there were also a couple of elite quests I wasn't able to complete, and in a small house I found a guy that taunted me with a grey exclamation mark over his head, but at 45 I was apparently still too low to see what he wanted people to do.

However, I do think I got the gist of the zone, and I really enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to call it my favourite of all the Turtle WoW custom zones I played through, possibly outdoing even Northwind and Balor (and I did like both of those a lot as well). The people who designed it really seemed to get what makes a Vanilla WoW zone great, with lots of little stories woven together to form rich tapestry of everything that's going on in the zone, culminating in a big finale in the zone's dungeon, similar to how the lawlessness of Westfall makes you wonder just who these Defias guys are, until you eventually take the battle to the Deadmines. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give I think!

The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Quiet at Midnight

The two MMOs I currently play have been competing for my attention particularly hard recently, which meant that WoW's latest expansion launched during a week when I was also extremely busy in SWTOR. This meant that I didn't actually play that much for the first couple of days, and am only slowly getting into it now.

Thanks to splurging on the epic edition I had early access too, something I still feel a bit uncomfortable about because I still don't like the whole notion of only the biggest spenders getting to play early. But it was a fairly trivial upgrade for me to make in terms of my current financials, and I quite liked the idea of the extra Trader's Tender and housing items (that was before housing went into early access and I realised I don't actually like WoW's housing all that much, at least not in its current state).

Anyway, thanks to the aforementioned business in SWTOR, the husband and I only made limited use of the early access, playing for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday, when EA had started on Friday. It felt like a very strange experience to me, due to how empty everything was. When we did the expansion intro event - which was pretty long - I think we saw a totality of two other players throughout the entire thing. (Which made it funny when I saw Redbeard's post a few days later in which he concluded looking at it from the outside "that most people bought Early Access".)

Someone on reddit pointed out that the new Silvermoon looks great with an Inky Black Potion, and I can only concur. 

Now, said expansion intro is phased, and there were a few more people in Silvermoon once we got there, but it was still strangely quiet. That whole experience only reinforced my earlier sensation that Midnight doesn't feel like a "proper" expansion to me somehow. I endlessly bemoan the state of Classic's mega servers because I think an open world where every square inch of landmass is permanently overcrowded with players is stupid, but an occasion as special as the launch of a new expansion should definitely draw crowds to feel exciting.

After the "proper" launch, things admittedly picked up a bit, and Silvermoon is laggy as hell whenever I fly over it, but I still feel like I don't see a lot of players out and about a lot of the time. I don't know if there's that much phasing going on, or everyone is just perfectly spread out across the long, winding path that is the campaign storyline, but I maintain that it feels strange.

Back at War Within's launch, the husband and I initially did all the quests in the first zone, and then switched to just doing the main storyline as we were already halfway to the new level cap. It then turned out that the actual main campaign was really short. This time around, we decided to just focus on the campaign from the beginning, since access to so much of endgame is locked behind completing it, and it turned out that this time around, the main story was much longer. We didn't 100% avoid all side activities, and we're both miners which also adds to one's XP gains, but I was still surprised that I was only a few bars away from 90 by the time we wrapped things up in the Voidstorm.

The levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years. Without going into spoilers, I'll say that I had fun questing with Arator and seeing his personality get fleshed out. Crazy fantasy settings aside, it also struck me as a quite realistic and relatable narrative for a young adult to have to come to terms with the fact that his parents are also just people with their own hang-ups and issues.

From a technical perspective, I was kind of impressed by how many cut scenes they included in the levelling journey - War Within already had a lot of these, but it feels like Midnight ramped it up by yet another level. Then again, it also seemed quite noticeable to me that this increase in quantity came with a bit of a drop in quality. From what I remember, most of War Within's levelling cinematics featured extremely detailed, hand-crafted animations, and while Midnight had a few of those too, there were also a lot of the more basic cut scenes that featured the old stock character animations that people sometimes clown on. I didn't mind that too much myself; I'm just saying that I found it noticeable.

On the plus side, I've appreciated the move to most of the cut scenes now being triggered by a prompt that has you talking to an NPC, which means it's clear when they're meant to happen. I say this as both the husband and I had issues in previous expansions when automatically triggered cut scenes bugged out and didn't play, causing us to be fast-forwarded in the story without any clue about what just happened.

I also have to say that there's something magical about being back in the Eastern Kingdoms, connected to the original World of Warcraft with no loading screens. There was one point in a quest where we had to go to the Eastern Plaguelands, and the husband asked how we even get there, and I responded that this had been my first thought as well since EPL is usually quite out of the way, but we're in Quel'Thalas now, so it's literally just the next zone down to the south.

Also, while I was 100% in on the Draenei at Burning Crusade's launch and never much into the blood elves, there's still something nostalgic to questing in Eversong and Zul'Aman again. Not to mention mining copper, tin and silver again, even if they have extra adjectives in front of their names now. (I had to look up what "refulgent" means.)

All in all, Midnight has still been off to a good start with me, despite the "Is this really an expansion or more like a big patch?" feeling. Ironically, I think it helped that Xal'atah didn't play that much of a role for most of it aside from in the intro, because honestly, all the stories that didn't involve her were just that much more interesting to me. As a commenter on Wilhelm's blog put it, "I still don’t understand why the angry blue orb girl wants to annihilate everything" - just...yeah, I agree. I laughed at and appreciated this line of dialogue on how we should deal with Xal in game:

Oh, and totally unrelated to Midnight itself: During this first week of the expansion, after more than a year of clearing MC almost every week, I finally got my second Binding of the Windseeker and was able to claim my Thunderfury. Definitely not the worst start to a new expansion I've had.

The Original Vale of Eternal Blossoms

The original Vale of Eternal Blossoms has, strangely, turned out to be WoW's most short-lived and exclusive zone. Some of us may have been sad when the Cataclysm ravaged Darkshore, but at least people had had a chance to play and explore that area in its original state for a full four years. Not to mention that it was eventually brought back via Classic in 2019.

Comparatively, the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was released in September 2012 and only got to hang around for about a year before it was destroyed, with no way to go back. Mists of Pandaria Classic revived it this past summer, but in only a few months time it's scheduled to be destroyed again, which is why I didn't want to miss my chance to have a proper look at it this time around.

I actually played for a few months during Mists of Pandaria's original run, but that was after the Vale had already been ravaged by Garrosh. I actually found that experience a little confusing. I'd heard a lot of complaints about the grindiness of the dailies for the Golden Lotus, but I never actually got to see them for myself. The faction still existed, technically, but they weren't really represented by anyone in particular. The first time I came across the Fallen Protectors encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar, it seemed strange to me that these characters were clearly people we were supposed to know, but I had never come across them even after questing my way through the entire continent of Pandaria (as it was then).

Seeing this content from the beginning in MoP Classic was actually an interesting experience. The Vale gets opened up apparently not just to outsiders, but many Pandaren get to see it for the first time as well and stream into it to settle there. Though it doesn't remain entirely peaceful for long even then, as Mogu invade from the north the moment you hit the level cap, at which point the Golden Lotus (a group that includes those who would later become the Fallen Protectors) give you dailies to fight off said Mogu as well as other, more minor threats.

In fairness, I can see why people didn't love these. Basically, you get sent to the Golden Stair in the north every day to fight some Mogu, and then get a shorter follow-up at another location in the Vale to fight off some sprites or crocolisks or whatever. As far as dailies in Pandaria go, these are not the most inspired. However, for me as someone who appreciates exploring and documenting things, it's still been interesting to see all the different quests and get to know the various NPCs.

The moment the Vale was destroyed, they were basically all killed off and their quests removed from the game. I'm thinking the devs must've still been riding high on the Cataclysm idea of "it's so boring that the world never changes, what if a bad guy blew everything up and it actually showed as blown up in game (and then stayed that way for the next decade)". It didn't really sink in until later that players weren't necessarily huge fans of that. 

Interestingly, the Vale was "kind of" restored in BfA... just so it could be assaulted by Old God forces instead every other week. However, this version of the Vale is a) still quite inaccessible, as you'll only be able to see the bronze dragonflight NPC to switch between versions if your character has done a certain amount of content in BfA (I don't know the details of that, I just know that I could only go there on my human monk) and b) not exactly the same as the original. While its general beauty is mostly restored, the old quests are still gone, and even the environment isn't exactly the same. The two giant stone guardians that were destroyed in the first assault on the Vale remain broken for example, with their broken-off pieces just a bit tidied up.

The so-called Twin Monoliths in their different states: in the original Vale (top), in the destroyed Vale (middle) and the restored Vale (bottom). 

Another interesting detail is that there are some quests that reference the Vale in quest text, such as "The Golden Dream" which is supposed to give you a vision of the Vale while questing in the Valley of the Four Winds. After it's been destroyed, the quest giver is distraught and yells "No... That's not right... It should be beautiful. It should be pristine!". What they were meant to say originally, while the Vale still is pristine... I don't know, because the Classic devs forgot to update those little details, and seemingly all the relevant quests still have the dialogue about the destroyed Vale from the start, months before it's supposed to happen. 

The Island of Balor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring the Forests of Northwind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turtle WoW: A Different Stonetalon & Wetlands

I mentioned in my last post about Turtle WoW that I set myself the goal to level up a bit in order to be able to explore more of their custom content. Their next full custom zone was designed for you to be around level 30, but according to their Wiki there were new sub-zones and quest hubs to be found in several lower-level zones as well, so I made it my priority to spend my time in the twenties questing in Stonetalon Mountains and the Wetlands. Both are zones that I'm reasonably fond of and very familiar with, but I'll also admit that their original versions didn't exactly contain a huge number of quests, so they seemed like interesting candidates for expansion.

Let's start with Stonetalon. This is a zone that I don't think I spent a lot of time in back in original Vanilla (I just remember a more experienced friend warning me that the Scorched Vale was a death trap) but at least from Classic onwards I became very fond of it as a more quiet retreat from the crowds. It feels like a bit of a backwater zone for both factions (though more so for Alliance) and there just isn't a whole lot going on.

By that I don't just mean that there aren't a lot of quests, but that the map as a whole is pretty empty because so much of it is just assumed to be uninteresting mountains (which we didn't really get to see from ground level). It's telling that when Blizzard rebuilt Kalimdor to be fully three-dimensional for Cataclysm, they added a whole bunch of new points of interest to the Stonetalon map and still also ended up creating quite a lot of minimally textured mountainside with nothing going on because there was just so much unused terrain in that zone.

I'm leading with all of this to say that this zone is prime real estate for anyone wanting to expand on it in Classic+ style, as it's not that far-fetched for a bit of mountainside to come down to reveal additional valleys to explore. In the case of Turtle WoW, I found a narrow path up even further up the mountain from Stonetalon Peak, leading me to a Horde troll base that I couldn't get a good view of because high-level guards were blocking all entry. (I could eventually glimpse a bit more of it from the back of a hippogryph, as the flight path to Stonetalon Peak goes right over it.) It's been a long time since I stood at the edge of a Horde town, wondering just what the other faction gets up to over there. (It's probably not that exciting, but the point is that I don't know, and the unknown is fascinating!)

I later also found another, smaller new Horde town belonging to the Horde-aligned goblins - just how many hubs do they need to have in one zone? To the east, my eyes went wide when I discovered that the mountainside above the Grimtotem villages had been conquered by giant brambles, accompanied by quillboar spilling in from the Barrens. Again, it looked like the Horde had some quests to do there.

For Alliance there was actually surprisingly little to do and I mostly ended up doing old quests while I was there exploring. There was a new Venture Co. area carved into the western mountains where I got given a few tasks to do, so that was something. I also really liked the new mine shaft they opened up not far off Stonetalon Peak, since it wasn't very deep but had two guaranteed tin ore spawns inside.

The Wetlands were a very different experience, with most of the zone largely unchanged. To the east there's a new dungeon called Dragonmaw Retreat near Grim Batol, but since that seemed to be designed for around level 30 as well, I didn't go there until I was somewhat higher level. (There will be a post about it!) However, there was also a whole new sub-section of the zone to the south-west, where a steep mountain path just south of Menethil led up to a new dwarf town called Dun Agrath, with an adjacent human village called Hawk's Vigil.

While the main quests in the Wetlands were largely the same old, same old, I was given several breadcrumbs to go up to these new settlements, which filled me with a lot of anticipation. However, when I finally went there, Dun Agrath offered me exactly one quest to kill a few raptors down the hill and that was it. I stuck my nose into every building, and it all looked very pretty and interesting, with plenty of named NPCs you could chat with, but no quests. I'm honestly still a bit baffled by that. Again, I'm not saying every square foot of terrain has to be filled with activities, but what's the point of creating a whole (albeit pretty) sub-zone and then not adding anything to do in it?

The human settlement of Hawk's Vigil was better in that regard, even if whoever created it clearly liked Harry Potter a bit too much based on all the NPC names. (I know, Blizz has always had references to other properties in their games, but a whole town of people with last names from Harry Potter is a bit on the nose.) As there were no hostile mobs nearby, all the quests were of the "go talk to someone" variety, which made for an interesting change of pace.

Some of them sent me quite far afield, which at first made me sigh a bit - everyone hates these fetch quests that make you travel to another continent, right? Why make more of those? But then I thought nah, that's not fair, depending on the story these can be quite memorable so let's see where this goes. One chain ultimately had me exorcising a demon from a lumberjack after doing several slightly questionable things to get to that point, and the other had me hunt down information about the dark past of a guy new to the town and awarded a pretty nice piece of gear at the end. (I did feel a little weird killing the guy. They were clearly going for something similar to the quest chain that ends with "The Attack!" in Stormwind Keep, but that quest has you catching the bad guys in the act, while this chain has a lot of bad things to say about the person you're supposed to kill, but he just kinda sits there in his tent at the edge of town minding his own business, which made me feel a bit bad.)

Anyway, I was definitely more intrigued than I'd expected, even by these relatively minor additions to two zones I know well. I think the additions to Stonetalon felt more natural than those to the Wetlands (there wasn't even as much as a footpath leading up to Dun Agrath; if you didn't already know it was there you'd have no reason to assume that there was anything new down that way), but they were fun to explore either way. And honestly, even the old content felt refreshed by the uncertainty of never quite knowing whether an NPC wouldn't suddenly have a new additional quest or something.

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.