Return to the Forbidden Reach

Retail WoW had a minor patch last week, which the husband and I went to check out over the weekend. Blizzard made it clear that they want to avoid any long stretches of no new content this expansion, and their way of doing this is by having minor patches between the major ones. So far this seems to be working out well! For a "minor" patch, 10.0.7 feels pretty chunky, with a few new quests and a whole new island to explore.

I say "new" but it's admittedly recycled, as the Forbidden Reach originally served as the Dracthyr starter zone. Now we just get to return to it in a different state, but even so it's been decent fun. I like that it just appeared on the coast and you can immediately fly across seamlessly. The constant chasing after rares and the bind-on-account gear token rewards you find everywhere gave me strong Timeless Isle vibes. It's one big gear catch-up bonanza basically, and particularly friendly towards alts.

There's also this thing called the "Zskera vaults" (though as SWTOR players we've taken to calling them the "Czerka vaults" which is easier to pronounce and amuses us). It's basically a personal little instance where you can collect some treasure every week by doing some really basic puzzles, such as using a fiery potion found in one vault to melt a bunch of ice in another vault. It's very chill compared to most of WoW's endgame - there are no timers and very few mobs, and you can go out at any point and come back later to continue where you left off (until the weekly reset that is). Considering that this is likely only meant to tide us over for a few weeks until the release of 10.1, I'm really impressed.

The only thing I slightly disliked about the vaults was that they can only be done solo as far as I can tell, which sort of makes sense but is still a bit annoying if you like spending a lot of your time in game playing as a duo. Also, the number of random items you find in there is insane in terms of the inventory clutter it creates. I don't know why Blizz does this - they made all these tabs for currencies, mounts, toys etc. in the past to declutter our bags, and then they give us all this other random stuff to take up space, like A Box of Rocks, or all those special gems for the new ring that's clearly modelled after the moddable Mechagon trinket.

Watching Era Grow

One interesting aspect of playing a "static" MMO like Classic era is just how much the player community matters. I don't mean that in a day-to-day gameplay sense (though it matters there too I guess), but I was thinking more about it in terms of how you measure time for example.

In an MMO that's in active development, you're always looking forward to the next patch, and when you talk about the past you'll often compartmentalise it based on expansions and patches gone by, thinking about what the gameplay was like back during each of those periods above everything else.

With era being permanently in "phase 7", there are no such milestones to track the game's progress, so the events that define it are purely based on player and community behaviour. I've documented some of them myself, such as the unexpected resurgence of Hydraxian Waterlords as a "hardcore" realm, or multiple content creators giving era unexpected exposure and causing a sudden population surge.

Soon after I started playing on era, I ended up installing the census addon to help with the community census project. I'm not going to lie however, with how quiet things were on Pyrewood Horde side initially, I also derived a certain amount of comfort from tracking population numbers. My first 30-day scan showed about 1.3 thousand Horde players active on the cluster, which is not much when I think back to, for example, how Classic BC Hydraxian Waterlords was considered "dead" with over a thousand active raiding characters (as opposed to total population).

On the other hand though, over a thousand characters is plenty to complete any content that exists in the game, and in those particularly quiet moments when things felt a bit lonely, it was comforting to think that all those other players were out there - just in other zones, or maybe not even online right at this moment, but they were around.

Since the big population surge, it's also been nice to see those same numbers grow. Pyrewood Horde hasn't seen as much of a gold rush as the PvP cluster, but my current rolling 30-day census is approaching 2.1 thousand characters... which is a lot more than it tracked a few months ago.

In the guild it's been noticeable that we've started to actually see raids fill up - we used to permanently under-man everything, but in recent weeks we've actually had instances of having to ask people to sit out on Molten Core or Naxx runs, which just feels wild.

I'd really like to see era continue to grow like that. As I've mentioned before, while I'm fully aware that it's a niche product, I don't think it's anywhere near reaching its maximum potential yet. Right now it doesn't look likely to slow down (Asmongold uploaded another reaction video about Classic era just a week ago), Season of Mastery has ended so it's no longer pulling Vanilla enjoyers away from era, and a growing minority of players are becoming disillusioned with Wrath of the Lich King and finding their way back to the "good old days".

I don't know where it will all lead, but I enjoy being along for the ride and having such a contrasting experience to what I saw during Classic Burning Crusade with its issues with dwindling server populations. When you start as small as era has, the only way is up.

My 5 Favourite Things about Dragonflight (so Far)

Dragonflight has been out for more than three months now, a point by which you'd expect the "new expansion honeymoon period" to be over. Personally I'm still having fun with it though, and I thought I'd make a little list of the things I like the most and that still keep me entertained.

1. Photography world quests

It's my understanding that these are modelled after a game called Pokemon Snap? I've never played that, but I really enjoy these. The one with the balloon is a bit annoying because of how fiddly it is in terms of targeting, but I love riding the rafts down the various rivers and just taking in the wildlife. It's a cute and chill non-combat pastime.

2. Climbing world quests

Speaking of non-combat pastimes, I also like the climbing mechanic. It's a bit of a funny thing to introduce in an expansion that's so focused on flying, but it works. The only annoying thing here is when a world quest bugs out and one of the early rocks goes missing so that it becomes impossible to complete. I thought Blizzard had finally fixed this but then I encountered it again just this past week so it still seems to be happening intermittently.

3. The Iskaara Community Feast

I'm always a bit sceptical of crazy open world events, because while they do have a certain appeal, I find that the chaos gets old pretty quickly, for me personally at least. I generally prefer my group content to be a bit more organised. However, the community feast manages to straddle a peculiar line between being complete mayhem yet also very structured. The way everyone piles on top of each other and spams AoE gives it the appearance of complete chaos, but in reality we're all just waiting for Big Kinook to give us another personalised task, and it's always fun to see what he'll ask of you next.

4. Dragon riding in general

I've made a whole post about how pleasantly surprised I've been by Blizzards pivot towards embracing flying this expansion, and it hasn't gotten old yet. I still enjoy discovering new things wherever I land, and I always do the racing world quests when they're up. I hope to eventually achieve gold on all of them, but I'm seeing that as more of a long-term goal for the expansion that I don't need to rush.

5. Alt friendliness

Coming from SWTOR, calling anything in WoW alt friendly feels like a stretch, but by WoW standards I've been pretty impressed by how many things are unlocked account-wide by your first character and how much freedom you have to play your alts on the Dragon Isles in different ways. It could still be better - grinding Renown on every character still seems unnecessary to me even with the 200% reputation boost you earn after a certain point - but it's pretty decent. The fact that I have been having fun working on some alts already even with my rather casual play pretty much speaks for itself.

Adventures Around Zul'Farrak

I was on my level 42 shaman, farming turtles on the beach in Tanaris and occasionally casting my fishing line into a pool. I've been feeling like this should be my next character to level, and I kind of want to, but as I mentioned in my year-in-review post, she's resto, dungeon groups have been kind of scarce, and questing as a healer is a bit meh. As a stopgap solution I'd been focusing on skilling up my leatherworking for the last couple of levels instead, which involved killing and skinning roughly a billion turtles.

I was just about to cast my line into a fishing pool again when it disappeared right in front of me, even though there was nobody else around. I turned around and the turtles I had just killed seconds ago were all up and about again. Guild chat piped up with various "what the..." type comments which told me that I wasn't the only one who had just had a bit of a Twilight Zone moment. "Looks like the server's got hiccups," I commented and moved on.

I had just earned my final Wild Leather pattern from the trainer when I noticed a call in LFG: "LF1M for ZF, tank or healer". I felt like I was hearing angelic choirs sing. I hadn't really planned to go to Zul'Farrak as early as level 42, but it was high enough, especially for a healer, and I hadn't healed a dungeon group on my shaman since I transferred her to Classic era. How could I say no to such an opportunity?

I whispered the group leader to say that I was up for healing ZF and got some confusing replies in return, something about how they actually had a healer now but no tanks but maybe we could work something out. When I asked for clarification (was I in or out?), the matter crystallised into whether I was up for a non-traditional dungeon group without a proper tank but two "dps tanks". I said of course I was, because people vastly overestimate the importance of tanks in levelling dungeons anyway. Someone who can survive a few hits is all you need really, and that can be a non-clothie damage dealer too.

I hastily went to pick up a few of the dungeon quests for ZF and made my way to the instance entrance, while people in guild chat kept complaining about odd occurrences such as: "Is it normal to fly through a mountain?" Someone else had issues with the zeppelin disappearing from under their feet and then getting teleported to Thunder Bluff.

Despite being the last one to join, I was the second person to make it to the dungeon. One guy in particular, an undead warrior whom I shall call Barry for the rest of his post (not his actual name), wasn't even on the right continent yet and was apparently trying to take the zeppelin from Undercity to Orgrimmar and failing. He apologised for ending up back in Undercity somehow but said he would try again. A minute later I saw him disconnect in my party frames, and when he reappeared he was dead.

"Oh dear," I said. "Where even am I?" moaned Barry, not unlike someone who just woke up from a night of drinking too heavily. I hovered over his portrait. "Says Tarren Mill here." Apparently his corpse had landed next to the Alliance entrance to AV somehow, and as his body was right among the high-level guards he stood no chance at reviving successfully. After one unsuccessful attempt he just resed at the spirit healer.

Meanwhile the rest of us had made it to the instance, but thanks to the server's bugginess, Barry was seemingly stuck in purgatory Eastern Kingdoms. He asked us somewhat sheepishly whether we wouldn't mind summoning him at the stone, which meant that we had to remind him that this was a feature that didn't come in until Burning Crusade (and we didn't have a warlock in the group).

"I guess I have a warlock alt in Orgrimmar if others have alts there to help summon..." Yes, my warlock dinged 20 recently and now had her first chance to become useful! Fortunately everyone has some sort of alt in Orgrimmar, so a quick relog later, our alter egos were in Org and ready to start operation "Save Barry from the Eastern Kingdoms" by casting Ritual of Summoning on him. Thankfully it worked.

Relieved, we logged back onto our characters in Zul'Farrak and got started on the trash, now that Barry was at least safely on the same continent as us and could make it the rest of the way by himself. Our four-manning was a hilarious mess with mobs running all over and dying very slowly, but we didn't suffer any deaths, so it was all good. Eventually Barry arrived too, and in the manner of warriors in Classic, he charged in with his giant two-hander like a god of war and laid waste to everything, meaning that things went considerably smoother from that point onwards.

The rest of the run was pretty unremarkable. We realised we didn't have a mallet so we didn't kill Ghaz'rilla, and we cleared out the entire graveyard in search of troll tempers but still didn't get enough for everyone. Still, by that point we were quite happy to call it a day and started to make our way out.

Everyone said what a nice group it had been, and somehow the conversation turned to pets, which resulted in Barry educating us about ants, after sharing that he owned three different types of them.

Basically, just another day in Classic era. 😁

Oh, and as for healing the instance on my shaman? Loved it. This was the first time I got to use Chain Heal in a dungeon and it really is as OP and easy-mode as everyone says, but I really liked how chill that made the whole experience. Definitely looking forward to doing more of that.

Making the Auction House a Better Place

The auction house in my little corner of Classic era has continued to vex me. I wrote back in August about how having to farm things for yourself because you can't just buy them actually has a certain kind of charm to it - and I still think that - but with the recent surge in population, the shortcomings of the Horde AH on my cluster have come into focus even more than before.

It actually annoys me somewhat, because I don't think that "number of active auctions" should be this big thing to brag about, but the truth is, for the average player who doesn't run a census addon and doesn't do any deep research about population, looking at the auction house is one of the few ways to get some kind of indication of activity on the server. Looking at the sorts of numbers people have shared on the Classic era Discord, there even seems to be a roughly 1:1 correlation between auction listings and overall server population on PvP servers, which was kind of surprising to me. PvE players seem to be a bit more into friendly trades and charitable giving, which lowers the number of auctions relative to population somewhat, but there's still a clear correlation.

There's also the consideration that not everything is easily farmable for the solo player. I remember Hydraxian Waterlords immediately after the "transfer apocalypse" and commenting on how I couldn't even find any green gems to put into the sockets of my alts' levelling gear. Yes, that was BC Classic, not era, but the principle is still the same.

So at some point the low number of listings on our auction house started to bother me not because I was looking for things to buy for myself, but because it made me unhappy to think what kind of message this was potentially sending to new players. The mods of the era Discord asked people to include a screenshot of AH listings with their newest census scans, and I actually felt vaguely ashamed about the last screenshot I contributed because the number of items on the AH was tiny even for an already small population (less than a third of the number of active players). The only reason I still did it was that I wanted to show that there was some kind of life on Horde side on the EU PvE cluster.

All that said, the nice thing about era is that the smaller the community, the more power you as an individual have to make a difference personally. So I started to increase the number of auctions that I listed myself, and kept relisting things even if they didn't sell well, as long as I knew that they could be useful to somebody and I wasn't making too much of a loss on the constant relisting. I also posted on my guild's Discord and in trade chat to remind people to not let too much stuff gather dust in their banks but to instead try to make things feel welcoming and alive to the newer players.

And now I'm making this post, with some more tips on what sort of things I think we as a community should aim to keep on the auction house to make things easier for newer players in specific:

• Bags! Every player will eventually hit that point where they're looking for more bag space, and their non-crafted options in that area are extremely limited. Recently I've been turning spare cloth into mid-level bags on my mage and at reasonable prices they've been selling like hotcakes.
  
• Basic consumables: Obviously high-level consumables are useful to raiders and there can be a market for that, but I figure if someone is looking to raid, they'll end up joining a guild anyway and from there they can figure something out even if the auction house is empty. This is more about the little things that levelling players might find useful, such as lower-level health or mana potions. I always like to keep at least one elixir of water breathing listed as well, because I know some of those underwater quests can be a right pain in the ass without one (depending on your class).
• Crafted quest items: This is a big one that people don't often think about, but Vanilla has a number of quests that can only be completed by handing in player-made items. While they don't tend to be important in terms of rewards, it still sucks if you pick one of these up and then just have to drop it because there's literally nobody offering to sell the item you need to complete it. Examples that are needed by both factions are the Gryochronatom for that gnome in the Badlands, or the Mithril Casing for Chasing A-Me.
• Green Hills and (for Horde) Shredder Manual pages: I know it's tempting to vendor these because of how much bag space they take up while being worth very little, but you could really help out a lower-level player who's close to completing their set by putting your spare pages on the AH for a few silver.
  
• Mid-level gear: There usually isn't a shortage of the really low-level stuff, but from level 20 onwards the AH tends to thin out in my experience. This one's a bit trickier because the deposits on some of these can start to become draining if stuff doesn't sell after a few days, but if the stats on an item are good, at least give it a try before vendoring or sending it straight to a disenchanter.

If your auction house is still somewhat anaemic and you're also seeing an influx of newer players, maybe keep these in mind if you're someone who's a bit more established on the server and has both cash and spare materials lying around. The fact that the number of auctions on our cluster has been growing steadily gives me hope that Horde side might eventually be able to transition from an almost pure guild economy to more of a server-wide one too.

I Tried Mythic Plus

Mythic Plus has always been a strange beast to me. It was introduced in Legion, when I wasn't playing, and everything I heard about it just sounded incredibly alien. Over the years, retail WoW has sacrificed a lot of immersion on the altar of gameplay and convenience, but the very concept of Mythic Plus just seemed to take things to a whole new level: over a dozen difficulty levels, with mechanics that changed all the time? Seasons, scoreboards and timers? What does any of that still have to do with the World of Warcraft? I seem to remember reading that the whole concept was basically imported from Diablo 3, which I've never played - it certainly seemed like an odd transplant.

It also didn't seem like something that would ever interest me at all, not least because of everything being timed. I was already getting annoyed with WoW's "rush rush" culture by Wrath of the Lich King, and Torghast certainly didn't seem to get any better when they added a timer to it either. The thought of racing against the clock with a bunch of hostile pugs just sounded dreadful...

And yet... I've always been reading about Kaylriene's adventures in Mythic Plus with a certain interest, and from the way he described the whole experience, it struck me at some point that if circumstances were different, if I was fifteen years younger and playing with a tight group of friends, maybe I would have enjoyed Mythic Plus too. After all, if I'm being honest and immersion aside, it's not that different from something like the Zul'Aman bear run, right?

Now, Dragonflight has been a good expansion for me so far not just because I've personally been having fun playing it casually, but also because my friends have been playing too. My husband and I are in a mini guild with a few friends from SWTOR, and we've actually had four of us playing at max level consistently - which might not sound like much but has been unprecedented for our group. Naturally we worked our way through all the normal mode dungeons together, and when we hit heroics we soon realised that we already overgeared them, and that the next step up for us would be mythic - a mode we had never done at level before.

Last week one of the weekly quests in Valdrakken was to do four mythic dungeons, so we agreed that the time had finally come. One of our guildies also roped in his brother to help us, since he's a much more experienced modern WoW player than any of us and could provide guidance and instructions on how things worked. (Incidentally, since said brother played a blood elf this was also my first ever cross-faction group.)

So we went ahead and did some mythics! We started with a mythic zero Neltharus and Algeth'ar Academy, and then used the keystones that we received to proceed into a +2 Ruby Life Pools and a +2 Temple of the Jade Serpent, followed by a +5 Court of Stars and +5 Halls of Valor.

And somewhat to my surprise, it was good fun! Mythic zero wasn't really much of a step up from heroic, and the low keys also only increased the difficulty in baby steps, so it didn't feel like as big of a jump as I had feared. The timer was also just a formality at this level, as we beat each dungeon with plenty of time to spare while proceeding at a casual pace and slowing ourselves down by dying occasionally. I imagine it only becomes an issue once you're pushing higher keys or if you're wiping repeatedly. Also, I had often wondered how the hell people keep track of all these affixes and what's happening when, so I was relieved to see that there are actually some in-game indicators for that too.

We got some loot out of it as well, and earned credit for some more out of the Great Vault. I think that since we had a good time, we'll likely try this again some time, and maybe push ourselves a bit higher... though I'm very aware that there's a risk that being as casual as we are, we're likely to hit our comfort ceiling sooner rather than later. Still, it was a pleasant surprise that low-level Mythic Plus was this accessible at all as I always got the impression that it was a pretty "hardcore" game mode at all levels.

Population Management Is Challenging

I've given Blizzard a lot of crap for Classic's terrible population management, but I'll fully admit that it's not an easy task. This has been very apparent in era's recent growth.

When there was almost nobody playing era, it made sense for people to band together in any way they could, just to be able to play the game. As it happens, this led to the main PvP clusters in both Europe and the US to have almost perfect faction balance. The PvE clusters were more Alliance-heavy in both regions, which seems to be a general trend as I remember Pyrewood Village starting with a similar faction balance back in 2019 - but with no mandatory world PvP, this sort of imbalance isn't an issue on a PvE server as long as there are still enough people on each faction to do the content.

Accordingly, the natural advice whenever newcomers came and asked where they could find others to play with was to tell them to simply pick either the main PvP or PvE cluster according to their preference. However, with the recent increase in interest in era came a new kind of player - one who didn't simply ask where to play, but wanted to know which server had the most Alliance or Horde. Often they'd add that they didn't care about PvP or PvE; they just wanted to be where "everyone else" is. The "play what you like" answer was increasingly rejected as unhelpful, or replaced by enthusiastic recruiters simply wanting to make people come to their server, where their faction is huuuge, honest!

It's not hard to see how this can cause problems. Especially on the PvP servers it currently feels like there's a bit of a battle for the cluster's soul going on, with people being fearful of their faction becoming the minority and being declared dead. I don't play there but it still pains me to see faithful old-timers that have made their home there despair at new players being warned away from their faction just because its population may be marginally smaller than somewhere else.

For me personally it's been bittersweet because while I'm happy to see era thrive on any level, the new line of "which faction is bigger" questions means that Horde on the PvE cluster in both regions is left in the dust, because it's always been the minority and nobody wants to be that now.

I've got to admit I've been feeling extremely jealous watching basically all other faction-server combos post numbers to prove their massive growth on the era Discord pretty much daily. A thousand players online concurrently! Ten thousand auctions on the auction house! Meanwhile, there's been an increase in activity on Horde side on the EU-PvE cluster as well, and again, I'm thankful for that, but it's hard to feel pride in the auction house going from 300-500 auctions a day to 700-900 when others are bragging about how they have 10-12k auctions going on at the same time.

When I started playing on era I kind of assumed that its lack of mainstream appeal would make it a relatively safe haven from the kinds of shenanigans that ruined TBC/Wrath Classic for me, but I have to admit that the recent developments do have me at least a little concerned.