So, How's the BFD Raid in Season of Discovery?

Blackfathom Deeps is one of my favourite vanilla dungeons, and one in which I've had many interesting and hilarious adventures. You can read about at least some of them in old posts on here if you check the Blackfathom Deeps tag.

Naturally, I was both excited and curious to see what Blizzard would do to it in the process of turning it into a raid for Season of Discovery. And I can say right away that I think they did a good job. Obviously they re-tuned things and added a whole bunch of new boss mechanics, but the general look and feel of the place was largely left intact. They just moved some named mobs around to improve the pacing.

Baron Aquanis for example has become the first boss of the raid for everyone instead of being an underwater summon for Horde only and located later in the instance. In fact, his fight takes place in the room with the stone platforms you have to jump across and you need to jump back and forth on them during the boss fight. It honestly blew my mind the first time I saw that.

I don't think Blizzard made any changes to those platforms either; players are just so much better at the game nowadays that you can expect them to just make that jump easily. However, I still remember wasting so much time in that room back in the day, just trying to get everyone across and people falling into the water over and over again.

Anyway, the second boss is a gigantic Ghamoo-ra, which immediately made me wonder what he'd eaten to get so big now. It was only later that I realised that he does indeed appear to have eaten one of the other dungeon bosses, Old Serra'kis, who does not feature in the raid except as a half-eaten carcass on Ghamoo-ra's little island. Turtle boy also drops variants of Serra'kis old loot table, so yeah... I thought that was a funny little detail.

Lady Sarevess is still fairly unremarkable, while Gelihast puts a new spin on the problem of "too many murlocs", with several phases of indestructible "shadow murlocs" ambling across the room that you need to dodge or take damage from.

Lorgus Jett gets to enjoy being upgraded from a quest mob for Horde only to a proper boss (and also appears to be a human shaman?!), while Twilight Lord Kelris has become known as the pug killer. My guild struggled with him too, though I didn't get to see any of that for myself since they had him on farm by the time I hit level 25 on my priest.

On my first run I asked for explanations and was told that as a healer I basically just had to stack up for most of the fight and drink a Free Action Potion when he enraged (I had been prepared for this). As such, my first time went super smooth, though on a subsequent visit I messed up by drinking a mana potion and putting my FAP on cooldown, causing me to die near the end, but the rest of the group still came through somehow. I wonder if I should look up what's actually supposed to happen in that phase...

Finally, Aku'mai has had some pizazz added to his poison attacks, but feels almost easy after Kelris.

He also drops an item that you can hand in for a piece of gear in Thunder Bluff and that also triggers a new world buff unique to Season of Discovery, called Boon of Blackfathom (I think for Alliance the hand-in is in Darnassus). This was pretty cleverly done, as it gives people a reason to hang out in what's usually the faction's least favourite capital in Classic (though I've always loved both Thunder Bluff and Darnassus personally).

Because there are so many people running the raid, said world buff is also popping almost non-stop, and it's not a bad idea for a levelling character to hang out in town for a bit just to get buffed up for your next session of questing, not least because the boon increases your run speed by 20%.

It's honestly comical just how many times you'll hear Bashana Runetotem do the yell starting with "Denizens of Kalimdor" during a short session of running errands in town. I always imagine this message being delivered in the same style as Rhonin's "Citizens of Dalaran!" from Wrath - which makes me glad that there isn't an actual sound cue for it, as otherwise the city would be awash with it non-stop.

Even without the buff, the spoils from BFD are pretty amazing in general, at least for casters. I don't know if it feels quite as good for melee, since they already had some pretty sweet loot available at various points in the levelling journey in Vanilla. However, for casters their best stat (+spell damage/healing) was practically non-existent outside of endgame, so my level 25 priest having about +50 to damage and healing after two trips to the raid feels absolutely insane.

So do I like the BFD raid? Hell yeah. I hope I'll get to run it a few more times before phase two drops, which we now know to be in less than a month. The only thing that kind of gave me pause about it is the difficulty. It's not hard exactly, but... compared to actual vanilla raids, it's closer to Naxx than to any of the others in terms of mechanics, which is weird. Obviously a ten-person group is much easier to organise than a forty-man, and there doesn't seem to be a hard gear barrier to cross, but in terms of how much is going on, this is no Molten Core.

I guess that's a good thing, since the modern Classic player base expects more from raids nowadays, but it also makes me a little worried about what the raids in the next phases will be like. I mean, those shadow murlocs on Gelihast were borderline stressing me out already... I feel so old.

The Battle for Ashenvale (as Horde on PvE)

I've had a few weeks to casually check out the current endgame in Season of Discovery at this point. One of the major endgame activities is the Battle for Ashenvale PvP event. I'm not a fan of PvP in Classic in general, but I figured this was going to be more like Alterac Valley, something with a heavy PvE focus, so I thought I'd check it out.

I also quite wanted the wolf mount that you can earn access to. It's 10% slower than a normal mount, only works in Ashenvale and offers no dismount protection whatsoever (so it disappears instantly the moment you take damage from any source), but it looks cool and Ashenvale is big. As a priest with no class abilities to boost my travelling speed, having a way to speed up my journeys from one end of the zone to the other was definitely attractive.

The general gist of the PvP event is easy enough to figure out, though I did check out the Wowhead guide after my first time to get clarification on a few points. Basically, there's a percentage counter for both factions at the top of the screen that goes up as people kill mobs and other players. Once it hits 100% for both factions, the battle starts and some special mobs spawn. Each faction gets three lieutenants across the map as well as a general. The latter is immune to damage until the former have been killed, similar to the way the turrets/bunkers add protection for the generals in AV, except there is no way to bypass them. Each of these opponents has raid boss levels of health and takes a while to die even with a full raid of forty players.

Because the objectives are spread out across the map and movement is slow (even with the mounts), realistically people have to split into multiple raids to get everything down in a timely manner and as an individual player, you won't get to see/tag each objective personally, though there are apparently people who try to do just that to maximise their rep gains.

Unfortunately, faction imbalance is a major problem on the PvE server, as Alliance traditionally outnumbers Horde 2:1, and... well, you can tell. On the PvP servers, Blizzard decided to enforce a degree of faction balancing in SoD by temporarily limiting character creation if one faction got too far ahead, but PvE has no such restrictions in place. Which is generally fair, but not so much in an open world PvP event like this.

Maybe the devs were hoping that it would sort itself out, since participation in anything PvP is obviously fully voluntary on a PvE server, and Horde has traditionally been more eager to jump into this kind of content than Alliance, however my personal experience at least hasn't really borne this out, as I've lost every single battle except for one. What usually happens is pretty much what you'd expect: Horde only gets one or two lieutenants down in the time the Alliance kills all three, so they get to the general first and win.

The one time I was in a raid that did achieve victory, it was pretty clear why: Most raids are formed at Splintertree Post, which puts them in relative vicinity of two of the three enemy lieutenants as well as the general. However, that leaves the third lieutenant on the other side of the map, beyond the Alliance town of Astranaar, which is a logistical problem.

In the one battle I won, someone formed a strong second raid at Zoram Strand, which took down the lieutenant there and then pivoted to defend the nearby Horde lieutenant. We arrived just in time to prevent him from being killed and absolutely decimated the Alliance raid. This cost them enough time that the people at Splintertree could finish the job there before the Alliance could catch up again, even with their superior numbers. I guess the problem is that this winning strategy requires people to forfeit some personal rewards in favour of the greater good, since the people at Zoram will get less reputation than the ones at Splintertree that get all the other kills, and that's simply not popular.

Even so, I'll admit it's an interesting little twist on open world PvP. We'll see what Blizzard come up with for the second phase.

Thoughts on the Level Squish and Chromie Time, Three Years Later

I wasn't planning for this to be my first topic on the blog in the new year, but Wilhelm made an interesting post two days ago that I wanted to bounce off of. It's called "The Shadowlands era Level Squish was a Bad Idea" and well... it's right there in the title what it's about. There are a couple of misconceptions in there, seemingly caused by Wilhelm not having played retail in a while himself, but his general point, that he thinks the level squish ultimately wasn't all that, is completely fair. I already responded in a comment, but I wanted to spin my thoughts into a full post here as well.

Do I think that the Shadowlands level squish and the introduction of Chromie time were a success? Well, they made me log back into retail for the first time in many years back in 2020, and I've clearly had some fun with it since then. Mission success on that front! But of course, it's not that simple.

From my point of view there were two main reasons for the level squish and the introduction of parallel levelling paths by Blizzard:

1. The ever-increasing level cap was getting too daunting for new and returning players and they wanted to lower that number. Slashing the overall XP required to earn those levels only does so much after a while.
2. Narratively, the levelling experience was increasingly becoming a mess. With all those expansions stacked on top of each other, combined with the constantly decreasing XP requirements to out-level each expansion, players were getting whiplash from how quickly they were supposed to change tracks from one level to the next, and without ever getting a resolution to anything. The hope was that by just allowing people to level in a single expansion, that expansion would be able to present at least a somewhat coherent story.

I think as far as point one goes, it was definitely a success in the short term at least - though with each new expansion once again adding another ten levels on top, one has to wonder whether the devs have any kind of long-term plan to avoid running into the exact same issue again in another few years.

The second point is... iffier. As it turns out, they lowered XP requirements so much, that you'll still hit the end of Chromie time before completing even the one expansion of your choice, but at least you have more options in terms of where and how you want to spend your time there. Also, even if the tuning had worked out in such a way that you actually completed all of your chosen expansion's zones before being shunted into the newest content, you still wouldn't really know the resolution to the story as that's usually contained in a raid.

Oh, and it turns out that WoW's expansions really weren't designed to be parallel levelling paths in terms of narrative. Anything from WoD onward (if not earlier) tends to start with a bombastic intro featuring NPCs you're supposed to know and that hail you as a hero of many campaigns, which doesn't really make any sense if you're only just fresh off Exile's Reach. I wouldn't say it's any worse than the old mess, but I'm not sure it's really any better either.

Also, one of the most baffling things about Chromie time to me, at the beginning, was the way it just ejected you the minute you hit the required level for the next expansion, with no consideration for what you might have been doing at the time (I talked a bit about that experience in this post). I don't know how the devs ever thought that was a good way of handling things and I think they got a lot of complaints about it, so the experience has been somewhat smoothed out since then.

When I last encountered this situation myself, I actually got a quest from Chromie asking me to come back to the normal timeline a level before it would've kicked me out, to encourage you to voluntarily exit Chromie time beforehand. The husband has levelled an alt even more recently, and according to him you don't get kicked out at all anymore now, things just suddenly stop giving XP the moment you ding - which remains a little weird to me but still seems like an improvement.

Still, I wish they would just open the whole thing up even more. Specifically, I'd like Chromie time to be open to all levels, including max-level, and it should just be one unified layer where everything scales to your level, instead of having separate ones for each expansion. Fun fact: if you queue for a random dungeon in Chromie time and don't get a group within five minutes, you'll get a pop-up saying "This search is taking a while. Expand your search to dungeons from other expansions?", to which the answer is pretty much always yes. Why not allow people to queue up and play that way to begin with?

You could argue that this won't help with new players' narrative confusion, but the way I see it, it could hardly make things any worse right now. At least they could continue to explore along whichever path interests them without arbitrarily being shunted off elsewhere at certain levels. (Plus, players being confused/overwhelmed by everything the game throws at them isn't limited to new players and old content anyway. I think it says a lot that this meme was the most popular post in the wow subreddit last year according to the community's 2023 recap).

In general, I think the devs still need to work on granting their players more freedom and being less prescriptive. Obviously it's a game designer's job to impose rules, but they should aim to achieve this by organically leading the player down a path that is fun, not by boxing them in and threatening to smack their fingers every time they dare to stick their nose over the railing. I get that this must be challenging with the WoW community in particular, considering how min-max-focused it can be, meaning players will absolutely do stupid and un-fun things if they turn out to be unexpectedly efficient. But sometimes... people really just want to do something a bit different from the current prescribed path, and why not let them? If someone wanted to level to 70 purely by playing Legion content for example, instead of going through the Dragon Isles for the tenth time in a row, who would be harmed by letting them do that?

I suspect that internally there is a lot of baggage associated with WoW's old content. The devs currently do try to keep it functional at a minimum level but since it's considered deprecated and not really relevant, only the most egregious issues with it get addressed and even that without any kind of rush. I remember when the husband and I played through Legion for the first time, he got stuck on his class order hall campaign since it required him to get an item that had just been removed in a recent patch, but the quest hadn't been updated to take this into account yet. I think it took several months until he was able to continue that particular quest line. There are countless minor oddities like that which just get ignored.

If they started more openly supporting the "legacy" content as something for people to still do at max level, it would probably take away time and resources from actually working on new and fun things (not just for us, but also for them!) and likely open up ten new cans of worms in terms of balance. If everything scaled to max level in terms of gameplay and basic rewards (I'm talking gold rewards and greens, you can keep the best stuff for the current expansion), you might suddenly be dealing with issues like demon hunters being OP in Wintergrasp, Mists of Pandaria dailies being too rewarding compared to the ones in the latest expansion, or WoD's garrisons unbalancing the economy (again). And who wants to deal with any of that?

Still, I'll keep dreaming. The WoW team has shown a lot of growth in Dragonflight, including a willingness to step away from old paradigms. And I honestly think that the world in WoW is still great. There are so many fun things to do that new players will never even know about. I'm not expecting the game to completely change its stripes and suddenly care more about levelling than about endgame... but there are a lot of improvements that could be made even so.

Classic WoW & Me in 2023

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

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

Classic era - Horde

Shika - Pyrewood Village

• Level 60 Hunter
• +7 days played

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

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

Shilu - PV

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

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

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

Shintau - PV

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

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

Shinny - PV

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

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

Fooba - Mirage Raceway

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

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

Gemba - MR

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

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

Tir - Nethergarde Keep

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

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

Classic era - Alliance

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

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

Razorr - PV

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

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

Shintar - PV

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

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

Isa - Gehennas

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

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

Hardcore

Lossy - Stitches

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

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

Season of Disovery

Shintar - Wild Growth

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

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

Retail WoW & Me in 2023

Ever since the release of WoW Classic in 2019, I've been doing an end-of-year summary at the end of December to track my progress throughout the game, by listing the characters I've been playing and what they've achieved in the last year. This has turned into a very interesting tradition, as a lot can happen in a year and my interests and aspirations have completely changed direction in that time more than once. Without this track record I wouldn't have nearly as clear a picture of that.

I haven't done the same for retail WoW, except for musing on the progress I'd made after a year back in 2021. As my investment in that side of the game has grown, that has increasingly felt like an oversight, so I've decided to fix that going forward. So without further ado, my retail characters and what they've been up to in the past year... and to some degree since 2021, since I'm not always sure when exactly I did certain things and only have that old post as a reference point right now:

Shindragosa

• Level 70 dracthyr evoker
• 14 days, 19 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 90 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking, 100 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 56 Northrend Skinning, 20 Cataclysm Skinning, 31 Draenor Skinning, 81 Legion Skinning, 7 Kul Tiran Skinning, 15 Draenor Cooking, 66 Classic Fishing, 5 Cataclysm Fishing, 15 Kul Tiran Fishing, 99 Archaeology

The hero class that's new with the expansion became my main, who'd have thought? Even though their healing isn't as obviously OP compared to other healers the way dps and tanking were for other hero classes when they were first released (at least as far as I'm aware), I've come to enjoy the unique play style... plus to be honest, at the start of Dragonflight, just the idea of being able to go into the expansion with an empty inventory was extremely appealing (as opposed to sorting out my monk's bags and figuring out what to keep and what to throw away after Shadowlands). For how generous retail WoW is with bag space, it also has a weird habit of filling your bags with absolute tons of crap at endgame.

The fact that her leatherworking is still not maxed out this far into the expansion is a reflection on how the changes to the crafting system haven't really worked for me, even though I initially liked the sound of them, but that could be a whole post of its own really.

Mehg

• Level 70 night elf demon hunter
  
• 10 days, 4 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 100 Mining, 69 Jewelcrafting, 68 Cooking, 52 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 16 Classic Mining, 17 Cataclysm Mining, 100 Legion Mining, 150 Shadowlands Mining, 18 Classic Cooking, 31 Legion Cooking, 75 Shadowlands Cooking, 74 Classic Fishing, 70 Legion Fishing, 27 Shadowlands Fishing, 800 Archaeology
  

The demon hunter that became my first max-level alt in Shadowlands is still my main alt, I think because it's a relatively straightforward class to play at a basic level among a sea of overly complex rotations in retail. Earlier in the expansion she felt a bit squishy (regardless of gear), but that improved a lot after one of the most recent patches. She also still has the same transmog because I really like that set from the demon hunter starting experience... I just change the look of her glaives sometimes.

Tilarea

• Level 70 lightforged draenei priest
  
• 5 days, 10 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 64 Tailoring, 64 Enchanting, 16 Cooking, 37 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 100 Classic Tailoring, 75 Outland Tailoring, 5 Northrend Tailoring, 2 Cataclysm Tailoring, 64 Pandaria Tailoring, 100 Draenor Tailoring, 65 Kul Tiran Tailoring, 100 Shadowlands Tailoring, 96 Classic Enchanting, 26 Outland Enchanting, 25 Northrend Enchanting, 11 Cataclysm Enchanting, 20 Pandaria Enchanting, 25 Draenor Enchanting, 16 Kul Tiran Enchanting, 49 Shadowlands Enchanting, 2 Classic Cooking, 6 Shadowlands Cooking, 15 Outland Fishing, 11 Shadowlands Fishing, 13 Archaeology
  

This was the first alt I levelled without any involvement from my husband, simply because I wanted to be a priest again! She's pugged dungeons, done some PvP, worked on her professions and run a fair few old raids for transmog (as you can tell from her sporting the old tier two set). I just still love being a holy priest.

Tharisa

• Level 70 human hunter
  
• 2 days, 18 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 18 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 14 Cooking, 23 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 119 Classic Leatherworking, 205 Classic Skinning, 70 Northrend Skinning, 5 Cataclysm Skinning, 9 Draenor Skinning, 33 Legion Skinning, 129 Classic Cooking, 37 Archaeology
  

Ah, my old human hunter. I eventually levelled her up because I really wanted to have a better understanding of how retail hunter compares to its classic version. It's still a bit weird. I'm currently marksman spec because that has been my go-to for many expansions, but I don't know if it's still the best option for me in retail. I do still like having a pet, and with the new talent tree you can actually opt out of the "petless" marksman talent, but I have no idea how viable that is and haven't been able to find any discussion about it. Not that it matters, considering that I'm not doing any hard content on her, but I guess it would be interesting to know.

Groghue

• Level 70 worgen rogue
  
• 1 day, 18 hours /played
• Dragonflight professions: 87 Herbalism, 105 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 35 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 259 Classic Herbalism, 175 Classic Skinning, 23 Cataclysm Skinning, 21 Classic Fishing, 10 Cataclysm Fishing, 107 Archaeology
  

Enter Grogu (silent h, silent e), though she also responds to "rogue" (silent g, silent h). I created her during Shadowlands and actually made a post about it at the time. Considering how much time I spend running around aimlessly while levelling, I think her /played time goes to show just how fast retail levelling is nowadays. You can also tell from her professions that she's hardly seen anything of the world, having only really quested in the old world and on the Dragon Isles. I guess that's probably fairly typical of the modern retail levelling experience.

I also learned from levelling her that I'm terrible at playing rogue. Maybe it's just the subtlety spec, but in an interesting contrast to how the class works in Classic, it feels like you need to be hitting some sort of dps cooldown non-stop or you do basically no damage. In one heroic I did, I was struggling to out-dps the healer...

Oh, and she doesn't have a hump; that's a backpack. It just always looks a bit funny on the character selection screen.

Shinlu

• Level 61 human monk
• 22 days, 9 hours /played
• Professions: 50 Outland Leatherworking, 16 Northrend Leatherworking, 150 Kul Tiran Leatherworking, 100 Shadowlands Leatherworking, 14 Classic Skinning, 75 Outland Skinning, 51 Northrend Skinning, 40 Cataclysm Skinning, 80 Legion Skinning, 175 Kul Tiran Skinning, 150 Shadowlands Skinning, 5 Dragonflight Skinning, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 48 Kul Tiran Cooking, 75 Shadowlands Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 39 Outland Fishing, 12 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 16 Pandaria Fishing, 100 Legion Fishing, 175 Kul Tiran Fishing, 200 Shadowlands Fishing, 678 Archaeology
  

My old Shadowlands main gained a bit of XP from doing stuff like the human heritage quest chain, but other than that she's mostly been chilling in Stormwind since Dragonflight. I feel a bit bad about it because I do still love her, but the thought of having to sort out her bags (there's probably still a dozen different kinds of anima in there for example) terrifies me.

Shinnins

• Level 60 worgen druid
  
• 17 days, 10 hours /played
• Professions: 300 Classic Alchemy, 75 Outland Alchemy (Transmutation), 75 Northrend Alchemy, 75 Cataclysm Alchemy, 75 Pandaria Alchemy, 10 Shadowlands Alchemy, 300 Classic Herbalism, 75 Outland Herbalism, 75 Northrend Herbalism, 75 Cataclysm Herbalism, 75 Pandaria Herbalism, 43 Shadowlands Herbalism, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 75 Pandaria Cooking (with all the different "cooking ways" maxed out too), 12 Shadowlands Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 75 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 75 Pandaria Fishing, 22 Shadowlands Fishing, 608 Archaeology

My main from my brief flirtation with retail during Mists of Pandaria. Back in 2021 I bemoaned that I never even finished all the zones there, but I did actually get the husband to go back with me and do Townlong Steppes and Dread Wastes in Chromie Time. Then I did a little bit of Shadowlands, but I didn't even get to start on my covenant story before Dragonflight came out.

Pishin

• Level 60 pandaren priest
  
• 5 days, 13 hours /played
• Professions: 4 Classic Herbalism, 100 Draenor Herbalism, 56 Shadowlands Herbalism, 21 Pandaria Inscription, 100 Draenor Inscription, 64 Shadowlands Inscription, 6 Classic Cooking, 6 Cataclysm Cooking, 105 Draenor Cooking, 17 Shadowlands Cooking, 100 Draenor Fishing, 17 Shadowlands Fishing, 117 Archaeology
  

Ah, my "piss priest", who levelled through WoD with the husband's monk and then did a bit of Shadowlands endgame. We actually never quite finished all of WoD - maybe once the level cap goes up again, I'll make him do the missing zones with me in Chromie Time, just like I did with the druid.

Other than that, I've been feeling a bit lost with this character. For a while, I logged her daily to tend her garrison, but eventually I had more resources than I could possibly use and gave up on it. I also levelled her as discipline, and regardless of the many changes Blizzard made to that spec over the years, I've pretty much disliked every single iteration of it. I thought I'd try respeccing to shadow, my original love, but all that nonsense with insanity and tentacles is just totally alien to me as well. It's weird to still love the priest class while not getting along with two of its three specs.

Tidella

• Level 48 Kul Tiran shaman
  
• 1 day, 17 hours /played
• Professions: 106 Classic Mining, 3 Cataclysm Mining, 140 Classic Engineering, 3 Cataclysm Engineering, 40 Classic Cooking
  

This character was part of a levelling group with guildies, but we stalled out after the issues we ran into with Wrath dungeons described in this post. Since then she's been sitting in that weird limbo where I kind of don't want to play her because I'm still holding on to the idea that we'll pick things up again one day and the reality of having to accept that this probably won't happen.

Violan

• Level 46 void elf mage
  
• 14 hours /played
• Professions: 8 Classic Herbalism, 61 Legion Herbalism, 2 Classic Skinning, 74 Legion Skinning, 40 Classic Cooking, 8 Legion Fishing, 30 Archaeology
  

After unlocking all those allied races, I thought I should actually create some characters using them. I made a void elf mage because it seemed like a good combo and I didn't have a mage yet. She's currently levelling through Legion.

Marquess

• Level 45 dark iron dwarf death knight
  
• 11 hours /played
• Professions: 139 Kul Tiran Herbalism, 80 Kul Tiran Mining, 15 Kul Tiran Fishing, 28 Archaeology
  

Same story for this dark iron death knight - plus I kind of wanted to level a plate-wearer to unlock certain transmog pieces. She's making her way through BfA one chunk of rested XP at a time, but because she's both a miner and a herbalist, she actually gets to do very little questing between all the gathering (which awards absolutely stupid amounts of XP).

Kehnan

• Level 19 dwarf paladin
  
• 7 hours /played
• Professions: 71 Draenor Blacksmithing, 2 Classic Mining, 3 Draenor Mining
  

This was actually my first attempt at getting a plate-wearer levelled up, but I haven't logged into her in so long that, before I did so to get her /played number for this post, she'd been marked as inactive and eligible for the free gear boost. I had this idea for taking another character through WoD while also checking out the state of paladin tanking, but the garrison quickly sapped me of all enthusiasm.

Kara

• Level 59 orc warlock
  
• 1 day, 3 hours /played
• Professions: 50 Zandalari Tailoring, 7 Classic Enchanting, 45 Zandalari Enchanting, 26 Zandalrai Cooking, 68 Zandalari Fishing, 80 Archaelogy
  

My one Hordie, about whom I've also written a bit here. She's currently level-locked at 59 to see the rest of Horde-side BfA without outlevelling it, and also picked up all the different quests to unlock the BfA allied races at the same time. She's got a long way to go, but at least it's something different.

Level 25 in Season of Discovery

So this actually happened before my LFR adventure in retail; I just had the urge to write about that one while it was still fresh on my mind. But yes, I hit level 25 on my priest in Season of Discovery, woo! What an achievement.

Actually, I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but I do think people overestimate just how quickly the "average" player progresses. Blizzard released a video with some SoD statistics a week ago, and in that they said that only about 10% of the population had hit the level cap after the first week, and less than 2% of characters had cleared the BFD raid. I shared this with my guildies who were already talking about how they were "done" or bored and called them filthy one-percenters.

My own journey to the level cap involved more dungeons, as I predicted in my last post about SoD. I ran Wailing Caverns twice, mostly to finish off all my quests in there, though I got lucky and also won this excellent ring off Mutanus the Devourer in my second run. As a side note, I found it pleasant how easy it was to get all those collection quests done for a change. When Wailing Caverns is just one step along your levelling journey and you want to get everything done in one run, getting enough herbs, ooze and hide drops for everyone is always a pain, but with the dungeon essentially being "endgame" you can get endless runs in which most people will already have done their quests, with way less competition for drops.

Anyway, what was truly memorable about those WC runs to me was that they were complete opposites in some ways. In my first run I had a warrior tank who was massively overgeared for the place and who was just barrelling from one pack to the next one-stop. I was trying to eat dinner at the same time as healing (don't judge me, I like multi-tasking like that) and I could hardly get a bite in because the guy just never stopped. We were done in less than an hour, and that was with one of the damage dealers being AFK for the entire run, which was another funny thing to be honest. This mage was the last to arrive at the instance and then immediately put me on /follow. I think I saw him cast a fire blast once or twice, presumably so he wouldn't be logged out for inactivity, but that was all he did until the last boss, where he came back just in time to roll need on - and win - the caster ring. I learned from this that the infamous "ledge jump" is in fact so easy that an AFK character on follow will simply walk over the gap without falling, so if you ever do fall down that hole again, know that you're worse than someone auto-running.

In my second run on the other hand, our tank was completely clueless, didn't talk, randomly went AFK a few times, and otherwise just ran off in seemingly random directions. We ended up doing the right side of the dungeon before the left side (something I hadn't seen done before), and when we returned to the druid at the entrance we realised he wouldn't talk to us because by simply following our tank's errant pathing, we'd completely missed one of the bosses. It took me to take charge and lead the group back to him to actually finish the dungeon (something I was actually quite proud of as I'm not at all good at navigating the maze that is Wailing Caverns either).

Next I was off to Shadowfang Keep, which had fewer quests but which I knew offered several juicy cloth drops. I got incredibly lucky in that regard as well, as I won everything I could possibly want in only three runs: shoulders on the first run, belt on the second and the robe on the third. I can't say that it was all well-earned either as I body-pulled and caused deaths in "that room" (you know the one) in two of those three runs.

Due to my good loot luck I was only level 24 at that point, and there was another wave of competing healers sweeping LFG, so I decided to just earn the rest of my last level via questing. While doing so, I found one more priest rune in Silverpine, which brought me up to a total of four. I didn't catch the actual level 25 ding, but I levelled up after handing in to Kadrak at the Ashenvale border as seen below.

A funny side effect of the season's timing is that everyone's running around with winter hats because there are very few useful head slots available at this level so you might as well wear the fluffy hat for fun.

What now? Well, I was keen to get into BFD, but with the imminent holidays there weren't enough guildies available, plus I had some family obligations as well, so that adventure will have to wait for another day.

I had a brief look at the Ashenvale PvP event, which seems to be occurring quite frequently and appears to be quite rewarding, but I don't know if I care enough to make it a focus. I did notice that it seems to involve shared tagging, as when I ran up to an Alliance boss and asked to join the raid group there, I was told they were full, but I was still able to contribute from outside the group and received both loot and kill credit for the boss.

At some point I'll probably want to look up the runes I'm missing and go hunt them down. There's at least one very powerful healer rune that I'll probably want to get before setting foot into the raid.

My professions are another thing to work on. While I've been levelling them as I've been going along, I'm only maxed out for my level in herbalism and cooking, so alchemy, first aid and fishing all have some ways to go to be truly useful.

And of course there is questing - Blizzard made it so that like when you quest at level 60, "unused" experience point rewards get converted into money instead, which means that completing any at-level quest at the cap of 25 rewards at least one gold, which is pretty huge. Again, I don't think I'll make a habit of grinding these, but even just doing a few adds up quite quickly. I can't see many people having issues affording their mount at level forty if they get to spend any time at all playing at the level 25 cap and accumulating quest reward money.

My Experience in Amirdrassil LFR

As of today, Dragonflight has the (dubious?) honour of being the first WoW expansion since Cataclysm in which I (technically) saw and cleared all the raids while they were current content, even if I only did so in LFR. I say "technically" because, well... we'll get there.

I had set it as a pre-Christmas goal for myself to do all of Amirdrassil in LFR, and with me being off work already, today seemed a good day to do so in order to secure some boss kill credit for next week's great vault. I decided to putz around planting seeds in the Emerald Dream while waiting in the queue, but pops were so quick as a healer that I never got to finish a full growth cycle between wings.

Wing one was nothing too special or exciting. The bosses fell over with no great difficulty and despite my usual habit of going in blind, I wasn't too confused about what was going on, except for having no idea what to do with Igira's spears, as DBM telling me "Spear!" was not particularly helpful. I just tried to imitate the people around me in placing them in a loose circle around the boss.

Wing two initially made me raise an eyebrow as wing one finishes with you killing Smolderon, and then wing two starts with said boss suddenly being back to life and yelling things. Why, Blizzard? I get that LFR isn't the priority when it comes to designing a raid, but surely you have the power to group the bosses together for LFR wings in a way that makes more narrative sense? I just don't get it.

That aside, this wing was probably my favourite. The Volcoross fight was very atmospheric, with the looming tail coming out of the lava to smash people during the trash already and then being a mechanic during the boss fight as well. Mechanically, I really enjoyed Larodar, Keeper of the Flame, and how it gave healers something slightly different to do by asking us to heal NPCs to trigger certain mechanics. I just thought that was neat.

I was just thinking about how much I was enjoying myself with everything going so smoothly and the colour palette being unusually easy on the eyes for a raid, when I ran into my first hiccup in wing three, where my group wiped twice on Nymue for reasons not entirely clear to me. If group chat was to be believed, it was because one of the tanks moved one of the tree adds into a bad place (twice). This wasted some time, but ultimately wasn't too bad. I just found myself wondering why we were killing the bosses in this wing in the first place, as they didn't seem like bad guys or even "corrupted" in the way WoW bosses so often are.

Then it was time for the final wing! Now, I'd learned during Dragonflight's previous tiers that the last boss of a raid could be quite a shitshow even in LFR, so I tempered my expectations, but what actually happened still caught me by surprise.

We started the fight with "T. Swift" (as Calcas calls him) and after a bit of skirmishing he flew away. Everyone around me jumped on their dragonriding mount and I followed suit as quickly as I could. I'd heard mention of there being a fight that involved dragonriding and kept muttering "oh no" to myself as I had no idea what I was doing, but I made it to the next platform just fine. Here the cycle repeated, except when the boss flew away again and everyone mounted up to follow, my mount icon remained greyed out. I ran in circles for a few panicked seconds, when I suddenly remembered a reddit post in which I had seen this fight mentioned, where someone had made a comment about needing to run over a feather. Those fiery things that looked evil and like you should definitely not stand on them? Yup, touching one finally unlocked my mount and I raced after the rest of the group as quickly as I could.

However, I had lost too much valuable time already and suddenly found myself dismounted in mid-air. I could see that I was close, and being a dracthyr, I was hopeful that I'd be able to safely glide down to the platform with the rest of the raid on it, however a painful damage-over-time effect kicked in and killed me before I could land, leading to me plummeting to my death just under the platform.

The boss died anyway, and I waited a few seconds to see if I would get a revive, but I wasn't sure whether that was even possible with me being dead on the ground underneath. Anyway, no res indicator popped up, so I released and found myself back on the last boss's starting platform, seeing no other option to get off than to talk to the nearby green dragon, however that just took me back to the previous wing, so I had to immediately revert.

I couldn't think of anything else but to mount my own dragon and try to manually find the platform on which the boss had died, but the map was completely useless and of no help. Someone did a ready check, which I obviously declined, followed by him immediately pulling the boss. Someone else did gripe about that in chat briefly, something along the lines of "dude, WTF do you pull when not everyone's here" but I seemed to be the only one affected so they did just fine without me.

After a bit of flying I was suddenly killed mid-air again and got an achievement for dying to Fyrakk. My body appeared next to the corpse of Mr. Swift (whom I'd been unable to locate until then) and which was sparkling at me tantalisingly. Annnd... that's where I spent the rest of the raid, never even seeing Fyrakk until the raid completion achievement popped up. This is why I said I "technically" saw all the bosses at the start of this post, because in reality I never even saw him. I'm not sure whether I should go back and re-do this wing at some point just to actually see the fight.

I'm glad I've got a blog to spin this into an amusing tale, because otherwise I might've been somewhat annoyed by how that last wing went. The postmaster didn't even send me whatever loot I had on Mr. Swift, and I didn't get loot credit for Fyrakk at all (which is fair but was still a bit annoying as well since I did get the lockout). Once again LFR delivered on an experience that was mostly inoffensive in terms of gameplay but also a terrible way to experience the story. I'm just glad I was able to tick all the raid boxes for an expansion for once, considering how much importance WoW still places on this content above all else.