Bringing Order to the Isles

There's a little more than a week left in Legion Remix, and a few days ago I finished my last achievement for this special mode. According to Data for Azeroth, Bringing Order to the Isles is now the rarest achievement I've got to my name, with less than one percent of all accounts having earned that one. That's rarer than even some of the old achievements I have that are no longer available, such as Champion of Ulduar or The Ancient Keeper, though I expect a few more people will get those last few quests in and tick the box before Lemix ends.

Bringing Order to the Isles required completing all class order hall quests for all classes, meaning both the basic campaign and the quest chain for the special class-specific mount. I had a lot of thoughts on these but I think I'll save those for another post because obviously twelve different storylines and mounts are a lot to talk about!

For this post I'll limit myself to the general experience of playing Legion Remix, especially compared to MoP Remix. Here's my final roster of timerunners and their /played time:

• Kinta, blood death knight: 4 days, 18 hours
• Flerence, havoc demon hunter: 14 hours
• Clar, mistweaver monk: 10 hours
• Axal, discipline priest: 12 hours
• Floo, fury warrior: 6 hours
• Bith, beast mastery hunter: 10 hours
• Bosan, retribution paladin: 14 hours
• Fangry, feral druid: 8 hours
• Whie, affliction warlock: 11 hours
• Tenderpaw, assassination rogue: 9 hours
• Rockpaw, elemental shaman: 7 hours
• Emb, fire mage: 6 hours

I felt a bit stumped initially, having to create twelve new characters when I had just levelled one of each class to 80 this expansion, but eventually I simply opted for some race/class combos that I'd never played before. Coming up with a fitting transmog for each one was actually the hardest part. As you can see, comparatively little play time was required just to level up and get through all the class order quests, with my death knight main being the only one with a significant /played time due to the fact that she did all the zone storylines, dungeons, raids and other achievement-related activities. And yes, I mained a tank again, how strange. It wasn't a choice with a lot of intent behind it; it just kind of happened that way.

Overall, the experience of levelling twelve new alts in such a short time frame felt weird. It's not that it's difficult exactly, what with how fast it all was, but from a gameplay experience it was honestly kind of terrible. I quickly gave up on even trying to sort out my action bars or understanding my talents, because it was all flying past way too quickly anyway. I just tried to remember a handful of buttons on each character and that was it. I'm someone who very much enjoys levelling alts in general, but the way Blizzard actively encouraged you to pump out new ones at speed in Lemix just felt weird. There isn't even a semblance of RPG left in playing that way, you're just trying to catch them all like some sort of Pokemon trainer, while also collecting and discarding shinies like you're in Diablo. It's bizarre.

In general I think I preferred the way the Remix experience was a bit more free-form in MoP last time around. I'm sure all the new structure they introduced for Legion helped with player retention, as the staggered content releases forced you to come back every so often if you wanted to see and do all the things, while the endless infinite research assignments for gear tried to hook into that part of your brain that likes to do dailies, way harder than anything in MoP did. And it worked, including on me! But it also shifted the experience towards being a bit more chore-like as opposed to the way MoP Remix just gave you all the content and was like "have fun, you figure out what you want to do".

And well, there was the whole "levelling twelve characters" side of it of course, compared to the five I chose to level up in MoP. It's weird because the moment I learned that Lemix was going to be a thing, doing exactly this in order to see all the class order halls was something I immediately considered, but only as a kind of "wouldn't it be crazy if I went that hard" type of idea. The fact that Blizzard put levelling one of each class in with the standard achievements for this event felt like it shifted the goal posts in way that I didn't really enjoy, and it's not something I'd ever want to do for a limited-time event like this again to be honest. They asked me to play this one a lot, and I did, but now the only direction for my investment to go in future Remixes is down.

But I guess that's Legion in a nutshell, isn't it? I already observed previously, after levelling through it for the first time in Chromie Time, that I could see why people loved it so much when it first came out, what with the expansion's coherent theme and steady progression with ever rising stakes. Revisiting Suramar was a delight, as I genuinely enjoyed seeing that story and all its characters again. (I love Oculeth!) But after Argus... where was there even left to go?

Doing all the class order halls this time around only drove home just how badly Blizzard screwed this up, actually. It kind of reminded me of how Bioware more or less made you the most powerful person in the galaxy during SWTOR's Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. It was insane, something that was always going to be a terrible idea in an MMO, even one with a personal story in which you are the hero, because it was a high that wasn't sustainable and climbing back down from that peak was always going to feel bad. (People still grouse about it ten years later.)

And Legion (which actually came out around the same time) did a very similar thing with the artifact weapons and class order halls. I'm not sure the quest to deplete your artifact weapon is still in the game, but basically giving you the Ashbringer and then making you throw it away was always going to feel bad, no matter how they spun it. But the class order halls are just as bad in my opinion! These should always have been a permanent feature, not something for one expansion only.

For any character that was actually played during the Legion expansion it must have felt utterly insane to, I dunno, ascend to Skyhold in the heavens (as a warrior) and then just... stop going there once BfA came around. Same with the "Highlord" paladin no longer caring to hang out under Light's Hope Chapel. It's just nuts that they built the player character up to this level and then just shrugged and expected you to move on from it without a second thought.

I guess in that way, Legion Remix mirrored the vibe of the original expansion. All those achievements to level one of each class made sense in the context of all the unique class-specific content, but no other expansion has that much of it, so it wouldn't make sense to ask people to do it again in whatever comes next, and I expect it will feel somewhat less exciting. My bet is on a Wrath of the Lich King Remix next, to get us ready for returning to Northrend in The Last Titan (the expansion after Midnight). 

Starting to Wrap Up Legion Remix

Legion Remix has less than four weeks left to run, and I'm slowly starting to think about how to wrap things up. The phased approach Blizzard has been taking with Lemix makes the whole experience a bit odd, as they added a couple of quests with the release of the last phase that are all about how the timeline is collapsing and we need to say goodbye! Except then we still had more than a month left at that point.

I've ticked off all the Lemix-specific achievements except for needing to level four more classes to 80, and there's one lesser invasion point commander that keeps eluding me. Not much to be done about that last one other than going back to Argus over and over again for another roll at the dice.

The whole "levelling all the characters" experience has been nothing but wacky. By character four or five, thanks to the stacking XP bonus, it was no longer a matter of timerunning but more like... time-tumbling. XP was just happening to me. You could no longer call it "earning" experience by any stretch of the imagination. Even with every quest rewarding a gear box, the constantly rising levels made it impossible to keep up with even the game's most basic gear requirements, and the last leg of each levelling journey was once again a painful struggle even in normal world tier as I tried to kill things with gear that's thirty levels too low for the intended difficulty. Your best bet at that point is to hope for an easy carry through some random dungeons and raids, which does work a lot of the time (it only takes one extremely OP person in the group) but not always. Not exactly my idea of fun, which is one of the reasons I've been stalling on the last four characters. But I'm still working on it.

Most other achievements have been easy and unremarkable enough. Do all the quests once, do all the dungeons once etc. I did want to take note of a few that stood out though.

First there was "Building a Heroic Army", which required you to earn 200 points in Withered Army training in heroic world tier. The trick there is that your Withered don't scale at all and are basically a bunch of fragile little dudes that will die almost instantly if any mob so much as sneezes at them. This turns the whole thing into a challenge of avoiding mobs that do AoE damage and/or that take a while to kill, while guiding your little "army" through the area in a way that allows you to more or less one-shot any opponents you encounter so they don't have a chance to hurt your guys.

I only really engaged with the Withered Army Training briefly during my first run through Legion, meaning I was vaguely familiar with the system but with no real understanding of the details. I had quite a bit of fun running through normal difficulty a few times to learn the lay of the land and collect the various upgrade chests (even if it's my understanding that these don't really make a difference on heroic mode either). Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing it only took me two or three more tries to get it right and I felt quite accomplished for finding a good route.

The other achievement that truly excited me was the one to either earn 999 ranks of the inifinte power progression or beat a M+ dungeon on level 49 or higher. I didn't think I was likely to have the motivation to grind out the power ranks (even at the time of me writing this, my Lemix main is only sitting in the 300s), but the M+ way seemed achievable. Together with the husband and a guildie we slowly increased our key level over the weeks as our power levels increased.

Ironically, at the higher key levels I saw way more boss mechanics than I've ever seen while running any of these dungeons in other modes. We failed the timer on our first Return to Upper Karazhan because we'd gone in blind and hey, it turns out you actually need to do mechanics on Medivh!

Our worst week though was the one when we had an Eye of Azshara level 40-something, failed the timer but decided to power through to the end anyway, just to then have to abandon the key at the very end as it turned out the final boss had an unavoidable mechanic that had buggy scaling and would one-shot even players at max gear and power level. (We confirmed this on the forums after a few wipes.)

However, the very week immediately afterwards I got a really easy key, which when we timed it turned into another easy key, which finally turned into a Neltharion's Lair (another easy key) 49, which we managed to time for the achievement. That felt pretty great. 

The reason we were always three-manning was that there was unfortunately less interest in this version of Remix in our little guild than last time. For raids we could also only get three to four people together. Still, we managed to make our way through all the mythic raids including Tomb of Sargeras (Archimonde was a pain but we got him eventually).

Mythic Antorus turned out to be the final obstacle and we were pleasantly surprised that we managed both Enonar and Imonar (though the latter was a hilarious shitshow - definitely a memorable experience, especially me always having to push him through his first phase by myself while the other two were put to sleep). The unexpected dead stop came at Aggramar, since we couldn't burn through his first phase before he did his knockback, and since the strength of that move is inversely proportional to how many people it hits, the three of us were always yeeted into space the moment he used the ability.

We eventually ended up building a normal pug for it, which I simply titled "Antorus for all" (since we knew we were capable of doing most of it with the three of us anyway and just needed more bodies). People applied faster than I could click "accept". It was a fun breeze that eventually ticked off my last raid achievements too.

I'll probably want to write another full post or two about Lemix once it's over, similarly to how I did for MoP Remix. The experience of levelling all these characters and playing through their class order hall campaigns has definitely been something. It's also been another generally enlightening reminder of what worked and didn't work about Legion in general - some of which I already wrote about a few years ago, but I think I have an even clearer picture of it now.

Legion Remix: What Am I Even Doing?

Legion Remix continues to enthrall retail WoW players, and that includes me. The other week I went to K'aresh for a bit and it was like a ghost town. Rares I'd never seen before were up everywhere, only surrounded by tumbleweeds. Meanwhile in Lemix, seemingly every part of every zone is popping, as are all the activity queues.

Almost a month in, I'm working on levelling my third character, but I'm also feeling a bit lost. Looking back at how I wrote about MoP Remix last year, I actually had similar feelings back then, though I eventually found purpose in replaying all the Pandaria story quests, selective hunting of achievements, and grinding Bronze to be able to buy all the cosmetics.

I thought I'd just do the same thing again this time around, but the changes made to the system make everything hit differently. I feel like I'm getting showered in Bronze as a mere side effect of everything else I'm doing, and I've actually been holding off on buying too many things as I know that some rewards can be earned by simply playing too, and I want to avoid spending currency on an item that I would've gotten naturally a week later anyway. (I read several comments from people who fell into this trap.)

In terms of doing the story quests, the husband and I made our way through the original four zones as well as the entirety of the Suramar campaign, which meant we were "caught up" until today's patch release opened up the Broken Shore. I'm actually not sure how I feel about the more staggered content release cadence they are doing for Legion. I kind of liked how MoP Remix was just completely open from the beginning and everything felt like you'd simply get there when you got there, but I figured maybe slowing some of the rushers down a bit this time around wouldn't be so bad to maintain interest in Legion Remix for a little longer. Now that I'm seeing it in action though - I don't know, it feels like instead there is this unspoken pressure to always do the newest bit of content quickly while everyone else is there, because in two weeks everyone will have moved on again. It's probably only in my head, but either way I'm not sure this change actually feels like an improvement to me personally.

The fact that there's an achievement for levelling one of each class during Remix, combined with my interest in seeing the different class order halls, has made me consider making that a personal goal for myself, but I'm still not 100% sure I've truly got the motivation. Yeah, seeing different class order halls is cool, but the shtick of being made "leader of your order" or whatever less than an hour after creating your character just grates a bit, even with the humorous explanation given by the infinite dragons. My most recent alt is a monk and having famous NPCs like Chen Stormstout or Taran Zhu fawn over a derpy little level 30 vulpera as "Grandmaster" just feels wrong.

Everything's also flying by so fast it kind of makes my head spin. Does playing a few hours to make a number go from 10 to 80 at super speed even still count as "levelling"? Can I really think of these new alts as characters when they have so little history and have had no real adventures of their own? They feel like dress-up dolls for different transmog sets more than anything else.

It kind of highlights a problem I have with retail WoW in general: that it gives rewards too quickly and for too little, to the point where they start feeling a bit meaningless and I eventually get sick of them. I used to have a similar problem back when I played Neverwinter, whenever they'd have some sort of bonus event and I'd grind like crazy until I just felt burnt out. WoW does something similar to me nowadays, where they'll provide loads of activities that are quick and rewarding, and I keep thinking "wow, that was fun and took no time at all, I should also do that on my alt" or something along those lines, but even a quick task starts to take up significant amounts of time once you repeat it ten times, and eventually I hit the point where it just becomes too much and too repetitive, so that I end up needing a break. It's like when someone gives you a cookie and at first you just think that's nice but if they then expect you to eat twenty more you'll just want to get away from the craziness eventually.

Remix is like that too, only dialled up to eleven. I definitely enjoy it in small doses, but I'm honestly not sure I can deal with the way it attempts to inject dopamine straight into my veins seemingly every five minutes.

First Thoughts About Legion Remix

Legion Remix is here and I've finally had a reason to spend more time in official WoW again. As mentioned in a previous post, I wasn't quite sure what to expect - while I enjoyed MoP Remix, the news I'd seen coming out of the PTR about this new installment didn't sound particularly encouraging, and unlike many, I don't have any nostalgia for Legion since I wasn't subscribed for that expansion. I only experienced its story for the first time about four years ago, when the husband and I levelled a pair of demon hunters through Legion Chromie Time, and while I came away with a vague feeling of "I can see why people enjoyed this at the time", it's not the same thing as when you were there yourself.

Anyway, last week "Lemix" finally arrived, and it's been pretty fun! In a departure from our usual tendency to roll tank/healer duos, and considering how superfluous I'd ended up feeling as a healer in MoP Remix, I created a Kul Tiran blood death knight as my first character, and my husband accompanied me as a gnome warlock. I'd forgotten just how fast you fly through the levels in Remix, and we levelled this first set of characters all the way to the cap right there on that first weekend.

When you have to sit down to be at eye level with your spouse. 

I will say that I was also reminded of some of the things that I didn't like about the last Remix at the beginning - the sheer speed of progression is extremely good at/bad for making you feel larger than usual levels of FOMO, because you log in for the first time on day three and people who've had nothing else to do during that time are already running around one-shotting everything, making you feel like you're hopelessly behind and will never catch up. But of course that's not true - progression is very quick for everyone; I just can't deny that it's a bit intimidating at first. Never mind the prompt on the character selection screen that constantly tells you that there are only X days left in Remix.

I'd also forgotten about my ambiguous relationship with the dungeon rushing meta. Sometimes it's funny to zone in and see some demon hunter just zoom ahead and kill everything before you can even get anywhere close. Other times though it just feels tedious to spend the whole dungeon jogging after someone else, unable to actually contribute anything and possibly not even getting any loot (the Postmaster will only recover certain types of items). It just requires a certain mental adjustment that whenever I zone into a pug instance, I can't expect to have much fun and have to accept that I'm just gonna be in and out to get something specific done/get my participation medal.

(The glorious exception to this that actually made me squee with delight was the Court of Stars run in which I was the one to successfully identify the spy at the end. People have explained to me in the past how that puzzle works, and I figured I'd understood it, but in practice I'd just never been the first one to find and talk to the right NPC. Actually having that honour for the first time felt weirdly validating and exciting.)

Anyway, I'd like to talk a bit about what's the same and what's different in Legion Remix compared to the MoP variant.

Lore-wise, the Infinite Dragonflight is experimenting again and we're time-travelling to help them out. I think the quest writers must have had a lot of fun coming up with explanations for certain mechanical changes that poke fun at the game while also making a weird kind of sense in-universe. Legion is one of those expansions where everyone addresses you as "champion" because the presumption was that your character would've levelled through the five previous expansions and defeated all kinds of potential world-ending threats. How do you reconcile that with dropping a freshly created level 10 into the storyline at this point? Your Infinite Dragonflight companion has answers:

Even better is what happens a bit later, when you get various quests to do table missions in your class order hall, and she outright says: "Like Eternus mentioned before, this experiment will eventually end. So, we have to be wise about how we spend our time." And then the quest just auto-completes. Considering they included these kinds of mobile-style waiting games in four expansions until they eventually left them behind with Shadowlands, it just cracked me up to have your in-game guide effectively admit that these systems are a waste of time, never mind.

Gear-scrapping and Bronze dropping as a currency everywhere are back, though the latter can no longer be used to increase your item level and only serves as currency to buy cosmetics this time, something that many people requested after the last Remix. I'm actually not sure how the gearing up works this time around. I tried to read up on it but found even the guides a bit unclear. It doesn't seem to matter though as simply doing various bits of content every so often rewards me with gear boxes that increase my item level ever so slightly, so I guess I'll just keep doing that and maybe it'll become more clear over time.

Instead of a magic cloak that constantly increases in power, we got the Legion artifact weapons growing with us this time. This generally seems to work well, except (in my opinion) for the missions to acquire the artifact weapons for your other specs, as these force you to respec and unequip your current artifact, making you feel terribly weak for the duration of those quests. There's also no power transfer to alts this time around, not even a little bit, with the exception of the event's XP bonus.

Things that are new are "heroic world tier" and obelisks, which are basically temporary power-ups that sometimes appear after you kill things in the open world. The latter led to one of my most memorable Remix experiences so far as it turns out there's at least one type of obelisk that doesn't actually power you up but summons a doomguard instead that you have to fight. Worse, these have a variety of different abilities, one of which involves them turning the floor to lava instantly and this floor then doing insane damage - that exact encounter and ability were what caused both of us to die for the first time and it was quite amusing and surprising. (For real though, I feel that particular ability needs a nerf. At least give it a cast time so you have a chance to start moving without the floor just disappearing from under your feet instantly.)

Heroic world tier is basically a separate phase of the world where everything has more HP and hits harder. I think you also earn more rewards but I'm honestly not even sure. The husband and I just accepted the prompt to try it out when we were level 30 or 40 and then continued to spend most of our time in there as it made playing as a duo feel a lot more beneficial and rewarding. I hope that this is a sign that my dream of a simple two-phased Azeroth is something they are at least considering for the future. (I'd want one version where you can simply out-level things if you want, and one where you are always in sync with the world, regardless of where you go, instead of the limitations of all the different Chromie Times.)

With enough random buffs applied, even regular mobs can suddenly turn into what feels like world bosses. 

After rushing our first characters to the cap, the husband and I are now as usual butting heads a bit about how to proceed. He just wants to binge nothing else while I still want to do other things on the side (such as work on my seasons objectives in SWTOR), even if I'm enjoying myself.

I'm also a bit uncertain just what kind of goals I want to set myself in this Remix. We'll work our way through all the quests for sure, and ultimately I'd like to buy all the rewards from the vendors, but that's not something I'm too worried about at this point, especially as some of them can also be earned directly from gameplay, so I'd like to see where that gets me first.

I'm actually also not that fussed about making my character super powerful to be temporarily OP, but more interested in the class-specific bits of the story I haven't seen before. Legion is an expansion with an unusually high amount of unique content for each class, and I only ever played through it as a demon hunter before. I get the impression that these class order hall stories contain a lot of "side lore" about more minor NPCs, which is very much my kind of jam.

I remember at the start of Shadowlands for example, I was surprised to see the former Inquisitor Whitemane among the ranks of the Ebon Blade death knights, wondering when the heck that happened. I haven't completed my death knight's order hall story yet, but I have found out the answer to that question, so that was very interesting to me.

But do I really have it in me to level another character of every class just to see all the order halls? Even if the process presumably speeds up a lot as your account-wide XP boost grows (I saw on reddit that people have already found out that it caps out at 400%), that still feels like a considerable effort. I'm just going to roll with it for now and we'll see.

Retail Bits & Bobs

I'm actually having more fun in Cataclysm Classic than in any other version of the game right now, how weird is that? Still, things haven't exactly been quiet in retail either, rather the opposite - it's just that nothing has been particularly sticky for me. Some notes on what's been going on: 

Retribution Paladin

I finished levelling the paladin I wrote about last month. I didn't get to the cap before the bonus XP event ended, but I was well into War Within by that point and the last few levels didn't take me long at all.

I can see why retribution paladins are so popular. People loved the idea of that class even back in Vanilla, when it performed really poorly in terms of output, so I'm not surprised that it's still popular now that it's more balanced and comes with a lot more shiny effects attached. Fighting as a retribution paladin is basically a massive light show with literal bells and whistles going off everywhere and hammers flying around, and it's just plain fun.

With the free delve keys you get from Renown it was surprisingly quick and easy to get her into a set of decent gear, but now I already find myself thinking "what now" again. Still, it was nice to actually play and level my first ever character in current content after all these years, even if I'll continue to primarily think of her as the one that first explored Elwynn Forest, fought gnolls in Redridge, protected weaker party members on a moonlit night in Loch Modan and got yelled at for tanking badly in the Deadmines.

Horrific Visions

The current patch (11.1.5) got criticised a lot for drip-feeding its content with too much time-gating, which is something I really don't mind, but what is true (for me at least) was that each part of the patch that was released later was less interesting to me than the previous one.

I loved the Nightfall event even if it was buggy and farmed my way to maximum Renown with the associated faction, but the return of Horrific Visions (a feature that was originally part of Battle for Azeroth) was already a lot less interesting to me. The husband and I actually dabbled in these a bit at the end of BfA when we first started playing again, but we didn't stick with them for very long, for reasons I can't recall now.

This time around, I think I already said during the second or third run that I could see these becoming boring really quickly. Sure, repeating content is a big part of WoW and MMOs in general, but there's just something about these little scenarios that makes the repetition even more blatant and tedious. It's become a bit more interesting as we've started to challenge ourselves a little with the higher difficulties, but I still wouldn't want to do these more than a couple of times a week.

Dastardly Duos

Finally, the latest part of the patch to be released belatedly was something called "Dastardly Duos", which I'd heard content creators praise while it was on the PTS, but my personal experience with this feature was comically bad. You see, the husband and I queued into them, and I thought that they would scale to your group size like delves and visions do. There were helpful NPCs at the start, but again I was thinking of Horrific Visions - where the general recommendation was to dismiss the help since it just increased mob health and wasn't actually all that helpful - and simply dismissed them.

This turned out to be a big mistake, as the content is clearly intended for five characters, and your gear is scaled down as well (something I had no idea about), so we got absolutely smashed and soon found ourselves camped at the spawn point. There was a timer on screen so I thought "oh well, let's just let the timer run out" but that did not complete the instance. We couldn't find any exit button either! I eventually distracted the mobs for a bit so the hubby's mage could hearthstone out, and I managed to get out the same way a bit later. It was just funny and bizarre but also totally killed any desire we'd had to engage with this content. Nothing like being thrown into an instance where you can't tell what's going on, get spawn-camped by NPCs and can't figure out how to leave.

I did eventually go back and complete a couple of rounds with the NPC group as intended, but I still didn't really understand what was supposed to be the point and it just didn't look particularly fun. There are plenty of more entertaining things for me to do instead of struggling to figure this out. 

In fact the next patch, 11.1.7, is already supposed to launch this week, so there's already something new to check out, yet again.

Legion Remix

During PAX East, something that was already floating around as a rumour was officially confirmed: that there'll be another Remix event like last year's Mists of Pandaria Remix, only this time it's going to be for Legion and it's going to launch towards the end of the year. I ultimately ended up liking MoP Remix quite a lot, so I'm looking forward to this, but at the same time my own experiences with Legion weren't that long ago and I didn't play the expansion at all when it originally came out, so I'm not currently feeling a lot of nostalgia for it.

I also have a character of every class at the level cap now (plus the extra paladin mentioned above) so what would I even level next? Another one of every class on the opposite faction, trying out different race and class combos? Not sure where I'll end up landing on all this. 

Housing Hype

And because all of this clearly isn't enough, Blizzard also keeps trickling out more news about housing. There's been a few dev blogs on the subject, such as this one and this one, and last month they had an event where different content creators got an early preview of how things are going, which resulted in a lot of them making gushing videos about the experience.

I'm following all this with interest but at the same time I'm not that much of a housing enthusiast that I'm on the edge of my seat (which is why I haven't felt the need to post about any of the above until now). In fact, a lot of the more advanced features don't sound all that interesting to me because I don't think I'd ever use them, so I was mainly relieved that it's been stated that there'll be a basic editor for players like me who just want to keep it simple.

One quote that amused me and that stuck with me (though I sadly can't remember now where I heard it) was something along the lines of: "Interior and exterior are completely separate, so your house can be much bigger on the inside, like the TARDIS. Or as we should say in WoW, like Naxxramas." 

WoW's Post-WoD Sub Numbers

Blizzard infamously stopped publishing WoW's active subscriber numbers during Warlords of Draenor, after they had fallen to less than half of their previous peak of 12 million. Since then, there's often been speculation about how well or badly the game is doing, but ultimately we didn't have access to any real data to back this up.

Apparently this changed this week, as Franchise Manager John Hight gave a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference called "The First 30 Years of Warcraft: The Making of a Game Universe" on Wednesday. There isn't a recording available online at the time of me writing this, but apparently some photos of his presentation were leaked, revealing some surprisingly open admissions of failure in regards to Shadowlands and showing a graph of overall subscriber trends since the launch of the Legion expansion.

Now, this graph didn't include numbers, but YouTuber Bellular matched the graphic up with information from previous public earnings reports to make some pretty convincing guesses:

Screenshot from the video "Report: WoW's Actual Subscriber Count & Blizz's Official Shadowlands Post-mortem"

There are a lot of interesting tidbits to take away from these numbers:

• Even at its lowest of lows, WoW still had 4 million subscribers, easily eating any other classic MMO's lunch. The game still sporting 7 million subscribers as it's approaching its 20th anniversary is actually pretty insane.
  
• That lowest of lows happened after the launch of BfA, but subscriptions then surged again with the launch of Classic, reaching a peak of over eight million, which was the highest number they had seen since the release of Warlords of Draenor.
• Shadowlands did indeed drop off very hard (a slide in Hight's presentation specifically calls this out) and was presumably only saved from dropping even lower than BfA due to the fact that overall subscription numbers were still propped up by Classic.
• Dragonflight had an unexpectedly weak launch, but has had "record post-launch stability and growth", with current sub numbers actually exceeding the ones seen at the expansion's release. Classic is presumably still helping to some degree though, so it's hard to say how Dragonflight has performed on its own. Regardless, there's a clear recovery going on compared to the doldrums of 2022.

More on Legion

The meat of this post has apparently been sat in my drafts folder for more than four months at this point, but I guess when you're writing about content from an expansion that's already more than five years old, a few months more or less don't really make a difference anymore. If anything, talking about Legion is about to become more relevant again, with Blizzard planning to retune some Legion content to become replayable at level during Shadowlands... or something.

Still, the focus of this post was actually meant to be on the demon hunter alts my husband and I created earlier in the year and our progress through Legion. We didn't quite "100%" it, but we did complete the quest content for all the major patches and duoed all the old raids. We always meant to do the same for the BfA raids actually, but just never got around to even trying.

It's been quite fun, because while regular attacks basically didn't hurt our characters even a mere two levels above the content, some special mechanics could still kill us and actually introduced a bit of challenge. Me just about finishing off Fallen Avatar with my husband's character already dead and just as the boss's last platform was disappearing into the green goo was certainly a moment.

Not having set foot into a WoW raid, not even in its LFR version, since Mists of Pandaria, I was also surprised by how story-heavy some of these have been. Nighthold and Tomb of Sargeras for example definitely had more going on than us simply killing a big bad. I can see how that wouldn't have been popular with a certain segment of the player base.

But anyway, I'm only four paragraphs in and already digressing. What I really wanted to focus on was that the Legion content has been surprisingly fun, and I feel that even with all the borrowed power mechanics stripped out or made irrelevant, you can still tell why it's the modern expansion that people look back on with the most fondness. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if not having to deal with systems like legendaries and artifact power actually improves the experience, considering that those seemed to be the main things I remember hearing people gripe about back in the day. (My demon hunter did find three legendaries by the way, but they might as well be greens at this point in the game.)

One thing I liked is that Legion felt extremely thematically coherent, which is something that BfA was not. The core of the base expansion content is basically: The Burning Legion (demonic bad guys) are invading and we need to find these MacGuffins to defend ourselves! Also, some ancient elves in this land are actually working with the demons because of course they are. And after that the progression is: dealing with the demon-loving elves (Nighthold), pushing back against the demons themselves (Tomb of Sargeras), taking the fight to the demon home world (Argus).

The intro to Argus was bloody brilliant by the way. The scale of it all was impressive and the music bombastic, giving the whole thing a real feel of the end times. If anything I think Blizzard probably took that too far, because it's hard to dial things down again in a meaningful way after dealing with those kinds of world-ending stakes, something that I recall people criticising about Mists of Pandaria in the wake of Cataclysm as well, even if public perception seems to have changed to look back on MoP with a degree of fondness now.

Anyway, it's commonly accepted that most WoW players don't care much about lore and I agree, but I think there's a difference between caring about the intricacies of the lore and having at least a vague idea of what's going on, what your character is doing and why. If the game fails at conveying the latter as it kind of did in BfA with its weird meandering from faction conflict to adventures under the sea to old gods, people won't take to the forums en masse to complain that the story is bad (edit four months later: apparently it takes a cut scene with Sylvanas for that), but I'm 100% convinced that it does result in the average player feeling less engaged by the game.

Legion definitely didn't have that problem. Some details may have been confusing (Why does Turalyon talk about fighting the Legion for thousands of years? Surely he can't have been with the Army of Light for more than a couple of decades, tops?) but you could always follow the main throughline.

The way major lore characters were involved was also pretty well done for the most part in that they fight by your side and provide some guidance, and there are interesting things happening to them, but you don't need to like them or care about the details of their stories for things to work. The closest the game came to violating that rule was with Illidan, and it's no coincidence that I thought the "travel around the world to watch selected two-minute cut scenes of Illidan's life" quest chain was not a great piece of content, and not just because the removal of most portals from Legion-era Dalaran made it a pain in the butt from a gameplay perspective as well. The point is, even if you thought that Illidan was annoying, smug and generally overrated, the rest of the story still worked (more or less).

This is something that has shaped up to be a problem in Shadowlands, with the plot being heavily focused on Sylvanas Windrunner and Anduin Wrynn, both characters that have had almost no interaction with the player character up to this point in the expansion. At the same time the threat being posed by the Jailer is poorly explained and also feels very distant, meaning that players are essentially left to tread water in the covenant zones, with the occasional foray into the Maw, which is supposed to be a hellhole and it's never our plan to make it nice or anything, so why are we here again? It all just feels extremely unfocused, which is quite a feat for an expansion that is all about us spending all of our time on a different plane of existence with none of the usual old world concerns around to distract us.

My First Shadowlands Alt

It took a while, but I actually got a second character to sixty in retail this week - the demon hunter I started in May. Her levelling journey could be described as... unconventional. As mentioned in the linked post, the demon hunter duo I started with my husband actually made it to fifty in no time at all, but we resisted Blizzard's push to continue into Shadowlands - because what for? So we spent the next few months puttering about in Legion content and gaining practically no XP. (One day I'll finish that draft about what I thought of the rest of Legion.)

Much to our surprise, we did eventually discover one source of XP inside old expansions though: archaeology, which for some reason hasn't been split out into different sub-professions for each expansion (unlike every other profession) and allows you to skill up and level seemingly anywhere without penalty. We stumbled upon this as Legion featured a fortnightly archaeology quest which we got into the habit of doing. So we slowly but surely started to gain levels from that. Just don't tell Blizzard please, you know they'll nerf anything into the ground that causes people to "play the game wrong".

Anyway, I was already entertaining the idea of how amusing it would be if we got all the way to sixty from nothing but archaeology... but every now and then I'd find myself fighting a mob of my own level (usually one of those guys that can spawn at archaeology dig sites), and it became very noticeable that while my level was going up my gear had remained static, which due to the nature of WoW's scaling meant that my character was actually becoming weaker and weaker - that's also why I had so much trouble with the scenario to unlock lightforged draenei.

I was starting to worry that I might end up entering Shadowlands in a position where I'd actually be unable to kill anything, what with mobs scaling to my level... so I decided to give in and do the introduction to Shadowlands at least. Turns out this was already considered low-level content for me as well, so it wasn't too much of a problem, though sadly it didn't reward a single piece of gear.

Once I reached Oribos, I was presented with the option to skip re-doing the Shadowlands storyline and level via "Threads of Fate" instead, which I took. It honestly was a bit disappointing though because I thought this meant that I would be completely free to choose my own sources of XP. I guess technically I was, but for some reason Blizzard still felt the need to also give you a quest flagged "campaign" which requires you to do a fill-the-bar routine in every zone. I guess they figured that just leaving you to fill your XP bar at your own leisure wasn't providing enough direction? I don't know.

At least you can pick the order of the zones, so I decided to go to Revendreth first since I'd made my demon hunter a Venthyr. I almost instantly regretted my choice though when it took me about ten minutes to find the entrance to the covenant sanctum... Revendreth is just a horrible zone to navigate. Fortunately the husband at least reminded me that the Shadowlands flight unlock is account-wide and also applies while levelling.

The final couple of levels to sixty then came in what felt like no time at all, though they were filled with a lot of dying on my part because it was just such a struggle to kill anything with my low-level gear. Whenever I managed to find and complete a quest that rewarded a gear upgrade, it more than doubled my stats in that slot.

After filling my Revendreth bar I was finally awarded a new weapon too, though this then led to the bizarre dilemma that my legion twin glaives were considered a single item that couldn't be split up, but my quest reward was only a single warglaive. I didn't really fancy fighting one-handed, but fortunately a world quest was up that didn't require any combat and rewarded a fist weapon to put in my off-hand.

I'm not sure where I'll take this character from here. I might do some casual work on the covenant campaign over time and get a few more gear upgrades, but I don't really fancy grinding Shadowlands content on a second character. I just wanted to not punch like a wet noodle anymore when fighting mobs of my level, but once that's sorted I might just go back and see whatever's left to do on the Broken Isles.

Allied Races

Are y'all ready for another episode of "Shintar talks about game content or features that people cared about four years ago but that are very much old hat by now"? Well, ready or not, here it comes.

Allied races were introduced with the Legion expansion and even though I wasn't playing at the time, I remember there being quite a bit of hubbub around their inclusion back then. They are basically different species available at character creation that (in a post-level squish world) start at level 10 instead of 1, don't have their own starting zone, and don't have unique animations but offer different skins. People love additional customisation options of any kind, and I recall cries to make pretty much everything and everyone into an allied race, something I could only shake my head at.

Accordingly, I didn't pay too much attention to the feature when the husband I started playing retail again, but the other day I realised that with us having completed both BfA and Legion at this point, I had most of the requirements for all the Alliance allied races unlocked and only had to actually go through the associated scenarios/intro quests to trigger the unlock properly, so off I went.

The Kul Tiran quest chain was honestly pretty cool, even if I was a bit exasperated by the amount of flying back and forth cross-continent that it required. The scenarios for the other races were noticeably less impressive, though the one for the lightforged draenei still resulted in a very memorable experience for me, for reasons that were probably not intended.

You see, I did this scenario on my demon hunter, who's currently level 54 without ever having set foot into Shadowlands, but is wearing the best gear you can get from Legion content. The lightforged draenei scenario scales to your level, which means that it was filled with mobs my level or one below. Should be easy enough, right? NO! A single level 53 mob in that scenario was enough to absolutely destroy me.

After a couple of deaths I quickly learned to let T'paartos, the friendly NPC I was supposed to be accompanying, do most of the fighting as he was pretty strong and sturdy anyway. But then disaster struck, when one pull resulted in several adds and I followed my gut instinct of starting to AoE, which meant that I went squish instantly. Oh well, what's another death, right?

The problem was that dying in that particular spot caused me to respawn away from my NPC friend and on top of another mob, meaning that I got killed again right away. I tried to get up again a few more times but without much success - if I managed to evade one mob, I'd just aggro another. Eventually I waited for Metamorphosis to come off cooldown before reviving again and managed to clear a little safe patch for myself. Then I slowly and carefully started making my way back to where I last left T'paartos, taking great care to never start a fight with less than full health and several cooldowns available and to never get more than one mob at a time. Eventually I made it back to him and the quest could resume.

After that I was even more careful and did okay for a while, until we got to the big end boss, who seemed to do some kind of hard to avoid/unavoidable(?) AoE that killed me in a few hits even with cooldowns up. I tried to make it back in time while T'paartos was still fighting but got delayed by more mobs in my way. While I was still busy getting lost inside the cave this was all happening in, I suddenly got the message that the scenario was complete, as T'paartos had managed to finish off the boss on his own. That guy really earned his lightforged status, is all I'm saying. My entire armour was yellow from all the deaths by the end of that, but I guess it was kind of funny.

I did make both a lightforged draenei and a Kul Tiran alt so far and quite like them. I think I'm coming around to this allied race idea... if for no other reason than that still being able to earn meaningful rewards in old expansion content is something I like, as it flies in the face of the sort of planned obsolescence model that Blizzard applies to too much of its modern content in my eyes.

Legion, Years Later

Meanwhile, in retail... the husband and I have been running out of things (we both want) to do in Shadowlands even with our ultra casual play style. Our main staple used to be to do the callings every three days at least, but we're at the point now where we've maxed out all the reputations and got all possible conduits out of the reward bags, so we were basically just doing dailies for vendor trash at this point. While gold still has some value in retail, this was obviously not the most satisfying of setups. I suppose we could always have continued to grind anima until kingdom come, but seriously, who does that?

After some discussion about what to do next, we agreed to roll up a pair of alts, specifically a set of demon hunters, as it's a class I'd never played and I also had zero first-hand experience with the Legion expansion in general.

The demon hunter starting experience was a great story with neat cinematics and some very interesting moments. Five stars, would play again. (Even if the once-famous Blizzard polish is definitely not a thing anymore. I got very confused by the game repeatedly throwing level-up messages at me that claimed I had gained this or that ability, but the cited spells were nowhere to be found. Only later on did I learn that skill acquisition for demon hunters in the early levels is actually tied to completing certain quests, not levelling up, so who knows why they did that...)

I knew from a post by Wilhelm that the demon hunter experience segues straight into the regular Legion expansion content, so that wasn't unexpected. As with our previous characters, we absolutely flew through the levels. After about two of the zones, we were already level 45 and mobs stopped scaling with us. (I keep having to refer back to Wilhelm's chart about this because the way levels work in different expansions now is just confusing to me.)

We jumped into the Chromie time version of Legion and also used this opportunity to do a few dungeons. With that and about another half a zone worth of quests, we both hit level 50. I know I'm not the first one to say this, but boy, does Blizzard not want you to hang around in old content. The moment each of us dinged, we got a shout-out from Chromie about being needed in the future and a one-minute timer started counting down before we were ejected from Chromie time. You better hope you're not in the middle of a quest chain that takes longer than a minute to complete, or else you'll have to manually make your way back to the unscaled version of the same zone. Who cares about silly things like seeing the end of a storyline anyway? Just go to Shadowlands already!

The husband and I refused the call and just returned to the unscaled version of the Legion zones, where everything was now grey to us and died within one or two hits. We've continued questing there for little to no reward, even if it's a bit disheartening to not receive significant gear or XP rewards anymore. But why would we want to immediately go back to the expansion we just left behind, and intentionally at that?

As of now we've more or less finished the base expansion zones and are currently working our way through the Suramar campaign. I can only imagine how incredibly epic (though potentially also annoying) all this content must have felt at the time when it was current. Even with the city guards posing no threat to us anymore, hearing phrases like "something's not quite right" whenever your disguise is about to be blown still makes me want to scream sometimes.

Then there's also patch content left to tackle, such as the Broken Shore (?) and Argus, but playing through this stuff now as a latecomer it's a bit hard to know what's what to be honest, as the quest NPCs throw everything at you at once, without any indication of what order these storylines are supposed to happen in or sometimes even that you're dealing with a major storyline at all (until you're further along already), which can result in chaos like conflicting phases for the same area of Dalaran and things like that.

The other thing that's stood out to me so far is that professions were super weird in Legion. All this play time and I'm nowhere near maxing out my mining skill for example, something that is usually extremely easy to do, and further jewelcrafting progress seems to be tied to me completing some dungeon quests first. It's as if Blizzard looked at professions in Legion and concluded that they needed spicing up, but for some reason decided that the best way to spice up these non-combat activities was to add more combat (the mobs that keep popping up whenever I do any archaeology on the Broken Isles are another prime example).

We'll see how long we'll keep working on this particular project. Achieving the old pathfinder, even if it doesn't serve any purpose anymore, seems like a reasonable goalpost that should result in us seeing most of what Legion has to offer (or what's left of it at least). At some point we can also move on to Shadowlands to see a different covenant campaign or something I guess, but I don't think we're ready for that just yet...

Legion & Legacy - End-of-year Thoughts

Just because I haven't been playing WoW doesn't mean that it has been completely off my radar. For one thing, the launch of the Legion expansion in late summer was hard to miss. And I do have to hand it to the WoW community: They are very good at building hype. I actually watched a video of someone talking so enthusiastically about just how much fun he was having with Legion that part of me was genuinely tempted to give it a try. I know better of course, but I have to give kudos to people for still managing to rouse these kinds of feelings in me after all these years and despite of my brain knowing better.

Following the reactions to Legion once the launch hype had died down was also interesting because... either Blizzard really never learns, people will complain no matter what, or maybe a bit of both. The reason I'm saying this is that after all the "there's nothing to do" moans about Warlords of Draenor, we are now back to people complaining about excessive grind and alt-unfriendliness - the exact same things that people were criticising about Mists of Pandaria. It's pretty fascinating to observe even without playing myself.

Meanwhile, I have been feeling a genuine itch to play some Vanilla again, but after just getting a new PC I'm uncertain about how to go about it. The memory of how much of a hassle it was to get the Vanilla client up and running last time doesn't exactly endear me to going through all of that again. And it makes me kind of sad to say it but... I also think I'm pretty much done with Kronos. I didn't really put down deep enough roots on it, and the fact that it's a PvP server just makes it too hard for me to casually enjoy myself on my own. I was really hoping that the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraj would invigorate my interest somehow, but seeing how I wasn't even able to observe the event peacefully, the opposite was the case. It's annoying that the private server community has such a hard-on for PvP servers that good PvE options are few and far between. Mind you, I don't regret giving it a try, but it also taught me that PvP servers are not worth my time in the long run.

But oh, what's this...?

The drama around Nostalrius continues, and apparently they have now decided to relaunch. I've previously written about why I don't think Blizzard will ever create official Vanilla servers, but it's hard to not feel at least a spark of hope these days considering that they've gone on record only this month to say that they are still thinking about it. The Nost team on the other hand, previously the community's untiring official champions for legacy servers, have now decided to throw their toys out of the pram and will just do the same thing as other private server hosts, which is to keep going and simply ignore any cease and desists from Blizzard. One can't help but see this as unhelpful to the cause... if you thought that official Vanilla servers ever had a chance that is. For many that were quite happy to play on private servers on the other hand, the return of Nost is a joyous day. And you know what? I think at this point it might be for me too... because they are also relaunching their PvE server.

It will be the last one to go up as part of an incredibly badly thought-out staggered release and will likely be the least populated... but all that is perfectly fine by me. Maybe in the new year I will give levelling another Vanilla character a shot, this time without constantly having to worry about gank attempts.

BlizzCon, the Warcraft Movie and Ironmen

BlizzCon has come and gone and WoW was once again all over the (MMO) news. There was also that little announcement about further subscription drops and that they'll never report subscriber numbers again, but oh well. I liked the way Wilhelm put it: "In the end, even World of Warcraft in reality cannot compete with World of Warcraft of legend."

The Legion announcement left me completely cold. I say this not to pooh-pooh on anyone who was excited by it, but because it's an interesting contrast to Warlords of Draenor. WoD at least still sounded somewhat tempting to me. This stuff? Nope. I guess I really am over that. I didn't even like the Legion trailer, mainly because it was focused on Varian.



I've been told that he's gradually been turned into a decent character, and maybe that's true, but if it is it definitely came too late for me. To me he'll always be that douche with the stupid hair. The only time I liked him (sorta) was when he was still the missing diplomat.

I was sort of intrigued by the Warcraft movie trailer:



I don't think it will blow anyone away in terms of story, but it does capture the Warcraft aesthetic pretty well and it's interesting to see a more "realistic" rendition of Azeroth for once. It focuses on a time period from classic Warcraft, which will appeal to a lot of people who may not like or care about the current game anymore. And it will be interesting to see how they change up the lore to make it more suitable for the big screen. For example the orcs come across as a lot more sympathetic in that trailer than I would have expected them to be at that point in Warcraft history, plus there's that whole "green Moses" scene...

I've also been watching people play WoW on YouTube, specifically the Ironman Challenge. I seem to remember hearing about the basic idea of levelling a character with as many self-imposed handicaps as possible as far back as Wrath of the Lich King, but it seems to have increased in appeal the more boring the base levelling game has become.



My favourite has been TheLazyPeon's series about it, because he gets so genuinely enthused about exploring the game in a new manner and so freaked out by his near-deaths. (Dying instantly causes you to "lose" the challenge.) You definitely feel a bit of Vanilla WoW flair in the air whenever his little mage sheeps things and runs for his life.

The other YouTuber I've been watching play through this challenge is Asmongold:



He projects more of a "bro" personality on screen, and if you see the weird sort of "fan mail" he gets, you wonder if he ever regrets it. It's interesting to see how completely different his approach is though. He couldn't get what the challenge was about initially, constantly deriding it as too easy (and to be fair, he did roll a hunter). But then he made a stupid pull in Duskwood and pretty much only survived it because he happened to level up at just the right time and it really seemed to sink in that the game could still be challenging if you do gimp yourself enough. He also has pretty much zero interest in quests and lore and frequently seems to forget that Cataclysm happened (as in, he'll keep talking about what sort of quest he thinks is coming up in the next area, but it's almost always the Vanilla version he describes). Still entertaining in its own way.