Retail WoW & Me in 2025

What with the 80/20 split in play time mentioned in my previous post, it seems hard to deny that I'm more of a retail player now, even if it still feels weird to me. I still prefer the way many things work in Classic, but with retail being the mode that both my husband and many of my friends prefer, it's easy for me to end up spending more time there.

I'll have to change the way I do the character round-ups this time, since we got the new warband character selection screens this year! It's technically still possible to take individual shots of each character by dragging them out of their groupings, but that's too much extra effort for me, so I'll just follow the groupings I've created for myself in this post as well.

Oh, and I've decided that I'm not going to get into Legion Remix at all in this post. I'll just note that I created twelve new characters for it, most of whom have had very little play time, have no professions (since those are disabled in Remix) and I don't quite know yet what I'm going to do with them going forward. I intend to make a separate post about that whole experience later down the line. Meanwhile, let's look at the best of the rest:

Mains

My main warband screen contains the four characters that I've played the most throughout the year.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
• 16 days, 16 hours /played (+11 days, 23 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Blacksmithing (+17), 100 Mining, 48 Cooking (+12), 139 Fishing (+91)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 66 Outland Blacksmithing (+66), 15 Cataclysm Blacksmithing (+15),  5 Kul Tiran Blacksmithing (+5), 58 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+58), 300 Classic Mining (+5), 75 Outland Mining (+75), 75 Cataclysm Mining (+62), 28 Pandaria Mining (+28), 14 Kul Tiran Mining (+14), 100 Dragon Isles Mining (+100), 7 Outland Fishing (+7), 4 Kul Tiran Fishing (+4), 7 Archaeology (+7) 

Towards the end of last year, the warrior I levelled in MoP Remix was still kind of transitioning into being my new main, but 2025 was definitely her year entirely, as no other character came close to accumulating even half as much play time. At the start of the year I was still tanking M+ dungeons for guildies, but I dropped M+ entirely at the end of season one, for a variety of reasons. I continued to have lots of fun duoing delves with the husband though, which probably took up the majority of our time. I also did some work on professions though, some of which I talked about in this post. (No, that second Thunderfury binding still hasn't dropped.)

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker
• 27 days, 2 hours /played (+2 days, 13 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Leatherworking (+17), 100 Skinning, 100 Cooking (+27), 250 Fishing (+106)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): Legion Leatherworking 3 (+3), 218 Classic Skinning (+89), 69 Outland Skinning (+8), 5 Pandaria Skinning (+5), 31 Draenor Skinning (+31), 100 Legion Skinning (+15), 36 Kul Tiran Skinning (+6), 31 Kul Tiran Fishing (+1)

I still feel attached to my Dragonflight main because I loved that expansion so much, but she got the least play time of the four characters in this group because preservation evoker just hasn't felt good to play for me ever since War Within dropped. It's not terrible, it's just felt slightly off all expansion, leading me to prioritise my priest whenever I felt like healing.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest
• 12 days, 9 hours /played (+4 days)
• War Within professions: 100 Tailoring (+35), 100 Enchanting (+39), 39 Cooking (+18), 88 Fishing (+15)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 75 Northrend Tailoring (+44), 75 Cataclysm Tailoring (+30), 76 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+2), 300 Classic Enchanting (+204), 51 Outland Enchanting (+25), 25 Cataclysm Enchanting (+10), 78 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+4)

... this being the aforementioned priest. She remains that character that serves no particular purpose in our little group's adventures; I just really like playing holy priest sometimes. I also did some real work on her professions this year, levelling up enchanting and tailoring skills from several old expansions. 

Shinfur - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 pandaren monk
• 4 days, 20 hours /played (+3 days, 16 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Engineering (+17), 36 Cooking (+30), 63 Fishing (+59)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 Classic Mining (+12), 7 Legion Mining (+7), 3 Classic Engineering (+3), 5 Outland Engineering (+5), 6 Draenor Cooking (+6) 

The monk I levelled during MoP Remix ended up supplanting my human monk from Shadowlands somehow, maybe because I'd levelled the latter primarily as a healer while this one gets played as windwalker all the time. She's the one dps character I have on whom I feel moderately competent and who was also the one on whom I beat Zekvir's Lair on ?? difficulty.

Melee dps alts

I've had kind of mixed feelings about my melee dps alts all year. I mostly decided at one point that I wanted to have one of every class at 80, plus more alts allowed me to work on more professions. But when push comes to shove, I only have so much time to grind delves or whatever other gameplay to gear up, which was mostly invested in the mains, meaning all of these ladies came out only now and then whenever the mood struck me.

Mehg - AN

• Level 80 night elf demon hunter (+8)
• 12 days, 12 hours /played (+1 day, 15 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining (+70), 100 Jewelcrafting (+75), 40 Cooking (+40), 53 Fishing (+53)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 290 Classic Mining (+274), 39 Outland Mining (+39), 44 Cataclysm Mining (+17), 11 Classic Jewelcrafting (+11) 

Hekatie - ER

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 12 days, 16 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Inscription (+29), 43 Cooking (+13), 63 Fishing (+21)
• Other professions: no changes this year

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue
• 3 days, 15 hours /played (+17 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism (+13), 105 Skinning (+35), 25 Cooking (+25), 12 Fishing (+12)
• Other professions: no changes this year 

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 80 human paladin (+61)
• 3 days, 8 hours /played (+1 day, 10 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 44 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 25 Cooking, 30 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 43 Dragon Isles Blacksmithing (+43), 15 Northrend Mining (+15), 94 Dragon Isles Mining (+94), 23 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23)

The paladin (who was the very first character I ever created, located on a German server) probably had the most interesting journey as I decided to level her up on a whim during a Winds of Mysterious Fortune event. 

Ranged dps alts

Yes, that's right, there's only three of these! I guess there's a job opening here for whenever I hit level 80 on another ranged class.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter
• 5 days, 19 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
• War Within professions: 88 Leatherworking (+32), 100 Skinning, 32 Cooking (+6), 53 Fishing (+20)
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 20 Outland Skinning (+14), 53 Legion Skinning (+4)

Hunter is a class I kind of want to like and play more since I loved classic hunters so much, but for some reason Blizzard just keeps making the retail version of the class worse and worse. I still think that turning survival into a melee spec in Legion was a mistake, and trying to take MM hunters' pets away in War Within just to appease raiders was even worse. They just don't seem to have any kind of clue what hunter players want from the class, and this reddit post on the subject I saw this year really resonated with me.

Willowie - QT

• Level 80 human warlock (+6)
• 1 day, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 3 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Alchemy (+52), 100 Herbalism (+38), 37 Cooking, 45 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only) 2 Classic Alchemy (+2), 11 Classic Herbalism

My perception of warlock gameplay tends to oscillate between "this is terrible" and "wait, this is fun" but then Blizzard changes something again, I get confused and lose interest again. This is the warlock I levelled in MoP Remix by the way. 

Daerys - Darkspear

• Level 80 draenei mage (+10)
• 31 days, 6 hours /played (+21 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 100 Mining, 53 Jewelcrafting, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 4 Legion Mining (+4), 6 Legion Jewelcrafting (+6) 

Honestly, I just levelled this one so I would finally have all classes at 80. And so someone could wear the banging tier one mage transmog once I'd finally completed the set. 

Tank and healer alts

Yeah, so... I already have a tank and two healers in my "mains" group, how much time could I realistically have left for these guys? They just exist for the occasional change of pace at this point. 

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
• 2 days, 16 hours /played (+1 day, 5 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 1 Cooking, 32 Fishing (+16)
• Other professions: no changes this year

I'll say that my bear druid came close at one point to getting some more play time, after I kind of ran out of things to upgrade on my warrior main, but for the rest of the year Blizzard was very good at drip-feeding me just one more upgrade over and over again, which kept me chugging away at the warrior until the very end of most seasons. 

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
• 4 days, 12 hours /played (+22 hours)
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
• Other professions (changed from 2024 only): 7 Northrend Mining (+4), 300 Classic Skinning, 28 Northrend Skinning (+16), 56 Archaeology (+6)

Shimeri - AN

• Level 80 dwarf shaman (+10)
• 5 days, 2 hours /played (+18 hours)
• War Within professions (new in 2024): 93 Alchemy, 100 Herbalism, 25 Cooking, 1 Fishing
• Other professions: none 

Recent levellers

The last grouping I'm going to feature here is... a bit of a lie, because none of these have actually been levelled "recently". They had been when I named the group though. 

Surly - QT

• Level 25 blood elf hunter
• 5 hours played
• Professions: none

Surly was originally created because I had picked up a "bound to warband" polearm that I thought would be good for a survival hunter. Not that I ever levelled her that far. Instead I just got a bit of a first impression of melee survival (extremely clunky in the first few levels) and got to revisit the blood elf starting zone (pretty nostalgic). She was also my first test subject for doing Lorewalking on a low-level character.

Spinny - QT 

• Level 21 goblin monk
• 3 hours played
• Professions: 34 Classic Herbalism, 20 Cataclysm Skinning

Spinny was created so I could refresh my knowledge of goblin lore before the release of Undermine. After that I couldn't quite decide where to level next and ended up going nowhere.

Tidella - AN

• Level 55 Kul Tiran shaman (+1)
• 2 days, 1 hour /played (+4 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 292 Classic Mining (+186), 9 Cataclysm Mining (+6), 245 Classic Engineering (+105) 

When I first looked up this character I was like "what, I gained a level, I didn't think I even played this character this year" but then I checked the profession stats and oh right, I guess I worked on her Classic mining and engineering at some point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also ran:

No more warband screens, just two more characters for whom I noted down some minor changes: 

Shinlu - AN

• Level 71 human monk (+3)
• 22 days, 16 hours /played (+2 hours)
• Professions (changed from 2024 only): 12 War Within Skinning (+12)

Again, I hardly remember playing my old monk from Shadowlands this year, but apparently she gained three levels. I think I took her to Khaz Algar and did a couple of easy delves to explore more variants back before they made it so you can see the delve variant of the day on the map.

Eartha - AN

• Level 52 earthen shaman (+26)
• 8 hours /played (+6)
• Professions: none 

Finally, this character! I mentioned last year that I'd created her to benefit from the earthen racial bonus to exploration XP and that I was going to write about that... but then I didn't. We'll see whether I eventually get around to it or not.

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.

MoP Pre-Patch Impressions

Mere days after I hit the level cap in Cata Classic last week, the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch dropped. I wasn't particularly excited about it, but I couldn't help but notice some changes as I logged into my hunter to do the daily cooking quest (like I said before, the profession dailies were easily one of my favourite things about Cata, so I'm still doing those until I max out my cooking and get the achievement for completing all the variations in all three capitals). 

The new talents were there, which I didn't particularly like in original MoP and still don't like now. Most notably though, my bow was in my bags and my hunter only had her staff equipped. Re-equipping the bow resulted in the staff going back into the bag instead.

Ah yes, remember how I said last month that one of the things I was enjoying about Cata was that hunters could still wield both a ranged and a melee weapon? R.I.P. to that particular class fantasy; I just never realised that this was a change that happened in MoP.

It actually made me realise that class fantasy aside, it's really kind of bizarre how Blizzard handled this. Survival didn't become a melee spec until Legion, so why would you let hunters equip a melee weapon only and then have them be locked out of using every single one of their combat abilities? Talk about a giant noob trap.

In fact, this is something that's still confusing in retail as I noticed the other day when I rolled up a survival hunter, because you still start with a ranged weapon and then when you hit level 10 and spec survival, you initially have like... one ability you can actually use, with everything else suddenly greyed out. It just feels terrible. Also, I only found out at that point that retail hunters no longer start with a pet for some reason? But you don't get a quest to tame one either, so... I have no idea how new players are supposed to figure this shit out. Anyway, I digress.

I had also logged into my feral druid briefly before the patch, to make the boat ride to Valgarde now that I'd remembered where to get on the right boat. Checking on her after the pre-patch, I was dismayed to be reminded that MoP was also when they did away with the whole notion of being a bear-cat, as feral was split into new feral (cat only) and guardian (bear only). I hadn't realised just how many gameplay changes that I didn't like actually came about in Mists of Pandaria. Both Wrath and Cata did things that I felt at least ambivalent about at the time, meaning I saw both pros and cons to them, but it seems MoP was when stuff got really bad, considering how many of its gameplay changes are triggering a pure "oh yeah, I remember hating that" response in me.

Anyway, with all those bad feelings, that likely would've been it for me and the pre-patch (other than to continue my daily cooking), but then I learned that Pandaren were already available and that you'd earn a free mount in retail for completing their starting zone in Classic, mirroring the promotion they had going on with a protodrake and the death knight starting zone during Wrath. I did that one in spite of feeling less than lukewarm about WotLK Classic, so re-doing the panda starting zone this time seemed like a no-brainer.

I'd actually only been through the Wandering Isle once before, about three years ago, so I was happy to pay it another visit. I also thought it would be interesting to do it as a monk this time, since I didn't create my first monk until BfA and therefore had no idea how different the class was going to be in its initial iteration.

The first difference was in fact immediate and very noticeable as my first ability was a move called "Jab" that actually hit my opponent with my staff, which I thought was delightful. In retail, monks don't use their weapons for anything, ever (which also makes the first Pandaren quest, which asks you to pick up a weapon and show that you can use it, quite nonsensical).

I made it to about level five, slowly jabbing things to death, when it occurred to me that while the Wandering Isle was very pretty, it was also quite boring to hit things to death so slowly. It was only then that I realised - oh right, we're in MoP, where you learn new abilities automatically and I guess they don't even show up on my bar? (Looking back, they did used to go on your bar in original MoP if there was space, so maybe this is just a bug.) Checking my spell book actually revealed new abilities I hadn't even realised I had access to, and that sped things up considerably, even if it was very weird to me to see Tiger Palm be a Chi spender instead of builder, which is the polar opposite of how it works in retail.

I was kind of surprised by how busy the island was, because on a lark, I had decided to create this "throwaway panda" on Hydraxian Waterlords, my old RP server home. Even though it was soft-merged into the regular PvE servers back in Classic BC and was meant to be closed down entirely in the run-up to Wrath, it's somehow still there, not just not closed, but not even locked for new character creation like most of the other old servers are. I figured it was going to be more pleasant to level in this more quiet environment without too much competition for mobs, so still seeing ~40 characters in the zone every time I played was a surprise.

When I got to Stormwind on the other hand, there were only about ten people there, and the auction house looked mostly empty. I wonder if there are any genuine holdouts still playing on this server or if it was mostly players like me who decided that levelling a throwaway character was more pleasant to do in a low pop environment.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Completing the storyline on the Wandering Isle, it was still a bit too linear for my personal taste, with a lot of running about, but overall pleasant. It's probably a better "island introduction" to the game than Exile's Reach to be honest. I was kind of surprised by how emotional the ending still made me.

The Alliance intro for Pandaren was new to me and was actually pretty funny! You meet with King Varian and he lectures you a bit about what it means to join the Alliance, but finishes by asking you to spar with him, because he's curious about the Pandaren fighting style. Now, when this duel starts, he has a buff that gives him 100% dodge chance, so all your attacks miss and he taunts you about it. Until... one hit suddenly goes through, and you get this slow-motion cut scene of him falling backwards and your companions looking absolutely horrified that you just punched the king of Stormwind, which I thought was hilarious. He just laughs it off and simply wanders off afterwards.

Anyway, with my free mount claimed and nothing else about the pre-patch looking particularly appealing, I'll probably coast by just doing those cooking dailies until the expansion releases properly and I can start my journey to the Vale. Though probably even that will have to wait at least a week or two, as I have no particular desire to compete with the launch day crowds.

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

Another Five Down, Four More to Go

Back in September I wrote about how I've felt encouraged to experiment with alts in The War Within. This eventually escalated into me deciding that I wanted to have a max-level character of each class this expansion, a prospect that actually wasn't all that daunting considering I had one of each class at level 70 (the old level cap) by the end of Dragonflight. I've reached 80 on five more characters since then and wanted to jot down a few more impressions of the different classes I've levelled.

Until I took this picture, I hadn't realised that the Warband screen also follows the day-night cycle.

Marksmanship Hunter

My fifth character to 80 was my human hunter, and I'm honestly not even sure why. I think I wanted a character for easier solo farming and hunter kind of fits the bill. That said, I feel a bit ambivalent about the hunter class in retail. I've long loved the classic hunter with all its challenges of micromanaging ammunition and taking care of your pet, and I never quite got over how all of that was taken away in Cataclysm. In terms of pet interaction, the modern hunter feels more like a Pokemon collector (no actual investment in the pet needed, you can just collect as many as you like and I guess there's some appeal in hunting down rare models), and the supercharged shooting animations look a bit ridiculous to me in the way they make your character treat their bow and arrow like a machine gun.

I'm Marksmanship spec because I was never a huge fan of BM (while I liked taking care of my pet, I never liked the idea of my pet doing all the damage for me - I still want to be the hero myself, OK?) and being melee as a hunter still feels like an abomination to me. That said, I can't say that Marksman feels all that great to me right now either. It doesn't actually seem to me that it has too many buttons, but I don't like that you're basically not supposed to have a pet at all (I tend to just not take the Lone Wolf talent) and it does still feel to me like there are probably too many complexities involved in having a good damage rotation. I thought I had a pretty good idea of which buttons did the most damage, but when I did an LFR wing on this character, even though I was mashing my buttons like crazy, my damage output ended up around the same level as the tanks - way, way below the other hunters in the group.

I also don't have much to say about the hero talents for hunters, because they feel designed around the idea that you're an elf and want to cosplay as either Tyrande (who isn't even a hunter!) or Sylvanas, and I want to do neither. I did pick Dark Ranger because it sounded slightly more appealing, but just as I thought I was getting an idea of what to do with it, Blizzard completely revamped the way its main ability works and I'm once again back to square one. In summary: the class still lives up to the hunter's reputation of being decent for soloing stuff, but feels too fiddly for me in group content.

Guardian Druid

This would be the druid I levelled during Mists of Pandaria Remix. I still love watching her cute and fuzzy bear butt, but the way druid tanking works still feels a bit weird to me. I was initially a little confused why she seemed to be taking so much more damage than my warrior, until I realised that you're supposed to be using self-heals all the time (something which the warrior doesn't have as much).

I also don't really like the way the Ironfur buff works, expecting you to constantly pump rage into keeping up this mitigation buff that only lasts a few seconds. It was only later that I realised that protection warrior actually has something similar going on, I just hadn't been using it because at low difficulties you basically take no damage as a warrior anyway! I've only slowly started to adjust to that as we're starting to crawl our way up the M+ ladder. Still, the point remains that I'm not a fan of having this sort of "mitigation rotation" where you're supposed to constantly be mashing defensive buttons to keep all your buffs rolling.

Regardless, like the prot warrior, a druid tank is really good for soloing as well, so I've been using her to tank some easier content like Timewalking and sometimes to solo delves (tank who can also stealth and sneak past mobs = OP). 

For her hero talents, I went with Druid of the Claw because I bear, I maul things. Why would I want to shoot moonbeams or whatever?

Holy Paladin

Unlike with some other classes, I never know quite which spec to choose with paladins since I do actually somewhat like all three, but I figured I'd stick to healing with this one and see how paladins are doing these days. Funnily enough, I found it very pleasant to quest as holy - I'm starting to think I like levelling as tank or healer in WoW because they have such simple dps rotations - things may die more slowly but at least I feel like I know what I'm doing, as opposed to many dps classes where I mash buttons that look like they should be doing good damage but then don't because I either didn't string them together in the exact correct order or because I'm missing some crucial talent without which the whole build is destroyed.

Anyway, as I was feeling a bit insecure about my abilities as a paladin and knew that regular pugs could generate quite insane healing requirements, I decided to practice my healing by doing some follower dungeons first. Sadly, they turned out to be of limited usefulness for that purpose as Captain Garrick pulls quite conservatively, to the point where the required healing is minimal, and I didn't quite have it in me to try and "ninja-pull" more trash onto her to make things more challenging. Also, even when there was already almost nothing for me to do, the elemental shaman NPC would actually feel the need to throw off-heals around too? Bitch, let me do something here!

In search of a slightly more challenging environment I eventually healed some LFR wings, but there I once again couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was doing something very wrong because my healing was very low compared to other healers. That said, I also couldn't be bothered to do any research into how to remedy that. I may want to level every class to 80, but I have no interest in playing them all in endgame content.

As an aside, this character also taught me that it's possible to lock yourself out of choosing certain hero talents if you don't make the right talent choices because I was "only" allowed to choose Lightsmith. This should probably tell me that I'm not good at making my own choices when it comes to filling out the new talent trees, but if Blizzard is giving me all these choices I'm damn well going to make my own!

Windwalker Monk

Levelling my pandaren monk from Remix was a pleasant surprise, because I initially wasn't sure about all the changes that had been made to the class since Shadowlands. (During Shadowlands, my human monk was my main and was primarily a Mistweaver, but occasionally I'd spec Windwalker for questing and a lot had been changed since then.)

Unlike most of the other classes whose play styles I bemoan in this post, monk has been delightfully easy to pick up and play. I didn't put any more effort into learning the class than with the others (meaning I read all the talent tooltips and picked what I personally thought sounded most useful) but for some reason my monk seems to do decent damage even with me mashing buttons semi-randomly. I don't know why more classes can't be like this.

I was even more surprised when I looked up their current standing in terms of raid dps and Mythic+, and they're apparently... not very good? I can't say I got that impression at all while soloing.

Subtlety Rogue

Rogue's a class that has never vibed with me, but it's worse in retail than in Classic. At least I found my AoE finishing move again... at one point during Dragonflight, Black Powder disappeared from my bars and I still don't know whether that was an intentional change or me messing something up... either way not having an AoE spender for several months was super weird. It's back now, but sadly just alternating between Shuriken Storm and Black Powder on dungeon trash still leaves me barely outdamaging the healer.

Similar to death knight, rogue feels built around the idea of constantly having some sort of short-cooldown dps booster up, but for some reason where on death knight this feels fun to me, on the rogue it feels bad. My combo points always seem to fill up either instantly or incredibly slowly, with no in-between, and I just can't wrap my head around it. There literally isn't a single button that makes me feel like I'm doing good damage, it's always either just "virtually no damage" or "you just hit a cooldown, now have a little bit of damage". (While editing this, I actually decided to quickly google a guide for this one just to get an idea of how badly I was going wrong and... yeah, not happening!)

In terms of hero talents, I picked Deathstalker over Trickster because I thought it sounded a bit cooler, but ultimately it's another choice that didn't feel very meaningful to me. I know I won't be playing this character very much, but let's be real: The main reason I wanted a rogue at 80 was just to finally be able to open those damn Bismuth Lockboxes, so I don't really need to know how to play.

Now I only have warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman to go.

MoP Remix: A Retrospective

Mists of Pandaria: Remix is wrapping up in a few days, so I wanted to talk about it one more time. I haven't really written about playing it since mid-June, when I think I sounded a bit disenchanted with it after my initially very positive impressions.

I kept chipping away at it at a slow pace, however, and it soon became evident that a lot of the people who had been super intense about it in the first month (such as my very own husband *cough*) had achieved most of their goals and dropped off. This was very noticeable from dungeon and raid finder queues growing in length (one evening I queued for one of the wings of Siege of Orgrimmar as both tank and healer and had to literally wait for an hour to get a pop) and from slightly less rush-rush madness across the board. That's not to say that there were no longer any overpowered characters farming things... but somewhat fewer than I would have expected. Since the power level of the special event-specific cloak is not capped, I would have expected to see more and more powerful characters over time, but the reality seemed to be that - like when you enter a cheat code in a single-player game and get bored after the initial rush of excitement wears off - a lot of people who worked hard to max out their gear in the first couple of weeks quickly got tired of actually using it. I started to see a lot more weak alts around, and even the stronger characters weren't running around one-shotting world bosses anymore.

Nowhere was this change more apparent than in the dungeon and raid finder, which meant that queueing for group content became a wilder experience than ever. You see, with so many runs effectively involving no gameplay other than sprinting after someone who'd ground out insane power levels, roles were pretty meaningless, and it made sense to queue as everything your class could do just to make pops happen, regardless of what spec you were actually intending to play. But as the player population shifted, you'd more often find yourself in runs without anyone as seriously OP, which would then lead to mayhem and confusion.

I remember queueing into a Stormstout Brewery on my druid who only had tank talents, getting put in as a healer, and being aghast when it turned out that people in this low-level group actually needed healing (I wouldn't be surprised if the actual tank hadn't actually been ready to tank either). We very slowly made our way through the first couple of rooms with multiple deaths, until someone mercifully quit the group and was replaced by an OP paladin who then proceeded to carry us through the rest of the run.

On the other hand though, I really loved that one time when I got into heroic Blood in the Snow on a fairly fresh 70 who I thought was pretty squishy, and it turned out that the rogue and priest I got grouped with were even squishier. We wiped on the very first trash pull, and then died a couple more times for good measure before we actually got our act together and started using proper tactics, such as focus targeting, using cooldowns and kiting. That was quite exciting!

I ultimately ended up levelling five characters through Remix - which is fewer than some, but still quite a lot by my own standards. I would've had time to do more, but as I think I stated before, I just don't see the point of having an endless number of characters at the level cap that have no history, no professions and that I don't know how to play. The five that I did level all had distinct reasons for existing.

First there was my resto shaman, who ended up being my Remix "main" and who quested her way through all the content with my husband's bear druid. Choosing to be a healer soon turned out to be a disappointment, seeing how healers were pretty useless 99% of the time except to facilitate faster queue pops, but I persevered with my healing spec because I wanted to at least try to familiarise myself with the current resto shaman kit a bit.

I will say that even without upgrading my gear, just by doing all that questing and group content, I eventually reached a level where I felt pretty powerful in the open world even as a healing spec, one-shotting regular mobs and able to kill elites in a few hits. I ended up completing all the Remix-specific achievements, and since there was something pretty zen to the whole thing once I hit a comfortable power level, I even ground out some of the non-Remix-specific Pandaria achievements and rewards, such as getting the mount for 100,000 Timeless Coins or killing every single rare on the Timeless Isle (after the War Within pre-patch merged achievement progress from different characters, it turned out I was only missing a few). I also ground out the dinosaur mount from the Isle of Giants and slowly duo-ed Oondasta to death with a random worgen death knight (I hadn't planned to do it that way, but I saw him start and could tell that he wasn't going to survive on his own, so I joined in and ended up heal-tanking the fight while he just added dps).

My next three alts were primarily the result of me trying to be clever about my goal of grinding out the cosmetics (and failing). While any Remix character could buy all the appearances, drops of armour and weapons were still based on your current class, so my shaman for example could only pick up mail gear and weapons a shaman could actually equip. I thought I would be clever by levelling a class of every armour type and saving myself some Bronze by acquiring gear sets "organically". This only worked in part, however. I did get several world and dungeon sets on each character, but in general Remix didn't really seem to be optimised for organic set acquisition. For example I remember one of the mail sets just wouldn't complete, and the UI said that the only source of the two pieces I was missing was a vendor... that turned out to not exist in Remix, and I guess those pieces weren't added to the special drop tables either, so I had to take a regular character to Pandaria to buy those bits for gold to complete the set.

At least I did have a workaround for that particular problem... my attempts to collect the Throne of Thunder LFR tier set for shamans were a lot less successful, as the boots forever eluded me, no matter how many times I queued for the wing that was supposed to drop them. This was stupid in so far as the armour sets weren't even that expensive, and I honestly had enough Bronze to just buy the set after a mere couple of runs, but I still had it in my head that the "natural" way should be better than buying everything from the vendor. It just wasn't.

Anyway, I still ended up with some useful characters levelled, so it wasn't a complete loss. I already mentioned that I created a protection warrior for example. Warrior is a class I've just never got along with in any incarnation of the game, despite its popularity, so this was actually the first time I reached the current level cap with one. I also had a lot of fun charging and leaping through dungeons, though I don't think that really taught me anything about tanking, considering that "tanking" in Remix basically just meant running ahead and spamming your AoE skills, no mitigation or defensives needed.

For the leather, I ended up levelling another druid. I did already have one from the original Mists of Pandaria that's somewhere in the low 60s and that I just never bothered to level all the way to the cap, but with druids being able to play so many roles and me not being a fan of constant respecs anyway, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to make another one. I mostly played her as a bear since I enjoyed watching my husband's fuzzy bear butt and wanted to see more of that kind of thing. But again, like with the warrior... just running around hitting your spammable AoE isn't really representative of tanking.

Finally, my cloth wearer ended up being a warlock. Like with the warrior, this was the first time I ended up getting this class to the cap, but it was a lot less comfortable. I levelled as destruction and honestly had no idea what I was doing at any point. Fortunately levelling a dps class through group content in Remix required very little in terms of knowledge or skill. While she and her incubus are kind of cute (you can't see it in the screenshot, but she's got green hair under that hood), I can't see myself playing this character much in the future because everything about the modern warlock toolkit just confuses me.

So that's four characters, and as my fifth I eventually ended up creating a dps monk on my old Horde server, Earthen Ring. I had seen Belghast talk about using the event to "seed" characters on different servers in case he wanted to play with friends on those servers later, and this seemed like a clever idea to me at the time. (I had no idea that the pre-patch would effectively make servers obsolete, making the whole project pointless from that perspective.) Still, it wasn't a total loss as I also used the opportunity to check out Pandaria from Horde side, something I had never done before. I didn't do all the quests though, as I found out in Jade Forest that the neutral Pandaren quest hubs seemed to be exactly the same as for Alliance, so it made sense to me to focus on the content that had obvious faction flavour, such as the Landfall campaign and the Isle of Thunder intro. I was rather amused to see the Horde actually express disappointment about their recruitment of the Hozen once they found out that the Alliance had got the much cleverer fish people, and seeing the whole drama around the purge of Dalaran play out from Horde side was certainly interesting. Seeing Lor'themar get mad enough to chuck a park bench into a fountain was definitely... something.

All in all, I really enjoyed Remix, despite some early disappointments and the pressure of FOMO. It really hit me in this J1mmy video about WoW how he notes that MMO expansions are about more than just the lore and the quests, but about being there and having a shared experience with other people. And in that respect, roping off an old expansion and sending players off to play exclusively in that content for three months worked so much better than solo-levelling through Chromie Time and being booted out after completing two zones worth of quests. Sure, some parts of the original content were missing, and it still suffered from the standard WoW problem of it being way too easy to accidentally experience things wildly out of order, but at least it was only things from that expansion. I played in original Mists of Pandaria for a few months (which was still longer than the duration of Remix!) but there were quite a few things I didn't get to see at the time, and it was really nice to both re-experience content I'd only really seen once before and to go and finally see the things I'd missed back then, such as Siege of Orgrimmar. There were a lot of things about the end of MoP that had honestly always been kind of vague to me as I hadn't experienced them for myself and had to piece things together from later references that were rather disjointed. Being able to see the story for myself was quite enlightening.

So I really enjoyed the "time capsule" aspect of the whole thing. As for the special cloak, tinker gems and getting super OP... eh, I honestly think I could've done without those things. I mean, there were parts of it that were fun: the tinker gem that made you immune to fall damage for example definitely encouraged you to try new things, and was quite a source of entertainment whenever people forgot that they hadn't slotted it on their newest alt yet. However, I feel they also shone a spotlight on some of the worst issues of the WoW community and dialled them up to eleven, such as the widespread competitive urge to be the first to no-life it to the top, or people with vastly different power levels and goals being thrown together in group content. I remember when I first got annoyed with some of the extreme rushing in dungeons and raids that would even make you miss out on bosses, I did some searching to see if there were people talking about that topic on reddit or the forums, and some of the (often highly upvoted!) responses I saw to the mere suggestion to have some consideration for your fellow players were bad enough to make one lose faith in humanity as a whole. The saving grace was that the worst of those people also seemed to be the first ones to be done with the mode, leaving things to mellow down somewhat over time, as I already mentioned at the start of this post. Ultimately I think I would've enjoyed Remix no less if it had just been about playing through Pandaria with "normal" characters.

I would also happily take part in another Remix - WoD and Legion would be prime contenders for me as expansions I didn't play at all back in the day. Though I think I'd also enjoy a remixed Burning Crusade, just to spend some time in that content again without the weird constant pressure to keep up that defined much of my experience in its Classic iteration.

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.