Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience

I've mostly written about Turtle WoW in terms of their custom content and how it compares to real Vanilla WoW, but I wanted to also dedicate some time to writing about mechanical and quality of life changes they've made to the game because I think they've made some interesting decisions in that area.

To begin with, what we call "Turtle WoW" actually runs three servers in the West at the moment, two designated as RP-PvE and one PvP. (There are some Chinese servers as well, but I don't really know much about those.) I actually find it interesting that there are no "normal" PvE servers - you've got to be accepting of roleplaying or GTFO. Now, I don't know how much RP actually happens on these servers - I've occasionally seen people that looked like they might be roleplaying but nothing I could identify as such with certainty. However, it sends a message that the devs support RP and immersion and I kind of like that. It strikes me as a virtual application of the broken windows theory - show that you care about the small stuff and it makes a better environment for everyone.

My hunter is on the older of the two PvE servers because I wanted to avoid the new server crowds on the more recently launched server. It's still plenty busy where I am and I've had no issues finding people to group with.

I also accepted a random guild invite at one point just because I thought the name looked kind of neat and I was curious whether there were any new guild-specific features to discover. The answer to that was yes. I wasn't surprised that guild banks are a thing, considering that's one of those features that everyone but the most hardcore Vanilla purists would be quite happy to import from Burning Crusade, however my ears perked up when I saw people mention a "guild house". My first thought was, WTF, Turtle WoW has housing? How come nobody mentioned that before? Well, the reason is that it doesn't really. What it does have is the ability for a guild to designate an existing inn as their guild's "base of operations" so to speak, and your guild tabard then serves as a second hearthstone to that inn. In that same building, you also gain rested XP at a heavily accelerated rate, similar to what you get while standing under a tent. It may not be "housing" but it's still a neat feature. 

Speaking of tents, I previously mentioned benefiting from the rested XP boost of a tent in Darkshore, but I didn't go into any detail about them (to be fair, at the time I also didn't really know much more about them than that standing under one was beneficial). The Turtle devs added a secondary profession called survival, which is not very fleshed out to be honest - but it does allow you to craft this item called Traveler's Tent, which you can plop down anywhere in the world to let people benefit from a quick boost to their rested XP. There's a two-hour cooldown on crafting them and you can only carry one at a time, so you can't spam them, but there's pretty much always at least one active right outside the gates of Stormwind.

It's a lovely way of encouraging player interaction and makes breaks feel more meaningful, but I also like that it's just one more way in which Turtle WoW let's you fine-tune the rate of your XP gains. Basically the tents allow you to almost permanently have an XP boost up if you want it and plan for it, but there are also levelling challenges that intentionally reduce your XP, and you can toggle XP gains on or off entirely via your portrait at any time. Giving players this much agency about just how fast or slowly they want to level has felt very refreshing to me compared to Blizzard's accelerationist approach that likes to just apply huge XP bonuses to everyone to get them to the end already. In Turtle, I made a lot of use of tents earlier on when I just wanted to get to the newer content, but recently I've stopped as I started to feel like I was going too fast. I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that not all players like to level at the same speed, and that even the same player may prefer to go slower or faster at different points depending on their mood.

Aside from obvious XP adjustments, other changes to questing make it feel smoother and more fun than in "normal" Vanilla, without jumping straight to the extreme streamlining that was introduced in Cataclysm. For example, just the addition of all these new zones with things to do helps to ease any potential stresses about where to go and how to get to the next level. I often hear people say that back in Vanilla, there weren't even enough quests to get you to max level so you had to grind mobs to get there, which was never my own experience. What is definitely true though is that as the available quests become more sparse, you spend more time running around for fewer rewards, and if it's not your first character, you'll be going through a lot of the same quest lines and zones over and over.

On Turtle WoW, due to my exploration of their mid-level custom zones, my hunter is approaching 40 without ever having stepped foot into the Scarlet Monastery or having done any questing in any of the traditional level 30+ zones. It's kind of remarkable what that does for pacing and personal motivation, as this freedom to go to half a dozen different places helps maintain that early explorer energy you have coming out of the starting zones, and you never get that feeling of "oh well, guess it's time for [insert zone you're not particularly fond of] because there's not much else left to do in my level range". It genuinely made me wonder for the first time how WoW's history would have gone differently if they had made the first expansion a lateral one instead of adding ten more levels on top.

Another thing that contributes to a smoother questing experience is a change that took me some time to notice - that quests never go grey; they always stay green. (Or rather, I technically don't know about never at this point, but as I mentioned I'm getting close to 40 and haven't seen one go grey yet.) In line with that, the exclamation marks for low-level quests never disappear, which I feel sends an interesting message: that it's more important to make sure players know where there are stories to see than that they only see what gives them the best XP per hour for their level. I've gone back and done some random low-level quests a couple of times, and while a level five quest won't move your bar much past a certain point even if it's technically green to you, it still felt nice to me. I also noticed that this gets rid of the sometimes disappointing experience of completing a green quest, levelling up before you hand it in and then seeing it go grey and close to "reward-less".

Also filed under "subtle but interesting levelling changes" we have rented mounts. I've written about the turtle mount you can get at level 18, but at some point I also started to occasionally notice low-level players riding around on slow horses with odd tooltips on their buff bar. I eventually figured out that at the gates of some towns, you can rent a mount for a few copper, which then puts you on a horse for five minutes. This may not sound like much, but again, if you're a lowbie wanting to get from Menethil harbour to the other side of the Wetlands, it's actually a worthy investment! It's just another small thing that gives low-level characters more options without completely trivialising travel.

Another unrelated quality of life change that surprised me and made me think "it's actually weird that Blizzard never did this" is changed icon art for some items. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect every single item in the game to have unique icon art and for the devs to never recycle anything ever, but there have definitely been instances of this that tend to feel worse than others. For example the drinks Bubbling Water and Morning Glory Dew share the same icon, but while one is only useful for characters around level 20, the other is an endgame consumable. I have definitely been in situations where I got these mixed up in my bag, sometimes with even more items that share the same icon.

Not on Turtle WoW though, as they gave Bubbling Water a new, different icon. Same with all the spices on the trade goods vendor - I remember back in the day I used to buy the wrong spices by accident a lot, because it was just so easy to get them mixed up since they all look the same. This is a lot less of a problem on Turtle WoW, with each spice packet having been given a different colour. Again, I'm kind of surprised Blizzard never seems to have given this any thought, especially after I heard stories of people using recycled icons to scam people in retail. (The specific case I heard about was during BfA when someone would make people believe they were buying valuable Midnight Salmon but would then trade them comparatively worthless Darkmoon Daggermaw at the last second.)

The way things look makes for a good segue to the subject of transmog, which is another thing that Turtle WoW has. Personally I'm someone who enjoys transmog in retail, but at the same time I like Vanilla not having it as I do think it changes the feel of the world around you, so I was quite surprised (and initially a bit put off) that this was a feature that the devs included. However, as I've learned more about it, I've been finding it kind of interesting.

In a nutshell it does not work like in retail where you can transmog very freely by simply paying some gold. Instead every piece of gear requires a special token to change its appearance. These tokens can be bought in the cash shop (naturally) but they can also be acquired via certain material hand-ins and as drops from higher-level dungeons. This means that the feature is generally not used much by levellers and more of a sign of prestige at high level. As a result of that, most people ambling about in town look like you'd expect random Vanilla WoW levellers to look, and only the high levels stand out through their transmogs, and only a very small number of them are ridiculous Playboy bunny style outfits. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this in the long run, assuming that the population at high level and the number of ridiculous outfits increases, but at least superficially this system seems to strike an interesting balance between giving people more options to change their appearance while also preserving a good-looking outfit as something to aspire to.

Finally, the last thing on my list of changes to discuss (for now) is the day/night cycle, which was again something that I only became aware of slowly over time, after first getting confused because I noticed that it wasn't what I expected but couldn't quite figure out yet why that was. Basically what Turtle WoW has opted to do is to treat Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms as opposite sides of the planet - meaning when it's night time on one, it's day on the other. I'm not sure of the reason behind this change to be honest. In retail we're not even 100% sure that the map of Azeroth we use is actually showing us the entirety of the planet. I remember there's a globe decoration in Halls of Lightning that people used to cite as "proof" for a while that the continents we know are all there is, but nothing has ever been stated explicitly and you'd think that if there was nothing in the way, there'd be some boat routes connecting the western part of Kalimdor with the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. Either way, the Turtle WoW devs have locked in on the map we know being all there is to the planet.

There may be more interesting things to discover but these were just some that stood out to me. Most of them are positive in my book, and whatever else you may think of Turtle WoW, I think they've displayed a great understanding of how certain aspects of Vanilla can be improved without harming the overall experience. I wish the WoW Classic dev team was similarly creative with their innovations instead of just coming up with new ways to tweak dungeons and raids.

Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.

Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Warcraft Direct: MoP Classic, Fresh Servers & Housing Confirmed

Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.

I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!

Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.

In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.

However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.

Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.

On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.

What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.

At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.

The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.

It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.

Expansion Pre-Patch Day

Yesterday (or Tuesday for the 'mericans) was War Within pre-patch day. I think I saw someone say that this might be the biggest patch WoW's ever had (in terms of impact, not file size) and while that sounds hyperbolic, I can't help but wonder whether it's true. Expansions always change a lot of things of course, but moving the game towards everything being account-wide as well as making everything cross-realm at the same time really was a pretty ballsy move on the dev team's part.

I knew about the cross-realm thing on an intellectual level, but I hadn't fully comprehended what it would mean. Suddenly having all my characters from all servers in a single list on the character selection screen certainly put things into a new perspective (it even included "KauvarB87508", the level 3 shaman from Aggramar whose name was released and reclaimed at some point during my years of not being subscribed). There was something funky going on with the character previews as well... all the low-level humans and draenei showed with the same face, hair colour and hair style and all the low-level tauren were identical-looking black cows. I logged into my original paladin, the first character I ever created and whose looks I remembered well enough despite not having played her in ages, and on loading in she appeared as her normal self and the character selection screen also updated, thank goodness.

The realm list feels kind of pointless now... it seems like realms are just like a sort of "last name" that's only relevant when picking a character name now.

And of course there was the warband screen, which everyone is posting screenshots of, so let me join in:

I was kind of surprised to see my old night elf priest be one of my default "favourites", and I can only guess that this was simply based on which characters you last logged into before the patch, because I think I did log her to check something quite recently.

I have to admit I didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for spending time on actually playing though. I don't think I've ever been great with large-scale changes like this, and it's only been getting worse as I get older. Fortunately I don't use a lot of addons, so that wasn't too much of an issue, but for some reason anything but the default action bars had been disabled on every single character and needed manual re-enabling. And of course all those talent resets! Those always exhaust me.

I was also a bit wary of just how broken things were going to be. Taking into account just how massive the changes were that the devs had to make under the hood for this update, I guess we should all be grateful that things weren't any worse, but I saw things like warnings not to use the currency transfer feature (or your currency might just vanish into the aether) and decided not to get too experimental with anything myself.

Mostly I just looked around a lot. There've been a lot of small changes to various parts of the UI like updated icons, and it all looks very busy. I'm sure I'll get used to most of it over time, though I am a bit cranky that they decided to get rid of the green exclamation mark over undiscovered flight masters after twenty years. Instead, the winged boot icon over their heads has a kind of greenish tint now if you haven't talked to them before, which is much harder to spot. (That said, I'm no longer sure how discovering flight paths works anyway. On one Remix character I still had to do it, while another had everything unlocked seemingly by default.)

Dragonriding turning into "skyriding" and becoming available for all flying mounts is kind of cool but also weird. I found myself slipping into the familiar keystrokes quite easily regardless of which mount was summoned, even if it was strange to see my Sunwarmed Furline zoom and leap across the sky in ways it didn't before. On the other hand, I found that evokers' Soar now also works with steady flight, though it looks quite silly the way you wind up for a massive leap just to do a tiny jump into the air and then float around like a butterfly. I'm just not a fan of switching between the two modes being a five-second cast. I wish you could just assign different modes to different mounts to make it smoother.

I also logged into one of my Remix characters whom I'd left at level 60 and had a rather painful questing experience. In anticipation of the level cap going up again with the expansion, the patch massively slashed the experience points required from 60 to 70, and I shot up to in levels in no time... which was not a good thing in this case. People were already complaining about power scaling in Remix in that level range before the patch, but now it gets combined with WoW's standard problem of your character getting weaker if the pace of gear acquisition can't keep up with how fast you gain character levels, and by level 65 I was as weak as a newborn babe. I tried to do one of the intro scenarios to the Isle of Thunder and died on every mob pull (good thing there's no durability or repair bills in Remix). The last fight fortunately offered a protective bubble I could hide in, but the encounter still took something like ten minutes. In regular retail you could at least buy some greens from the AH in that situation, but I'm honestly not quite sure what you're supposed to do in Remix with its trade restrictions when you're too weak to fight anything. Queue for dungeons and hope that others carry you for long enough to pick up a few level-appropriate gear pieces? I don't know.

Timewalking to an Unexpected Achievement

I only talked about timewalking on this blog once before, a little over a year ago. As I noted then, it's a feature I quite like, as it's one of Blizzard's (generally limited) efforts to let people enjoy old content as part of their normal gameplay. Sure, a group rushing through a heroic in ten minutes while AoEing everything along the way is not necessarily anything like the way that dungeon was experienced when it first came out, but it's still better than running it solo while over-levelled and just one-shotting everything. At least you get to see mechanics sometimes.

Last week was Cataclysm Timewalking, and there was a quest to run five of them for a gear reward box, so our little retail-playing friend group signed up for a full tour. It went well and I was actually reminded of how much I enjoyed the Cata dungeons at launch, so I decided to do the run-five-timewalking-dungeons quest on my demon hunter as well.

I've kind of reached the point where I'm reasonably confident queueing up to pug certain content in retail. I still think that the way people rush through dungeons is less than ideal, and makes for a terrible new player experience in particular as it means newbies just spend their time racing after the more experienced players without having the slightest clue about what's actually going on (thematically or mechanically). However, if you know the content you're queueing up for and mentally prepare yourself for the experience, it's generally tolerable.

One of the dungeons my demon hunter got thrown into was Lost City of the Tol'vir. The group rushed through AoEing everything as you'd expect, while I reminisced about how deadly many of those pulls used to be. However, when we killed the last boss, Siamat, something unexpected happened: I saw the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement pop up, as well as a notification that I'd just earned the Volcanic Stone Drake mount.

I was briefly baffled but didn't have time to think about it too much, as I had to leap off the boss's terrace to quickly hand in the dungeon quest I'd picked up at the entrance (what with it being my demon hunter's first time there), and the rest of the group was already hitting the re-queue button.

It was only after completing my five runs that I could really sit down and take in what had happened. WoW's achievement system is a bit confusing with the way it mixes character-specific and account-wide achievements in some situations but not others, and my first thought had been that surely I just got some sort of character-specific achievement on my demon hunter that I'd already earned on another character. I even logged into my old troll priest, the original Shintar, to check her achievement log for comparison.

What I found though was that it was indeed true that it was my demon hunter who had earned me the Volcanic Stone Drake. Looking back at the various achievement dates, it looks like I made a bit of a push for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero in early 2011 and did in fact get all the achievements bar one: Headed South. I don't know why I didn't get that one in specific - I can only guess that it must've been challenging in some way, even if many of the Wowhead comments claim that it's super easy and barely an inconvenience. And then I never went back to try again even though I continued to play Cataclysm for another year after that.

Either way, getting that last achievement purely by accident twelve years later, in a timewalking pug that was just steamrolling the content, created a very brief flash of a connection to past me (who actually cared about this stuff) and made me feel very, very odd.

The (Lack of) Allure of Classic Wrath

Ever since I decided that I definitely wasn't going to bother with Wrath of the Lich King Classic, I haven't really been keeping up with the latest news about it. However, with the launch being only a few days away now, it's been kind of hard to escape the subject as someone who's still involved with and plays other versions of WoW.

My old levelling buddy decided to resubscribe and run endless AVs on all his alts to gear them up just before the expansion, which has been kind of baffling to me. Bloggers I follow who don't always play WoW have jumped back into Classic for the Wrath pre-patch. Blizzard's promotional emails have been trying to lure me in with interesting behind-the-scenes videos about subjects such as designing the continent of Northrend, death knight class design, or the making of the Wrathgate cinematic.

WoW's official social media accounts have seemingly been all Classic, all the time for the past week or so. Today I marvelled when they shared a video called "Wrath of the Lich King Classic Journey Trailer", which looks pretty amazing. I learned that it was done by a fan called Hurricane, whose work I'd actually encountered years ago in promotional materials for the private server Kronos, such as this AQ trailer. His style is very distinctive as he drains a lot of the colour out of his videos (presumably to make WoW look more "serious" or adult), which is actually an artistic choice I don't agree with as I think WoW's bright colours are a big part of its charm, but that aside he definitely does some fantastic work and it was actually nice to learn who'd created all these amazing clips that I'd seen previously.

To get back to the subject of Wrath however, Blizzard is even offering people a free mount for retail if they complete the death knight starter zone in Classic... and I have to admit that was probably what pushed me over the edge. I mean, I'm playing retail at least casually now, right? And getting a throwaway death knight through the starting zone takes like no time at all, right? So I re-installed Wrath Classic today and created a night elf death knight on my old home Hydraxian Waterlords. The server was actually meant to be on the chopping block back in August, but for some reason Blizzard changed their minds about that, and after previously emptying the server out by offering free transfers away from it, there are now free transfers available onto it from selected realms. Have I mentioned yet that Blizzard have really fucked up managing server populations in Classic?

Anyway, I was actually surprised to find the server not completely dead, with some chatter going on in the LFG channel, including some server personalities whose names I recognised from back in the day but who I thought had transferred away. Still, I wasn't here to socialise but rather to get a job done.

I'm kind of relieved to say that the whole experience did not leave me with an overwhelming urge to suddenly play Wrath Classic after all. I know people are gaga over death knights because of how OP they were at launch, but for me the class never really did that much personally, probably because melee dps is my least favourite role. I mean, it felt okay to play, but not amazing.

In a similar vein, I can appreciate on an intellectual level that the death knight starting zone is a pretty well-crafted experience, but playing through it doesn't exactly fill me with joy - or any other emotion really. (Except that part where you have to execute the prisoner; that one still tugs at my heart strings every time, not gonna lie.)

Instead, I often found myself cynically noticing small flaws or inconsistencies, such as that several quest givers addressed my character as "Unknown" (but who reads quest text anyway, right), or that the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel was a rather annoying affair in practical terms that involved mobs getting punted all over the place and evading all the time. When I arrived in Elwynn Forest, I also had to chuckle at the fact that Brewfest was being celebrated right next to a Scourge invasion. The descent into nonsense starts with small things...

Anyway, I got my mount and I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity. All the hype was starting to affect me, but that little play session was a good reminder that I decided not to get invested in Wrath Classic for good reasons. I hope that those who do decide to play it have fun, though I maintain my suspicion that a large chunk of the community will soon find out that what many consider WoW at its peak does perhaps not hold up as well on repeat as they remember. But I guess we'll see.

Dragonflight Announcement

I got to watch the new expansion announcement stream live on Tuesday evening because it actually happened at a convenient time for me. Sadly, all the "live experience" added was a scrolling chat full of the WoW community's worst dregs being juvenile and bigoted every time there were female devs on screen, which was distracting and not in a good way. One star, cannot recommend.

The expansion cinematic was a bit of a weird one. It was of course beautifully rendered as always, and I liked how people got really invested in Stony Tony's fate (or however the golem dude ended up being called in your circles) and were instantly meme-ing about him ("already a better character than the Jailer" etc.), which was quite fun to see. As Rohan also observed yesterday, players who meme affectionately are happy players.

However in terms of content and hype, the trailer felt like a bit of a nothing sandwich to me. Looking back at previous expansion cinematics, they always tended to include at least one of three things:

• cool fight scenes
• depictions of one or more of the expansion's new features
• an iconic lore character

Dragonflight doesn't really deliver on any of those - we do see a bit of the Dragon Isles, but what we see is very barren and not really showing much other than the big beacon thing. And Alexstrasza is technically an important character in lore, but considering that we've been on a first-name basis with her since Wrath, never mind the commodification of dragons in WoW in general, just seeing her fly past and roar isn't really that awe-inspiring anymore, sorry.

The actual dev round-tables were interesting, though my first thought was simply: "God, does Ion look old and tired." The past few years clearly haven't been kind to him. The general presentation style was also somewhat stiff - not insincere, but like everything was heavily scripted, and even with that in mind the general vibe (as I perceived it anyway) was that of people who are a little timid and very aware that anything coming out the wrong way would lead to them being torn apart by the community later. I'm all too happy to acknowledge Blizzard's corporate failings, but it's also impossible for me to not feel compassion for the people who are still working there on the ground because they enjoy what they're doing and who've clearly been having a rough time.

Now for the actual expansion-related content reveals... like many, I was kind of surprised/impressed to see Ion actually admit that they'd heard the feedback about players being sick of all these temporary systems and that they want more long-lasting additions and improvements to the game. And to be fair, a lot of the feature bullet points seemed to indicate that Blizzard have listened!

First off, there's a new race and class, the "dracthyr evoker". This one was a big surprise to me because for all the speculation that had been going on about the dragon theme beforehand, the idea of playable dragons always seemed ludicrous to me. But no, Blizzard are actually doing it! Sorta.

Mechanically, everything about the new class sounds very sound and appealing. It's going to be another hero class with its own starting zone, and it will be a ranged dps/healer that wears mail, which seems like a sensible decision in terms of balance. (Did you know that until now, every single class that has been added to the game since launch has been melee?) The fact that the new race and class are a package deal, meaning that you can't have one without the other, is unusual by WoW standards but again, pretty reasonable under the circumstances and certainly not a novelty in the MMO space as a whole. (The most frequent parallel I've seen people draw here is to the Beorning in LOTRO.)

I have yet to see anyone comment that they really love the aesthetic of these new dragon people though. What's been shown of their animations reminded me of the Worgen (whose animations I used to loathe, though I got used to them over time) and overall the closest thing to these dracthyr that we've seen in WoW before is probably Maloriak, the raid boss from Cataclysm, who was created by Nefarian fusing the body of a young human with the corpse (!) of a dragonspawn. There's even a parallel in the origin story here as the dracthyr were apparently created by Neltharion wanting to combine the best humanoid and draconic traits. It's not a good look, is what I'm saying!

Then there is dragonriding, a new form of flying exclusive to the Dragon Isles, and the mechanics of which appear to be a wholesale copy and paste job from Guild Wars 2's Skyscale mount - honestly, I recognised that even as someone who's never played GW2. I see no shame in copying good features from other MMOs though - it's what WoW used to be good at, after all. I personally can't judge how fun this will be, but it does seem like a potentially neat idea and like it would offer a different kind of non-combat gameplay. The dragon mounts are also supposed to be super customisable. If this takes off (pun intended), we can only hope that it or something similar at least will also become an option for other mounts/in other expansions eventually.

There will be a long overdue revamp for professions, with crafting supposedly becoming more involved - I guess we'll see how that pans out in practice, because WoW's crafting has never been great even at the best of times, so I'm a bit sceptical of whether the team has the design chops to get this right... but I do appreciate them making the effort at least. There'll also be a new "work order" system where you can advertise that you want people to craft stuff for you, and they can even turn your soulbound materials into gear for you. This sounds great! Makes me wish we could have buy or sell orders for general goods as well though, instead of being stuck with an auction house where everything needs to be relisted every two days.

Talents are making a comeback! Now, having lived through times when Blizzard changed the way talents work every expansion, I can't fault people for being a bit wary of this, but the system introduced in MoP never grew on me, so personally I'm happy for them to revisit this. From my point of view almost anything they can do in that area can only be an improvement.

And finally, while I'm sure that a lot of addon lovers won't care about this, as someone who's been playing with the default UI for most of my time in WoW and who generally wants to avoid dealing with addons as much as possible, I was very pleased to hear that they're planning to upgrade the default UI. While they've made some tweaks to things like raid frames over the years, I've generally been quite astounded by how little they seemed to care about the UI, seemingly because they assumed that if you didn't like it, you could always download an addon. Which is an approach that's fine for some things in my opinion, but not so much for the basic window through which the player interacts with your game.

I've been trying to get an idea of how to characterise the community response to Dragonflight, and it's been somewhat difficult, because the reactions have honestly been all over the place, with most of the ones I've seen sitting somewhere in the middle. I guess in a way that's telling in itself, seeing how I used to joke that it was typical of the WoW player base in general to always be hyped for every expansion when it's announced and then hate it two weeks after launch. So things have definitely changed... then again, maybe that will give Dragonflight a chance to prove itself on its own merits instead of having to live up to made-up hype. I don't think it's a coincidence that Mists of Pandaria is now remembered so fondly by many while also having been the expansion that probably had the coolest reception at the start.

I'm also in a strange position myself since I have little interest in classic Wrath of the Lich King at this point (which was also confirmed during the announcement by the way), and it's the first time since Cataclysm that I'm actually an active (if casual) retail player at the time of an expansion announcement and could potentially see myself playing it when it comes out. From that point of view I've got to say that I like what I've seen, even if I'm not "hyped". Things like a new race/class, updating the UI, re-thinking talents and revamping professions are long-term investments in the game - and dragonriding could potentially be developed beyond this expansion (though I'll be honest and admit that I kind of doubt it will be), which to me is a better way of managing the game than the modus operandi of recent years where stuff gets added and then trashed again pretty much on a schedule.

Zul'Aman and the Pain of Nostalgia

I've said pretty much since the beginning of Classic that while nostalgia is a powerful draw, to truly be able to enjoy Classic, you need to be able to keep it at bay to some degree. If playing Classic starts to feel like you're trying to re-create the exact experience of being a young student with endless free time and (relatively) few worries in the world, things are likely to go down a dark path fairly quickly. The joy of Classic should lie in playing a game again that you've missed and that is still good fifteen years later, but while still being aware and leaving room for the reality that it couldn't ever feel exactly the same as it did fifteen years ago.

I think I mostly managed to do that throughout Classic's original run. The familiar environments stirred up memories for sure... but I tended to play different characters, and I actually participated in endgame in a way in which I never really did in vanilla, which very clearly made it a new and different experience.

I think part of my struggle with Classic BC has been that I did much more of BC's content in its original iteration, and that all of this happened during my most formative WoW years, meaning that I have a lot of powerful and positive memories associated with pretty much everything - more so than I did in old Azeroth, and no matter what I do in Classic BC, it has often felt like it pales in comparison to the original game if the experience isn't totally amazing.

With that in mind, I've been anticipating the opening of the Zul'Aman raid with very mixed feelings. I wrote a post on here two years ago in which I described the experience of raiding with my fixed Zul'Aman group back in Burning Cursade as "the height of my WoW raiding career". No matter how much I may have wanted to practice self-awareness to temper my expectations of the re-release, that kind of high was always going to be a very tough act to follow.

I don't have detailed records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day, but I strongly remember the sense of camaraderie as we came together for every reset, goofing off in the entrance area until it was time to ring the gong to open the gates - which was the signal to put our serious hats on and be intensely focused for the next forty minutes or so.

We messed up the timed run many times, but we did get better over the course of weeks and months, and there was a strong sense of progression and of overcoming a challenge as a team. When we finally beat the timer for the first time, it was glorious and felt well earned.

The previous paragraph was originally supposed to start with "I have no records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day", but I did actually find a text document on my hard drive in which I'd saved the write-up of our first successful bear run that I'd originally posted on our now defunct guild forums. Let me reproduce it here in full to give you a sense of the general vibes I associated with ZA:

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17/6 [2008] - Onslaught's first bear mount!

It started with one man having a simple idea. This Zul'Aman place is nice, Kanoth thought to himself, I think I'd like to go there every week, even if it's not part of the official raid schedule. Some of those timed chests contain amazing rewards! Always being a man of action, he soon started to assemble a group for this very purpose.

At first it was a bit of a struggle. Our gear wasn't quite up to the intended level, and it took some time to figure out the ideal strategy for each boss. Sometimes people stopped playing or just couldn't make the raid times anymore so the group makeup had to be changed. In the end this became the final "Team Bear Mount":

Arkiza - Noggenfogger addict and shooter of chain heal lasers
Drokhnar - suicidal killing machine and provider of windfury
Kanoth - cookie dispenser, crowd controller and frosty aoe master
Kordac - unsurpassed circle of healing spammer
Koreth - stabmaster supreme
Minox - whirlwinding bringer of death
Marasha - crazed warlock alt of Iarwain
Odious - amazing Tuesday tankadin
Shintar - neverending source of mana
Verment - strong bear and fierce cat in one

Two chests were a guaranteed reward for us in no time, soon three. Losing Kordac for several weeks as he moved house set us back a bit and made our runs considerably less spirited, but we persisted. As we got closer to the fourth chest the many ways in which you could just mess up the timer made us want to tear our hair out. Make sure you wear your tanking gear on the boss, Verm! Oh god, Marasha got too close to the hut! How did Odi just die there? What the hell is wrong with Shintar's computer, we're practically nine-manning this! [Note: I'd forgotten that this coincided with the time when I was struggling with an utterly crappy PC, lol.] ARGH.

However, in the end it was only a matter of time. Tonight we knew it would have to happen. People were excited before we had even started, and Minox got subjected to many vicious pokes by impatient people while trying to cook his dinner until he finally decided to leave it for later. We rang the gong and were off.

As usual Odi tanked a large part of the eagle gauntlet in one go and we just aoed it down. Akil'zon only had a chance to cast three storms before he bit the dust if I recall correctly. Barely a few minutes had passed by the time we engaged Nalorakk. He too went down fairly quickly and we rushed on to Jan'alai's gauntlet, the hardest bit of trash in the instance. However, people were really on their toes this time and all scouts were quickly intercepted and disposed of, without a single one getting a chance to call for help. On the dragonhawk boss himself there was a brief moment of panic when a hatcher didn't get killed in time and the whole right side of eggs got hatched before we were really ready for it, but fortunately we had just managed to kill off the left side before so Odi was free to pick them up. Flame debuffs were everywhere but nobody lost their cool and we were able to regain control while the healers did an amazing job keeping everyone up. As Jan'alai fell, Arkiza was so exhausted already that she stood on one of the remaining bombs and died right after the boss, becoming our first casualty. 😂

At this point we had almost twenty minutes left on the timer and Kanoth cautioned us to better move a little more slowly and carefully now rather than risk a wipe. The troll spirits smiled upon us as we sneakily wove our way through huts, past trees and across the lake without incidents, as all the patrols were conveniently in just the right place wherever we went, not even requiring us to wait for them to move. Our hearts pounded in our chests as the last of Halazzi's trash mobs died at our feet and we still had almost ten minutes left. After one last check that everyone was buffed and ready, Odi and Verment charged in... and only a few minutes later Halazzi was dead, with about five minutes left on the timer.

VICTORY!

We were all happy and laughing as we freed the last prisoner, a chatty little gnome that zoomed all over the room before finally revealing the fourth chest to us. And then it was ours, our very first Amani War Bear! 😀 Arkiza was the lucky winner of the first roll but I think we were all equally happy really.

Here's a shot of the happy team with Ark on her bear, unfortunately we suck at lining up properly. 😉 Also, here's a bigger one of just Ark and the bear in all its glory. Now to farm nine more bears for the rest of Team Bear Mount!

A video of the event made by Odi should also be forthcoming. [Note: I actually found that this video was still up on YouTube fourteen years later! You can tell it's authentic from the minimal editing and the stamp-sized resolution, which means that you can't even read people's names, but you can make me out as the shadowy blob mind-flaying Halazzi from the side.]

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I kind of dodged the matter of Zul'Aman opening in Classic for a few days since I wasn't playing much anyway, but then the Monday raid got cancelled once again and someone suggested going to Zul'Aman instead. "Screw it," I figured, "I didn't reserve this evening for a raid for nothing, so I might as well make this ZA run happen." (It fell on me to organise it since no actual officers or raid leaders were present. Yeah...)

After poking a lot of different people, I managed to assemble a group of ten, even if some of us were on alts. I had to play on my druid to fill one of the tanking spots myself, and the other tank was a warlock's paladin alt. People were asking whether we were going to try for a bear mount and I firmly told them no. Not only did we have a bunch of alts in the group, for many it was their first visit to ZA altogether! Obviously things weren't going to feel quite as challenging as they did back in the day, but the notion of people expecting to get a bear the very first time they set foot into the raid seemed ludicrous to me.

And in a way, my assessment wasn't wrong. The first boss, Akil'zon, took us three tries, meaning we already failed at the very first chest. I didn't feel too bad about this either, because as I said, my expectations were based on how hard I remembered this timed run being in the original Burning Crusade. The bear boss went down on the first try (even if my health bar yo-yoed to a scary degree), but then the dragonhawk took two tries, and the lynx no less than five. That last part threw me a little because I didn't remember that one being that much of an issue.

After four more wipes on Hex Lord (the penultimate boss), we had to call it because some people wanted to go to bed. And I'm not going to lie, at that point I did feel disappointed. I didn't expect us to get a bear, I didn't expect us to get any chests, and I did expect us to wipe repeatedly... but I'd hoped that we'd at least be able to complete the instance.

For that extra bit of salt in the wound, a friend joined us on voice chat just as we were finishing, to ask how we were doing, and when someone else told him that we'd only killed four bosses, his counter-question was: "Did you at least get a bear mount?" At least! Bears are now the bare minimum you should get out of this instance, pun intended!

The next day while I was doing business in Ironforge, as if to taunt me, a random parade of bears formed up between the bank and the auction house, as if to say: "Look how easy this is nowadays, we're only a week in and there's loads of these around already!"

It's not so much a matter of envy - I don't really crave a bear mount for myself in Classic - as being made to feel that the general vibe and the expectations around Zul'Aman are totally different now than they were fourteen years ago. The goal posts have moved from "here is a new raid and if you really work on it you can also earn a mount from it eventually" to "if you don't get the bear every single time from day one, you suck", and my memory - nay, my knowledge of how it used to be is so strong that the clash between then and now is painful.

Back then our gear was mediocre (if you look at the above group shot I used as my desktop background for a while, you can see a lot of tier four in there still, as well as gear from Zul'Aman itself, which we had farmed over time and which had actually been upgrades for us), everything wasn't as well documented, and the ZA timed run was a challenge on which we failed over and over again as a group until we got better, something that truly felt like an achievement.

In Classic, it feels like everyone's already running around in Black Temple gear, doing enough dps to steamroll everything with ease, and the ZA bear run is just treated as another item on the checklist of "objectives to complete in Classic BC" before moving on to Wrath. I hate it!

I can't really hold it against anyone who enjoys this type of play, but it's so fundamentally unlike what I've wanted out of my Classic experience that I honestly find the realisation kind of depressing. I wonder if people who spent months on the vanilla raids back in the day already felt something similar during OG Classic...

I also find myself missing our old server once again, because I have a hunch that this "issue" wouldn't have been quite as pronounced on Hydraxian Waterlords where we only had a small number of guilds doing hardcore progression. Over there, a bear mount would still have been a rare sight in week one, and we all would've gone, "Oh yeah, that guy's in Caelum, of course it's easy for them". Things feel very different when you're on a server where dozens of guilds have been farming Illidan for months.

Wind and Fire

Stepping down from progression raiding was an immediate relief in so far as I went from constantly worrying about what I should be doing whenever I logged in to simply thinking about what I'd like to be doing that day.

Items on the "should" list included things like:

• Hit LFG for Mechanar and Botanica runs, to work on completing my Beast Lord set, which is best-in-slot for hunters until Black Temple or something silly.
• Farm Primal Air to finally get my gloves enchanted.
• Prioritise levelling my druid's alchemy to build a sustainable consumable pipeline for myself. (I said this in OG Classic but it's still true in BC - people who have a herbalist or alchemist can't really appreciate what a PITA consumable requirements can be if you can't get anything yourself but instead have to buy everything, all the time.)
• Figure out what I need to do for my Eye attunement and work on it.
  

None of these are things I definitely don't want to do, but only in moderation I guess? So I'm glad that I can now just do some quests or putz around, levelling fishing on an alt without feeling like I'm not being a "proper" raider because I'm not putting in the time to make my character the strongest she could be.

One thing that had been bothering me for a while and that I really wanted to rectify was that I still only had the slow flying mount. People who only played later expansions or retail probably have no idea just how slow "normal" flying used to be in BC. It's slower than your epic ground mount! Which often means that it's not actually any faster to go as the crow/gryphon flies than to take the scenic route via a flight path or even to follow a path on the ground.

It's not so bad when everyone's in the same boat, and I remember back in the original Burning Crusade, people with epic flyers were a rare sight during the early phases. This time around though, it seemed like everyone else was buying their epic flyers the moment they hit 70, seemingly without effort. (Obviously I wasn't the only exception... but the trend has pretty much been the reverse of back in the day, in that people crawling along on basic flyers stick out as rare oddities.)

This made me feel envious and I wanted to fix it... but I'd also set myself the extra challenge to go straight for the Cenarion War Hippogryph (the only appropriate mount for night elves in my opinion), which would also require me to hit exalted with Cenarion Expedition and raise an extra 1600 gold on top of the "regular" cost of epic flying.

Free to spend some time and money focusing on this particular goal, I was pleasantly surprised to read on Redbeard's blog that the Fire Festival was a great way of making money. (I feel a bit bad linking to that post like that because it was really about something completely different and that was only a side note, but it was where I first heard it mentioned...)

And what a way it was! Just visiting beloved locations in the old world (of which I hadn't seen much since BC's launch) and clicking on bonfires to be rewarded six to twelve gold for each. I don't remember that being a thing back in the day, but sometimes it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. My main visited all of them over the course of a few days and racked up several hundred gold that way - I stole the flames from the enemy capitals as well while I was at it and didn't even die once. Good fun!

This just happened to coincide with a heroic Slave Pens run finally pushing me over the edge for CE rep as well, so it "finally" happened:

With that major gold sink taken care of, I checked on my alts. My mage and druid didn't even have epic ground riding yet, but I'd forgotten that the price for that had also been reduced with BC, so I was pleased to have both of them be able to afford that right away as well.

Then I just kept doing the torch tossing/catching dailies in Stormwind for the rest of the event, because I found them a fun little mini game and they rewarded 24 gold for about five minutes of effort a day. 

There are plenty of other things left for me to do besides running Karazhan with my guildies, but I'm glad to be rid of that feeling of urgency. One thing I always wanted from Classic was the knowledge that the game I enjoyed wasn't going to go away in a few months or years and that there should be no need to rush to complete your goals. It's odd how easy it's been to get caught up in the rat race anyway.