MoP Classic: Still the Better Housing

I expected that I'd be dropping Mists of Pandaria Classic the moment I finished my "Project Vale", but surprisingly, this has not been the case. In fact, I got back into it more vigorously than I'd been playing while just trying to get to level 90.

I think the main reason for that has been the farm. Everything associated with it, from the Tiller reputations and the vegetable-planting mini game to maxing out my cooking skills in all the different Pandaren "ways" is just plain fun to me. It helped to keep me engaged for a few months during my original time in MoP back in 2013/14 and wasn't part of the MoP Remix experience, so it's genuinely been over a decade since I last did all these things and I'm happy to do them again.

After my disappointment with retail's new housing system, it also stood out to me how the farm, to me, still feels like better housing than the new system. The farm is located in a beautiful, central zone and while it uses phasing, you can transition into your personal area without needing to go through a portal or loading screen so it's a very integrated experience. The neighbourhood feels alive with all the different Tillers visiting the Halfhill market throughout the week. And the farming gives you a reason to visit every day and spend a few minutes there, without trying to keep you cooped in all day like the WoD garrisons did. It's the reason I've got my hearthstone set to Halfhill instead of the Shrine of the Seven Stars, even though the latter is where all the portals and vendors are. It feels like home. Comparatively, retail housing allows me to place and arrange my own chairs in a dark box that's an instance inside an instance located nowhere in specific. I know what matters more to me.

Another thing that I've been working on has been the Golden Lotus reputation, because I wanted to see whether raising it would unlock some more quests that no longer exist in retail. And indeed, my first reward for doing all those dailies was to unlock even more dailies. They're still not among my favourite quests, though I did do a double take when Ren Firetongue casually suggested that Anji and Kun Autumnlight may be looking to have a threesome with me. Not something I would've expected from WoW quest dialogue to be honest!

I also unlocked a one-time quest that had me collecting three relics of the Thunder King, with the Golden Lotus deciding that the safest thing to do was to put them all into a single room in the Guo-Lai Halls. There's no way that could possibly go wrong, I'm sure!

Doing all these dailies has been pretty good for my hunter's wallet as I have very few expenses, so her savings have shot up by the thousands. I'm sure it's still nothing compared to someone who's actually played through the last three Classic expansions consistently but it still makes me feel pretty rich. I actually don't think it's as easy to make money just from questing in modern WoW, which is weird when I think about it. I've noticed that throughout the first few expansions, gold rewards from quest completions kept going up in pretty big leaps. In vanilla Classic you get about four gold per quest completed at max level, in BC that doubled to about eight or nine, I think in Wrath it was fifteen? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, but the point is that rewards kept going up for several years, and then they just... stopped. Inflation kept going, and there are some quests in retail that give payouts in the hundreds and thousands, but "regular" questing is way less profitable in modern WoW than it used to be. Just something to think about.

The wider endgame in MoP Classic is of course a bit disappointing compared to modern WoW. It's basically dailies, dungeons or raiding, and that's it. I wasn't initially planning to engage with any of that beyond the dailies I'd already chosen to do for other reasons, but at some point I found myself wondering whether I had earned enough reputation with the Golden Lotus to buy a gear upgrade or two, and that quickly led me down a rabbit hole of where else you can get what gear, how crafted gear compares, how the item upgrade system works, trying to figure out what stats I wanted as a hunter in MoP, and more.

So now I've also run all the dungeons on heroic, and today I ran my first three "celestial" dungeons, the "slightly harder" version of heroics that's meant to serve as a replacement for LFR in terms of gearing. I'm not quite sure what to think of those yet. There were a lot of celestial-related fireworks going on that I didn't fully understand, with some coloured circles actually being good to stand in, but in terms of overall feel they didn't seem significantly harder than heroics. (Though there was that one time I got one-shot by some sort of explosion where I'm still not sure what caused it.)

People are definitely not as forgiving as they are in LFR though. In those three runs I was in, there were two vote kicks. I actually voted yes on the first one, because the guy had joined with res sickness, which... yeah, you shouldn't do that (though I wouldn't have initiated a kick myself). The second time someone tried to kick another hunter in the group for the reason "low", which I assume meant dps, but I voted no on that one cause it seemed mean, and it failed. Karma promptly punished me for my solidarity as the same hunter then outrolled me on all the hunter loot that dropped at the end. Oh well.

Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon

I would describe my early dungeon experiences in Turtle WoW as "okay" for a Vanilla environment - neither worse than nor significantly improved compared to playing on official Classic servers. I knew that they had added entirely new dungeons to the world though, and I was very curious about those. I became aware of the first of these being called Dragonmaw Retreat, located in the Wetlands and designed for characters around level thirty.

As I was slowly getting the hang of the way the automated group finder without teleportation worked, I made a point of only putting myself in the queue when I was at least vaguely in the vicinity of the dungeon and not doing anything that couldn't easily be interrupted, so that I could pack up and start legging it to the instance at a moment's notice. I had picked up several quests for Dragonmaw Retreat by the time I got there and was very intrigued to find out what awaited me.

The healer in my first run warned me that it was going to be hard, and at the start of my second run someone cautioned everyone that the dungeon was quite long, wanting to double-check that all party members had sufficient amounts of time for the run. It wasn't all trepidation though: the aforementioned healer in run #1 also gushed about how cool and beautiful the dungeon was, comparing its vibe to Lord of the Rings.

The inspiration for that remark was hard to miss, considering we were soon climbing a long flight of stairs reminiscent of the way the Bridge of of Khazad-dûm was portrayed in the Fellowship of the Ring movie.

I was pretty impressed by the dungeon in general. Mind you, to me as someone who's spent way too much time in the vanilla World of Warcraft at this point, it was still quite obviously custom content that didn't quite have Blizzard's level of artistic polish: Everything seemed just a tad too big, too straight, too symmetrical and simply lacking in detail (in a way this exercise has given me a new appreciation for just how much work Blizzard's artists put into these things) - but it wasn't off by much, and I could imagine a more casual visitor who's unfamiliar with many of WoW's dungeons perhaps being unable to tell that this wasn't in the original game.

Lord of the Rings comparisons aside, the dungeon's general vibe reminded me a lot of Lower Blackrock Spire, with a dashing of Blackrock Depths sprinkled into the mix perhaps. At one point we tried to jump across a gap in the stairs, but only the healer and I made it, while everyone else landed on a ledge underneath. When trying to get down to their level, both the healer and I then missed that jump and ended up going splat on the ground below, followed by a corpse run back... I thought that was very authentic to the Vanilla WoW experience for sure.

Difficulty-wise, everything hit very hard, as noted in my last post about how dungeons feel kind of overtuned on Turtle, but oddly enough I didn't mind here at all. I guess it felt more disruptive in the Deadmines, which I've run so many times that I'm very familiar with what to expect. With this being new content, I had no preconceived notions of what it should be like, and it was easy enough to accept that mobs hit hard so you have to pull carefully, which to be honest tends to be my personal MO most of the time anyway.

The bosses were all fairly straightforward affairs with usually just one real mechanic each, e.g. an add summon or a fear on a cooldown. (They also had voice lines, and one orc in particular had such an over-the-top death gurgle, it made me laugh out loud.) The biggest challenge was usually just to get to the boss without accidentally pulling additional trash, and honestly that's kind of how I feel like it should be in a Vanilla environment. I don't know why the Blizzard devs seemed so enamoured with stuffing the updated fights in Season of Discovery with extra mechanics (which were usually still too boring for retail raiders, but disproportionally demanding compared to Vanilla content). 

Speaking of just getting to each boss though, another thing that was interesting was that the last two bosses were hidden behind a locked gate, and to unlock it you needed to create a key from two fragments found within a dungeon. One can be looted from a chest and the other is a guaranteed green drop from one of the earlier bosses. In my first run, everyone greeded on the green drop but we didn't keep track of who won it, and when we got to the gate, everyone insisted that they hadn't been the one who won the item. This meant we had to abandon the dungeon at that point as we couldn't proceed to the last two bosses.

I initially thought that perhaps this key was a temporary item that you had to assemble every run, kind of like the head on a pike in Lower Blackrock Spire, but later I learned that no, it actually translates into a permanent key, as on my second run the tank already had it and told us not to worry about the drops, which I thought was interesting. The key fragments also don't bind and can be bought and sold on the auction house, though you need to be inside the dungeon to assemble them.

The last bit of the dungeon hidden behind that gate was definitely the most interesting and impressive part of the experience, as you end up in this giant hallway in which a corrupted red dragon patrols, and you need to sneak around and kill six enchanters around the room to bring down his 95% damage reduction shield. That definitely felt very vanilla.

The very last boss turned out to be Zuluhed the Whacked, which made me go "oh, I know this guy", though it took me a moment to recall that in official WoW lore, this particular orc leader went to Outland and enslaved the Netherwing there. Not sure it's an upgrade for him to become a mid-level dungeon end boss instead, but it was a cool reveal nonetheless.

Also, shoutout to Hoodedmon the troll shaman, who was our tank on the second run and did a bang-up job both with the tanking itself as well as providing general leadership and explanations of what to do. He was also the first shaman tank I encountered on Turtle WoW, which wasn't that new a concept to me considering they were a big hit in Season of Discovery, but I hadn't realised that specialisation was available on Turtle WoW as well. 

My First Dungeon on Turtle WoW (Was Messy)

I felt that my first dungeon run on Turtle WoW was worthy of its own post, because it turned into quite an unexpected adventure (in both good and bad ways).

To set the scene, I noticed early on that Turtle's UI included the little dungeon finder eye that was added during Wrath of the Lich King as an icon on the edge of the mini map. I clicked on it to make sure that it was indeed what I thought it was, and while there was a second tab for manual group finding, the primary one was indeed an automated dungeon queue, though it required level 13 to access. I thought to myself that this was a bit odd and un-Vanilla-like, but then it's not an unusual thing for private servers to mix and match different expansion features, so I just shrugged it off.

When my little hunter hit level 13, the option to queue up for Ragefire Chasm opened up, so I signed up for that. (If you have experience playing on Turtle WoW, you may already be able to guess where this is going.) Somewhat to my surprise, I was in the queue for over an hour before anything happened. I mean, I know that wait times as a damage dealer are always longer, but the low level open world zones had been plenty busy and I couldn't quite fathom why seemingly none of these people would be queueing for dungeons.

I was inside a cave in Elwynn Forest when I finally got the pop-up telling me that a group had been formed. I excitedly pressed the "Let's do this!" button and quickly found myself in a group with four Horde characters. Now, I'd read some stuff about cross-faction play being a thing on Turtle, so that part wasn't really a surprise, however what was a surprise - and an unpleasant one at that - was the lack of a teleport to the dungeon.

So here I was, a level 13 Alliance player in Elwynn Forest, with the rest of my group waiting for me in Orgrimmar. Oh. OH.

I immediately apologised, telling them that I was new to the server and had expected this automated group finder to work like Wrath's, and that it probably wasn't worth waiting for me to get over there. I felt profoundly embarrassed, and part of me wanted to quit group right there, but I also hate leaving a group I only just joined, so I kind of hovered for a bit to await the party's judgement. Maybe Turtle WoW also had summoning stones? Someone (I think it was the tank but I'm not 100% sure now) said that it was fine and that they could probably wrangle a higher-level warlock into summoning me over there.

Still feeling a bit sheepish and uncertain about what to do with myself now, I decided that the best course of action for me was to at least make a good faith attempt at legging it to Orgrimmar in the meantime, even if I was unlikely to get very far. When I arrived in Darkshore, I noticed some strange things happening to the group, with people leaving and re-joining repeatedly, until the whole party was suddenly disbanded - or at least, I was suddenly group-less.

I just figured that I'd been kicked after all and felt a little sad, even if I thought it was understandable. As I was already on the road, I kept running south in an attempt to at least make it to Astranaar, since I was already in the area. However, not soon after, I got a re-invite to the group, and this time it included a level 60 troll warlock who sent me a summon. I appeared in Orgrimmar in front of the RFC entrance and thanked everyone once again.

Aside from me, the group consisted of a bear druid tank, an undead mage, a goblin warlock and an undead priest healer. The mage handed out some water and we quickly seemed to be off to a good start inside the dungeon.

At one point a green cloak with +2 agility dropped, and since I was still wearing a white, I rolled need on it. I wasn't surprised that I didn't win, but I was surprised that the other person who had rolled need on it was the warlock. Still, I wasn't going to complain - for all I knew, classes might be working differently on this server and I had only just had a demonstration of how little I actually knew about how things worked around these parts.

However, the mage took note, was not pleased and asked the warlock why they were needing on everything. It was only then that I noticed that the lock had indeed also needed on other items such as random gems. "I'm a JC" was their defense, which I thought was pretty weak (especially since I was one too) but again I didn't say anything. The mage continued to argue and rant about it though, and the lock started passing on everything for a little while, though they later resumed rolling.

The mage then also started complaining that the lock was just on follow and not actually doing any damage. I couldn't tell whether that was true, but it did seem like they were mostly just ambling about and not casting any spells. Still, nobody was responding to these accusations at all, even when the mage started outright demanding that the group leader should just kick the warlock already. It was as if they were just shouting into a void.

We made it past the first boss, but on one of the trash pulls that followed, my hawkstrider pet suddenly shot off into another group of mobs around the corner. I've played Classic hunter for so long now and have had so many pet accidents, but I still don't know what caused this particular one, as he was not on aggressive and the mobs were around a corner and not even visible to me. Either way, the moment I saw what was happening I said "omg, I'm so sorry, I don't know why he did that". We tried our best, but sadly it was too many mobs at once and we wiped.

The mage made one last complaint about how the warlock was supposedly only auto-attacking, before calling us all the "worst classic group ever" and quitting the party. Everyone else cared about that about as much as they had cared about the person's previous complaints, which is to say nobody even commented on it in any way. We just ran back, revived, and then finished the rest of the dungeon just fine with the four of us who remained.

When we exited the instance, my hearthstone was still on cooldown, so I thought I'd take a look at this apparently cross-faction-friendly Orgrimmar, but I had barely taken two steps away from the instance portal when a guard ran up and one-shot me. So, uh... so much for that.

Nonetheless, I thought this was a very educational experience. I can see now why no Alliance players are queueing for RFC, and I'm not sure why the game would list it as a "recommended dungeon" when you're supposed to walk all the way to Org as an Ally. Considering my encounter with the guard, it seems unlikely that a full Alliance group would even be able to make it there without a lot of corpse-running.

The mage was a weird character because I could kind of understand their complaints (my pet mishap wiping the group was definitely worthy of some disdain I thought) but they were just... so angry about everything. It's RFC, man, and maybe that warlock is someone's kid or a complete newbie or whatever, no need to get quite so wound up about it.

Meanwhile, the druid tank was an absolute saint, organising the summon for me and also telling me "no worries" after I'd caused the wipe. The best and the worst of most Classic environments in a nutshell. 

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.

Cata Classic: Halfway There

Progress on my little Cataclysm Classic project has been swift. I played a fair bit over the past week and already hit level 80. I'm still dithering in Northrend as I'm writing this because I felt like I was actually progressing a bit too fast and I don't want to move on to Cata just yet. It's one of those flaws with the way WoW does expansion content, that because of how much of it is concentrated at the level cap, when the level cap moves up, it requires a lot of effort to actually still take any of that content in because you'll just be sailing past it way too quickly.

The gameplay has been surprisingly enjoyable. For as much as Cata removed a lot of what made everything that came before feel "classic", there are still bits of flavour left in there that are now missing in retail, such as my hunter wielding both a melee and a ranged weapon. I always thought that was incredibly cool, even if I didn't use the melee weapon much - but shooting things with a bow from point blank range like you have to do in retail just feels dumb. My pet's AI also feels much better for some reason, with my pet actually reappearing reliably when I dismount (in retail I feel like I have to manually re-summon it every five minutes) and defensive stance working much more smoothly than the annoying split between assist and defensive that they introduced later and which makes your pet unresponsive at the most annoying times.

In general it's noticeable how damage rotations are still in a kind of sweet spot where they are more involved than Vanilla (requiring you to use, say, five different damage abilities instead of just one) but don't have all the annoying upkeep of buffs or temporary cooldowns that you're supposed to cycle through constantly in retail.

Not everything is great of course. After the War Within just made massive improvements to the way the game handles transmog collection, it's almost physically painful to be back to a system where collecting any appearances and even merely keeping track of what you've already got is strictly tied to your class and armour type.

Last week was also Darkmoon Faire week, so I hopped onto Darkmoon Island to do the rounds there like I do in retail. Since the Island was introduced in Cata, I didn't expect to notice many differences, but I was quite surprised. For example I had forgotten that there was originally no return portal, and the targeting circle for the "Target: Turtle" game was huge and incredibly inaccurate for some reason, making it feel much more difficult than in retail.

All that said, most of my levelling was spent in Northrend, flying around exploring the landscape, working on my professions and engaging with a quest hub here or there as the mood struck me. (As a hunter I just had to do the Nesingwary quests in Sholazar for example.) In-between I queued for dungeons - I have my gripes with Wrath, but the dungeons were pretty cool and I literally ran them hundreds of times back in the day. I initially expected that I'd have to look for groups manually, since I still remembered all the hubbub around WotLK Classic launching without a dungeon finder, but clearly they did decide to add it eventually.

I decided that I wanted to queue for all dungeons in order and even though that limited my selection and I was dps, my pops were always pretty quick. As if I needed confirmation that I wasn't the only one levelling a character now specifically for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I once ended up in a run with characters from two different guilds whose names implied that they were MoP levelling guilds, with the existence of a third guild implied.

At first I still tried to say hi and bye, but people rarely responded so I quickly gave up on that. in Dark'tharon Keep I got kicked at the end of the dungeon for declining to immediately re-queue as I was trying to hand in the quest at the end of the dungeon and it has some RP that requires you to wait for a bit. At least this didn't come as a complete surprise to me at this point, so I wasn't exactly shocked and dismayed, just slightly exasperated. I manually flew to the dungeon to see if I could re-enter and hand in my quest that way, but all the mobs were back and I couldn't get to the end. I didn't feel like re-queuing for the same dungeon and risking people do the exact same to me again, so I just abandoned the (completed) quest.

I did note that the unfriendly group that had booted me consisted entirely of people from Firemaw, which was at least on brand. With how few actually active Cata servers there are, server identity is clearly still a thing, and it figures that the PvP mega server still has the most jerks on it. People from the other PvE servers seemed at least marginally friendlier. In Halls of Stone a group from Lakeshire (a German PvE realm) even managed to convince the tank to do the two optional bosses.

Looking around on my own server (Mirage Raceway), it was interesting to see that even though it was largely alien to me (I'd just taken the free transfers at the start of Cata and had never really played on it) there were remnants of things I recognised, such as certain guilds or characters I remembered back from Nethergarde Keep or even way back from Hydraxian Waterlords. It did bring me a little bit of joy to see that some people have weathered the repeated server consolidations and expansion changes against the odds.

Anyway, I continued my levelling journey and got into Halls of Stone at 77 or 78. The queue for this took longer than for any previous dungeon I'd done, and I figured that the rush-rush people were probably intentionally avoiding the fifteen minutes of Brann RP. However, after opening my dungeon finder window again at level 79, I was surprised to find that Halls of Stone was just... missing from the list. I figure that's probably an even bigger reason for why the queue for it took so long.

At 80, things got even worse as most of the level 80 dungeons I still hadn't done also disappeared from the list. I found a forum thread about this problem going back to 2023, and it appears that this issue still hasn't been fixed two years later. I guess that tells us all about how much love Cataclysm Classic has been getting from the development side. So that's how my Wrath dungeoneering came to an end.

As I said, I'm still puttering around a bit as I haven't even explored Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and I want to get my leatherworking and first aid caught up. XP gains are already greatly reduced, but I expect to hit level 81 quite easily, by which point I'll probably feel the pressure to move on as XP payouts will likely go from reduced to near non-existent. I won't get away with getting as much levelling done in dungeons in Cata, as it says I'm currently ineligible to queue for any of them. I'm guessing they faithfully reproduced the mechanic where you had to find the dungeon entrance in the world before you could use the tool? I guess I'll just quest instead.

Levelling Through Raiding in Season of Discovery

I've kind of stopped caring so much about my alts in SoD and have been more focused on just continuing to level my priest at the moment. I hit level 40 during a Scarlet Monastery run that was funny because in Cathedral, we had so much dps that we bugged out the last fight and Whitemane died from dots and totem damage before she could actually revive Mograine, something I didn't think was possible. This bugged out the fight so we only got one piece of loot and no quest completion, but most of the group was happy to just reset the instance and go again.

Also, I noted in my last post about SoD that buffing a full group with fortitude "still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD", so I was rather chuffed when one of the bosses in SM dropped a priest scroll that reduced the mana cost of fort by 50% while also extending its duration by the same amount. This is the kind of change I can get behind!

Once we were done in SM, I manually legged it back to Brill in anticipation of getting my ground mount. I wasn't sure whether I was actually going to be able to afford it since I didn't have 90 gold yet, but I was hopeful that with how much certain things had been streamlined and sped up in SoD, the price might have been reduced and I would be able to afford it anyway. This turned out to be correct.

At this point I thought I should maybe start focusing a bit more on getting my professions and runes caught up before doing more questing, but I hadn't yet been fishing for half an hour when a warlock whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go to Gnomeregan (the raid). I replied that I hadn't done it before but was up for it and quickly got an invite, which was followed by a summon only a few minutes later.

We killed the first boss with no issues, but wiped on the second one due to massive AoE. The warlock (who was also the main tank - what is it with warlock tanks in SoD?!) just went "adds?!" and rage-quit the group. I thought that was quite funny, considering he'd been the one to actually put the raid together and didn't seem to have any issues with inviting people who openly said that they'd never done this before. Talk about giving up quickly.

The rest of us hung around and tried to get a replacement, but without a summon we knew it would take a while for them to arrive. We spent about fifteen minutes sitting around waiting for this shaman to make it to Booty Bay for the teleport, just for them to notice the level 60 we had in the group and go "oh, never mind, I just wanted to come for the XP" and leave again. (I think they were worried that a 60 in the group would nerf their XP too much?) We just nine-manned it in the end and had another wipe, but once people finally understood that the adds had to die, the fight was easy-peasy and we were able to move on.

Crowd Pummeler seemed pretty straightforward, and I commented that the XP was pretty good even with the level 60 in the group. That remark clearly jinxed it for everyone, as on the next boss, everybody but the level 60 died, and he shaved off the last sliver of the boss's health all by himself, which meant that none of us got any XP for it, being dead at the time.

On Menagerie (an encounter completely new to SoD) we wiped once because people didn't make sure to get the bosses down at the same time. On the second attempt we were successful, but then Thermaplugg spawned right in the middle of the room and even though we'd been warned about that, someone immediately aggroed him and we wiped again. At this point the level 60 and two others quit the group, but the new raid lead valiantly made an attempt to find a few more replacements, including another level 60. In the end we gave Thermaplugg a few more tries with nine people, but we only got as far as the third phase with basically no mana and immediately dying to massive damage at the start of the phase, so we eventually called it there.

I didn't get any loot but was still happy to have had the opportunity to see the raid. Even though I recalled Blizzard buffing XP gains in BFD when phase two launched, I wasn't sure how common it was for people to actually run the low-level raids as levelling content. The XP was indeed very good, even with the level 60 in the group and me only being alive for four boss kills, as I gained more than a full level of experience from that run. I'd kind of like to go again at some point to see whether another group might be a bit more successful (and with me having the advantage of actually knowing the fights now) but I probably won't put too much effort into finding a group since there are plenty of other sights to see still.

Anniversary Success

After the bad pug story from a few days ago, today I have a tale of a good one! From retail even...?!

However, first things first: The big event for WoW's 20th anniversary finally came to an end this week. I wrote about what I thought of all the different activities involved back in early November, including the fact that currency payouts were initially very restricted. Once the devs fixed that, I kept collecting celebration tokens for about a month until I'd gotten everything I wanted, and then I kind of lost interest.

That was until someone reminded me at the end of my Christmas holidays that the event was almost over, and I decided that I'd probably like to still polish off the remaining achievements that I hadn't completed yet. These basically fell into two categories: Secrets of Azeroth and the BRD raid.

With the Secrets stuff, I'd done a few of the Guest Relations quests but stopped at some point because I'd found them too tedious to figure out. This time around I just looked up some guides and powered through everything that was left with instructions up on my second monitor. So many of these puzzles were just way too fiddly and obscure. Ticking all the boxes still took some time (the story quest about the feast recipe for the pirates was absolutely diabolical, especially if you didn't want to just buy all the ingredients off the AH) but I got there over the course of one day, finishing off my hunt for crates in the early hours of New Year's Day.

The issue with the raid was that I had done it multiple times on LFR, but the two achievements for it required you to go into areas where a raid finder group usually wouldn't go, so I figured my only chance to get them done was to join a normal mode pug. Even though I hadn't set foot into anything beyond LFR since mid-Cataclysm (not counting the craziness of Pandaria Remix), I strangely enough wasn't too worried about that, as I'd repeatedly heard from credible sources that normal mode raids these days aren't really much harder than LFR. I invited my husband into a party on New Year's Day and suggested that we look to join a BRD normal raid together.

We only had one problem: there wasn't a single listing for BRD that evening, just Nerub-ar Palace runs as far as the eye could see. So I decided to be brave and simply create my own raid. I named it "BRD normal full run" and set the description to: "Let's get those achievements!"

You might think this foolish, considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had faith that at least a couple of people willing to join our pug would know what to do and would speak up if we went grievously wrong. And... it worked out alright! After accepting absolutely everyone that applied over the next fifteen minutes or so, I realised that we were still a tank short, so I relogged from my evoker to my own prot warrior because I'm a glutton for punishment I guess I also had faith that the other tank would know what to do. First thing I did on zoning in was to hand them raid assist and they did seem to take charge quite happily, so all I had to do was help with rounding up adds, soak damage and taunt swap where appropriate.

We did have a couple of wipes, and one guy left after the first three bosses, but overall we progressed at a good clip, and my description had clearly attracted the right kind of people as at least half the raid piped up about missing the exact same parts of the achievements that we also needed and everyone gently herded each other towards them when we got to the right area.

It was also quite apparent that at least a few of our dps were even more clueless than I was (I'd at least watched a brief guide!), which usually became evident when someone was targeted by a soaking mechanic and ran for the hills to die alone in a corner instead of stacking up to survive. However, we were generally able to power through those losses just like you would in LFR, and the couple of times when things got too crazy and we wiped, someone did indeed speak up to inform us about just what had gone wrong, and people listened and did better next time. Everyone was friendly enough, and when we finished it was all "gg"s and thank yous.

I won't lie, I felt kind of proud that my first normal raid, my first pug raid, and my first raid organised by me - all rolled into one - went so well. Sometimes someone being willing to start the group is really all it takes.

When You're the Bad Pug (in RFD)

Last Sunday I healed a Razorfen Downs pug with my undead priest in Season of Discovery. It went... awkwardly.

I felt chipper enough when I first joined the group - I was filling the last spot, so we were immediately ready to go. The group had been listed for several dungeons, so I asked what the ultimate destination was meant to be and was told that it was Razorfen Downs. I could see that several people were already on their way to the entrance, and the tank was a warlock, which meant that I could simply await a summon, which was nice as I was very far away.

The tank asked whether we were all okay with doing the escort quest after the first boss, and I said "sure". I mostly took it as a given that the escort and its associated boss encounter would be included in an RFD run, but there's nothing wrong with making sure that everyone's on the same page! The warlock wasn't appeased that easily though - he insisted that each individual member confirmed in writing in the chat that they were okay with doing the escort, and that they would wait for everyone to hand in the previous quest before picking up the next one (the actual escort). A rather unexpected degree of paranoia I guess, but I wasn't put off just yet because I was well aware of how much of a pain that escort could be. (I mentioned it in this post from 2011!)

Anyway, eventually a summon arrived for me, and the moment I loaded in, someone shared the quest you can pick up just outside the instance with me. I thanked everyone around me and started buffing everyone with fortitude, something that still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD. I hadn't even buffed everyone yet when the tank was already off to the races - and thus began half an hour of me frantically chasing after him, trying to sit down to drink every now and then but barely getting above 20% of my mana at any given time.

At one point before we even got inside the instance, the tank died because he had charged so far off, I hadn't stood a snowball's chance in hell at getting in range of him in time. He put "mb" in the chat but didn't seem to learn a lesson from it as he still didn't slow down in any way the moment he was back on his feet. Eventually I did put "oom" in chat myself because I really wanted a moment to drink, but this still wasn't enough to stop the tank. One of the dpsers took pity on me and handed me a mana potion though. At one point we spotted a chest and a few people rolled on it - I won but again didn't have time to actually grab it because the tank was running and pulling again and I had to race after him in turn to keep him alive.

When we reached Belnistrasz, the tank was very firm that we should all "just accept, don't talk". Frazzled as I was from the constant running and barely being able to keep up, I quickly accepted the first quest, hit complete and then accepted the second quest, which immediately started the NPC running. "Who hit accept?!" the tank roared, and it took me a moment to process what had even happened. He'd said to just accept, not talk, which was what I'd done... but then I opened my quest log and could see that I was the only person on the escort quest. It was only then that it came back to me that of course, that's why it was so annoying, because there is no separate dialogue option to start the escort, it immediately starts the moment you accept the quest. Why had he said "just accept, don't talk" then though...?

Anyway, the tank kept demanding to know who'd ruined everything while we ran back to the entrance to reset the instance. I wanted to be honest and confess, but he seemed so mad, and someone else piped up with a comment along the lines "somebody probably had auto-accept on" (in an addon). I of course had no such addon installed, but the temptation of blaming an unspecified person's addon was just too great and I said nothing.

When we got outside, the tank again made each of us confirm individually that we didn't have any auto-accept function on (anymore) before resetting the instance. As we fought our way through the same bunch of pig people a second time, he also kept putting "alfa" in chat repeatedly. I didn't know what that meant, but already racked with guilt and nervous as I was, I worried that I was missing something important and eventually asked whether that was a SoD thing. Someone simply said yes and the tank repeated "alfa" a few more times. But who was he talking to? I searched Wowhead for "alfa" on my second screen and got no useful results. Was I doing something else wrong now? Fortunately it eventually turned out that it was the shaman he'd been pestering, namely for the buff "Spirit of the Alpha".

Anyway, we got back to Belnistraz again, and it was once again emphatically repeated not to start the escort quest until the tank officially called for it. I meekly hung my head and waited. When I noticed level-up type sparkles around people's heads as others handed in the pre-quest, I started to sweat again. What if people were paying attention and noticed that I wasn't visibly completing the pre-quest just now? Would that give away my bad deed from earlier? However, even as I wondered about that, I suddenly got the pop-up to say that someone else had started the escort quest and whether I wanted to accept it too. I clicked yes of course, and there was once again raging about how someone hadn't waited, though at least I knew it wasn't me this time. There was also no threat of a reset as only one guy had been unable to pick up the escort, and the tank was like "screw that one guy" I guess.

The silver lining of the run was that the boss at the end of the escort dropped Scroll of Shadowfiend for me, which I took with some delight. I had no idea you could even earn extra non-rune abilities like that too!

Anyway, we continued the run as before, crazy rushing included. One of the bosses dropped a really nice caster cloak, but I saw the tank roll need so I passed, guilty conscience still gnawing at me, plus I had got the distinct impression that this tank had very strong opinions about getting what he wanted.

He also died two more times on trash, even though I was able to keep everyone else alive. He hadn't run out of range either, I just... wasn't able to keep him up? He seemed to take crazy amounts of damage sometimes, but I have no experience with warlock tanks so I couldn't judge whether this was normal or whether he was effectively doing the warlock equivalent of tanking in battle stance and without a shield when you're under-levelled for the dungeon. I just felt like I was failing as a healer, even though nobody said anything. At one point after I'd resed him again, he just stood there for a minute not moving, and I imagined him telling his guild mates about how trash the healer in his RFD run was.

Eventually we got to the end of the dungeon. We ran past another chest, which nobody but me even attempted to roll for this time, so I just looted it after everyone else had left. Amnennar the Coldbringer dropped his Coldrage Dagger, on which the rogue in the party rolled need... but so did the warlock, and he was the one who won. The rogue just put a ":/" in chat, understandably not pleased with a caster needing on a melee weapon. I felt bad for him, but that last incident also made me feel a bit better about my own failures, knowing that the warlock wasn't just bossy and in a hurry but also a ninja. Didn't need to feel quite so bad about him dying then I guess.

I hearthed back to Undercity and did my quest hand-ins. I then opened the group finder one more time just to see what else was happening, and saw that the warlock was already in the process of forming another group for Scarlet Monastery, this time with a druid healer that was only level 33. I silently wished that guy good luck in my head and logged off for the day.

WoW Memories #5: October 28th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on October 28th, 2006 under the title "Another Lazy Day":

... another day of playing with Nemi. Sorry, I wish I had something more interesting to talk about, but I've simply been enjoying a lazy weekend.

As for WoW, Nemi made me travel a lot today, and we did our first quest in a larger group - as in, about half a dozen people. It was fun, even if we died a few times and the NPC involved was quite weird. (He would complain about being hurt while moving along at snail's pace, spot an enemy, run and fight it, then run back to where he was and go back to walking really, really slowly.¹) We even repeated the whole thing three or four times, once because we failed and another time just because we wanted to be nice and help the other people doing it.

It was a fun experience all around, death and all, because everyone involved was very nice and fun.² There was this guy from Poland who fought until his weapons disintegrated, a level ten warrior who insisted on following us around even though he kept dying and talked about wanting to buy a horse for a few silver coins... it was rather endearing. I also liked being the priest in a group of close-combat specialists³, because I got in relatively little trouble (except when all of us died). I need to work on keeping track of where people are though - it's very annoying when someone dies and you have to send out the whole party to look for the corpse to be able to resurrect them.⁴

¹ I can tell from the description that this was my very first escort quest: Mission In Action in Redridge Mountains, which involves escorting Corporal Keeshan from being imprisoned at the back of a cave all the way back to town. You can tell I was not yet familiar with the tropes of the genre.

² And thus, my love for pick-up groups was born...

³ Imagine if this had become the common term to describe melee dps... LF CC would have a whole different meaning!

⁴ It may be that I was just being dumb, but I do seem to remember that in those early days you indeed couldn't target someone for resurrection via the unit frames (at least not if they had already released) so you had to find their corpse out in the world to cast the spell on them... which could sometimes be challenging if the death had occurred during a bout of absolute mayhem involving fears and the like.

These Pugs Be Crazy

As much fun as I've been having in War Within over the past month, one thing I carefully avoided for the longest time was the random dungeon finder. I wrote a post earlier in the year about how WoW's random dungeon experience is terrible, and early indications from reddit pointed towards things only having gotten worse with the expansion. It made sense to me too, seeing how the introduction of follower dungeons meant that people who don't want to be harried or berated by strangers could now opt out of that experience while still seeing the content, further increasing the relative percentage of rushers and toxic players in LFD.

So for the first month or so, I strictly stuck to doing dungeons with the NPCs or in guild groups. However, in the past week my resolve started to weaken a bit. My priest needed a couple more levels and random dungeons started to look appealing as both a source of XP and as a way of practising my healing with the new priest toolkit. I'd had plenty of time to get to know all the dungeons on a basic level, and I figured that the sweatiest of the sweats would probably be in Mythic Plus or wherever by now, right? Right?

You can probably already tell that I ended up being wrong about that, at least to some degree. Basically, I ran about half a dozen normal mode pugs, and while they made for excellent healing practice, at least half the runs had someone in them who was acting insane. That is not a good percentage!

The very first dungeon I got into was Priory of the Sacred Flame with a monk tank. They pulled the entire courtyard to begin with and it felt like a minor miracle to me that nobody died, especially since I got silenced at some point. But okay, I'd consider that "normal" pug behaviour, even if unpleasant.

However, then they made a straight beeline for the first boss, which immediately made me go "uh oh". In case you don't know, the first boss in Priory is a bit like the second boss in Court of Stars in the sense that he gets buffed by lieutenants that you're supposed to draw away and kill separately first. He is however slightly less deadly than his Court of Stars counterpart, meaning that I'm told it's technically possible to kill him without taking out the lieutenants first, as long as your group has a perfect interrupt rotation. Which a normal pug obviously wasn't going to have.

Unsurprisingly, we got AoEd to death within a few seconds, which then resulted in the tank saying something along the lines of "you guys have no clue how to interrupt, good luck" and dropping group. I was only annoyed because I really wanted to tell them "What in the world did you think was going to happen?" The replacement tank we got did the fight the intended way and we had no further issues for the rest of the run.

Insanity of a different kind - but also displayed by a tank - was something I encountered in the Rookery. This tank was a death knight and level 71, when the scaling is most in your favour and you should be a god among men. However, for some reason this tank felt like they were made of paper and it was a real struggle to keep everyone alive, especially as the tank decided to go for massive pulls regardless.

Still, healing practice, right? At some point I opened Recount just to get an idea of how the numbers were looking, and I noticed that the tank was at the bottom of the damage done chart, having done less than half of the damage I had done as a healer (and that was with me not having had much time to add dps since everyone was constantly on the brink of death). I really have no clue what this person was doing.

Considering that every pull was a life or death battle due to the tank's disregard for their own or anyone else's health, I was worried about the bottom floor of the instance, as this is where the trash does a lot of AoE damage and can wipe you even if you were fine with bigger pulls up top. Naturally the paper tank tried to pull three groups at once and died. Somehow the dps had the sense to go into crazy kiting mode and it wasn't a full wipe, but it sure was intense. After we'd killed the last boss, one of the damage dealers put "please don't tank" into /say before leaving and I felt that.

However, the most impressive display of - to me - crazy behaviour happened in a Stonevault that actually seemed to be off to a good start initially. Sure, everyone was running and we were doing huge trash pulls as usual, but this death knight tank actually seemed to know what they were doing and things were much more controlled, with not that much damage hitting the party.

However, after the first boss a vote kick for the mage in the group suddenly popped up, with the given reason being either gibberish or a language I didn't understand. Naturally, I voted no. Moments later it came up again, this time with "puller". I voted no again, though I hadn't really seen what was happening. Everyone was ahead of me, I hadn't seen who had actually pulled, but there hadn't been that much damage going around either way, so it seemed fine?

The vote kicks kept popping up though, with different reasons. There should really be something to prevent you from trying to vote-kick the same person over and over if it keeps failing. The mage tried to kick the tank in turn at least once as well, but I voted no on that one too. We were fine! Why were people freaking out so much?!

This continued until after the second boss. On the trash to the third boss, the tank decided that they'd had enough and stopped tanking. This time I could see that the mage had indeed pulled, and naturally I had managed to get healing aggro already. The mage ran out of the instance portal and I had to do the same as the tank showed no interest in saving me from the mobs either. We both zoned back in once aggro had reset and rejoined the group at the third boss. Here the tank decided to... I don't even know what exactly they did, but it ended up wiping us, clearly on purpose. The mage gave up and quit, and people in chat were like "haha, finally". I was honestly just confused.

As we got a replacement and made our way to the last boss, the tank seemed surprised that I hadn't quit as well, and a conversation along the following lines ensued:

Tank: "Why didn't you kick the mage if you weren't together?"
Me: "Because I don't like kicking people over the tiniest things."
Tank: "Do you tank?"
Me: "Yes, I do."
Tank: "Don't you find it annoying too when dps pull for you?"
Me: "Yes, but I also find it annoying when tanks don't save me from healing aggro just cause they're annoyed with a dps."
Tank: "Who was annoying here first though?"
Me: "Here? To me? You were! But I didn't vote to kick you either."

Now, if you're someone who's very cynical about retail WoW, you might just chuck this up to retail being retail, lacking incentives to socialise etc., but the funny thing is, out in the open world I keep having great collaborative experiences and keep thinking how nice everyone is. It's just normal dungeons that have become this pocket of utter insanity.

I definitely find it worrying that so many of my runs were like this though. This wasn't one bad apple in a dozen runs, this was every other dungeon or worse. How are new players ever going to have a chance to experience grouping in a positive way like this? Friends and guilds are great, but I'm not sure people are going to stick around long enough to get to that point if their first grouping experiences are like this.

Nerub-ar Palace Solo Vs. LFR

I actually got one of those opinion surveys from Blizzard today. It wouldn't make for an exciting reddit exposé because the questions were all over the place (though the one that asked whether a MoP Classic would make me more likely to spend time in Classic was certainly something to take note of), but one subject it asked about in particular was something I've been meaning to write a post about anyway, namely how I felt about the new solo/story version of the Nerub-ar Palace raid.

WoW has long had a reputation for being both a solo player's game and yet all about raiding. I certainly think that both of those play styles can coexist peacefully, but as Blizzard has put more and more emphasis on storytelling, this dichotomy has certainly presented a bit of a problem: Over and over, you'd go through this whole intricate storyline by yourself just to have it end at the entrance to a raid, with nothing but a breadcrumb quest telling you to go do the raid now. By the time the next patch came around, it was on to the next storyline and solo players were largely left in the dark or confused about what had actually happened at the end of the raid.

The devs tried to alleviate this problem a little by adding an NPC after a few weeks that would let you watch the raid-end cut scene regardless, but that only worked to a limited extent. I thought Amirdrassil was a great example of this actually, as the story leading up to it ended with big baddie Fyrakk entering the raid and needing to be stopped, and then the cut scene you were allowed to watch afterwards was just a few seconds of the aspects looking surprised while their eyes glowed. I believe my initial response to this was something along the lines of: "What is even happening?" (I did eventually get more of a resolution through LFR, though that took more than one attempt as well.)

Being aware of this problem, Blizzard decided to try a new approach with The War Within's first raid by adding an actual story/solo mode. It's not the whole raid - only the last boss - and you won't get any loot out of it, but it should provide more context for what's going on. Naturally, as someone who's been following the in-game story through LFR for the last couple of expansions (or at least trying to), I was very interested in this.

So how does it work? A week after the raid opened for group play, a new quest appeared for solo players that had completed the campaign story, asking them to meet a contact in the City of Threads. He gives you a couple of tasks to help out people in the city, which culminate in a mission that tells you that the time has come to strike against the queen. Another NPC near the raid entrance "smuggles" you inside... along with nine friendly NPCs, the same ones that help out Horde and Alliance in the follower dungeons.

You then get to meet and fight Queen Ansurek in what I can only call a weak imitation of a raid fight, with some flashy mechanics going off that don't really seem to do anything and the NPCs mostly just forming a big pile. If you're a tank or a healer, the game doesn't even trust you to do the role you signed up for, as you'll be slotted in as the sixth dps regardless. But you do get a (very) vague idea of the fight and can watch the little cut scene at the end in peace. The reward for the quest also includes one of those rare crafting materials for a high-level item, which I actually used to place my first ever public crafting order for an epic belt.

I still wanted to see the whole thing in LFR too though - more than usual in fact, because while I'd appreciated the opportunity to see the story conclusion at my own pace, it did feel a bit "off" to me to just "sneak up" on the queen like that and face so little resistance. It made me go into LFR with a different attitude than usual, in the sense that I knew exactly how it was going to end this time, but I wanted to see more of how you're supposed to get there. Even if LFR fights are also mostly unorganised mayhem with extremely toned down mechanics, it does feel more epic with real people, and it's certainly possible to wipe.

I also found myself paying more attention to the bosses. I was happy to get a proper conclusion to the last fight of the Dawnbreaker dungeon for example (the boss runs away at the end and you don't get to take her down properly until the raid), and I found myself wondering just how the Ethereals will play into all this, as they were featured in the pre-expansion quest line and one of the bosses is a "Nexus Princess" who also makes an escape after you defeat her. These may be minor, but there are still story threads leading both into and out of the raid that you don't get to see in solo mode.

Overall I'll say the new story mode is a big improvement though. Its biggest weakness this time around was actually just the bad signposting. I was looking forward to checking it out, but I would not have known when or how to start it if a headline from Blizzard Watch hadn't caught my eye on my Bluesky timeline.

Blizzard is usually quite fond of just auto-granting you new story quests, but not only did they not do that with this one, it's also marked as a side quest - in an expansion with about a million of them. So unless you'd already cleared your map of all side quests before this one came out or used some sort of map filter, odds were high that you'd simply miss this new exclamation mark being added in town.

The other issue I had is that the WoW community is still absolutely atrocious about spoilers. The cut scene at the end of Nerub-ar Palace doesn't exactly contain any major plot points, but I still tripped over it left and right mere hours after solo mode was released and before I'd had a chance to see it in game for myself, as multiple YouTubers I watch used it as background footage for their videos while talking about something else. Like, come on, dudes. Is it that hard to show your viewers a little bit of courtesy by holding off on doing that kind of thing?

As far as Blizzard themselves go though, I think story mode is a good addition and didn't even turn me off LFR. I'm generally not a huge fan of LFR - I don't dislike it by any means but I also find it a bit tedious as a way of just seeing the end of the story, so I was wondering whether this new story mode would make LFR feel redundant to me. Surprisingly that hasn't been the case though - if anything, it kind of made me appreciate LFR more for what it is. Like a side quest to the final boss fight that I'm happy to check out, but I also appreciate that I don't have to do it to understand what's going on.

It's worth noting that the overall structure of the storyline also felt a bit different in this first tier of War Within than it usually does, as the raid is really more of a side story. Not to downplay Queen Ansurek's importance, but we know from the beginning that she's not the one in charge. The solo campaign also has a satisfying ending of its own (for the moment), so the pressure to go see the raid to understand how it all wraps up is actually lower than it would usually be at this point in an expansion. And I think that's a good thing as well.

What was your experience of the Nerub-ar Palace raid storyline?

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.