Pandas of Draenor

Just as I was starting to wonder whether I still had enough of a reason to stay subscribed to WoW, my husband came in clutch for Blizzard by expressing a desire to pick up retail again, now that our new-expansion gearing frenzy in SWTOR was coming to an end for the time being. Much to my surprise, he wasn't that keen on going to Zereth Mortis yet, but wanted to roll up a new pair of characters, this time to level through Warlords of Draenor.

After a bit of discussion about what to go for, we ended up with a pair of pandaren, him a brewmaster monk, me a discipline priest. I've certainly come a long way from being notably underwhelmed by the Mists of Pandaria announcement, to finding the expansion itself kind of neat, to actually playing a pandaren myself!

I had never played through the pandaren starting experience before and found it enjoyable enough, though I did get a bit of a sense of déjà vu towards the end, which makes me think that I must have watched a playthrough of the zone on YouTube at some point many years ago.

And then we were off to Warlords of Draenor, the one remaining expansion from which I hadn't played any content before, though it does of course have a strong reputation. I remember when it was first announced I was actually kind of intrigued and considered checking it out, but that interest didn't last long. I also recall watching my husband play through the content on his own at the time and commenting how ridiculous it was that all the orc warlords appeared with their names floating next to them in giant letters - I guess Blizzard didn't think people would be able to tell them apart otherwise. My opinion on this was unchanged when we got to that part ourselves.

The introduction to Draenor in general is a fast-paced adventure that feels super odd to jump into story-wise with the new levelling system. A moment ago we were noobish pandas only just earning the right to leave the Wandering Isle for the first time, the next Khadgar greets us as famous champions who are Azeroth's only hope. I know that opting into Chromie Time includes implicit acceptance that the timeline won't really make sense, but this just seemed like a particularly extreme contrast. There also isn't any real context for why we suddenly have to go through the Dark Portal, it just feels very rushed and out of nowhere. Also, speaking of Khadgar: I thought he was kind of funny in Legion, but here the first impression he makes is actually one of being rather cold and uncaring... not a fan.

After the intro we were off to Shadowmoon Valley to start building our garrison, another feature that was reported on a lot back in the day. My husband seems to be very fond of it (he has several across his stable of characters) but he does love base-building games in general. I was a little overwhelmed at first to be honest, especially with him going on about all the things I "should" be doing to upgrade my garrison asap. The process looks like it must have been sped up a lot compared to back in the day, but it still costs resources - in fact it's ironic that the garrison had a reputation for being a massive gold generator when WoD was current but now seems to have been reduced to a gold sink instead - my husband confessed that he sent his new alt several tens of thousands of gold to be able to upgrade his buildings asap. As I've refused to do this so far, my own garrison is still extremely basic as my panda priest has only earned a few hundred gold throughout her questing so far.

At the time of me writing this, we've only done a few quests in Shadowmoon Valley plus one random dungeon and we're already level thirty, so I anticipate that just like with Legion, we'll hit fifty very quickly and will then continue running through the rest of the zones overlevelled, one-shotting everything for almost zero XP just to see the story.

While it's been fun to level with my husband again, I have to admit that the expansion content itself hasn't really grabbed me yet. The Alliance garrison being situated in a zone where it's basically always night is an emotional downer for me, and I struggle a bit to care about what we're doing. I think it's a mix between the whole alternate timeline thing and the story just not establishing very well what our motivations are. It was one thing to stop a sudden and barely explained invasion in the intro, but what exactly our beef with all the orcs is now that we're settling down on Draenor ourselves feels a lot more fuzzy. I was always told that the hate for WoD mainly came from the fact that it had little to no content added after launch but that the levelling experience was fine, but to be honest it doesn't really strike me as all that great so far either. We'll see whether that opinion changes as we explore further.

Oh, and as a fun little aside: I'd only been playing my new panda priest for a few hours when a friend whispered me on Battle.net:

Him: Did you really name a character Pishin? [Panda-Shin... get it?]
Me: Please don't tell me it means something bad!
Him: Oh no... OK, my lips are sealed.

At this point I put "Pishin" into Google of course... first result was a city/district in Pakistan, that didn't seem so bad? However, a bit further down the page I found "(Scots): urine, piss" - and of course the friend mentioned above is Scottish. Sigh!

On Wings of Nether

I'm really burnt out on the Molten Front dailies, even though I only completed them on a single character. To be honest I was kind of surprised by the strength of my own negative feelings. I mean, I expressed some disappointment when I first completed them, but at that point I still thought that I would keep going back to finish up the achievements at least, but when it actually came down to doing it, the mere thought of it was just too repulsive. Same with the idea of doing it on alts - even though every single one of mine would benefit greatly from the gear upgrades from the vendors, it's really not something I fancy doing at all.

I think the linearity of it all is once again the biggest problem for me. If I could pick and choose... do just the dailies I still need for achievements on my main, and maybe kill spiders for the Shadow Wardens on my hunter for the skins or something - I'd be all over that! But there's no way of bypassing the earlier quests and it just becomes too grating.

Like I said in a comment to Nils' post on the subject the other day, I don't mind dailies in principle, I just think that they should never feel like they are absolutely necessary to advance your character. They should be just one option out of many. With the Molten Front making me feel too pressured, I decided to go back to doing other random dailies that I found fun: A Tol Barad quest here and there, getting some Champion's Seals at the Argent Tournament... and for the first time ever, I started gathering reputation with the Netherwing.

Considering how often I've said that the Burning Crusade was my favourite expansion so far, it may come as a surprise to people that there are whole chunks of content in it that I never even touched. In part, I think that was part of BC's beauty: that I always felt that I had things to do even without participating in every part of the game, and with no achievement system there was no meta game to tell me what I should or shouldn't do.

A lot of people were madly in love with the Netherwing back in the day, seeing how they offered the first dragon-like mount in the game, back before Wrath started handing out dragon mounts like candy. Personally, I just thought that they were ugly and thus wasn't interested. But that was okay!

I decided to go back to them for a variety of reasons. I wanted to keep doing some dailies that didn't feel excessively grindy to me and that had little to no reward pressure attached to them. I wanted to get my mount count up to get the Mountain o' Mounts achievement. I finally wanted to see the story. Certain aspects of it, like the Booterang quest or the Skyshatter races, have become pretty iconic and I wanted to experience them myself. And with me being fifteen levels higher than the intended audience, they were easy to do even as a healer.

I was surprised by how many other people seemed to be doing the same thing. Pretty much every day I ran into at least one other person who was also busy on the Netherwing Ledge, and it wasn't always the same guy. For endgame content from two expansions ago, I think that's pretty good going.

Reputation gains have been buffed considerably over time, and as the Grumpy Elf remarked recently, you could pretty much get to exalted within a single day if you really wanted to. I took it easy and only did most dailies once as they unlocked, just to see what they were about, and pretty much skyrocketed towards revered solely by doing that. After that I only did the Netherdust Pollen daily and the Booterang every day, which slowed my progress considerably but I didn't mind. It was nice to be able to trade faster progress for the ability to only do the dailies I actually felt like doing. (Yes, that was another jab at the Molten Front.)

What did I enjoy most? Well, even though they are not dailies, the Skyshatter races deserve a mention as something that I felt was quite unique and different. I felt like a bit of a cheat with my 310% flight speed, I can barely imagine how hard some of the later ones must have been back in the day! Seeing Wing Commanders Ichman and Mulverick reunited with a shared hatred of Alterac Valley made me crack up.

The Booterang quest was every bit as fun as people always made it out to be, because the disobedient peons are just too funny. Work is da poop! WHY IT PUT DA BOOTERANG ON THE SKIN? WHY?

I loved doing the Netherdust Pollen daily because like many gatherers I'm quite obsessed with removing all those little yellow dots from my mini map, and I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed there actually being daily quests for it. I think I got at least one character to exalted with the Shattered Sun back in the day purely by doing Gaining the Advantage every day. I wonder why they don't make quests like that anymore? Gathering professions could definitely use some love like that.

Most of the other dailies honestly didn't seem that great to me. Flying all the way to Nagrand just for a daily quest in Shadowmoon? Eh. And the mines must have been a veritable death trap back in the day considering the sheer amount and density of mobs in there. But hey, maybe someone else enjoyed them - once again, there is value in having a choice.

Today I finally hit exalted, on a bit of a whim really - after doing my "usual" dailies I realised that I was only missing a little bit of rep to max out, so I did the mine dailies as well just to complete the whole thing. The final quest was striking in its simplicity, a lot less flashy than what we're used to these days for sure, but it still evoked a solid sense of "you're finished, well done" from me.

When it came to picking my personal mount in Shattrath, I was a bit taken aback. These weren't just random mounts, these were sentient creatures that wanted to be my friends! That struck me as quite touching. Nonetheless I couldn't resist having a little moan in guild chat about how their quest text claimed that I could pick only one, at which point a guildie informed me that I could actually gather the whole set if I visited a vendor in Shadowmoon afterwards, a Dragonmaw orc.

Now that felt like a weird ending: "Okay, I choose you to be my best friend, Zoya! And now I'll go buy the rest of your mates as slaves from our mutual enemy! Muahahaha!" Not to mention that I still think that they are ugly. But I'm still glad that I did the whole thing. I wonder if I should work on the Terokk quest line next, as that's something I never did back in the day either... not sure if there's much point though, as I did get to see the final fight multiple times when I helped friends with completing it and I'm already exalted with the Skyguard anyway.