Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

New Changes and New People Coming to Classic Era

The Classic anniversary servers are getting ready to leave Vanilla behind and progress into the Burning Crusade, with Blizzard announcing on Tuesday that the expansion pre-patch will arrive in January. Those who don't want to progress into BC will be given the option to freely transfer to Classic era, which I think everyone kind of expected and which should give the era servers a nice population boost again.

Some were surprised that there's no option to clone your character this time, but I wasn't. I've long been under the impression that the cloning service saw very limited use back in 2021, but what it did do for sure was lead to no end of complaints. I think I also saw a dev comment at some point that it required a surprising amount of work or something? Either way, I'm not at all surprised that Blizzard didn't consider it worth the effort a second time around.

What did make my eyebrows shoot up was this tidbit hidden away in the patch notes for the Burning Crusade Classic PTR:  

When making your decision to transfer, please consider that the Group Finder tool and the Dual Spec feature will soon be added to Classic Era realms. This means that new and existing characters on Classic Era realms will have the option to learn Dual Spec. At the same time, the rulesets between Anniversary Hardcore and the original Hardcore realms will be aligned. This means that the original Hardcore realms will receive Dual Spec, Instant Mail, and the Dungeon Finder tool. [...]

We recognize that to some players, any change being brought to the Classic Era or original Hardcore environments arrives with hesitation. We acknowledge this, and we want you to know that we consider any change we make to these realms extremely carefully. In the case of the Group Finder tool, we consider it to be a true quality-of-life update, bringing players an additional and intuitive way to connect with each other.

A similar quality-of-life update is Edit Mode, allowing players to edit their user interfaces, which we are adding as a new change to BCC Anniversary Edition. Quality-of-life user interface options like Edit Mode could eventually make their way to Classic Era as well, and we look forward to the community’s thoughts on optional user interface quality-of-life additions such as this.

The choice to bring Dual Spec to Classic Era similarly received a tremendous amount of consideration and listening to the community’s thoughts on this feature. Since its introduction to Vanilla WoW in Season of Discovery, and again from the very start of Classic Anniversary, the introduction of Dual Spec to Vanilla WoW has been arguably the single most popular new feature and one of the most well-received in the Classic space. Players have praised that it simply makes the game more fun to play, and our hope is that Classic Era players will enjoy it just as much.

I immediately got flashbacks to when they dropped a bunch of random changes on era last year and there was a proper uproar from the community. I guess at least they are telling us in advance this time... though hiding it in the patch notes for another mode's PTR is not good form in my opinion. It's a good thing that the era community is so tight-knit that it's extremely good at spreading gossip - I had a ping about the news literally minutes after it was posted, thanks to Ronkuby from the Classic era Discord.

I don't think there's going to be a huge uproar this time though. Streamer Xaryu did a community poll last month about what kind of features people would like to see in a hypothetical Classic+, and while I wouldn't claim that any streamer's community is necessarily representative of the player population as a whole, it was still interesting to see that dual spec was one of the most popular features with a 94% approval rating. (I originally saw this in a handy graphic that I unfortunately can't find anymore, so I can only link to this AI-powered summary of his poll and stream that I found instead; I'm sorry.)

I'll say that I'm personally not a fan of this move - I rated dual spec as one of Wrath of the Lich King's best features back in 2010 so I do get the appeal, but I do also think it changes things in a way that I'd personally have preferred to keep out of era. It greatly increases the pressure on hybrids to be competent and geared for multiple roles, and people who prefer to just play one spec are increasingly seen as "lesser" than those who are more flexible, in a way that isn't as pronounced when changing specs takes a lot more effort and there's no real expectation that most people would want to do it.

But it is what it is, and I haven't been spending a lot of time on era for a while anyway. Same thing with the group finder tool - that's the one for manual listings that was also on SoD I presume, not the fully automated retail variant. It's handy for sure, but it does change things a little yet again in a way that at least as far as I'm aware, nobody on era was asking for. How many more tweaks can we make to this museum piece before it becomes something very different?

The State of My WoW-ing

I sometimes hear people say that WoW is in a better state than ever because of how many different ways to play it there are nowadays. Not enjoying retail? Well, Classic's right there and could still be earning your sub! Love the original world of Azeroth but Classic is just a bit too same-old, same-old for you at this point? Here's Season of Discovery! And so on and so forth.

I'm going to neither agree nor disagree with that statement, but I'll say that the multiple versions of WoW thing has definitely worked out well for me in terms of getting value out of my subscription, as I've at least tried almost every mode that the dev team has come out with and I tend to enjoy playing more than one of them at a time. Sadly (to me), it often seems that I'm in a minority in that regard, with most players that I talk to just sticking to the one version they prefer and perhaps even actively disliking the other versions of the game.

I've been wondering what this means for this blog, because I imagine that if readers just want to read about their favourite version of WoW, me switching back and forth between talking about very different things seemingly at random might be perceived as annoying. I'll still write what I want to write, but I thought it might also be useful and interesting to give a general update on where I'm at with each version of WoW at the moment, so you know what to expect if there's one specific mode you're waiting to hear about.

Retail (The War Within)

I'm currently doing four delves a week with the husband but to be honest not much else. K'aresh has been entertaining enough - I rescued all the wee animals and so on and so forth, but it doesn't have the same staying power for me as the final zones of the last two expansions had. Patch 11.2 also killed my desire to play alts temporarily as it broke the Altoholic addon, and the bank restructuring made all my alts' banks a horrible mess. Altoholic works again now, but those banks are still in chaos and I just can't bear to look at them much, so my alts have mostly remained unplayed.

I'm generally feeling a degree of end-of-expansion ennui, which feels a bit weird to say when Midnight is still more than half a year away, but it is what it is. I don't feel like there's much to look forward to before then. I do have a few goals I want to achieve before the expansion ends, such as throwing myself against ?? difficulty Ky'veza and seeing all of Manaforge Omega on LFR, but none of these things feel particularly urgent at this point.

Admittedly Legion Remix is coming out in a few days, but I'm not actually sure how I invested I want to be in that either. I was quite looking forward to it initially (after how much fun I ended up having in MoP Remix), but from everything I've heard since then, the Legion version is actually going to be quite different and I'm not sure whether all those changes will be good or bad for me. I'll still check it out and will probably get a few posts out of it, but I'm currently not actively hyped for it.

Mists of Pandaria Classic

My "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms" has kind of stalled because I just couldn't bear levelling from 84 to 85. Fortunately this one isn't something that needs to be rushed, as I should still have several months to complete my goal (until Garrosh destroys the Vale in Classic too). I expect that I'll still get back to it in time before then, though I still have no plans to do anything else in MoP Classic.

Season of Discovery

SoD has sadly become another abandoned project. Remember, I wanted to level up so I could see the actual new dungeon Blizzard had added to it (Demon Fall Canyon). However, Incursions apparently managed to completely sap my will to play. It's kind of weird actually, but I really did not deal well with the way they required you to completely clear out your quest log. It made me realise that I really rely on those random breadcrumb quests to give me direction. Even if I technically know in my head which zones to go to for quests at level 45 for example, having to make a choice with no quest guidance whatsoever was weirdly deflating.

I do remember that I actually got to Searing Gorge and was kind of fascinated by the new Blackrock Eruption event there, but unfortunately this was also when my OP raid gear from BFD in phase one was starting to no longer be quite so good, and questing was starting to feel like a bit of a drag. At some point I just stopped logging in.

While I wasn't playing, the devs actually added a second new dungeon (Karazhan Crypts) and an actual new raid (Scarlet Enclave), followed by an announcement that they're stopping development on SoD but also not shutting it down. It's been sitting in this weird limbo state ever since where it's technically still there and has some people playing, but much of the community considers it dead because new content is no longer being added. (The server selection screen has the largest Europen PvE server listed as low pop at this point, and according to Ironforge.pro stats, the number of people still raiding there is about half of what it is on Classic era.)

Assuming SoD does continue to hang around, I expect I will get back to it eventually to check out more of the stuff I missed, but there's also a chance that I won't.

Classic era

I've mentioned before that while I love Classic era, I've seen so much of it as this point that the novelty has kind of worn off. I still log in almost every day to do things like create Mooncloth or put items on the auction house - to what purpose, I'm honestly not sure. I guess since the population on era is not that large (especially since the anniversary servers went live), I feel like I'm still making a small contribution to the server community by keeping the auction house stocked. I'm also still keeping an eye on my guild's Discord even if I don't have anything of my own to add.

I currently find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I'd go back to playing era as my primary mode of Classic, though I guess you should never say never. It seems more likely to me that one day I will finally tire of just logging in for cooldowns and auction house business and that will be it for me then. Though that day is not yet today.

Turtle WoW

I wasn't planning to get back into the private server scene, but I've got to admit my recent exploration of Turtle WoW has had me quite charmed. I'll probably keep at it until the server shuts down or I hit max level, whichever happens first. The dev team seems largely undeterred by the Blizzard lawsuit and even posted another update on their Unreal Engine project this week. While I have no doubt that they won't have a leg to stand on under the jurisdiction of a US court, I've got to admit I do wonder a little what will happen if the stubborn head of the turtle, who is supposedly located in Russia, manages to simply evade the long arm of the law due to geography. I'm sure the lawsuit has been great advertising for them over the past few weeks, bringing in a lot of new business for the time being.

Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?

I was going to start my day doing something else today, but then I came across a hot bit of gossip late last night that I just had to write about first: that Blizzard is suing Turtle WoW. I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately wondered whether this is going to be another Nostalrius situation.

But let's back up for a second for anyone who might be confused by what some or all of that means. To recap, Nostalrius was an incredibly popular Vanilla WoW private server that was active for a year from early 2015 to 2016. It purported to be not for profit and claimed to offer the most authentic recreation of Vanilla WoW out there. Despite its very short lifespan, it managed to attract an incredible amount of interest within that year, to the point that even mainstream media were starting to report on it. Blizzard eventually sent them a cease and desist, but also ended up inviting the developers over to their headquarters, and it's widely believed that the whole incident was what convinced Blizzard that there was a valid business case for them to release their own Classic servers, as they announced WoW Classic at BlizzCon the following year.

(I myself never played on the original Nostalrius, but I played on its direct competitor Kronos. Vanilla WoW was definitely "in the air" around that time, with the disappointing Warlords of Draenor making many yearn for the good old days.)

The initial release of WoW Classic took a sledgehammer to the private server scene, because most people were happy to just pay for easy access to the "real" thing. However, ten years later, things look a little different.

WoW Classic is still around of course, but it has evolved in ways that have once again started to put some people off. WillE just released a video the other day about how he thinks there are too many versions of Classic at the moment, and I've been thinking about writing my own take on the state of Classic for a while. Because while there are many versions of it, at the same time they haven't necessarily been what (at least some) people wanted. Players were given a chance to play Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and then these expansions were taken away from them again, so if either of these was what you really wanted out of WoW Classic, it was back to private servers for you. Season of Discovery was off to an incredibly strong start with the promise of offering "Vanilla with a twist" and then lost steam hard in its subsequent phases, just to end up in an awkward state of abandonment now, with no more active development planned.

People keep clamouring for "Classic Plus", a version of Vanilla WoW that should be permanent and receive continued active development like retail, but stay true to Vanilla somehow, even though you won't be able to find two people who agree on what exactly that means. In fairness, Blizzard has sent out more than one survey seemingly trying to find out what such a version of WoW could look like, but personally I'm still not convinced that they are really working on a permanent Classic+ as opposed to just the next seasonal server.

Either way, the point is that there is once again a gap in Blizzard's offerings that private servers have been happy to fill, and one of the most popular of these has been Turtle WoW. Unlike Nostalrius, this one has been more of a slow burn. Their website proudly states that they've been online since 2018, but I didn't really start hearing about them until a few years ago. YouTuber McDoubles has a whole playlist about him exploring TurtleWoW that was widely viewed and whose first video was posted roughly three years ago.

I've never played Turtle WoW myself - I'm not necessarily happy with everything Blizzard has done, but I'm also less invested at this point than I was, and ease of access and stability are more important to me - but I read and heard a lot about it. In recent months in particular, I couldn't watch a YouTube video about WoW Classic without the comments being flooded with "go play Turtle WoW" style comments, similar to how people were shouting about Nostalrius everywhere in 2015.

I'm not sure Turtle has become as popular as Nost was back then, but considering how long it's been up, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd had several hundred thousand sign-ups by this point as well, and it's clear that Blizzard was getting fed up with them. Unlike Nostalrius, Turtle WoW also hasn't been afraid to make money with a cash shop, and the lawsuit alleges that they may have made millions of dollars from it.

I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about this whole thing. Legally, Blizzard is obviously in the right (as they were with Nostalrius), and Turtle WoW's big cash shop shows that they weren't nearly as selfless about this whole thing as the Nostalrius team was. However, reading through the lawsuit and seeing the sheer amount of international cooperation required to run Turtle (defendants are alleged to be located in Russia, Germany, the US, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Romania and the Czech Republic) I can't help but also feel the passion of the people involved, even if they were making money off their product.

And there is a reason Turtle WoW got as popular as it has, in that they managed to tap into what at least a significant part of the player base wants out of Classic and that Blizzard doesn't currently provide. Noteworthy to me has been:

1. Their focus has been on PvE (when all the big private servers used to be PvP), levelling and the world. Their website states that they added two new raids, but there are way more improvements and additions made to the open world and lower-level zones, such as additional boat connections and countless new quest hubs, new world events and a new profession. This is in contrast to how with Blizzard, everything always seems to circle back to raiding, endgame and adding even more powerful gear. This was the big letdown of Season of Discovery for me personally.

2. In a time when big companies are constantly outsourcing and reducing staff with "soft skills", such as social media or customer service teams, Turtle WoW had a reputation for having actual human GMs and good moderation. I even heard complaints that their moderation was "too strict", which to me to be honest sounded like a good thing in the context of MMO general chat channels.

This is not to say that Turtle WoW was perfect or anything - what I heard about their cash shop sounded quite off-putting to me (you could buy bags, "transmog" and garish mounts to an extent that puts retail WoW to shame), but to be honest I was still kind of glad the project was there as a signal to Blizzard that there are people who care about things they don't currently offer.

With this lawsuit, it seems unlikely that Turtle WoW will survive for very long - while it's not impossible for a for-profit private server to continue operating in the face of legal threats if they route all their activities through just the right countries (Warmane has infamously been in operation for over a decade), I'm not sure the Turtle WoW team has what it takes to continue evading the law, especially as the details of the lawsuit seem to show that the owners have already been identified and tracked down in real life.

I think the best we can hope for is that the situation will create sufficient amounts of attention and community outcry to make Blizzard think hard about what it is that's missing from Classic right now to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people would rather sign up for and download a private server client than play their product. 

Struggling to Enjoy the Journey in MoP Classic

As far as MMOs go, my attitude has long been one of enjoying the journey above all else. I've never really been able to relate to people who just want to get to "the end"/level cap/whatever and complain that everything along the way is boring and takes too long... until I played Classic Mists of Pandaria I guess.

It's not even that the quests are bad or anything. As I wrote last year while evaluating MoP Remix, aside from some specific plot threads, they were pretty decent overall. However, Remix is kind of the problem. I "just" did all of this content about a year ago, in an environment where everything was significantly sped up, it was easy to travel around with full flying enabled from the start, and killing mobs was a breeze. Re-doing the same quests while ground-bound and taking ten times longer to kill anything doesn't feel nostalgic to me right now, it just feels tedious.

I've been trying to "ease the pain" by picking and choosing my quest hubs so that I could focus on the ones I liked best, but it's still just so. Slow. At level 86 I pushed forward to the Valley of the Four Winds and did the majority of the quests there since I remembered quite liking them (plus there were a lot of animals to skin for my leatherworking), but since then it's been nothing but a drag.

I started running random dungeons on the side but they don't actually give that much XP - which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, as I noticed that people actually kill all the bosses and let others complete their quests, seeing how those things actually contribute significantly to your XP gains. (This is a contrast to retail, where people will skip absolutely everything just to get to the end as soon as possible and get the completion reward.)

In general, those dungeons were a bit of a weird experience initially, since my brain doesn't quite know whether to file them under Classic or retail. The way people tend to pull entire rooms in one go is certainly more retail-like, but then I was actually kind of surprised when I got my first pop-up to roll for loot, since I had expected everything to be personal loot already. I even had the option to roll need on items I couldn't even use, so I was briefly startled that I actually had to pay proper attention to which button to press. That's not meant to be a complaint; it just goes to illustrate that my brain seems to have different "modes" for Classic and retail, and MoP doesn't really fit either one at the moment.

I'm currently about halfway through level 88 and it feels like I still have an eternity to go. I did actually go ahead and do the quest to open the Vale of Eternal Blossoms early, but I soon ran into a "you're not seasoned enough to help us yet, come back later" wall, so I'll save that for another post.

On the plus side, after my initial reservations about MoP gameplay changes, such as the loss of my melee weapon or the new talents, the way hunter plays has actually turned out to be pretty fun, though I'd say the rotation is starting to veer into slightly too many buttons for my liking (Cata seemed close to perfect, while now there are pretty much always one or two that I forget to press regularly). However, the fact that they actually gave hunters full non-combat stealth with Camouflage in this expansion is wild to me and super handy for many quests (though it's also so alien that I sometimes still forget that I have it). 

Also, the farm! The farm and professions were not part of Remix, so I've been enjoying growing a few vegetables every day and working on my cooking again. It's just a shame that you can't unlock the full farm plot until max-level, adding yet another item to taunt me from the finish line if only I could get there sooner. I just need to knuckle down and grind out those last one and a half levels over a weekend some time, but WoW has just never felt slower to me.

MoP Pre-Patch Impressions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cata Continued

I finally hit level 85 in Cataclysm Classic! About time too, as the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch is only a few days away. 80-85 took me a little longer than expected mainly because I took a bit of a break about halfway through, otherwise it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than 70-80 did.

I ended up loitering in Northrend for longer than expected, since there were a few milestones I wanted to hit before moving on and the XP I got along the way wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I have this memory of many years ago, that XP gains in Outland became absolutely abysmal the moment you hit level 70 and the game wanted you to move on to Northrend, and it's stuck with me ever since that Blizzard hates you lingering in old expansion content. However, I'm starting to wonder whether I didn't exaggerate that effect in my mind over time, because as I said, continuing to quest in Northrend past level 80 wasn't all that bad. Sure, XP was reduced, but it wasn't abysmal. I actually ended up making it to 82 and about a third into level 83 before moving on to Cataclysm properly.

The main things I did in Northrend were the cooking and fishing dailies, as well as finishing up my exploration of the continent by uncovering all of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. In the former zone I also did the Loken quest chain, because unlike many players back in the day, I absolutely loved the Sons of Hodir. I briefly contemplated doing the Argent Tournament in Icecrown as well but ultimately decided against it as I didn't want to get bogged down with doing jousting dailies.

The last goal I finished up was getting my leatherworking skill caught up to the appropriate level, which required me to do a bit of farming for leather and other mats. I actually found it strangely zen to farm yetis in Storm Peaks and revenants in Wintergrasp, and it made me realise that this is an activity that I kind of miss in retail. Skinning as a skill still exists of course, but since skins - like all gathering nodes - are shared, the best way to farm leather is not to farm by yourself in a quiet corner of the map, but the opposite: to find an area where lots of people are killing skinnable mobs and then clean up behind them (and since the skins are shared you won't be "stealing" from any other skinners). It really drove home for me that while these shared gathering resources are a good thing in many ways, they have also taken something away from the game.

Anyway, once I was finally ready to get started on Cataclysm content properly, I did what I had planned and hauled my butt over to Vashj'ir, as I felt that it had been ages since I last visited that zone and I figured that it might actually be nice and nostalgic to replay after all this time. This turned out to be... partially true.

My initial review of Vashj'ir back in 2010 was pretty positive, but already a few months later I noted that replaying the zone on alts felt like "a massive drag". This time around, the first few quests felt pleasantly familiar and nostalgic. Back in original Cataclysm, mounts were not account-wide yet, so I had to do at least the first hub and a bit on every alt in order to earn my underwater breathing buff and seahorse mount to be able to navigate the zone.

As I continued deeper into the zone, my memories became fuzzier and I realised that there were some bits I barely remembered at all, such as the whole Nespirah chain. However, by the halfway point or so things definitely started to drag again this time too. I got the "2000 quests completed" achievement at some point and it struck me that almost 10% of those quests took place in this one zone alone, which is insane.

There's nothing wrong with any of the quests by themselves (and the Battlemaiden chain provides nice insights into the world of the naga), but it's just the fact that you have to go through almost 200 of them in a strictly linear chain just to cover a plot that can be summed up in two sentences. The same story could have been told in less than half the number of quests; there's just way too much "kill 15 naga" filler.

It's funny because at the time, I didn't think Cataclysm questing was that bad, but having revisited several older expansions in recent years it seems undeniable to me that Cata was an absolute low point in terms of questing. Mists of Pandaria was a noticeable step up again, but even BC and Wrath have aged better than Cata - in my opinion at least.

Gear progression was another interesting thing to observe. I'd started my journey in mostly tier five from BC and only replaced a few pieces of that while levelling through Northrend, and for very marginal upgrades at that. And then I started doing quests in Vashj'ir and the stats on the green quest rewards just went through the roof. By the end of level 83, after questing in Vashj'ir for a while, my health had nearly doubled compared to what it had been at level 82.

Finishing all of Vashj'ir got me most of the way to level 85. For the rest, I did the introductory quests to the other four Cataclysm endgame zones to unlock all the portals in Stormwind, as well as a bunch of cooking and fishing dailies. (I'd forgotten how much I used to love those in Cata.) At some point the Midsummer Festival also started, adding more supplementary XP from bonfire visits and torch tossing dailies.

I also got the "Stood in the Fire" achievement while doing the Uldum intro thanks to Deathwing paying the zone a visit. 

I was surprised to see the Darkmoon Faire return after only two weeks, but then I recalled reading somewhere that Blizzard increased the frequency of its visits in Classic due to the sped up expansion schedule compared to the game's original run.

I even paused to do a bit of archaeology when I found myself flying past dig sites. I was surprised how good they were for XP and pleased to see that Blizz had already increased their yield a bit to five fragments or more per unearthed relic - I vividly recall that when archaeology was first added, you only got about three to four pieces per successful survey.

Now my plan is to perhaps continue doing the cooking and fishing dailies as well as possibly level my leartherworking some more. I'm not planning to dive into Pandaria the moment it launches as I expect things to be very crowded and I'd rather avoid all the mayhem tied to that. With my modest goal of wanting to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I should have plenty of time to get there at my own pace, as long as I do so before the release of the later patches.

I've got to admit I found myself wondering why I still care so much about this night elf hunter. Sure, part of it are the fond memories I made with her during Vanilla Classic, and another part is that I simply enjoy things like levelling professions, regardless of how useful it might turn out to be. However, I think at this point it's also that I'm kind of hoping that eventually she'll be united with my warband in retail. I don't think she'd bring anything particularly rare to the table, but she may well have collected some transmogs that I don't own in retail yet.

I know Blizzard hasn't even hinted at Classic merging with retail, and in fact said at the start of Classic that the two would always be separate. However, with Classic about to move into Mists of Pandaria, that seems like forever ago now, and I find it hard to imagine any other endpoint than an eventual merge with retail, regardless of how many more expansions will actually end up getting the classic treatment. I can be patient.

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.

Checking in on Cataclysm Classic

Back in October, in a post about why Classic wasn't really vibing with me at the moment, I noted the following: "If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state." As far as I can tell, MoP was the last expansion in which Blizzard permanently replaced a zone with an updated version, as in the years since, they've opted for the Bronze-Dragonflight-sponsored time travel option instead whenever they made major changes, which allows people to still access the old zone if they want to.

Since I made that post, Mists of Pandaria Classic has not only been announced, but also had a public beta and is currently scheduled to go live in mid to late July. As I hadn't forgotten about that goal of mine, I decided that it was about time to re-download Cataclysm Classic and get a character expansion-ready.

For those of you not keeping track, I last played "progressive" Classic at the end of TBC. I checked in extremely briefly both at the start of Wrath Classic and at the start of Cata, but did not feel drawn to either expansion. This meant that my characters were server-transferred last year as part of the latest round of soft server consolidations, but other than that, my hunter Tiirr (now with two Is and two Rs) was still level 70 and sitting in Shattrath.

I took the portal to Stormwind and started doing some maintenance to get her into a playable state. As an aside, I was surprised by how busy things were in Stormwind (and that's on a server that was flagged as having a medium population). Classic Cata is the currently live version of Classic that I've been hearing the least about in terms of people actually playing it, but clearly it still has its audience. Ironforge.pro has registered slightly fewer than 100k characters raiding in Cata Classic last week, which is about the same number as on the vanilla Classic anniversary servers. So for all the scoffing I've seen about how Cata is where the real Classic ended and surely nobody actually wanted it, there do seem to be plenty of players who've been happy to play it anyway.

Either way, my primary task was to get my bags in order. All my mounts and pets could be added to the new collections interface to no longer take up bag space. Toys were eligible too - the first time around, those didn't became part of collections until Warlords of Draenor, but in progressive Classic that part is already there. Likewise, the transmog interface is the one that was introduced in Legion, and the auction house is the new one that was added in Battle for Azeroth. I swear, this is going to make it harder than ever to remember which features were introduced in which expansion.

Anyway, other bag slots were freed up from selling items that had been turned into vendor trash, such as all my arrows, or things that were simply no longer relevant to a hunter in Cata, such as pet food and mana potions. One bag was filled with a bunch of random keys tied to various BC quests that I wasn't even on... I can only guess that those had been on my keyring when that was removed. Either way, more stuff to destroy. A few items, such a stacks of cloth, I decided to actually list on the AH since there were presumably still some people interested in them.

I had to visit the flight master to unlock flying in Northrend and the revamped old world. (Fortunately the ramp I was jumping off when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fly yet without this wasn't very high.) I stopped by all the profession trainers, as well as - after some initial confusion - my class trainer. (For some reason I'd had it in my head that Cata was also the expansion where they removed the need to train abilities, but no, that actually happened in Mists.) I dragged abilities from my spell book back onto my bar and spent my pet's talent points.

My hunter herself had no spec either, and my first impulse was to go Marksman as usual - but then I read some of the talents and went "eurgh" - right, Cata was when I went Survival, back when that was still a ranged spec, so I opted to revisit that particular setup. Still, I was kind of surprised by how incredibly boring all the talents looked, as I seem to remember quite liking the condensed talent trees during original Cataclysm.

Finally I was ready to pick up the breadcrumb quest to Northrend. It sent me to Borean Tundra when I would've preferred Howling Fjord, but in that moment I genuinely couldn't even remember where to board the right boat for that. So I just hopped onto the next ferry leaving Stormwind to start in the Tundra.

I miss boats being relevant. They are slow but they really force you to immerse yourself in the world for a few minutes in a way that portals don't.

I decided I could be picky with which quests to do, so I only did about a third of the zone (if that) and also made a trip to Dalaran and Howling Fjord to pick up some flight paths. Unsurprisingly I suppose, this was enough to net me two levels in that single play session. The Wrath portion of the levelling curve was presumably nerfed again with the release of Cata, there's another bonus XP event going on right now, and I was fully rested. Still, considering I'm not here for Northrend or the Shattering, I found the levelling speed heartening and it made the prospect of making it through the last two expansions I'd skipped less daunting. I expect that 80-85 might still be a bit of a pain unless they nerf it with the pre-patch or something, but we'll see. I'll probably do Vashj'ir since I haven't done that zone in ages... but first I need to actually make my way through Northrend.

A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Back in October I wrote a post about why I'm currently not playing that much Classic anymore, and I always meant for that to have a kind of part two, in which I talk a bit about why I am still playing retail and how I got back into it in the first place.

"How to get Classic players back into retail WoW" is a question to which I'm sure the Blizzard devs would love to have the ultimate answer... because while a subscription is a subscription regardless of which game mode you play, retail has extra monetisation opportunities that Classic lacks, which I'm sure makes it the much bigger earner of the two, regardless of what the actual player distribution might look like.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video called "I Asked Over 400 Classic WoW Players Why They Don't Like Retail" and the most interesting thing about it to me was the conclusion, as the creator said that he'd originally intended to have a section about how to get Classic players interested into playing retail again, but gave up on the idea when the majority of the people he interviewed flat out said that nothing would bring them back to retail, ever.

I think this reveals that for many Classic players there's a strong emotional component to their dislike for retail, which also expresses itself in a sort of tribalism at times - I've found that in retail environments, nobody really cares if you also play Classic, but in pretty much all the Classic guilds I've been in, admitting that you also play retail is likely to result in persistent (if hopefully friendly) mockery.

I'm not being judgemental of that behaviour here either, because I was in the same boat only a few years ago. When I resubscribed for Classic, I had zero interest in ever playing retail again, and I shared several of the opinions expressed in the above video.

What changed? Well... the biggest and simplest draw to return to retail was curiosity. Having a single subscription for both was a pretty genius move by Blizzard in that regard, because I never would've re-subscribed to retail in specific, but since it was already part of my "subscription plan" so to speak, checking it out again cost me nothing other than giving up a bit of disk space after pressing the "install" button.

And I do suspect that this is something that has worked on other Classic players as well... the problem is that the initial experience you have upon returning is most likely pretty bad. Your natural reaction is probably to log back into the last character you played several years ago, which might have logged out in a location from multiple expansions ago, whose UI will be messed up, and which probably has a bunch of half-empty action bars. The game offers you a free teleport back to the capital nowadays, but I'm not sure how helpful that really is... I still dislike post-Cata Orgrimmar for example and always try to get out of there as soon as I can when playing Horde side.

Either way, even if you put up with the mess that greets you and try to make sense of it, the experience of trying to sort out what's what is likely to exhaust you and make you feel like the whole thing is just an awful chore. I remember that's exactly how I felt when I briefly logged into retail when I first renewed my subscription in the run-up to Classic's launch.

When I actually did start to play retail again, I did so by making an alt, a course of action which would also be my personal recommendation to you if you're a Classic player who's considering giving retail another try, even if you're not usually an alt person. It means that "chores" and elements of confusion come at you at a much more manageable pace, and you have a better chance of re-evaluating the game for what it actually is.

There are two basic strategies here from my point of view:

The first is what I'd call "the nostalgia route", in which you create a character of a race and class you like and start levelling them through familiar zones. While things are likely somewhat different from how you remember them from Classic, familiarity is going to outweigh strangeness, making it much easier to process the things that actually stick out to you as odd. I did this at first by creating a draenei shaman named Bluu and levelling her through the draenei starting zone, followed by having her go to Outland (this was before Burning Crusade Classic). I got a good shot of nostalgia out of the zones and quests, while pausing to be bewildered by things every now and then: Wait, they changed the intro cinematic for draenei, this makes no sense! Why does lightning bolt have no mana cost now? Why is the quest log weird like that now? What's up with the first aid trainer only teaching tailors now? Etc.

The risk with this approach is that you may run into one too many things that hurt your nostalgia after a while and sour your mood: elite quests that aren't elite anymore, barren landscapes where you remember bustling crowds, or confusion about where to go now that boats and portals don't work the way they used to. In addition, with the way scaling works nowadays, questing in old content means that you'll likely fall behind in terms of gearing and will eventually find combat increasingly awkward and drawn out.

Which takes us to the second approach, which is to still make an alt but almost with the opposite attitude: You know that trying to approach retail with nostalgia goggles creates problems, so you opt for a scenario where this won't be an issue, by creating a character of a race and/or class you've never played before, and jump into one of the more recent expansions that you know little to nothing about. This means that you'll be bombarded with more newness and strangeness than on the nostalgic path, but on the plus side, since you don't have expectations you shouldn't be disappointed by failing to have them met. Just read those quests and follow the markers and take in parts of the world you've never seen before. The slower trickle of information and features should still make the experience a lot more manageable than trying to get back to your old main instantly, and you'll get to explore a whole bunch of new content in the process. You can pick your old characters back up again later on if you want, when you're actually used to the UI again and have a better grip on how things work.

This is all under the assumption that you enjoy exploring and questing, which I would expect to be the case for a good chunk of Classic players at least. However, if you're looking to jump right back into group content and endgame, I'll admit that you'll have a tougher time and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Dragonflight and War Within have solo versions of all their dungeons at least, so you can check those out in a low-pressure way the first time around.

I will say that playing retail again hasn't suddenly "converted" me to thinking that it's the better version of WoW or anything. Here's a list of things I still prefer about Classic: 

• The way the whole world is relevant to some degree and how players interact with it by travelling a lot
• The slower-paced levelling and gearing and how it makes everything feel more meaningful, from your connection to your character and the ability to take in your environment to the excitement of getting a rare item drop
  
• The slower-paced combat with its simpler rotations and how it's more about being strategic about things like relative positioning to other mobs than about perfectly executing a complicated rotation
• The way being social is more integrated into general gameplay and the difficulty of just making progress in the world encourages you to co-operate with other players
  

Now, you might read that and go: Wait, what's even left for you to like about retail then? Well...

I think one major point is that I'm an explorer type, and while the Vanilla world is great, I've seen a lot of it by now (I know there are still some things I haven't personally experienced, but not a lot of them to be honest). In retail WoW, there are always new things to try out and new places to see, and since Dragonflight the devs have also made it a lot more rewarding to just cruise around the open world and explore. Nobody can tell me that the zone design isn't still top notch.

I also like how many casual activities they've added over time beyond just grinding dailies/world quests. I loved all the different recurring events they added during Dragonflight, from the communal soup cooking to the time rifts, and War Within has added more of these. They are little things that feel somewhat rewarding to do on pretty much every alt and are just plain fun. Classic has less of a variety of pre-made content: you either quest, do dungeons, raid or PvP.

Most importantly though, Classic is simply not getting any updates, the occasional experiment on a seasonal server not withstanding. Retail WoW is in a unique position in the MMO genre in that it's such a juggernaut with a huge budget, it's been pumping out new content like nobody's business for several years now. (It's fun to think back to when this game used to have "content draughts" of half a year or more. No longer an issue as it stands.) I love that there are always new things to do and new places to see, and even if not every single one of them is a banger, there's still a lot to love for players of all kinds of different persuasions.

So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.