7 Reservations I Have About The War Within

I made it clear a few weeks ago that I think Dragonflight has been a great expansion. However, with the War Within alpha up and running, all eyes are increasingly turning towards the next expansion, and I'm afraid to say that I still view it with a degree of scepticism at this point.

There are good things about it for sure - I'm very much looking forward to more mounts being upgraded to Dragonriding dynamic flight for example, as well as the introduction of more account-wide features - though as far as the latter goes, Blizzard is so incredibly late to the party compared to the competition that I also find it hard to give them bigger praise than "fucking finally".

However, there are also quite a few points that I currently look at that still make me shake my head and go "I don't know". I want The War Within to be good, and I wasn't immediately in love with Dragonflight based on the early announcements either, so there is definitely room to win me over. I'm just kind of... concerned right now. From biggest to smallest, here are my current worries in regards to The War Within:

1. Pay a Lot to Early Acess

I'm actually not opposed to early access being used as an incentive for new MMO releases in principle - but the way Blizzard are giving people three days of it only if you buy the most expensive super ultra mega deluxe edition of the expansion doesn't sit right with me at all. I know they've tried to reassure everyone that early access players won't gain any significant gameplay advantages during that time, but that's not really the point for me.

The WoW community is one that is always in a rush, and when it comes to people whose brains seem to be permanently on speed, three days are an absolute eternity. Unless we opt to completely stay off the internet, those of us who refuse to shell out this kind of money will be met with an absolute deluge of spoilers about stuff we can't play yet, everyone else who's still locked out will grumble, and I generally expect the community to be in an unpleasant state of tension between the haves and have-nots. I'm pretty sure one or two people in our little friend group will go for the early access too, and it will be super awkward to see them level up ahead of the rest of us.

I mean, I can hope that it will all blow over relatively quickly, because at the end of the day it is "only" three days and any outrage and annoyance may end up just being a storm in a tea cup. On the other hand though, a really bad launch experience can colour people's impressions of an expansion for a long time.

2. Story Regression

Dragonflight's story got a lot of flak but I honestly feel like a lot of that has been overblown because there simply wasn't anything else to complain about. While I'd never claim that it was without flaws, I appreciated that it seemed to try out a fresh new direction in many ways, especially in how it approached themes of familial conflict and death, in a game where a lot of plot points in the past have basically boiled down to "guy gets angry and runs away/goes on a vengeful killing spree". It made me hopeful for the game's future.

And then Chris Metzen came back and they laid off a bunch of the people who've defined WoW's story direction for the past couple of years. My initial reaction was mostly one of confusion, since I didn't have any particular feelings about Metzen and couldn't at all relate to those who seemed to think that his return heralded some sort of return to glory for WoW's storytelling.

However, as more time has passed, I've found myself with a slowly increasing feeling of dread instead - dread that him being back will mean narrative regression for WoW, and that the game's story will simply fall back onto all its old tropes. I'm not a fan of Anduin seemingly turning into a grizzled old war veteran/Varian 2.0 for example (as I never liked Varian much to begin with). And then I came across a massive spoiler for the start of War Within in a YouTube thumbnail of all things - if you want to skip discussion of that, just go ahead to the next point on the list.

If you already know or don't care to be spoiled, I am of course talking about the destruction of Dalaran. And yes, the devs have also already been out there trying to do damage control, telling everyone that they think it's the right thing to do for the story and so on and so forth - but they also thought that when they came up with the Cataclysm, when they blew up Theramore and burned Teldrassil, and yet those decisions still ended up being hated by players for years after the fact. I think "we need to blow shit up or nobody will care" is definitely a step backwards and really dampened my enthusiasm for the expansion already, and I'm not even particularly attached to Dalaran.

3. No Sky All Expansion

This seems to be one of these things that people either relate to immediately or don't understand at all, with apparently no in-between. Simply put, WoW is at its best when it lets you explore wide open and beautiful spaces. Caves and "evil" zones exist as places of danger to venture forth into, but are not enjoyable as somewhere to hang out in all the time.

With that in mind, I'm very concerned about the entirety of The War Within basically being set underground. Sure, they can do things to alleviate the oppressiveness of that theme - one of the zones has something like a "fake sun" in the sky I believe - but I'm not sure that's going to be enough considering that there's never been an underground zone that I loved. Zaralek Cavern in Dragonflight was probably the best zone of this kind they've ever done, and it was still undoubtedly the expansion's weakest spot. Building a whole expansion on that premise is... a choice.

4. Delves

When delves were first announced as a new progression path for open world/solo players, I thought "neat", but the more I've learned about them from reporting from the alpha, the less interested I've become. They're not so much open world content as just another form of instance that can also be soloed instead of done in a group and that... just doesn't sound that exciting? I'm kind of reminded of Mists of Pandaria's scenarios, which I thought were pretty lame.

They're probably not going to be the worst thing in the world, but as the key new expansion feature that's supposed to change the game for years to come the way Dragonriding did, delves currently don't look promising to me at all.

5. Talent Complications

In my Dragonflight review I put the talent revamp down as a positive overall, but the system is quite complex. In my opinion the best way of letting players come to grips with it would be to not change it too dramatically for the next couple of years, just apply some tweaks and refinements maybe.

So what does Blizzard decide to do in War Within? Add a third "mini tree" to the whole thing and it just made me sigh the moment I learned about it. I remember hearing some discussion about the earliest version of the priest "hero talents", and while that obviously wasn't final, it sounded so complicated that just listening to people talk about them made my head hurt. As someone who thinks that retail WoW's combat still suffers from a lot of unnecessary complexity, I find it hard to see how these new talents could be anything other than a way of accelerating us down the road of "it's all too much of a mess" again and having yet another complete talent revamp incoming.

6. Xal'atath

I was rather befuddled when Holly Longdale announced this character as the main villain of the expansion (or at least the start of it) seemingly with an expectation of generating excitment, since I knew so little about her. PlaniumWoW's lore video about the character was very helpful in that regard, and I definitely related to the opening skit that has Holly's announcement ending with someone from the crowd yelling "Who the fuck is that?".

Unfortunately knowing more about Xal'atath hasn't really made me like her more. Her "master manipulations" honestly remind me more of the worst traits of the Jailer - possibly the most hated villain in WoW history - and it feels like people are just more willing to give her a pass because she's an undead elf with a sexy voice. Clearly this was a position that needed filling with Sylvanas out of the picture... Maybe she'll actually turn out to be cool and I'll change my mind, but for now I'm not optimistic that she'll turn out to be anything but an attempt to appal to a certain... demographic.

7. Just... Rock Dwarves?

I'm not saying the success of any given WoW expansion is tied to its new races and classes, but it's worth noting that the only two expansions that added neither of these were Warlords of Draenor and Shadowlands. Giving us an allied race of slightly differently skinned dwarves isn't much of a step up from not giving us anything at all in my opinion. And look, I'm not being anti-dwarf here, I'd also be disappointed if it was just one allied race (as in, one using an existing race's skeleton and animations) of a different type. I don't think this is a huge deal (which is why it's at the bottom of this list) but it's just another way in which War Within seems to want to underwhelm right from the start when compared to many of its predecessors.

More Hardcore Horde Adventures

I've continued to level my hardcore troll priest in small bursts of activity, and she's now up to level 20.

I initially struggled with more interface problems, as I could tell that I still wasn't seeing all the death announcements, even after joining the server-wide HardcoreDeaths channel. Some googling revealed that there's an additional drop-down in the in-game settings nowadays where you need to select how many deaths you want to see, and it's set to show only those of guild members by default.

I was happy when I finally got that sorted out and could see everything, as the discourse from the peanut gallery about deaths is always interesting. There were some raised eyebrows about a wipe in Ragefire Chasm for example, and when a level 52 died to fall damage in Tirisfal Glades there were exclamations along the lines of: "Why not wait five seconds for the zeppelin to actually dock, man?!"

Aside from that, guild chat sadly remains a bit confusing because they expect you to install an addon called "Greenwall" to connect it with the guild chat of sister guilds, which I've refused to do so far because I don't like the thought of having an extra addon just for that. That said, it makes reading guild chat a very disjointed experience right now as it's very obvious that people are frequently responding to things that I'm not seeing. I might cave eventually.

I've been surprised by how regular world buffs are dropping on hardcore. I think I mentioned this before, but still... I know that people raid on hardcore, but I figured it was more of a fringe activity considering the risk vs. reward. The number of world buffs going out on the regular seems to defy that assumption though.

After accidentally picking up some buffs in Orgrimmar one night, I decided to venture forth into Skull Rock at level 12. I knew that was probably a risky move, but I was feeling brave and was hopeful that I wasn't going to be the only person there. Indeed, I ran into a male troll hunter as soon as I turned the first corner. At first we continued fighting separately, just leap-frogging each other with our mob pulls, but then I spotted the rare elite warlock around a corner and suggested we group up to kill him. We did and then continued killing more together - grouping up is such a force multiplier in era (particularly as a priest!), it never ceases to amaze me.

Just as we were about to go out, a mage entered the cave and asked to join. I invited him, but of course he was only just starting his quests. The hunter thanked everyone politely and took his leave, but I stuck with the mage to help him get his quest done too. Then a druid showed up as well! I enjoyed the grouping experience, but at that point I was getting a bit worried that I 'd gotten myself caught in an endless loop of helping out new joiners. As if he'd read my mind, the mage said that he'd stay with the druid to help them complete their quest, but that I was free to go. I thanked everyone and took my leave, happy that the most deadly place in Durotar had gone so well for me.

Up next, I started questing in the Barrens. One funny experience I had there was when I was killing centaurs around the Forgotten Pools and a death announcement popped up that "a Stonearm" had killed someone at my location. For all the hours I've spent in the Barrens over the years, I had never heard of "a Stonearm" before, and I was rather alarmed to hear that this unknown entity was apparently killing people in my vicinity. A quick Wowhead search revealed him to be a rare centaur, and about five minutes later he killed another player. I was looking over my shoulder with some serious paranoia now, wondering whether he was a patroller or something, but he was not. I eventually spotted him guarding a chest near some tents but decided not to engage after the earlier carnage. When I came past the tents again a few minutes later, someone else had successfully killed him though.

At level 15 I wanted to run Ragefire Chasm. My first attempt to find a group in the evening wasn't successful - I saw that another group was already looking for a tank, so I didn't fancy my chances and went off to do something else. This turned out to be a good decision though, because when I logged in the following Saturday morning, I didn't even have enough time to type "LFG RFC" into chat before someone had already whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go there.

It was a smooth enough run, but it also highlighted to me that healing in hardcore feels like a much bigger responsibility than usual. We had a level 18 shaman tank, which was fine enough, but there was also a level 15 warrior with a two-hander and a mage that liked to go up close to spam Arcane Explosion, and they both got aggro on more than one occasion, which resulted in sudden damage spikes on them, and that at a point when I didn't yet have Flash Heal or anything... I think I saw the mage chug a healing potion once and when the warrior got low, the other shaman in the group threw him a quick off-heal. Usually I'd be mildly offended by people "panicking" like that as soon as someone's health drops below 50%, but in hardcore I understand wanting to be safe rather than perma-dead.

We also made the most out of the experience (seeing how you can do each dungeon only once per day) and even went to kill the troggs in the little cul-de-sac to the left, something I hadn't done in donkey's years.

We'll see how things develop as I go up in levels. I do love how much everyone seems to appreciate being buffed with a priest's fortitude. I do it all the time on the road and people will often stop what they're doing just to whisper me thanks - I like knowing that those extra HP might really help someone out in the world. My next personal goal is probably going to be to get into a Wailing Caverns run, but there's no rush.

The Cataclysm Cometh

I wasn't really planning to comment on Cataclysm Classic any further unless I suddenly found myself overcome by a surprise urge to actually play it. I try to have the attitude that if I get tired of an MMO, I turn away and leave it be, because people who still complain about the supposed shortcomings of a game they haven't really been interested in actually playing for years are cringe.

However, that doesn't mean that I don't still take note of some of the things that happen in MMOs I used to play or am still "adjacent" to, so hearing the stories coming out of the WoW Classic subreddit since yesterday's Cataclysm pre-patch has been absolutely wild. I'm enough of an old hand to expect some level of disruption from any major patch, but there are still... degrees. In the context of Classic, I wouldn't have expected:

• Battlegrounds being busted for levelling, allowing players in Warsong Gulch to gain ten levels per flag cap (apparently Blizzard responded by disabling battlegrounds as an emergency measure)
• People being unable to leave random dungeon groups without a script
• Mayhem with professions and spell books
• Utter chaos with the new talents, as people report having talented abilities from all three trees, or from none, or they have abilities for a while and then they disappear, or...

I actually kind of wanted to log in just to see whether the chaos was bad enough to actually be noticeable in game to a casual observer. So I reinstalled Classic Cata... and instantly forgot all about what I had come for when I was overcome by nostalgia on the character selection screen.

As a reminder, I hopped off the Classic progression train during Classic Burning Crusade, but it was a sad parting, not one driven by anger or indifference. Seeing my hunter in her tier five gear still filled me with fond memories of the Forks, even if guild life had soured a bit in the expansion compared to OG Classic. There was my mage in her Frozen Shadoweave! Seeing my druid in her tier four immediately gave me flashbacks to tanking in Gruul's and Magtheridon's Lair. Those were different times, all of... three years ago.

I logged into my hunter and was presented with a cascade of achievements, because of course, those were added in Wrath and I hadn't logged in since then. There was also some automated mail reimbursing me with gold for old currency and keys that had been removed. I wanted to check the status of the guild I was still in, but had issues with seeing everything as the guild UI was kind of bugged out, so I guess that checked out at least.

I then thought about the upcoming server merges that I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago. I didn't think I cared enough to make use of the free transfers instead of letting Blizzard automatically shunt my old characters off to wherever by default, but now that I was already here... In the old (now inactive) guild Discord someone had mentioned that they were choosing to move to Mirage Raceway over Pyrewood, so I actually made the effort to choose that as destination for all my old chars as well.

I even got to keep a couple of names because I'd completely forgotten that back when Blizzard first opened free transfers from Hydraxian Waterlords and before the Forks had decided to go to Nethergarde Keep, I had checked out all the options and reserved names where I could.

Of course my old hunter was not so lucky. Tir had become Tirr with two Rs when moving from Hydraxian Waterlords to Nethergarde Keep, so I thought it would make sense to add a third one for yet another server transfer. This is when I learned that apparently there is a restriction/error message for "you cannot use the same letter three times consecutively". Okay! Never thought I'd run into that one.

Anyway, I completed the transfers and then... I just felt lost. I never thought I'd really want to play anyway. But now that I saw them, I still felt a weird attachment to all those characters and like I should "look after" them. I almost wish I had the casual disregard for virtual life that some of my friends have, being serial character deleters. Meanwhile, I still feel vaguely bad about that gnome rogue I deleted almost two decades ago...

I just want stability for my characters, and Blizzard used to be good at that. My old characters from the game's early days are all still there on the same servers where I originally created them. Sure, they may have had their levels squished, talents reset and contents of their bags obsoleted, but they are still there. I shudder to think how I'll feel about the characters I made in Season of Discovery whenever the time for that comes to shut down. They didn't get to very high levels, but still... this is definitely a downside of this whole seasonal server model and Blizzard making so much more liberal use of server merges in my opinion.

Reflections on Dragonflight Mythic+ Season 3

On Tuesday, the third M+ season in which I actively participated came to an end, and I wanted to jot down some thoughts on it again. In general, I've been very happy with our little group's progress, something I already talked about in my post about timing my first ever +15. This was also reflected in my rating, as I broke 2k for the first time, finishing with about 400 more rating than I achieved in season two.

I heard that season three has been easier than other seasons of the recent past, and that this also made it more popular, but at least to me, that doesn't take away from my personal sense of achievement. I'm not sure we'll be able to climb much higher in the future than we did this time, but then, Season 4 will also have that systems revamp that will have us spending time in M0 at least for the first few weeks, so we'll see how that goes.

I just wanted to do a quick ranking of the season three dungeons again, because boy, did I have opinions on these. Let's go from favourite to least favourite like last time:

Black Rook Hold

This was the first dungeon we timed on +15 and it was also the dungeon that consistently felt the most doable for our group throughout this season. I didn't play during Legion so I only have the vaguest familiarity with that expansion's instances from Timewalking (which doesn't really teach you anything beyond the most basic dungeon layout), but the bosses all felt very straightforward and like they didn't require any crazy dancing. I've generally noticed that I've liked all the Legion dungeons I've seen in M+, while BfA dungeons have been a bit more hit or miss.

Waycrest Manor

Waycrest Manor was another hit though, and the only other dungeon we timed on +15 on both fortified and tyrannical. The tight corridors were a bit annoying and we had more than one "incident" with people getting lost in the hallways (apparently it used to be even worse with some doors being locked randomly in the past?!) but once again, the bosses were very straightforward and the trash not too bad either. I just hated the Thornspeakers and their infected thorns, a painful disease which as an evoker wasn't covered by my regular dispel and which our dps often failed to interrupt.

Everbloom

I didn't play during WoD either, and I've mostly liked the WoD dungeons featured in the M+ rotation as well. Everbloom is a pretty-looking place and about half the bosses are very straightforward. The Ancient Guardians vexed us for a while, but we eventually got there. (It was funny when we brought our more experienced advisor along for one run and he was really surprised by how we'd been doing the fight because according to him it seemed to require the healer to do a lot of unnecessary heavy lifting, something that wasn't going to be possible on higher keys. That just felt very validating to me.) The mage lady and her trash could also be brutal but I don't know, for some reason I didn't mind her too much either.

Darkheart Thicket

Another Legion dungeon, and to be honest I still liked this one overall as well. The most annoying things about it were the trash density, which made it extremely easy for one of us to accidentally back into something and overpull, and the long runbacks in some places if you wipe. I remember failing the timer in here more than once not so much due to a huge number of deaths but because we wiped in a bad place and it took sooo long to get back to where we were. The last boss is also a bit unforgiving in the sense that if you lose even one person, you quickly get mechanics overlapping on other people that become harder and harder to deal with, which can cause things to snowball into an almost inevitable fail cascade.

Throne of the Tides

After seeing what Blizzard did to Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle in season two, I was rather worried about what they'd do to this Cataclysm dungeon for M+, but fortunately it wasn't quite as bad. We just had way too many wipes in here, both on trash and on the second and last boss. We did learn to deal with all of it in the end, but it was more painful to get there than in most other dungeons.

Atal'Dazar

This is a case of a BfA "miss" for me, which is a bit of a shame as I generally love troll dungeons and it's got both a cool theme and beautiful visuals. However, I found its trash to be really annoying as a healer, and almost all the bosses were annoying in one way or another as well. The golden priestess was probably the least painful, just making me sigh sadly when I realised that saying "this mechanic is just like Hakkar" meant nothing to anyone in my little group of friends. The big troll dude was an insane heal check at the start whenever the dps took their sweet time taking down his totems. Rezan was just annoying with his bugginess (which is something I actually read about, so I know it wasn't just me), meaning you had to be very careful while running away from him as taking a step in the wrong direction could cause the game to instantly snap you into his mouth instead (apparently as an anti-exploiter measure, but it seems that in practice it just makes the fight much harder for normal players trying to run away while also having to make sure to not run away too hard). Apparently bringing a night elf allows you to negate the mechanic completely but we didn't have one in our group. And don't even get me started on Yazma and her spiders, which I think we also did wrong in some way for a lot of the season. Just ugh.

Murozond's Rise

I had my reservations about the mega-dungeon from the moment its inclusion in season three was announced, as we hadn't even been able to beat the first boss in M0 when it first came out. It was indeed retuned for M+ to bring the difficulty more in line with the other dungeons, but even so, it still felt like a clusterfuck from start to finish for me. Starting with the names for the two halves of the dungeon, which to this day I can't correctly connect to the right half, meaning I have to look up which bosses are actually tied to which name every time (including while writing this post). This is the second half of the dungeon, which I minded slightly less as a healer (though I still didn't like it overall). We probably had more wipes on Tyr than on any other boss because he actually requires all of the damage dealers to do a lot of stuff correctly in a way that others can't compensate for, and Time-Lost Battlefield always felt like an encounter that should be relatively easy but that we still managed to screw up more than a few times. Morchie and Deios were okay I guess.

Galakrond's Fall

I disliked the first half of the dungeon more because of the Manifested Timeways boss, which was the boss I hated the most of all of the season three M+ dungeon bosses, primarily due to its requirement to keep moving non-stop. It's not particularly demanding movement when looked at in isolation, but I just found AoE healing as an evoker while almost never being allowed to stand still, while also making sure to dispel people at the right time and dodging orbs, to be way too much for my brain. We did get the hang of it after a while, but I still dreaded the fight every time. Chronikar and Blight of Galakrond were okay I guess, but Iridikron was another pretty brutal boss. In fact, he was my prime example for how the reduced damage in lower keys can teach you to do things wrong, because the way it was at the beginning, we always struggled with Manifested Timeways due to my healing issues, but once we got past that it was completely smooth sailing. Then we did the dungeon on a difficulty higher than +10 for the first time, one-shot the Timeways - and then wiped on Iridikron for half an hour or more because it turns out at that level you can't be healed through standing in the bad anymore, you actually have to dodge all of it, which was a nasty surprise for people and took a long time to get right. I'll be glad to never see this dungeon on mythic difficulty again.

At the end of my Season 2 in review post, I mentioned how we'd had some epiphanies in the very last week of the season, such as that we had been doing two bosses in Underrot wrong all along. There was a funny equivalent to this in Season 3, as something I had done to my Deadly Boss Mods suddenly made it come to life during our last week in a way it hadn't been before. I'd had it installed for months already, but I guess I was missing an important module or something since it didn't really tell me about anything but the affix mechanics. I just didn't realise that wasn't how it was supposed to work! Then during our last week it suddenly started yelling at me about dispels and moving out of stuff and I was just in awe of how much more audio support I could have had all along - and it made me wonder how some of our addon-loving damage dealers were still so bad at standing in things when they've had DBM yelling at them the entire time. I just thought it was funny.

Plunderlord Achieved

Well, I did it!

Whatever site I originally got the idea from that Plunderstorm was going to be active until June turned out to be wrong, as Blizzard eventually announced the 30th of April as its official end date. I was rather displeased when I found out because I'd been happily making slow progress with my couple of matches a day, but I wasn't sure I was going to be able to hit Renown 40 at that pace.

Fortunately they doubled reputation gains for the end of the event to help speed people along, and this helped immensely. I even logged in the day after hitting 40 to play another couple of matches before it hit me that I didn't really need to do this anymore. Not that I "needed" to before... but I did genuinely find it enjoyable in small doses. I definitely didn't share the sentiment that I've seen expressed in many places of it just being a "chore" to get through to get the rewards. Like I said before, I don't even care that much about pirate stuff - there was just so much of it to be won, it felt like a right bargain in exchange for a bit of skirmishing every day.

No chance at getting either of the achievements related to the event though. I never won a match, though by some stroke of luck I once managed to come 2nd. And anyone who actually managed to collect one million plunder must be a little insane, considering that I had barely hit 80k when I completed the Renown track.

Either way, I'm ultimately satisfied with my time spent with Plunderstorm, and I'll happily take part again for a little while if they ever decide to bring it back.

Dragonflight Has Been a Banger of an Expansion

With the War Within alpha launching the other day and the internet being awash with news about everything we get to look forward to in the next expansion, I thought it would be a good time to look back on Dragonflight and give it a bit of a review. Technically we still have a few months of this expansion left, but I feel that regardless of how the Pandaria Remix thing goes, it's not going to move the needle on how people see Dragonflight as a whole in a major way at this point.

Shadowlands seems to be considered one of the worst expansions ever now, but for me it was the first retail expansion since Wrath of the Lich King for which I was subscribed during its entirety, and I honestly thought it was pretty alright. I was only approaching it casually, and since I was focused on Classic, I kind of viewed it as the "inferior" version of WoW that "came free" with my subscription. I ignored pretty much everything power-related and had a good time with the content I did choose to interact with. It was fine.

Ironically, Dragonflight made it clearer to me why so many people hated Shadowlands, because it was just so much better in every way, even I could see that as someone who wasn't entirely "fluent" in retail. The zones were huge and gorgeous, with Ohn'ahran Plains stirring memories of Nagrand, and the Azure Span being vaguely reminiscent of Grizzly Hills, without either of them being straight-up copies. Even what I would consider the "weakest" of the zones, Zaralek Cavern, had its charms and impressed with its seamless integration into the overland world map.

Dragonriding was a smashing success as a new feature (even if it took a little bit of getting used to) and it's great to see it getting carried forward and expanded upon in the next expansion, something that we haven't seen Blizzard do with an entirely new type of gameplay/major expansion feature since Mist of Pandaria's pet battles. (You could make an argument for Legion's world quests and Mythic Plus I suppose, but I feel like those were more tweaks to an existing formula than entirely new features. Either way, it's been a while.)

While this was also the expansion that ended up getting me to try M+ for the first time, I'd like to disregard that for the purposes of this post, since it feels like something that also could've happened in another expansion if things had lined up with my guildies previously the way they did in Dragonflight. Maybe Dragonflight's appeal was a factor in finally getting several of them to the level cap in a timely manner, but I don't feel like I really know that.

However, even leaving our weekly excursions into M+ aside, Dragonflight was just so much more engaging on a casual level. I kind of swore off grinding for gear back in Cataclysm, since the rate at which Blizzard was making gear obsolete every tier was too fast for my liking and made everything feel like a pointless hamster wheel. Dragonflight was the first expansion that managed to make me care about gear again to some degree simply because they actually made it the focus of power progression again after several expansions of temporary systems overshadowing everything else, but also by simply making it so much more accessible to the masses. I think I've done the "Valdrakken weekly" during more weeks than not, simply because it managed to hit a sweet spot between fun content and being rewarding. I didn't care about the exact item level of the gear coming out of the box, I just knew it was almost always a bit of an upgrade for me for doing a little bit of open world content that was also enjoyable, so I often did it not just on one but on multiple characters.

I generally loved all those open world events they kept adding with each patch. Yes, they became a bit of a meme after a while and weren't entirely without issues either, but again, overall they were just simple and fun.

I wasn't too enamoured with the dracthyr when they were first announced, but I mained one all expansion and enjoyed it, so the devs must've done something right there in the end.

The UI revamp and new talent system were a bit overwhelming at first but I think both came out as a net positive in the end as well. (I actively dislike fiddling with talents, but when I finally made some changes to my build for M+, not based on some guide but based on which abilities I'd actually ended up using most runs, the resulting improvement in my gameplay was a very satisfying experience.)

If I had to mark anything down as a bit disappointing it was the profession revamp, which I thought sounded kind of cool in theory but in practice was just kind of off-putting to me. I did the weekly profession quests most weeks, but I never saw a public work order I could actually do (without effectively paying someone else to be allowed to craft something for them) and felt kind of frustrated by how awkward it was to max out crafting skills. It was all just too complicated and grindy and not in a fun way. Oh well.

The story I actually liked overall. I'm not saying it was amazing, and there are plenty of valid criticisms you can throw at it (this T&E video sums up just a few of them) but ultimately most of these didn't bother me that much and I think they got kind of overblown by the community at large because people couldn't really find much else to complain about this expansion (which is telling in itself). Personally I liked that it had a lot of positive moments, where characters got to enjoy a little bit of happiness (even if there were also deaths and bad things happening as always), and it felt like just the right mix of old lore and trying to take things into a fresh new direction. The Primal Incarnates were a brand-new and yet fantastic set of villains for example, which really stood out to me after so many expansions with a lot of utterly rubbish antagonists.

I feel like Dragonflight will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the "great" expansions, the ones where you're not at all surprised if someone says it was their favourite (even if your own preferences might be different). It certainly has been for me, and combined with Classic increasingly going into directions that were not for me, I wouldn't be surprised if I actually spent more time in retail over the past two years than in Classic. (Edit: I belatedly remembered that I still have ManicTime installed so that I could actually check the data for this. Looking at the period from the Dragonflight pre-patch to today, Classic still comes out ahead, but in the past year, I've actually played a bit more retail than Classic.)

If anything, I've got to admit I'm a bit concerned that Dragonflight has given War Within a lot to live up to. I'll undoubtedly play War Within when it comes out and I'm sure it will have some features that will be a lot of fun, but I've got to admit I'm not hopeful that it will manage to be as good as Dragonflight, for a number of reasons that I'll explain in another post some time.

Hardcore after the Hype

I'm in a bit of a funny place with WoW at the moment - a lot of things are happening and many of them good (in my opinion) but I'm still somewhat undecided on what I want out of Classic in specific right now. On a whim, I decided to pay the hardcore servers a visit again. It's been about six months since the death of Lossy the mage, so I was ready to give it another go.

I'm also slowly coming around to some of the arguments that people used to make to me about why they love hardcore - that it's not so much about the permadeath and more about how it changes levelling. I used to say that nothing stops you from taking your time levelling in "normal" Classic either and that I have indeed generally played that way, but I can't deny that the older Classic gets, the more it feels like a certain min-max culture starts to permeate every aspect of it, which can make slower and more casual play styles feel unwelcome. Sure, there were people like that in 2019 as well, but at the time I still felt that I could get away from their influence myself, while it seems harder now somehow.

Anyway, both hardcore realms in Europe at least are low population nowadays. Since I played Alliance on Stitches last time, I decided to create a troll priest on Nek'rosh this time around. The low population meant that my census addon no longer struggled to complete scans, though the numbers are still somewhat larger than those of the era PvE cluster. It also feels busier than era because characters are more spread out across the levels. On era, about 40% of all characters are at max-level, with many of them presumably raid-loggers, while the nature of hardcore means that people are constantly forced to roll up and level new characters, and less than ten percent of all characters my addon registered were level 60.

The addition of self-found mode at the end of February doesn't seem to have made much of a splash, though I did see a fair few characters with the buff in the starting area. I was surprised to find out though that Blizzard cut out the "solo" part of the challenge, so these characters can still group up too. Either way, this is something I'm definitely not interested in, as trade is an important part of earning money for me and I bought a wand from the auction house as soon as I could afford it.

When Blizzard released that video about the top ten causes of death in hardcore, it was noteworthy to me that most of them happened in Alliance starter zones. Looking at things from the Horde side, it definitely stood out to me how much less dangerous questing in Durotar seemed to be, with no caves full of kobolds or lakes guarded by murlocs. There are basically only two really deadly places: Skull Rock (which I've avoided so far) and Fizzle Darkstorm's camp. I was lucky and ran into a druid when I approached the latter, because even though I knew it was dangerous, I was still taken aback by Fizzle's almost instant respawn and how easy it was to aggro more and more adds... needless to say, if we hadn't grouped up, the druid and I most likely would've both been toast, but as it was we were fine.

In general all my interactions with other players have felt very positive. Drive-by buffing is alive and well, and someone randomly traded me some low-level herbs after they saw me making potions in the alchemy shop. A level 42 randomly whispered me to ask if I was French - not sure what that was about.

When I got a polite and unobtrusive invite to what's supposedly the server's biggest levelling guild, I took it. I was kind of missing the death announcements to be honest (and I didn't want to install the addon for that). Weirdly though, I still didn't see any even after joining the guild, even as I could see others responding to death announcements seemingly happening somewhere. Eventually I figured out that Blizzard apparently moved all death announcements to its own dedicated global channel called HardcoreDeaths, and for some reason it's not turned on by default. It was good to see that random deaths were still a thing after I joined it, though with a lower (and presumably more experienced) population they were few and far between compared to the craziness of hardcore's launch.

I'm not sure where this is going to go, if anywhere. Maybe I'll just die again in a few levels (which seems like a likely scenario, to be honest), but for the time being it's a nice distraction.