Category Archives: Instance Group

Tales of the Twilight Cadre instance group in Azeroth

The Case for Outland in Retail WoW

We continue on as a group, moving into retail WoW and trying to figure out what characters we are going to play.

We took a couple more runs at follower dungeons with mixed results as we tinkered with our group composition. We seemed to have the best luck in Neltharus, where NPC tank Captain Garrick ebbed and flowed between indifference and avoidance and managing to aggro every mob in sight.

At the end of Neltharus once more

Things seemed to go best when I ran with my Death Knight Tokarev, and all the more so when I moved from the two button play style of last week to a three button layout.

Three buttons, I can handle it

For whatever reason the attack with a big self heal doesn’t come up in the rotation, so I gave that its own slot on button 4 to grab a little health back when things were getting rough.

Also, that button in the control-1 slot is the one that turns on and off NPCs guiding the direction of the group.

The run was enough for me to go off later on my own in blood spec, which is his usual spec, made myself tank, and ran the instance as tank just to see if I could do better than Garrick… and it went pretty well. I mean, it is still a PUG-like experience with the DPS attacking whoever they damn well please, but Crenna the druid is such an OP robo-healer that it was pretty fun.

So I think I’ll just tank for the group next time.

If I want to play Tokarev. We shall see.

I did notice a couple of things. The first is that you do level up pretty quickly. While he started with a full blue bar, that quickly ran out but he still kept leveling up. He was 50 when we first kicked off and he is well into 56 after basically three dungeon runs.

The second was that he got the same item drop on all three runs, Sargha’s Smasher, a drop from the final boss. It is a nice 2H hammer, cool looking, hits hard, I like it. But in the era of personalized loot it had slightly different stats at each drop as I was a different level.

Which isn’t so bad at level 56 I guess. Moving at that pace he’ll get to level 70 soon enough and then have to commit to TWW content I guess. More follower dungeons are possible, though I think you have to unlock them by playing the expansion.

But what if I don’t want to play Tokarev? What if I want to play my Dark Iron warrior Dargan? Because he is kind of cool looking and the Dark Iron have some interesting housing stuff only they can buy. The only thing is that he is level 10.

And at level 10 you don’t get any follow dungeons unless you group with somebody higher level or who has unlocked them in Dragonflight. You can’t just follower dungeon yourself to 70.

No follower dungeons for you

I mean, you sort of can, but it requires you to pick Dragonflight from Chromie as your timewalking experience. The problem is that… I really don’t care about the story in WoW, and the further along the expansion trail you go the more the game absolutely insists you pay attention to the story.

I am even now working my way through Midnight and looking bored because here is another cut scene telling me thing beyond where to go and who to kill.

Why does this guy keep talking? Can we get on with it?

This is a personal flaw of mine, and not something that applies just to Azeroth. As I have said no doubt ad nauseam here on the blog, I care about the story of my character and the group I am playing with. Putting me in the cut scenes is cool… I appreciate the effort, honestly… but I am going to forget whatever was said the moment some NPC with punctuation over his head tells me to kill some people. Me completing the task is the story that interests me and not the NPC and his complaints about the world.

This is why I play EVE Online, and more specifically play in null sec in EVE Online. The story of my character and his corp, squad, alliance, or coalition is something I can help shape and it doesn’t matter what CCP or some random NPC wants.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about the story and the lore the devs have provided, I am saying that I seem to lack the gene that allows me to care about that sort of thing.

Which is why I probably keep ending up in Outland.

This may seem a bit off, given how often I have ranked The Burning Crusade as a middling expansion, problematic in its approach and unrelentingly grindy in its execution. As I have said in the past, the lesson that Blizz took from vanilla seemed to be that if killing 10 rats was good, then killing 15 or 20 much bet better.

The thing is, for an expansion, it doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t want to pay attention to the story.

It was also the absolute peak of the maximum quest hub experience, where you could pick up 5-10 quests at one go and just spend time out in the field killing stuff or whatever.

Also, my criticism of TBC has been largely in the context of it being the current live expansion. I don’t want to go back to 2007 and run that, we punted on running it in 2020, and when it went live on classic classic earlier this year it still had no appeal to me.

But as an experience in the context of something else being the live expansion, and all the more so in the post-level squish world where there are nine expansions after it, Outland is just a chill place to go kill stuff and not worry about the story.

Just killing some orcs out by Honor Hold

Of course, I say that right now. I just launched into Hellfire Peninsula and everything is simple and I have a side bar full of quests that I have done many times before so I know exactly where to go and what to do. We’ll see how I feel when it is time for Terokkar Forest.

But I can just skip that if I don’t like it. Everything just scales to my level as I go. I can just go back to my Outland Zones Ranked post from 2022 and pick my favorites. I can avoid Terokkar… which honestly isn’t that bad… or the Blade’s Edge Mountains… which are totally as bad as I suggest… and go straight to Nagrand I guess.

Though that feels like going straight to desert. But I might do Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and then Nagrand. I’m feeling like I might have overrated Shadowmoon Valley on that ranking. But rankings are like that, very in the moment.

At least the way I do them.

So I have started down that path. We’ll see how long it lasts. I think he is 16 now.

But that brings me back to a problem I alluded to above with my Death Knight and getting the same drop three times with three different stats. As I level up, and the zones level up with me, my gear is going to be in an almost constant state of needing replacement.

While TBC is pretty good about shoving gear at you regularly, is it paced well enough to get me from 10 to 70?

That brought to mind heirloom gear, which was a thinking about heirloom gear. That was supposed to be the solution to alt gearing, giving them the equivalent of blue gear that would level up with them. Around since WotLK, heirloom gear has clearly gone through some changes.

To start with, the level squish messed everything up so I have a bunch of items in the gear tab that are good to a range of levels.

A glance at the heirloom tab

There was stuff in there that was good up to level 24 through to 59. I could get Dargan started with that, but I kind of wanted him to be able to get at least to level 50. Maybe even level 70.

I did remember that you could upgrade heirlooms, though the how I had to look up.

It turns out that buying them can be done in many currencies. I seem to recall buying quite a few via Darkmoon Faire. However, that route only lets you upgrade to level 35… or 34. There is a disconnect between what the gear says (e.g. level 49 above) and what the upgrade options say.

I have no level 50s, only level 49s

I mean, I am sure that somebody at Blizz has a long winded, hand waving explanation as to why they couldn’t match up the levels in two different views, but it seems dumb to me. Also, when you upgrade it then says level 59. not to 60. Do they just want us to feel cheated?

Speaking of feeling cheated, I found the vendor who sells heirloom upgrades for gold… and that shit ain’t cheap. The 50 to 60 upgrade and the 60 to 70 upgrade both run 7,500 gold. So 15K gold to get a level 49/50 piece of gear to level 69/70. And, while the price is lower for the previous increments, needing to go from 24/25 to 29/30 to 34/35 to 39/40 to 49/50 to 59/60 to 69/70 is quite and investment.

They also changed heirloom gear benefits. No longer does one piece give you a bit of an xp bonus. Now the whole thing is set based, and you need to have six pieces to fill out the set, which means given the ideal end state of just using heirloom gear to level 70 quickly runs into the barrier of me not having anywhere close to enough gold to cover that sort of thing.

The heirloom set bonuses

You need 2 pieces of heirloom gear for the first bonus, 3 for the second, 5 for the third, and 6 for the final bonus. And the bonus is now a reduction in the consumption of your blue bar bonus rested xp. I guess that is fine. Still, if you want the full blue bar protection, you need six pieces.

I have never been good at pursuing gold, and felt kind of rich having 126K gold on my main, until I started doing the heirloom upgrade math in my head. Even if everything I had was only two upgrades from 70, and I was not close to that being true, the upgrades would cost 90K gold.

So maybe just two pieces of gear to level 70. Probably a weapon and then an armor piece.

Or maybe I defer that buying decision until I hit the cap for the first piece of gear. That sounds like a plan. There is no point in blowing a load of cash because I am suddenly starry-eyed about an alt. I’ve been there before… note the 42 characters I found when I did my play time inventory… and I have lost interest more often than not. So I loaded him up with heirloom gear and sent him off.

Dargan all decked out on the character select screen

For now though, it feels almost like freedom to just be roaming around Hellfire Peninsula seeing the old sites.

I have come to slay you… how many times have I been here

So I like Outland I guess… just not when it is the primary focus. Or such is my theory of the moment. Felt old school. Might delete later.

WoW Midnight – Two Button Dungeon Running and Figuring Out Who can Group Up

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WoW Midnight remains on the menu for the instance group, though there have been some initial issues and decisions to make. The first of those decisions has been who is playing which character/class/race.

World of Warcraft Midnight

I have enough characters for now, as noted in my play time round up, but some people want to start fresh.

Also, we do want to do things as a group, which tends to mean dungeons. And, since there are only four of us active in the guild now, that means follower dungeons.

Follower dungeons, which came in near the end of Dragonflight, let you fill in missing roles in your group. For now there is a selection of Dragonflight dungeons that will let you mix and match levels in your group between

Follow dungeons for those under level 70

This is also why the game gives you a hard shove towards Dragonflight when you’re considering which time walking campaign you might run with your new character. But more about that in another post.

The downside is that if you were like me and used your boost on your “main” character, they are now level 80 and outside the zone for those dungeons.

Sunday saw three of us get together, myself, Potshot, and Ula, and we tried to sort out what to run and with whom. Potshot and Ula had both rolled up fresh Dracthyr who had leveled up a bit but who were still down at the bottom end of that 10 – 70 level range.

I, again, had a bounty of choices… 42 characters in retail at my audit a couple weeks back… including a few level 50 characters as I played Battle for Azeroth pretty hard and that was where being at the level cap back then left you after the great level squish.

I pulled a frost spec Death Knight out of the backlog and made sure he had his talent points set and joined the group.

We had run Ruby Life Pools in our first test run last time around, but we were still other options.

Opting to just move down the list we chose Neltharus and Potshot put us in the queue.

Queued up for Neltharus

We had three DPS so we were going to play the ultimate “you don’t actually have a group” lineup. The queue popped for us quickly enough and we were soon standing there with our tank, Captain Garrick, and a Tauren druid named Crenna. Both of them played like they gave no fucks about anything, but before we got to that I had a problem.

I will stipulate right here and now that I know nothing about how follower dungeons work or how the scaling mechanics that allow a couple of level 20-ish characters group up and do a dungeon with a level 50 character.

What I do know is that my guy entered the dungeon and found that my hotbars had been wiped clean. I already wasn’t sure how to play a DK, but I was pretty sure I might need some combat skills… or at least auto attack… to succeed.

Not wanting to hold the group up while I started in on page one of “You’ve decided to play a Death Knight…” I decided that it was time to test out the two button combat rotation.

Just TWO buttons on my hot bar

The first buttons, mapped to 2, is the single button assist. Yes, using that button slows the global cool down by 25%. But you know what else slows stuff down? Me trying to figure out what to do on a character I haven’t played since 2020.

The second button was a macro that Potshot put together for us.

Focus Assist Macro

With that you set the tank as your focus, then triggering the macro will set your target to whoever the tank is currently attacking. That ended up on the 3 slot because, for reasons I do not understand, it would not trigger when I had it on the 1 slot. I could click it just fine, but hitting 1 on the keyboard did nothing.

That set I gave the thumbs up and we were off.

As I think I noted last time, Blizzard has accurately modeled a random PUG tank with Captain Garrick. I feel like the next follower dungeon update should allow you to pick your tank play style, with options like “fastest run,” “hey watch for walkers,” and “full clear, leave not witnesses” or something like that.

But at least you can turn the tank “off” if you need a breather… and they will wait if you are not following them closely (really missed a banter opportunity here by having the tank get impatient and start shouting at the group) but if you take three steps towards the next mob they’ll be on it.

Garrick was in “fastest run” mode and absolutely walked around every mob they could. There was some absolute hero level pathing going on.

Garrick running on a ledge for a shortcut around things

Mob avoidance included mobs that were on the move and which were clearly going to wander back and catch us in a pincer movement. Garrick didn’t care. She had Crenna there to back her up, a druid with a seemingly unlimited reserve of combat resses. It was kind of funny and crazy.

We did wipe once, as we approach Forgemaster Gorek, when Garrick completely ignored wandering patrols who came at us from three sides as we were taking on two sets of stationary mobs. At that point Crenna was out of options.

But we manage to clear enough that our next run at it, when Garrick did exactly the same thing again, we had thinned out the pack enough to survive.

That was the only real hiccup and we made it through to the end and defeated Warlord Sargha, the final boss.

Our group… Crenna was off doing a bowl or something

We got the achievement, got the decor drop, which went to Ula, and wrapped up the quest inside the dungeon, though we had to walk all the way back to the beginning to turn it in, which was a hazard as we had left a few mobs behind untouched. What happened to quest giver concierge service? Or is that only for heroic tier and better customers?

For xp this turned out pretty good. My DK was a level 50 with full blue bar and ended up at level 52. Now I can put him back in the queue and get somebody else out while his blue bar comes back. I guess one of the nice side effects of that addon that measures played time is that I logged everybody in and made sure they were in town so they will be ready to level.

That did not take too long, so we decided to do another run. This time we had an eye on something in the current expansion. We got out our ostensible main characters, those who had been boosted and had done at least a bit of the expansion, but found that only two of us had done enough in Midnight to unlock the first follower dungeon.

Somebody isn’t ready

So that was out.

But we could, when grouped up, get into some of The War Within dungeons.

TWW dungeon list

Those were limited to level 70-80 characters, and Vikund and Ula were already past 80, but with Skronk in the group those opened up as an option. The problem was that when we entered those instances… and we tried it a few times… Ula found half of her mage combat skills locked out, which made player her character difficult at best.

Eventually we gave up on that, gave Potshot the assignment of getting far enough into the expansion to be able to run the first instance, and fell back on alts again.

I dragged out my hunter, Tistann, Potshot got out Fergorin his dwarf pally, and Ula returned to her Dracthyr just to keep the party rolling on leveling them up.

Then we picked the next Dragonflight dungeon on the list, The Nokhud Offensive.

The Nokhud Offensive

This is a sprawling, overland instance in some green rolling hills where we were killing… something… I will admit I was paying a lot more attention to remembering what my character skills were and where Captain Garrick was running off to than the story. Again, successful recreation of a PUG dungeon group.

Once again we were three DPS with Captain Garrick and Crenna shepherding us around and doing their usual thing. In order to get around you ride, or are transformed into, a ghost bird that brings you to the next set of encounters. However Tistann was still wearing the fish head from Darkmoon Faire… it has probably been on him for five years now, not back for a 60 minute buff… and while everybody else saw just their ghost bird, Tistann saw the bird AND his fish head.

Holy flying fish heads Batman!

So I had that going for me… which is nice.

The run was mostly as before, with us chasing Garrick around… or Garrick running ahead of us as we approached… whatever… and occasionally getting into trouble. At one point Garrick did their classic move of running to the next set of mobs, ignoring completely two wandering groups, one to each flank and things looked like they were headed towards a wipe.

Yeah, that looks bad

But Crenna wasn’t having it. Getting out there like it was 1999 and they were kiting griffons in North Karana, Crenna managed to grab all the aggro from all the mobs on us, DoT’ing them up and hitting an insta cast heal when needed, then proceeded to run in a circle around Tistann, who had survived due to a timely use of feign death, and who then sat there peeling off mobs one by one as Crenna kept circling.

Crenna leading the pack

Every once in a while Crenna would get far enough in to combat ress Garrick.

Crenna pulls ahead, time for another ress attempt

Garrick would come back to life, run straight at the batch of mobs, grab all the aggro, and then die again.

Tistann would feign death again and Crenna would grab aggro, and the dance would continue. Once in a while Tistann had to heal or ress his pet, but for the most part Crenna just hero druid tanked the whole extended encounter.

When things were done Crenna then ressed everybody and we were set to go.

After that encounter, the remaining two bosses were pretty tame. We made it through and everybody who had full blue bar got a couple of levels along the way.

That gives us 16 dungeons to work through, three of which we have done already, plus the dungeons that open up to us as we progress with Midnight. The question is whether or not that is enough to keep us busy given that we’re going to stick to just our group to play.

WoW Midnight and Housing First Impressions

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Welcome to Palia with Orcs!

-Twilight Cadre current guild MOTD

I left off last time with the critical choice; Housing or Midnight? I mean, that is the choice the game gives you, straight up.

Get a house or go outside and play?

That this is literally the choice presented when you’re done with the catch-up… or it is if you have purchased Midnight in any case… does tell you how much weight the retail team has put on trying to generate a housing boom. And, as I said in the last post, we veered straight into the Get a House! option.

When I showed up on Saturday night to find the whole crew in retail WoW, the whole location discussion was already well underway. Potshot and Ula were trying to find a neighborhood with some open plots available.

There was a brief discussion of trying to get our own exclusive group neighborhood, but that requires ten people to commit and our guild is lucky when we can get three of us online together at one time. So an open neighborhood was chosen.

As I was getting myself situated and through the catch-up thing I heard them going through several of the neighborhoods.

They had picked a neighborhood and managed to both get there, but now I was ready to peek in. I got the choices above and it gave me a list of five neighborhoods, but the one they chose was not on the list.

Potshot told me to refresh the list as it just gives you five likely choices rather than trying to overwhelm you with a list of all possible neighborhoods, and there must be a lot of those by this point.

Rolling the RNG dice seemed like a suckers way to try and find the right location, so Potshot invited me to their group to see if I could just travel to him. And I think you can do that with group members. But while he did that I opened up the guild roster and found I could right click on guild member names and visit their homes from there. So I was off to New Wave Refuge, which as somebody who was a young adult in the 80s, was almost too on the nose as a pick. I expected a revived KQAK “The Quake” in SF to be the local radio station.

There I found a plot close by where Potshot and Ula had settled. I clicked on the sign and purchased it… for whatever value the word “purchase” has when it comes to digital goods these days. But at least it was free.

Time to but real estate!

Being free was good. One of the worries around coming back to retail after having skipped the back half of one expansion and all of the next two is that inflation tends to grow rather dramatically with each on. I have what would have seemed like an impossible amount of gold back in 2004 but which I am sure is mere pocket change to any of the hardcore these days.

Anyway, I pressed the “buy” button and got a big, glowing “House Purchased” message and a little house appeared on the plot of land, just like in real life. I know, my wife is a real estate agent, so trust me when I say this is exactly how it works.

House Purchased!

There was also an achievement, because of course there was. I think we’re getting some achievement fatigue in the group because when I boosted Vikund to level 80 he got a bunch of achievements from the two missing expansions.

Anyway, I was now no longer an itinerant adventurer but a member of the landed class, I set about checking out the new digs.

A lot of people have spilled much digital ink as to the hows of the new housing system, so I am not going to bother trying to duplicate any of that. I would do a half-assed job because… well, I’ll get to why in a bit.

I will say that Blizz has done a credible, competent job on the housing mechanics. You have all the flexibility you could expect, including doing some silly things.

In this house fire burns the way I say it does here

There are some nice little touches, like if you move an item that has an item on top of it, they both move together. Sure, that leaves me out of the “crap floating everywhere” aesthetic I went for in a couple of my EverQuest II houses back in the day, but if you want things to move this is probably the right approach.

You can place, rotate, scale, and move stuff around a free form way that comes close to the EQII model that no doubt set the bar for what Holly Longdale would let into the game, and is a bit more slick in most places.

I was more than a bit skeptical of the neighborhood model. Sure, it is kind of cool to be able to have a house next door to a friend or three, but I’ve also been through the EQ and LOTRO neighborhoods and both games failed to make neighborhoods a place for anything besides housing. EQII remains the champ on integration into the game on that front.

In the WoW neighborhood you are close, but not too close. No other plot seems to be in direct line of sight from my own.

Our little corner of New Wave Refuge

Unlike LOTRO’s failure to make neighborhoods anything useful, Blizz has endowed theirs with some quests and tasks and NPCs that will help you expand your options.

Potshot is convinced this guy will never return your calls

There are also vendors who will straight up sell you more stuff for your house. The prices are steep if you’re coming off of classic, but minor if you’ve been socking away gold over the last couple of expansions. There are also flight points around the neighborhood, if being sizable and spaced out, and even a cart to pull you around at not much more than a walking pace if you want to tour.

They even put the top up when it rains

So Blizz has put some effort into making their neighborhoods a place where there is something to do besides just being there. You can even pet the cats and dogs wandering about.

Even your plot has stuff going on outside. You can move your house around on your plot, reconfigure how you house looks with towers and chimneys and windows, and, most importantly, you can put junk out in the yard to get that real redneck Azeroth feel.

If there was a banjo I’d be strumming it

I tried to put one of the carts and wagons in my yard up on blocks, but I am going to have to work on that to get the full effect. There are five wheeled conveyances in there. Can you spot them all?

I thought the Murloc house with the chicken coop next to it was a nice touch. Potshot says that the cow pasture behind the place will start complaining about me bringing down property values pretty soon.

And I did not have to go out of my way to get any of that going. You get a lot of starter items, so you can get straight to decorating to make your place your own, with more for sale from NPCs in the center of town.

So I have to give Blizz a lot of points for the work they did. The house is a bit strange in that it is a single size even when you add rooms to it, but the ability to screw up your front yard makes up for that in a way.

But even with all of that credit for the effort, the end result feels a bit soulless.

I have two specific complaints.

The first is the somewhere generic feel of everything. I know, the WoW cartoon art style kind of makes everything feel that way. For all of its faults, LOTRO housing “feels” more interesting, at first glance at least.

There is also, as a subset of that, a bit of an feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of items you get at the outset and the additional items that can be easily obtained. Like any collection, having a bunch of it dumped on you all at once makes everything feel less special. I was happy to have that table, mug, and mirror in my first crappy apartment in EQII back at launch. My lack of options made me long for more.

And then there is the fact that none of these items has any meaning for me. I mean, I got those cuddly faction Grrgle baby Murlocs as Twitch drops, so maybe not EVERYBODY has those. But all those say about me is that I left Twitch running for four hours.

In the end, housing has meaning to the extent it reflects you in some way. Or that is my view of it anyway, spoiled as I was by EQII having quest rewards and achievement markers and other items that showed I have done something in game to get at item. You can hang a trophy fish on your wall in LOTRO.

I will admit that I have just started out, so maybe there are some great items you can obtain in the world that will make you feel like the house is really yours. But so far it is about as personalized as decorating from the IKEA catalog.

My second complaint is that, for all that Blizz did to make the neighborhood active, all the things they put in there for you to do, in the end your house is not a place where the overall game takes place.

I mean, even in Palia you could craft in your house… and even have friends over to cook as a group.

Making ramen with Potshot and Ula in Palia

Hurl whatever negatives you want about garrisons back in Warlords of Draenor. They were generic locations, with each looking like the other save for some minor choices, that took people out of the world and destroyed crafting and added some unfun game play.

But you could do stuff in your garrison. It had an ostensible reason to be there. You could craft and do pet battles and let some of your pets wander about and fish and probably a few more things I have forgotten. Could you play Hearthstone in your garrison? I remember there at least being a table for it you could add.

I appreciate that there is a functional mailbox, for example. But that is some LOTRO level of effort, and LOTRO has some storage in their housing as well.

There is no game reason to go to my house. Again, it sits in the shadow of EQII on that front.

Of course, all of this is based on just a few hours fiddling around with my house. I have, perhaps, not yet arrived at the meaning, the raison d’etre of housing in WoW.

We shall see.

We Arrive at Midnight

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Welcome to Shadowlands! Join the Army and see the Navy!

-Twilight Cadre guild MOTD last week

That MOTD gives a sense of how far behind we were when it came to retail WoW.

I had mentioned a couple of times that Ula, having not found Guild Wars all that interesting, wandered off to retail WoW and specifically the Midnight expansion. Housing was the draw and I had been asking if she was enjoying things and if it was worth the group considering joining in.

World of Warcraft Midnight

Potshot and I discussed this further after our previous Guild Wars run where we basically stood after getting a hero and NPC helpers.

We had succeeded, but the NPCs did the work while we stood back or died. That did not bode well for the future for us as our group is only ever going to be three people at this point and we do kind of like to feel like we’re influencing the outcome of events.

And, of course, I chose last week to divert back into Valheim.

Come Saturday afternoon though, I saw Potshot in Discord and it was telling me he was logged into retail WoW. Discord will rat you out like that. He had asked me earlier in the week about Valheim because I was shown playing it. And, just to finish this loop, talk of retail WoW started because I could see Ula logged in via Discord.

Anyway, we seemed to be on for retail, so I pinged him on Discord to confirm and he said we were, but that he was still working out getting his character lined up.

That was enough for me. I decided to go get myself patched up… which meant remembering how to even launch the title. I had taken the Battle.net launcher off the Start menu a while back. Eventually I got myself there, patched, and ready to jump the next two hurdles.

No subscription and no expansion yet…

I decided I would just re-up my subscription for 30 days, something the game really argues against. When you try to subscribe it has the 12 month plan selected and flagged as “BEST VALUE,” ready to shove that down your throat like a VC with billions invested trying to get you to use AI.

Okay, maybe they aren’t that desperate, but their eagerness to get you to buy the the most expensive option carries on to when you choose to buy the expansion itself, where spending $90 is the “BEST VALUE” as well.

But I wasn’t ready to buy the expansion yet. First I just wanted to subscribe and get into the game. Having done that I went and found CurseForge, the addon manager I have used for ages now, and removed all but the most basic or essential addons. The only one I added was Account Played, which I will get to in a post of its own.

Then I was into the game and at the character selection screen, where most every character over a certain level had a “Catch-up available” option shown.

Who are these people? Where am I?

At some point I had rolled out Vikund and started on Dragonflight, but then gave up. But he was likely going to be my main for Midnight, so I opted to start with Tistann, my hunter, and second highest level character.

The game asked me if I wanted to go with the catch-up, which I declined to jump straight into. In the US at least “catch-up” sounds like “ketchup,” the latter being a sugar laden condiment that you put on food items in order to coax children to eat them… which I suspected would be a metaphor for what Blizzard had in mind.

Once logged in, Blizz immediately chose violence.

Movement key heresy

I went with the legacy setting. The new UI and what not was going to be enough of a challenge without that. As the MOTD at the top of the post indicates, it has been a while since we indulged in retail. But on a couple of alts I didn’t change to legacy went I went in, and to fix that you have to go into settings and into key bindings and swap things back between Q and A and between E and D.

I landed me in Stormwind where… I didn’t have much going on. So I decided fine, I will go with the catch-up experience that the game was pushing on me… and it was laden with sugar and not a lot of meat.

Come on, you’ll love it!

The journey through the Arathi Highlands is, if nothing else, pretty short even if it felt mostly unhelpful.

To start with, the game keeps insisting that I have skill points to spend, but the new skill point… it is no longer a tree, having turned into a matrix that looks like a bad idea Holly Longdale brought along from EverQuest II… won’t let you save your selections until you have spent ALL your damn points.

So you’re left staring at a field of tiny icons trying to discern which to pick… and some of them are split in two, so you have to click on half of the tiny icon. There is an option at the bottom left of things that lets you just assign a starter set, but at no point did the UI highlight that for me. I had to dig around and find it.

What the hell is all this?

The redeeming aspect of this is that it shouldn’t matter for overland content… right? RIGHT?

Perfection in skill points should be the domain of raiders and shlubs like me should be able to get along with any random pick. So the starter set is probably fine.

The catch-up option seems mostly interested in introducing a few new concepts to the player and handing them a bunch of gear upgrade. Of course, I fought with the game over that. It wanted to tell me about the new type of flying that came in with Dragonflight, but I see where it had shoved that skill on my action bars, but I did see my old mount icon, so I chose that. The game kept telling me to do something else without being specific.

I am already in flight man

Eventually it game up when it had other things to tell me about.

Most of the quests gave me upgrades… but not all of them. The Heart of Azeroth, still a better than their handouts it seems. I swapped it out only to find that I had downgraded.

The Heart of Azeroth, still beating

And then there was the quest that gave me four 24 slot bags.

Here are some bags!

That is slightly better than a past gear handout, which swapped out all of my 30 slot bags… bags I have had since Warlords of Draenor… for 22 slot bags… but still. I get it, this gear update routine has to cover a lot of bases and it cannot guarantee that everything it throws at you will automatically be better.

On the other hand, didn’t we get The Heart of Azeroth with the Battle for Azeroth expansion back in 2018? I feel like there is a message about gear in there somewhere.

The catch-up also brought me up to speed on a new feature that highlights which skill the game things you should hit next, which was semi-helpful as I was very much out of practice. I say “semi” only because the hunter with beast mastery only has a few key skills anyway and I probably could have figured them out, but it was nice to have the items in slots 2-5 on my action bar verified as still key.

Then I was done with the catch-up, at which point it wanted to take that away.

Have you had enough of easy mode loser?

I opted to keep it on for now.

At that point I had to go. We had a party for a friend to attend.

However, later that evening, when we arrived back from the party, I got on my computer and could see that everybody in our group was on and playing retail WoW. Again, Discord tells all.

So it was clear we were all in. At that point I opted for the $50 version of WoW Midnight, then applied the level 80 boost to Vikund, my paladin and long time main in retail, then logged into the game, opting to go through the catch-up.

That turned out to be a complete waste of time as the boost gives you a full set of new gear that is notably better than the catch-up gear. At least both the boost and the catch-up gear were better than my currently equipped weapon, Ashbringer, which was from Legion.

Also, it appears that at some point I had opted for a more classic layout for the UI… which was good. While I get the idea of putting yourself and your target right above the action bars, for me that also makes them kind of blend in. Also, I have nearly 30 years of habit of watching the upper left corner of my screen for those things.

As noted, at least the catch-up was quick. As with Tistann I opted for the starter skill point setup and was happy enough with being told what to click next. Unlike hunters, what works for a pally seems to change every expansion.

Eventually I found the “how about we give you just one button to press for combat skills?” option, and now I am just using that. I would draw myself down to one action bar to clean up the screen, but it only seems to work with skills already on your bar.

Once through the catch-up again I was offered the critical choice… housing or adventure?

Get a house or go outside and play?

We were there for housing, so it was time to dive into that. But that will be for the next post.

Meanwhile, there is the question as to what jumping on the retail WoW bandwagon will mean.

I have room in my free time to play three games on the PC and maybe one on mobile… and the third PC title tends to be somewhat neglected.

EVE Online gets one of those spots, though it could be the neglected one for a bit. Retail WoW looks to be taking a spot, probably at the expense of Guild Wars since the group all moved.

That will leave maybe some time for Project: Gorgon still? Or maybe Pokemon LeafGreen?

I’ll have to see how that works out.