gaming – Grizzlebeard Plays

From Refugee to Landlord (Building My WoW Garrison in Frostfire Ridge)

Last time on Dragonba…whoops, wrong show.

If you missed the last entry, I created a Highmountain Tauren Shaman named Grizzlebeard and dove into Warlords of Draenor to see how it plays compared to my memories of the olden days in Mists of Pandaria and before. Our scrappy band of adventurers made it through the Dark Portal and escaped the Iron Horde to land in Frostfire Ridge, where we were gifted a plot of land by Thrall’s father(?). I think it is his dad anyways. Did I mention I’m bad with WoW lore?

Personally, as someone who very much enjoyed the farm in MoP, the Garrison was one of the main things I was excited about. To my understanding, Warlords of Draenor introduced Garrisons, and they continued to iterate and adjust that system in following expansions, so I am curious to see where they started and how it works out.

The Garrison begins as a small Horde outpost in the frozen wastes of Frostfire Ridge, and acts as a staging point for our adventures in the area and in Draenor as a whole. After a quick little introduction to the system and poking around at menus, it seems that I can use the supplies I have been gathering to build certain buildings in empty plots in the Garrison and tweak the overall function to meet my needs.

As someone who always enjoys crafting in MMOs and being somewhat self-sufficient, I figured I would snag a few professions here and see how those changed over the years as well. Opting for the old standby of Tailoring and Enchanting, I went ahead and selected the corresponding buildings for the Garrison.

Adding those allowed me to learn Draenor Tailoring and Draenor Enchanting, and this was one of the first things that really stood out as glaringly different from the olden days (aside from the graphics). Previously, professions functioned similar to the leveling route. You would first take up a profession, and level it from 1 to 300 in Classic, then pick up TBC versions, WotLK, and so on, leveling each of them from the previous cap to the newly raised cap.

Now, each era is broken up into a separate set of levels, and you can learn each independently. This makes sense with the new leveling layout and Chromie Time, as there is no requirement to go through each expansion sequentially, and it would be incredibly awkward to level professions in the old style. That said, it does make it seem like there is little reason to level professions in the older content outside of things like profession specific mounts, pets, and so on.

As I was only really taking Tailoring for making my own bags, this is not a huge issue or anything that will take much adjustment, but it is a large change from the way things used to be.

In addition to the buildings tied to crafting, I ended up with a few other things added to the Garrison as well.

A fishing shack, an herb garden, and a mine. The fishing shack lets me take daily fishing quests to catch certain fish and turn them in, so pretty standard fare. The herb garden does what it says on the box, and is a garden where you can harvest herbs. As I am not an Herbalist or Alchemist, these aren’t super useful, but I’m assuming I can always sell them. I won’t turn down free money.

As a side note, I am really enjoying these cinematic reveals of buildings and notable NPCs with the camera swooping in and a nice descriptive bit of text like in the screenshots above with the new buildings. It is nothing I was ever missing when I played before, but it is a nice addition to add a little more cinematic flair.

The other main aspect of the Garrison seems to be the ability to send Followers on missions with various rewards. For now, I have only had missions that reward XP for me, XP for the Followers themselves, or rarely a piece of equipment. I vaguely remember seeing mention of this in another expansion, so it seems like this has continued on, and it seems pretty neat for when the expansion is current game content. Playing through the expansion now as old/irrelevant content, there once again does not seem to be any significant reason to spend time on this, though it is fun to be questing out in the world and realize at the end of a quest chain that the NPC you have been working with is now going to join your merry band back at the Garrison as a Follower.

After a good bit of running around and familiarizing myself with the Garrison and doing some quests to unlock various things, I decided to head out and start really exploring the rest of Frostfire Ridge. After freeing the Citadel from Ogres, quests took me all over the zone to continue beating back the Ogre threat and rally more bands of Orcs to my banner. I encountered Gul’dan doing Gul’dan things and trying to summon or corrupt people, but after chasing him off most of the zone was pretty straightforward.

The story quests culminated in a 300-esque standoff in a ravine with a small group of our Frostwolves holding the pass against the incoming Iron Horde. Ultimately, the plan became to hold them back long enough for Drek’thar, who by the way I feel like I should know, to use his Shaman powers and collapse the ravine walls and block off the pass.

This was a neat sequence, and getting to fight alongside Durotan and Ga’nar everyone to hold back the Iron Horde ended up being a really enjoyable fight. We beat back cannons, a giant Gronn, and all manner of Orcs, until eventually Drek’thar was able to complete his communing with the elements. Unfortunately, at the same time a massive wave of Iron Horde surges through the ravine, and it looks like they will make it through to overrun our small band of Frostwolves. Durotan makes a move to intercept, but is held back by his brother Ga’nar who tells him that the Frostwolves need him, and to let Ga’nar do this in his place. Charging in, we see Ga’nar put up a heroic last stand, taking out numerous Iron Horde before the stone walls of the ravine crumble and bury them all.

This was a fairly epic feeling conclusion to what I understood to be just the starting zone of this expansion. Ga’nar himself I was fairly on the fence about throughout Frostfire as he was typically fairly abrasive and bloodthirsty, but he ended up making a noble sacrifice and doing what he thought was best for the Frostwolves.

Afterwards, there is discussion of pressing onward to Gorgrond, the area the Iron Horde were pouring through from, and we are also given a choice of Followers. This Makar Stonebinder guy does his best Professor Oak impression and presents us with three options to pick from. Greatmother Geyah (Thrall’s grandma), Kal’gor the Honorable, and Lokra.

Lokra was part of a chain of quests in Frostfire, and Greatmother Geyah is Durotan’s mother, making her Thrall’s grandmother. The other guy? Absolutely no idea. I assume he was probably part of some quests I did, but if so they were not memorable.

Of course I chose Thrall’s grandma. Come on, was it really a choice? Grandma to the greatest Shaman and Warchief to ever grace Azeroth or the Horde. No contest.

So, she becomes a Follower we can send on missions, and we are now off to Gorgrond!

But, we’ll save that bit for next time. For now, I want to touch on a few thoughts that arose while playing.

Flight. Ohh flight. What have they done to my beautiful boy? Starting in Dragonflight, the flying system in WoW was overhauled into the new Skyriding system. Where previously your flying mount operated like a harrier jet, allowing for vertical takeoff, reverse, and all manner of control, the mounts now operate more like actual dragons. You take off and glide forward, have boost skills, gain speed while descending, and lose speed when climbing. While neat, this feels horrible coming from the old style of flight.

I am aware there is the option to toggle between the two, and it seems like it may be faster to get around while Skyriding due to the boosts and increase in speed while angled down, but I wanted to highlight how jarring this was a returning player. I miss being able to just drop right on a gathering point and then mount back up and ascend. The new changes have made gathering while mounted significantly less enjoyable, and while I am going to continue to use it to get used to the new system, my initial impression is not positive.

Also relating to flying, I no longer need to purchase the ability to ride a flying mount in any areas from what I have seen. I will freely admit that I complained about the old system back in the day. Having to learn a specific skill for my mount to figure out how to fly in cold weather seemed absurd. Now with some experience with the alternative, I can appreciate the choice to restrict flight at the beginning of expansions. Zones feel so much smaller and emptier when you can just mount up and zoom off across them. Were the zones designed from the outset with flight in mind, taking verticality in mind, this may not be so much of an issue. As is, having immediate access to flying in these old zones is an interesting conundrum. For someone returning and wanting to experience the old zones, this feels like it somewhat cheapens the experience. But, I can understand why it was done as these zones are no longer relevant, and when leveling most players will want to progress as quickly as possible.

Talents have constantly changed throughout expansions, and I am curious what they looked like back in the Warlords of Draenor days. During Vanilla/Classic, we had three trees and the ability to mix and match points throughout to create diverse builds. In Cataclysm or Mists of Pandaria that system was overhauled and we were given a choice between three options every five levels or so I believe. This was a massive reduction to the talent trees, and while it was much more straightforward, it limited the options for build diversity as well. I was never particularly a fan of the streamlined talent system, and it is nice to see that we have returned to the trees at some point.

Now, we have talent trees, but only two options instead of three. It appears to be a general tree for the overall Class, and a tree for your Specialization. An option in the menu lets you select a Starter Build, and it will highlight suggested options as you level. This feels like it straddles the line between the previous trees we had in the past and the depth, while also offering ease of use for newer players.

Ultimately, I am enjoying the state the game appears to be in, and the story so far throughout Draenor. I am excited to progress into Gorgrond and see what new adventures are in store!

Next time: Welcome to the Jungle (Exploring Gorgrond in Warlords of Draenor)

The Road Less Traveled (Choosing Which WoW Expansion to Play for a Fresh Start)

I previously played WoW from launch until the Mists of Pandaria expansion. During that time I took breaks here and there, but I never fully left the game. I raided with a guild through WotLK and MoP fairly consistently, though I was always more on the casual end of the spectrum. While primarily a Horde player, I had a slew of Alliance characters as well to see their side of the story, and by the end of MoP had characters at level cap for every class and all professions maxed. This gives a rough idea of where I left off and the amount I played in ye olden days.

After Mists of Pandaria, I drifted away. I purchased Warlords of Draenor, but barely booted it up before losing interest after a few quests. At the time, I didn’t realize I had well and thoroughly burnt myself out on the genre, and I kept trying to force it. The same happened for the launch of Legion. With Battle for Azeroth, I stuck around long enough to maybe finish a single zone, then completely missed Shadowlands and Dragonflight.

In each instance where I attempted to return, I ran up against different issues that turned me away. The largest of those issues is one endemic to the genre, and that is the complete and utter bewilderment I suffered when logging in to my old characters. Why did I have all this random crap in my bags? Where did half the things on my bars go? What are these quests on my tracker even about? Because, of course, when we quit, we rarely do so with two weeks notice and an offboarding period to leave everything nice and tidy for when we return. No, we start to log in less and less, taking longer breaks between sessions, then one day we just don’t log back in at all.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the elephant in the room and state that, as I’m sure most other fans of the genre experienced, I did find Final Fantasy XIV to be a fun adventure. The story was great, and more than anything I enjoyed the ability to play every class/job on a single character, including every crafting and gathering profession. That focus on crafting and gathering alone played a big part in drawing me more to the casual side of things. I will likely touch on FFXIV more over the course of this blog for comparison purposes, or maybe we take a little side quest to discuss that one, but for the moment I only want to illustrate how my tastes and area of focus evolved over the years.

One other detail to touch on, which should provide a little more context and background, a large part of why I drifted away was also due to burnout. At the time, I did not realize the signs, and I ended up blaming the game for changing or not drawing me in, when in reality, the main issue lay with me. Over the years, I tried each new MMO that hit the market, and while some had unique and interesting mechanics that would draw me in, nothing ever got the hooks in quite like the old days with WoW (Or Final Fantasy XI, but that is for later in the series). I want to touch on this, because I feel it is important to learn to recognize the signs, and to be able to acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with becoming burnt out, nor can you fix it by trying to force it. I also feel that a good portion of “The MMO genre is dying! Everything sucks!” type discourse can be tied back to players being burnt out with the genre. I ruined multiple expansions for myself in both WoW and XIV due to attempting to ignore my issues with burnout, and I have truly only come to realize in recent years that I need to pivot from the genre wholly to allow myself time to come back around. Taking time to enjoy some single player games, or just games of a completely different genre with friends has helped immensely in breathing new life into the MMO genre when the itch to return starts back up.

Was there a point you were getting to…?

So, ALL of that said, on to the actual point of this post. Unlike previous times where I have attempted this, I will not be trying to dive back into my old characters. It is too confusing, and leads to too much time spent trying to clean up and organize when I could just be playing. I am not going to do anything so drastic as delete my old characters or start a fresh account, because I do intend to eventually dip my toe back in once I hopefully get a better grasp on what I have missed.

Instead, I plan to start a fresh character, and level through each expansion again from Vanilla, through The Burning Crusade, all the way up to The War….wait…

If you are a current WoW player, you will likely realize the error in my thinking as it relates to Retail.

After some research it has come to my attention that the leveling process has been significantly overhauled, and attempting to play through Classic > TBC > WotLK and so on is no longer strictly possible.

Enter “Chromie Time“

It appears that in current World of Warcraft, something called “Chromie Time” now exists, which allows a player to select an expansion they want to play through from level 10 to 70, with all content scaling to the players level throughout. I vaguely remember there being a stat and level squish along the way at one point as well when I popped back in, but having all my previously capped characters now at level 30-ish was a bit odd.

While definitely a massive change from when I previously played, I don’t necessarily disagree with it. Every MMO suffers over the years from bloat, and each addresses it differently. With FFXIV, it is a frequent comment that the game is amazing and the story is one of the best Final Fantasy stories “once you get through ARR”. No one likes to acknowledge that the “once you get through A Realm Reborn” alone is a daunting task, and can take a significant time investment for new players. With WoW, prior to Chromie Time being introduced, the game had a good 10-15 years of history to play through. Most of the zones and content from the early years had received no update, so for a new player, the change from playing through The Burning Crusade zones would have been jarring, and Cataclysm threw a massive wrench in the continuity with it updating the old world, while TBC and WotLK stayed the same.

I am very curious to see how it feels to level using Chromie Time as a new player. If I select a later expansion, am I just a level 10 nobody, or am I shoved into the story as it was, being the Savior of Azeroth who has slain gods, but also just a level 10 who is fresh off the boat? Time will tell.

So anyways, first speed bump encountered, but no biggie. It looks like I will instead be picking a specific expansion, and leveling my way through that from 10 to 70, then jumping into The War Within. This should allow me to experience both a part of the content I missed over the years, and the current content that players are engaging with presently, and compare what has changed or been added over the years.

Choosing what expansion to play was less straightforward. Ironically, when I look at expansion rankings now, MoP is very highly rated, which is the exact opposite of how it was received at launch. Largely derided as the “Kung Fu Panda” expansion and being too tongue in cheek, it appears players now look back fondly on the balance and endgame? Either way, MoP is out, as it was the last expansion I truly played, and for me, it feels like MoP was basically the last expansion. Wrath of the Lich King and The Burning Crusade are similarly knocked out of the running as I played both, enjoyed both, and feel like they would not fit the bill of “experiencing something new”.

This leaves me with:
Warlords of Draenor: (2014)
Legion: (2016)
Battle for Azeroth: (2018)
Shadowlands: (2020)
Dragonflight: (2022)

After a bit of searching around, the general consensus appears to be that Legion would be the best of that list, and by a decent margin. I was all ready to dive in and enjoy hearing Liam O’Brien tell me that I was not prepared, but it turns out I was, in fact, not prepared. It seems there is an upcoming event called a “remix”, which will throw back to Legion and allow players to re-experience the expansion as it was. With only minimal reading, I am not 100% sure of what the “remix” event entails, but while I do want to see the expansion in its original form, the idea of playing through along with other people also sounds quite fun, and I have numerous others to choose from, so we will shelve Legion until the Remix and take a stab at that.

Of the remaining expansions, Shadowlands seems to be far and away the least liked, and the others are all somewhere in the middle. I thought on this one a bit, and in the end figured I may as well go chronologically. A lot of the complaints about Warlords of Draenor seemed to be around the endgame, and that is a whole section of the expansion I won’t be experiencing. Due to it being old content, I would not be able to stop and experience the gearing and balance that existed at endgame when WoD was current. Instead, I will be playing through, taking my time to enjoy quests, the story, and see what mechanics were added after my time with MoP. That last bit lent itself to the choice to go chronologically, as it seems like WoD laid the groundwork for some systems that are still in place today, and I would like to see how those came about and evolved.

The downside to this approach is that, well, I’ll be playing less well-liked expansions first, and that could very well temper my experience with the game. Additionally, from what little I have read, it sounds like Chromie Time may make it difficult to fully experience each expansion before I out-level it. I can always stick around in an expansion after hitting the point where experience stops to see some of the story if I am close, or I can always make another character. Depending on just how fast you level with this system, my initial thought is that I can level through specific zones with one character, then explore other zones with the next. I am something of an alt-aholic after all.

Next time: Who Am I?! (Starting Fresh with a New WoW Character)

Previous Entry: A Premise, and a Promise: Nostalgia, WoW, and Starting Over in MMOs

A Premise, and a Promise: Nostalgia, WoW, and Starting Over in MMOs

The Premise

Picture this, if you will: It is the summer of 2005. School is out. You have just woken up, sometime around noon, fixed a nice, hot plate of pizza rolls, and are settling down in front of the family computer. The dulcet tones of AOL dialing up squeal through the empty house. You have a full day ahead of you with no responsibilities, no worries. You log in to the newly released MMORPG, World of Warcraft, and prepare to make the trip across the world to run the Deadmines.

Life is good.

Like most MMO players, I miss those days. I was in high school when WoW launched, and I am now approaching my 40th year. Where once I could spend most of a day and well into the night questing, leveling, and having a good old time, I now have many more demands on my time. With a son, a fiance, a full time job, household chores, and who knows what else, the time I have to devote to gaming has steadily declined. That is not a complaint. I have a full life, and I am thankful for all that I have and where I have made it. It is merely a statement of fact to set the stage.

“Back in my day”, leveling in an MMO was an ordeal all on its own. We spent hours grinding out single levels, running across continents to reach dungeons, and in some cases/games losing those levels when we died. Over the years, that journey has changed and evolved. Now, the endgame is the focus, and games are designed to speed players to those activities as quickly as possible. Many players feel that this has cheapened the overall world of some games, and distilled what used to be a fairly social and sprawling world into little snippets of activities that are experienced in a more drop in/drop out nature. Games are rife with systems that promote FOMO to keep players coming back, and they often feel more focused on retention mechanics than on delivering enjoyable content.

All of that said, I don’t mean to necessarily paint current games in a negative light compared to older MMOs, rather, to highlight the contrast between the two eras.

Through these posts, I want to provide the perspective of an older gamer from the earlier days of MMOs who is attempting to dive into the current generation of games and capture some of the old nostalgia. I myself hope to glean some deeper sense of engagement by taking time to recount my adventures, my thoughts, and my feelings as I play. Personally, I feel as if the discourse around MMOs (And games in general) as become entirely too negative. No one hates MMOs more than the supposed fans of the genre, which is quickly made evident if you choose to browse MMO communities like /r/MMO or comments on MMO news sites.

The Promise

Recently, I made the decision that I want to bring some positive, and more nuanced, discussion into the MMO space. I love watching reviews by Mortismal Gaming on YouTube specifically for that reason. The channel as a whole is a breath of fresh air when gaming content has devolved largely into rage videos, clickbait thumbnails, and misleading titles.

In that vein, I plan to try a different approach to returning to an MMO than I have before. For the time being I will focus on World of Warcraft, as I recently saw the trailer for a new expansion, and I saw mention on Reddit of something called a “remix” coming up. Realizing I have been out of the game for so long that I do not even recognize these events or lingo, plus an expansion is on the horizon, now seemed like a good time to dip my toe back in.

So, my plan is thus:

Start a fresh character.
Reach level 10 and select an older expansion to experience.
Level to 70 and jump into The War Within.

That’s enough rambling for one post, but hopefully this gives you, dear reader, a general idea of my background and basis, and what I plan to do here going forward.

Next time: The Road Less Traveled (Choosing Which Expansion to Play).