mmorpg-2025 – Grizzlebeard Plays

Rebirth and Remix (A New Chapter in Legion)

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time getting this one out. Originally, when I started this little adventure, I was worried that I would burn out fairly quickly as I have in the past.

The me of the past was not aware of the absolute banger that is the Remix. While I missed the Mists of Pandaria throwback, Legion Remix has absolutely devoured my free time. So much so, that I almost forgot to polish and publish this post.

That said, the Remix mechanics do necessitate a slight change to the form I had established with Warlords of Draenor. Everything in Remix is JUST SO FAST! With Warlords of Draenor, I tried to take my time with each zone, do all the quests, and savor the experience. Remix took all of that and threw it right out the window. The first character felt fairly regular, if a little accelerated. I managed to complete two zones before I had hit 80, with one being Suramar, and that did not feel too crazy compared to WoD where I had capped out in three or so zones I believe.

My first character was a Demon Hunter that I played through Azsuna and Suramar, and knocked out a few dungeons. I thoroughly enjoyed the Suramar story, as I mentioned in my last post, and Azsuna was an enjoyable romp through demon infested ruins, treating with ghostly elves, and slapping around giant pirates.

I have seen social media posts talking about farming the XP bonuses, and how some people are hitting 80 in just two short hours, but I avoided trying anything to that effect. After capping out my Demon Hunter, I decided to pivot and level another class to see more of the zones and continue gathering Bronze. I chose Death Knight for my second, as I really enjoyed playing one back during Wrath of the Lich King. I opted to go for Frost spec, though I grabbed the artifacts for both Blood and Unholy as well, because…why not?

The bonuses I had gathered from my Demon Hunter alone were enough to make that leveling experience quite a bit faster, and I only completed Highmountain before hitting 80 again. I rolled this Death Knight as a Tauren, because I have a fond spot for that race after all my years spent playing a big awkward cow man, and Highmountain seemed perfect for a Taurent to play around in. The zone overall was less memorable than Azsuna and Suramar, but I still enjoyed the overall look. The extreme verticality of the zone was somewhat annoying at first, as I could burn all of my mount’s vigor just trying to gain height, but the little demons flying around that you can mow down for an extra few bronze and a vigor bubble helped immensely.

Fortunately, while Highmountain did not blow me away, the Order Hall campaign for Death Knight was an absolute treat. Demon Hunter was good, but I did not have any real connection to the people I was working alongside. Being on a Legion spaceship and assaulting Legion worlds was great, but with Death Knight I was back in Acherus alongside NPCs I had spent countless hours doing quests for back in my Wrath of the Lich King days. The hunt for the Four Horsemen, raising well known characters from WoW’s past, all of it just felt so, so good.

Of the two, I ended up enjoying Death Knight a good deal more than the Demon Hunter, both the Order Hall campaign and gameplay-wise. I tinkered with Blood a bit, and “tanked” a few dungeons just for giggles. Those quotations lead me to one thing that I cannot firmly put in the con column for Remix, but has led to some odd times.

Due to the absurd power level of everyone playing, dungeons are negligible. From what I have read, people are soloing the hardest tier of dungeons, and can eventually do raids solo with enough of the Remix stat boosts. Bring a full party of five, and the dungeon becomes a mad dash to tag mobs before they melt. If your dungeon has a Demon Hunter as the tank? Good luck keeping up. At this point, my queue times are longer than the actual dungeon itself takes. So far, I have been knocking them out here and there for quests, but not really prioritizing them as the leveling process has been taking up most of my focus.

My intention originally was to level one or two characters to see all the zones, mess around with some of the various Remix specific mechanics, and move on. Now? I am hooked. Each character leveled only adds more fuel to the fire, and it feels like shoveling coal into the boiler of a runaway train. Each class is awarded a color shifted version of their Class Mount upon reaching level 80, and while yes, I could purchase them for Bronze, it just feels better to do the actual leveling. In addition, there are some classes I truly have no real attraction to, so why not bang out a quick level 80 there while it is so absurdly accelerated.

I acknowledge that this may very well contribute to quicker burnout, as I may end up blowing through all the classes and grinding my WoW hype down to nothing, but on the flip side, I am very much someone who likes to strike while the iron is hot to take advantage of my ever shifting whims with hobbies.

Will I burn out completely, leaving only a fel fire ravaged husk? Or will this only serve to prolong my enjoyment and push me to dive deeper into the depths of Azeroth to see what is on offer?

Who knows. All I can say for now, is that seeing the numbers go up on the Legion Remix tracker I keep open is the exact dopamine hit that I have been craving. My last activity when logging off for the night is to update my characters on Completionism.com, and I’ve spent more than a little time while sitting at work browsing there just to see what thing I want to focus on next.

With Demon Hunter and Death Knight out of the way, I believe my next class will be Druid. I am very curious to see their Order Hall and the class story.

Next time: Fur, Feathers, and Fel Residue (A Druid’s Life in Legion Remix)

You Are Not Prepared (Diving Into the Legion Remix)

Reeeeeemix!

It is finally time for the Legion Remix, and despite having not played the expansion during the original launch, I have been really looking forward to this one. During my research into what expansions people enjoyed and reading different tier lists, Legion was almost always rated highly. That kind of overwhelming praise for an expansion after the “golden age” of WoW had to mean that something good was going on.

As I have never played Legion, and never played a Demon Hunter, that seemed like an absolute no-brainer. I went with Horde for Warlords of Draenor, so I figured why not swap and see the Alliance (eww) side this time around.

And so, Grizzlefel, the Night Elf Demon Hunter was born.

It turns out that I was, as Illidan would so graciously remind me, not prepared. The Remix portion of this event was no understatement. Not five minutes after creating a character I was speaking to a member of the Infinite Dragonflight, who coincidentally look like the Taken from Destiny, and was given my artifact weapon after a short quest. I chose to go with the Havoc spec, and I really enjoy the look of these warglaives. The pacing here was a little odd to me, as they give you your artifact weapon here, but no sooner do you finish the intro than you are given what seems to be the actual quest that would have unlocked your artifact weapon initially. If you choose to pick the same one here, so in my case the glaives for Havoc spec, you can take them back to the blacksmith who made your fake/replacement artifact and have it broken down.

At the same time, I was given access to both my class Order Hall, and the Infinite Bazaar. I popped into the Infinite Bazaar to browse and pick up quests, and woo, buddy, is there a lot going on. So many vendors, with so many neat old mounts, pets, toys, and gear sets. The mount vendor alone has seven pages of mounts for sale. Each class has a class-specific mount they can purchase for 20,000 bronze, the Remix currency, or you can get it for free by leveling a class to 80. I will likely focus on getting a handful of these through leveling, and the rest with Bronze.

Unfortunately, at this point I have next to no Bronze, so I went back and found my way to my Class Order Hall. For Demon Hunters, this just involves leaping off of Dalaran and gliding to a nearby tiny island with a portal to what I assume is a Burning Legion spaceship that we have commandeered. Order Halls seem to have replaced Garrisons, in that you have a table where you can send Followers on missions, pick up quests to do, and hang out away from town, but Remix seems to have adjusted how they work from what I can tell. I was given two Followers within the first couple quests, but when I was told to use the mission table and send them out I was interrupted and told that the Infinite Dragonflight would just be skipping time ahead. This repeated multiple times for quests that appeared to be based on Follower missions. After a bit of poking around, it seems that this was done to remove time-gated content that would otherwise have required you to complete missions at the table before you were able to progress.

While the Garrison allowed you to build out certain buildings, that seems to have been removed in the Order Hall, and instead of being an area solely for you to hang out in like the Garrisons, Order Halls will have you bumping into all kinds of other members of your class.

Overall, this seems like a really neat addition, and one I am thoroughly enjoying. If this level of effort was put in for each class, the Order Hall seems like a great addition to play into each class’s fantasy. Not only are you hanging out in a clubhouse designed specifically for your class, you are there alongside famous members of your class from WoW’s history, and completing quests that fit into your class story.

I was given another quest to go and grab the artifact for my other spec, and after knocking that out along with a few other Demon Hunter quests, I started getting the hang of my new demonic edgelord. A double-jump, eye laser, and periodic demonic transformations has made for some pretty fun gameplay. A few of the abilities feel a little odd, but overall the gameplay feels fairly fluid. Almost a little too fluid. Backflipping, a dash with two charges, double-jumping, gliding, it seems that every bit of mobility was packed into one class, alongside moves that let me blink around like an anime Samurai. All together, very fun, but also makes me feel like a teenage weeb.

Much like Chromie Time, I am leveling so fast here that I assume I will only be able to see two zones or so before hitting level cap, especially with the Remix specific quests that promote doing World Quests and Dungeons. On top of that, completing the Research quests gives you a stacking XP buff. I can see why people were saying that later in Remix you could fully level a character in just a few hours.

Initially, I focused on Azsuna, before moving over to Suramar. While Azsuna was enjoyable, nothing particularly stood out that much to me, but Suramar was a treat. Learning the history of the Nightborne, helping them establish a foothold, and supporting the oppressed lower class in the city. The quests within Suramar city itself stood out to me, and left me wanting to roll up a Nightborne character. Ancient-Mana-addicted Nightborne were withering away due to manufactured scarcity by the upper crust. Being able to slip into town in disguise and provide them Ancient Mana to avoid withering away, steal Ancient-Mana-infused wine for an underground Robin Hood-esque figure that spends his time providing that wine to those in need, and taking out corrupt guards was a blast. While I enjoyed Warlords of Draenor, the Suramar storyline alone blew that entire expansion out of the water.

I am trying to avoid blowing through every zone and all the Remix event has to offer in a couple days, so I will leave off here, but I am very excited to see what other zones have in store.

Overall, Legion Remix has been a blast, and I find myself really looking forward to signing in and playing each night. There are so many mounts and other various rewards that I want to get with Bronze and so many achievements to pick up with having never playing Legion that it feels like there is always something to do whether I can sign in for twenty minutes or hours.

Next time: Rebirth and Remix (A New Chapter in Legion)

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

The time has finally come! In this post, we actually open the game! If you are one of the few people who read the previous posts, thank you for sticking with me. If you are just stumbling upon this, welcome! I am a middle-aged dad who is taking a trip down memory lane and trying to dive back into WoW after not seriously playing since Mists of Pandaria.

In the previous posts, I laid out the groundwork for who I am, what I am doing, and decided which expansion I will be playing through to start.

To recap, I will be starting a fresh character, and once I hit level 10 I will choose Warlords of Draenor as the expansion to level through up to 70, at which point I will then begin The War Within to see what current day WoW looks like.

So, without further ado, to the character creator!

As you can see, I have most of the Allied Races unlocked from my previous forays and attempts to get back into the game, but I have never actually used any aside from the Zandalari Troll. Spoiler alert: they run funny… and I hated it.

Allied Races as a concept are one big difference from the old days. I remember when Pandaren were added, and I had numerous Pandaren characters, both due to enjoying their derpy selves and being a contrarian with everyone bashing them as “Kung-fu Panda” characters. Additionally, the graphics have had quite the overhaul. According to Google, Allied Races began to be added in Legion, and the graphics update took place with Warlords of Draenor. Fitting that I will be starting with WoD then.

Ok, grandpa, enough stories about the good old days, get on with it!

Ok, ok, character creation time. Step 1, pick a Race. Sort of? Certain Classes can only be played by specific Races, and while that has opened up significantly since WoW launched, it is still something to take into consideration. Racial passives have always seemed to be purely flavor, outside of maybe being useful in PvP? Either way, they do not affect my decision. Unless! Some of these Races have bonuses to crafting. I do like crafting…

Anyways, my very first character back in 2005 was a Dwarf. A Dwarf Rogue to be specific. Eventually, I made the move to the correct faction, the Horde, and settled on a Tauren Shaman. While a large portion of the Horde tend to be very warlike (looking at you, Orcs and Undead), Tauren always came across as a more peaceful Race who are in the unfortunate position of looking like bulls. Over the years I have had characters of almost every Race, though I was never a fan of Goblins or Gnomes. Not a fan of being tiny, I guess. The logical choice strictly for “newness” would be Dracthyr, but I can’t say I am a fan. If you could be a ripped dragon, sure, but the lithe little draconids do not really appeal to me.

My first inclination was Mag’har Orc as I would be playing through WoD, and I believe they came from Draenor. I am far from a lore master, as you will soon realize. Upon further consideration, I realized that might be kind of odd as WoD would be the first place you meet the Mag’har from my understanding, and to then just show up with the people from Azeroth and have no one acknowledge it might be odd. Alternatively, these may be the orcs from Nagrand in TBC, but honestly, I don’t feel like looking it up.

After clicking through a little more and perusing the various options, I eventually settled on Highmountain Tauren. I know, reaaal unique for someone who predominately played Tauren before, but come on, they look like a Moose minotaur. A mooseotaur? Whatever, they have cool horns.

So, Race selected, on to Class. Right out of the gate, we can rule out any Class that is tied to a specific expansion, as it seems it would make the most sense to use that Class during their associated expansion. Of the existing Classes, that would be Demon Hunter (Legion), Evoker (Dragonflight), Monk (Mists of Pandaria), and Death Knight (Wrath of the Lich King).

Four down, nine to go. I typically do not enjoy playing pure caster cloth wearers, so that rules out Priest, Mage, and I guess Warlock, though I have enjoyed it in the past due to the pets. Despite starting as a Rogue back in the old days, I have never really enjoyed that Class either, though I did hear that it got a new spec in Legion or something where they get a gun, so that could be fun.

At this point, the potential options are Warrior, Hunter, Shaman, Paladin, and Druid. I mostly tend to lean towards hybrid Classes that can heal fairly well as I prefer to play solo and goof around in the overworld, and those hybrid Classes are more than capable of holding their own. This would push us towards Shaman, Druid, or Paladin. Of those, Shaman was my first love, Druid has always been enjoyable due to their flight form, and Paladin fits the big beefy boi in heavy armor part of my Class fantasy.

Honestly, I will likely end up leveling more than one character, as from what I understand Chromie Time levels you so quickly that you rarely get to experience a whole expansion, and I want to see multiple of the expansions. Not to mention I may want to see both the Horde and Alliance side as well depending on how things shake out. So, with three Classes lined up as potential prospects, it felt like a no brainer to just pull the trigger with the knowledge I would play the others fairly soon anyways.

Drumroll please! Meet Grizzlebeard, Highmountain Tauren Shaman, ready to strike out into Warlords of Draenor and experience the alternate reality where all of Outlands wasn’t turned into a demon tainted hellscape!

Next time: Through the Dark Portal… Again (First Quests in Warlords of Draenor WoW 2025)

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

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).