world-of-warcraft – 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)

So Long, and Thanks for All the Garrisons (Wrapping Up Warlords of Draenor)

At this point, I have finished the Warlords of Draenor expansion, in that I have completed the story and hit level 70. I ended up doing a small bit of story in the Spires of Arak zone and then heading to Nagrand, which had been my favorite zone of The Burning Crusade. This wrapped up the expansion’s story as we fought against ogres and more Iron Horde, and eventually had Thrall face off with Garrosh in a pretty epic cinematic. If there’s one thing Blizzard can consistently deliver on, it is fantastic looking cutscenes.

Having finished, I’d like to take this time to look back at what I enjoyed, what fell flat, and overall give my thoughts on the expansion as someone playing through it in 2025, some 11 years after initial release.

Before I dive in, I want to stress that this is not intended to be a review of Warlords of Draenor. I am replaying these expansions well after their initial release, and many of the things that may have been problems on release have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. Endgame is irrelevant at this point. Dungeon and raid difficulty, gear grind, and things of that nature become a non-issue when playing with Chromie Time. Since this is just a leveling route leading up to the current expansion, there’s no need to take part in endgame activities. So, all of that said:

Garrisons! I love my little camp, and I fully intend to keep returning to this periodically to continue building it up. By the end of my playthrough, all of my buildings are level 2, and level 3 seems to be locked behind doing a certain amount of work orders so as to be able to purchase the plans. We even got docks and our own navy!

This unlocked a whole separate mission table, so now in addition to sending out followers to level and bring back supplies we can also send ships out. A good portion of this appears to be gear tokens, which are fairly useless at this point, but I did get a pet from one as well.

The Stables were probably my favorite building so far, since they let me trap and tame numerous animals, and then, over the course of repeated dailies, turn them into mounts. I’ll always take more mounts.

In that vein, I will say the addition of flying to all zones without needing to train a flying skill does seem to have rendered ground mounts fairly useless outside of collecting. Outside of a few specific zones that do not allow flying, I can’t really think of an instance where I would summon a ground mount now unless I just really liked the look of it in town. Just a thought as a returner.

The story was…fine? I enjoyed the start: running pell-mell through Tanaan Jungle to destroy the Dark Portal and escape the Iron Horde, then fighting with the Frostwolf Clan to claim a foothold in Frostfire Ridge.. Gorgrond was an enjoyable zone to look at, and honestly the zones as a whole were very pretty and enjoyable to run around in, but the story quests seemed fairly bare-bones from here on out. I honestly lost track of Garrosh and Grommash during this portion of the story. Shattrath was right there in Talador, but the only story quest that sent me in was to fight off a few demons at the docks? Running a few dungeons and raids later solo I came across Grommash being tortured in Hellfire Citadel, and was more than a little lost as to how the Orc that threatened us prior was now chained up and being tortured by Gul’dan.

Maybe I missed some things, or this was explained in more context in dungeon quests along the way, but overall I would say the story left something to be desired. Fun to play through to see what happened to Garrosh after his stint as Warchief, and I am curious what the Alliance side looks like, but this story is not one I would rate highly compared to something like Wrath of the Lich King.

Leveling in general was an enjoyable experience, and I could see picking WoD again on another character to explore some of the zones more and see more of the random side quests. Since I was trying to see the most of the individual zones and story without over-leveling, I ended up avoiding most side quests and all the little world quests that kept popping up. I do not particularly remember these being a thing during Mists of Pandaria, and it is neat that WoW finally adopted the world quests/FATE system that Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have had.

Crafting was an odd one for me. As far as I remember, from launch up to Mists of Pandaria, crafting and gathering was a fairly straightforward process in which you mined ore, picked herbs, or skinned animals, then used those materials to craft certain items by clicking a button to craft once you had all the requisite materials. With Warlords of Draenor this seems to have changed somewhat, and a good portion of the crafting process involves turning in materials at your Garrison to complete Work Orders. Completing the Work Orders will allow you to gather other reagents for crafting. The crafting itself requires gathering books you can turn in to purchase recipes. The trainers themselves have nothing to teach you aside from the initial Warlords of Draenor crafting skill. Honestly, this setup has yet to click for me, and feels like a change for the sake of change. I’m very curious if this continued on through the next expansions, but as is, I did not spend much time leveling my professions in WoD due to a lack of enjoyment.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this return to WoW, and at this point am about a month into playing again and enjoying every second. This blog has helped immensely as it gives me a sense of focus and a reason to explore the game outside of it just feeling like an obligation. While I am sure that sounds bad, I feel like MMO players will understand hitting the point with a game where it begins to feel that you are logging in each day not because you really enjoy it, but because it has become habit or you fear missing out on dailies and so on. Something I may explore a bit in a separate series.

From here, Legion Remix is coming up, and I am excited to see the expansion that everyone seems to rate so highly. I really hope Blizzard carried on with the Garrison system, and that I will have another chance to carve out a little space to call my own. In the meantime, I plan to keep doing dailies from my Garrison to collect mounts and tinker around with running some old content to get mounts I may have missed over the years.

Next time: You Are Not Prepared (Diving Into the Legion Remix)

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

Before I dive into my adventures in Gorgrond, it looks like further details on the Legion Remix have arrived!

I’ll be honest, I have no idea what the majority of that means or pertains to, but I can read dates. So, we have until October 7th to wrap up this foray into Warlords of Draenor. I’ll touch on this more later, but at the pace things have been moving, that shouldn’t be too much of a rush.

Anyways, onward to Gorgrond! Right out of the gate, this zone is nuts. The makeup of the zone itself is nothing that appears to break the mold, but the sheer amount of massive named elite mobs here really lends itself to the feeling that you are in a land of storied giants.

Entering the zone, we meet the Laughing Skull Orcs, a group of murderous psychos who need some help against an equally murderous band of something called Goren. So, as is typical, we kill a bunch of guys, help them retake their village, and then we skedaddle.

Somewhere along the line here, a Goblin named Penny falls from the sky, tells us she’s from our Azeroth, and wants to join. Also, there’s a nice spot for a camp just around the bend.

This is where I learned that you apparently get a Garrison or foothold in each zone, and get to make a choice on how they are equipped or what bonus they provide to you. This is neat, because the idea of running back to Frostfire every time I needed to check something didn’t seem appealing. I picked an option, and got access to a Shredder that allows me to cut through large roots that may be hiding treasure or access to certain places. It is a neat little addition, and again seems like each zone has one. In Frostfire I could summon a few soldiers from the Garrison to help, now in Gorgrond I get a Goblin Shredder I can hop in.

Around this point, I realized I was on the second zone of WoD, and already pushing level 40. At this rate, I won’t be able to explore every zone and see the story before I end up hitting the Chromie Time cap, so I had to make a bit of a decision.

Do I continue knocking out all the quests in a zone to see everything, but potentially hit 70 well before visiting all zones, or start to focus solely on story in an attempt to stay roughly on pace with the leveling?

I decided to focus on the story for now, and I am glad I did.

As I mentioned earlier, flying from quest to quest I repeatedly see massive elite mobs stomping about or fighting, but it doesn’t appear that I am expected to interact with them at any point. Part of me is curious if this wasn’t something more of an endgame thing, or if they are purely set pieces. On the map, certain named ones are marked and it states that they appear periodically. My assumption at the moment is that they were intended as overworld bosses, but since no one does them anymore they just stay spawned and hanging out. As it is, they somewhat remind me of the Fel Reavers in Hellfire Peninsula back in TBC, and honestly, even if they are just there for show I still enjoy it. The zone overall feels like a wild, untamed jungle with these massive creatures who seem to have their own lore centered around how they returned life to the barren wasteland that the zone had been in the past.

I continued to quest my way through, focusing solely on story quests now, and tried to remember to take little trips back to my Garrison to send my Followers out on missions. From what I have seen so far, there are three possible rewards from these missions: Follower XP, XP for me, or materials for my Garrison. Being able to check in once or twice a day and see these Follower missions completed for small rewards is neat, and just adds another layer of mechanics to the Garrison itself.

Somewhere along the line here, I traveled to Ashran to turn in a book for a Garrison plan, and had a quest to upgrade my Garrison as a whole to level 3. I managed to scrape together enough gold and resources for this upgrade, and it seems to have opened up numerous building slots, more quests, and a heck of a visual upgrade.

With the new building slots I added a Trading Post, some sort of pub, barracks, and the coolest one of all…a Menagerie. I promptly upgraded this to level 2 after I realized I can just purchase the plans for these higher tiers from a guy next to Gazlowe. Battle pets are something I wanted to tinker with a bit more during this stint in the game, as it was something I enjoyed a little back in the day but did not devote much extra time to. The Menagerie looks like it allows me to battle an elite Battle Pet or something similar for a daily quest to get pet rewards. The first one absolutely destroyed me, and I will definitely need to do some research on how this all works before I take another stab at that.

Returning to questing, I realized that Gorgrond was a fairly short zone if I focused solely on story, and I was pretty quickly sent off to Talador. From the map, this looks to be where Shattrath City is located, which is interesting since it was in a gloomy forest back in TBC. In this alternate universe, Talador is a pretty forested zone with Draenei villages dotted throughout, though quite a few appear to be on fire at the moment.

The first place I visited was Vol’Jin’s Pride, our base of operations in Talador. I had honestly forgotten about Vol’jin replacing Thrall as the Warchief, and it was neat to see him hanging out at our random little fort here in Talador. It didn’t take long though before I was sent back over to rendezvous with Thrall and Durotan, and we took the fight to the Iron Horde. From fighting our way through swarms of Iron Horde Orcs as they landed on the beach, to confiscating an experimental shredder, all the way to storming some docks to attack a super weapon, this was a pretty fun chain of quests.

I am not super sure who the large orc was that we battled for the super weapon, or what said super weapon actually was since it just looked like another cannon on a boat, but honestly if Thrall says smash, I smash. Khadgar did some magic and teleported us around (in the most circuitous way possible), we fought against what looked like a Deathwing version of an Iron Horde Orc, and he absolutely destroyed our whole little group. After we beat on him a bit, he laughed at us and detonated, making it look like everyone was wiped out.

When it looked like the dream team had been completely defeated, there was a pretty epic cutscene where Khadgar gave the order to fire the giant cannon at the boat carrying Blackhand and all of our friends, but he stopped short at the last second upon seeing a flash of holy light. Our Draenei buddy and Durotan were still kicking, and worked together to bring Blackhand down. Durotan chucked one of his axes to the Draenei, and she called down the light to bury the axe in Deathwi…I mean Blackhand’s neck. The tough bastard didn’t quite go down, but Durotan followed up with an attack using the Draenei’s goofy crystal warhammer to drop him. Khadgar gave the order, and the weapon fired what looked like a complete ripoff of the terrible Battleship movie (Sorry Rihanna).

Altogether, a really enjoyable questline, and set the stage for the rest of the zone. The town of Auchindoun, which I really thought was a dungeon or ruin in TBC that was much further south, appears to be a Draenei town under attack by Gul’dan. Throughout a handful of quests, I was conscripted to help push back demonic attacks, save some Draenei, burn some bodies, and eventually chase Gul’dan himself through a Warlock portal (which seemed incredibly ill advised). Another Draenei was able to hold the portal open, I dove through, and surprise surprise, there is Gul’dan ready to wreck me. He and his lackey summon a big demon, the whole group of Draenei and Blood Elves we’ve been helping throughout the zone appear to help, and we all take down the big bad. Popping through yet another Warlock portal, we return to Auchindoun to find that Gul’dan took the time while we were distracted to pop over and murder everyone, but was repelled because we foiled his plan to summon the big bad. Well, less that we foiled it, more that we just let it happen and killed said big bad. Close enough.

This all wrapped up Talador, and it was now on to Spires of Arak, the homeland of the Arakkoa. These hunched over little bird guys were all over Shattrath back in TBC, so it is neat to see them now, but that is where I will be stopping for this entry.

At this point, I am pushing 60 and hurtling headlong towards the end of what Chromie Time can do for me, but I haven’t really seen quests in two of the remaining zones, Tanaan Jungle and Shadowmoon Valley. Tanaan looks to be a zone that was intended for endgame, and is where we appeared to begin the expansion before finally reaching our Garrison. Shadowmoon Valley I have yet to see anyone mention when we’re fighting back the Iron Horde, so I am unsure when it comes into play.

By the time I finish Spires of Arak and Nagrand, I should have hit 70 pretty easily, and can see how I’m really feeling about this expansion. Honestly, at this point, I really don’t understand all the hate.

Lets see if the last couple zones change my opinion…

Next time: So Long, and Thanks for All the Garrisons (Wrapping Up Warlords of Draenor)

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)

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).