Classic

The somewhat recent release of Burning Crusade Classic has thrown all kinds of new flavors into the mix of feelings I am feeling towards World of Warcraft at the moment, some good, some bad.

For the good part, it has oddly really reminded me why I like the game and why I kind of still want to keep playing it, despite all of its flaws. Being somewhat more casual in classic than I am in retail, has meant that there is a greater feeling of freedom to doing things since the only real motivation is what I personally want to achieve and not what is required for some external reason, and also a lot less pressure to actually do things I might not want to do but feel in one way or another required to do the things I do want to do. Classic still has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to things like consumables, but the fact that I am playing it in a way that doesn’t necessitate those things to the same degree as retail makes it much easier for me to ignore those flaws if I want to.

Further, having the goals be that much more personal and also usually concrete things makes working towards them a lot more engaging, since it’s a lot easier to feel the progress as it comes along.

For the bad part, it feels like the biggest ill that has come from it isn’t even necessarily something bad in and of itself, but it feels like I am questioning a lot more why I am continuing to play retail at this point. It at this point feels like the game might be giving me more stress than it is bringing in joy and that seems like a obviously lopsided equation for what it is supposed to be, and while I would very much like to experience the new raid once more and progress it, I am simultaneously dreading all of the things that might be required to be done around that progress, not the progress itself

These aren’t exactly new thoughts, but merely things that having a point of comparison has once again brought to the fore, and I unforunately can’t really see any easy answers. There are reasons I’ve continued playing retail for as long as I have, and those are my guildies, and it feels very wrong to leave them high and dry so shortly before progress so quitting at the very least at this time is not an option, but it feels like continuing as is might be taking an unkown toll on me. At the same time, I fear that not continuing might be the even worse option, since it would provide me with an opportunity to retreat more completely into myself since there would be a certain lack of routine keeping me together, and while that routine can at times feeling frustrating in its limiting of what I have the freedom to do, it also helps ground me and keeps me doing the things I enjoy.

Another thing I fear, is that it feels like playing might have become a too big part of my identity, or at least how I self-identify, and changing who one is is a scary thing indeed.

As a astute reader may note, it is Wednesday and not Monday on the day this post comes out, and that is for a somewhat good reason: I’ve been too busy playing Burning Crusade Classic to make time for writing a proper post. Well, to be more accurate, I was too tired after finally getting to 70 Sunday evening/Monday morning to actually sit down and write a post—I still have the habit of leaving it to the last minute most of the time.

The journey of leveling itself, along with our first run of Karazhan on Monday, has been a fun one so far, even if towards the end of the leveling I was getting rather frustrated partially with my own unfounded fears of abandonment along with worries that I wouldn’t be able to level up in time to complete the attunement to participate in the Karazhan run.

I ended up mostly, or rather exclusively, leveling in a group, for the most part through dungeons, which suited me rather nicely since I once more picked up my priest and played her as a healer, so solo content wouldn’t exactly have been the most enjoyable to do. It actually felt rather nice being back on my priest in Classic after having recently spent a rather significant amount of time levelig a hunter there—which while enjoyable just doesn’t feel like home quite like playing a priest does.

Leveling in a group it turns out, is also a rather efficient way of leveling due to giving a rather decent chunk of reputation with the different factions in Outland, meaning I could simply buy at least two of the keys needed to enter heroic dungeons—I say at least, because I’m actually not sure where my reputation ended up on with Lower City, so I’m not sure if I could simply buy the key there, but I shouldn’t be missing much at the very least.

The heroics themselves, though I have only had time to complete two so far, have also proven fun, at least with the right people and mentality. It is definitely slower going when comparing it to current high-end content, but it feels somewhat difficult actually classifying it as distinctly hard content, more perhaps simply unforgiving. To be fair, I’ve been in there with relatively experienced players who know the dungeons fairly well, so there haven’t been too many surprises along the way, which is probably contributing a lot to that feeling. Still, so far I’ve actually rather enjoyed the difficulty level of the content, making use of my familiarity with it to actually enjoy it more than I think back in the day where the insecurities due to my lack of knowledge would’ve prevented me from actually enjoying what I’m doing even if my youthful arrogance at the time may have masked it.

Entering Karazhan again was something of a swell of nostalgia, and I think once again I ended up enjoying the raid more than I ever did at the time due to the knowledge I’ve acquired in the years between, especially of the layout of the tower itself. Not being afraid of going the wrong way and actually to a degree knowing my way around the place really helped me both with figuring out where in the raid we were and what was coming up next, but also in actually soaking up the atmosphere since I wasn’t as focused on not making some sort of mistake that while in the grand scheme of things minute would have probably ruined at the very least my evening back in the day.

Overall, in both gameplay and nostalgia, Burning Crusade definitely scores higher for me than Classic itself, and it has been really fun to go back and see the old things with more experienced eyes even if the whole experience of playing is rather different due to the way the landscape has shifted in the intervening years as well as how I’ve changed with time. Still, the game does to me stand the test of time of still being enjoyable, and I’m happy to share the experience once more with a group of friends.

I managed to find the Eye of Shadow in the auction house to a somewhat reasonable price of around 360 gold, and off I went to the Eastern Plaguelands in order to complete “The Balance of Light and Shadow” for the final part of the puzzle: the Splinter of Nordrassil. This was definitely the most difficult part of the whole ordeal: Molten Core is rather trivial and perhaps half the raid needs to be somewhat awake in order to get through it in a reasonable time and you just need to get lucky with the drop in order to get the eye from there; the Eye of Shadow mostly requires patience, either through farming or having enough gold; but this final part actually requires you to do something alone, or well, I did it alone at least.

To expand a bit on that, I saw some old comments saying other priests could actually help with the quest, as long as:

• they only helped by healing and not doing damage
• they also have the Eye of Divinity in order to see the NPCs
• they don’t move, since apparently even moving potentially triggers the failure state

There was another priest queuing for the quest after me, but he decided not to risk it and assist me and I managed to complete it anyway which was nice.

The quest itself is somewhat curious, waves of ghostly NPCs spawn that you have to keep alive while they get bombarded by skeletal archers as well as melee skeletons that spawn, the melee skeletons will also aggro you once you start healing so some way to deal with this is recommended, I ended up using Oil of Immolation which made rather quick work of them and saved me a lot of mana. I also saw recommendations to use Stratholme Holy Water but that feels somewhat overkill since one would need a group to farm it and the oil made short work of the skeletons anyway. What I definitely would recommend however is a couple of big mana potions, the quest has you pretty much constantly in combat and healing so you will probably be stuck inside the five second rule meaning mana will be a problem; using Renew worked well for me, downranked to rank three as well as max rank.

What makes this quest curious however, is that while you are essentially spothealing a raid, you don’t get any of the usual UI elements which you would normally use to do this and instead have to completely rely on the nameplates. What makes this somewhat more annoying are the debuffs which the standard nameplates don’t display meaning you do also have to keep an eye on the NPCs themselves in order to see if they are diseased or not—curing the disease quickly is vital since it deals quite a lot of damage.

Overall the quest proved a positive surprise since I’m not actually expecting to find much difficult content in Classic which was nice, though the biggest challenge being actual UI problems as well as proper consumable usage does dampen that somewhat. The unecessary waiting between tries forced by the 20 minute or so respawn of the questgiver is also somewhat disappointing but still a lot better than the original two hour one, that was actually something I was very happy to see has been changed in Classic—or maybe it was changed in one of the later patches, not sure, though a lot of old comments indicate the timer used to be two hours.

So the year is slowly coming to an end with the holidays approaching and we had our last raids on Sunday and Monday, retail and Classic respectively. There will probably still be some non-mainraid activity going on, potentially an alt raid on Friday and an optional Classic raid on Monday the 23rd, though it will be interesting to see how far we get since I’m assuming attendance won’t be especially high.

In the meantime, I think I’ll continue farming some transmog, with my current target being finishing the Naxxramas 25-man set. Only the gloves are still missing and they quite stubbornly refuse to drop, had an especially unlucky run yesterday with two pairs of set-gloves actually dropping from Sartharion but neither pair being the Priest ones unfortunately.

Another thing on the agenda will probably be finally getting the +15 achievement from mythic+, have somehow completely neglected that so far this season and it’s rapidly coming to a close so I’ll slowly be in somewhat of a hurry to complete it. Still, only 5 dungeons are missing so the bigger challenge will probably be finding the correct keys rather than actually completing the dungeons themselves, at this point in the season most of us are rather overgeared for +15 keys so they tend to go rather smoothly when we aren’t fooling around too much. I’ve also had a couple guildies mention they are happy to help, so getting the group together shouldn’t be a problem, it’s more the actually engaging and asking people that will be the “challenge” I think.

So that’s retail, as for Classic, I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled on the auction house since I got lucky and won the roll for Eye of Divinity on our previous Molten Core run which means I need the Eye of Shadow in order to do the quest for Anathema/Benediction.

Unfortunately, we actually somewhat recently transferred over from our overpopulated and Horde-biased server to a somewhat smaller server where we avoid both the rather long queues—an hour or two during the weekends and evenings—as well as the constat gank squads in the open world which is nice but the new server being smaller means both that the Eye of Shadow is somewhat more expensive here as well as a bit less available meaning it isn’t simply a quick matter of buying the trinket I do have to do some waiting. I did briefly try farming it with a guildie with no luck, unfortunately the droprate isn’t the greatest either and the mobs have a sufficient amount of health to make farming them somewhat tedious.

Still, I’m sure I’ll end up getting the trinket eventually, and probably still this year, but it is something of an unexpected setback in the sense of something I hadn’t considered while we were changing server.

All in all, I’m rather looking forward to this small lull in activity going forward, even if the two raids a week haven’t been exactly bad and actually quite fun so far, it’s still nice to have fewer things on the todo list for a while. Especially so considering 8.3 will probably be hitting sometime early next year, which means a lot more farming coming up with the cloak as well as new levels on the neck.

Yesterday we ended up doing something interesting in Classic, namely helping a guildie finish up their Paladin epic mount quest. Due to us all being much poorer back in the day, this was something I never did end up doing during the original release of the game and as such was something of a new experience for me.

Now, of course, me playing a Priest and not a Paladin I didn’t get see all of the quest, only getting some snippets here and there of the quests that we did in dungeons and even then I’m not sure I participated in all of the fun but still, it was interesting to see what all needed to be done as well as the Paladin-specific final event in Scholomance where we had to fight through waves of shades and finally a Death Knight in order to free the spirit of the horse.

This final event proved surprisingly interesting, mostly when the caster shades arrived since they spawned and started casting on the nearest person it seemed, leading to a close call with myself and another party member before I managed to shackle one while we killed of the rest. Aside from that though, the event wasn’t overly taxing though this was probably partially due to our somewhat strange party composition consisting of two healers—myself and the Paladin.

Everything before the final event was mostly in the category of “do the dungeon normally, but the Paladin needs some quest items or needs to activate something for a quest” which meant it wasn’t really overly interesting from an outsider perspective though doing the dungeons was fun as usual.

Still, it was all well worth the experience and fun and now our Paladin doesn’t get left behind while running to the raid since he too has a fast mount so that’s an added bonus!

So I managed to get myself a fast kitty in Classic, in other words the epic mount. It was actually surprisingly easy, considering how short a time Classic has been out and I haven’t really done any moneymaking activities in the game, mainly just ran dungeons. Sure, those dungeon runs were fairly successful and with a mage so my costs were low—not even water—but still, wasn’t expecting it to be this profitable especially consindering I played back in the day and was always pretty poor, always sitting around 50-100 gold.

Because of that, felt nice being able to achieve this in Classic, something I never managed back then only buying my epic mount while leveling in Burning Crusade though there I did later manage to afford the epic flying mount.

In general though, the epic mount seems much more common than back then, not sure if this is due to the patch we are playing or if players are simply that much more skilled or knowledgeable these days, I know that’s the case for me but it’s still interesting to see. What probably also helped me is that I’m just a lot more motivated to play the game now than I was back then somehow, and actually set goals and achieve things. My playstyle used to be a lot more aimless with several breaks which probably is what caused me not to achieve too much back then.

Still, with how seemingly easy it is to get the epic mount now, I would recommend it since the extra movement speed is nice even for someone like me who spends most of their time in dungeons or raids. It’s also one of the few sensible places to invest one’s gold I find, so that helps as well.

World of Warcraft Classic was released pretty much exactly two weeks ago by now, Tuesday morning at one in the morning. The launch uptill pretty much the last few days actually went surprisingly poorly considering how well Blizzard handled both Legion and Battle for Azeroth, with the game being unplayable for most people due to the queues on the servers. Basically if you didn’t log in sometime before midday you probably weren’t getting in in a reasonable amount of time which at times proved problematic for me with the queue being longer than the time until the next raid. I was rather disappointed to see this, since Blizzard had specifically deviated from the way the original game was launched and introduced layering in order to avoid this very problem, but apparently they didn’t go far enough with this approach.

Beyond that pretty much utter failure on Blizzard’s part, Classic has actually been a ton of fun and it has been interesting to see how differently people approach the game now that everything is a bit more well known than it was at the start as well as how the different pace of modern games seems to influence it as well. I think the most notable example of this are the “bombing runs” of dungeons that seem to really start when Scarlet Monastery becomes available and then continues in Zul’Farrak and later in Blackrock Depths. It seems to basically boil down to the Legion-style of large AoE pulls of packs which then get nuked down in order to level up quickly, not really doing the dungeons for the loot but for the experience. It is quite an effective method, especially with the amount of players on the servers since all of the outdoor content is very heavily farmed, so having your own instance to farm is quite a bit more efficient. I’m sure some of the professional levelers have more efficient methods of leveling, but for the more normal player like me this has been a very effective and fun way of keeping up the pace.

Doing the dungeons, it has also been interesting to see how my approach to healing in them has changed or rather stayed the same. I’m still trying to get in as much of my healing as possible through Greater Heal only, in order to stay as manaefficient as possible—the big difference to back in the day is that due to how big the pulls are I still end up running out of mana with this strategy, while that only used to happen when we had a really bad pull back in the day. Actually kind of used to pride myself on being able to do dungeon runs without needing to sit and drink, but that just isn’t realistic when you pull several packs and the tank is in need of pretty much constant attention.

Something else that’s a bit different this time around is that I’m now assining spell damage and healing a somewhat higher value than before, since it does seem to be one of those stats that no one really realized was good back in the day. I still really like spirit, but it of course doesn’t help much when my primary task is spamhealing the tank though that is getting to not be as important as we have moved into Blackrock Depths since we can’t quite do the pulls we did in Zul’Farrak and we also kite the mobs a bit more than before. Still, my higher priorisation of spellpower probably means I will need to start thinking about downranking at some point, something I purposefully avoided back in the day since I didn’t feel like stepping into the five second rule more than necessary was a good idea hence trying to only use my most powerful and manaefficient spell but spellpower naturally changes the HPM calculation on all spells.

Personal experiences aside, I also have to say, overall with the implementation aside from the queues Blizzard has been fairly successful keeping most things as they were along with some small interface improvements like the new raidframes which I don’t really mind since basically everyone used an addon for those anyway. There is a small list of things I’ve found so far that they’ve missed though:

• K was completely unbound instead of being bound to Skills like it used to be
• T was also unbound instead of being bound to auto-attack
• As introduced in Legion, you can’t buy partial stacks from vendors which at times is somewhat annyoing especially with water or the like
• Warlock pets despawn too quickly, making me unable to ressurect them

Now, admittedly, all of these are very minor things and the first two are easily fixed by going into the keybindings, but they were still things that stood out to me as deviations from the original.

The final deviation is of course the Battle.net integration and layering, but both of those were pretty much forseable so they’re not really worth mentioning—and layering is getting removed at some point in the future anyway so.

All of that summarised means I’ve actually been quite happy with Classic at the times I’ve gotten to play the game and this has lead me to putting in quite a significant chunk of time into the game which has been a rather welcome diversion from Azshara progression. Here’s hoping Blizzard sees this as a success as well and considers Burning Crusade servers since from the people I’ve spoken with quite a few of them would probably enjoy those even more it for many having been one of the best if not the best version of the game.

So Blizzard recently posted their plans for European Classic realms and their plan seems to be to only have International (English) realms which has made several people rather upset—it feels like a third or more of the comments on the English forum are in other European languages complaining about this decision—and while I can see where this decision is coming from it still to me too seems like the wrong one.

As we get closer to WoW Classic’s release, we thought now would be a good time to talk about our plans for Classic realms here in Europe.
We’ve prepared several realms, which will include Player vs Player, Player vs Environment, and Role-playing realms.
For Classic, we’re planning on not splitting up realms by language. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, we think that it’s the best starting point for WoW Classic. An exception will be made for the Russian language, which will have separate realms due to its reliance on the Cyrillic Alphabet. For technical reasons this will also mean Russian is going to have its own separate game client, similar to what happened in The Burning Crusade.
We think this approach will give players more freedom to move around to where they want, and find guilds and friends that best match their interests.

Taepsilum – Community Manager

Now, my mothertongue never had language specific realms so I started out playing on English realms and ended up on one where the inofficial language at least was my second language and this is probably what is going to happen on these realms as well—inofficial language servers or a mixing pot of several languages on the same server being spoken in the public channels—and I don’t quite see how that will be beneficial in the long run since there will still in effect be language specific server they will just be harder to find like it was for me back in the day.

It will also be a bigger problem in Classic than it would be in today’s game, since in Classic you are locked into the server you start on and can’t really transfer away or do anything cross-realm, so if you unknowingly roll on a server where the inofficial language is one you don’t speak you might be in for a somewhat bad time since communication will be considerably more difficult. In general, this decision seems to poorly take into account the diverse language landscape present in Europe and even in the case that it goes as Blizzard fears—namely there simply not being enough players on single language realms—it feels like the more sane option would be to then merge realms instead of creating a solution for a problem that might not even present itself. Alternatively, if merging realms is considered a bad thing by Blizzard—understandably so, since it does present problems with names and who gets to keep theirs—they have since Classic already developed the technology allowing multiple realms to be in the same pool and share guilds, auction house and so on completely separate from the other cross-realm features impelemented since. This would still allow for that server community feel that several people think is important since you would still have a limited pool of people you play with but would mean that you don’t get the naming problems you would get with merging realms.

At the same time, part of the beauty of the European community is exactly the diversity of language and being able to overcome the challenges the game presents despite that extra difficulty in communication and it does keep the opportunity open for people to enter into communities which don’t have their mothertongue as the primary language—exactly this happened to me on live, have been playing on German servers and learning the langauge for over two years now and without the exposure that cross-realm gave me to those German servers this would never had happened. So there could potentially be a big positive in a small amount of cases as a consequence of this decision, so maybe it will all end up good in the end.

All in all, I guess my feelings on this decision are rather mixed. It won’t overly affect me personally since I have already been in the position of playing on a realm where my language isn’t the primary language at a time where I barely knew any English so I know the situation will be manageable. Simultaneously, I can understand that people don’t necessarily want to have the extra stress of learning or using a new language while doing an activity that is supposed to be relaxing or fun. In the end, I think people will find ways and means around that if they are truly interested in playing Classic be that through inofficial language servers or in-game chat channels for specific languages and this will all be a smaller issue than the forums currently make it seem.

Classic servers were announced a long while ago at BlizzCon along with the Battle for Azeroth announcment. But I think that slowly my thoughts on them are starting to crystallize as someone who played on a private Classic server.

In the end I’ll probably check Legion out as well, though as usual it’ll probably be mostly to see the leveling experience and checking out the dungeons a few times. Sure, maybe I’ll poke my head in to LFR as well, but eh, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. Might as well watch some of the livestreams for that.

Me, 2015

How little I knew at the time.

Are Classic servers a good idea?

I think so, yes. There’s clearly quite a lot of pent up demand from them considering how much the community has been clamoring for them for a long time. Also considering that new private Classic servers keep popping up as old ones get closed clearly shows it’s something people are willing to work on to keep alive and something people want to play.

They also provide an outlet for people who love World of Warcraft and want to keep playing it, but have gotten tired of the current content or mechanics. Being able to play the original form might very well re-ignite their love for the game—looking at the quote above, that’s certainly what it did for me. Playing Classic on Nostalrius was what made me have another proper go at Warlords of Draenor and actually try to like it and learn the new mechanics. Here we are a couple of years later with Legion accounting for something like half of my /played on my main that I’ve had since Classic.

Sure that’s also down to Legion being a really good expansion and the people I’ve met while playing, but without Nostalrius and being able to play something I know I love I’m not sure I’d given Legion (and Warlords) the same chance.

What could go wrong?

The implementation. This is something Blizzard is extremely aware off, but it might still go wrong. The question is: what, if anything, do you change? Now with StarCraft: Remastered, they changed a few things: the lobby system for multiplayer (from what I know) is now integrated with the new Battle.net, Battle.net friends are now to a degree accessible in-game through whispers and the like, and finally the big obvious thing: the graphics.

Now the graphics along with better resolution support were the obvious change that people wanted with SC:R and that’s what they got and from what I know people are quite happy with that. With WoW however, the situation might be different since we have already gotten new textures and character models with expansions and they are not universally loved and would quite significantly alter the feel of the game. Resolution support is already up to par from what I know, since WoW is a 3D game anyway so resolution restrictions aren’t a thing in the same extent as with a sprite-based game. I personally would hope for updated textures in higher resolution with no model changes.

Another innocent seeming change might be Battle.net integration, I mean who wouldn’t want to be able to talk to their friends? At the same time, that was unavailable in Classic and actually really encouraged server communities. And if we have Battle.net, do we get cross-server group support? While it is a really nice feature to have, it does erode the importance of the server and the reputation one can build there. So seemingly innocent changes can come with big consequences for the feel of the game which makes the whole thing something of a mine-field which is probably why it has taken Blizzard so long to start working on this. I would like Battle.net integration in order to be able to keep chatting with people who aren’t necessarily playing on a Classic server but any cross-realm features beyond that I don’t think fit.

Then we come to the less innocent changes, like LFD and LFR. Both of those seem like a somewhat obvious “no way” to me, but at the same time they might be something people expect. And what about the LFG-tool, does that belong in the same category? It’s a lot more convenient than spamming chat channels but it also doesn’t allow for the same kind of spontaneous activity. Most of my dungeon runs in Classic came from chilling in a city and seeing some group going somewhere looking for more and me just deciding to join. That doesn’t really happen with the LFG-tool in the same way as I have to actively open the tool and decide what I’m looking for (the category if nothing else). I don’t really see a place for any of these tools on a Classic server, but we’ll see what Blizzard comes up with along with the community.

Am I going to play on a Classic server?

Now for the real question. I think the short of it is: no. That comes with some caveats however—am I going to at least try a Classic server? Yes, almost definitely. However I do not see myself playing on a Classic server long term at the moment as playing two MMOs at the same is just a huge time investment and I have kind of done most of the things I wanted to achieve in Classic.

Sure, there are things I never did that would be nice to achieve—like clearing the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas—however the path to those things would include doing all of the content I’ve done which would require regular raiding which depends on a guild. And I’m really enjoying only having three raid-days at the moment, introducing another guild with more raid-days is not really something I’m planning on. Now if the Classic servers get released at the end-lull of Battle for Azeroth where I only have one day a week of farm left, that might change. But I highly doubt Classic servers would take priority over the current expansion servers for me which would make it difficulty to do the content I’m interested in and enjoy.

Unless maybe I decide I hate the current direction of the game and decide to go back to something old and familiar again, but I hope I have grown past that and that I can be a bit less stubborn these days. Sometimes being stubborn is good, but when it’s preventing one from enjoying something one wants to enjoy it’s not very helpful.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Classic servers turn out and at least taking them for a spin—I’ll let future-me be the final judge and keep an open mind for now.

So quite a bit has happened since my last post, most notably the closing of Nostalrius where I had played. Admittedly, I did not end up playing much more since my last post, primarily due to the concern of something like closing down happening. And while Nostalrius was well managed I do still have a preference to play on the official servers even though the game in some aspects feels inferior.

I’ve ended up examining my prospects as far as it comes to joining a guild and while it is yet to be finalised will probably be joining a casual-ish raiding guild on my priest that is about to start in Hellfire Citadel Heroic, so far having downed one boss. If nothing else, it should give me a better feel on how I enjoy the current state of healing, considering I’ve yet to do any “proper” content since the revamp in Cataclysm though the signs haven’t been all that good, though the changes coming in Legion to Holy priests do seem promising. Mostly though, I’m just looking forward to getting some proper raiding in.

Pristine Realms

Now, the response provided by Blizzard on the backlash caused by the closing of Nostalrius and consequent community demand for official Classic realms did also provide an interesting though lamented idea for recapturing some of the things players at least alledgedly miss, namely community. That idea was Pristine Realms. Specifically, these would be realms where certain “quality of life” features would be disabled:

• LFD/LFR
• Heirlooms
• Character boosts, transfers
• Cross realm zones
• Recruit-a-Friend bonuses

Personally, I’m not too sure how to feel. It does remove several things I feel are problematic, however content would still be obsoleted at a unecessary pace due to catch-up mechanics like PvP gear or Tanaan/Timeless Isle and badges before them. Even as I say that, I have been leveling a warrior and quite enjoying being able to level at a quick pace through dungeons (at least until Warlords of Draenor content, at which point one is force out into the world to gear up grumbles), which wouldn’t be possible without LFD. So these features certainly aren’t without merit and I’m not sure if such realms would generate sufficient interest for them to stay playable without the cross-realm features. In the end, I’d be very tempted to participate, though having to give up my characters would be a somewhat difficult thing to bear. Another thing preventing me from enjoying unofficial servers as well.

Legion

On the matter of Legion’s current state, I’m not sure I have too much to say. I do look forward to the changes coming to Holy priests, specifically the new Word spells. Especially having a properly strong single target heal again is appealing. How I feel about the removal of Spirit as a stat I’m not so sure yet, on one hand it should keep regeneration from getting out of hand at the end of expansions necessitating more bursty damage yet it’s been a stat I’ve enjoyed being able to increase the most (less so with the changes in Cataclysm admittedly).

There was also a recent worry over the proposed changes to respeccing, namely: characters have a primary spec, changing from it costs an increasing amount of gold (up to 62g, a curious number) but changing back to the primary spec can be done for free. This functionality would be available anywhere, and dual-spec would be leaving us. Personally, I’ve generally been very attached to the spec I choose to play on a give character and am consequently not overly concerned over this change. At current gold rates, this also seems like a quite minor gold sink. To be fair, it is an extra cost incurred during raiding, as changing specs for specific bosses or even for clearing trash has become popular. It remains to be seen if this change would discourage such a change, potentially serving Blizzards goal of empowering class and spec fantasy by encouraging players to stay in spec. It’s an odd change in that it probably primarily hits the top and bottom end of raiders, as the top cares the most about optimisation while the bottom end probably needs the flexibility provided by hybrids the most. I’ll be watching with interest how this ends up playing out.

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In the end, there’s a lot of wait and see here with how Legion changes end up playing out and how I enjoy the (potential) guild I join. Hopefully it all ends well and there’s some enjoyable gaming on the horizon. For now, it remains to be seen.

So I did end up freezing my subscription again and it’ll run out on the 26th though I doubt I’ll be logging in before that. In the end what solidified it for me was dabblinga bit with a private Vanilla server again and noticing how much more fun the game felt even with all its flaws. It’s odd noticing how years of further development haven’t really successfully added all that much that would motivate me to play and rather conversely succeeded in taking some of those motivating factors away.

Anyway, I had played on this server before back in spring with a few friends, I rolled a priest (obviously). But then summer came and as usual put a bit of a damper on my gaming and I didn’t end up returning immediately during fall. Now though I’ve made somewhat of a more casual comeback, playing a bit at a time every few days and it’s been quite fun. A bit of questing and a Sunken Temple run is all I’ve managed so far, though now it’s looking like I’ll have to start doing some more serious dungeoneering as quests are starting to seem somewhat scarce. Though that’s probably a wise move anyways, as the dungeons are starting to drop gear that’ll be relevant at 60 anyway so I can gear and level up simultaneously.

As of yet I’ve no ambitions when it comes to raiding, mostly due to not being sure how much time I’m willing and able to dedicate to scheduled gaming. Hopefully I’ll have time for something, the server does seem to have a rather active raiding community so finding a guild shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Especially considering healers are usually in demand, though I’m not overly familiar with the class distribution on this server.

In the end I’ll probably check Legion out as well, though as usual it’ll probably be mostly to see the leveling experience and checking out the dungeons a few times. Sure, maybe I’ll poke my head in to LFR as well, but eh, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. Might as well watch some of the livestreams for that.