It’s been a while since I’ve talked about World of Warcraft, or any MMORPG for that matter. While I skipped Shadowlands entirely (I’m sure I’ll play through it some day) I jumped into Dragonflight not too long after its launch and started gradually chiseling away at its campaign. It was rarely a priority, and the amount of time I spent on it waxed and waned without much of a discernible pattern, often with massive gaps of no activity at all, as has been the way I’ve casually played World of Warcraft for many years now, with the major exception of the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, of course!
“Vibin’ in the Emerald Dream.”
You know, I don’t think I ever wrote about how that ended. To keep it short and sweet, in an amazing recreation of how a lot of WoW guilds probably ended back in 2004, and indeed have ended in many games before and since, my dozen or so guild mates (all coworkers!) found ourselves with differing levels of interest, different gaming schedules, and different playstyles, and as soon as we entered into the mid-late stage of leveling, when things really started to slow down, that lack of cohesion started to matter more and more, and we began to splinter. At first one or two people made the call to leave, and then our numbers continued to bleed. I think I quit not long after writing my one post about WoW Classic. I might have made it into my 50s, I don’t recall, but I hit one of the very same leveling walls I remember hitting back in the day, yet this time I simply decided I’d had my fill and that the experiment was over. No regrets, it was a fun little trip back in time!
Back to Dragonflight though!
This expansion’s big new feature, Dragonriding/Skyriding, kind of sucked at first, but as I got used to it, and of course as I leveled it up, it started to feel superior to the old way of flying. Challenging at times, yes, but also much funner when it all worked correctly. This is especially true now that Blizzard allows it anywhere, with any flying mount, and more recently, has removed the need to manage your vigor – this has dumbed it down a bit, for sure, but also makes it a lot less of a hassle, and therefore more appealing for casual travel. Dragon racing challenges are fun, even if they did kind of feel like extraneous, bolted-on content. I also loved all of the customizable mounts you unlock throughout the campaign, though I wish so many of their customization pieces weren’t locked behind reputation grinds and other endgame busywork. Such is life in Azeroth, though.
“Thar be dragons! and boy, do they have a lot of quests for you to do.”
Dragonflight also added the new Dracthyr race and its exclusive class, the Evoker. Of course, I had to play through their new introductory questline just to check them out. While I don’t think the Dracthyr are quite my style, the Evoker is pretty fun, and I’m sure some will love both. I’d recommend anyone playing “retail” WoW to at least try them out, if you somehow haven’t already.
The Dragon Isles and their new zones were really quite enjoyable. In many ways the variety of biomes, enemies, and storylines reminded me of my first playthrough of Wraith of the Lich King’s Northrend zones, although with a ton of added verticality to support Dragonriding shenanigans, of course. Part of that might be due to the return of some old favorites, the Tuskarr and the Centaurs, having major parts to play. In some ways it felt like a return to form to me, especially once you make it to the Ohn’ahran Plains and The Azure Span.
At some point I stopped to catch-up with all of the dungeon related quests I’d skipped while leveling, which happened to coincide with the addition of the new Follower Dungeons feature. This basically lets you bring a full party of NPC bots into dungeons, so now even the most asocial WoW player can at least play through the more story-relevant dungeons and complete dungeon related quests. I gave this a spin and I was delighted with how well it worked. Unfortunately, I later found out the hard way that because I’d reached max level, this feature was no longer available to me. I guess I’ll have to finish those quests when I can easily solo those dungeons or *gulp* join a PUG. That felt bizarrely punitive, though I believe this has since been changed, thankfully. Another new feature to help out us lowly casuals is “Warbands” which is just a catchy way of saying that there is a lot more in terms of items and progress (reputation, various unlocks) shared account-wide rather than per character, similar to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Legacy system. About time!
“This random return to Dalaran’s sewers was certainly unexpected.”
Once I finally beat the main story quest (I lost a lot of steam when I finally reached the final zone, Thaldraszus, plus Plunderstorm is always a major distraction when it comes up) it was onto the areas added via seasonal patches. The Forbidden Reach wasn’t that exciting, but it had some cool quests and was kind of a fun diversion. The Zskera Vaults was a cool idea, but playing it so long after their release, the excitement to keep pushing through them just wasn’t there. Zaralek Cavern was also kind of neat, giving me major Planetside: Core Combat vibes. It wasn’t until Bel’ameth and the new Emerald Dream zone that I really connected to one of these new areas. Overall, a little boring, but part of that is on me as this seasonal content, even the meatier stuff, is design to keep players occupied during the current season, and don’t quite hit the same once their time has passed.
By the time I wrapped all of that up, The War Within had been out for a little while, so I continued right onto that expansion’s main story quest. TWW feels like much more of an iteration on what was done in Dragonflight than we typically see with WoW expansions, which I definitely prefer to throwing away most of the prior expansion’s systems and pretending like it never happened. Dragonriding is still here, as are its racing challenges. The crafting system is still more or less the same (unfortunately – I’m not a huge fan) and its talent trees were expanded upon instead of more dramatically overhauled. Likewise, Follower Dungeons and Warbands were iterated on quite a bit, becoming more standard features of the game. In fact, one of TWW’s biggest (and best) new features feels like it was built on top of Follower Dungeons.
“The majesty of Hallowfall!”
Delves are basically little micro-dungeon instances scattered all over the Isle of Dorn and Khaz Algar. Most people will run Delves solo, choosing only to bring your NPC companion, Brann Bronzebeard, though you can run them with up to 4 people. There are a lot of challenges related to grinding through Delves, which can lead to an endgame gear progression track, amongst all kinds of other goodies. There’s also quite a bit of variation and customization in the system – beyond the huge number of delves, each has multiple, sometimes drastic variations, quite a few tiers of difficulty, you can level and customize Brann in various ways, etc. I had quite a lot of fun running Delves, and while I won’t go into describing every mechanic around them in detail, I did progress quite far, using them instead of my usual PVP grind for catching my gear up once I hit 80. Between my own experience and what I’ve heard and seen from others, I’d definitely call them a massive success, and thankfully, they appear to be a mechanic that is here to stay for now, already confirmed to be coming back with Midnight.
The only thing I didn’t enjoy about TWW’s campaign was its odd habit of locking various things behind completing the main story quest. For instance, at one point I really wanted to create an Earthen alt, but I had to beat the campaign to unlock it. Okay, that’s somewhat understandable, but those delves I was loving so much? I couldn’t access higher difficulty tiers nor the “bountiful delves” which have better loot until, yep, beating the campaign, despite being max level for much of the time. And I have to say, the main campaign of both of these most recent expansions felt far longer than I wanted them to, despite how much I enjoyed them overall.
“I could run around in a mech killing elites for hours on end. In fact, I did.”
TWW’s campaign was filled with all kinds of cool moments and areas. I loved the Dwarven inspired architecture of the Isle of Dorn, the city of Dornogal, and the Ringing Depths. Hallowfall and the Arathi Lamplighters were an unexpected, extremely cool surprise. I can’t say that I loved Ajk’kahet nearly as much, but as a Warcraft 3 fan it was cool to see Nerubians get so much more attention. The seasonal patch zones were really cool this time around too. For some reason I got absolutely addicted to Siren Island – I’m not sure why, it just clicked with me and I ended up almost 100%ing it. I don’t think I’d had that much fun since tooling around on Mechagon Island in Battle for Azeroth. It should come to no surprise, but The Undermine, the huge Goblin city zone, is an absolute trip. While I didn’t obsessively grind it like I did Siren Island, I really loved how much detail went into it – speeding around in my G-99 Breakneck while some sleazy jazz plays in the background, passing by all kinds of bizarre Goblin robots, trash blowing around in the streets – there’s nothing else like it in all of WoW. K’aresh, the Ethereal zone, was neat but ultimately didn’t do much for me. Perhaps I just had a sour taste in my mouth because I accidentally triggered “The Warning” questline which locked me out of doing it’s main storyline in the proper order.
I wrapped up almost all of the TWW storylines and side quests the very week the Midnight pre-patch came out. It’s a good thing too, as my Outlaw Rogue feels a lot less punchy after its stat squish and talent changes, and the patch itself has been a bit rocky, with broken add-ons, performance issues, and the occasional disconnect. Nothing new for these huge expansion pre-patches, I guess, so hopefully this has all shaken out before the launch of Midnight. As usual, I’ll probably wait quite a while to dive into it to find out for myself. In fact, I believe I’ll be taking a break from WoW for quite a while.
“If you like Warcraft’s Goblins, you’ll loooovvvve Undermine.”
I should mention that I’ve played quite a lot of other MMOs in recent years, but I’ve yet to write about many of them here mostly because I’m planning to revisit almost all of them sooner or later. Next on that list was New World, which I played a bit at launch and haven’t been back to since. I liked it a lot at the time, and I was already planning on going back into it to see how it has shaped up, but now that it is closing down in early 2027 it seems I have no choice but to make that a priority. 🙁