Legion

I'm not quite halfway there, but I'm feeling pretty good about having posted every day so far.  Continuing the theme of discussing the various expansions, today's topic is Legion.

Legion is the expansion that saved WoW for me, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. I came out of the Warlords drought about as close to done as I've ever been, logging in out of habit more than want, watching a garrison table like a guy checking a mailbox he knows is empty. Then Legion dropped, and within a week I remembered why I'd given this game something like nine years at that point. It was WoW at full strength, firing on every cylinder at once, and it showed up right when I needed it to.

The Broken Isles were the best set of leveling zones they'd built in years. Every zone told its own story and told it well, Val'sharah and Highmountain and Stormheim all pulling their weight, and then Suramar sitting on top of the whole thing as this slow-burn masterpiece that they kept feeding you across patch after patch. The Burning Legion invasion actually felt like an invasion. High stakes, real losses, a world that felt like it was genuinely under threat instead of just waiting for the next patch cycle.

But the thing everyone remembers is the artifact weapons, and they earned it. For the first time your weapon wasn't a slot you upgraded and forgot. It was your class fantasy made physical, a named legendary you carried the whole expansion and poured your progress into. On the warlock that meant carrying around a weapon with actual history and lore stapled to it, leveling it, unlocking its traits, tricking it out with relics. It made a character feel like a character instead of a rack you hung gear on. I got attached to the thing, and I say that fully aware of how ridiculous it sounds to be attached to a pretend scythe.

The artifact weapon had a natural home, too, and that was the Class Order Hall. Legion made you the leader of your entire class, all of you, every warlock in the game running the same fantasy of commanding the Council of the Black Harvest out of a hidden pocket dimension. You recruited champions, sent them out on missions, ran a class-specific campaign that actually respected the lore of what a warlock is supposed to be. It's the most seen my class has ever felt. For one expansion I wasn't just a guy playing a warlock, I was the warlock the other warlocks answered to, and that kind of class identity is exactly the thing WoW usually sands off in the name of everybody being interchangeable.

I was never sure that all the attention from other warlocks was really deserved given I had just spent the past two years sitting around my garrison like some netherworld hermit, but I got over it.

Legion is also where Mythic+ arrived and quietly changed the game forever. Now, I've never been the guy pushing high keys, that's not my lane and never has been. But even from the outside I could see it was the missing piece. Suddenly there was a whole progression ladder for five-person groups that didn't require raiding, endlessly repeatable, always another rung to climb. Half the modern game's endgame grew out of that seed. They planted it in Legion.

What made it all land, though, wasn't any single system. It was that they came back. After Warlords taught me that Blizzard could take my favorite game and just leave it in a ditch for a year, Legion was the patch cadence never letting up. New content kept landing, the story kept moving, Suramar kept unfolding, and then Argus at the end to close the whole thing out. They went from the longest drought in the game's history to the steadiest run of updates I could remember, back to back, and the whiplash of that is a big part of why Legion sits so high for me.

I did what I always do. Leveled at my own pace, ran normals and LFR, poked at the world quests way longer than was strictly reasonable, never went near the cutting edge. And I had a better time doing it than I'd had in years, because the game around me was finally worth showing up for again.

The altoholism also got a little more out of control during Legion for me.  I finished the character of each class of each faction plan, and then started on a second set of Horde alts, so that by the time Legion was finished, I had 33 max level alts

If you bounced off WoW during the Warlords drought and never came back, Legion is the one you missed. It's the comeback the game needed and, honestly, the one I needed too.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Delves

Delves are the best thing Blizzard has added to WoW in years, and I say that as someone who has been around long enough to be suspicious of every new system they roll out. Usually the new shiny thing is a grind wearing a costume. This one isn't. Delves are the first piece of endgame in a long time that was built for the exact player I actually am, and I didn't realize how much I'd been waiting for it until it showed up.

Here's the pitch. Small, self-contained dungeon-shaped chunks you can run solo or with a couple of friends. They scale, so a tier 1 is a walk and a tier 11 will absolutely end you if you get sloppy. You bring a companion along who levels up over the season and fights at your side. It started with Brann Bronzebeard back in War Within, who you could spec to either patch you up, tank or add damage. These days, in Midnight, it's Valeera Sanguinar riding shotgun instead. Either way the point is the same, a partner who makes solo not feel quite so solo. That's it. No group finder anxiety, no linking your score to a stranger who's going to leave after one bad pull, no signing up for a schedule. You log in, you run a delve, you get something for it.

And the something actually matters. That's the part that still surprises me. For most of WoW's history, if you weren't raiding or pushing high Mythic+ keys, the game quietly told you the good gear wasn't for you. You could do LFR and the occasional normal and cap out somewhere respectable but distinctly second-tier. Delves broke that. The coffer keys, the Great Vault slot, the gilded stuff at the higher tiers, it's real gear at a real item level, and I earned every piece of it by myself on my own clock. A solo player finally has a lane to competitive gear that doesn't run through 19 other people.

For the warlock plan this is the whole ballgame. I've parked the alts, I'm going all-in on one character for once in my life, and delves are how that character stays geared without me having to become a raider at 56. Renown, a steady delve habit, the vault every week, and the blues slowly get replaced with things I'm not embarrassed to be wearing. Except for pants.  Pants never drop for me.  From anything.  

It's a progression path that fits the amount of time I actually have, which is not a sentence I've been able to write about WoW's endgame in about a decade.

They're not flawless. The companion AI does things that make me want to reach through the screen and smack it upside the head. The difficulty spikes between tiers can be rude if you're undergeared and stubborn, which I always am. And there's an end boss at the very top that rotates with the seasons. Zekvir was the first, back in War Within, the one who taught everybody that "solo content" doesn't mean "easy content." Nullaeus closed out the just-finished first season of Midnight and carried on the fine tradition of separating me from my repair money. Whoever's sitting up there, the lesson lands the same way.

But none of that touches the core of it. Delves respect my time and they respect the fact that I mostly play alone these days. They gave the solo, semi-committed, one-character-at-a-time player a real seat at the table instead of a folding chair by the door. Nineteen years in to this game for me, that's not a small thing. That's Blizzard finally building something for the guy who's still logging in on a Tuesday night with 45 minutes and no group.

More of this, please. Fewer costumes on grinds.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is the expansion I think about when someone tells me WoW can't disappoint me anymore. It started as strong as any expansion ever has, and then it just stopped, and the way it stopped taught me something about what I actually want out of this game.

The opening was genuinely great. The intro on the Tanaan Peninsula, blowing through the Dark Portal in reverse, the leveling zones through Draenor, all of it hit. The old orc warlords were a fun hook, the questing was tight, and for a few weeks it felt like Blizzard had a real one on their hands.

Then there was the garrison. Your own base, your own little plot of Draenor, and on paper it sounded fantastic. In practice it quietly ate the game. Everything you needed came to your garrison. Materials, missions, followers doing the work for you while you watched a table. Why fly out to a zone when the zone comes to your doorstep? Why stand around in a city when your garrison has everything? I logged in, made my rounds like I was checking on a farm, made a ton of gold, and logged out having barely seen another player. The most social game I own turned me into a hermit, and it did it on purpose.

And then came the drought. Content dried up, the patches stopped landing, and we sat in that garrison for well over a year with nothing new before Legion finally showed up to bail everyone out. It was the longest stretch of nothing WoW had ever put me through. Some people feel the same way about Siege of Orgrimmar, but this one felt worse for me.  We've already talked about the insanity that I was trying during that particular long piece of content. 

A lot of people quit in that gap. I didn't fully quit, but I got as close as I've ever come, and I played a lot of other games.

My altoholism also made great strides during Warlords, and I was up to 20 different max-level alts by the end, and was very close to the goal of having a different character of each class AND each faction by the end.  I think it was just an alliance monk and an alliance warriro that I didn't finish.  But imagine having a garrison on all of those alts and doing all the various garrison chores on all of them every single day.  

Draenor is the cautionary tale. Great bones, a killer opening, and a flagship feature that isolated everybody and then left them there. I learned that I don't just want things to do in this game. I want reasons to bump into other people while I do them. Warlords is what it looks like when you take that away.

That's it for now!

Cheers!

Joar 

Where My Ideas Actually Come From

People assume there's a system. That after seventeen years of posting there must be a notebook, a list, some process where I sit down and brainstorm topics like a real content operation. There isn't. Except for this month for Blaugust.  This month, there definitely is.  In general, there really isn't.  The honest answer to where the ideas come from is messier and a lot less impressive.

Not even sure what this is

Most of them show up while I'm playing. Not while I'm thinking about writing. While I'm halfway through a delve, or standing at the mailbox sorting bags, and some small thing snags. A mechanic that annoys me. A feature I love that nobody talks about. A memory of an old zone that Cataclysm paved over. The idea isn't the post. The idea is just the snag, the little burr that won't come off, and if it's still bugging me an hour later, there's probably eight hundred words in it.

Frustration is the most reliable source, honestly. Some of my best posts started as me being irritated about something and needing to work out on the page whether I was right to be. Enthusiasm works too, but it's rarer, and it's harder to write well without tipping into gushing. Annoyance has edges. Edges are easier to write around.

The other big source is a screenshot. I take way more than I use. Every so often I'll be scrolling back through them, and one will remind me of exactly how I felt in that moment, and that feeling is usually the actual subject, with the game as the excuse to talk about it.

But most of the time I just talk about what I've been playing, what characters I've been leveling and how, and what I think about it.  A vast majority of my 640+ posts don't have any fantastic theme or subject.  It's just me talking about what I've been doing in video games.

What I don't do is force it. I said a few days ago that the fastest way to kill a blog is to turn it into a calendar you owe somebody, and this is the flip side of that. If nothing's snagging, or I haven't been doing much, I don't post. The ideas come when they come. My only real job is to notice them when they do, and to not talk myself out of the ones that seem too small. The small ones are usually the good ones.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Mists of Pandaria

Mists of Pandaria got laughed at before anyone had played a minute of it. Kung fu pandas. A whole expansion about kung fu pandas, plus a pet-battle system a lot of people immediately wrote off as WoW doing Pokémon. I remember the reaction to the announcement, and it was not kind. It also turned out to be one of my favorite expansions in the whole run, and I've never really backed off that.

The joke fell apart the second you actually got to Pandaria. The place was gorgeous. The Jade Forest, the Valley of the Four Winds, the Vale, all of it hand-built with a care that the goofy marketing completely undersold. And the pandaren weren't a punchline once you spent time with them. There was a melancholy running under the whole continent, this sense that fear and doubt were literal monsters here, that stuck with me more than most WoW stories do.

Even the pet battles I'd rolled my eyes at hooked me for a while, and I'm not proud of the hours I spent chasing rare critters around zones I'd already cleared. That's the MoP magic in miniature. The stuff that sounded dumb on paper was quietly some of the best-designed content they'd shipped.

I did what I always do. Leveled at my own pace, leveled a new panda alt, ran heroics and LFR, poked at scenarios, never went anywhere near the cutting-edge raiding. And I had a better time doing it than in expansions with far better reputations.

I also finally hit the goal of having a character at max level from every class during this expansion.  And then quickly moved on to starting on the same thing on the alliance side.  

Oh, and I did the rep grinds.  That was probably the least great part.  And I killed a lot of rares, which was another great addition to this expansion.

Mists is also where I pulled off the single most absurd thing I've ever done in this game, and I mean that as a compliment to myself. The expansion ended with the Siege of Orgrimmar, and Garrosh Hellscream waiting at the bottom of it. I killed him on a character of every single class. All of them. If the altoholism ever needed a monument, that's it, one dead warchief for every class in the game, most of it through the Raid Finder, one run at a time, over and over until I'd taken him down from every angle WoW would let me. Nobody asked me to do that. Nobody should. I did it anyway, and I'd do it again.  

It was also an expansion where I found myself getting oddly attached to and protective of Anduin Wrynn, which is kind of weird for a Horde guy, but he brought me some hope and stood up for what was right, and I got a little emotional about it.  Still have a soft spot for him, and he's been through some shit now.

Draenor was right around the corner and it would remind me how badly this can go. Mists was the opposite of that. It was WoW being confident and a little weird and completely committed to the bit.

If you skipped Pandaria because the trailer made you groan, you missed one of the good ones. I'll die on that hill, panda and all.

That's it for now! Cheers! Joar

Why I've Stopped Playing FFXIV

After a pretty solid week of World of Warcraft discussions, I thought I'd take today to being to toss in some discussions on other games.

I gave Final Fantasy XIV a real shot. Not a weekend, not a free trial I abandoned in the starting city. A couple of years, an actual subscription, a character and jobs I put genuine hours into. And I still stopped. This is my attempt to be honest about why, without doing the tribal thing where you have to trash one game to justify playing another.

And of course I did the altoholic thing, FFXIV style.  By the end of Endwalker, I had every job at max level on my character.

Because here's the thing. FFXIV is good. It's clearly, obviously good, and the people who love it aren't wrong. The story people rave about really is that well told. The community is about as friendly as any I've dropped into. The presentation, the music, the sheer care in it, all of that is real and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise.

And I embraced it for a long time and thought I'd found a new home after WoW disappointed me with Shadowlands.  But at the end, it just wasn't for me, and I think it comes down to two things. The first is the story itself, which is the game's biggest strength and, for me, its biggest wall. FFXIV asks you to sit through an enormous amount of narrative to get to the parts everyone talks about. I respect people who did it. I found myself skipping cutscenes I'd promised myself I'd watch, and once you're skipping the thing the game is built around, you have to ask what you're actually there for.  But at some point it just felt like I was moving my character from cut scene to cut scene instead of actually playing.

A second reason is that, in order to level alt jobs in FFXIV, you can't just go back to the beginning and start questing again.  Really the only way to do it is to do group content, and that just didn't fit as well with my play style.

The last is simpler and a little embarrassing. It wasn't WoW. Seventeen years of muscle memory means I sit down in another MMO and half my brain is comparing the map, the bags, the way abilities feel, to a game I already know in my bones. That's not FFXIV's fault. That's mine. But it's real, and it's why almost nothing else has ever fully stuck.

So I let the sub lapse, no drama, no burned bridge. I'd tell anyone on the fence to try it, honestly. It might grab you the way it grabs its people. It just turned out that it wasn't the replacement for WoW for me.

But when the next expansion drops, don't be surprised if you see me jump back in to try out the new stuff.  

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar 

Cataclysm

Cataclysm is the expansion that took the world I'd spent a few years in and rearranged the furniture while I was out of the room. Deathwing came up through the middle of Azeroth and broke it, and Blizzard used that as the excuse to rebuild the entire old world. Every low-level zone I'd leveled through a dozen times was suddenly different. That was the whole pitch, and it landed as a strange mix of exciting and unsettling.

I have complicated feelings about it, and I think most people who were around then do too. On one hand, the revamp was genuinely impressive. Zones that had been dull, disconnected quest-strings for years finally told a story, flowed properly, made sense. And they finally let you fly in the old world, which is the kind of thing that sounds small until you've spent hundreds of hours running around Azeroth on the ground. Two new races, Worgen and Goblin, and I rolled both just to see the starting zone, because of course I did.

On the other hand, there was a loss in it I didn't fully clock at the time. The old world I'd learned WoW in was gone. Not updated. Gone. The rough, sprawling, slightly broken 2004 version that pulled a lot of us in got paved over, and you can't go back and visit. Classic servers eventually gave people that, years later, and the fact that they were so popular tells you I wasn't the only one who missed it.

Cataclysm was also the expansion during which I joined the guild that I'm still in today, at least with my main Horde characters.  That alone has provided quite a bit of stability for me in the times since then.

It was also the expansion during which I started to get more deliberate about my alt leveling process.  I have tracking data from Cataclysm on my leveling times to max.  The average was around 24.7 hours.  I still didn't have a character of each class at max level, but I was only missing one or two by the end of the expansion.

The endgame gets a mixed reputation and I won't pretend I loved all of it. The heroics at launch were brutal, on purpose, and plenty of people bounced. But Cataclysm handed me something that mattered more to me than any raid tier list, and it's the reason I'll always have a soft spot for it. This is the expansion where they added the Raid Finder, LFR, first bolted onto the Dragon Soul raid near the end. For a guy who was never going to schedule his life around a raid roster, that was the door finally opening. I could walk into current raid content, see the fights everybody was talking about, and put Deathwing down myself. And because I'm the way I am, I didn't see it once and move on. I ran it across a whole stack of characters, watching the same raid unfold from behind a warlock, then a paladin, then whatever else I had parked at the cap. LFR is the thing that let me actually experience this game's raids, and it started here.

Cataclysm was ambitious in a way WoW rarely is. It also spent its ambition redecorating the past instead of building the future. I respect it more than I enjoyed it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

The Altoholic Confession

I have a main. An undead warlock that I've been playing for over 19 years, and never seriously wavered. And I still can't stop rolling alts. Both of those things are true, and if that sounds like a contradiction, welcome to my armory page.

The 52 characters that I leveled to max in War Within

Here's how it goes. I'll be perfectly happy on the warlock, chipping away at whatever the current thing is, and then I'll see a class and race combo that I don't have, or a class gets reworked, or Blizzard releases a new class or a new allied race or something. Next thing I know I've got yet another character plugging along towards max level. I've leveled the same early zones so many times I could quest them with the monitor off.  And that eventually ends up being true for the leveling process for each expansion.

And it has gotten completely insane.  Going into midnight I had 52 different max level characters.  I hadn't been anywhere close to that since Battle for Azeroth, where I think I finished with 43.  And it's spread across everything.  The most of a particular class that I have is warlock at 7 and hunter at 6, druid at 5 and then every other class is either 3 or 4.  Evoker only has 2 at max level, but I had started a third and was working on it when midnight dropped.  So 53 alts in total.

The honest reason isn't that I want to master every class. I'm not chasing anything. It's that a fresh character is a fresh start with no baggage. No half-finished reputations, no bags full of stuff I'm afraid to vendor, no sense that I'm behind. Level one is clean. Level one is possible. There's something genuinely relaxing about being bad at the game again on purpose.

It's also just that I honestly enjoy the leveling process and it fits in well with my schedule and my play time these days.

The catch is that spreading yourself across dozens of characters means none of them are ever quite where they should be. I've felt behind on my own main because I was off playing pretend on a rogue I wasn't even enjoying that much. That's the altoholic tax, and I've paid it for years.

Which is exactly why the current plan is warlock-only. Renown, delves, events, world bosses, all of it on the one character, alts parked. It's the most disciplined I've been about this game in a decade, and I give it maybe even odds of surviving the next class patch. The itch doesn't really go away. You just negotiate with it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Wrath of the Lich King

 Ask a hundred WoW players which expansion was the best and a good chunk of them, without hesitating, will say Wrath. I'm one of them. I've played every expansion since, and none of them ever quite got back to what Northrend felt like in 2009.

Part of it was the setup. TBC pulled me in, but Wrath was the first expansion I got to walk into on day one, already max level, already ready, no old-world slog standing between me and the new stuff. You picked a boat to Howling Fjord or a zeppelin to Borean Tundra, and either way you dropped into a continent that actually felt like a place. Snow, longships, vrykul, a mystery hanging over the whole thing. And behind all of it, the one villain the game had been building toward since before I ever logged in. Arthas. The Lich King on his throne, waiting the entire expansion.

Wrath is also where the wheels came off, in the best way. I'd been a one-character guy through TBC, faithful to the undead warlock. Then Wrath added the Death Knight, the first hero class, starting at level 55 with that fantastic intro questline, and I had to try it. Then dual specs showed up and suddenly respeccing wasn't a tax. I'd already toyed with an alliance hunter a little bit.  Then I rolled a Blood Elf paladin just to see, and that was it. A druid and shaman were not far behind. The altoholism I'll confess to later this month started right here. I blame Northrend entirely.

I wasn't in there clearing Icecrown the week it dropped. But Wrath is where the Dungeon Finder landed, in patch 3.3, and that quietly changed the game for a player like me. Suddenly you could queue up, get dropped into a random heroic with four strangers, and actually grind out the gear to be ready for a raid without having to build your whole evening around organizing one. I ran a lot of those five-mans. I geared up more reliably than I ever had, and I saw the Lich King go down eventually, well after the people who are good at this game had moved on. Didn't matter. Getting there at my own pace, on my own characters, was the whole point.

I also should mention that I never had a consistent guild up through Wrath.  That didn't gel for me until Cataclysm.  So I was always bouncing around trying new guilds.  Sometimes seeing if a more serious raiding guild would fit, or trying something casual, or signing up with whatever random person messaged me while I was out leveling.

I also have to give Wintergrasp its due. I'm not generally much of a PvP guy, although I have had my moments where I've done quite a bit.   The itch hits me occasionally, and that big battle out in the Northrend snow was the most fun I've ever had with the PvP side of WoW. Whole raids of players fighting over a keep, siege vehicles rolling in, the whole zone flipping back and forth. When it was about to pop I'd drop whatever I was doing and go. That kind of thing almost never grabs me. That one did.

People argue Wrath was the peak and it's been downhill since. I don't fully buy that. But I understand exactly why they say it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Seventeen Years of Blogging

Seventeen years. Somewhere between twenty-one and seventy-seven posts a year, depending on how much life was in the way. It works out to more than six hundred posts about a video game and the guy playing it, written under a name that isn't mine, for an audience some years I could count on two hands.

When people find out, they ask why anyone keeps a blog going that long with numbers like that. Fair question. Here's the honest answer.

I kept going because I never made it a job. The second a blog turns into a content calendar you owe somebody, it dies. Mine has gone dark for months at a stretch. Whole expansions where I barely posted. Then something clicks, I get the itch, and I'm back once or twice a week like I never left. I stopped feeling guilty about that a long time ago. The blog is a place I go when I have something to say, not a machine I have to feed.

The other reason is the people. Not a big crowd, but a real one. The same handful of names in the comments, year after year. Other bloggers I've never met in person and would still call friends. That's a hard thing to explain to somebody who doesn't do this, but if you do it, you get it right away.

And I'll admit the pen name helps. Joar isn't quite me. He's the part of me that plays too much WoW and doesn't have to answer to anybody about it. Writing as him is easier than writing as myself, for reasons I'll get into later this month.

Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything for no particular reason. But that's sort of the reason. Nobody's paying me, nobody's making me, and I'm still here.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

The Burning Crusade

I didn't start with Vanilla. I know that's practically heresy in some circles, but it's the truth. The expansion that actually pulled me into World of Warcraft and never let go was The Burning Crusade.

Picture where I was. Everybody I knew was already max level, already geared, already talking about a game I'd never touched. So I rolled a character and started the long grind to 60, through the same Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones that hadn't really been touched in a while by everyone else. That part wasn't glamorous. It was a slog, and plenty of people bounced off the old world before they ever saw the new stuff. But then you hit 60, stepped through the Dark Portal, and dropped into Outland. Hellfire Peninsula is not most people's idea of beautiful. Red dirt, broken rock, a sky the color of a bruise. I loved it. After all those hours in the old world, it felt like somewhere new, and new was exactly what I wanted.

Then came the thing TBC is remembered for most, at least for me. Flying mounts at 70. The first time you lift off in Netherstorm and realize you can just go anywhere, the whole game cracks open. Of course, you needed a ton of gold to buy it then, so that piece took a while too.  There were also the two new races too, Blood Elves and Draenei, and half the server rolled one. I didn't. I stuck with my undead warlock, the character I'd started on and have mained ever since. The Blood Elf paladin didn't show up until Wrath, once the altoholism really got going.

I wasn't raiding Black Temple or anything close to it. I did a little Karazhan, mostly with a guild that had more patience than I deserved, and I'll get into why the high-end stuff was never for me another day this month. But TBC is where I learned the loop that's kept me here for seventeen years. Log in, chip away at something, fly somewhere new, log out a little more attached than when I started.

People argue endlessly about which expansion was the best. I won't pretend TBC was flawless or would even make my top three. The attunement grinds were brutal and I bounced off a couple of them completely. But it's the one that turned me into a WoW player instead of a guy who happened to own WoW, and you only get one of those.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar