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

Blaugust 2026

Good morning, Friends. Belghast opened that way, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. Felt like the right thing to borrow for day one.

Thirty-one posts in thirty-one days. That's the plan, and I'm starting today.

If you've spent any time in the gaming blogosphere, you already know Blaugust. Every August, the people who write about games try to post every single day for a month. I've never come anywhere close. Some years I manage a decent run and then fall off, some years I barely show up. Posting all thirty-one days would be a huge stretch for me. This year I'm going to try anyway, and I want to be clear up front about why.

Blaugust was Bel's. He took a small annual blogging challenge and grew it into a real community event, dozens of people posting all month, cheering each other on, dragging the quiet blogs back to life for a few weeks. He died in July, in the middle of another round of chemo. I wrote about that already and I'm not going to do it again here. What I'll say is this. The best way I know to honor a guy who wrote nearly every day of his life is to sit down and write.

So that's what August is. Thirty-one days, one post a day.

I've got a rough map. Eleven posts on WoW expansions, one for almost every one we've had, from Burning Crusade all the way up to Midnight. A handful on writing and the blog itself. Six on the other MMOs that grabbed me over the years and then let go. And nine on the habits and confessions of being an altoholic who's been at this game for way too long.

Really?  We're doing this?

Some of these posts will be good. Some will be four hundred words I bang out at eleven at night because I refuse to break the streak. That's the deal you sign with Blaugust, and honestly that's the point. Show up, say the thing, hit publish, do it again tomorrow.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Back to Playing A Little

I've found myself with a little bit of playtime again this week, but I have remained focused on my warlock.  Still no leveling of alts.  I managed to max out Zul'Aman renown this week, so I just have Voidstorm and Harati left.  They're both relatively close, but probably still a few weeks away even if I do continue to have some decent amount of play time.

The switch to herbalism and mining is working out pretty well so far, as there always seems to be stuff to do there as I'm knocking out events or doing other stuff.  I'm still only around level 30 in both, but I'm feeling pretty good about the choice.

I also finished up the new campaign quest line with the trolls.  It's an interesting story so far, and I'll be curious to see where they end up going with it. 

I've also gotten back to working on Loremaster and am continuing to progress through the Harandar zone.  I'm probably about halfway done with that one now.

Finally, I still have no pants!  I have yet to get a set of purple pants from chests, from my vault, or from anywhere, so I'm still wandering around rocking a blue set of pants.  It seems absurd, but that's just where my luck is.  It's my only piece of non-Champion-level gear at this point, and they're still blue.  

That's the update for this week.

Cheers,

Joar

June Month In Review - Way Late

June came in at 5 hours and 5 minutes. All of it on WoW. If May's 7 and a half hours felt like an all-time low, June looked at that number and said hold my beer.

And honestly, I'm amazed I got even that much. June was the moving month. I drove DJ up to Boston the 8th through the 11th to get him settled for the IBM job. Turned around and drove Jake out to Phoenix the 15th through the 21st to move him into ASU. The movers loaded us up on the 22nd, and we hit the road for Arizona with the dog on the 23rd. Somewhere in the cracks of all that, I logged five hours on the warlock.

There isn't much of a progress report to give. A few weekly faction events for renown, a couple of delves when I had twenty minutes and a working brain, and that was about it. The warlock didn't move much, but it didn't go backward either, which, under the circumstances, I'll take as a win.

Now for the part where I usually promise next month will be better. I did that in May. I said things should settle by July and I'd get reacquainted with my warlock and maybe remember which buttons do damage. Well, it's July, we're in Arizona, we're settled in to our first AirBnB, and I'm still not playing. So I'm going to stop making promises the calendar keeps breaking.

That said, I do want to get back to it. The setup is here, the warlock is waiting, and the only thing missing is a stretch of days where nobody needs to be driven across a state line. Those days are coming. Whether they come in July or spill into August, we'll find out together.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

For Belghast

Belghast died on Thursday. He was in the middle of his seventh round of chemotherapy, one year to the day after his wife died from her own cancer.

I have to be careful writing this because I never met Bel in person. Our relationship was the kind that only really exists now. Mostly Mastodon these last few years, Twitter before that, comment threads on each other's blogs going back further than I can properly account for. And yet the news landed hard enough that I have been sitting with it for two days, not sure what to say, not sure if I have any business saying anything at all. That last part is the piece I want to talk about.

The last time Bel meaningfully changed my thinking, he told me that my blog wasn't just me typing into the wind. He said it had value for the broader gaming community, that people were reading and getting something out of it, and that the writing was worth continuing. I don't remember the exact wording. I remember how it felt to hear it from him. Bel was the kind of person whose opinion on gaming blogging carried real weight. He had been doing it since forever. He had built Blaugust from a small annual challenge into an actual community event that runs every August with over a hundred participants. He podcasted on AggroChat every week. He wrote nearly every single day, across MMOs, ARPGs, and just about every game genre that mattered to him. If Bel told you your blog had value, it had value.

His last post went up on July 1st. It opens with a quiet apology. He apologizes for not blogging enough, because the seventh round of chemotherapy had wiped him out in mind and body, and he was honestly barely holding in there. Then he wrote nine hundred words about Path of Exile 2 mapping being kinda broken. That is a nearly perfect summary of who Bel was. Whatever was happening to him personally, his default was to sit down and write about the games he was playing, because that was the shape of his life and he was going to spend it the way he wanted to spend it.

His site tagline read: Life and times of Belghast: Blogger, Podcaster, Tank, MMO Gamer, Widow, and Cat Dad. He added the Widow himself after his wife died last July. He was open about the grief and open about the diagnosis that came right after, and he kept blogging through all of it. That the two dates ended up matching to the day is the kind of coincidence I would not believe if it were fiction. It is not fiction.

I did not know Bel well enough to write a proper eulogy. I do not have first-name stories. I do not have voice-chat memories. What I have is what a lot of us out here have. A shared blogosphere for years. A few Blaugust seasons where his encouragement kept me going. A Mastodon feed where his cat photos and his POE screenshots and his hard chemo weeks all showed up alongside each other, treated with the same steady voice. He made online relationships feel like real friendships instead of the thinner one-sided thing they get written off as. He treated the people who read him like actual people, he responded when we wrote to him, and he took our writing seriously in a way that most of the internet does not.

I keep coming back to the fact that he sat down on July 1st and wrote about mapping in Path of Exile 2. Not a farewell. Not a legacy post. Just what he had been doing for years. That is the version of him I want to remember.

Good morning, Friends. That was how he greeted us, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. It landed differently than a greeting was supposed to. I am going to miss reading it.

Joar