Wrath of the Lich King Classic launched six months ago the past weekend, which seems as good of a time as any to stop and do a “how’s it going?” sort of post.
Has he even shown up yet?
Generally speaking, I would say it has been going pretty well for me and our group.
This was by no means guaranteed up front. We dove into WoW Classic pretty hard, but still took a couple of breaks along the way, then jumped into The Burning Crusade Classic but found ourselves distracted and off to other titles part way into that, such that when Wrath Classic loomed we had to get in and work to get our characters to 68 so we could make our way to Northrend.
For me, WotLK holds a special spot in the history of WoW as probably my peak involvement with the game. But when you’ve done all the things you’re likely to ever do on the first pass, the question seemed to be how likely was it going to be that I would want to do some, if not all, of those things again.
We have, as a group and as individuals, in the past taken runs at the expansion again with alts only to get bogged down or lose interest barely a zone into the expansion. I’ve done the first two dozen quests in Borean Tundra a lot of times.
But now, six months in, I seem to be still invested in Wrath Classic. My play time in the month in review post on Friday will, once again, put WoW Classic at the top of the list. I log in daily. I do the Argent Tournament dailies or battle in Wintergrasp most days of the week.
And our group has done pretty well, though I have to hand it to Potshot committing to running instances as both the healer and as a hunter doing ranged DPS to help sustain us and give us that extra bit of damage to tip the scales in our favor on a lot of boss fights.
But there will also always be the question of whether or not we could have done some or all of these instances as a group of four, the way we did in WoW Classic. We could have leveled into some of them as a group of four I am sure, but there is that Prince Keleseth DPS check so early on that it is not implausible that we might have just given up on it.
So, now that we are six months in, is it everything I remembered?
Yes and no. Some of the zones feel like a bit of a slog. While I have two characters at level 80 now, the next one is only at level 75 and one is still back at level 70.
At some point I will want to do a ranking of Northrend zones, the way I did with the Outland zones, but I have to admit the zones aren’t all that exciting. There is no zone I feel strongly about for either the top or bottom of the list, though I tentatively would be Icecrown at the top and Crystalsong Forest at the bottom for pretty much the same reasons. Icecrown is where everything ends up happening and Crystalsong Forest might be the most skippable zone in the expansion.
Then again, Zul’Drak has a lot to recommend it being at the bottom of the list as well. And I know some people love Grizzly Hills the way they loved Nagrand, but it wasn’t that big of a deal for me.
Anyway, we’ll see what I come up with when I get to that post. I am not quite ready for it yet.
Otherwise it has been interesting to see what has grabbed me and what has not. I thought, for example, that I would be more interested in leveling up some alts, that working my way through the quest lines of each zone would keep me invested.
That has been less the case that I figured. I made it that was with my Deathknight, being the completionist on zones for the lore achievement, but ended up going from 78 to 80 on my pally largely on dailies. And my hunter is still lingering at level 75.
On the other hand, I am a bit surprised that I log in to do the Argent Tournament dailies as often as I do. I thought that might be one of those “did it once, that was enough” things, but I guess I must enjoy them because I find it difficult to log in for things I do not enjoy.
So far my expectations have been about met. They have been exceeded on some fronts and have fallen short on others. In the end though I do still log on and play pretty much daily.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 