WoW Shadowlands Sales Stacked Up Against Past Releases

This has become a staple post after every WoW expansion release, usually because Blizzard puts out a press release about the first day sales full of superlatives.  And so it goes for Shadowlands.

This time though Blizzard has out done itself with a press release declaring Shadowlands “the fastest-selling PC game of all time industry-wide” having had 3.7 million first day sales.  That is some boast, though the previous champion was, by their accounting, was Diablo III which had 3.5 million first day sales.

They also have a few additional brags.

• In the months leading up to the expansion’s release and the time since launch, the game reached and has sustained its highest number of players on monthly or longer-term subscriptions compared to the same period ahead of and following any WoW expansion in the past decade, in both the West and the East.
• Players have spent more time in Azeroth year to date than in the same period of any of the last 10 years.
• In addition, total player time in game this year to date has nearly doubled compared to the same period last year.

The last bullet point is a solid one, since numbers were up a year ago due to WoW Classic, so topping that says something.  The first point is time bound by expansions that launched in the last decade, which basically means since they pissed a lot of people off with the Cataclysm expansion.  The game’s peak no doubt remains in the Wrath of the Lich King era.

A chart from 2015 back when we used to get subscriber numbers

Still, it is good to see the game doing well, though for the video game industry the pandemic has been a rising tide that has lifted all boats it seems.

Anyway, like I said, there is a press release like this every expansion.  Battle for Azeroth had one two years back which pegged its first day sales at 3.4 million, and Legion had one before that which put it at 3.3 million, and so on down the line.  The totals, so far as I could figure it out some time back, should now look like this:

• Shadowlands – 3.7 million
• Battle for Azeroth – 3.4 million
• WoW Legion – 3.3 million
• Warlords of Draenor – 3.3 million
• Mists of Pandaria – 2.7 million (first week)
• Cataclysm – 3.3 million
• Wrath of the Lich King – 2.8 million
• The Burning Crusade – 2.4 million
• World of Warcraft – 240,000

Those are mostly “first 24 hours” of sales, except where noted.  After Cataclysm Blizzard needed to give Mists of Pandaria a bit more runway to get into the zone I guess.

And, of course, we get into what really counts as day one sales.

With the original World of Warcraft  launch, that was all boxes purchased retail.  I recall the story of Blizzard having to divert the truck filled with employee versions of the collector’s edition to the retail channel because the game was selling out.

Day one of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King both saw midnight launch parties at retailers.  I recall a pallet of TBC collector’s edition boxes sitting on the floor at Fry’s in Sunnyvale the day it launched.  But I haven’t been down to a retail store to buy a physical box for a WoW expansion since WotLK.  Since then digital sales and pre-orders have been my thing and have no doubt come to dominate the sales numbers.

Because, technically, that 3.7 million number isn’t the first day sales number.  That is the number of units they were able to recognize revenue on due to having shipped the product on November 23rd.  The expansion had been selling via pre-orders for a long time.

I have a post back from November 7, 2019 where I compared four upcoming MMORPG expansions that mentions that the Shadowlands pre-orders were already open and available.  That is more than a year ago, so we are not talking a single day sales record… or probably even “fastest selling” if we were able to get the actual sales data from Blizzard.  I strongly suspect that the most sales in the shortest space of time still belongs to some of the older titles.

I am now also curious about how long pre-order periods have been for WoW expansions over the years.  I am going to guess that Shadowlands, which ran over a year in pre-order mode, would top that list.

Still, that is a lot of sales, and with that big revenue recognition burst I expect we’ll see World of Warcraft pop up a few spots on the SuperData Research November chart when we get that later this month.  Can it dethrone League of Legends?

Of course, as that list I made indicates, nobody is likely to debate whether or not Blizzard can move boxes, virtual or otherwise.  Can they keep the subscribers though?  That has been a problem for several expansions in the last decade.

Other coverage of this announcement:

• WCCF Tech
• Massively OP
• MMO Fallout
• VentureBeat

Addendum: Shadowlands record broken already by Cyberpunk 2077.

Hitting 50 in a Level Squished Legion

Last week I mentioned that I had rolled up a Demon Hunter to see what the leveling experience was like in the new post-squish Azeroth.

This week I can say that I made it to level 50.  It took me a total of 22 hours and 13 minutes over the course of about a week… I was done by Thursday night… to go from character creation to level cap.

However, I would not necessarily mark that down as a benchmark time for a few reasons.  I spent some time side-tracked with trade skills, because I cannot help myself, and that slowed me down a bit.  I was also AFK for more than an hour over the course of one day while I did laundry.  And, as I noted, Demon Hunters start at level 8 and skip the new starter area, which bought me some time, though their own starter area was a bit slow.

But the primary slow down was a strange mix of the Legion expansion, the Demon Hunter class, and the level squish combined.

Again, as I mentioned, the Demon Hunter class and its starting experience is tied directly to the Legion expansion.  So, unlike other classes, when you exit their starter area you are thrust straight into the beginnings of that expansion and not Battle for Azeroth.  Or so I thought.  It is not obvious that you are in one timeline or the other.

Certainly when I saw Nathanos Blightcaller standing there with a quest and a portal to Orgrimmar behind him, I thought that was the path to the BFA content.

Nathanos hanging around

Instead, that is quest that gets you into the starting scenario for the Legion expansion.  I went and did that at one point late in my ascent when I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

For a long stretch everything seemed fine.  Levels came fairly quickly, mobs throughout the expansion leveled up as I did, gear given as quest rewards scaled up as I leveled up, as did the experience rewarded.

Everything was fine until I hit level 46, and then I noticed things started slowing down.  It was not so bad at first, but as I made it to level 47 it was becoming obvious that something was off.  The experience being rewarded for quest completion was getting smaller.  Gear given as quest rewards would show as item level 56-58 in the quest window, but would be scaled down to item level 50 when I claimed them.  Then I noticed that the mobs had all stopped leveling up with me, that they were all still level 45.  After a bit of flailing about… which included running the starting scenario… I realized where I was.

I had thought, being spit out into the Legion expansion, that I was in this universe.

My vision in Excel format

After all, the game put me in the Legion expansion, why would I not assume I was on the path that led to level 50?

But, no.  On reflection, the mobs ceasing to level up was an indicator I was in the horizontally sliced timeline where every expansion besides BFA caps out before 50.

The horizontal stack with level caps on each expansion

So when I hit level 45, everything stopped leveling up with me.

It is still a bit bizarro world to me that Blizz decided they needed both a level 10-45 and a level 10-50 version of the Legion expansion, but I suppose that applies to all of the areas.

Anyway, it was easy to fix that.  I took the portal in Dalaran to Orgrimmar, went to the Horde embassy, which is where Chromie sits, and asked to be put on the “Legion Invasion” timeline… they aren’t named for their expansions… and was good to go.

Chromie doesn’t know the expansion names

I then returned to Dalaran… it was nice of Blizz to give us a special hearthstone just for that… and found that everything had scaled up to me at level 47.  I went back out and ran down some more quest and managed to level up to 50 not too much later.

Then, of course, you have to do that strange thing where, on hit 50, you get recalled out of your timeline to Chromie.  I guess this was to ease the confusion over timelines, but in the absence of Shadowlands, it seems a bit odd.

Chromie Calling… also, my DH is named Fernwood

Still, I was done, so why not?

Then there is the Legion expansion, which I quite enjoyed back in the day.  It is still quite enjoyable.  There are a couple of oddities though.

The cornerstone of the Legion expansion were the Artifact Weapons.  They, and their abilities, were core to each class.  Much of the focus of the expansion was leveling up and unlocking abilities and looks and what not.

That is pretty much all gone.  But we knew that when BFA hit.

However, running the content again from scratch without them made for a very different experience.  You still go get your Artifact Weapon for you class and spec.

I got my warblades

But all the powers and advancement has been removed.  It was, up front, that the power was sacrificed to heal the wound in Azeroth, which was part of the BFA pre-expansion event back in July of 2018.

My warblades

Now, when you’re leveling up in the Broken Isles, the only thing you have are three relic slots that you can use to upgrade the item level of the weapon.  You get them as quest rewards here and there.

Some items from a quest reward

I guess that isn’t a bad compromise, and they keep a regin on you getting too got of a weapon by only unlocking the third relic slot when you hit level 45.  I ended up with a weapon that was better than most items I could find at the AH for a Demon Hunter.

My warblades at level 50

This is the primary argument for classic style servers.  While they have a work around, you cannot play the expansion the way it was back when it was live from 2016 to 2018 because they had to gut the primary mechanic in order to make way for the next expansion.  With Shadowlands we’ll likely shed the Heart of Azeroth for something else.  And so it goes.  But this means that, while the content is still there, and Chromie can set you to level up through it, the experience is very different.  It just isn’t the same.

This gutting of the Artifact Weapons mechanic also led to an interesting side effect.

When the expansion was the peak of the game there were quest reward and treasure chest and world quest reward items all over the expansion that would increase the artifact power of you weapon.  Leveling it up was a big deal.  But now leveling up is no longer a thing, so Blizzard left all of those items in the expansion, but made them all gray level vendor trash worth between 10 and 50 gold each.

I made bank.  Compared to my characters in other time walking expansions… I have two in WotLK and one in WoD… my Demon Hunter was rich.  Other gray drops and quest rewards were about on par, but these items, which are everywhere, were a big boost.  When my DH hit level 45 and could train Master Riding, which gives you high speed flying, I was there.

5,000 gold? Give it to me!

My alts in other expansions… not so much.  They’ll need handouts.

Otherwise, the Legion expansion is still a good time.

Map of the Broken Isles

I did all of Highmountain and Azsuna, most of Stormheim, and parts of Suramar and The Broken Shore before I hit level 50.  I had no need to go to Argus, and I managed to avoid going into Val’Sharah, which is my least favorite of the main zones.  I don’t hate it, but I am not eager to return either.

The Demon Hunter class is pretty good.  I enjoyed it, though at times the play style can be a bit simple.  After mashing buttons with it, going to play in WoW Classic requires me to breath and think about my skills more.  And DH glide is very OP.  I am surprised they haven’t nerfed it.

Glide Blood Elf, Glide!

So now I have my 10th character at level 50 in anticipation of the Shadowlands expansion.

Fernwood the Demon Hunter

I am not sold on any more, but it is possible I could end up with an 11th before the launch on the 23rd.

A Demon Hunter in the Level Squish

Since the big level squish hit last month with the Shadowlands pre-patch, I have been playing a lot more retail WoW than WoW Classic.  It has been something new to explore.

I started with three characters at level 50 after the squish and have managed to work half a dozen more up to that level, giving me a total of nine at the cap now.  I also played around with the new starter area with a few fresh characters just to see it, but haven’t really committed to any of them.  They mostly represent classes I already have at level cap, so there isn’t a lot of pressure to push a duplicate unless there is a second spec I want to try.

So I started looking at what I did not have at level cap and realized that I didn’t even have a Demon Hunter on my character list.

The Demon Hunter class came in with Legion and I know I rolled on up at some point, but I recall never getting out of the starter area.  I must have deleted that character later on during a clean up of barely started alts, because they were gone.

So that became the plan, to start a Demon Hunter in the new squished reality of Azeroth.  Demon Hunters need to be elves, blood or night, due to lore reasons, and I decided to go with a Blood Elf this time around just to expand my Horde character base.

For whatever reason, Demon Hunters start at level 8 now, which is 90 levels shy of their old starting spot.  So goes the squish.  Allied races and Death Knights, which both skip the new starter area kick off at level 10.  But the DH gets 8.

Otherwise, you are in the same starter area as before.  I had vague memories of a few of the quests.  The zone is shared, which means a lot of things have to be available in parallel, so it can seem a bit chaotic as you excuse yourself as you pass through some respawns because you’ve done that bit already.

Quietly waiting for the elevator amidst the chaos

I made it through the core part of the tutorial.  If I am remembering correctly, I must have left off just before I got to the part where you move on to Orgimmar.

The fun bit is that the DH starter area is wired directly into the Legion expansion, so rather than showing up in the Battle for Azeroth timeline, you carry on into the Legion intro where you get to see Sylvannas become the Warchief of the Horde and hang out with her for a bit.

She sounds like Holly Hunter and always looks a bit bored

Then there is Khadgar and watching Dalaran warped off to the Broken Isles, and you are pretty quickly stuck into the Legion expansion.  I was probably level 15 or so when I got there and was immediately sent off for the special class/spec weapon that was the hallmark of the expansion.

I hope they scale like heirlooms, because I need them until 50

You also have to go to your order hall, which for the DH means jumping off the flight point area and gliding down to one of the islands floating nearby Dalaran.  Not as epic as the warrior leap into the heavens, but it gets you used to using your glide skill, which comes in very handy.

The glide to the island with the gate that takes me to the order hall

There is the order hall stuff, which is pretty much the same in each even if the scenery is a bit different, after which you get to pick your starting zone.  But in the running around Dalaran it is possible to skip out.  Over by Khadgar in the Violet Citadel in Dalaran stands Nathanos Blightcaller with a quest.

Nathanos waits

I am pretty sure his quest sends you through the portal to Orgrimmar that sits behind him and starts you off into Battle for Azeroth.  If you like wicked Sylvannas, there is your chance.

I didn’t go find out.  I decided to stick with Legion.

I opted for Stormheim, one of my favorite zones in the expansion, and was flown out there.  But when I arrived there wasn’t a quest to be seen.  I think there might be an issue here.  I rode around for a bit, straying into Highmountain.  There I picked up the started quest for that zone instead.  I like Highmountain too, so I carried on with that.

Now I am moving along there, closing in on 30.  We’ll see if I make it all the way to 50, but this will keep me busy for a bit.

Tough Act to Follow

We are in the waning days of the Battle for Azeroth expansion in World of Warcraft.  This expansion seems destined to rank down the list in the annals of the game.  It is a bit hard for me to even judge it as an expansion, as I did about as little as you could do and still be able to claim to have played.

Battle for Azeroth

But even with my low commitment to the expansion… I made it to level cap with two characters and unlocked flying, but did little else besides the main overland quest lines… I felt the pain of the expansion.  The whole idea that mobs ramped up in difficulty so that equipping better gear made the game harder… a problem that Blizzard acknowledged but said they didn’t care about… was just the main issue I had to deal with.  But it seemed like everything from the story to the raids was making somebody angry over the course of the expansion.

However, some of my lack of enthusiasm is no doubt related to the fact that the previous expansion, Legion, was one I did enjoy.  I played that through pretty thoroughly… for me at least, no raiding, but I ran the instances via LFG… and came away feeling pretty satisfied.  I liked the story, the zones, the mechanics of the classes I played, and I honestly felt a bit robbed when my legendary weapon abilities went away.

So I wonder how much of my disappointment… or at least my lack of enthusiasm… lays in the fact that I enjoyed Legion more.

I have, in the past, tried to articulate the problems with expansions.  They must, by necessity, reset the game in some way, undo what has gone before, in order to give you new things to accomplish.  They also stand as waypoints where  a company can assess features, add new ones, and adjust things that players were complaining about.  For WoW, the latter always involves an update to classes because there has literally never been a time in WoW when somebody wasn’t loudly and repeatedly complaining about their favorite class being bad on some other class being too good.

That means there is almost always a shake up to the status quo, something that will make some slice of the player base pack up and walk away.

And yet some expansions are recalled fondly.  Maybe not by everybody, but there is often something of a consensus about what was a good expansion and what was not.  The good ones mentioned are often:

• Wrath of the Lich King
• Mists of Pandaria
• Legion

While the bad list tends to be:

• Cataclysm
• Warlords of Draenor
• Battle for Azeroth

But there is clearly a pattern to that, and a regular “every other expansion sucks” seems a bit too convenient.  So I wonder how much the quality or popularity of a specific expansion influences that of the expansion after it and how much the expansion before it does the same.

As I noted above, my enjoyment of Legion might very well have shaded my reception of BFA.  Maybe.

More certainly, my time spent with Wrath of the Lich King, where I played from the last few months of The Burning Crusade and straight through the whole time it was live, made me less receptive to Cataclysm.

I have softened a bit on Cataclysm over time.  Destroying the old world still seems like a mistake… unless you think somebody was playing the long game and that Blizz meant to do WoW Classic the whole time.  And giving people flying out of the box was problematic.  But there was still some quality content there, including possible the prettiest zone in Azeroth, Vashj’ir.  And when we went back and did the instances, especially the 5 person heroic versions of Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, those were a good time.

And it is quite arguable that my enjoyment of Mists of Pandaria… I skipped the first year of it, but then played it through until Warlords of Draenor hit…  was colored by my dislike at the time of Cataclysm and the fact that I stayed away from WoW for at least 18 months before getting into it.

Which, of course, brings me into another cycle with WoD, and the story continues.

Are the ups and downs of my relationship with World of Warcraft because of the expansions and their merit (or lack thereof) or due to my own expectations being set or mis-set by over exposure or hype?  Should we be thus optimistic about the coming Shadowlands expansion, it having followed one of the down expansions?

Every expansion is its own time in the WoW continuum, and yet none of them exists in a vacuum either.  Each one builds on the past and sets expectations for the future.

My First WoW Alt to 120

I finally have an alt up to level 120 in World of Warcraft.  120 was the level cap introduced with the Battle for Azeroth expansion.  That expansion launched over seven months ago, so this isn’t anything like a brag.

The moment – who can tell me where I am?

In a way, it is something of the opposite of a brag.  Because the funny thing about my alt, an alliance druid named Alioto, is that he hasn’t been to Kul Tiras or Zandalar yet.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that while he did go to the Broken Isles in Legion, and has his feral spec artifact weapons, I fell off the wagon there after a couple of levels.  The changes to druids between Warlords of Draenor, where I played him quite a bit, and Legion were enough to put me off the class.  And that didn’t seem to get much better with the coming of BFA.  Still, I might have given it a shot save for the next item.

Second, there is/was/remains the whole bit about how mobs scale up faster in difficulty than you do as your level and ilevel go up.  That was a serious drag with my ret pally main, and I felt pretty good about playing him otherwise, and led to all sorts of angst in the community about levels and what not.  Even I was wondering what the point of levels were if they actively made you feel weaker against the exact same content, and I kind of like levels despite their problems.

I am past that with my pally.  He hit level 120 months ago and has boosted his ilevel past the point of punishment and it is fun again to go out and do world quests and follow the story line.  When the expansion stops punishing you for upgrading things are pretty good, because aside from that I have enjoyed the zone content and the story line.

But I am not keen to dive in with alts quite yet.  I will probably wait until I unlock flying on my account before I dive into that.  And I am certainly not hankering to dive into BFA with alts that are classes that I feel weak playing to start with.  I’d probably be okay with warrior, hunter, or death knight, all of which are ready to go, but my mage, rogue, and druids… those all feel like they would end up being an unhappy slog.

Basically, BFA has made me focus on my main even more than Legion did, and Legion really felt geared to make you focus on a single main to start with, something that was a bit jarring after the alt happy Warlords of Draenor expansion, where I ended up with a bunch of characters at level cap.  And all of this was compounded by the fact that allied races came in with the run up to BFA, so Blizzard was essentially pushing alts by giving you a passel of new level 20s to grind up, while delivering an expansion that made leveling up alts feel like a chore.

Is it any wonder that Blizzard is fretting about levels and talking about crazy things like a level squish?  In hindsight they seem to have set themselves up for trouble.

All of which is part of the public debate about WoW, but leaves out how my druid managed to get to level cap.

He got there via pet battles.

And not just any pet battles, but the battles against grand master pet tamer NPCs in the Warlords of Draenor and Mists of Panaria.

Due to the quirks of the way pet battles have evolved over time, the easiest way to level up your battle pets is to run through some daily NPC pet battles in those two expansions.

I have been over how I can run a level 1 battle pet up to level 25 daily without a lot of effort.  With the right set of teams it is not a big deal, save for the occasional bad luck with the RNG. (I still highly recommend the addon Rematch for managing your pet leveling queue and teams.)

The side effect of running these pet battles, which are all in areas where the level cap was lower so they are pretty safe to travel through even if you haven’t unlocked flying, and completely safe if you have, is that they also yield experience for your character.  They are all daily quests, but due to the fact they are pet battles, they scale up with your level, handing you a solid at level quest worth exp with each one.

Seriously, from where ever through to level cap each battle gave my druid nearly 4% of a level of experience. With Legion, and carried on with BFA, the master trainers became world quests, which means you need to unlock access to them and can only battle them when they are up in rotation.

While there is a limit to the number you can do on a given day… you can only battle each master trainer once… doing enough to level a pet up to 25 each day gets you a good chunk of a level.

In fact, I think the master pet trainer daily quests in all of the content up through Warlords of Draenor do the same, and there are a lot of them.  There is even an achievement for doing them all in a single day, which I will do some day (with an alt well shy of the level cap).  I haven’t done it yet because, for me at least, pet battles are best done in small doses lest they become tedious.

Anyway, there is a way to level up an alt.  I’ll probably start in with another character… probably my mage, which is the level 110 alt I am least likely to ever play… and carry on with the pet battle dailies.

Addendum: I am not the only one on about mob scaling in BFA today.

WoW Battle for Azeroth Sales Stacked Up Against Past Releases

Fortunately I did some of the groundwork for this post back with the WoW Legion release.

It is here and it is selling

Blizzard announced today that the Battle for Azeroth expansion for World of Warcraft, which went live around the world on August 13th and 14th, sold more than 3.4 million copies.  From the press release itself:

Heroes everywhere turned out in force, and Blizzard Entertainment today announced that as of Battle for Azeroth’s first full day of launch on August 14, more than 3.4 million units of the latest World of Warcraft^®expansion had sold through worldwide—setting a new day-one sales record for the franchise and making it one of the fastest-selling PC games of all-time.^*

I was a little worried about that asterisk at the end, but that just points to this:

Sales and/or downloads, based on internal company records and reports from key distribution partners.

So nothing dramatic there, just a clarification without much information.

To put that number in perspective here is how it shakes out relative to past launches:

• Battle for Azeroth – 3.4 million
• WoW Legion – 3.3 million
• Warlords of Draenor – 3.3 million
• Mists of Pandaria – 2.7 million (first week)
• Cataclysm – 3.3 million
• Wrath of the Lich King – 2.8 million
• The Burning Crusade – 2.4 million
• World of Warcraft – 240,000

That bodes well for the expansion.

Of course, you have to have some perspective when looking at that list.  Back in 2004 people had to go buy a physical box to play World of Warcraft and it has only been over the years that the process has become mostly a digital download experience.  But back then even that 240K number set a record for single day sales.  That number could have been bigger, but they effectively ran out of copies.  At BlizzCon they told the tale of the truck load of collector’s editions meant for employees being diverted to the retail channel because the game had sold out.  And that was US sales only, as it didn’t expand to the rest of the world until later.

The Burning Crusade number is probably the most impressive on the list, since it is made up of people who went out to a store and bought a physical copy on day one.  I went down to Fry’s on launch day… not at midnight for the launch party event… that used to be a thing back in the day… but closer to noon, to find pallets of the expansion out in the front of the store.  Blizzard was not going to run short like they did with the initial launch.  The cashier told me that people had been lined up outside the store for a copy earlier, so it was a pretty big deal.

I think the last time I went to the store to buy an expansion was for Wrath of the Lich King.  It has either been digital or Amazon discounted pre-orders since then.  WotLK was also a big seller considering how much of it was physical boxes.

And then there is Mists of Pandaria in the middle there, which they extended out to the first week of sales because it had to fight against both the sense of betrayal that some felt after Cataclysm and the lightweight perception that people had about it because it featured Pokemon-like pet battles and pandas as a race.  It turned out to be a fine expansion, but it had some work to do to overcome that.  I didn’t buy a copy until almost a year after it launched.

Anyway, the 3.4 million number is impressive, though the there ought to be an asterisk after it as well to remind people that the number includes all pre-launch digital sales.  You’ve been able to buy a copy of Battle for Azeroth since late January, so they have had a lot of time to pack in the sales, making the “fastest selling” claim a bit dubious.  (I am pretty sure that title really belongs to The Burning Crusade.)

But there were reasons to buy the expansion early, aside from the usual max level character boost (and mounts and pets if you bought the digital deluxe version).

There were four allied races to unlock (for which we received four more character slots per server) and level up, with special transmog gear if you hit level cap with them.  So, as a “giving people something to do” option it had some additional pull relative to past expansions.  And even that was only worth an additional 100,000 sales I guess.

The real number we’d all like to know, how many people are actually subscribed to World of Warcraft, remains hidden.  Once a staple of the Acitivision-Blizzard quarterly reports, they have kept it hidden since the dark days of late Draenor, when the number dropped to 2006 levels.  I suspect that if the subscriber base passed 13 million they would issue a press release, but the days of being able to track that quarter by quarter… or even pick out WoW‘s revenue from the financial statements… are long gone.  The irony of being a public company; they are required to report important data, but they get to decide what is important.

We will see how Battle for Azeroth does in the longer term.  A lot of people are very happy with the open world story and quest lines and the look of things in general.  But there is still the whole question of Sylvanas, a story line that upset some people in the pre-launch events. (#notmyhorde) And then there are the recycled bits from WoW Legion that pop up pretty quickly.  Those aren’t bad, but they aren’t new either.  Blizzard has had time to learn how to keep people engaged with an expansion.  They did well enough with WoW Legion, even if they did open up the Battle for Azeroth pre-orders seven months before it was done.  They will get to show us what else they have learned I suppose.

WoW and the End of Legion

We are in that transition time.  The World of Warcraft 8.0 patch lands today.

This heralds the start of the run up to the Battle for Azeroth expansion launch in the middle of next month.

From the Blizzard site

With Blizzard planning a world-wide simultaneous launch, we’re actually going live mid-afternoon of August 13th here on the west coast of the US.

It is also the official end of the Legion expansion for the game.

WoW Legion farewell tour

It isn’t as though Legion is being purged from the game. If you have a character that levels up into the expansion’s range you can still get your artifact weapon and run through all the zones and dungeons and what not. If you haven’t purchased Battle for Azeroth you can hang around at level 110 and work on faction and unlock flying just like many of us did before today.

However, Legion will no longer be the focus of the game. The bulk of the player base will be moving on. Right now the pre-expansion events will start taking people away, and once the new expansion itself hits Argus and the Broken Isles will be much more quiet. Using LFG for dungeons may take some time, and LFR for the expansion raids will likely be untenable. Class changes coming with BfA will also alter the Legion experience. And, of course, some achievements and events will no longer be accessible. The Legion experience is over and the game is moving on.

So I am going to take a bit and reflect on Legion in its first moments of being part of WoW‘s past rather than present.

Zones

I still think it kinda looks like Outland…

I liked the zones. Each of the initial four had their own flavor. I think I liked Stormheim the best. After that Suramar was an adventure in and of itself. The stealth/disguise game play could be a bit much after a while, but it gave the zone its own dimension. Moving beyond that, Broken Shore wasn’t anything special, but Argus was good, in its own no-flying sort of way.

World Quests

I liked those, at least as a variation on the standard daily quest mechanic. The Emissary Quest aspect of it gave a nice, compact set of daily quests to do without burning yourself out griding. The Kirin-Tor quests were perhaps the most problematic. At least the ones where you had to teleport around, though they became incredibly easy once you unlocked flying. And I was happy to have pet battle world quests available.

Dungeons and Raids

I don’t have much to say on this really. Lacking a regular group with which to run the group content I had to rely on the Dungeon Finder. That tends to be an unsatisfying experience to me. Groups are focused on getting the dungeon done and moving on as fast as possible, while I like to stop as see what is going on. You can’t do that when you’re chasing a tank who is running at full speed to get to the last boss and get out. But I wouldn’t be able to do the dungeons at all without LFG, so there is that.

Raids I am less concerned about. I have never been a raider in WoW. They tend to be slower anyway, and I am only there in LFR in full on tourist mode, so things work out.

Still, I ended up not doing much group content during the expansion.

Artifact Weapons

I was okay with the artifact weapon idea. As a player I am not very good at keeping my gear up to level, but my weapon is always the exception. I want the best I can get and will hunt down upgrades or stalk the auction house. The artifact weapon meant that I didn’t have to keep track of that even.

Some of the artifact weapons looked good… or would have if they hadn’t been literally everywhere.  I transmoged my Ashbringer to a Mists of Pandaria model that looked about the same shape just to see if I could confuse anybody.  Other weapons were pretty bland.  I wasn’t keen on my hunter weapon.  I had a pile of transmog options that looked better than any variation of Titanstrike.

Flying

Blizz is still firmly on the fence about flying. You can’t have it to start with. You have to run through the expansion without it. Then at some point they unock it and then you and your alts can fly, but not in every zone. This time around there was no flying in Argus.

However Blizz giving us that whistle that let us recall to the nearest flight point fixed a lot of the drudgery aspect of not being able to fly. You have to be on the ground to do the quest, fight the mob, collect the thingies, or whatever. It is just getting back to the nearest settlement or on to another one that concerns you most of the time. Especially when you’re doing world quests in order to unlock flying! This made the lack of flying much nicer.

Classes

I ended up with seven characters at 110 in Legion, so I guess I ought to have some opinions about classes. Paladin and Hunter remain my favorites, though the spec split for Hunters didn’t do much for me. I was excited about the split when they announced, then stayed with beast mastery the whole time because ranged weapons and pets are what the Hunter class is all about for me.

The Death Knight and Warrior classes also worked well for me.  I am good at running up to things while wearing a pile of metal and beating on them.

I am not so good with squishy stuff.  I leveled a combat Rogue from 1 to 100 during Warlords of Draenor, then struggled to play him during Legion.  I boosted a mage to 100 and then died so much I leveled him to 110 via pet battles.  I helped my druids, one Alliance and one Horde that way as well.  The Alliance one still isn’t 110 yet.

And somehow I never quite got around to working on my Demon Hunter.  I rolled him up early in the expansion, yet he is still in the starter story.  Never finished it.  No gliding about for me.

Order Halls

An attempt to fix/refine the problematic garrisons of Warlords of Draenor. It was tough to pretend you were anything special when you’re running around in an area with a lot of people all wielding the same “unique” weapon as you. How many Ashbringers are there?

I’m with the bland

Still, having only a few followers and missions available removed the follower management mania of garrisons. I never felt order resources were as critical as garrison resources.  I did run down all my class quests for my Pally, but never felt the need to do it with alts.

I liked the Paladin order hall the best.  It was likely the easiest one to get around.  It was certainly the one I spent the most time in.  But for travel to and fro, nothing beats the Warrior order hall.  When I told my daughter that you simply jump into the sky to get there she thought I was kidding.

Trade Skills

Again, after Warlords of Draenor pretty much made trade skills pointless by giving everybody access to everything in their garrison I know they had to do something.  But I guess there was no going back to the harvest and grind.  Instead they went forward with quests and multi-level recipes and what not.  When I found I had to do dungeons in order to advance trade skills lost interest, even with my Paladin, who is an engineer and who I always max out.

Here is what I did for trade skills during Legion.  I sat my tailor in his garrison after he hit 110 and had him make hexweave bags, so now all my characters are loaded up with 30 slot storage.  And then I did Darkmoon Faire.  I suspect I advanced more via the latter than I did in the Broken Isles.

Overall

A while back I tried to quantify which WoW expansions I enjoyed most based on factions as a metric.  The theory was that the more time I spent doing something like grinding faction, the more likely it was that I enjoyed the expansion.  It was probably as good a metric as any.  In that list I worked the number so that Wrath of the Lich King, my gut favorite expansion, came out on top, with 8 of 11 major factions exalted, or 86%.  Now it is time to look and see how I did with Legion.

Legion Faction Count

I guess by that metric I have a new champion.  Unless there was some major faction I missed, I am 9 for 9, which gives me 100%.

Now there were some special circumstances.  I had to get revered with six of those in order to unlock flying in the expansion.  And, later on, I had to get revered with four of them to unlock the four pre-BfA allied races.  Still, I did do my bit for grinding, largely thanks to world quests and the emissary quest system, which put it all into daily bite size pieces.

By another measure, time spent playing, Legion is only average.  I spent about a year playing Legion out of its near two year run.  I played WotLK from its launch to the launch of Cataclysm, the only expansion I stay with for the full term. So, as it goes, Legion is likely mid-pack in my favorites; behind WotLK and Mists of Pandaria certainly.

Now a days for somebody like me who doesn’t have a regular group, who doesn’t raid, who doesn’t do any PvP… I know there must have been at least one new battleground introduced with Legion, but I couldn’t tell you the name…, who did a bit of Time Walking, but who mostly plays solo and does some pet battles and works on some alts, there is about a years worth of content in a WoW expansion.

Which is fine.  Taking a break is good.

Anyway, tonight is probably the last night for the Legion login screen.

One last look

When I get home tomorrow it should be version 8.0.x and have the Battle for Azeroth logo.  But what that brings is another story altogether.

Return to Azeroth – Summer 2018 Edition

Coming and going from the game is pretty much the norm in my own personal history of Azeroth.  It was, in its way, a precedent started when I first tried the game back in early 2005.  I played a bit then went away for about a year.  Then I came back with our EverQuest II guild and it has practically been a revolving door since then.

There have, over the years been stretches, long and short, away from WoW.  Sometimes I and some friends would pop off for another game for a bit, as we did with Lord of the Rings Online or Warhammer Online.  Sometimes the game drove me out, as during the Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor eras.

But somehow I always end up wandering back in to pick up with whatever new content Blizzard has to offer.  While I bitch about how things have changed at times, WoW does seem to be a soft landing to return to when compared to other MMORPGs.  I have been back to LOTRO and EverQuest II a few times, but the effort required to become basically knowledgeable as to what you’re doing is so steep and has changed so much over the years that it is very difficult to shake off the feeling of being completely lost unless I just start a fresh character and begin again from square one.

Not that such a venture isn’t fun.  I’ve probably run levels 1-40 or so in LOTRO more than a dozen times and have quite enjoyed it.  But mucking around in the Lone Lands for the fourteenth time doesn’t get you to Mordor.  And character boosts, something I’ve tried in both LOTRO and EQII tend to just compound the feeling of being lost, both in how to play your character and where you lay in the context of the story.  Being lost in a zone can be fun, but being lost when it comes to how to play or what your purpose is… that is decidedly unfun for me.

There is probably a whole comparative study waiting to be done about how various fantasy MMORPGs welcome lapsed users back and get them up to speed again.  I am not even sure how WoW manages to get me back on the right path.  But I now take it as read that I am going to come and go from the game as part of every expansion release and that I’ll just get by.

And so it has come to pass, one of the milestones that brings me back to Azeroth has arrived, the start of the pre-launch activities for the next expansion.  I knew the time was coming and had the Battle.net launcher… we’re back to calling it Battle.net right… up to get the pre-download going before the rush.

12.57 GB remaining to download

Since we were also hitting the first week of a new month I decided to resubscribe a bit early in order to get in some time earning prize tickets at Darkmoon Faire.  I still have my eye on that Darkmoon Dirigible mount.

But on logging back in I found that the pre-expansion activities were warming up.  There was a quest that popped up automatically that sent me back to Stormwind to speak to Mathias Shaw, the leader of SI:7.

I’m still not sure how he is speaking to me…

I headed off to Stormwind where I received the update that in turn sent me off towards Silithus.

I had to think for a moment about the best way to get there.  I discarded my old school impulse to get on boat when I remembered that Stormwind got a series of portals during Cataclysm, on of which sends you straight to Uldum, which is just a zone over from Silithus at the south end of Kalimdor.

On arriving in Uldum I went right to the flight point looking for a lift to Silithus only to find that the flight point I was looking for was missing.  I took a ride to the flight point at the north end of Uldum and then flew over into Silithus on my own.  Things there had changed.

That’s new…

Sticking out of the ground in the center of the zone was a giant sword with a pulsating point on its hilt.

Zone map for the event

I flew on to my destination where I set about a series of quests to gather information about what was going on… through the usual method of killing things… until Khadgar finally showed up.  After being used so much over the last two expansions he is feeling a big worn out as a narrative device.

But Khadgar was mostly just a sign post this time around, sending me off in search of Mangi Bronzebeard, with whom I eventually settled in to speak with on a Stormwind airship near the offending sword.

Aboard the airship…

Mangi had a plan.  He wanted to contain the power of the titanic offending weapon stuck into the middle of Silithus, a zone so unpopular that I am a bit surprised anybody noticed the thing was there, with my artifact weapon.

You want me to stick my sword where?

I guess I really only have a Malaysian knock-off Ashbringer.  You can tell by the faux Asian style when looking at it.  So I figured I ought to go along with the plan.  So I  went along and raised my weapon with a crowd of NPCs around me.

Ashbringer is absorbent

After that Mangi declared that the op was a success, that the giant dingus in the sands had been neutralized for the moment and they’d be in touch if they needed anything more from me.  Dismissed.

I was sure I much have missed something.  I logged my hunter on to run through the whole thing again, paying closer attention this time.

Mangi explaining how only my gun can contain this now…

I trigger the event and watched myself and the same set of NPCs try to absorb the power of the thingy.

An absorbing broadside

And, in watching this cut scene… one of those on the fly cut scenes that puts your character into the action… I though this time I noticed a change.  The event seemed to transform my hunter!

It turned me into a newt!

Then I realized that those were my shoulder pads, so outsized that when I turn a bit sideways they hide almost the whole of my head.  After that it was “off you go” and that was it.

What I was missing is that this event fully levels up whatever artifact weapons you have.  I didn’t notice that on Vikund, my paladin, since Asherbinger was almost there already.  But when I did the event with my mage, whose staff had barely anything unlocked, there was an accompanying achievement that clued me in.  I also did the Horde side of the event, which starts a little differently, but ends up with the same result, just on a Horde airship.

This time for the Horde

So that was it, a little bit of a lead in and/or closure as we hit the expansion transition, along with the usual catch-up mechanic that Blizz likes to throw in for the laggard crowd.  Use it quick, because that artifact weapon won’t be around after Battle for Azeroth hits.

Now I have to go and figure out what I need to do before the 8.0 update hits.  I understand that pet battle tokens and the shop are going to change.  I’d better look that up and spend my currency to upgrade whatever pets I have still waiting before the change.

And speaking of pets, at least when I was in Silithus I was able to pick up the last pet I needed in Kalimdor for the achievement.

That was the Qiraji Guardling that appears outside of AQ, but only during the summer.  So if you need one of those as well, now is the time.  You cannot get them near the wall because there is a phasing transition in the zone for the event, but if you go further in you can find them easily enough.

WoW Allied Races, Alpha, and Taking a Break

As expected/predicted previously, I have hit something of a saturation point when it comes to World of Warcraft.  I am good for six months of sustained play generally, after which I tend to reach a plateau and start to look into playing something else for a while.

I usually have a set of goals when I start out.  This time around getting flying in the Broken Isles was a key item.  I managed to unlock that back in December.  As usual, a task that looked like it would take some time actually went faster than I thought it would.

First Flight in Legion

I also worked on pet battles some, growing my menagerie beyond 600 collected and finishing the Celestial Tournament finally.  I also leveled up quite a few pets to 25, so I now have quite an army to select from.  But pet battles do tend to lose their charm if all you’re doing is leveling.

When that was tapering off we had the Battle for Azeroth pre-order show up, which included the ability to unlock allied races.  I was already set for the Highmountain Tauren and it did not take me long to get the Nightborne unlocked as well.

Moose on moose action outside Orgrimmar

However, the Horde really isn’t my thing.  I just happened to have finally leveled up my Tauren druid to level 110 this time around, the first time I’ve bothered to get a Horde character to max level, which enabled all of this.  But I wasn’t sure I needed to level up another Horde character, especially not from level 20.

Meanwhile I was somewhat out in the cold on the Alliance allied races.  They required exalted status with the two Argus factions, Army of the Light and the Argussian Reach, and I wasn’t close on either.

That, however, gave me a new goal.  I hadn’t spent much time on Argus, where flying is not allowed.  So I dug into that and, this past weekend managed to get to exalted with Argussian Reach one day.

Also the 50 faction achievement

And then, having collected up a pile of faction tokens, went exalted with the Army of the Light the next day.

Another exalted faction

I waited for Darkmoon Faire to show up to use the boost to faction you get from riding the merry go round, but I didn’t really need it.  I had collected enough tokens to have gotten there without it.   But now I was set.

Allied Races unlocked

I went and ran through the missions to get the Lightforged Draenei and Void Elf options… the quest chains take about 20 minutes each, but that was about it.  I wasn’t keen to roll up new characters.  I have seven characters at level 110 already, and could get an eighth there pretty quickly, but I wasn’t feeling it.

One other goal I had was to get a character to try out the scaling leveling they put in with the 7.3.5 patch.  I did do a bit of that in Northrend with a Horde character, but did not get too far and never quite got around to doing a post about it.  Probably the biggest impact level scaling has had on me is that now all the mobs in Warlords of Draenor scale up to 100, which isn’t gray for level 110 characters, so for the Darkmoon Faire quest for 250 grisly trophies I can run around Draenor one-shotting mobs with impunity.

That helped me make some progress towards another minor goal, to get the Darkmoon Dirigible mount.  I’m still working a bit on that this week as Darkmoon Faire is up.  But I am not going to make it this month.

Meanwhile, my account renews at the end of the month so I think I am going to let it lapse.  I have other games I want to pay attention to at the moment and my zeal for Azeroth is in decline.  It is probably better that I take a break now and come back with fresh enthusiasm when the Battle for Azeroth pre-launch events start to kick in.

Of course, as soon as I decided that was probably the best course, Blizzard threw something my way, and invite to the Battle for Azeroth Alpha.

Come test our game!

Fortunately I long ago discovered my own problems with alpha and beta access.  Nothing diminishes my desire to play a game once it goes live than playing it before it goes live.  One of my pet theories is that the “it was better in beta” crowd that inevitably becomes vocal after launch is partially driven by the fact that at launch the game is no longer fresh and new to them.

That is certainly the case for me.  So playing in the Battle for Azeroth alpha now would only make me less likely to care about it when it did go live.  This is why I no longer do alpha or beta or even early access in some cases, though for some games early access is almost all you ever get. (e.g. Landmark)

So I’ll likely let WoW run down for now and come back to it when the time is ripe.

Argus and the Alliance Allied Races

With the coming of the Battle for Azeroth pre-order I was in and had one of the allied races, the Highmountain Tauren, unlocked straight our of the gate.

Moose on moose action outside Orgrimmar

Furthermore I had a second allied race, the Nightborne, pretty close to being unlocked.  You can go use WoW Head’s Legion Attunement page to see how close a given character is to unlocking the allied races.  As it turned out I fell off the final quest line about three quests before it was done.  Once I got back on that track I was able to get the requisite achievement.

Suramar achievement achieved

That, in turn, unlocked the Nightborne Elves for me as well.

More elves, wheee…

So I had the Horde allied races covered.  The Alliance allied races… is being allied with the alliance make you an ally ally or just part of the Alliance… were not available to me.  In what I will claim is yet another example of residual Horde favoritism from the Chris Metzen era, you could unlock the Horde allied races in the core areas of the Broken Isles, but the Alliance allied races required you to go to Argus.

Argus.

Argus, like Gaul, is divided into three

It isn’t so much that Argus is bad.  In fact, it follows closely the zone design philosophy for WoW Legion, where zones are actually small but feel big due to good design.  The problem is flying.  Once Blizzard gives you flying it feels like they’re punishing you when they take it away.  We’ve been over that many times, but it is still true.  Once the genie is out of the bottle you’re cooked.

I ran once character up to the level cap, went away for months, came back once flying was made available, worked to unlock that, and only then started on alts.  Flying makes running through a zone trivially easy as you avoid any unwanted entanglements.  This is doubly handy when you just want to zip in and get a few world quests out of the way.

And then you get to Argus and there is no flying.  There are not even flight points.  You just unlock what are essentially teleport nodes to get around.  So, while I started in on Argus, I tended to leave it alone in order to concentrate on efforts elsewhere… like in places where I could fly.  Also, Darkmoon Faire, and Love is in the Air, and pet battles kept me busy.

Eventually though I hit a point where I had some time and Argus was still there waiting for me.  In fact, getting the Darkmoon Faire “Test of Strength” quest done prompted me a bit to get out a slay some stuff on the ground.

As noted, not so bad.  The usual amount of stomping about the various land masses and occasionally trying to figure out how to get from point A to point C when mountain range or chasm B is in the way… stuff you never worry about with flying… but otherwise not an excessive amount of schlepping along in the usual knees bent running about advancing behavior.  And the story sticks you in the cut scenes now and again, which I always seem to enjoy more than I should.

Some guy wearing green googles showed up…

A couple hours of quiet time with my wife and daughter out of the house was all it took to get the achievement side of unlocking the Alliance allied races.

An achievement has never been so wrong about me…

So that both Alliance allied races are unlocked by the same Argus achievement is good.  That they need me to get exalted with both of the Argus factions is… less fun.  As noted above, flying and world quests… and world quests are the way forward for faction… go together like two things clearly meant to go together actually going together.

And my having ignored Argus for a while means that I have a ways to go on both factions.

My current standing with allied race unlocks

And I am only that far along with the Alliance allied race faction unlock effort because we had a faction bonus week that overlapped with Darkmoon Faire and its bonus faction merry-go-round booster, which I renewed liberally, and that I am doing this all on a Human character that gets its own boost to faction accrual.

Riding for a faction boost!

Still, I don’t have to unlock the allied raced TODAY.  I can move along, wait for the emissary quests to roll around for Army of the Light or Argussian Reach or Kirin-Tor, the latter which gives you a boost to the faction of your choice, and end up unlocking both in time.

Because the next question is what to do with these unlocked allied races.  I am not sure I need four more alts.  I am not sure I what classes I would make them or if I really need the overlap that would come with making yet another character of a class I already have.  I still haven’t finished the Demon Hunter starter quest line, leaving my Demon Hunter lingering about waiting for me to get back to him.

And then there is the usual problem of the level 110 booster that came with the Battle for Azeroth pre-order.  Do I want to use it straight out on one of these allied races?  Do I want to get any of them to level 60 first to fill in any sort of trade skill gap I might have when I boost them, because boosting from level 60 also means boosting trade skills as well, or is there some other character I should boost instead?

And then, of course, there are two more allied races to be unlocked once the expansion hits, the Zandalari Trolls and the Dark Iron Dwarves, the latter seeming an odd choice for an Alliance allied race given all the trouble they’ve cause in the past.  But the lore is malleable.

These questions will probably linger until summer when the pre-expansion events kick in and I come back from playing Rift Prime or whatever I am likely to try a couple months down the line when I tire a bit of Azeroth.