War Within

Midnight Was Pretty Great

by

Good Morning Folks! Happy Midnight Official Release Day! I have been playing Midnight since Thursday, when the head start began, because I am a sucker and am willing to pay the premium to get access to things early. There are folks out there with way more self-control than I have… and as a result, I hope you all enjoy your journey into Midnight. This morning’s blog post is going to talk about some of the themes in Midnight, so if you want to go into the game completely unspoiled, this morning be something that you want to come back to later. I feel like it is also important to state that I have been out of the World of Warcraft game for a while now. I very briefly played through the Dragonflight campaign at release and then attempted to come back and play a bit for War Within, and crashed out on the second zone because I was overloaded by the sheer number of quests. So I have been gone from seriously attempting to play World of Warcraft since the Shadowlands expansion in 2020.

The last time I played the game seriously was during Pandaria Remix in 2024, and I am actually maining the character that I played during that event, which is a Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven. There has been a lot of adjusting to the sweeping changes in the game that have happened since I last played, and Remix doesn’t fully count since it was its own thing. First up, I think the User Interface changes are brilliant, and I have managed to play the game without reinstalling any sort of hotbar or nameplate addons. The only thing that I wish I had was some equivalent of the threat bar that FFXIV has where you can see how much threat you are holding on all of the targets that you currently have threat on. This would be amazing, but the base UI seems perfectly cromulent for the role of a tank. I have no clue how good it is for healing, but seemingly it works just fine for DPS, given that after the campaign, I have swapped over to Arms Warrior. I’ve also been using the one button assist quite a bit because I have wanted to completely shut off my brain while playing World of Warcraft. If I do anything serious, I will set my hotbars up properly and care about rotations again.

As far as the campaign goes, I think Midnight is pretty freaking great. It is a massive step up in World of Warcraft storytelling, even over The War Within… which was itself a massive step up over Dragonflight. While I am not feeling the feels that I did during Final Fantasy XIV, they are trying to tackle far more nuanced topics in this expansion than we usually get. The Amani zone and the redemption arc featured within it was phenomenal, and it might go down as one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones, period, from any expansion. Zul’Aman will always have a special place in my heart, and I completely forgot that it was associated with the Silvermoon area… so this was a massively pleasant surprise. Another zone that I did not expect to really love was the rambling mess that featured around Silvermoon, which takes you across all of the Plaguelands as you deal with the sins of the past. It tells a way more mature story about the horrors of war and what it brings people to do than I expected from Warcraft. Blizzard is known for big bombastic hero tales… and significantly less so for dealing with sensitive topics, but I applaud them for trying something new and interesting.

This game, however, continues my tradition of hating the “druid” zone. I am not the biggest fan of Harandar or the Navi… I mean Haranir. I get what they are going for with this zone and this race, and I might actually play one at some point because they have some really interesting druid transformation forms, but this is so not my jam. Harandar, in general, also suffers from the “Heart of Thorns” problem, where the zone uses aggressive verticality that makes waypoints mostly useless unless you have the layout memorized and know without a doubt what vertical tier of the zone the thing you are looking for is located on. I will always love the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion for the sweeping meta events that it introduced, but I fucking hate traversing these zones… and Harandar is that but for World of Warcraft. It also makes me feel like I need to sneeze the entire damned time because I can always feel the pollen in the air. There are going to be tree huggers out there that love this zone and good for them… but for someone whose favorite zone is Blackrock Depths… this is very much not my jam.

I dinged level 90 on Sunday morning and then wrapped up the campaign about an hour after that. This feels like a pretty good pace for leveling through the content, but I was left in the dust by Kylana and Erixi, who dinged, I believe, sometime on Friday. The biggest frustration that I have with the leveling experience is that you are still going to need about two zones worth of side quests to hit the max level. Go into the leveling process with that in mind and choose which zones you want to grind out completely in order to accomplish this. I personally chose Voidstorm and the Amani zone, and doing all of the quests in one and 90% of the quests in the other, combined with the Main Story quest, was enough to get me there. I did hit a wall at level 85, where I needed to be 86 in order to open up the last zone of the game, so you are better off just pushing through some side quests that are convenient as you are doing the MSQ. I wish the MSQ alone gave you enough experience, but then again, this is a problem that FFXIV has not solved either.

I’ve geared out Belgraven mostly through world quests, which are way less plentiful than when I was doing this in Shadowlands. That has opened up a lot more time to start leveling an alt, and I decided to push up Belgrace, my Horde side Paladin that was my main during Shadowlands. I have two guild families, House Stalwart on the Alliance side and Facepull on the Horde side, and I feel like it is only proper that I alternate back and forth between the two. I was apparently already in Dragonflight when I last played the character, and in theory, I should be able to hit level 80 while doing the campaign over there. I might actually do War Within as well because I would like to actually see the main story quest for that expansion without a multi-year lag between the first parts and then wrapping up rapidly right before Midnight. I’ve swapped up to Retribution because it feels like leveling as a tank is no longer as advantageous as it once was.

One thing that I had forgotten, though, is how much I enjoyed certain aspects of the Dragonflight storyline. While I do not give a shit about the Dragonflights in general… I really enjoyed a lot of the quests involving the races of the Dragon Isles that weave around the larger draconic narrative. I will never not love a Tuskarr storyline, and I really enjoy the tales of the Centaur tribes as well. Probably the worst zone is actually The Waking Shores, and that’s largely because you are so deeply involved in Dragon bullshit, with no real side narrative of the people you are impacting along the way. I feel like the Dragonflight storyline peaked in Northrend, and it has been downhill ever since. That is not to say that I did not enjoy this expansion, because clearly, there are some well-designed zones, and so much of it has an Outland and Northrend revisited vibe to it. The Ohn’ahran Plains is absolutely a rethinking of Nagrand, and large swaths of The Azure Span feel like Grizzly Hills, all of which are huge positives for the expansion in general.

As much credit as I give them for the updated UI, I am back to my old ways of installing a bunch of addons and using WoWUP to keep them patched, specifically the Curse Forge branch. Most of these are just quality of life improvements but the ones that I probably would not want to be without are Better Bags, which gives me similar functionality of having virtual bags sorted by item type, and Waypoint UI, which gives you a giant glowing beacon where the next step in your quest chain leads you to. The latter is especially handy when dealing with the bullshit verticality of Harandar. I am also a big fan of Dialog UI, which gives you a much more readable quest interface that also creates keybinds for all of the dialog options so you do not have to click the screen. Now that I am in the “endgame” and doing World Quests and such I started leaning on Handynotes and RareScanner again, which just are significant quality of life improvements when looking for rares and lootables in the zones. So I feel like all of the addons I am using now are window dressing on what is a completely functional base game, and I could play without them… but simply do not want to.

Are you just starting Midnight today? What are you most excited about for this expansion? Have you played through the expansion already? What did you enjoy the most? Drop me a line below.

Many Smol Possums

by

This morning I had a delightful experience. For a few months, we have been getting up at 5:30 and going for a walk before things heat up. Part of this experience is feeding the outdoor feral cats that visit our home. Generally speaking, we have Greybie, Skippy, Big Boy, and Blackie waiting on us out front of the house. This morning there was another little face peeking around the corner of the house and in the dark I thought at first it was a cat. Once I got a good look it was a skinny little possum, that troddled off once I had “perceived” it. After my walk, I go out into the backyard and feed Tripod the three-legged stray calico that lives there, and as I was walking back into the house I noticed this momma possum hanging out in front of me. She was pretty chill about it and largely did not move until I was just about to go back into the house… at which point she wandered off towards the cat food I had set out.

Surely the joeys are about to be weaned because they were pretty big and VERY active. I felt for the momma because one of them kept slipping down and covering her face… which would lead her to push them back up onto her back. We’ve had some pretty extreme reactions from our family as we have shown them pictures. I told my dad we had a new weird-looking cat, and he appreciated it because they live in the country and have all manner of visitors like this. Another family member has been squicked out by the possums and thought they looked scary. Me… I just think they are adorable and wish they would be my friend. I don’t dare attempt to pet one because they have very hurty-looking teeth. I kinda hope that we have a bunch of baby possums underfoot in the backyard honestly. I am wondering though if they are living under our deck.

Last night we continued our shenanigans and realized we had missed unlocking one dungeon… Lost City of Amdapor Hard. We ran through it, Sohm Al Hard, Hullbreaker Hard, and Great Gubal Hard. All in all they pretty much all went smoothly. I am still seeing the recurring thing about Reapers having ants in their pants and being unable to stand still. I did screw up and start one dungeon without tank stance on, but recovered pretty quickly. Things ended up going onto Ace… who was heavily shielded giving me plenty of time to pick it back up. I am consistently annoyed that Tank stance gets turned off constantly… and while I am usually good about hitting it first thing. Ace and I had gotten to talking about something over Discord and I completely forgot about it.

We got a bit of a late start last night so did not end up doing anymore Alexander, but we did duo Ravana and Bismark Extreme. Ravana was pretty easy and we one-shot it without much problem… giving us the confidence to try harder things. Bismark however took a couple of attempts for us to get a pattern going. The first failure was trying to kill both of the Snake adds at the same time…. then the second go I turned off tank stance and Ace heal/dpsd one down while I dpsd down the other… only to have Ace get knocked off the platform. On the third attempt, we executed everything pretty perfectly and got our kill. We attempted Thordan Extreme and just could not make it through the very final phase. There was some mechanic we were failing to do correctly…. which would knock us both out in a single hit so we are going to need to do some research on how to solo that fight. Either that or we just wait until we have more levels on us and attempt it again.

Probably the coolest part of last night is that we killed two Extremes and got two Lanners to drop. We both rolled on and I won the one from Ravana, and then passed on the one from Bismarck so we each got one. Honestly, the distribution is pretty perfect because my gear is way more red in theme, and theirs is way more white on average just because healer gear is usually white. We’ve made a pact that once my Path of Exile shenanigans wind down a bit we will probably start working on farming all of the lanners… doggos… etc on our Cactuar mains. I am pretty sure Ashgar and Thalen might want to get in on that nonsense as well. I had to turn back on the mount music so I could cruise around listening to the Ravana music. I am glad they chose the Phase 2 music instead of the Phase 1 music… but either is pretty great. Side note we also both got a pony from our Extreme ARR shenanigans.

In other news, I patched up World of Warcraft and logged in enough to make sure my friend Finni had gotten an invite to House Stalwart. I am not actively playing the game and it will probably be a while before I check out War Within, but I did run through the quests to unlock the Warband fully on my OG Main Belghast. Right now the Warband is showing my Dark Iron Warrior, Tauren Paladin, and Vulpera Hunter from Pandaria Remix. It seems as though the Warband bank is bricked at the moment… but this is apparently a known issue. At some point I will get in and play around some more with it. Probably when my Dark Iron Dwarf transfers over from Pandaria to Retail. That is probably going to be who I play War Within on because I had a lot of fun being a Dark Iron.

Finally, today is the league start for Path of Exile Settlers League and I have decided that I am once again going to level a Righteous Fire Chieftain. There is a meme over on Reddit that indirectly calls RF players Cowards and I am fine with that. Largely I enjoyed the leagues when I started RF and regretted starting something else on the leagues where I have not… ultimately rerolling at some point. It is my happy place and I have reached a point of acceptance around that. I like playing other builds and I will absolutely roll something else along the way to play as well. I just like having my good stable base of a character to get through the atlas and into the endgame before I start experimenting with other things. I know at some point I am going to make a Gladiator Bleed character of some sort… and maybe something focused around Retaliation skills as well. I also want to try building something around the new Warden ascendancy… but those are all side projects that I will do after building a stable base of currency on the Chieftain.

If you play any of the games that I play regularly feel free to join me in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. It is a little community that I run that is admittedly not super active, but we have a league chat channel for example where we talk a lot about Path of Exile while the league is going on. I keep getting the notion that I am going to start streaming again at some point, and if I ever do I will be hanging out in this Discord while live. All are welcome pending they agree to the rules upon entry. It pretty much follows the guidelines that I have for this blog as can be seen in my Core Beliefs page, so if you align to those thoughts you would probably enjoy yourself just fine.