Around And Around

If there's one thing the many the blog posts I've read on World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion have in common it's that they don't seem to agree on very much. I've heard people saying the open-world leveling experience is better than usual and worse than usual, that the expansion is very alt-friendly and that it doesn't really work for alts. 

Some people describe their experiences in Torghast in glowing terms, others aren't so keen. Everyone has their own idea of which covenant is best except for those who don't like any of them. Overall, some people think Blizzard have done a good job, others not so much. About the only thing everyone agrees on is no-one likes the Maw.

Can't say I'm all that surprised. It's probably a good sign. When expansions are genuinely below par the critical voices usually drown out the praise. If people are mainly disagreeing over which parts are good and which bad then the developers have probably got it about right.

It's all a bit notional for me since I'm not playing Shadowlands. Come to think of it, I seem to know a ridiculous amount about an  expansion of which I have no personal experience and not really all that much interest. That's WoW for you.

Reading all that did make me re-assess an mmoprg expansion that launched around the same time, one I am playing: EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows. In particular it got me thinking about EQII's current expansion gameplay loop, at least as it applies to solo players like myself.

The Darkpaw team does have one theoretical advantage over their counterparts at Blizzard. They knock out an expansion every year. With about a hundredth of the people and a thousandth of the resources, true, but at least they can remember what they did last time. Which is handy, because chances are they're going to do the same again.

 

Except not exactly. The level cap only goes up every other year and every expansion has to have at least one new feature to grab everyone's attention. Last year's Blood of Luclin had ten new levels and the Overseer system. It also had an unannounced, unexpected and, for many, unwelcome tradeskill revamp. Reign of Shadows keeps the same level cap but comes with a new race, the Vah Shir, and announced changes to the way both Alternate Advancement and Guilds progress.

Surprisingly little of that factors into my personal gameplay loop, which has remained remarkably consistent not only throughout the two Lunar expansions but the two Planar ones that preceded them and several more before that. Here's how it goes.

First things first. If the expansion has new levels I concentrate on getting those done, usually on my Berserker, who I grudgingly have to admit is my "main" these days. He's also a weaponsmith but far more importantly he's my Transmuter and Adorner, which means he also has crafting levels to work on. 

There's always a "Signature" questline for both adventurers and crafters. Each is usually lengthy, although the craft Sig felt a little shorter this year. The two traditionally carry the same main storyline but from differing perspectives, which makes doing both somewhat synergistic. 

I always start with the adventure quests, which until last year were designed to finish around and about the same time as you capped out. Blood of Luclin changed that, giving hugely increased xp, so last year I hit the cap long before I'd finished the questline. 

 

That made almost no difference to my motivation because as well as telling a story I find interesting, these quests provide regular upgrades. The final reward is either a weapon or a near-best-in-slot item. Something worth having, anyway. 

The rewards from the tradeskill line tend to be a bit fluffier - a lot of house and appearance items - but crafters are fluffy, by and large. Again, the final reward tends to be a very good piece that most players are likely to want. You also often need to complete at least one of the signature lines to get various character flags giving benefits like access to instances and allowing the use of flying mounts.

Blood of Luclin made a raft of changes to crafting that the majority of tradeskillers found detrimental to their enjoyment of the game, mostly for very sound reasons, but I personally liked them and even found them to be in my own best interests. This year, however, things are roughly back to normal, which is fine, too.

Once I've finished both the Signature questlines and completed all my levels, if there are any, the real expansion begins. For group and raid players that means the traditional round of progressively more challenging dungeons but for solo players like me it means a lot of single-use and repeatable quests.

Separate from the Signature quests, these days each expansion includes a load of quests that start with drops. In the distant past EQII had players learning languages and acquiring racial masteries from items mobs dropped. It still happens, but sparingly. The slack has been taken up by drops that give quests which send you around the new zones killing certain types of mob. That's one way you get more upgrades.

 

The other very important way adventurers can upgrade their gear without visiting a dungeon is to join in with the never-ending carnival of Public Quests. These vary quite a bit. Sometimes they're elaborate, with multiple stages requiring people to do different things in different places. Other times they're straightforward open raids on creatures other games might call World Bosses. Last year they happened in instances, this year they're on open maps.

Reign of Shadows must have good PQs because a couple of months after launch they're still very much the hot ticket. They're all the World Boss kind and there seem to be three in each of the new zones. If you kill all three a fourth spawns. 

Just about any time I log in there's either an open raid circling around doing them as they pop or people are calling them out and trying to get a raid started. I did four two nights ago and three last night. I could have done a lot more if I'd wanted because there's so much interest multiple instances of the zones keep spawning, leading to an almost unbroken chain.

The PQs are popular because they have drops which, while rare, are upgrades even for dungeoneers. I'm not absolutely sure but I think there may even be a few things raiders wouldn't sniff at. That keeps things busy, at least until most people get what they want, which usually takes a good portion of the twelve-month expansion cycle. 

It goes without saying that any of those good drops is going to be be a huge upgrade for a solo player like me but even the regular drops can be better than my quest gear. And there's a currency too, naturally, to spend at a special vendor. I haven't actually checked what you can get with that yet.

 

There are other soloable upgrade paths that shouldn't be ignored. EQII has a fantastic collectables system where you find and pick up "shinies" from the ground in every map and instance. Most are tradeable and the inevitable duplicates can go for big money - some of the rewards are very nice indeed.

Completed collections also come with collectables of their own, leading to meta-collections that can nest several times and provide really very good items for those with the patience or the deep pockets to acquire them all. 

Over the years the collectable system has been expanded to include No Drop shinies that can't be traded and different colored kinds that only characters who've achieved certain benchmarks or completed certain quests can see. Collecting in Norrath is serious business.

So is crafting. Last year there were many complaints about the way crafters acquired their new recipes and what they could make with them but this year things are a little more traditional. Basic recipes are purchasable from trainers and, as far as I know, the more sought-after rare recipes are still dropped by mobs (although possibly only by Bosses and then only rarely). 

The main crafting gameplay loop for me, however, is Research. Most of the new maps have a Researcher NPC who's almost the tradeskill equivalent of a Public Quest. Anyone who qualifies (usually by dint of having progressed a certain distance through the Signature questline) can take a repeatable quest from each of these NPCs several times a day. The more quests the server collectively completes, the more new recipes open up for sale on the associated vendor.

 

That's an incentive in itself but the real draw are the personal rewards you get for completing each quest. From those you can get all kinds of nice things like recipe books, mercenaries and the patterns needed to make the desirable new mastercrafted armor and weapons. They also give you the currency you need to buy things from the aforementioned vendor.

All of the Research quests involve harvesting materials and crafting items, something which melds very comfortably with the adventuring activities listed above. It feels very organic, swooping around the new maps on the mount that now flies because you finished the zone storyline, dropping out of the sky to snatch up a shiny, kill a bunch of quest mobs, harvest some materials or join in with a PQ.

In Blood of Luclin last year this loop kept me happily occupied right into the summer, interspersed as it was with the regular holidays and a couple of big updates. With the ever-popular ethereal season that seems to go on longer each year blending into the now-traditional Panda quests and then the pre-expansion events running up to next year's xpack, it's quite feasible to spend the whole year working on something or other - and that's not even considering playing other characters, of whom I have many.

The downside would be that all this activity can start to feel somewhat familiar, year on year. And, as we all know but don't like to admit, almost every gain our characters make is temporary, set to be wiped out as soon as the next content drop arrives. 

Those are very minor quibbles. The entire hobby relies on, even thrives on, these kinds of repeatable activities. And as an entertaining, satisfying, enjoyable way to spend a few hours as often as the mood takes me, I don't think the way EQII handles the loop can easily be bettered. 

I Think I'm Gonna Let My Subscription Slide

After some thought this morning, I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft, just a day before it fell due.  I filled out the "Why don't you love me anymore?" questionnaire including the "any other reasons" section, where I ran into the five-hundred word buffer long before I'd finished explaining why it wasn't them, it was me.

Even so, I was pretty cagey. There was something about my decision-making process I wasn't sure I wanted Blizzard to know. Among the reasons I feel I can't really justify paying ten pounds a month for WoW, the main one is that I can do most of the things I enjoy in the game without paying them a penny.

I strongly prefer the low-mid level game to what comes later. I like making new characters, trying different race and class combos and generally goofing around. All of that, I can do for free. With the level squish effectively adding another twenty old-school levels to the free option as well as opening up every expansion short of Shadowlands for anyone, there's more than enough free content to keep me amused for the foreseeable future. 

I'm not sure I want to bring that to Blizzard's attention. I mean, have they noticed? I'm guessing they're now so laser-focused on the bizarro version of WoW people have to pay for that they've completely forgotten they're giving away a bigger and arguably better mmorpg than anything we used to pay for back when subscriptions were the norm.

I was so certain I'd be carrying on without the sub I even did some prep for when it lapses. I made two new characters on the Horde side, where I had no-one under forty, then I had my level fifty goblin shaman buy half a dozen thirty-slot bags and post them to the newbies along with five hundred gold pocket money each. 

 

Then I ran a few old raids on my fifty hunter to make a couple of thousand gold and sent some of that to several of my low-level Alliance characters, along with all the hexweave bags he's been making in his garrison. And of course I'd already taken the trouble to start a new garrison with my level fifteen druid, who can take over as Alliance bagmaker if I need more, which I probably won't.

Apart from the simple truth that I just haven't been using most of the parts of the game I'm paying for since the new year, one of my main motives for cancelling is to find out just how much fun WoW is under the free to play rules. On paper, there's a lot more freedom of choice, with double the levels and a huge increase in explorable content, not to mention free players can now have a thousand gold to their names.

And there's the materials vault or whatever it's called. When did they add that? I only noticed it a couple of weeks ago and the mat-packed bags of every character I've logged in since suggests I hadn't just forgotten about it... but then I logged in my gnome hunter, who hasn't been anywhere near a bank for at least a year, went to buy it for her and she already had it. But it was empty... 

No clue how that happened.

Just the massive increase to inventory space alone is going to transform the experience of playing low-level characters. Running out of space has always been a defining feature of the game until I reached a point where I could just buy my way out of it, which was never going to happen on the old version of the free trial. Now that's changed, whether it's going to make for a more enjoyable experience... well, that's what I'd like to find out.

 

I'm also interested to know whether, having made a new vulpera (They start at level ten, annoyingly.) I'll be able to play her. I've tried to research it but the information I've found has been contradictory, never a surprise when it comes to WoW. I think the allied races are excluded from those you can create as a free player, even if you've unlocked them, but whether you can play one that's already on your account is something I'll find out tomorrow.

The penultimate reason for canceling the sub is that, as must be obvious, I've decided not to buy Shadowlands just yet. I did a bit of searching and it seems I could get a key for the expansion for less than £15, which would have been exactly what I'd be willing to pay, but only if I want to play on a U.S. server. For some reason that escapes me, the cheapest EU key in the secondary market runs around £25 whereas I 've seen U.S. keys as low as £13.

I do actually have a U.S. WoW account but for irritating historical reasons I have almost all my characters on an EU one instead. I always prefer to play on American servers when I can but I really don't want to repeat my EverQuest/EverQuest II/Guild Wars 2 history by spreading my efforts across multiple accounts, let alone regions. 

The other problem with buying Shadowlands is that all I'm really interested in is the levelling part. There's a near-zero chance of my carrying on with it once I've seen all the zones and storylines. It seems nuts to pay anything like full price just for that when I still have so much of the older content to play through for free. I'll wait until I can pick up Shadowlands at a price that more closely refelects the use I'm likely to make of it.

 

The final and most pressing reason for the cancellation has nothing at all to do with WoW itself. These last couple of weeks I've barely mentioned EQII and that's because I haven't been playing it much. I even went several days without logging in at all. I'd finished the signature adventure and tradeskill questlines on my Berserker/Weaponsmith and it felt as though I was done with Reign of Shadows other than going through the same content again with another character.

Yeah, that was stupid. I knew it wasn't true, it just felt as though it might be. Last night I finally logged in and while I was setting my Overseer missions I saw someone was setting up a raid for the Wolf PQ in Savage Weald 2. I asked for an invite, got one and ported there. 

When I arrived I noticed I was standing next to an NPC with a green feather over his head. He was a researcher with one of the repeatable research quests so I took it. An hour later I'd done three public quests and got a major upgrade from one of them (celestial quality, shoulder slot). I'd also finished two research quests, one of which gave me a key recipe book for adornments which, when I make them, will give me a bunch more upgrades.

Just like that I had a whole new reason to knuckle down and get on with the expansion. I remembered how important research quests had been in Blood of Luclin a year ago and also how much I'd enjoyed doing them. And I had a ton of fun doing the PQs, which are currently a hot ticket in EQII, at least until a critical mass of people get the drops they want.

I took a moment to consider whether I'd rather be spending my time in WoW or EQII. The answer was obvious. I've been looking for an mmorpg to sink my teeth into and there it was, right in front of me all the time. Back to Norrath it is.

For a while, anyway.

Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

On Repeat

A topic that bubbles up in conversation now and then, when people talk about playing mmorpgs, is the time-consuming nature of the hobby. People occasionally out themselves as addicts or make a point by quoting extraordinary /played statistics running into hundreds or thousannds of hours over a number of years. It's a given that successful, long-running games come with more curated content than most of us are likely to consume even once.

In some ways mmorpgs have more in common with other media than they do with video games, even those that come in series. Single-player games tend to have finite narative arcs that alternate paths and endings merely complement. Almost all non-competetive games have some kind of completion state, whether it's a Game Over screen or a full set of achievements.

It's as well, then, that mmorpgs hang around. When Blizzard's John Hight says of World of Warcraft "Why should it ever end?" he's doing no more than stating the obvious in the form of a rhetorical question. Why indeed? There's no reason. 

In these days of boxed sets and streaming platforms, a long-running mmorpg isn't all that different from a series of movies or a long-running TV show. Time was when you'd need to catch something like that on broadcast or release. Maybe, if you kept your eyes open, you'd get another chance on repeat or rerun or revival. 

 

Nowadays, it's harder to think of things you can't access at will. Even failures and flops live on in a dim half-life, uploaded to YouTube from glitchy VHS cassettes or released back into the culture by creators hoping for another shot at an aesthetic validation they never experienced the first time around. Unsuccessful online games are one of the rare cultural entities that fade and even there, like a superhero's death, you can't count on it lasting.

Jeromai was talking recently about purging games from his hard drives: "I used to just keep the game around… just in case. Well, part of deliberate unfettered gaming is to loose that fetter. UNINSTALLED. Gone from the hard disk. What’s the harm? I can always re-download it again when I get the urge to play it again. The save files are mostly all intelligently maintained or cloud saved these days".

It's true, although I suspect many of us will take a little longer to feel entirely secure in our non-ownership of things we really care not lose. But then, nothing is ever guaranteed. Files corrupt. Disks break. Tapes fade. Even books burn. It's maybe safer in the ether, after all.

The medium isn't the message, anyway. What's stopping all of us going back and doing it over isn't access to the data. It's time.

And playing mmorpgs takes for-frickin'-ever! Even with things on fast-forward, with all the short cuts and the  boosts and the skips. Look at that WoWHead chart I put up yesterday, telling you how long it takes to go from ten to fifty in different expansions. The shortest time is twelve hours. 

Twelve hours!  Twelve hours to get a single character to the old cap, experiencing just a fraction of the basic content of one expansion, from the perspective of one race, one class, one faction. At which point, in the minds of many - possibly most - the game is just about to begin.

Not that most people really are going to get through even that small portion in any twelve hours. It's going to take the average person twice that, I would bet, unless they literally skip the actual content of the content.

Twenty four hours, which is less than it took me to level my shaman, is long enough to watch all three seasons of Stranger Things, something I was doing concurrently with my recent stint in WoW.  It was the disparate experiences that sent me down this track. Also the similarities.

When I finally got around to playing WoW about five years after it arrived I was surprised to find it wasn't at all what I was expecting. I'd heard plenty about it. Plenty. It was a cultural phenomenon and I thought I had a pretty good handle on it despite never having played it.

Yeah, well, I was right and I was wrong. WoW wasn't not what I was expecting but it was much more than I was expecting. It had depth and feeling I hadn't anticipated. It also reminded me very, very strongly of other mmorpgs, some of which I liked better, and yet it didn't disgrace them. In some interesting ways it shed light on them and made me appreciate them even more. And want to play them again. 

Stranger Things is like that. It's not quite the cultural phenomenon WoW was in it's prime but it's the show that made many of us take notice of Netflix as something more than just a distribution service. It had sufficient cultural capital to penetrate the mainstream as a trope, an analogy for a genericized cultural nostalgia, similar to how WoW stood in for nerd culture in general back in that South Park episode and a score more noughties comedies.

I thought I had ST pegged; eighties' nostalgia filtered through a post-nineties' ironic lens. A mash-up of all those Spielberg-influenced, D&D-quoting, kid-friendly movies that themselves referenced a Saturday Morning Pictures culture long forgotten even then. All thrown into a blender with monster-of-the-week hits sequenced all the way from the Outer Limits to the X-Files.

And then I watched it and, like WoW, it turned out to be everything I thought it would be and something entirely different at the same time. Just as WoW, back when I first played it in 2009, was both easy and hard, so Stranger Things is both light and dark. In both cases I went in expecting a frothy, sugar-sweet rush that wouldn't last and came out feeling strangely changed; satisfied yet unsettled; fulfilled yet wanting more.

Good art bounces. Playing World of Warcraft always makes me think of playing EverQuest. It makes me consider what that game did first and did right. It makes me consider what came after and how at least a part of the culture changed because of it and is still changing now.

 

As I was watching Stranger Things I couldn't but help compare it with its preternatural progenitor, Buffy. As in mmorpgs of a certain stripe everything comes back to EQ, so in television shows like this, everything comes back to Buffy but in the case of Stranger Things there are tighter correlations than just that. I could start my dissertation on the touchstones right now. I imagine someone already has. 

What it really makes me want to do, though, is re-watch Buffy from start to end. And I could. I could do that. It would take me six days. If I did nothing else but eat and sleep. Taken at a more realistic pace, five or six episodes a day, I could be through it in a month. 

Which is still a hell of a long time. One day I'll do it but time is growing short. As life passes, things pile up. It's hard enough to keep pace with everything new that's added without revisting and re-evaluating.

Except you have to. You really do. Nothing worth doing is worth doing only once, at least not when it comes to art and culture. It all needs to be looked at again and again, set in context with itself and everything else. The cheese does not stand alone.

One of the more curious effects of this peculiar year for me has been the recovery of my re-reading habit. For many years I re-read as a matter of course. I would often irritate people in pubs with my theory that it's the third time that counts. The first read is all about discovery, the second about comparison. The third is the first clean read. I can elaborate, trust me, but I won't.

 

Working in a bookshop for twenty years broke me of the habit, not intentionally but through the sheer, unceasing torrent of free, new books. I never had time to re-read anything because I had to keep winnowing that pile. This year, for the first time in a long time, at home, surrounded by thousands of books, I started to re-read. And it was good.

Only my rule of three didn't apply so much. I could barely remember having read most of the books in the first place. It was more like reading them for the first time, again. You really need to re-read in real time to keep the doors of perception propped open. Same with movies, TV, music...

And, I guess, mmorpgs? Maybe? I'm not sure. Because we for damn sure aren't likely to start again from scratch and do the whole thing over, are we? I mean, many of us come around a few times. We go back to older games and give them another spin. But it seems to me that's more like playing a few tracks from an old album than reading a whole novel or even sitting through a full movie.

With Shadowlands launching today a whole new layer gets added to the cake. And, trust John Hight, they'll keep adding. Because why in the hell should they ever stop?

But we will. We will stop. Which is why we have to make choices, like Jeromai. What to keep. What to lose. And, for me, what to pick up again, and when, and how many times. How many more times?

I am so going to re-watch Buffy. Maybe I could use the time I'm not using not playing Shadowlands...

Ready Or Not : Shadowlands

Today's the big day, then. Everyone excited? Scornful? Affecting not to notice? Got to be one of those, I guess.

Or maybe it doesn't. I'm still kind of on the fence. I haven't bought Shadowlands. I don't plan on buying it just yet. I might, at some point. Maybe some point soon. Especially if everyone keeps talking about it and makes it sound too interesting to miss.

I just won't be there on day one.

Then again, in a very real way I will. I'll be playing World of Warcraft, anyway. I'm letting my subscription run on for another month. Since I re-subbed in October I've been logging into WoW Retail every day. I usually play for a couple of hours,  sometimes quite a lot more than that, and I've been having plenty of fun doing it. 

I'm going to carry on leveling my vulpera hunter. She dinged thirty-two last night, completing the zone storyline for Plaguelands (East and West, I believe), thereby adding yet another level of confusion and complexity to the already convoluted process, as Shintar will be no doubt be amused to hear.

As we accelerate away from the pre-patch that brought us the Level Squish and Chromie Time, information on how the whole process works is starting to harden up but its a scab I just can't stop picking.  

WoWHead now has a much more detailed and comprehensive guide that clarifies a number of issues of concern. For a start, it makes it very clear that the status quo ante still prevails as the game's default setting. If you don't go speak to Chromie, the pre-patch changes nothing. There's now a big warning near the top of the guide:

That's quite neat. If you were happy with how things were before, fine, just carry on as if nothing happened. Of course, you'll be in a world of your own.

That explains a couple of things, not least why it is that the game forcibly removes you from Chromie Time and teleports you back to your capital city as soon as you hit fifty. It has to or else you'd be out of synch with everyone else. Which you already were, only until then it didn't matter, apparently.

Okay, maybe it doesn't explain it all that well.

It does, however, explain why I couldn't take my mid-forties hunter to Icecrown to level up on the round robin rare event. Why, indeed, there were no rares to be seen when he tried. Also no event and no crowds. He was on Chromie time for Warlords of Draenor and phased accordingly. The whole event literally didn't exist in his timeline.

Another thing the WoWHead guide not only clarifies but codifies is the radical difference in efficiency between the expansions. Leveling from ten to fifty in Warlords of Draenor is estimated to be twice as fast as doing the same in Wrath of the Lich King or the Burning Crusade.

Now that I've levelled one character all the way from creation to cap (well cap-as-was), taken another from forty to fifty and a third from ten into the low thirties, I'd have to say that whether things go too fast or too slow all depends on what you want. Revelations, eh?

When I was trying to get my dwarf hunter to forty-five, then fifty, for specific reasons, even the xp in WoD didn't feel fast enough. I'd have happily pressed a "Be There Now" button just to get to the bit I wanted.

Playing my vulpera hunter, things feel very different. She's not on Chromie Time at all. She just wandered out the gates of Orgrimmar and started exploring.  She's been gawping and gosh-wowing her way across the unfamiliar post-Cataclysm world ever since and frankly it's all going a bit too fast.

There's so much to see. The changes wrought by Cataclysm are widespread and fascinating and thanks to my stint in Classic last year the way the world used to look is fairly fresh in my mind. So far I've barely had a chance to take a detailed look at one small area, the Plaguelands, and she's already in the thirties. 

 

The much bigger problem is that without Chromie Time most of Cataclysm stops scaling at thirty. When this begins to happen it's actually kind of a relief. The "everything matches your level exactly" method of scaling is a mixed blessing at best. 

I find it has a deadening effect over time. Everything feels too similar. I miss being adjust the difficulty level on the fly by choosing to fight mobs lower or higher level than me. Losing that option almost seems to negate the obvious advantages of nothing being too tough to handle.

I hung around in Plaguelands for a couple of levels after things stopped keeping pace just so I could enjoy that feeling of getting more powerful each time I dinged. That's quite a significant element in the levelling process for me. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the concept of being just about exactly as capable at level thirty as I was at level ten.

You do get more tools in the kit as you level up. That makes a big difference or it does when they're things like Feign Death and Camouflage, which literally change the way the game can be played. Not to mention the upgrades to riding skill, which can also feel game-changing. 

Even so, I think I'd prefer a little more granularity. Maybe if the mobs could all maintain a holding pattern around the character's level, three to five levels either side perhaps, rather than matching it exactly. That might make things feel more nuanced.

 

While everyone else is enjoying Shadowlands I'm going to have to make some choices. If I want to carry on with Cataclysm on my vulpera she's going to have to go visit Chromie to get the whole world reset. 

Although, not right away, I guess. Most Cataclysm zones tap out at thirty but there are a handful that go to thirty-five and even after that presumably there are several more levels where the xp diminishes but doesn't stop completely.  With luck I might stretch things all the way to forty. It would slow down a lot towards the end but would levelling more slowly for a while be such a bad thing?

There is another intriguing possibility. I don't plan on staying subbed indefinitely. Once the EverQuest II expansion arrives I'll probably let the WoW sub lapse. But I do expect to keep playing on the eternal free trial or as it's properly known, the WoW Starter Edition.

It occured to me as I was writing this that, with the way WoW scaling now works, I could cycle a number of characters through not only Cataclysm but all the expansions, eventually seeing everything, without ever having to subscribe again. 

I can't imagine keeping that up. The organization involved would be immense and I'd run through a lot of characters. The free trial does allow you to make a lot of characters, though, so it's possible.  

Or is it? Not according to the official guidelines, it's not. I just checked the support article on the rules and restrictions for the free trial at Battle.net and it says "On the Starter Edition you will not have access to: Expansion content (quests, zones, etc)". WoWHead agrees. 

Hmm. Is that really true, though? Let's just fact-check it, shall we? It so happens I have an unsubscribed Starter Edition account right here...

... six hours pass ...

Nah, that's not right! They need to rewrite the FAQ. You can level to twenty in any expansion now. I'm as sure as I can be. My Starter Edition goblin just dinged sixteen in Warlords of Draenor. She has her own garrison now. I may have gotten a bit carried away - she was level seven when I logged her in...

I'd have to do a bit more experimenting to see if you can skip the introductory questlines to the expansions. Those give quite a lot of xp so you'd eat up a significant chunk of your twenty levels just getting to the opening zones. I can think of a few fun projects for the future there.

So, Shadowlands is going to have to wait. I have more than enough to keep me busy already.

Make a note of this so you can have a good laugh in a day or two, when I'm posting my first impressions of the expansion I said I wasn't going to get.

More Of The Same

 

Time for a few bullet-point updates on how things are going in World of Warcraft Retail. Keeping it short because this kind of stuff tends to run away with me and sometimes even I roll my eyes when I read it back.

• Invulnerable Hunter Pet

Yeah, I don't have one any more. After I finished writing about it, I went back to hunt and quest in Northrend for a while, before moving on to the expansion Chromie expected me to be in, Warlords of Draenor. I wondered if that would set things back to normal but no, the cat remained all but indestructible as I plowed through nearly two full levels, logging out out just before I hit fifty. 

I only saw the pet take significant damage once. It was while I was on an escort quest alongside two other players, all of us doing our own thing. It was a farcical sight, three of us running along behind identical triplet NPCs, each of them getting ambushed by three sets of mobs. 

At one point there seemed to be a mechanic where mobs kept spawning and in a few seconds there were so many of them all you could see was a big, red blob where all the nameplates blurred together. I was tabbing through as many mobs as possible, setting the pet on all of them, and after a while his health did drop a few notches. 

When some of the mobs peeled off onto me I had to feign and I watched while the cat fought an army. Couldn't see him for the crowd. He went to maybe 80% health at one point. Mobs kept dying but more kept coming in and he clearly wasn't going to make much headway but nor was he in any danger of dying so I stood up, whereupon a bunch came at me and killed me. I may have shot some of them first.

 

Other than that, nothing could put a scratch on him. Didn't matter what expansion, zone, mob or difficulty level. I even logged right out of the game once to see if that would make a difference but nope. Just the same when I got back in. 

Then this morning I logged in, decided to go  to my Garrison and finish a few things, picked up a quest there to clear some racoons out of the herb garden, set the pet to gathering them up so I could multi-shot them and next thing I knew he was dead and I was feigned, trying to figure out what happened. Since then the pet's been completely back to normal, taking the damage you'd expect, needing to be healed all the time, losing aggro if I go too fast (did I mention the invulnerable pet also held aggro like superglue?).

No explanation for what started it or why it stopped. I hadn't changed anything I was aware of. I'm putting it down to a bug but who knows? All I can say is it was nice while it lasted and if someone wanted to make hunter pets work like that all the time I wouldn't be the one complaining.

• Garrisons

Since I've mentioned them...

I read a lot about WoW's garrison feature back when Warlords of Draenor was the new not-so-hotness. Opinions seemed to be mixed. Those who'd been hoping for something like a real housing option were disappointed while others, taking the system on its own merits, seemed a lot more impressed. Since I wasn't playing WoW at the time I didn't pay that much attention but I got the impression that it was kind of a fun mini-game and potentially very profitable. 

When the EverQuest games added the Overseer feature last year I saw a number of comments comparing it, unfavorably, to the mission system that comes with having a garrison. I really like both editions of Overseer, particularly the more filled-out EQ version, so I was expecting to enjoy my garrison when I finally got one. 

 

And I do. I can easily see how people got addicted to it when it was a live option. Even as a legacy relic it seems like it could be a lot of fun. As housing it reminds me very strongly of Guild Wars 2's Personal Instances: a bunch of buildings you can't do much to customize with a load of NPCs wandering around looking like extras inbetween takes.

It clearly beats GW2 in that you do at least get some choice in what buildings you see and where they're placed and the overall structure has a form of progression but compared to any game that has actual housing... well, this isn't that. On the other hand, it's better than nothing and it does feel somewhat like a place your character might want to hang out.

I can also very much see the attraction of having all my facilities somewhere I can teleport to from anywhere on a twenty-minute cooldown. I haven't had much of a chance to dig into the mission system yet, but it looks interesting. If it wasn't for the fact that everyone did all this to death several years ago, I could see a number of blog posts in it, too, but I'll do my best to restrain my enthusiasm for going into this outdated content no-one cares about any more in nit-picking, tooth-grinding detail.

 

• Ding! Level 50 Hunter

The last five levels seemed to go reasonably quickly. Or it did until I came to do the last five per cent this morning.

Is it just me or is it sadistic to have a death mechanic that gives you a ghost form and a map marker so you can return in complete safety to recover your corpse and then allows you to die somewhere that's not only impossible to reach but where even your ghost dies if you try. Your ghost ffs! How does a ghost die? And then you're back in the same graveyard, looking at the same map pin in the same damn place and if you go for it again the same damn thing happens!

It went like this: I lit up a quest marker and saw it was most of a zone away so I got on the griffin and hit autorun. Then I tabbed out to do something else. I tabbed back in and out a couple of times and I was still flying. Then I tabbed in one more time and I was dead. 

I'd died of exhaustion, apparently. I figured maybe I had the angle wrong and flew too high. That'll kill you in some games. But no, when I checked the map my gravestone was way out at the furthest edge, in the ocean. In the opposite direction from where I'd been heading. Somehow, maybe one time when I logged in and out, I'd managed to get turned around and flown off the edge of the map, or tried to, whereupon the game killed me.

 

Fair enough. My mistake, no doubt. I'll just run and get my corpse. Long run. Maybe I'll just tab out... and I'm dead again. I tabbed back in just as I was about to arrive at the marker but I didn't see the revive button pop. 

Second time around I paid more attention. Didn't tab out. Looked at the screen up the whole time. Watched the yards count down... 

About a couple of hundred yards out the exhaustion warning came on. The two timers raced to meet in the middle and the exhaustion timer won. I never got the option to resurrect although I was only about fifty yards away when my ghost, um, gave up the ghost. 

It appears my corpse was beyond the point the game would let me go, which I understand, only why even let me think I could get there? I took the durability hit and rezzed in the graveyard (and then nearly got killed by a passing bird but let's not mention that). When my rez sickness wore off I got back on the griffin, flew the right way for once, did my hand-in and dinged. There wasn't much time for a celebration before Chromie whisked me back to Stormwind. Which was handy because...

 

• Farming The Rares In Icecrown

Back in Stormwind I got the quest for the Shadowlands pre-event and its going pretty well, thanks for asking. I did a couple of rounds with the shaman last night and got another nice purple. Then today I took the hunter through the Alliance version of the questline before spending a couple of hours doing the dailies and hitting each rare as it popped.

Things have gotten much more organized. When I was first doing it a couple of days there seemed to be radio silence on the map. I never heard anyone speak. Today there's plenty of chatter and someone calls every rare, in advance, with a map pin linked in general. 

It makes a huge difference. The event suddenly feels communal and relaxed. There's plenty of time to get to where you need to be even with slow flying, just as well since I can't afford the 4,000 gold for the hunter's training yet.

The twenty minute fixed spawn (I was misinformed when I reported it as fifteen last time) is perfect for having the event on in the background while I'm writing a blog post. It reminds me enormously of last year's combined fifteenth anniversary and pre-expansion events in EverQuest II, when I spent several weeks killing dragons on a very similar schedule. That was a better event all round, not least because the dragons took longer than fifteen seconds to kill.

The drop rate is reasonable. I've had two purples on each character so far, plus a ludicrous number of Pitch Black Scourgestones. There's a daily for those but it only needs twenty-five. I've got almost a thousand already. I think you can turn them in for rep with the Argent Dawn somewhere. Yay! I guess. Not sure how long I'll keep it up but I do find these things quite moreish.

• Caravanserai

Perhaps the most surprising thing that happened last night was when I took a quest from some priest or other and he started telling me about a caravan "led by a woman that looked like a wolf". Hang on, that sounds familiar...

And so it should. It turned out to be none other than Fiona, my friend from the Plaguelands. Only of course she's not my hunter's friend at all. He's never met her before. She's a pal of the shaman's. There was nothing in the dialog to suggest otherwise but it made me wonder whether there would have been, had the shaman been doing it. I'm going to have to bring her to Draenor to find out.

It's a very nice piece of continuity, anyway. So far there haven't been any actual wagon rides but I live in hope. Fiona and her boys are solid characters. It's good to see them being used again in a later expansion. Did they make a cameo appearance in Mists of Pandaria, too?

I could look it up but why spoil the surprise?

And that's about it for now. Didn't really keep it all that short, did I?

Out Of The Shadows

 

Pre-orders for EverQuest II's seventeenth expansion, Reign of Shadows, finally opened yesterday. It's about time. Daybreak has been taking orders for the elder EverQuest's upcoming Claws of Veeshan (#27 in the series - collect them all!) for a couple of weeks now. 

The time lag between the two games always puzzles me. I get why the reveals would be staggered to give each a chance to grab some headlines but why there's such a discrepancy in the pre-orders is harder to figure. You'd think they'd want to get the money in the bank as soon as possible. I'm guessing the huge majority of sales are going to come from people who decided months ago they were going to pony up as soon as the time came. Hard to imagine many on the fence, waiting for more info before they decide.

 But then, I only ever buy the standard version. In twenty years I have never gone "Collector's" or "Premium" for any game. I want the playable content and you always get all of that in the basic pack. Unless they're going to bundle something like six months discounted membership in there, so it ends up saving me money, I'm not interested. And even then, no thanks. Tried it once with Rift's first expansion and look how that turned out. Paid for a year and played for three weeks.

I guess someone has to sit down and design all those pets and paintings and mountains and perks and then someone else has to code them and test them and it all takes time. Time that could, arguably, be better spent on actual content, although it's not an argument I'd make. Fluff is content, now more than ever.

Then there's beta access. Every company seems to wrap some kind of beta around the launch of an expansion these days and apparently players have to be enticed into testing with bribes (titles, mounts, pets). I imagine there's some set-up time involved. Also, the game has to be right in the final stages of readiness for players to be nodded in on nothing more than the wave of a credit card. You'd think so, at least, if it wasn't that, so often, it patently is not.

I suppose you have to be sure and get all your goblins in a line before you start taking money, although it's noticeable that neither game has announced an official release date yet. Makes me wonder just how close to a final build either of them are. And as we've just seen from the Shadowlands delay, declaring a date too soon can be risky. If Blizzard, with all their resources, can't hit a deadline, why should anyone else feel confident? 

The four options for Reign of Shadows are the same as last year:

Presumably the return of the astonishingly expensive "Family and Friends" edition means someone bought it. It does come with a giveaway copy of the Standard but for that price you could buy seven. 

I'll just be buying the one. Standard edition, that is. In fact, I've  already bought it. I did look wistfully at the Shar Vhal prestige home in the Collector's pack but realistically I already have far more prestige homes than I could ever hope to decorate, let alone actually live in, so I think I'm good there.

Detail on specific content is still light, although EQII expansions tend to follow a very reliable format so I'm not expecting any major surprises. The one thing that does sometimes throw a gnomish spanner in the works are the "features" and there I do have some concerns. 

The long asked-for revamp of the AA system could be an overdue clean-up that returns a popular mechanic to its former glory or a botched opportunity that leaves everyone wishing they'd left it alone. Whatever way it goes, I'm sure it won't please everyone, but I'm equally sure they did need to do something about it so here's hoping for a good result.

I'm a lot less sanguine about the mysterious "all new content-driven guild leveling mechanism". Unlike the AA revamp, I can't say I've heard people asking for this one. Yes, there was a bit of a rumble for more perks to be added to the higher tiers of guild ownership but I was under the impression the playerbase was broadly happy with the way guilds level up via Status.

Of course I may be wrong about that. I've been a guild of one for about as long as I can remember. The last person who wasn't me logged in something like six or seven years ago. Perhaps in active guilds people are clamoring for a "content-driven" means of advancing their collective fortunes.

I just hope that doesn't mean what it turned out to mean in Guild Wars 2. That game launched and ran for several years with a pretty good progression system for guilds. It worked whether you had three people or three hundred on the roster. Then they scrapped the whole thing and replaced it with a horrible version that left small guilds extinct in all but name.

I notice that, yet again, even the Standard edition comes with a max-level character boost. I've lost count of how many of these I have lying around. With the new Vah Shir race it's possible that, for once, I might even have a use for one. I'm betting we won't get a new 1-20 starting area and if we don't I can't see a lot of point going through the levels the hard way.

 

Speaking of the Vah Shir, I'm very impressed with both the concept art and what I take to be the in-game representation. Those are some cool cats. I'm very much looking forward to making one or two, although I think I'm going to have to buy some extra character slots. Also some extra hours in the day if I'm ever going to play them. 

Even though no date's been announced I find it highly unlikely the doors will open before mid-December. That puts it two or three weeks behind the revised launch for Shadowlands, which poses an interesting dilemma. 

A few weeks ago the idea of buying Shadowlands wasn't even on my horizon. I wasn't subbed to WoW or even playing the free version. The last expansion I bought (actually, was given) was Legion and I never did get around to playing that one. 

Then the pre-patch arrived with the extra free levels and the squish and Exile's Reach and I popped in to take a look and here I am, spending much of my time, subbed, playing and regularly blogging about World of Warcraft. And enjoying it. 

Here's a curious thing about Shadowlands. When compared to Reign of Shadows, the upper-tier editions, dramatically entitled Heroic and Epic, are very significantly less-expensive than their EQII counterparts, Collector's and Premium. When it comes to the versions I would actually buy, however, EQII's Standard edition comes in at two thirds the price of WoW's Base, at least with my All Access member's ten per cent discount.

The irony here is that I'll almost certainly get a good deal more value out of Reign of Shadows. Given the timing, I wouldn't have considered getting Shadowlands as well, had it not been for... the timing. With England under another lockdown I'm back on furlough until the second of December (at least), which means I could get a week and a half of WoW's new expansion in before I go back to work. And it's not like I have a lot else to do with my time right now.

I'm still thinking about it. A firm release date for Reign of Shadows would help me make up my mind. Anyone listening over at Darkpaw? I mean, you already have my money. It's safe to let the Vah Shir out of the bag now!

Real Tough Cat

 

What's wrong with this picture? I'll give you a moment. Anyone? Bueller?

Look at the health bars. A dwarf and his trusty cat, who's been with him since he was just a shaver hunting boars in Dun Morogh, putting down a named, an elite giant. worthy of an achievement, and not  a scratch on either of them? Isn't that odd?

Yes, well, I thought so. I was in Icecrown, failing to find the new pre-expansion invasion everyone's been talking about, when I noticed the pet didn't seem to be taking much damage. From anything.

We were in Northrend because supposedly that's where the new Scourge invasion is happening, only we couldn't find any sign of it. To pass the time I'd been questing for an hour or so. The dwarf had done a level, tipping him over into forty-six. The mobs, as per usual, were the same but they felt noticeably tougher than usual. They certainly took a little longer to kill.

There seemed to be no good reason why the pet wouldn't need a heal now and again. Or a rest between pulls. Only he didn't. Not once. Even with adds, of which there were plenty.

Belt but no pants. It's quite the look.

 

It was unusual enough that I noticed. I watched his health bars on a few pulls and coudn't see it move so I held the mouse pointer over it and watched as we fought.  He was taking one one or two points of damage, now and again. The most I saw his health drop by was five - out of just over four thousand.

Now I was really curious. I let him fight a couple of mobs on his own. It was slow. He didn't seem to do a lot of damage. But his health never moved. Still, not much of a test. 

One of the quests asked us to kill three named mobs. We'd already killed one before we knew there was a quest for it and it had been a very long fight. I hadn't been watching the pet then but it felt like it would be a bit more of a challenge for him so I took the pair of them back to do the mob again, only this time I sent the cat in and stayed well back to watch him.

He tanked the fight without visibly losing any health at all. Same on the other two nameds. Hmm.

As I'd been flying around Icecrown searching for any sign of a crowd gathering, without success, I'd spotted a lot of elites. I thought we might try some of those. We did. They didn't muss the cat's fur. I was starting to get ideas. What about the huge named elite I'd seen, stomping about the place, looking scary?

So we pulled him and we killed him. The hunter stood back, the cat tanked, the bird did whatever it does and the giant fell over. Up popped the achievement and a nice drop. I watched the pet's health closely. It was the same as on the regular mobs. Never lost more than five points at a time. Usually no more than three.

Compare my health with the pet's. I had to fd after about twenty seconds - he's full health after nearly five minutes.

 

The final test was unplanned. I was still thinking about it, trying to figure out why the cat, who I don't recall ever having been particularly robust, should suddenly have grown a steel-hard skin, when the hunter noticed there were about four or five mobs trying to rip his arms off. 

The cat might be virtually invulnerable but the dwarf very definitely wasn't. I feigned him at about twenty per cent health and sat back to watch what would usually be a slow but inevitable death for the pet. Only he didn't feel like dying.

He just kept fighting. It was slow but he worked his way through all of the mobs until there was only one left. It took him five minutes and his health never moved even in the slightest. With absolutely no support from me he whittled them all down and I got the xp. And the loot, when I finally stood up with a minute of feign death left and one half-dead dryad still staggering around being savaged by an indefatigable feline.

That was about where I left it. I still wanted to try the new pre-expansion event but it was beginning to look very much as though the version of Icecrown you get if you just portal there as a level forty-five (as he'd been when he arrived) isn't the same one all the level fifties get sent to for their big bash.

I logged in my shaman instead, she being the only level fifty character I have. Before the screen had even loaded, in came an urgent call from someone or other, telling her the plot was afoot and off we went on a merry chase, all through Orgrimmar, then to Crossroads and finally on to Icecrown.

This event is invite only.

 

She did all the quests, narratives and dailies, then flew around the map, trying to get to the bosses that pop every fifteen minutes and just barely managing it. After two extremely close calls she hearthstoned back to Orgrimmar because it was clear her pokey slow flying wasn't going to cut it. She'd never gotten around to training for the fast mounts even though she could have done it at forty.

Luckily, she'd never really spent any of the money she'd made while levelling up, either. She had six thousand gold left, which turned out to be enough. Just about. Then she went back to Icecrown and tried again - it was a lot easier that time.

On the third boss she got a purple ring that was almost double the stats of the ones she was wearing. I thought that would be a good point to stop so I went and had my tea and then came back to write this.

I'm left with a couple of questions for tomorrow. Firstly, is the unbreakable pet a thing, now? Is it just how hunter pets are, near the cap? (Because they certainly aren't like that for my vulpera hunter in the twenties - I nearly wore her heal spell out last night). Maybe it's a function of the new levelling process, in which case is it working as intended or will it get nerfed as soon as someone realizes what's going on? 

Maybe it was some kind of bug or fluke and when I log in next it'll be gone. If not, though, if it keeps on happening, do I want to keep experimenting with it or just carry on as though I hadn't noticed?

Performances every fifteen minutes, prompt. No refunds for latecomers.

 

Secondly, do I want to go even a bit hard on the Scourge events? There's a currency you can earn with dailies and a vendor that takes it for some armor that would be a big upgrade for either the shaman or the hunter (when he levels up to fifty and they let him join in). The dailies aren't too bad (Okay, the mushroom one's pretty bad...). I could fit them into the schedule quite comfortably.

Then there are the bosses. They spawn every fifteen minutes and the loot is potentially better than I'm ever going to see anywhere else. Plus I like big zerg fights. 

I haven't even decided if I'm going to buy Shadowlands, though. Daybreak finally opened pre-orders for Reign of Shadows today and I'm going to give them my money as soon as I finish this. Still no launch date that I can see but unless they push it into next year it's bound to clash with the WoW expansion at least somewhat and I know where my priorities are going to lie.

And anyway, as we all know, every catch-up reward from a pre-expansion event is going to be obsolete as soon as you get a few quests into the expansion itself. Is it even worth bothering? And if you aren't getting the expansion then what do you even need upgrades for? You're done, aren't you?

Yeah, but upgrades are fun even if they don't last long. And so are big events that get everyone all hyped up. I suspect I'll end up doing quite a lot of bosses just for the buzz, if nothing else.

As for the indestructible pet, well, I guess if he keeps it up I'll just have to see how far I can push him. For science. And maybe for the loot.