and things went downhill from there

I don't think many people are going to look back on Battle For Azeroth and include it in the list of better expansions. The art team and quest design teams did a marvellous job, and it had some memorable NPCs along the way (Jani, for one). The story was lame, with an unsatisfactory ending that felt rushed (because I'm pretty sure that it was - it's no secret that they skipped a content patch once it became clear this expansion was a dud).

The worst of it, though, was that this expansion felt like it had the most rigorous grind of any when it came to factions and resources. When I say "rigorous" I mean that it was an endless slog. There were time-gated resource grinds you needed to endure in order to make basic, non-optional gear functional. It led to weird quirks where an upgrade in item level was effectively a downgrade if you did not have enough resources farmed in order to unlock its advanced features.

You had to grind out upgrades for your gear later on, but those upgrades were curses that had stacking, negative side-effects. So you also had to grind out resistance that corruption just so you could use those upgrades.

- You had to grind out Azerite power for your next in order to unlock Azerite-powered features in your head, shoulders and chest armour.
- Each new tier of gear unlocked new powers that required more grinding to unlock.
- They added plug-ins for your neck that gave important abilities. You had to grind out those plug-ins, and also grind out more Azerite power in order to unlock the sockets for them in your neck.
- You also had to grind out reputations with new factions in order to get some of the best neck upgrades (get to Revered/Exalted with these gated rep grinds...)
- Later, you had to grind out a long quest chain to unlock a new cloak that was required for the final raid tier.
- Then you had to grind up the levels of that cloak by running scenarios. But you needed a single-use key to run those scenarios. Guess what you needed for the key? You had to grind out 10,000 tokens from gated quests for each key.
- You had to grind out resources that let you buy abilities usable only within in the scenarios, but they were effectively mandatory in order to complete the later stages needed for the cloak upgrades.
- You had to grind out gear with good corruptions on it, then later you could buy the corruptions but you had to grind out the currency to buy those.
- ... and, of course, you had to buy up the corruption-resistance of your cloak in order to counteract corruptions.

It. Never. Ended.
It was not fun.
It was not engaging.

Anyway, every time you reached the end of one slog, the next patch dropped and a new grind began.

I don't see that changing much in the next expansion, but hopefully the story and other parts of the system make up for that. They pruned away way too many character abilities in this expansion, and they are giving most of them back again for the next one. It's nice to see Blizzard learning from at least a few of their mistakes.

A couple of the things I have loved in this expansion are some of the visual aesthetics and the new races. I love the snakes, and I'm a bit sad that they were not a playable race. On the other hand, I am ecstatic that the foxes were made a playable race, and as a result, all four of my main characters are furry now (two foxes, a tauren and a panda).

I flew to the top of the main Horde hub today and snapped a picture of my priest (my main character in the game) staring thoughtfully off into the distance. It almost has the feel of an oil painting to it. For all of its faults, this game has been very visually pleasing to play.


I mean ... she's got little angle wings. Isn't she almost freakishly adorable? (Don't say "yes" or she may smite you.)


I have mixed feelings about moving on to the next expansion. One the one hand, it can't help but be better than this one overall. On the other hand, it's going to feel like tossing out an old pair of shoes that you had finally broken in. Sure, the heels still rub and give you blisters, and they still kinda pinch your toes, but you've gotten used to the pain now, and you've grown accustomed to the bad fit.

Although these pictures are not large, I have decided to put them behind cut tags anyway out of consideration to those who could not care less about WoW.

One of the things that they added to the game in the 2.3 patch was the Azure Whelpling as a non-combat pet. (To those who are not familiar with the finer points of the game, a non-combat pet is something that you get for reasons of vanity. They are little critter that follow you around in the game, and in the case of some of the rarer pets, they will do stuff when they get bored; sing, dance, fall asleep, run around in a berserk frenzy, etc. Their sole function in the game is to add atmosphere.) Anyway, after three days (and after killing ~1500 dragonkin up in Azshara) I finally managed to land two of these. I gave one to atara and kept the other for myself.

( Isn't he cute? )
I have this hair-brained plan to collect all four colours of dragon pets (reg, green, black and blue) but I don't know if my sanity would survive the ordeal. They are pretty rare drops.

Engineering is one of those professions that I would never have taken in the game if I had known more about it at the start. It is difficult and expensive to level up, and it produces almost nothing that one can sell in the game to recoup expenses (there is only so much market for fancy gun scopes). In patch 2.1 they finally gave us some decent recipes for all of the armour types (the engineering headpiece is one of the better ones in the game). In patch 2.3 they finally gave us some toys that made it all worthwhile. Almost since the game came out, engineers have been saying, "We should be able to build our own mounts."

( Now we can! )
The strange, gold colouring is caused by a de-buff that got put on me when I got caught in a transporter malfunction. In a nod to Star Trek, amongst the malfunctions is one that splits you into your "good" or "evil" half. In this case only my good half made it through. If it had been my evil half, I'd have had a reddish hue. The de-buff also makes you slightly taller. In this case the effect lasts for two hours (or only three minutes when it turns you into a chicken - thank goodness).