mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

I have played every World of Warcraft expansion, at least a little, since the game came out. I've never reviewed any of them, in part because I don't think this type of game lends itself very well to reviewing. A lot of the experience is about long-term character progression through complex interlocking systems that are constantly being revised, such that you kind of don't know if the current iteration of the game is good until you've played it long enough that it's too late to tell anyone that the third major content patch of the ninth expansion was great, actually! Because now it's over and you're not going to know if the next iteration is good until you've played it.

So, Dragonflight is over now, and this is not a review, it's a retrospective of my experience playing an iteration of the game that no longer exists. As such, it's mostly for me, but you can read it if you want to do that for some reason!

I started the expansion unsure of how much I was going to play it, but certain that I wasn't looking for a steady group. The group I played with in the previous expansion had already split up and dispersed to different games for complicated reasons that don't bear going into, but it left me feeling kind of burnt out on committing to playing with a group on a regular basis.

Over the years I've played the game with many different groups all along the casual-to-hardcore spectrum, and it can be very rewarding and form long-lasting friendships, but there's also something to be said for being a lone wolf. If nobody's depending on you to show up, you can come and go as you please. It is easy and I think accurate to align this with a general trend in my life over the past couple of years towards focusing much more on my own priorities and much less on other people's. (This is not a move everyone needs to make, but I really did.)

That said, while WoW does have solo content, what I really wanted to do was play Mythic+, a scaling-difficulty PvE progression track for five players. I had played Mythic+ in pugs (pickup groups) before, but only at low levels that weren't challenging for me, saving the hard stuff for when I was with people I knew and trusted. Nonetheless, I decided to just start pugging and see how far I could get. What was the worst that could happen if I failed? A stranger would yell at me in a video game?

I started out playing my shaman in elemental specialization, which in retrospect was maybe a bad idea since I hadn't played the spec in years and did not, in fact, know how. I hoped I would get the hang of it, but I don't think I ever quite did. I messed up a lot. Sometimes strangers yelled at me in a video game, and sometimes they had a point. But I persevered and managed to attain the mildly-exalted rank of Keystone Master in the first season of the expansion.

That was enough of a struggle that I decided not to try to push further on my shaman, and instead leveled up a hunter. I did not need to do this as I had multiple hunters already (it was the first class I ever played in the game and I've never lost my affinity for it) but I felt like it so I did it. I'd wanted to make a vulpera anyway because I'd never leveled one up before and they are hella cute.

Man, it felt good. Every class in the game has been overhauled so many times that you never know what's going to feel right, but I clicked with this iteration of hunter right away. When I got to max level I jumped back into the beginning of M+ and quickly breezed past my shaman's progression to hit the slightly-more-exalted rank of Keystone Hero. (Why is Hero above Master? I do not know!) Even taking into account that it's easier to push late in the season because other players are more geared/experienced, it felt obvious to me that this was what I should be playing, and that my awkward fumbling on my shaman had been a problem between me and Blizzard's vision of how shamans should work, not a problem with me inherently.

So I switched mains! In the middle of an expansion! And I didn't have to ask anyone's permission, or revamp a raid roster, or find another shaman to replace me, or worry that I was inconveniencing anyone! Amazing.

In the second season I made KSH again, and in the third and fourth I pushed a little higher to unlock all the dungeon portals. I still made mistakes, but strangers yelled at me less often. The biggest challenge I faced was not with the gameplay, but dealing with people. People who make you wait for ages because they want to find the perfect healer, people who ragequit because someone made a mistake, people who shamequit because they made a mistake, people who start shit in chat when there isn't even a problem, and, of course, people who just plain don't know what they're doing. But really, most groups were fine—you just don't remember those so vividly.

Of course, I will never forget the very brief time I spent in a certain Underrot key before it disbanded amid a comedy of errors. I sent the video to Metro (a streamer who often shows funny/weird M+ fails sent in by viewers) and was famous for fifteen minutes. Well, not really, but I was excited that he showed my clip, and relieved that he only made fun of me a little bit.


Video: A man with glasses comments on three viewer clips. I sent in the third one (starting at 4:00) which shows the tank pulling a caster into the group right before a spell goes off, with explosive results.

Though the vast majority of the time I played was with strangers, I did also play some with sdk. She was on her own journey with the game, which isn't my story to tell, but she'd joined a discord and made some friends there, and I got in on those groups now and then, which was often helpful and occasionally hilarious.

But mostly, I just did what I wanted to do, which was log on a couple of times a week, do a couple of keys, and then log off and do something else. The expansion probably had a story (something about dragons, I guess?) but I didn't follow it beyond the leveling quests. After the first season I didn't touch any of the other progression tracks besides M+. This was possible partly because Blizzard had designed the expansion's systems in a less rigidly interlocking way so you didn't "have to" do everything, but it was also possible because I had decided to change my approach.

WoW has so much content that it can easily be the only game you play. You certainly won't run out of things to do. For an MMO with a monthly subscription, that's the business model—keep players perpetually engaged. But I don't want it to be the only game I play, and I don't think I ever did. There have been times when I let it become that, though. Not so much because of the structure of the game, initially, but because I was not always smart about who I played with and how big of a time commitment I agreed to. And then the game structure would catch up to me, because even if I didn't care about keeping up with every aspect of progression, other people did, so the time commitment ballooned and I'd end up playing much more than I wanted to out of a misguided sense of loyalty, and then I'd burn out.

Some people get addicted to MMOs. I think what I get addicted to is people-pleasing. I'm proud of myself for learning how to play this game without doing that, and for being able to look back on an expansion and say I played in moderation, met my own goals, and had fun.