Summer WoWcation – The Climb #859

Wednesday 30^th June 2021

I always take time off for Warcraft expansions. Rather than enjoy the new content at a slow and moderate pace, I have found myself so hungry for something new that I rush through it.

In the past year, I’ve started streaming some of my gameplay and as such, I’ve made myself slow down, read the quest text and actually enjoy my first playthrough.

This is what I did today with the release of 9.1. Even so, there was a huge amount of stuff to do. I ended up streaming for 8 hours just to do the patch opening quests for one character.

What I love about Warcraft is that there is this history I’ve experienced. So when we end up and going to see a character we last saw 4-5 years ago, there’s extra gravitas to it, because it’s a passage of time that we, as the person experiencing the story, know. I think it’s the same reason I love the MCU. The impact is greater because that passage of time is real.

There is part of me that worries about the new weeklies. Doing them on every alt, meant I’d got them down to around 30 minutes a character. But the new dailies seem harder and as such, I feel I’m going to struggle to do one on Warcraft Wednesday, let alone 15.

I’m not really complaining though. After a 7 month drought, having new content feels amazing. The story has opened so many new threads and twists that I’ve no idea where it will go next. And they’ve made changes to The Maw so that not just the zone, but the actual gameplay has changed in that area. It’s still weird mounting up on a regular mount there. And with no eye of the jailer in the zone any more, I can finally spend a bit more time there without fear of something popping off suddenly and killing me.

I had planned to play for all day, but I thought the server would come up at 2pm and as such would give me a morning to do things. They came up at 9am, which led to me frantically doing some graphic card and add-on updates.

I’m glad I got to spent a lot of time with it. It meant that by the time it got to the evening, I was ready for a break.

I plan to play it heavily for the next few days, but it won’t be a two week wowcation like the expansion launch. There’s a lot of content in 9.1. Just not that much.