Tuesday was pre-expansion patch day in WoW, and it is once again (temporarily) relevant to my interests. I actually resubbed a few days ago, but close enough.

What brought me back? The realization that what I was doing in most of the survival games I played isn’t so different than what I do in MMOs. In Conan: Exiles, for example, I routinely went back to a fast-respawn pirate area so that I could grind XP and potentially enslave new Thralls. When I was wasn’t doing that, I was farming mats for building materials. Longer-term goals included traveling to far away places and repeating that entire process at tier N+1.

If I’m just grinding shit for something to do, why not do so in WoW?

…

…that’s not actually a good reason for anything. The unspoken assumption in the back of my mind is that WoW is a game that matters, in some ineffable way other games do not. I mean, what other game do you still play 10+ years later? But just because I seem to fall back into the familiar groove of a bad relationship, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be trying something newer, even if I’m going through the same motions.

Trouble is, I’m kinda waiting for Fallout 76 and Battlefield V and the next 7 Days to Die Alpha release. Alas, here we are in the meantime.

My original goal was to unlock Legion flying. I left right before it was fully implemented, but I had unlocked everything in the Part 1 of the achievement. Part 2 was simply… getting Exalted with a new faction. Which will take literal weeks. [Edit: Only takes Revered, apparently. Still, it’ll be days of work.] That in of itself wasn’t the worse thing, but the process essentially being “hope there’s friendly people around to help kill these outdoor bosses” was. And, you know, bored/angry Horde characters wanting to pick fights for no reason. War Mode couldn’t come fast enough.

So, I gave up on unlocking flying for a bit, in the hopes that perhaps Blizzard would make it slightly easier in some future patch. Instead… let’s unlock some of the new races!

…and it requires Exalted rep with the two new factions in zones I had not even entered once. I’m actually a bit miffed, because the two new Horde races require Exalted reputation with factions that have been present in Legion since the beginning. What kind of bullshit is this?

All that aside, it’s kind of funny coming back to the WoW side of things from a combat point of view. Like, I have no concept of what kind of enemy I can safely face-tank, which is pretty much the default playstyle of Boomkins. I kept trying to dodge-roll out of melee range, like in GW2 or Conan. Druids have 37 different kinds of buttons anyway, so I sort of just embraced the 5-10 buttons I could comfortably press and then hoped that Shadowmeld would get me out of any serious binds.

What I have realized though, is that without flying, playing the druid is a real drag. Instant mounting is pretty much the only reason to play a Boomkin over any other ranged caster, and I’m pretty sure I’d have more fun on the rogue than Feral. All my other characters are below level 103 though, and I don’t want to run around in a full-PvP world in which flying exists for everyone other than me.

So, we’ll see.