Midnight has entered its first season, and with it, I’ve had to think strategically about how I want to play and engage with the game. Over the launch window, I’ve accomplished a fair few goals, and today, I wanted to chat about my gameplay, goals, and more as I prepare to enter the first week of Mythic Plus availability and start to tackle my favorite gameplay mode within the World of Warcraft.

Leveling Characters

So far, I have 5 characters at level 90 – my namesake Demon Hunter, my favored Druid of last expansion, my prior raid main Monk and Priest, and my Shadowlands season 1 main Paladin. Of these characters, 4 out of the 5 are currently main-played as tanks, with the Priest being a healer as Holy. I’ve got my crafters all to 81 as a result of first craft bonuses leveling their professions, so my Death Knight, Mage, and Warrior all dinged solely within the confines of new Silvermoon, and my Hunter has become my next focused leveling project, dinging 82 last night as a result of tackling all 8 delves currently available at Tier 3 for the Delver’s Call quests.

I’ve started a Haranir Druid, but that’s a project for a far-flung future, as right now, I have 64 other characters to push from 80 to 90. In The War Within, this was an easier focus because of how long the 20th anniversary event and experience bonus for that persisted, but with Midnight I do have a harder choice on leveling. I’ll probably do something in the vein of rest experience cycling coupled with delving for efficiency – I don’t want to spend too much time leveling but I enjoy the benefits of pushing alts and having the options of what to play including characters of each spec so I can choose to specialize strongly over having generalist characters in each class, even if my “mains” of each class (usually just the first-leveled or most-played of that class I have) tend to also generalize and carry gear and spec loadouts for all available specializations.

Professions

As I currently write this, I have max-skilled every profession in Midnight except for Engineering (82 out of 100) and Fishing (haven’t started, long project for a block of idle time in the future). I’ve focused on profession-mains and thus focused deeply on those characters, doing the weeklies every week, burning through Treatises made on my Scribe for more KP, and doing the first round of the Darkmoon Faire in Midnight on each of them. As a result, I have between 14% and 22% of the total knowledge points available per profession, and have gotten to benefit further by having almost all of the blue profession gear recipes and thus making that gear for them.

I used to hate this new profession system in Dragonflight, as it felt like a poorly-explained barrier to entry for the core promise of the revamp (profession gear always kind of good and worthwhile). In The War Within, I wasn’t a huge fan, but I also understood it better and was able to push and progress the skills much further than I even tried to in Dragonflight, and this expansion, I kind of love the system because I understand it much better now and know exactly how to push within it for the results I want. Within the next few weeks, I expect to skill-cap Engineering and Fishing and continue to push knowledge points as far as possible through frequent crafting order refreshes looking for flickers and glimmers like I’m prospecting for gold.

How did I do it? Well, the easiest answer is that I overspent hilariously on materials in week 1 so that I could rush professions as a priority and then never have to think too hard about them again. I spent around 1.4 million gold to stockpile thousands of just about everything on the bet that I would make it back by the end of the expansion with ease and that it would grant me the ability to auto-pilot with regards to professions for much of the expansion, and so far that has held true as I have made a decent pile of cash back on selling blue profession tools while also needing to spend nothing further on raid consumables and my own stockpile for M+. I’ve been able to be fully enchanted and gemmed on my main and I don’t feel too much pinch in terms of gold supply – if anything, I’ve been able to benefit from the wave of cheaper materials, especially Majestic skinning rewards and Petrified Roots.

Raiding

Our first raids opened this last week, and I did four out of the seven bosses with my raid team (first 3 of Voidspire plus Chimaerus) on Normal. I did PUG later in the week to round out a full clear of Voidspire as well.

I have…mixed opinions about raiding this expansion in a way that is causing some stress. My personal experience, separated from that of raid leading, is that the normal raids are pretty tame and easy overall. In my PUG run of Voidspire, no boss took more than 2 pulls except the finale Crown of the Cosmos, which took…3 pulls. Granted, both groups I was in were a high average item level (around 245-251 average) which is basically Normal gear drops equivalent, so like yeah, of course it wasn’t that bad. However, most of the mechanics are kind of simple in a way that is both nice and also very not nice. On the one hand, simple mechanics mean simple answers and there’s rarely a crazy multiple-question test for mechanical evaluation, plus you get a lot of time to think through each mechanic and execute. On the other hand, without DBM callouts (the detailed versions we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years), a lot of players just…don’t do mechanics, even worse so than before. The double dragons fight has one pivotal mechanic, which is Dread Breath, it targets a random player and fears anyone in the range of it. The player who gets targeted gets an advance warning from the built-in boss mods that they have been targeted, and then gets 5 seconds to move the breath in a predictable and safe manner, so you’ve got a ton of time as the target to position to protect the raid. And most folks just…ignore the warning, stay where they are, move erratically with it and blast everyone. It tests my patience, because on the one hand, I try to keep in mind that it’s first week of season, people need time to learn, and also we’re all kind of adapting to the changes in new content we haven’t done before, so hey – it logically follows that people will make mistakes. However, it has followed a general trend that the people I see adapting well are those who traditionally do well at mechanics and those failing them are normally somewhat inattentive and prone to the same issues even when DBM could yell at them with detailed roadmaps to follow, so while I try to extend some grace, I also recognize that I can’t be too credulous and overextend grace where it isn’t earned.

One place where Blizzard has my unmitigated ire is in debuffs and dispels, however. To start the season, Blizzard, eternal geniuses they are, thought it would be wise to make everything in the raid a Private Aura, protecting them from showing up on unitframes. In a coordinated group, hey fine, I can yell in voice chat that I need a dispel, sure. In a lot of groups though, not everyone wants to speak on voice, not everyone is in voice, and it really sucks that the fear on that aforementioned Dread Breath is a private aura kept from healers when the fear lasts forever and also does ticking damage. Blizzard has, allegedly, unprotected dispellable auras so they should now be showing up, but anecdotal evidence around the community suggests that this change maybe hasn’t worked or fully rolled out because many dispellable debuffs are still difficult to see on the frames if at all, whose visibility and overall settings are iron-gripped by Blizzard and have become the real headache of the whole addon API change. I just cannot imagine why Blizzard thought that would be a good idea, because the whole setup of healing rarely also allows such a player to have a whole view of the arena such that they can see visually when a player character is being targeted by something and react from that without a unit frame. It just baffles me why they ever thought that hiding dispels was good tech and that it took them like 4 days post-launch to figure out that they had goofed and allegedly longer still to actually fix it.

Dungeons

I haven’t done all the seasonal dungeons yet! In fact, I’ve basically ignored the retro-half except Algeth’ar Academy, which I love pulling as a tank because the entire Overgrown Ancient room is a very doable pull but I also loathe doing as DPS because most tanks are babies who won’t trust in their skills enough to pull it like a real tank. Still, I’m excited for Mythic Plus to launch and my plan is to push mostly +10s in week one and try to reach Keystone Hero within that first week on my DH. While I haven’t decided what to bring altwise for the season, I do feel like I want to round out a Keystone Master run on my Priest as Holy and see how that goes.

Delves

I like delving! Actually, really this expansion, very few of the delves are annoying in ways that some TWW delves could be – no candles, no water bubbles, and overall good map layouts and density of enemies. While I love the density in some ways of the Grudge Pit, I also find it is too much on Tier 11 at times, because the way they make the tiny map work is to have 3 waves of mobs per story…except the rare mob and all the Nemesis packs spawn in the first wave, so it is sometimes impossible to avoid double or even triple pulling Nemesis packs and early enough in the season that doing so is still highly dangerous. My Valeera is level 48 and I have gotten all curios to rank 4/4. One thing I dislike is the hardcap on Delver’s Journey that is unexplained, because it fits a trend with Blizzard where they put hardcaps to limit progress, never explain them in-game or provide any information about them, and then it does feel like the time spent delving beyond is partially wasted, even if it is also rewarding with gear and Valeera XP. So right now I’m at level 4 and exactly 75 XP into it, waiting for whenever they update the cap, which the game doesn’t tell me so I assume weekly reset but also maybe not? Minor gripe aside, I have been enjoying delves a bit more this expansion and we’ll see if I feel that way when I’m neck-deep in them from leveling more alts!

---

Midnight has been a pretty good expansion for me thus far. In many ways, I am really enjoying the game, while in some ways, I am re-evaluating how I want to engage with certain parts of the game going forward and I’m likely to see my gameplay shift as a response to some of the places where I feel more frustration than joy. Overall though, while the experience has some rough edges that needed sanding from Blizzard, I’m definitely enjoying the expansion and excited to see what comes with the dungeon gameplay I enjoy so much in the coming weeks.