I know I haven't been posting about WoW as much as I used to here (given that this blog was initially specific to that game). But with the War Within, the next expansion and the first chapter of the Worldsoul Saga, coming soon (it's actually coming out I think two days after I fly to New York to help my sister and her husband take care of their not-yet-here newborn baby - so we'll see whether I have the time to do my quick level-up on my main like usual,) we have a big event to kick it off.
The Radiant Echoes takes place across three different zones - Searing Gorge, Duskwallow Marsh, and Dragonblight, and is runs every hour and a half or so (I think it was initially every three hours, which was far too infrequent).
Essentially, it seems that Azeroth is manifesting its memories that are then taking the form of powerful foes we've faced in the past - Onyxia, the Lich King, Ragnaros. When the event starts, you fight a giant globule of coalesced memory, which then, upon defeat, manifests as various world-quest-like tasks that everyone in the zone helps to complete (these can go very quickly). Once all these are complete, the boss shows up and you fight them, which again, goes pretty quickly (luckily, like a lot of rare spawns in Dragonflight, there's a little invulnerability shield on them for the first minute or so to let people actually get to them and join the fight).
Mechanically, the big upshot of these is that you can collect a lot of 480 Warbound gear, using the new Warband system, which makes a lot of things easier to transfer between alts on the same account.
Really, the Warband system is the highlight of the patch, transforming all the Dragonflight factions into Warband factions, so that all of your characters will have the same renown level (I believe it sets it to whatever character has it highest when you first log in). This also means that any reputation gains now contribute toward a single Warband reputation, meaning that even if you bring a brand new alt to the Dragon Isles, they might show up with maxed out renown.
It also, at least at this point, gives altoholics like me (see the name of the blog) an edge in gaining rep - that one world quest that gives 250 reputation? Do it on four characters and you've effectively gained 1000. It was this that allowed me to finally max out my Loam Niffen and Guardians of the Dream (or whatever that one's called) renowns.
Back to the Radiant Echoes, like the Dragonflight pre-launch event, you'll be able to get a new heirloom item, this time a ring, which you'll need to fuse with the essences of the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and Northrend, each by collecting the sort of lesser memories and getting 20 of them. As a warning: there's a limit to how many of these you can carry, and they don't always come in nice round factors of 20, so I actually had to delete a few of my Memories of Kalimdor in order to claim the number I needed to complete my essence from the Postmaster. Bit awkward.
The other thing I've been exploring is Mists of Pandaria Remix, which has been active for a while but I only just got into it.
This is a really interesting way to revisit an old expansion: while you can level up by questing and the like as usual, you're also free to run dungeons and even raids while leveling. Gear appears to only come in certain generic varieties - green with maybe one secondary or tertiary stat when you get to higher levels. But higher-level gear also comes with various kinds of sockets, and these can take either gems that grant secondary stats (and can be combined with two of the same kind and quality to get the next-higher quality of the same gem) or various equippable passive abilities and one active ability (in the helm) that you can add to the character.
You also get a special cloak that absorbs "threads of time," which permanently increase the stats of that cloak. The ultimate result of this is that characters become insanely overpowered, and so when you run LFR, for instance (something that I remember being fairly challenging in Mists, though admittedly I was on an aging computer that I replaced early during Warlords) it's... it's going to be a chaotic race through the place, slaughtering bosses like you're in a heroic Wrath of the Lich King dungeon during patch 3.3.
Anyway, everything you do earns you a currency called Bronze, which can be spent, yes, on gear or upgrading said gear, but will also earn you various cosmetic rewards, including many raid-drop mounts that haven't freaking dropped for me in twelve years! Yes, I finally have the Astral Cloud Serpent.
I'm super curious to see if they'll be doing more of these remixes for other expansions. It's a lot of fun, and a good way to make use of the massive amount of content that you get with an expansion that typically kind of falls into disuse.
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