My World of Warcraft subscription has now run out. For the last month before it did, I spent almost all of my time on the Mists of Pandaria Remix event, which proved far more enjoyable than I ever expected. After two months of Dragonflight, I was starting to wonder if maybe WoW just wasn’t for me anymore, but the Remix made me realize it’s still a game I can enjoy.

This is partly down to the systems of the Remix itself, which showered rewards from the heavens, but also a lot down to the inherent strength of Pandaria as an expansion. It had some of the best story, music, environment art, and dungeon design of any expansion. Really it’s only flaws were in its endgame systems, none of which are relevant in the Remix, which has its own systems, so this is just peak WoW across the board.

It really struck me while playing that the Remix had fixed almost everything wrong with World of Warcraft. Too grindy? Anything you’d want to achieve in the Remix can be done almost effortlessly. Too much irrelevant older content? Everything scales to cap; literally nothing is ever irrelevant in the Remix. Restrictions on flight got you down? You can fly, including dragonriding, right from character creation.

Too much focus on raids? Well, that one was still a little true, with normal raids being all but required to get XP threads for your cloak in a reasonable timeframe, but doing the bare minimum of them needed was trivially easy, and every form of content awards bronze, threads, and gems, so again there’s no content that isn’t relevant and rewarding, even at endgame. It’s not like raids are the only game in town, at least not once you’ve got enough XP threads for fast leveling.

I was also reminded how perfectly scenarios fit into the eco-system of WoW’s endgame as a lighter alternative to dungeons and raids. I still can’t believe they ever stopped making them. I hope delves in War Within will scratch the same itch, but we’ll see.

Also, does anyone else feel like Pandaria is far more suited to dragonriding than the Dragon Isles are? There’s enough verticality to feel interactive, but not obnoxious. I’m not fighting with my vigour to slog out of the lowlands of the Azure Span or bashing my face into trees every five seconds like in the Emerald Dream. Suddenly dragonriding was actually fun.

Giving the event seems to have been wildly popular, it feels all but certain that we’ll be getting another remix event at some point, though perhaps not for a while, as it seems tailor-made for end of expansion doldrums.

I’m calling it now: Legion will be the next expansion to be remixed. Like Pandaria, it’s a widely popular expansion that’s old enough to be feeling a bit nostalgic these days but not old enough to feel too dated. The class stories make it an ideal expansion for alt-leveling, and the Pandaria Remix cloak was based on the tech from Legion’s artifact weapons, so it should be pretty easy to convert it back to artifact weapons. They just need to make progress shared across specializations.

Whether the remix will have an impact on mainline WoW I’m not sure, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it will. I know we can’t just copy and paste remix mechanics into the main game, but it’s general attitudes of flexibility and making all content relevant would benefit the main game immensely. I dare to hope that one day we’ll look back at the Pandaria Remix as a turning point in WoW’s history.

The Remix did have its own problems, different from those of mainstream WoW. Mostly the insane power creep. And yes, that is meant to be part of the appeal, but for a three month event I think it should have taken more than a week or two before the high end players became able to solo every dungeon without effort. I wish there had been some kind of matchmaking based on cloak level so us mere mortals didn’t have to end up picking up scraps in the wake of some demi-god if we didn’t want to.

Thankfully not all groups were like that, not even a majority. Just enough to put a mild damper on an otherwise nearly perfect experience.

My main goal was to at last fulfill my decade-long ambition to level a Blood Elf paladin to cap, and I achieved that pretty early on. The paladin class is much as I remember it from Legion, which is largely a good thing. Holy is now once again a lot more like how it played before Legion, which is definitely a good thing. Healing is kind of a mess in the Remix, though, so I mostly played Ret and Prot.

These are both specs where absolutely every ability has a cooldown, which is not something I usually enjoy, but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much where paladin is concerned. The cooldowns are so quick there’s no downtime, and I was able to settle into a decent rhythm.

Something I do appreciate about Retribution is that it has an unusually high number of ways to customize your rotation, while sticking to its core identity of building holy power with short cooldown abilities and then spending it on your big nukes. More classes should work this way — lots of ways to add, remove, or alter the core abilities of your rotation within the context of the spec’s identity.

I ended up taking the talent that removes Crusader Strike in favour of your auto-attacks periodically generating holy power. I was worried it would add a lot of downtime to the rotation, but it didn’t add any at all, and somehow I felt it created a good flow.

After the paladin, I leveled up two more characters to max: a Blood Elf hunter using the new “dark ranger” customizations from Shadowlands, and an Undead death knight. I was a little mixed on both these classes, which perhaps isn’t surprising considering I’ve struggled to enjoy them in the past.

Marksmanship was the hunter spec that most appealed to me in theory, but I found it painfully dull in practice. Survival is actually pretty fun nowadays, but I didn’t roll a dark ranger to not use a bow.

That left Beast Mastery, and despite my usual dislike of pet classes in tab target MMOs, I ended up liking it pretty well, though I do find maintaining the buff from Barbed Shot unnecessarily stressful, and there’s still a bit too much fiddling about with short cooldown abilities. The plethora of instant cast abilities is nice, though.

I don’t like ascribing negative motivations to game devs, but I really get the vibe no one on the WoW team actually has any passion for the concept of an archer class. There’s never been another ranged weapon spec added to the game in the twenty years since launch, Survival got changed into a melee spec in Legion, Beast Mastery barely uses its weapon for anything, and every Marksmanship ability is just “you shoot an arrow.”

“But what else is an archer spec supposed to do?” you may ask, but you can give things more flavour and flair. Look at warrior, the most vanilla melee weapon user. Even they have crazy, dramatic abilities like stomping the earth so hard it shatters, shouting so hard you rupture the enemy’s blood vessels, and getting so angry you literally catch on fire. The only exciting or flashy button Marksmanship gets is Wailing Arrow… and the WoW team didn’t even come up with it! It’s originally from Heroes of the Storm!

Or look at archer classes in other games. Marksmanship hunters weep tears of bitter blood as they look upon the glory of Aion rangers.

Anyway…

Death knight’s kind of in the “I almost really like this” limbo it’s always been for me. The big problem is that right now there’s only spec I particularly enjoy, Frost. I don’t dislike Unholy, but it feels a little too clunky to grab me, and Blood is suffering from severe rotational bloat these days.

What I like about Frost is that it’s a very simple rotation with just a couple buttons, and it’s almost entirely resource-limited instead of cooldown-limited. It’s got a natural flow, and I can actually look at the game world and my character rather than watching cooldowns on my action bar the whole time.

And yes, it is a bit mindless. To be fair, nothing in WoW really takes a lot of thought. Even the most complex rotations are more like a test of your ability to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time than anything requiring tactical decision-making… but even still, I won’t lie and say Frost isn’t totally mindless.

I do wonder if I’m just losing the mental acuity to learn more complex playstyles as I get older. There’s probably a bit of that. But I think part of my reticence to invest in learning any more complex WoW specs these days is that any one I pick is probably going to be completely different next expansion anyway, or if not then the expansion after that.

A few years away has really impressed upon me how incredibly extreme and Not Normal Blizzard’s obsession with reinventing its own class design is. Balance tweaks and even the occasional full revamp are necessary parts of any live service game, of course, but WoW’s approach is far beyond what other games do. Really makes me feel like there’s no point in expending too much effort in learning any particular specialization, which does lead me to gravitate toward simpler ones.

So, yes, give me Frost’s mindless button spam. At least it’s still not as braindead as Arcane mage was in Cataclysm, or so I tell myself to get to sleep at night.

I also found the death knight is one of those characters that immediately came to life for me in terms of role-play. My concept for the character was basically, “Well, I was a paladin when I was alive, and I’m too damn old to change my ways now!”

It’s a bit sillier than my usual character concepts (which usually don’t involve any levity), but I did picture some genuine pathos behind this seemingly eccentric old man. He’s made a conscious choice to turn away from being the monster the Scourge made him, and it’s a struggle every day.

Aside from those main three characters, I also made a pair of Tauren, a shaman and a warrior, but I didn’t level either very far. I’d like to play Tauren more, but I already have more alts than I know what to do with. And yes, I know I already have a Tauren death knight from back in the day, and there’s no particularly good reason why I couldn’t play him instead of just making all these new characters. I’m complex.

Speaking of excessive alts, the one other thing I did in my final month besides frolic through Pandaria was play a bunch of my warlock and her demon hunter alter ego during a Timewalking dungeon event.

Demon hunter hasn’t changed much, but with other specs slipping a bit, I think I’d crown Vengeance my favourite tanking spec in the current state of the game. Still, it’s probably not new main class material, even if it’s one I definitely enjoy.

Warlock, though… I started to kind of regret I haven’t really played my warlock since I’ve been back. I think I had more fun playing Destruction than any other spec since I’ve been back, and Affliction feels pretty good, too. Again, nice simple rotations that are mostly resource-focused.

It’s kind of sad how warlocks and Frost DKs play more like rogues than any of the actual rogue specs these days.

I think they revamped the spell animations for warlocks since I played last, too; I don’t remember them being anywhere near this dramatic. They really capture the reckless rage I always felt was driving my warlock.

Anyway, I’m still waffling a bit on if I’ll be resuming my sub, but if I do, I may have to abandon my plan to keep the warlock in mothballs until Midnight.