FOR THE LAST DAY of early access for WoW: Midnight, I was ready to start my penultimate zone of the expansion, Harandar. A lush, forest zone that feels like a mashup of Zangarmarsh and the Emerald Dream, Harandar falls under the classic WoW trope of “area that was hidden away for years and is now about to be overrun with thousands of outsiders.” It’s a bit of a maze to navigate, with lots of underground dens and burrows, but at level 88, I could see the finish line (others might call it the starting line) of level 90 just a few hours away.
88 -> 89: After a little questing and some lore dumps about Harandar’s history, I got roped into another delve, the Gulf of Memory. Again, I think delves are a solid addition to the game — some players absolutely love that there’s challenging solo content with endgame-level rewards if you’re willing to push hard enough — but they’re just not for me. Hey, at least the first-time quest rewards a nice chunk of XP.
At the center of Harandar is The Den, sort of a central hub for the zone. There are lots of quest hubs scattered around the perimeter of the zone, which routinely send you back to the Den for your next task, and the flow of the zone reminded me a little of Deepholm (from Cataclysm).
One nice change Blizzard added while leveling: the new transmog system, while still a little clunky, allows you to keep swapping in gear upgrades without having to re-transmog (and spend gold) every time. You now maintain a consistent xmog appearance no matter what new gear you get, and Blizzard gave all players a one-time free transmog after most players’ xmogs got wiped in the Midnight pre-patch.
One hub of quests has you “entering a painting”, which continues this expansion’s focus on storytelling. This also included a new type of painting puzzle mini-game, where you create a straight line path through a maze of dots. This first quest was easy enough, and feels like something that’s going to appear regularly as a world quest or elsewhere, but the arrow keys are so unintuitive. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let us click a path? Whatever the case, this was the quest that finished this particular hub and where I dinged 89.
89 -> 90: I suspect I’ll hit 90 before I leave Harandar. Most of my early levels in Midnight took about 90 minutes, but the last few have crept closer to the 2 hour range. Which isn’t that bad, especially if you remember how long it took out to grind out levels from 50 to 60 in vanilla WoW.
Sure enough, a few hubs later, I finally ding level 90, with the end of Harandar nowhere in sight. But for now the campaign questline is pushing me into the remade Magister’s Terrace dungeon. Hey, at least I’m not worried about XP any more and maybe I’ll get some quickie level 90 upgrades out of it.
The revamped Magister’s Terrace bears a slight resemblance to the old one, but it’s definitely a new dungeon. Like the new Silvermoon City, you’ll see some areas that look familiar, but with completely new areas and all-new bosses. You won’t be fighting Kael’thas Sunstrider at the end this time, but instead the dungeon culminates in an outdoor fight against an all-new boss named Degentrius.
Although I had the option to complete the quest in a follower dungeon, I instead opted to queue for a normal 5-man run while questing in Harandar. The dungeon was plodding along slowly but surely when one of our DPS DC’d. (I just can’t get through a single dungeon without some kind of hiccup.) After waiting to be allowed to kick the AFK player, the dungeon took about 30 minutes overall, which wasn’t surprising since the expansion is new and everyone’s still running around in greens, but we got through it without any deaths. (For me, the bar is that low.)
After returning to Silvermoon City to turn in the quest for Magister’s Terrace, the campaign kicked into its endgame by sending me to the Voidstorm, the final zone of the Midnight expansion. But I wasn’t quite ready for that yet; I wanted to wrap up the Harandar story and grab some more quest rewards before moving on.
So I returned to Harandar and quested for a half hour or so before I looked up the “Sojourner” achievement for the zone and discovered I still had NINE hubs to complete. Yeaaaaah, I’ll come back to this after I’ve complete the main campaign. The official Midnight launch is at 6p EST Monday night, and I suspect the servers will be on fire once again, so I’ll probably take my time finishing the campaign this week before starting to work on gearing up properly.
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Notable 2026 Game Releases Feb 27 - Pokémon FireRed/Leafgreen Feb 27 - Resident Evil: Requiem Mar 2 - World of Warcraft: Midnight Mar 5 - Marathon Mar 26 - Life is Strange: Reunion May 19 - Forza Horizon 6 May 27 - 007 First Light Sep 15 - Marvel's Wolverine TBD - Grand Theft Auto VI TBD - Control Resonant TBD - Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis TBD - Professor Layton/World of Steam
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World of Warcraft: Midnight – Harandar
FOR THE LAST DAY of early access for WoW: Midnight, I was ready to start my penultimate zone of the expansion, Harandar. A lush, forest zone that feels like a mashup of Zangarmarsh and the Emerald Dream, Harandar falls under the classic WoW trope of “area that was hidden away for years and is now about to be overrun with thousands of outsiders.” It’s a bit of a maze to navigate, with lots of underground dens and burrows, but at level 88, I could see the finish line (others might call it the starting line) of level 90 just a few hours away.
88 -> 89: After a little questing and some lore dumps about Harandar’s history, I got roped into another delve, the Gulf of Memory. Again, I think delves are a solid addition to the game — some players absolutely love that there’s challenging solo content with endgame-level rewards if you’re willing to push hard enough — but they’re just not for me. Hey, at least the first-time quest rewards a nice chunk of XP.
At the center of Harandar is The Den, sort of a central hub for the zone. There are lots of quest hubs scattered around the perimeter of the zone, which routinely send you back to the Den for your next task, and the flow of the zone reminded me a little of Deepholm (from Cataclysm).
One nice change Blizzard added while leveling: the new transmog system, while still a little clunky, allows you to keep swapping in gear upgrades without having to re-transmog (and spend gold) every time. You now maintain a consistent xmog appearance no matter what new gear you get, and Blizzard gave all players a one-time free transmog after most players’ xmogs got wiped in the Midnight pre-patch.
One hub of quests has you “entering a painting”, which continues this expansion’s focus on storytelling. This also included a new type of painting puzzle mini-game, where you create a straight line path through a maze of dots. This first quest was easy enough, and feels like something that’s going to appear regularly as a world quest or elsewhere, but the arrow keys are so unintuitive. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let us click a path? Whatever the case, this was the quest that finished this particular hub and where I dinged 89.
89 -> 90: I suspect I’ll hit 90 before I leave Harandar. Most of my early levels in Midnight took about 90 minutes, but the last few have crept closer to the 2 hour range. Which isn’t that bad, especially if you remember how long it took out to grind out levels from 50 to 60 in vanilla WoW.
Sure enough, a few hubs later, I finally ding level 90, with the end of Harandar nowhere in sight. But for now the campaign questline is pushing me into the remade Magister’s Terrace dungeon. Hey, at least I’m not worried about XP any more and maybe I’ll get some quickie level 90 upgrades out of it.
The revamped Magister’s Terrace bears a slight resemblance to the old one, but it’s definitely a new dungeon. Like the new Silvermoon City, you’ll see some areas that look familiar, but with completely new areas and all-new bosses. You won’t be fighting Kael’thas Sunstrider at the end this time, but instead the dungeon culminates in an outdoor fight against an all-new boss named Degentrius.
Although I had the option to complete the quest in a follower dungeon, I instead opted to queue for a normal 5-man run while questing in Harandar. The dungeon was plodding along slowly but surely when one of our DPS DC’d. (I just can’t get through a single dungeon without some kind of hiccup.) After waiting to be allowed to kick the AFK player, the dungeon took about 30 minutes overall, which wasn’t surprising since the expansion is new and everyone’s still running around in greens, but we got through it without any deaths. (For me, the bar is that low.)
After returning to Silvermoon City to turn in the quest for Magister’s Terrace, the campaign kicked into its endgame by sending me to the Voidstorm, the final zone of the Midnight expansion. But I wasn’t quite ready for that yet; I wanted to wrap up the Harandar story and grab some more quest rewards before moving on.
So I returned to Harandar and quested for a half hour or so before I looked up the “Sojourner” achievement for the zone and discovered I still had NINE hubs to complete. Yeaaaaah, I’ll come back to this after I’ve complete the main campaign. The official Midnight launch is at 6p EST Monday night, and I suspect the servers will be on fire once again, so I’ll probably take my time finishing the campaign this week before starting to work on gearing up properly.