Hardcore Patchocalpyse

It's a well-known truism that patch day in any MMO means chaos. New features are exciting of course, but something random is always bugged and becomes the worst problem ever for a few days, just to promptly be forgotten almost instantly the moment the issue is fixed.

Classic era should be devoid of such issues, seeing how it's a static game that doesn't receive content updates - however, as I mentioned previously, technical adjustments still need to happen sometimes and can introduce new bugs. Today's patch not only pushed the changes to the PvP ranking system live, it also laid the groundwork for tomorrow's launch of the official hardcore servers... and played havoc with era in general in the process.

Nothing was really completely broken, but there were a dozen different things going on that confused people, probably more than usual since everyone's used to things not changing on era. Chatting and grouping with people on the same cluster suddenly posed challenges, casters using wands would find their character starting to smack mobs with their useless melee weapon if the enemy got too close, and spell ranks had seemingly disappeared from the spell book (though they could be made to reappear via a Wrath-style tickbox). Talents were reset for no reason, and the talent window suddenly acquired a dungeon finder-style role icon. The general settings menu was updated to match that in Dragonflight, which looks bewilderingly different... though the thing that really bothers me personally is that the little check boxes are done in a different style than the Vanilla ones. Where's that striving for authenticity now...

Anyway, nothing's completely unplayable, and most problems seemed to be down to people's addons breaking, which is not unusual for major patches - but again, kind of unexpected for era players. Era also doesn't receive as much community support as other versions of the game, so some of those broken addons might stay outdated for a while. We shall soldier on.

As a somewhat tangential fun fact, the names of the hardcore servers going live tomorrow were revealed yesterday. There are going to be two per region, because apparently Blizzard hasn't learned anything from Wrath Classic's mono-faction servers, but oh well. Either way, what I really wanted to comment on were their names, which I thought were pretty brilliantly chosen to be honest: in North America, players will be playing on "Defias Pillager" and "Skull Rock", while Europeans will get to choose between "Nek'rosh" and "Stitches".

Defias Pillagers of course are notorious for being the most deadly low-level mob in Vanilla. Back in the day, the official Warcraft site had a "leaderboard" that showed how many people had died to different kinds of mobs, and the Defias Pillager, a low-level caster mob from Westfall that shoots disproportionally powerful fireballs for its level, was very high up on the list, right up there among raid bosses that were wiping raid groups forty people at a time. I expect the good old pillagers will claim the lives of many hardcore players as well, and that this will become the North-American Alliance server.

Skull Rock on the other hand is a cave in northern Durotar that is known to be a death trap for low-level Hordies, due to housing a mix of hard-hitting melee mobs and warlock-type enemies with pets, at a level when most classes don't really have the tools to deal with multi-mob pulls very well. I wrote about my own struggles with getting the Voidwalker quest for orc warlocks done in there in this post. I'm guessing many hardcore Hordies will meet their doom there as well, and that this server might end up being more favoured by the Horde.

Nek'rosh is an orc elite boss in the Wetlands and I guess has surprised many a unsuspecting Alliance player who found themselves sent on a mission to kill a level 32 elite when the previous quest in the chain had them kill regular orcs in the mid-twenties. But that's Vanilla for you! I'm not sure he'll get to kill that many people on hardcore since I don't think many who'll get that far will go into this chain unprepared, so I guess this name is a little less exciting than the others. I'd initially thought it was better than it was since I got my orc names mixed up and mistook him for one of the nasty named warlocks in Durotar.

Finally, Stitches is of course the high-level elite flesh golem that wanders the roads of Darkshire whenever someone completes the necromancer quest chain. While his body count probably isn't as high as that of other mobs, unexpectedly seeing this hideous giant lumber your way when you thought you were safe surely gave many an Alliance lowbie their first life-or-death scare after they innocently expected to be safe on the road. Another very worthy name for a server that's going to be all about dying at low levels.

We'll see what mayhem ensues tomorrow.

The Returning Player's Plight

It's strange to think that Classic turns four in less than a month, and even stranger to think that I've also been playing retail again (if casually) for almost three years now. I originally started playing WoW in October 2016 - add three years to that and you're about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King. By that point, the game had had a huge impact on me but was also changing a lot already.

Things are certainly very different now, as the last three years of dabbling in retail haven't felt like a big deal at all. What's also interesting to me is that I still struggle to feel properly at home there, even after three years of refamiliarising myself with it. My returning-to-retail journey has been a long and slow one, from the initial desire to just have a quick look at some new stuff and being confused by everything, to falling into a routine playing with my husband with only moderate enthusiasm for the game itself, to slowly starting to work on some goals of my own. However, even now, with me logging in quite regularly to do my own thing without the husband, just for fun, I remain somewhat detached. Even after three years, I still feel like a "returning" player, perpetually confused by the fact that things aren't the way I remember them.

This probably isn't a problem for the average person, but for me those early years in WoW really made a huge impression on me and shaped my ideas of how a lot of things "should" work. This is very apparent when it comes to classes for example. I don't think it's a coincidence that the classes I've played the most since picking up retail again are monk, demon hunter and evoker - all three of which didn't exist yet when I last played WoW in the past. (Okay, monks technically existed during my stint with Mists of Pandaria, but I never played one so I still knew nothing about them.)

It's much easier for me to accept the way a class works nowadays when I've never known it any other way. With pretty much every other class, there's always that feeling of things being slightly off, as I find myself looking for abilities that are no longer there, keep forgetting to use (to me) new abilities and just generally get confused by things not working as I remember them. It's honestly been surprising to me just how strongly some of those ancient memories are influencing my perceptions, even on classes I barely even played back in the day, such as warrior or warlock.

The world of Azeroth has also changed in a lot of ways that makes it confusing to navigate sometimes. This post from 2020 mentions a lot of them, and while I've gotten a little better at finding my way around, it's still an issue for me three years later. On the day I drafted this I was playing a Horde alt for example and found myself wondering where to find the portal room in Orgrimmar. Can you ask a guard where it is? Nope. I tried to instead ask for directions to a place which I knew would require a portal to get to, which did prompt them to mention its existence, but still with no map marker or directions. As it turns out, I had to ask for one specific location that is accessed via the portal room and that then also prompts the guard to tell you where it is.

Or there's that whole zone phasing thing. I appreciate that Blizzard didn't want to do another Cata and just remove old zones whenever they made major changes to them, which is why they introduced the "bronze dragon phases you between different versions of the zone" mechanic, but it's still sooo opaque. I remember flying to Uldum during the Fire Festival on a level 49 alt, clicking on one of the bonfires, levelling up, and having the zone phase around me, with the fires suddenly disappearing before I could click on the second one. I thought I was lagging out at first! It took several relogs and some googling for me to figure out what was going on, that the game had decided to automatically switch me from Cataclysm Uldum to BfA Uldum the moment I dinged, and that the bonfires only existed in one version but not the other.

It's these kinds of things that make me feel tired and estranged from the game. These aren't fun little secrets to uncover, just messy systems that really make you feel confused about what's going on.

The reason I've been thinking about the "returning player experience" recently is that Blizzard added a "welcome back gift" in the latest patch that can be applied to any character of level 60 or lower that hasn't been logged in for at least 60 days. This is independent of your subscription status, so it also showed up for a bunch of my old alts.

If you do pick the "gear upgrade" option, the character is auto-equipped with a level-appropriate set of gear, four 22-slot bags, and teleported to their capital city. Unless you were in BfA or Shadowlands, you also get the option to fully wipe your quest log. Any old gear, old bags, and anything you had in your inventory appear in your mailbox instead.

I tried this on some old alts just to see what it's like and... I can see it being useful. It's not been that much of an issue for me in WoW personally, but as a general rule, a cluttered inventory can indeed be off-putting when returning to an MMO you haven't played in a long time. I don't like the quest-clearing myself since I do like the way my log helps me remember where I last left off however many years ago, but it's fine since that step is optional.

The free gear is an interesting workaround to deal with the broken level scaling and the way many returning characters will find themselves way too weak to fight anything (I've found out that this hasn't just been a problem for me) but I wonder if it's enough of a band-aid. To use a personal example again, I used the gear boost on a level 10 void elf mage that I had literally just created and never played. The starter gear with which she was originally spawned was replaced by much more powerful items, and as I ran around doing my first few quests, I was effectively one-shotting many mobs. However, as my level increased and I didn't get gear upgrades from quests equally as fast, I quickly started to feel weaker again, taking us back to the same old problem of the triad of levelling, gear acquisition and scaling being somewhat broken for players without heirlooms right now.

It's nice that they're trying to be more welcoming to returning players, but at the same time I feel like this is barely scratching the surface of the kinds of obstacles you're faced with if you skipped a few expansions.

Era News: SoM Gone, PvP Changes, Hardcore Launch

Time for a short post to mention a few things happening in and around era that don't really affect me much personally, but that I'd still like to make note of here as they are milestones of a sort.

Season of Mastery Gone

The temporary Season of Mastery officially ended in February, but while the servers were locked at that point, they still showed up in game as accessible and people could go and grab their old characters to make use of the free transfer option to move them to the regular Classic era servers. Blizzard said that this option would be available "for at least three months" but then didn't specify any further.

Until last week that is, when they suddenly gave short notice that the realms were about to disappear for good in a few days. If you had characters on those servers and didn't bother to save them until now, they're gone for good now, sorry.

Based on my experience with the shutdown of the Classic era cloning service before Wrath of the Lich King, I anticipate a constant trickle of people posting on the forums and on Discords from now on to complain that Blizzard deleted their characters "without notice", or to assert that surely nothing was really deleted and Blizzard just needs to stop hiding their characters already.

PvP Changes Going Live on August 23

Back in June I mentioned that the Classic devs had decided to overhaul the PvP system on era. These changes were eventually explained on the forums in full and tested on the PTR. They ended up changing more than I expected, but all the feedback I've heard from PvPers in my circles has been positive even so.

In a nutshell, Blizzard is getting rid of both the competitive aspect of the old system as well as rank decay. The former means that your progress is no longer measured against other players, but gaining rank is simply a static honour grind with fixed values. This gets rid of a lot of nonsense that people were doing in order to game the old system. From what I've heard, the new fixed honour requirements for each rank are lower and easier to attain if you were previously on a busy PvP server, but if you were on a chill PvE server where there wasn't that much competition, you might have to work a bit harder to get to max rank than you did before. This is kind of along the lines of what I expected.

What took me completely by surprise was the removal of rank decay. There will still be weekly honour decay, but you won't be able to go down in rank anymore unless you get dishonourable kills. This means that going up in rank still requires consistent play for at least a couple of weeks, but you can basically "take a break" between working on ranks without decay pushing you back to the very bottom of the ladder. This obviously takes away a lot of the "no-lifeing" requirements of the old PvP system and makes it much more accessible to a wider audience. I just wonder whether that'll mean that we'll eventually find ourselves surrounded by Grand Marshals and High Warlords everywhere.

Oh yeah, and like it says in the headline, a few days ago Blizzard announced that this change is meant to go live on August 23.

Hardcore Realms Coming on August 24

That very same news post also contained the announcement that the official hardcore realms are meant to launch a day later, on August 24. Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to this one now, even if I'm not planning to play hardcore myself, simply because I expect it to be a big community event involving lots of drama. That should be fun to watch.

Human Heritage

From my understanding, heritage armour quests were first introduced at the end of Legion, presumably to add a bit more context/lore to the newly added allied races, seeing how they didn't have dedicated starter zones of their own. However, they turned out to be so popular with players that people started clamouring for similar quest chains for the existing races, and Blizzard has slowly been adding more of them over time. (If I'm wrong about any of this and you were playing at the time, please do correct me.)

In an earlier Dragonflight patch, Blizzard added a heritage armour quest for humans, which recently came to my attention as I've been playing more, and both my monk and my hunter are human. As I didn't want a repeat of my struggle with the Worgen heritage quest (as mentioned in this post), I decided to do the chain on my monk first. She still had pretty good gear from the end of Shadowlands, and I figured that would make combat a breeze and allow me to focus on the story instead of every trash mob becoming a life-or-death battle. (It worked.) And I was quite impressed!

If you'd asked me beforehand what I expected the human heritage quest to be about, what I consider to be the quintessential experience of being a human in WoW, I would have thought of zones like Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Stormwind, and plots like that of the Defias. And what do you know, all of these feature.

The lore around these things has evolved over time, perhaps not always in optimal ways, such as the old Deadmines getting replaced with an updated version in Cataclysm in which the end boss is no longer angry stonemason Edwin Van Cleef but his vengeful teenage daughter Vanessa.

I don't really want to spoil the actual content of the quest chain in detail, but I was impressed by how it wove old and new lore together in a pretty convincing way. After Cataclysm, I never expected to see the old showdown with Onyxia in the Stormwind throne room to ever make a comeback in retail, even if it's in the form of a cut scene cinematic (which illustrates Spymaster Mathias Shaw telling you the story of the Drakefire Amulet). Apparently there are some little variations here as well if your character actually did the Ony attunement back in the day - not that this is something I could test myself, as I didn't have a high-level human back then.

I also liked the bit where you return to Ragged John in the Burning Steppes and his dialogue throws heavy shade at the way the lore around Onyxia's exposure and death has been retconned in the past.

All in all, it was a really nice quest chain with a lot of callbacks to some pretty nostalgic moments that also portrayed the way current generation of characters have to deal with the past with a surprising degree of sensitivity. More of this kind of thing please, Blizz.

Patch 10.1.5 Goodness

However you may feel about Dragonflight, it's hard to deny that Blizzard has been knocking it out of the park in terms of patch cadence this expansion. Every time I find myself thinking that I'm kinda done with the latest content and that I should maybe take a bit of a step back from retail for a while - boom, there comes a new patch. They were right on time with 10.1.5 as well, with it releasing literally the week after I hit Renown 20 with the Loamm Niffen.

I really like these medium-sized intermediate patches. They don't contain that much new content, but it's something new to check out and log in for, and then you might as well keep playing since you're there already.

The (in my opinion) main event of 10.1.5 is a new public event called Time Rifts. Blizzard seems to be leaning really heavily into public events with this expansion, something that hasn't really been WoW's focus traditionally. Mostly I've been quite enjoying them, but I do worry that in the long run, the concept might not be compatible with Blizzard's M.O. of always pushing everyone towards the newest content and away from the old, as it means that older events end up being deserted and quickly become hard to impossible to complete successfully. Zaralek Cavern for example (the patch 10.1 zone) has already gone from being a place where you'd blink and miss a rare or event if you didn't join in fast enough, to rares and events being up seemingly 24/7 because nobody wants to do them anymore (and many of them are hard to impossible to solo at this point).

Anyway, Time Rifts: the idea is that once an hour, an alternate timeline starts leaking into Thaldraszus and the bronze dragons ask you to help out with cleaning it up. In gameplay terms, it's kind of a mix between the community feast and a massive world boss, in the sense that everyone is given individualised tasks to complete (either to kill some mobs or to do something involving clicking on stuff) but a lot of people will end up with the same task anyway, meaning that you're spending a lot of time running around in a massive crowd AoEing things.

At the end you go through the rift to kill the anomaly, which manifests as a boss that usually dies really quickly because of the massive number of players joining the fight. The first few times I did this part, the lag was insane and I could hardly any get any abilities off. This was particularly funny when the fight in the alternate timeline involved an Arthas lookalike that cast Defile while everyone was lagging so hard that they couldn't even move. I was one of the ones who died as the whole platform seemed to get covered in deadly black goo, but somehow the boss still died, so... 🤷‍♀️

Either way, I've found these rifts quite enjoyable and they're a nice source of catch-up gear for alts.

There's also this new whelp daycare... thing where you do time-gated quests to help hatch eggs and raise dragon whelps that eventually become your pets. It's very cutesy.

Finally, there's a new mega-dungeon which is only available in mythic difficulty. My guildies and I gave it a go last weekend, wiped on the first boss about half a dozen times and then gave up. Clearly not intended for players of our skill at this point.

There are also some other new features I haven't really looked into, such as a new spec for evokers (something I really didn't expect them to add mid-expansion), and new race options for warlocks. I just think it's nice that they keep adding all this stuff in smaller chunks to keep things fresh between the major content patches.

A Year of Playing on Classic Era

Exactly a year ago today, I made my first post on here about quitting Burning Crusade Classic in favour of going back to the Vanilla Classic servers. And wow, it's sure been a year!

I remember the loneliness of those first few weeks, when I would sometimes be the only person in any given zone, nobody talked in LFG chat, and the auction house was almost empty. Yet even then, I managed to find a guild (or rather, the guild found me!), I joined them for raids, and quickly became part of a community. It was largely what I'd hoped for: a chill, safe haven for people who just wanted to hang out and not always chase the latest patch.

I remember a funny conversation where one of the officers told a newcomer that things were slower on era, and he said something like that playing here was more like riding a sail boat than a high-speed train, and I chimed in to say that era wasn't even a boat; it was like sitting in a deck chair - just people relaxing and not going anywhere.

I figured that's just how things were going to continue to be - little did I know that a bunch of YouTubers would make Classic era go viral a few months later. Even with most of the focus being on the PvP cluster, my PvE home got a nice boost from the publicity as well and for two consecutive months we saw exponential growth, with the numbers recorded by my census addon doubling each month. It was pretty nuts to see all these new guilds pop up out of nowhere.

After that I stopped running scans as regularly, but my impression has been that activity more or less plateaued after we hit medium population, as the hype kind of died down. Still, things have remained stable, so I'm hopeful that we'll continue to see a more "normal" influx of players as the months go by. Classic era is still a niche game mode, but now at least one that people in the wider niche (WoW players, MMO enthusiasts) are somewhat aware of.

Ironically, for as delighted as I've been to see this development, I myself have actually been spending less time on Classic era in recent months. Part of that has been due to wanting to prioritise the seasonal content in SWTOR, but another is just that it feels kind of... okay to not be online as much. While the guild was struggling to fill raids, it felt important to me to join in whenever I could, even if I was late to arrive, because getting one step closer to having a full 40 people increased the raid's chances of success. When every raid gets 50+ sign-ups on the other hand, it's just not the same. I'm happy that the guild's seeing success, but I'm also happy to let others have my raid spot if they're keen, because I'm here for the long haul and not in any kind of rush. Or maybe I'm just a horrible hipster and era has become less interesting to me as it's become more popular; who knows.

Anyway, point is, I still log in almost every day, even if it's just to check my mail and auctions, and I usually attend one or two raids a week, so it's not as if I'm not around at all. It's just more of a background routine now, which I think is totally fine. Not feeling any kind of pressure to keep up is part of the appeal of era after all. I'm curious to see how things will develop over the next few months with the addition of the official hardcore server(s) and regular Classic potentially continuing into Cataclysm.

Viscidus Victory

Viscidus in AQ40 is probably Vanilla's weirdest raid boss. He's kind of out of the way and therefore optional, doesn't drop anything particularly exciting to most players, and he's very oddly designed in the sense that he requires a whole special set of gear to kill, a silly amount of consumables, and can't be overpowered with world buffs. The Forks only ever killed him once... we did go back and tried a couple more times after that, but we weren't particularly enthused to keep trying when we didn't immediately succeed.

With the Warriors of Sunlight, I never got to kill Viscidus either. When I joined, I was told that they'd done him in the past but didn't find the amount of consumables required to be worth the hassle of revisiting him, which seemed fair enough.

However, there was one member in particular, an undead warlock, who was obsessed with killing Viscidus for some reason. In specific, he was after the Sharpened Silithid Femur - again, it's not entirely clear to me why, considering that there are better caster weapons in Naxx, but chasing after certain rare items just seems to be this guy's thing. When I first joined the guild, he was on an epic crusade to acquire Pattern: Rich Purple Silk Shirt for example.

It basically became a well-known meme that he'd always ask to do Viscidus and we'd never even try. I remember waking up early on Christmas Day and having a quick look at my phone while still in bed, just to be greeted by this "Christmas card" made by him on the guild Discord:

It gave me a good chuckle! (Seal of the Archmagus is another meme within the guild...)

My own feeling on the matter was that I didn't really care one way or the other, though I did feel vaguely bad for the warlock as I did get the impression after a while that for all the memery, the whole thing was genuinely important to him and he was starting to feel let down by the fact that so many months had passed without a single Viscidus kill.

In terms of gear and consumables, I wasn't really ready to fight Viscidus myself. In the Forks, I had been required to assemble a full set of nature resist gear before even setting foot into AQ40 (something that caused me a certain degree of anxiety at the time). I only learned much later that it was apparently a bit of an oddity that we never had enough people playing melee characters and therefore needed the hunters to help with soaking damage on Huhuran. In the Warriors of Sunlight, it didn't matter that my hunter didn't have any gear since we never did Viscidus and had plenty of melee to soak on Huhu.

I did farm up a pair of Coldrage Daggers at one point when it had sounded like we might finally have a go at Viscidus soon, but then that didn't end up going anywhere.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised when one of the raid leaders pinged everyone a few hours before raid start today to announce that we were going to kill Viscidus tonight and that we were to come prepared. I immediately confessed to my utter unpreparedness and that it would make complete sense to take someone who actually had nature resist gear, but somehow I ended up on the roster anyway.

Fortunately the guild bank provided a lot of consumables, and in the end, we actually did it. It took us five attempts, but we got there in the end! I've got to say, for all of Visci's awkwardness, Horde have it comparatively easy with shamans and their cleansing totems, as there was almost no need for poison cleanse consumables, the main thing that made the fight so prohibitively demanding on Alliance side. I just had to keep an eye on the shaman in my group and stay near him.

Even though it wasn't a guild first or anything, it was the guild's first kill in over a year, so it still felt pretty good to get the boss down. And even better, he did actually drop the Femur for our warlock friend! So yay for him!

The only downside is that we might now decide to revisit him more often, which means that I really need to get onto that nature resist gear. Ugh...