Dungeons and Drama

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I'm continuing to level my dwarf priest on Nostalrius Elysium PvE, but progress is slow. One of the downsides of Vanilla WoW gameplay that I absolutely admit is there is that it doesn't lend itself very well to short play sessions, so I only really play on the weekends when I have the time to play for several hours at once. Unfortunately one or two such play sessions don't necessarily provide me with enough content for a proper blog post, so the blog stays silent even if I'm happy with having made a level or two of progress, especially since there isn't as much novelty to the process as there was when I rolled my first character on Kronos.

I'm currently sitting at level 25 and have only really quested in Redridge since leaving Westfall and Loch Modan behind, with all my other experience having come from dungeons.

First I tried to give the Deadmines another go, but that run was pretty awkward and ended up getting aborted halfway through. I should have known that it wasn't a good group considering that the leader was advertising via /yell instead of general chat. Still, the real problem wasn't anything anyone did... as far as I could tell anyway. We'd had a wipe in the forge and had just run back in, then had to run back out again when someone pulled a nearby patrol before we'd all reassembled, and the next time I ran in, it suddenly said that everyone had left the group simultaneously, which was way too much of a coincidence to have occurred naturally. Some sort of group disband bug? I don't know. Either way, since things hadn't been going so great anyway, I made no effort to whisper anyone about putting the group back together, and they didn't contact me either.

Then there was Blackfathom Deeps. What was funny about that one was that we spent ages looking for a warrior tank since the group leader (a ret paladin) insisted that this would make for the smoothest run. Then we finally found one, but the moment we actually stepped into the instance it turned out that he had neither a shield nor any interest in tanking. I don't know if he was intentionally deceiving us, didn't know what he was doing, or if the invitation issued by the paladin had been unclear, but nobody made a fuss and we just moved on with the hunter pet tanking. (Could have had that experience without waiting for half an hour, that's all I'm saying...)

Ironfur the bear was actually doing a pretty decent job at it for most of the instance too, but when we reached the part with the Twilight cultists, our pally DCed, never to return, forcing us to continue with one man down. This did not go well on the part with the braziers, where we wiped on every single one as far as I recall, and on some of them more than once. When we didn't wipe, I at least still died on every single pull (since I instantly got healing aggro from everything and the hunter was the only one trying to get things off me) and had to make the long corpse run from Darkshore every time because nobody had a res. By the end my armour was nearly broken and I was seriously losing the will to live, but at least I got a Rod of the Sleepwalker out of the whole ordeal.

In contrast to these, running the Stockades was a breeze, with a tank who seriously knew what he was doing and made it a great experience. I happily joined him for another round when it turned out that his friend had forgotten to pick up some quest items and needed to go again. I was disappointed only when I got my Seal of Wrynn at the end of the lengthy quest chain, as it was only a pesky green! I can only guess that this is another one of those "back in patch 1.x it hadn't been upgraded to a blue yet" things that the Nost team seems to love...

Speaking of the Nost team though...

The Vanilla WoW community continues to provide endless entertainment in the form of pointless drama. Remember how this whole Nostalrius relaunch came about? Because the Nost devs were ticked off that Blizzard wasn't responding to them and released their code and database to former rival server Elysium to recreate Nostalrius. While many were happy to get the server back, people were also shaking their heads at the Nost team's behaviour, as acting like that was an obvious slap in the face of Blizzard after they had considered themselves the champions of getting official WoW legacy servers previously.

Well, it seems that a couple of months later, they've finally realised this too, and are akwardly backpedaling by asking the Elysium team to stop using the code and data that they've been given only a few months prior. Unsurprisingly, the Elysium team replied with what can be summed up as: "Sure, we'll change the name from Nost to something else and go back to using our own core. Thanks for gifting us this massive community!" So nothing really changes except that the former Nostalrius team has officially disavowed private servers I suppose? One can only guess that this has something to do with Blizzard, whether they privately expressed an unwillingness for any further talks because of what had happened, or whether the Nost team is actually dealing with legal action that forces them to officially cut all ties with the project.

Little to nothing should change for those of us who are simply playing on the servers. Maybe my Seal of Wrynn will actually turn blue. And I guess I'll have to go back and re-tag the previous posts about this project "Elysium" instead of just Nostalrius.