AQ and Paladin Update

It's been about ten days since the war effort started and as I predicted, the rate of progression slowed down a lot after the first day on both of the servers that I play on. If it had stayed the same, Pyrewood Village would have been done after four days and Hydraxian Waterlords after seven. Needless to say, neither server is actually there yet.

We get all these headlines about how some streamer/super hardcore server got everything done within hours but I'd be highly dubious of any claims that this is the sort of pace at which the average player experiences the game. Things may go faster than they did back in the day, but I suspect that most people who choose to play Classic still play at a much more casual/old-school pace than those reports would have you believe.

Anyway, I plugged the numbers into my percentage calculation spreadsheet, and as it stands Pyrewood Village is three quarters of the way towards being done, while Hydraxian Waterlords is almost halfway there. I like that the two servers' progression rates are so different, as it means that I'll have not one but two chances at potentially seeing the gate opening event!

One thing that was interesting to note was that despite the faction imbalance on both servers, the war effort progression percentages are now almost identical for both factions. Since both servers are PvE, I wouldn't be surprised if some Alliance raiders had made an effort to even things out a bit - it's not like it's difficult to roll up a Horde alt and farm some wool cloth in the Barrens (or transfer things via the neutral auction house if you want to be more organised I guess).

In terms of material progress, the low-level hand-ins continue to be the bottlenecks, with linen and wool bandages sitting at 18 and 31% completion respectively on Hydraxian Waterlords. On Pyrewood Village it seems like someone made a concerted effort to get bandages up - while they still have a long way to go, they are not the least provided items anymore. That honour now goes to light leather on Alliance side and Peacebloom on Horde. Alliance is actually 100% finished with herbs, well done!

All the extra demand for low-level materials actually makes this a really good time to play lowbie alts, because you'll get a lot more bang for your buck than usual when putting stacks of linen and the like up on the auction house. This inspired me to spend some more time playing on my human pally, but for some reason it's just not clicking this time and I don't know why. Everything just feels so slow and I keep dying! 

Which is all the more ridiculous considering that when I levelled my pally on Kronos (which was supposedly much higher tuned than Classic), she didn't even die once until a Defias Pillager got her in a cave in Westfall. Though now that I just went back and looked at that post in its entirety again, I did mention dying a lot around that level range too. Anyway, in one play session about a month ago I died so many times to fireballing dragon whelps in Redridge that I eventually just logged off and didn't log that character again in weeks. This time around things have felt a bit better, but casters are still a major pain and I just feel weak. I fear that levelling two easymode hunters in a row may have spoiled me a bit for difficulty.