Playing Catch-up

I've been playing so much Classic lately; it feels almost embarrassing. I pretty much could have been writing daily blogs about all the things I've been doing, but instead I've just been spending all my time actually playing the game. I haven't been in this deep for a while.

Since that first AQ20 I've been to quite a few more raids: more runs of AQ20, one Zul'Gurub, two Onyxias and two Blackwing Lairs. In the last BWL run I won Ashjre'thul, Crossbow of Smiting, the best weapon for hunters until Naxxramas. My little nelf hunter is starting to kick some serious butt.

Unsurprisingly, the gentle nudges to join the raid team proper have continued, and not just from the hunter class leader either. I was quite surprised for example when, after watching one of the priests stream an AQ40 run, he commented to me that it was a shame that I was only watching and that I should be there with them next time. It's been strangely flattering to be courted this way.

At this point I'm about ready to cave, because I'm a firm believer in embracing serendipity, and that if life gives you something nice you should appreciate it to the fullest while you can. I wasn't looking to raid, but I also wasn't looking to join a guild that would turn out to be an awesome fit for me - it just happened. It's not that I absolutely can't raid "properly" in WoW, I've just been prioritising my hobby time differently. I think it may be time to make some changes in that regard.

So with that in mind, I've been looking at what it would take for my little hunter to be raid-ready for current content. Unfortunately, the answer at this point in the game is: more than I expected.

In general, gear level isn't as much of an obstacle as you'd think. I got myself hit-capped through dungeon drops and quest rewards, and everything else is pretty much a bonus. In terms of dps, the tuning in all the Classic raids up to Naxxramas is so low that there isn't really that much pressure to perform. More is nice of course because it makes things go faster, but it's not a big deal unless topping the meters is a personal motivation for you. It's mostly just tanks and healers who have to worry about having enough stats to stay / keep each other alive.

But there are other obstacles. For example, a big hunter utility in Classic is the use of Tranquilizing Shot, an ability that is key to preventing certain bosses from smooshing the tanks while "frenzied". The ability has a cooldown, and on the bosses that frenzy, it happens often enough that you need several hunters rotating their tranq shots.

The ability is learned from Tome of Tranquilizing Shot, a guaranteed drop from the first boss in Molten Core that binds on pick-up. While people were doing MC regularly, it was trivial to get this for every hunter in the raid. However, one year later, people are mostly sick and tired of farming MC and I still haven't been on a full run of it even once.

On the bosses that require tranquilising in BWL, one of the officers has repeatedly called for me to tranq, just for me to have to remind him yet again that I don't have it. It was fine because we had enough other hunters to cover it, but more than any lack of gear, it really highlighted how much I relied on others to carry me and that's something that makes me feel kinda bad every time. The guild finally put an MC run up for next week, so I'm hoping that I'll at least be able to fix that particular problem soon. This is relevant because tranq shot is still used in AQ40 as well.

A seemingly even bigger hurdle is the nature resist gear though. Resistance gear as a whole is a bit of an odd beast in Classic. In Vanilla it was commonly assumed that you needed fire resist gear for Molten Core for example, but in Classic hardly anyone seems to bother except for a few pieces for the tanks. Similarly, nature res for AQ40 doesn't appear to be quite as big a deal as it was back then, but it's still recommended for some bosses at least. I asked in guild what would be required for a hunter and was told to aim for 200 NR buffed, mainly for Princess Huhuran, which may not sound like much to some, but you have to consider that resistances in Classic are generally parcelled out in stacks of 10-20 per gear piece at the most, so that's a lot of different gear slots that need to be filled.

My heart kinda sunk when that realisation hit me. My understanding is that the guild worked on building up everyone's resistance gear for weeks and months before the opening of the gates, so that's potentially quite a lot of work to get done just to get caught up. People have of course been kind enough to offer help, but a grind with help is still a grind, and proper catch-up mechanics are largely absent, so it really is all about farming materials for crafts and going back to old dungeons for rare drops.

Maraudon is one major go-to for nature resist gear, so I trundled over to Desolace last night to see what I could solo in there. I was relieved to see that I could run past pretty much all the trash mobs (the only time I aggroed any of them was when I had my pet out and doing its "running into places I didn't want it to be" thing) but the bosses were still somewhat of a challenge. I couldn't get Noxxion down for example, and while I found a video of a hunter soloing him, that seemed to require a very specific setup. Razorlash was easy enough, as was Meshlok the Harvester (who was actually up), though the latter only gave me a pretty dress instead of the mail helmet I had been hoping for. Celebras the Cursed was very doable as well, though I didn't handle the adds very well so that we ended up knocking each other out simultaneously, which was at least amusing.

In the end I'd had a decent refresher of the earlier half of Maraudon, and the value of the things I vendored just about covered the repair bills for my multiple deaths, but in terms of gear I wasn't really much better off than before. (Razorlash dropped a pair of leather leggings, but the legs are one slot I would've been able to cover with crafted stuff anyway.)

In short, my whirlwind romance with being guilded and trying raiding in Classic continues, but at times it's also emotionally confusing and finding myself face-to-face with some of the more... eclectic-seeming design choices definitely makes me more sympathetic to why the devs decided to change these things later on to make it a bit easier for people to play together.