Why I'm Not Playing as Much Classic Anymore

The launch of WoW Classic five years ago rekindled my interest in WoW in a way I didn't think was possible, and was also the event that truly revived this blog after it had more or less lain fallow for several years. That's why I added (Classic) to the blog title at the time, and updated the header to feature images of what I loved most about Vanilla... the beautiful world (and specifically parts of it that the Cataclysm had destroyed).

I had no interest in retail at the time and didn't think I was ever going to play it again, and I did stick strictly to Classic for about a year. Then I decided to at least dip my toes into BfA (when that expansion became part of the standard subscription with the Shadowlands pre-patch) and found that it was alright as something to play with the husband on a very casual level (since Classic sadly hadn't appealed to him at all).

I continued dabbling in retail throughout Shadowlands while at the same time ignoring huge swathes of the game, which is why many of the complaints people had about that expansion largely passed me by. However, then Dragonflight came out and... it was really fun! So my retail play time went up, and at some point last year the scales tipped to the point that I ended up actually spending more time in retail than in Classic.

While some of that has been due to retail improving, part of it has also been my interest in Classic decreasing a lot, and I wanted to talk a bit about why that is, and where I see my relationship with Classic going in the future.

Since there are several different versions of Classic, let's split things up by "mode":

Vanilla / Classic era

I'm inluding hardcore in this, because while permadeath changes the feel of the game considerably, it's still the same world with the same quests and the same gameplay. Either way, I think this version of the game is great and I do still love it. This is honestly what I wanted out of Classic when it was first announced: a place I can go back to whenever I feel nostalgic for the original World of Warcraft.

However, a side effect of this version's unchanging nature is that... at some point you're just kind of done. I've seen this a lot in my Classic era guild, where even the most devoted players (she had a freaking real-life tattoo of Atiesh!) eventually reach a point where they've achieved everything they wanted to achieve and want to move on to other things. And I think that's fine.

The few that stick around for years regardless usually seem to do so because of strong social ties and/or a deeper involvement with guild business, which again, makes complete sense to me. However, I'm just not in that place myself anymore. I actually do still log into Classic era almost daily, but I don't really play much and I just generally feel like I've kind of seen it all. Not literally of course, but... I was really deep into Classic for two years on Alliance side, and then again on Horde side when I moved to the era servers, so it feels like everything about the zones and dungeons is honestly still quite fresh on my mind and I'll need some time away before I'll get the itch again.

Progressive Classic

Progressive Classic ceased to be of interest to me when it was first announced that all BC Classic characters would have to transition into Wrath of the Lich King, since that was the expansion where I personally felt that things started to go downhill, and while I did have some good times in original Wrath, I tend to think of those days as the kind of experience that was good once but that I'd rather not go through again.

Cata Classic was similarly uninteresting to me, even if I feel that people tend to be a bit too harsh on that expansion. (For me it was quite similar to Wrath in that it had both good and bad aspects.) Personally I don't think that Blizzard will actually continue to ride the expansion train until Classic catches up with retail, but until they tell as otherwise it's fair to assume that they will, and when I look at the line-up of what's to come next, I don't really see much reason to get re-invested into progressive Classic either.

Mists of Pandaria: If they do make a MoP Classic, I have exactly one plan for it: to level a character high enough at the start of the expansion to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original state. I was intrigued by seeing both in-game NPCs and actual players talk about its beauty back when the expansion was current, but by the time I went to check out Mists in late 2013, the zone had already been changed to its permanently destroyed state to accommodate the entrance to the Siege of Orgrimmar raid.

That is literally all a Mists Classic could offer me though. I just spent several months levelling characters through MoP Remix earlier this year, so in terms of Pandaria quests, dungeons and raids, I've had my fill of that content recently.

Warlords of Draenor: I'm actually kind of curious what garrisons were like when they were the focus of the game, but from my understanding a lot of their appeal came from the fact that they were competely broken in terms of how much gold and resources they generated, which is something that Blizzard later nerfed, and somehow I can't see them putting them into Classic in their broken state again, so yeah... I just don't see much of interest here.

Legion: I didn't play during Legion but people mostly seemed to love that expansion, and even while playing through the content years later I could kind of see why. Still, all that content is still in the game, with the only things missing being the temporary systems like the artifact weapon grind and the randomly dropping legendaries. I wouldn't see the point in reliving a classic version just for those.

BfA: This one doesn't actually seem that long ago and I did play through that content in retail... plus again, it's still there for you to play through right now, just minus the systems that everyone hated, like Azerite power. I just don't see the point of a Classic version.

Seasonal servers / Classic+

I'm lumping these two together even though they're not exactly the same, but they are the same for my purposes.

If Blizzard were to actually release a Classic+, I would check it out for sure, but I'm not hopeful that it would appeal to me in the long term. Back in 2016 (during my private server days) I wrote a post called "Nostalgia and Other Reasons to Play Vanilla" in which I noted that people loved some very different if not outright contradictory things about original World of Warcraft. In a similar vein, after Classic was first announced, I wrote a post called "Flaw or Feature?" in which I also noted that taking away an aspect of the game that one group of players dislikes to make things smoother for them is just as likely to break the game for somebody else.

In a nutshell, I feel that this is exactly what Blizzard has done with some of their "twists" on Classic, and I don't think it's something on which they will change direction either as it seems to appeal to the people who keep the lights on on the current Classic servers. To be more specific, I cannot get over how they've merged everything into big megaservers (because players demanded it!) because those are absolutely antithetical to the Classic experience for me and playing on one just tends to sap all my enjoyment out of the game after a few weeks/months.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority on this as well, so again, I don't expect things to change, but the point remains that both the Classic dev team and the current community seem to want the game to go in a direction that ultimately doesn't appeal to me, so I'm not hopeful that anything that comes out of these efforts will have lasting appeal to me personally.

I will of course continue to keep an eye out for new developments and I suppose one should never say never, but as it stands, I simply need a break from Classic era and don't see the other modes of Classic producing anything that will manage to enthrall me anywhere close to the way the vanilla game did and still does.

WoW Memories #4: October 27th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The first three installments were all first impressions that I posted one day after another, but from then on, mentions of the game started to be further apart.

The following was originally posted on October 27th, 2006 under the title "WoW Ramblings":

Thoughts from someone who's been playing her first MMORPG for a week now:

The world, it is a-purty. When I read some articles about the game before getting it I saw some comments about people not liking the graphics because they thought the polygon count was too low or something. Bollocks. It's not that it is particularly high, but the whole world is just so well-made that you don't really notice. When your character is crossing the sea on the back of a hippogryph you're much too busy marvelling at the detail on the waves below and the stars above to worry about things like your ride's claws not being perfectly rounded.

Races: I'm surprised to say that people are more boring than I expected. I knew that they were shallow and as such it was clear to me that there would be a lot less Orcs than Night Elves for example. But that most people would still choose to simply be humans in a fantasy world where they could also be one of seven more or less fantastical races? That floored me. I mean, I made a human character¹ and the starting area there was absolutely flooded (see my initial thoughts about not even being able to find my own character). I made a Night Elf and it was pretty quiet there. I made a Troll and the place was absolutely dead, even though it's the combined starting area for two races. The mind, it boggles.

Addictiveness?² Still undecided. I have been playing a lot this week, but I wouldn't say that this went beyond anything I've done previously when I really got into a new game I got. The "problem" is that it can be really hard to put an end to things. When I play Sims and it's getting late I can say to myself that I'll just finish one more Sim day and that's it. It's rare that something unexpected happens that will make me change my mind. In WoW you have the real-people wild card which makes things a lot more difficult. I.e. you are about to call it a day when a complete stranger asks you for help with something. While it's not advisable to follow a stranger to unknown places in real life, things are quite different in the virtual world and you can soon end up walking down an unknown road with no clue where you'll end up and when. Or you just want to quickly catch a few fish when a friend asks you to go on a quest with them... and suddenly you're in the process of crossing the continent without even knowing what you've just gotten yourself into.³ It's a complex issue.

Crossing the continent brings me to one of my few complaints: While there definitely is a lot to do in the game, you end up spending even more time just going back and forth between places, which can get quite annoying.⁴ There are ways to speed things up once you reach the higher levels, but when you're still as new as I am, travelling is really quite tedious. Especially when quest givers keep sending you back and forth between places on opposite ends of the map. Rawr.

Anything else? Oh yeah, I wonder if one-man invasions like the one I described here⁵ are a common practice? Because today Nemi and I saw it happen on Darkspear too, when a high-level Orc Shaman invaded Aubergdine and killed everyone in sight while running laps around town. Is this considered fun? Surely there can be no other point to it, seeing how I can't imagine the game rewarding people for killing newbies. Admittedly it was vaguely amusing to watch, but only for as long as you didn't get involved yourself - as both Nemi and I did by accident when we cast spells on people who had been involved in the fight before and were instantly vaporised by the Troll⁶ as a result.

¹ I think it's funny that I was so judgemental about this, yet did not draw a connection to the fact that my own first character was also a human, and the one I kept playing afterwards was a night elf.

² Again, even as I enjoyed myself immensely, my fear of unhealthy addiction was very real.

³ I'm pretty sure this was in reference to Nemi making me do the Wetlands run to join her in Westfall (where she'd had to go for her druid's seal form quest).

⁴ My friend Matje told me at the time that people also jokingly referred to the game as "World of Walkcraft" for that reason. I think it goes to show that people weren't blind to Vanilla's flaws even back then... we just loved it anyway.

⁵ This linked back to my second post about WoW.

⁶ I can't believe it took me 18 years to notice that I changed the assailant's race between the start and the end of the paragraph. What was it, an orc or a troll?

Winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza in Retail

I don't know much about it since I've barely scratched the surface of that particular part of the game, but I get the impression that fishing has a lot more going on in The War Within than it did in Dragonflight. Specifically, I noticed that there's this new item called an Algari Weaverline, which you're supposed to spin into your fishing pole.

I got some of that and it made me realise that my evoker didn't actually own a fishing pole, since they stopped being a requirement to fish many years ago and I just hadn't come across one organically. So naturally, I opened up Wowhead to have a look at what good fishing poles are out there nowadays and how to acquire them. I was stunned to find that after almost twenty years, the Arcanite Fishing Pole that you get for winning the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza from Vanilla is still the best permanent fishing pole in the game. There are other options that are very close, but this one still beats them all. It even got a new model at some point. Amazing!

What was even funnier however was that it also looked like the most straightforward option to acquire on short notice, as all the other good poles were either RNG-dependent in some form or required a reputation I hadn't ground out on this particular character (and which isn't account-wide yet). I mean, yes, winning the fishing tournament is not trivial, but I'd done so several times in Classic, so it didn't seem that outlandish to think that I might be able to do the same in retail as well.

Somewhat amusingly, I actually struggled to find up-to-date information on how the tournament works in retail. The reason this was funny to me is that the first time I took part in the event in Classic, I confused myself due to having looked up a retail guide with information that didn't apply to the Classic version. Now it was the other way round.

Ultimately, I came up with the following list of differences compared to the Classic version:

• In retail, the tournament is a world quest. This means you get a little pop-up and tracker on your UI when it starts, but other than that, I didn't see this change making much of a difference to the experience. It still doesn't auto-complete or anything; and you still need to hand in in Booty Bay to pick your prize.
• As I'd observed previously, Tastyfish can be fished up all throughout Stranglethorn in retail, not just along the coast.
• There are no longer dedicated pools of Tastyfish, but the regular pools just start giving primarily Tastyfish once the tournament starts (though you can still get those pesky Oily Blackmouths ruining your day sometimes).
• It's no longer a server-wide competition, so you don't automatically win by playing on a low-pop server, but the first fifty people in the region (?) to hand in their forty Tastyfish all get a prize, regardless of what server they are on.
  

I was very curious how the latter in specific was going to pan out. Azjol-Nerub is considered a medium population server, but I decided to follow the advice to do my fishing in war mode to minimise competition anyway. (Also, I had to google how to turn on war mode because who thought the talent panel was the logical choice for that?!)

So I figured I shouldn't be facing too much competition for pools... but I also wasn't optimised in any way. My Classic fishing skill on my evoker was less than 100, even! And I'd read about all kinds of weird min-maxing to win the competition, such as that if you were after the account-bound heirloom ring reward, it would be best to use a Highmountain tauren druid since they can move between pools more quickly with instant flight form, and Highmountain tauren have a racial that lets them catch extra fish sometimes.

Either way, I was happy to wait and see. Min-maxers might be a threat, but the new expansion is also still pretty fresh, so I figured that might work out in my favour in the sense that there might be fewer people spending time chasing rewards from old content. I changed my hearthstone to Booty Bay, parked myself in my usual spot in northern Stranglethorn and set my phone alarm to remind me just before the competition was supposed to start.

When the time came, I was kind of surprised by how not nervous I was, considering the way the Classic version of the tournament had got my heart racing at times. The war mode gamble was definitely paying off as I didn't encounter a single soul while fishing and had all the pools to myself.

Just as I was starting to wonder when the first winner would be announced, considering that in Classic the contest tended to end after 15-20 minutes and that the cast bar for fishing is shorter in retail, the yell to announce the first winner went out, only ten minutes in. I kept calm and carried on, reminding myself that there were 49 more prizes to be won.

After another three minutes or so came a yell that Riggle Bassbait had given out about half of his prizes and to hurry up, but fortunately I was close to done myself by that point. Once I grabbed my 40th fish, I quickly hearthstoned to Booty Bay and handed in - and clearly not a second too soon, as two Horde druids did the same right after me, which then triggered a spam of "that's it, we're done" style yells from the quest giver.

I could hardly believe that it had been that easy! Of course, now I needed about another 200 fishing skill points to actually be able to use my new pole. I figured I'd fly around and fish up a few more Tastyfish for consolation prize money, but oddly all my casts came up empty now. A bit of googling revealed that this is a bug that has seemingly been around forever - that you can't actually get any more Tastyfish like you're supposed to after the competition is over. However, the same forum threads also noted that you'd still get skill-ups for your "empty" catches and that you still had a chance to catch one of the rare fish, so I kept it at for a little while until I ended up picking up a Dezian Queenfish which I was able to hand in for another buff to my fishing.

Now to work on those remaining 100 or so skill points...

WoW Memories #3: October 22nd & 23rd, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

Today I'm combining two posts since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on October 22th, 2006 under the title "Socialising In The Twenty-First Century":

Yesterday was full of quite a lot of socialising of different kinds.

[The first two thirds of the post talk about me playing Neopets¹ with other people, followed by me throwing a karaoke party for my real life friends in the evening.]

And because that wasn't yet enough to make my day, I got back online after all my guests had left and made a new WoW character to play with Nemi² on an English server. She said she'd want to be a Night Elf, so I said I'd be one too.

Can you guess who is who?³

Either way, things really are more fun when you do them together. Certainly there are still tasks you'll want to take care of on your own, but when it comes to things like venturing into a cave or attacking a particularly strong monster it's definitely nice to have someone who watches your back and can help you out when you get in trouble.⁴

---

The following was originally posted on October 23rd, 2006 under the title "*shuffles uneasily*":

Don't really have anything interesting to say about today. Went to uni, cleaned the piggies' cage⁵ and generally didn't feel too hot.

The only fun thing I did was play WoW with Nemi again, and this time Mechanichamster joined us too.⁶ Do I sense a new addiction?⁷ I sure hope not, because my Sims deserve better than that.⁸ Still, at the moment I can't help it I guess, after all the game is all new and shiny to me.

¹ I played Neopets for about five years before getting into WoW, and I tend to think of it as my "proto-MMO" nowadays. While it was a simple browser-based game and the world of Neopia only existed as a bunch of flash images, it did invite people to think of it as a virtual world, there were "dailies" to do and I ended up interacting with other players quite a lot, which included joining a guild, signing up for multiple forums, and contributing to a Neopets fan blog for a while.

² I've mentioned my friend Nemi a couple of times before. In a nutshell, she's another person I met on an online forum around 2001. She was from Sweden and we met up in real life a couple of times. We ended up playing WoW together for something like a year or two, though our association became more loose over time, as she was more progression-minded than me. She also came back for Classic for a couple of weeks, though quickly lost interest again.

³ On the left we have my priest Tiranea and on the right Nemi's druid Elentiel. I think either her or Matje recommended that I should roll a priest because having a priest around would be handy for getting into groups. I had no idea what that was going to mean in practice, but I didn't mind filling the role. I ended up enjoying it enough that Tiranea stayed my Alliance main for several years, until I stopped playing in Cata. It wasn't until last year that I finally dusted her off in order to do the night elf heritage quest.

⁴ With how much railing I've seen against "forced grouping" over the years, I've occasionally come to doubt my own commitment to it. Do I just love group content because that's simply what I got used to over the years? This post shows that the answer to that question is no. I had barely been playing WoW for a few days when I concluded that it was much more fun with other people than to just play by myself.

⁵ I was still living with my mother at the time and we owned two guinea pigs.

⁶ Matje created a night elf warrior called Dantaniel to play with us, but from what I remember we didn't actually end up grouping that often. He spent most of his play time raiding with his guild on his mage main on another server and would just log in every so often to level his new alt a bit. Being a much more experienced player, he had no issues keeping up with us even with less play time, but our schedules just didn't seem to align that often.

⁷ I'd mentioned the subject of addiction previously, and it would come up again later too. I think it's easy to forget for how much hype there was about WoW at the time, there was also fear-mongering about its addictiveness, with the news reporting on people who had got so lost in WoW that they lost control of their real lives. I don't think I seriously expected it to have that kind of effect on me, but I was definitely a little worried about potential negative impacts it could have on me.

⁸ It goes to show again just how much I was into Sims 2 at the time that I was worried about "neglecting" my characters in the game in favour of WoW.

The Joy of Exploration in Modern WoW

One of the things I love about the vanilla World is how utterly explorable it is. You've got these huge land masses full of interesting things to discover everywhere, and even after years of playing that version of the game, I have no doubt that there are still some quests and hidden surprises that I've never come across. The sense of wonder this created was amazing.

Sadly, this is also something that kind of fell by the wayside in the expansions that followed. The artists still created beautiful environments, but you weren't really meant to spend much time in them; they were increasingly just a backdrop for the quests you rushed through on your way to the level cap. Just today I did a few low-level Cata quests on an alt, and while mining an ore node, I accidentally got into combat with an elite. It was surprisingly powerful and took me a while to whittle down... just to then drop nothing, and not even give XP, presumably because it only exists to be blown up with a quest item in one specific quest.

Fortunately Blizzard has backtracked on this in recent years, and both Dragonflight and War Within are full of all kinds of neat things to find if you only allow yourself to look. Sure, you can never be that same wide-eyed newbie again, but there are still new vistas to marvel at and fun secrets to discover.

On that subject, I just wanted to share a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently and that really resonated with me. First we have small YouTuber ButchX3's series about playing World of Warcraft for the first time.

The first part with the title "I played World of Warcraft for the first time EVER" showed up on my YouTube feed when it came out, but I've got to admit I ignored it at first. The thumbnail hinted at him having difficulties, and I figured I'd seen enough videos of people struggling to figure out basic mechanics or not understanding the story recently.

But then part two showed up, with the title "FIRST TIME Player Discovers the SECRET of World of Warcraft", with a thumbnail of him gaping in awe at a purple flower in his hand, at which point I was like "fine, I'll click, let's see what a new player considers the secret of WoW". And I was not only surprised, but positively enchanted. The purple flower in the thumbnail even turned out to be relevant! I immediately went back to watch part one afterwards, and found that there was a third part as well.

In a nutshell, he started by playing through Exile's Reach and had a fun time, but once Azeroth fully opened up to him, he forgot all about questing and got completely distracted by other players and the sheer size of the map, embarking on an epic adventure to immediately travel as far as the game would let him, which he conveys with appropriate excitement and sense of grandeur.

He got a lot of help from newcomer chat as well, which really impressed me, as until now this was a feature that I was vaguely aware of but hadn't really given much thought. I felt inspired to sign up as a guide myself after that. I wonder if there'll be any more installments in this series, now that he's explored the world in all three dimensions.

The other video that showed up in my feed one day and really surprised me was "DragonNoFlight: A love letter to ground travel" by tiny YouTuber FaroraSF, which caught my eye with both its title and the lovingly hand-drawn thumbnail.

Unlike Butch, Farora is an old hand at the game, but clearly loves to explore. In this nearly two-hour long video, she decided to randomly quest through Dragonflight without flying, documenting along the way the kinds of challenges she'd come across. Spoiler: For an expansion all about flying, the Dragon Isles turned out to be surprisingly accessible on foot!

At various intervals, she takes a break from her current adventures to look back on older versions of the game, going over fond memories and analysing different expansions' zone designs. I found this really eye-opening, as she points out a lot of things that I'd kind of noticed sub-consciously but had never really thought about myself.

Finally, she also made a shorter sequel about exploring War Within without flying. Seriously, the way she did that quest with the pipes!

Anyway, I just really wanted to give these two creators a shout-out as examples to show that modern WoW still has room for exploration and a sense of wonder as well, and because I found all their videos thoroughly enjoyable.

WoW Memories #2: October 21st, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'm adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 21th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Fun":

Ah, the bizarreness of the human condition.

Yesterday I logged on one more time to see how many Germans would be online in the middle of the night.¹ Unsurprisingly the place was pretty dead. Except that I ended up running right into the middle of a commotion.

As it turned out Goldhain², the village next to the starting grounds, was suffering a two-(or-three)-man invasion by an Orc huntress and her pet lion and some other Horde guy I couldn't identify.³ He had a staff and made himself invisible a lot.⁴ Now, they couldn't actually attack any players without being attacked first, so they started slaughtering NPCs instead, which caused a lot of "OMG, the village is under attack" messages to pop up in the chat.

A few brave souls actually ventured forward and tried to take them on, but they were killed almost instantly. It was really sad. After that everyone else made sure to not attack the Horde players anymore, but they kept following them around, jumping up and down and yelling for help. I thought it was quite sad and funny at the same time.

I guess that was the revenge for everyone making fun of the Orc corpse that lay on the town square all day long.⁵

¹ As a reminder, I was still living in Austria back then, bought the game in German, and rolled my first character on a German server.

² Goldhain is the German name for Goldshire. I was using the German client and while I was writing about the game in English, I didn't immediately realise that some places had different names in German and English.

³ I think it's interesting that even though I rolled on a PvE server and had no interest in PvP at the time, literally the second post I wrote about the game was about an instance of world PvP. In the starting zone. People are not exaggerating when they say that it was happening everywhere back then.

⁴ The only class that would fit that description would be druid, but then I'm thinking that if it had been that, I would have made note of the giant bloody minotaur instead of "a Horde guy with a staff"? I think it's more likely that it was something like an undead mage or warlock whom I simply struggled to keep track of.

⁵ That last sentence is fascinating to me simply because the notion that a dead orc in town would keep general chat talking all day is kind of incomprehensible to me nowadays, but I guess those were different times and it took a lot less to get everyone excited and chatting.

Delve Week

I mentioned a few weeks ago that delves weren't off to the best start with me, or I with them. After I wrote that post, I did a few more delves on low tiers on levelling alts, for whom they really were the advertised fun 15-minute romps, but otherwise I mostly stayed away unless the husband needed help with a tier eight on his mage. Some things you just don't get to say no to.

More generally speaking though, I continued to feel vaguely annoyed by delves and didn't want to bother with them. For some people they may be the greatest new feature ever, but I figured Blizz couldn't pay me enough to put up with them. Except... maybe they could.

Which is to say that this past week was "delve week". Not only were rewards from delves increased for seven days (as if they needed to be any more rewarding than they already were!), there were also not one but two weekly quests available for max-level characters in Dornogal to complete multiple delves. I know I didn't have to do those, but I really like ticking off my weeklies... fine, Blizzard, I'll play your game.

With four characters at level 80 by this point, I was potentially looking at twenty delves or more, so I knew I needed help. I searched for advice and found this video by SignsOfKelani particularly helpful. The "use your utility" section was what stood out to me the most. Careful pulling? Using crowd control? That sounds like heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade and I used to like those! Maybe I just needed to let go of this notion that because Blizzard promoted delves as this quick and easy activity, that's what they were actually meant to be. I mean, I guess they could be if you were sufficiently overgeared or doing them at a low enough tier, but if you were actually trying to use them to gear up, they were something else. Maybe it was just a matter of accepting and embracing that.

I decided to make my holy priest my dedicated solo character for this purpose and started with a round of Fungal Folly, since I'd heard that the exploding spores in there actually do damage to the enemies as well, something I hadn't originally realised. Soon my go-to strategy became to simply aggro everything on a given platform, including all the spores, and then run screaming in hopes of making it out before they exploded. It worked surprisingly well and was - dare I say it - strangely fun.

In Kriegval's Rest, I progressed one tiny step at a time, using mind control to make the mobs beat each other up from a distance so I had fewer of them left to finish off at the end. I actually used abilities like Mind Soothe and Psychic Scream, which I hadn't really found a use for in forever. Without exploding spores to help with the dps, killing things took a really long time (I sadly had to find out that many of the mind-controlled mobs' abilities gave the error "target not a player" when I tried to turn them against each other), but I did get there in the end.

I had absolutely hated my last experience in an underwater delve, so that was next on my list of fears to face down. I made sure to grab some underwater breathing potions this time to get rid of the constant pressure of drowning and that immediately helped a lot. In the middle of a pull featuring more mind-control, Zekvir breached the delve and I had barely time to go "oh no" before he swatted me. Weirdly enough the fight didn't reset though, probably because I went into Spirit of Redemption form and had the talent that brings me back to life for free once every ten minutes. When I got up again, blinking in confusion, Brann was still fighting so I joined in, and with a lot of frantic kiting and spam-healing, I managed to stay alive long enough for Brann's dps to push him back. Now that was satisfying.

People have very different attitudes to challenge in MMOs, or video games in general for that matter. Some don't really want to be pushed at all, desiring only relaxation from their gaming experience. Others want challenge and thrills as often as possible. I'm more in the "taking it easy" department myself nowadays, but there are definitely times when a game pushes me that I will push back. I'll always remember that time I spent something like half an hour fighting a beholder boss in Neverwinter just because he was standing between me and completion of a quest. This situation with delves has felt similar in that at first I was just put off, but somehow this week's event was the push needed to nudge me back into action and it actually felt satisfying to go back into delves and be successful.

It's also been a good opportunity to do more duoing with the husband. I mostly talked about the solo challenge so far, but we also did more delves together. The main lesson we took away from this is that one person just has to be on a sturdy character that has the cooldowns to stand still and take some hits. When we tried the Underkeep as an evoker/mage duo it was just a disaster because we were both too squishy. Sure, sometimes you can kite, but sometimes you can't, and then you're stuck. In this instance we'd got the variant of that delve that requires you to defeat a row of ambushes within a small circular area, and there just wasn't enough room to make kiting work, and neither of us could survive getting hit more than a couple of times. After losing all our lives, we went out and redid it twice as evoker/death knight and mage/warrior instead and both of those were a breeze. In fact, that was the first time we did complete a tier eight delve in the advertised fifteen minutes, because with the right combination of classes it was just a whole different game.

Warrior and mage taking a break at the campfire after surviving an ambush in the Underkeep

I guess the point of all this rambling is that you only get to make a first impression once, but sometimes a second look does change things. I'm glad I gave delves another try because approaching them with a different mindset made a huge difference to my enjoyment. That said, I'm not planning to suddenly start running them by the dozen like I did last week. They are still time-consuming, and (in my opinion!) overly rewarding to the point that they can feel like a chore that you must do because the rewards are too good to pass up. 

This past weekend my guildies and I also stepped into Mythic Zero dungeons for the first time since the expansion launch, which was definitely the right choice based on the challenge level we encountered (which is to say we cleared them in decent time, but we did wipe and generally die more than a few times, showing that we weren't really ready for M+ yet), but most of us got no gear rewards out of the exercise since all the item drops were about ten item levels lower than what people already had.

WoW Memories #1: October 20th, 2006

As mentioned about a month ago, I'd like to celebrate WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends back then. Since there was never an intent to have these posts be read by a wider audience, a lot of things will be lacking context (which would have been obvious to me and my friends at the time) so I'll be adding footnotes to make things clearer, and to judge my past self's choices.

The following was originally posted on October 20th, 2006 under the title "[My RL name] Goes WoW":

I saw the German version of Pets in a store here today.¹ For sixty Euros (a little more than seventy-five dollars). Hrglnglrgl. And people ask me why I prefer to buy my computer games abroad...² to be fair though, I then saw it in the store across the street for only half of that. Which in turn made me wonder what possessed the people in charge of the first store to think that sixty Euros would be a good price. Crazy.

I also got a completely different computer game in the post today³: World of Warcraft. I know I said I wouldn't⁴, but those were just the last fragments of denial from someone who was just too curious to resist the temptation any longer. Especially after I talked to Mechanichamster⁵, who's been playing for a while and assured me that it was all good fun.

Unfortunately he wasn't around today to give me any guidance, so I just started by creating a Human Paladin on a German server and ventured out on my own.

This is Isadora.⁶ She's even decently dressed and everything!⁷ Though I'm sure I'll end up finding some more revealinguseful armour soon enough.

Being a newbie was fun, starting from the moment that I entered the realm and was hopelessly confused because I couldn't see myself, having merged with a bunch of other characters that stood in exactly the same spot as me. A lot of exploring, general stupidity and annoying death followed. And I almost laughed myself silly when I found the corpse of "Dumbledore" in the forest.⁸ I can kind of see why people find this addictive, because the world is huge, and as you enter it for the first time it seems as if the possibilities must be endless.

Still, I think that all on your own it's bound to become a bit boring after a while, especially with all the running around you end up doing as you level up. I haven't really interacted with any other players yet beyond helping each other out at defeating the occasional monster, and I'm a bit worried about making a fool out of myself due to my noobishness. I haven't even figured out how to make my character wield anything but that giant hammer thing yet, and I'd really like her to have a different weapon. Not that there's anything wrong with it in terms of functionality, but there's just something very ungraceful about clubbing wolves to death with a giant mallet.⁹

If any of you've been secretly playing WoW already, feel free to let me know - or if you've been thinking about giving the game a try but haven't yet, now would be just the perfect time to keep me company! *looks at Nemi...*¹⁰

¹ This is in reference to the Sims 2 expansion of that name. Before WoW, Sims 2 was my gaming addiction for a couple of years. While a single-player game, it had a very active community around things like custom content, storytelling and community challenges, which meant that I was always sharing how things were going for my Sims and talking to other people about it.

² Funny to see me complaining about video game prices back in 2006. To be fair, sixty Euros was a lot more back then that it is now.

³ It feels kind of weird that even the mere notion of receiving a new PC game in the post seems incredibly quaint and outdated already.

⁴ This linked to a post I had made about two weeks earlier, in which I expressed interest in the subject of MMOs after seeing a lot of friends and acquaintances talk about WoW, though I noted at the time that "I wouldn't trust myself with something as addictive as an MMORPG" - girl, you had no idea.

⁵ Mechanichamster, also referred to as Mecha or Matje later, was the first friend I ever made online, about four or five years prior to writing the original version of this post. We met on a message board about the Transformers cartoon from the 80s and actually ended up meeting in real life in the Netherlands (where he lived) too.

⁶ I actually posted this screenshot on this blog before, in this post from 2014, in which I answered some questions about my early/formative years in the game.

⁷ In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was so surprised that my character got to wear "decent" armour. I think my image of fantasy worlds at the time was still strongly influenced by the kind of materials I had found in my older brother's room while investigating the subject... which tended to feature very skimpily dressed barbarian ladies.

⁸ I was easily amused back then. I still am now, but that example seems like a low bar even by my standards. Then again, Harry Potter was actually super relevant back then, as we were still all anticipating the release of Deathly Hallows.

⁹ Fun fact: I tend to prefer swords to maces to this day.

¹⁰ My friend Nemi responded to the post with: "I'll install it tomorrow."