Turtle WoW Dungeons: Crescent Grove vs. Stormwrought Ruins

Let's talk more Turtle WoW while it's still around, shall we? Next on my list to explore and write about were the two custom dungeons Crescent Grove and Stormwrought Ruins.

Crescent Grove is a level 32-38 dungeon located in southern Ashenvale. I actually played through this one last year already, and did originally mean to write a post about it at the time - but then it turned out to be kind of boring, and I was like "wow, this is not enough material for a post, I'll have to bundle it up with whatever the next dungeon on the list is and write about them together". And then I lost interest, naturally.

To be clear, Crescent Grove is not a bad dungeon. I had a perfectly fun time running it with a friendly pug. It just seemed pretty uninspired, especially after my previous experience in Dragonmaw Retreat. I couldn't help but think that it must've been one of the first dungeons the Turtle WoW devs built by themselves, as it actually didn't feel very dungeon-like and nothing about it felt in any way original. To me it kind of felt like someone was just familiarising themselves with the devs tools and played around with Ashenvale assets, adding a little vale to the map where they tried out all the different environmental textures available in the zone and populated it with matching mobs, such as furbolgs, satyrs and demons.

I checked the Turtle WoW Wiki and according to that, Crescent Grove was added at the end of 2021 - compare that to Dragonmaw Retreat coming out in 2025. It makes sense that they would've learned some things about how to do more interesting things with the tools available to them over the course of four years.

Stormwrought Ruins on the other hand, a level 35-41 dungeon, came out in the same patch as Dragonmaw Retreat, and boy, does it show. The first time I zoned in and opened the map, I was stunned by how massive it was. It's not quite as sprawling as BRD, but in terms of number of bosses it certainly comes close.

I'd been aware from the group finder that it had two Stormwrought instances listed, Castle and Descent, but I hadn't realised that it was effectively one giant dungeon that they'd just split into parts for the sake of the queue. I was quickly introduced to how that worked as the first group I got into only wanted to do the higher-level half and headed straight for the back door, even though I'd specifically queued for the first half. I didn't feel like I was in a position to complain and was just happy to take in whatever sights they were willing to show me.

Like Dragonmaw Retreat, Stormwrought Ruins goes extremely hard on the ambience. The custom music featured what sounded like church bells, choirs and... synthesisers? I don't know, music is not my area of expertise. But it was very loud and basically screaming "epic and scary stuff is happening here" (you can listen to some of it on this playlist).

Like everything else on Turtle WoW, all the environments and bosses were strongly reminiscent of existing dungeons, but unlike in the Crescent Grove example above, existing assets were put together in a way that still felt refreshing and new, even if it was clearly a derivative creation. The first half set in the castle reminded me of Shadowfang Keep and Scarlet Monastery in places, which makes sense when you think about it. That didn't change that the Duke's throne room looked pretty cool and impressive.

Also, the mobs were mostly (Stormreaver) orcs, which did make for an interesting combo with the human architecture. One of the bosses was Oronok Torn-Heart, and I've got to admit that with this one, I definitely felt a bit bad about killing him, recalling his canonical retirement in Outland as a peaceful boar farmer.

The mid section of the dungeon, where the two halves meet, is dominated by wetness and fungal decay, reminiscent of Maraudon or the Naxx plague wing. There's a room with a death knight boss that was pretty intimidating.

You encounter members of the Shadow Council as trash mobs throughout, but the final section of the instance is dedicated to them in specific being, well, horrible, conducting human sacrifices and shit. The penultimate boss was a giant red blob called "Remains of the Innocent" and there's a quest that has you confirm that this used to be the missing son of a grieving mother in Northwind. It strongly reminded me of Scholomance, but even that has less of a downer ending, because at least you give the ghosts some peace at the end.

The second group I ran with did the full dungeon from start to finish and it took us something like two and a half hours. At the end, people wanted to pose for a screenshot together, which I thought was cute. A true adventure! In both runs, the more experienced players had been more than happy to explain to us newbies how everything worked as well, which was very much appreciated.

So, Incursions.

With my Season of Discovery main in her high forties now, I've reached the part of the game that made up SoD's phase three, which - based on what I heard about it at the time - was widely lambasted as even worse than phase two. One of the phase's main new features were so-called "incursions" around the Emeral Dream portals in Duskwood, Ashenvale, Feralas and the Hinterlands. What I'd heard about those was mainly that they were simultaneously too good (in terms of rewards) and horrible (in terms of gamplay), which both hurt the economy and frustrated people who felt that they were being shoehorned into levelling from 40 to 50 by doing endless laps around one corner of a zone.

I was very curious to check these out for myself, if for no other reason than to see whether they were as bad as everyone had said.

I initially got a bit lost, because I thought they were all level 40-50 content, but when I got to the Feralas portal the NPC there didn't want to talk to me. It was only on reading up that I found out that actually, incursions start as low as low as level 25, and different zones are targeted at different level ranges.

I eventually found out that the right place to be at my level was the Ashenvale incursion, so I made my way over there.

I've got to admit, talking to the quest giver immediately had me horrified in a number of ways. Remember that in Classic, the quest log has a limit of 20 quests at a time... and here this night elf was offering me no fewer than eighteen missions to do in the local incursion, which meant I had to almost completely empty my quest log of everything else. The quests were numbered for convenience ("Ashenvale Mission I: Defeat Satyrs", "Ashenvale Mission II: Defeat Treants" etc.) and flavour-less copy-and-pastes of each other that just told you in the most minimalist terms where to go.

It was easy to see what the pattern was: The incursion was active in three nearby sub-zones of Ashenvale: Forest Song, Satyrnaar and the Warsong Lumber Camp, and each one had five quests tied to it: one to kill mobs, one to kill a boss, one to pick up an item, one to gather a field report from an NPC, and one to escort another NPC out of the area. The three remaining quests were profession-related, asking you to collect Emerald Dream-flavoured herbs, ore and skins.

I figured with such a high density of quests it would be hard not to trip over any objectives, so I just bumbled into Forest Song and started killing dreamy whelps there. In what turned out to be a stroke of good luck, a nearby orc hunter threw me an invite almost immediately. I warned him that this was my first time doing one of these, and he reassured me that it was the same for him. While he obviously had an addon running that was showing him details about where to find each quest objective, he wasn't exactly trying to speed-run the area. He was also a skinner and therefore paused all the time to skin the various dragonkin we'd killed.

I've got to admit I was happy to defer to him in terms of setting the pace and let him take the lead. All I had to do was follow him around and focus on healing him and his pet, while occasionally throwing out small bits of damage here or there or pausing to pick a herb. Priest and hunter make for a pretty good duo, and I found myself recalling happy memories of my night elf priest questing with a hunter friend back in Burning Crusade.

I didn't look at the time, but even with the two of us it took us some time to fully clear out all the objectives in all three areas. I wasn't sure whether we'd be able to do the named boss mobs with just the two of us as they showed as level "skull" but we ended up being able to duo them just fine. At the end I traded him some spare herbs so he could also do the herbalist quest, and he gave me some of his skins in return so I could complete the skinning quest (neither of us got the mining one done, obviously). I gained more than two levels from this adventure, though I'll admit that I was rested for a good chunk of it, which undoubtedly helped.

For a different perspective, I also decided to take my level 28 mage to do the lowest-level incursion in Duskwood (questing in Duskwood as a low-level Horde character felt very weird by the way). The quests there followed the exact same pattern, but since I didn't find a friendly helper over there, it was a lot less pleasant. (All I got was Alliance players spouting gibberish at me in /say and doing incomprehensible emotes.).

I couldn't do any of the bosses by myself, and one of the field report missions was also out, as the NPC was placed literally at the feet of the local boss mob, nobody else was around to kill him, and I was unable to even have a quick chat with the NPC before the boss flattened me.

Waiting for the escorts also turned out to be a waste of time. These are not classic-style escorts where you get an NPC walking from A to B while you defend them from exactly three ambushes; instead you talk to the person and they then follow you around. This is much more convenient in many ways but has one important downside: because there is competition for the spawns and people want to be efficient, whoever sees the escort NPC up will immediately talk to them to "claim" them... just to then proceed with their other dailies until they are ready to go back to the portal themselves. The problem is that this means it can take a veeery long time for the escort to reset and respawn. My mage didn't see a single one of these NPCs up and I grew tired of waiting.

What with being able to do fewer quests by myself and not being rested, I think I only gained about a level from this particular incursion, maybe even less, though I'm not sure as I'd spent some time fighting my way through two crypts in Raven Hill Cemetery for rune stuff before starting on the incursions.

Ultimately my conclusion was that I did like the conceptual idea of incursions - going into the Emerald Dream to fight off invaders - but in terms of execution, I'm not sure I've ever seen content in any version of WoW that was created with such a seeming lack of love, with not even any attempt at lore, flavour or interesting quest text. It's like the devs figured: hey, nobody cares about that stuff anyway; Classic players just want a way to efficiently grind levels outside of dungeons, so let's give it to them.

As it stands, with the rewards supposedly nerfed considerably compared to what they were at launch and the quests being dailies instead of endlessly repeatable, I can see incursions being a fun little diversion every now and then, especially if you find yourself running low on other sources of XP in a certain level range. My team-up with the orc hunter was good fun, and I can imagine it being even better with a group of friends. When you're by yourself, it feels a lot more lacklustre though.

And I can definitely see why people hated these. When they were endlessly repeatable and also gave ridiculous rewards, they must have felt like an absolute "must-do" for a while, but who wants to spend all day grinding the same fifteen quests over and over in one corner of the same zone? I'm not surprised people were put off by that. It was also very noticeable that whenever I looked up incursion-related things on Wowhead, I was lucky to find even one comment with two upvotes on anything. People just did not care about this content at all, not even enough to complain about it in the end. They just stopped playing.

I don't expect to see the Sunken Temple raid, so I suspect I'll be moving on to phase four content pretty soon.

More on Starting Over on Lava Lash

This is a follow-up to last week's post about me deciding to try a fresh start in Season of Discovery phase two by re-rolling on the RP-PvE server.

As mentioned, I got to 20 incredibly quickly due to the XP buff, but with basically no cash to train abilities or do anything else. So I decided that it was time to put on the brakes and take care of business other than levelling for a while, namely by doing some travelling to unlock access to additional flight paths (I hadn't even been to Kalimdor yet), working on my professions, and working the auction house to make some money.

Fishing turned out to be surprisingly lucrative here, because for some reason there didn't seem to be a lot of active fishermen about - or maybe they are all still busy levelling to 40; I don't know. The point is, I found pools of firefin snapper, oily blackmouth and sagefish everywhere, and while each fish only sold for a few silver, it added up quickly. I think fishing may actually be my highest skill right now.

I also developed a strange fascination with chests. While I've played dwarf characters before, I don't think I ever got any to a very high level, and they usually had some other form of tracking (ore or herb nodes for gatherers, different types of mobs for hunters) that took priority over using their "treasure finding" racial that highlights chests on the mini map.

My newest priest on the other hand is a tailor and enchanter, so she doesn't have anything else to pay attention to, and I've been very surprised by just how many chests there are about. I always thought I was pretty good at spotting them with the naked eye, but apparently there've always been a lot more hiding in corners and behind sheds that I never knew about. It's turned me into a proper treasure hunting fiend, as I'll randomly fight my way into buildings or caves just to access a chest at the back.

When I revisited Ashenvale, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some life had returned to the PvP event, mainly level 40s that had decided to come back for more reputation I guess. The groups tended to be about 80-90% max level characters, with the rest being made up of levellers like me that just happened to pass through the zone. I now have first-hand experience of how much easier it is to get rewarded for taking part in this event as Alliance, as I hit friendly with Silverwing Sentinels after only two battles.

I also made good progress collecting more of my runes - knowing where to pick them up along the way after already going through the whole process on Horde side in phase one made things a lot simpler. I also found out that Alliance have it significantly easier when it comes to collecting their Meditation buffs, as Meditation on the Light and Elune can be picked up almost right next to each other in Stormwind.

As one of the priest runes drops from the elite orcs in Redridge, I decided to join a group for the quests there. Even considering that Lava Lash's population is much lower than Wild Growth's, it was crazy busy there that evening, meaning we spent a lot of time just running about without being able to tag anything, so people got to chatting.

I was surprised to hear from several of my group mates that they had only just started in phase two, and was slightly amused when our ret pally declared that they were both a mythic raider and a streamer in retail. Far be it from me to doubt the truthfulness of that, but that same paladin stood out to me for not casting a single seal all evening... just goes to show again that retail and Classic are two very different games and knowing your way around one doesn't automatically translate into knowing anything at all about the other.

Not that it mattered either way... we had a good time, and me, the pally and the rogue who had started the group actually stuck together to complete a few additional quests once we were done with the elites, such as collecting pendants from the gnolls and escorting Corporal Keeshan. The whole experience had that good old-fashioned pug feel to it, reminding me of the way I first made friends in WoW nearly twenty years ago.

I also spotted some familiar guild names in town, and in fact am pretty certain that I even ran into the GM of a guild I used to be friendly with on Hydraxian Waterlords back in 2020. I just wasn't able to 100% confirm it as they were AFK when I encountered them and therefore didn't respond to my emote. It's just fascinating to me how these RP server communities persist over the years and across different versions of the game. This is one of those things I love about Classic and that the megaserver aficionados just don't get I guess.

That said, I'm feeling surprisingly little pull to get to level 40 and start raiding Gnomeregan now. I'm not super interested in raiding without being part of a group going into it together, and to be honest what I've been hearing about Gnomer isn't helping. I noted about BFD that while I thought it was fun overall, some of the bosses were kind of bordering on being "too much" for a relaxed Classic raiding experience, and from everything I've read, Gnomeregan is much harder (something that people tend to frame as a good thing, but to me it's not - supposedly it's particularly punishing for healers as well).

So while I'm having fun for now, I'm still not convinced that Season of Discovery is really "working" for me. I liked the level cap being 25, but it occurs to me that when it was raised, it was essentially like a microcosm of an expansion release... oh, you've been working on learning how endgame works and getting better gear? Forget all of it! Everything is different now! And while that sort of thing generates excitement, it can also be exhausting in a way, even more so on a sped-up schedule. I wonder how many players have already dropped off for similar reasons.

SoD Phase 2: First Impressions & Ennui

Season of Discovery's phase two launched Thursday late in the evening in my time zone. I had a quick look at the time to see whether there was enough hype to create login queues again... there was not, though it was insanely busy in Thunder Bluff when I logged in. I needn't have worried about people immediately losing interest in the BFD raid once it was no longer at the level cap, as the "Denizens of Kalimdor!" yells were going out non-stop. They had always been frequent but now they were even more so as people were running it for XP.

I didn't really try to play properly until the next morning myself. I figured maybe I could avoid the worst of the crowds if I focused on my professions before trying to level, so I went out to buy the expert cooking, first aid and fishing books. However, I then realised that the primary professions still required level 26 to progress beyond 150 skill, even in phase two, so I decided that levelling up at least once should be my main goal for the time being.

I took my priest to Stonetalon since I had a few quests from there in my log and it's usually a comparatively quiet place - but it wasn't that day. Or rather, it might have been if things were even busier in other zones, but my point is that things were pretty crazy in Stonetalon as well, with everyone fighting to tag mobs as they spawned. I even saw people looking for group for "The Den" - a group quest which I think I've never completed at level because it's part of a chain that takes you all the way to Ashenvale and nobody wants to go back to Stonetalon to find a group to finish it, but on that day, people were doing even that.

While things were pretty brutal on Stonetalon Peak, the Charred Vale was the most striking to me, because I always remember my more experienced friend warning me about the place back when I first started playing WoW - that it was densely populated with mobs and could be quite dangerous. That Friday morning, it was barren, and harpies were dying pretty much as soon as they dared to make an appearance. Still, I successfully made it to level 26 and returned to town to work on my professions a bit.

I came on again later in the early evening, and actually found two guildies online who invited me to do some dungeons with them. We did SFK twice, followed by a partial run of Razorfen Kraul, in which I at least got my Blueleaf Tubers and the goblin escort done. Apparently the place was a popular destination to level as I saw people advertise for "RFK boar farm runs", which sounded very South Park-esque. Apparently dungeon farming to level is "the meta" even in Season of Discovery, simply because the open world is too full to quest efficiently. There's something kind of sad about that.

However, already the next day, the biggest wave of power-levellers seemed to have washed over me. I took my hunter (who hit 25 literally the night before phase two released and never did get to go to BFD) on a similar quest circuit around Stonetalon and it was much, much quieter... but in an oddly annoying way because without the hyperspawns triggered by the massive crowds I actually had to run bigger circles around the area to find more of the only slowly respawning quest mobs, while my priest had just had new ones pop up in front of her over and over.

I just needed a little more XP to get her to 26 so I thought I'd do the breadcrumb delivery quest to Thousand Needles. At the Great Lift, a human paladin aggroed my quest NPC while running to the lift, just before I could talk to him , so I did a /shoo emote on her, meaning to indicate that she should just get on the lift so he would run back to his spot and reset. She then decided to turn back and kill both Horde NPCs before I could talk to them, which meant I spent the next ten minutes waiting for them to respawn. In that moment I was kind of glad there's no cross-faction communication in Classic as I definitely would have called her names.

Meanwhile, my priest was close to 27 after the dungeons from the day before, so I thought I'd pop over to Ashenvale to ding her as well. I was successful, but Ashenvale was another sad sight as I saw the PvP event come on and nobody took part on either faction. I wonder whether anyone will come back to farm more Warsong Gulch rep once the current levelling frenzy is over.

I haven't checked out the new PvP action in Stranglethorn yet but I'm also kind of scared to. When I was doing the dungeons with guildies, one of them accidentally took the wrong zeppelin and landed in Grom'gol while the Blood Moon event was on. Turns out it's so free-for-all that even the guards hate you, meaning he instantly got ganked by them and was unable to revive and get back onto the zepp. He actually had to switch to a different character entirely to be able to go to the dungeon with us as the one stuck in STV was effectively unusable for the time being.

Reddit is afire talking about the new event, though I'm not sure I entirely understand what's been happening - something about people getting insane rewards for spam-killing the same characters over and over again at the graveyard since the event was lacking anything to discourage that? I don't know, it doesn't currently sound very fun either way.

I was wondering whether the release of phase 2 would bring more of my era guildies back to SoD to check out the new stuff, but after three days, only half a dozen people or so have even logged in. The ones who are still active are talking about moving to a new guild in SoD and I can't blame them. I need to think about what I want out of Season of Discovery myself. Right now I'm just getting major deja vu, finding myself feeling lonely on a crowded mega-server like I did a couple of months after Classic's launch, though back then I was still carried along for a few more months by the sheer excitement I felt about Vanilla making an official comeback. While SoD does have some interesting new mechanics, it's not enough to make the experience completely different from what I've been doing for the last five years (gosh, has it really been that long - it has), and being on my own all the time just feels unsatisfying.

I'm even wondering whether I should go and re-roll Alliance on the RP-PvE server - it's only medium pop so that should alleviate some of my stress caused by the crowds, and relocating to Hydraxian Waterlords is what ended up turning Classic around for me back in 2020. Who says that couldn't happen again? However, even if it could, would I even want to go in that deep again? (I went pretty hard for a while once I started raiding in Classic.) I just don't know. I keep looking at SoD and thinking that everything looks so fun on paper, but I just end up feeling slightly jealous of all the people who are so obviously enjoying themselves because something about it just isn't working for me right now.

The Battle for Ashenvale (as Horde on PvE)

I've had a few weeks to casually check out the current endgame in Season of Discovery at this point. One of the major endgame activities is the Battle for Ashenvale PvP event. I'm not a fan of PvP in Classic in general, but I figured this was going to be more like Alterac Valley, something with a heavy PvE focus, so I thought I'd check it out.

I also quite wanted the wolf mount that you can earn access to. It's 10% slower than a normal mount, only works in Ashenvale and offers no dismount protection whatsoever (so it disappears instantly the moment you take damage from any source), but it looks cool and Ashenvale is big. As a priest with no class abilities to boost my travelling speed, having a way to speed up my journeys from one end of the zone to the other was definitely attractive.

The general gist of the PvP event is easy enough to figure out, though I did check out the Wowhead guide after my first time to get clarification on a few points. Basically, there's a percentage counter for both factions at the top of the screen that goes up as people kill mobs and other players. Once it hits 100% for both factions, the battle starts and some special mobs spawn. Each faction gets three lieutenants across the map as well as a general. The latter is immune to damage until the former have been killed, similar to the way the turrets/bunkers add protection for the generals in AV, except there is no way to bypass them. Each of these opponents has raid boss levels of health and takes a while to die even with a full raid of forty players.

Because the objectives are spread out across the map and movement is slow (even with the mounts), realistically people have to split into multiple raids to get everything down in a timely manner and as an individual player, you won't get to see/tag each objective personally, though there are apparently people who try to do just that to maximise their rep gains.

Unfortunately, faction imbalance is a major problem on the PvE server, as Alliance traditionally outnumbers Horde 2:1, and... well, you can tell. On the PvP servers, Blizzard decided to enforce a degree of faction balancing in SoD by temporarily limiting character creation if one faction got too far ahead, but PvE has no such restrictions in place. Which is generally fair, but not so much in an open world PvP event like this.

Maybe the devs were hoping that it would sort itself out, since participation in anything PvP is obviously fully voluntary on a PvE server, and Horde has traditionally been more eager to jump into this kind of content than Alliance, however my personal experience at least hasn't really borne this out, as I've lost every single battle except for one. What usually happens is pretty much what you'd expect: Horde only gets one or two lieutenants down in the time the Alliance kills all three, so they get to the general first and win.

The one time I was in a raid that did achieve victory, it was pretty clear why: Most raids are formed at Splintertree Post, which puts them in relative vicinity of two of the three enemy lieutenants as well as the general. However, that leaves the third lieutenant on the other side of the map, beyond the Alliance town of Astranaar, which is a logistical problem.

In the one battle I won, someone formed a strong second raid at Zoram Strand, which took down the lieutenant there and then pivoted to defend the nearby Horde lieutenant. We arrived just in time to prevent him from being killed and absolutely decimated the Alliance raid. This cost them enough time that the people at Splintertree could finish the job there before the Alliance could catch up again, even with their superior numbers. I guess the problem is that this winning strategy requires people to forfeit some personal rewards in favour of the greater good, since the people at Zoram will get less reputation than the ones at Splintertree that get all the other kills, and that's simply not popular.

Even so, I'll admit it's an interesting little twist on open world PvP. We'll see what Blizzard come up with for the second phase.

Level 25 in Season of Discovery

So this actually happened before my LFR adventure in retail; I just had the urge to write about that one while it was still fresh on my mind. But yes, I hit level 25 on my priest in Season of Discovery, woo! What an achievement.

Actually, I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but I do think people overestimate just how quickly the "average" player progresses. Blizzard released a video with some SoD statistics a week ago, and in that they said that only about 10% of the population had hit the level cap after the first week, and less than 2% of characters had cleared the BFD raid. I shared this with my guildies who were already talking about how they were "done" or bored and called them filthy one-percenters.

My own journey to the level cap involved more dungeons, as I predicted in my last post about SoD. I ran Wailing Caverns twice, mostly to finish off all my quests in there, though I got lucky and also won this excellent ring off Mutanus the Devourer in my second run. As a side note, I found it pleasant how easy it was to get all those collection quests done for a change. When Wailing Caverns is just one step along your levelling journey and you want to get everything done in one run, getting enough herbs, ooze and hide drops for everyone is always a pain, but with the dungeon essentially being "endgame" you can get endless runs in which most people will already have done their quests, with way less competition for drops.

Anyway, what was truly memorable about those WC runs to me was that they were complete opposites in some ways. In my first run I had a warrior tank who was massively overgeared for the place and who was just barrelling from one pack to the next one-stop. I was trying to eat dinner at the same time as healing (don't judge me, I like multi-tasking like that) and I could hardly get a bite in because the guy just never stopped. We were done in less than an hour, and that was with one of the damage dealers being AFK for the entire run, which was another funny thing to be honest. This mage was the last to arrive at the instance and then immediately put me on /follow. I think I saw him cast a fire blast once or twice, presumably so he wouldn't be logged out for inactivity, but that was all he did until the last boss, where he came back just in time to roll need on - and win - the caster ring. I learned from this that the infamous "ledge jump" is in fact so easy that an AFK character on follow will simply walk over the gap without falling, so if you ever do fall down that hole again, know that you're worse than someone auto-running.

In my second run on the other hand, our tank was completely clueless, didn't talk, randomly went AFK a few times, and otherwise just ran off in seemingly random directions. We ended up doing the right side of the dungeon before the left side (something I hadn't seen done before), and when we returned to the druid at the entrance we realised he wouldn't talk to us because by simply following our tank's errant pathing, we'd completely missed one of the bosses. It took me to take charge and lead the group back to him to actually finish the dungeon (something I was actually quite proud of as I'm not at all good at navigating the maze that is Wailing Caverns either).

Next I was off to Shadowfang Keep, which had fewer quests but which I knew offered several juicy cloth drops. I got incredibly lucky in that regard as well, as I won everything I could possibly want in only three runs: shoulders on the first run, belt on the second and the robe on the third. I can't say that it was all well-earned either as I body-pulled and caused deaths in "that room" (you know the one) in two of those three runs.

Due to my good loot luck I was only level 24 at that point, and there was another wave of competing healers sweeping LFG, so I decided to just earn the rest of my last level via questing. While doing so, I found one more priest rune in Silverpine, which brought me up to a total of four. I didn't catch the actual level 25 ding, but I levelled up after handing in to Kadrak at the Ashenvale border as seen below.

A funny side effect of the season's timing is that everyone's running around with winter hats because there are very few useful head slots available at this level so you might as well wear the fluffy hat for fun.

What now? Well, I was keen to get into BFD, but with the imminent holidays there weren't enough guildies available, plus I had some family obligations as well, so that adventure will have to wait for another day.

I had a brief look at the Ashenvale PvP event, which seems to be occurring quite frequently and appears to be quite rewarding, but I don't know if I care enough to make it a focus. I did notice that it seems to involve shared tagging, as when I ran up to an Alliance boss and asked to join the raid group there, I was told they were full, but I was still able to contribute from outside the group and received both loot and kill credit for the boss.

At some point I'll probably want to look up the runes I'm missing and go hunt them down. There's at least one very powerful healer rune that I'll probably want to get before setting foot into the raid.

My professions are another thing to work on. While I've been levelling them as I've been going along, I'm only maxed out for my level in herbalism and cooking, so alchemy, first aid and fishing all have some ways to go to be truly useful.

And of course there is questing - Blizzard made it so that like when you quest at level 60, "unused" experience point rewards get converted into money instead, which means that completing any at-level quest at the cap of 25 rewards at least one gold, which is pretty huge. Again, I don't think I'll make a habit of grinding these, but even just doing a few adds up quite quickly. I can't see many people having issues affording their mount at level forty if they get to spend any time at all playing at the level 25 cap and accumulating quest reward money.

The Death of Lossy the Mage

I was going to sit on this post for a few more days but then I figured: It's Halloween, what better time to entertain people with a tale of death? Which is basically my way of saying that my hardcore character died. I'll tell you how it happened, because as I said previously, how people die in hardcore is easily the most interesting thing about it.

The main thing that came to mind after the death was that it's true that it gets you when you least expect it. Here I had been worried about Defias in Westfall and pugs in the Deadmines, but I certainly didn't expect to be killed by some random naga on Zoram Strand.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have played on a day when I was feeling a bit under the weather and quite fuzzy-brained (I spent most of the afternoon sleeping after shutting down WoW) - I'd like to think that I would have made fewer bad decisions if I'd been entirely with it, but it is what it is.

So what happened was that I decided to make my way to the Wetlands and from there to Kalimdor to unlock some flight paths. I reached Astranaar in Ashenvale without incident and decided to do a few easy quests while I was there. One of them was to collect twenty naga heads on Zoram Strand, which was easy enough as they were three to four levels below me.

When I got there I also "found" another quest I'd completely forgotten about, the one to retrieve an ancient statuette. I decided to pick it up since it was on the way. The follow-up asked me to get a key from a named non-elite naga, and I figured I might do that as well. So I went to the little island where she resided, where most of the mobs were yellow to me instead of green, but I still didn't think too much of it. I noticed that the named naga was patrolling with two guards attached to her, but I was confident that I could take them on with clever use of sheep and frost nova. You can probably guess where this is going.

I still don't think that this was a terrible thing to do in principle, but I should have taken more care. I sheeped the named naga and started nuking the melee guard, but there was also a caster that kept blasting me. When I tried to freeze the melee guy in place I also didn't immediately step far enough away and he still got several hits in. I noticed that I was taking a lot of damage and chugged a health potion, but I thought I still had it under control - this is where things really started to go wrong as I waited too long to start running.

I also hadn't considered that being on a small island meant that my only escape vector was by swimming, which made me very slow. When I eventually tried to make a run for it, using blink etc., I noticed that my health was still going down even with nothing hitting me, because the warrior-type had put a bleed on me. Can't even bandage like that! I thought I was almost sure to die but the bleed ended with me having 17 hitpoints left, which is when I took the below screenshot. I actually thought I'd made it for a moment as I thought I'd lost my pursuers, but then the melee guy caught up with me and one final swing finished me off.

In hindsight I can see on the pre-death screenshot that I still had a lot of mana left, so mana shield might have saved me if I'd thought to use it, but oh well, when you're running scared you don't always think of all your options. Plus I honestly thought that I'd shaken them off (it's a bit hard to see while swimming) or I might have tried to frost nova one more time.

Thus ends the story of Lossy the Mage, and probably also of me trying hardcore for now, as I have no particular urge to immediately start over. I was, after all, just checking the mode out for the novelty. We'll see what news BlizzCon brings on the weekend.

Roguish Charm

One thing that makes playing my little rogue so appealing is that it feels very fresh and new to me. I've never had a rogue at the level cap at any point in the game, and even the mid-levels are something I didn't reach until later expansions, by which point a lot of quests and class mechanics had already been changed.

For example, I'd kind of forgotten that Ravenholdt was a "thing" for rogues - by which I mean: if you'd asked me about it I would have been able to tell you that it's a faction that's associated with rogues somehow, but it hadn't occurred to me that I should be visiting the place or anything. It was only around level thirty that I noticed that my class trainer had gained an extra dialogue option which hands you a letter telling you to visit Ravenholdt Manor. (Apparently that had already been waiting for me for about six levels.)

It took me ages to even find the place again, because for some reason, that particular mountain path is not one I generally come across in my travels. I happily followed the instruction to pick the pockets of the locals, which resulted in me cleaning out the entirety of Durnholde Keep in one go, but after that the next step asked me to fetch lockboxes of a level for which I was still too low. Not the most exciting piece of questing, I've got to say. Nice place, though.

The other notable adventure my little rogue had in the past few weeks was a visit to the Dor'Danil barrow den. I was finishing up the last few quests I had in Ashenvale when I was sent to this network of caves that I recalled as being a very unpleasant place. In fact, it was even more unpleasant than I remembered because I'd forgotten that it's filled both with mad druids and forsaken rogues - the presence of the latter means that it's actually not so bad to visit as Horde since the rogues at least are friendly, but as Alliance it's just a very claustrophobic place sporting an extremely high density of hostile mobs.

I'm a rogue though, I thought to myself, and the quest is just to kill three guys. I can sneak in and bypass most of the annoying trash! Now, if you're thinking "I bet it wasn't that easy", you'd be right, but my plan did work in principle, and I suffered no deaths. What happened though was that - somewhat to my surprise - it ended up being an extremely immersive and satisfying experience.

I could sneak past a lot of mobs, but the tight corridors - combined with the fact that the undead rogues liked to lurk in stealth themselves sometimes - meant that I still had to do a fair amount of fighting as well, sometimes because I aggroed something by accident, sometimes because I felt I just needed to create a bit of breathing space in a certain spot by removing the mobs from it. This made me feel like a proper assassin, and it felt oddly in-character to view the narrow corridors through my night elf's eyes and imagine her unhappiness at having to kill those poor druids.

The gameplay was also really interesting, because rogues have so many tricks! On most classes, pulling unexpected extra mobs is something that I find very alarming and that often gets me into trouble, but as a rogue it was surprisingly easy to stay collected and calm, even in the confines of a densely populated cave. I just had this mental checklist of steps I could take every time something like that happened (hit evasion, drink health potion, gouge and bandage, vanish if worse comes to worst); it always felt perfectly controlled. You'd have to mess up pretty badly to find yourself in a situation where none of your cooldowns are up.

It's just been surprising to me how much enjoyment I've been getting out of this character, when rogues have always been firmly on my "not interested" list when it comes to WoW's available classes. To be fair, I think in a group context I'd still largely prefer to play almost anything else... but for these occasional solo adventures I've been undertaking, it's been working out surprisingly well.

Level 40 the 3rd

Well, who saw that coming? I certainly wouldn't have guessed, looking at my roster at the beginning of the year, that my third character to level 40 would be a brand new nelf hunter, but here we are. I'm just enjoying the solo experience as a hunter way too much, and playing as Alliance feels refreshingly different after focusing on Horde side for months.

I even remembered to take a ding shot:

This one doesn't have the money to buy a mount yet, but I decided not to fret about it this time. So instead of proudly showing off my new ride, have some random screenshots I took while levelling on Alliance side:

 

The very first screenshot I took of my hunter in the starting zone. It was raining so hard that night! Also, I really love the female night elf bow-drawing animation.

The night I made the run to Ironforge. I never realised how you can see the city's lights up on the mountainside at night.

 

Remember when the Titans were this big mystery from Azeroth's past instead of overused and annoying?

 

Ashenvale contains a fair number of ruins, but it didn't really hit me just how pompously those elves must have lived back in the day until I considered the sheer size of that half-buried statue.

There's this quest in the Wetlands that has you fighting cursed undead, and one of their abilities temporarily passes their curse on to you, turning you into an undead as well. To my great amusement this applies to pets as well, meaning that I ran around with a pet undead for a while. (And I guess it confirms that Spotty is a girl? Unless everyone gets turned into a female undead.)

Hunting at night on the Shimmering Flats. I've said it before but I'm astounded by how beautiful I find Thousand Needles in Classic, because I don't remember being particularly fond of it in Vanilla.

Always gotta keep your eyes open on the road through Duskwood, you never know when you'll run into Stitches!

Whenever I spotted him wreaking havoc in Darkshire, I sometimes decided to help out.

I noticed there's an impressive amount of yells associated with Stitches spawning as well. It's interesting and somewhat old-fashioned design if you think about it: There is no quest to kill him, he's just a really hard mob (for the level of the zone) that spawns when someone completes a certain quest and is basically like a cat set among the pigeons, making the road unsafe and killing lonely questers left and right if they aren't careful. Makes for a very memorable experience.

Stranglethorn can be quite beautiful when you take a break from killing wildlife and trolls every now and then.

Logging in one evening I was baffled to find such a crowd in Stormwind, considering the server's usual population levels. Turns out it was just before someone dropped Onyxia's head to give everyone a buff. There is a whole system to this where guilds take turns I think, everyone assembles just before the event to get buffed, then mages put up portals to take the big guilds away to raid and the city empties out again. Quite fascinating to watch.

The Hall of Explorers in Ironforge is such an RP place, with all those oddities on display, including plaques that you can actually read.

Looking out over the beauty of Loch Modan. Destroying that was one of those things I could never quite forgive Cataclysm.

Finally, a sunset over Theramore.

Hunting in Warsong Gulch

When battlegrounds were added to Classic I mentioned that I might give Warsong Gulch "a try in one of the lower-level brackets if there are enough people queueing to keep wait times at a reasonable level". I was reminded of this resolution when my nelf hunter travelled through the Arathi Highlands and past the (currently still non-functional) Arathi Basin entrance.

As she was level 29 at the time, I decided to queue up for some WSG the next time I was in Ironforge. Being at the top of your level range is never a bad thing, and I thought I remembered hunters being pretty good in the lower level brackets.

My queue pops weren't quite instant, but close, and I played a total of four matches that day, three of which the Alliance lost. It was a pleasant enough nostalgia trip, reminding me of all kinds of details about the battleground that I hadn't thought about in ages (a speed buff spawns in that nook here, there's a gap in the fence over there etc.). I realised that I really liked the map and its music, and the experience also stirred some pleasant memories of playing with my rated battleground team back in Cataclysm.

Lowbie pugs have nothing like the co-ordination of a rated team of course, though considering the number of twinks on both teams, things were certainly more organised than they could have been. Each match lasted between 10 and 35 minutes, and the latter was a stark reminder of why I really didn't like this battleground much in its original incarnation: spending more than half an hour fighting just to lose anyway and end up with zero bonus honour doesn't make for the most fun of experiences.

That said, I have a knack for seeing the upside when evaluating the scoreboard at the end of the match. Sure, we lost horribly and only got four kills throughout the entire match, but at least I got the killing blow on all four of them! Or: Sure, we lost, but nobody died as many times as me - I win at dying!

(As an aside, I've come to the conclusion that this is because I'm the objective-orientated mirror image of "that guy who fights on the road" - note that I'm not saying "opposite": I have a tendency to blindly run towards the objective with no regards to my own safety, which is why I die a lot when things aren't going well. Not really that much smarter than road guy I guess, just a different kind of stupid.)

Anyway, my favourite thing that happened during all of these matches and which I just have to recount on here was when I hopped down from the graveyard, unsure of which way to head after just respawning, and a human mage beckoned me to come with him. The enemy was holed up in their base with our flag, and he thought that we could take them on. In fact, he had it all planned out as he explained to me in whispers: we'd both nuke the warrior who was carrying the flag, and he would take care of the warlock and priest that were guarding him by sheeping one and using his Gnomish Mind Control Cap on the other.

So we went into the tunnel together and up the ramp on the inside, where we ran straight into the warlock. My mage friend hit his magic button to mind-control him and... I got to watch his name turn red as the cap backfired and turned him into an enemy instead of turning the warlock into an ally. I died soon after but was laughing too hard to do anything useful anyway. It's these kinds of moments I play Classic for.

Level 30 Hunter And Other Tidbits

One month into Classic's lifetime, my hunter has been my first character to hit level 30. I still think of the shaman as my "main", but I'm trying to keep that one in sync with my husband right now, whose enthusiasm for Classic has greatly diminished and whom I can therefore only get to play every couple of days. Meanwhile the hunter is always available for a short play session here or there during the week, so she was bound to get ahead in levels eventually.

Level 30 meant that I got my favourite of all hunter abilities:

As you can see in the screenshot above, I also went ahead and tamed that second pet I'd been thinking about. I opted for a plain old cloud serpent from Thousand Needles this time, no rare skin or anything. I'm hoping for distinction through species for this one, as I don't see many hunters running with cloud serpents, most seeming to prefer cats. It does remain funny to me how due to this, even "rare" cat skins seem way more common than whole other species.

For example I've seen about three different night elves with the Ghost Saber already, and I ran into a multiboxer who was playing five identical hunters who all had Echeyakee as their pet. Comparatively, I haven't even seen a single hunter of either faction with a spider pet so far... but then that might change once the PvP system comes in and people have an incentive to conduct psychological warfare against arachnophobes in battlegrounds.

Hunter may well be the most fun class to play solo in my opinion, to the point that I don't even mind grinding mobs. There's just something very relaxing about sending your pet in and then just plonking away at the enemy from range.

Belghast had a good post about farming spots up a few days ago, and I spent several nights in that vein killing furbolgs in Thistlefur Hold in Ashenvale. It's a place that wouldn't meet all of Belghast's criteria for a good farm spot, not least because the nearest vendor for Horde characters is miles away, but it's pleasantly unpopular with the crowds and offers a dense mob population that's easy enough to kill if you're high enough level.

I remember back in Vanilla I didn't even find out about its existence until I levelled my first Horde character, since it's so easy to miss as Alliance, and it being basically one big cave crammed with furbolgs doesn't make it a particularly pleasant place to be in general... but I didn't find it too much of a problem. I only died once in there, and that was due to such a hilariously out of control overpull that it was at least as amusing as it was frustrating.

While farming those furbolgs I got my first blue BoE world drop in Classic. I paused and took a screenshot, just like my first blue drop on Kronos was among my highlights of levelling on that server. Rare items in Classic live up to their name.

It was an off-hand called Antipodean Rod and while spell damage is generally a good stat, I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. According to Wowhead comments it's a very good twink item for mages, but of course there is no real market for that yet with no battlegrounds.

I tried putting it up on the auction house for three gold anyway, but it didn't sell and the next time I checked someone else had put one up for a single gold. I decided that I didn't want to part with my first blue for that little money and sent it to my lowbie mage instead.

Yes, I made another alt, why not? (Not a cow this time, simply because they can't be spellcasters.) This one's main purpose was actually to become my disenchanter, since I was recently reminded that disenchanting had no level requirements back in Vanilla. Doesn't mean I'm not going to play her at least a little bit.

And so it goes, as everything I do in Classic quickly sets me on the path towards something else, and it feels like I have endless goals to pursue. This is why I expect that it's going to keep me busy for a while.

Six Screenshots

Saga kindly tagged me for a screenshot-sharing meme today, and I shall oblige, though in my own way. I find the very premise of taking the sixth image out of my sixth screenshot folder vaguely amusing, because how many screenshot folders do people have? I only have one, with three sub-folders in it called Desktops, Games and Webcam. I'm not sure why I ever thought that it was a good idea to take screenshots of my desktop, I haven't actually done anything with that folder in years. Anyway, in Games... the sixth folder in there is called Grim Fandango, and it only has four pictures in it. Let's stick to WoW I guess.

I take care to sort, resize and rename my freshly taken WoW screenshots at regular intervals, but I still have over a thousand of them crammed into a single folder. Unfortunately Windows 7 doesn't let you save sorting preferences for individual folders, so every time I change sorting method while looking at anything on my PC, all my WoW screenshots get shuffled around as well, so I'm not entirely sure which one should really be the sixth. Let's make it six sixth screenshots, depending on how you sort them!

If we start alphabetically, the sixth screenshot is this one simply called "A warlock and his pet". It shows my first ever real alt, Wilson the warlock, sitting in an inn, possibly even in Goldshire, and I thought that it looked cute how he appeared to be hugging the imp that had jumped on his lap.

On the reverse end of the alphabetical sort, the sixth screenshot is one of our Zul'Aman group preparing for a bear run by transforming into ninjas. The German titles are a reminder of how I used to play with the German client until Wrath of the Lich King, when I got tired of people being either confused or in stitches every time I linked an item in chat.

Sorting by date, the sixth oldest screenshot that comes up is one of my night elf priest jogging through Ashenvale with two friends. I remember this zone being the one where I was first introduced to the term "World of Walkcraft" - keeping in mind that this was back when you couldn't get your first mount until level forty, and Astranaar offered the only Alliance flight path in all of Ashenvale. I remember how scared we used to get every time we had to run past Splintertree, because we had a knack for accidentally aggroing one of the wandering guards and getting ourselves killed. Nonetheless, those were good times. You just made sure to turn on autorun, chatted a bit... and panned the camera around to take screenshots of your characters running.

The sixth most recent screenshot I took is one of a bit of guild chat in which my guild leader, in his own special way, expressed that he misses having me around in raids (or at least that's how I interpreted it).

Finally, let's sort by size - something I pretty much never do, but I want to have a reason to post six screenshots! The sixth biggest WoW screenshot I have is apparently this picture of my Worgen death knight at Light's Hope Chapel. I just thought that the scenery looked cool, and I didn't think of taking any pictures on my first death knight.

Unsurprisingly, the sixth smallest screenshot... is one of the old thumbnails I use to link to my characters' armoury profiles on the sidebar. Heh.

Thanks for this opportunity to share a few random memories! I won't tag anyone, but if you're reading this and would like an excuse to post some old screenshots with commentary, this is obviously your chance.

A goblin in Azshara and Ashenvale

I rolled a goblin priest to see the goblin starter area some time ago. Those zones seems to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion.

So once I had seen what it was all about, I parked my little priest in Orgrimmar and didn't touch her for the next couple of months. I've found that not playing a character for a while gives them time to settle, and possible negative associations from the past are given time to dissipate. So I finally felt ready to play my goblin again the other week and took her to Azshara.

Azshara is a sort of continuation of the goblin starter experience, but officially open to all races and not quite as silly. Yes, the hyper-intelligent raptor that escaped into space with a rocket was a bit mind-boggling, and then there was that whole affair with Azuregos and the spirit healer. What the...? However, a lot of the zone was about fighting night elves and naga and typical wildlife, and I was happy.

I saw a comment on someone else's blog, I don't remember by whom, who said that Blizzard had "destroyed" Azshara with Cataclysm. It's certainly not the quiet and empty land it used to be, but... don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciated the old Azshara, but let's not kid ourselves: emptiness is cheap. Azshara was what it was due to Blizzard failing to do anything useful with it, not due to any intentional design making it awesome. They did the same thing again in Cataclysm in some areas, so if you miss that feeling of being lost in a landscape that is nothing else but land, you can always go for a stroll through Alterac. (Or actually, Gilneas works quite well too, due to so many things being phased.)

While Gallywix is ugly as sin, I have to admit that I still found this display oddly awe-inspiring.

Meanwhile, Azshara offers lots of questing fun now and I think it's a solid experience, though I had one problem here that I haven't managed to have in any other post-Cata zone: I managed to lose the plot. Suddenly I had no more quests in my log, even though I still had a good quarter of the zone left according to the quest achievement, and I was sitting out in the middle of nowhere, lost. I then spent about half an hour driving around the zone on my annoying-sounding trike, until I finally found a quest on a lonely mountain peak which then reconnected me with the rest of the story.

I wasn't sure how I felt about that. On the one hand it's nice to engage your own brain in search of quest givers every once in a while instead of blindly following a breadcrumb trail all the time. But if the entire zone is designed around the idea that you will be following the breadcrumb trail along fifty different mini-hubs, losing the plot is annoying because it could literally be anywhere. How I longed for just being able to check three different quest hubs for updates instead of having to peek into every nook and cranny of the zone in search of that lone missing exclamation mark.

I also felt bad about ending the zone by killing the former Alliance flight master.

I continued onwards to Ashenvale. For comparison, I wrote about how I experienced the zone on Alliance side in this post a few months ago. Horde side was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster to me. Oh cool, I get to ride around on a kodo. Argh, why are we killing all these night elves and I'm not allowed to join in? Why am I doomed to watching passively as the cut scene plays out? Combat cut scenes seriously need to go, considering that's the basic unit of WoW gameplay.

There were a couple of NPCs that I liked, like that orc couple where the guy made me pick flowers for his lady and she made me collect fel fire. It made me like the Horde. I was quite happy to slaughter generic night elves by the dozen, and I was absolutely delighted to see that the three named beasts from The Ashenvale Hunt were still around and dropping quest items.

Around the third time or so when I walked through Silverwind Refuge, I noticed that there were actually night elf corpses on the ground still... and named ones. Agrnagvekf. I didn't really remember them very well, but I found myself wondering which one of them had sold me the expert cookbook back in the day. Suddenly I hated being Horde.

Emotional turmoil aside, seeing the Alliance vs. Horde conflict in Ashenvale play out from both sides was also a bit strange. I've talked about how quests running in parallel on both sides can make for a more interesting story, and to some extent this is happening in Ashenvale, but it's all very inconclusive. The Horde has you bombing Astranaar and then happily sends you on your way with a pat on the back. But didn't I put all those fires out as Alliance? Didn't I save Astranaar? So Alliance wins, technically? Likewise a Horde quest sends me to corrupt the Forest Heart, and I do, but I know from Alliance side that they cleanse it afterwards. At Splintertree Post I fought off not one, but two major night elf attacks, but the attackers never really went away entirely. And at Raynewood Retreat the Horde kills the local Alliance leader, but the Alliance lays massive waste to the Horde army on their side of the quest. They then say that I saved the place, but did I really?

Silverwind Refuge is the only area where it's completely clear who won, but that happened before I even got there. Anything I contributed to the war effort made no particular difference from what I could tell. That's actually not a bad thing in principle, but what bothered me a little was that I couldn't tell whether that was by design, or whether the developers simply didn't want to tell Horde players that they lost those fights... because knowing what I knew from Alliance side, it kind of felt like they should have.

Next zones coming up in review from Horde side whenever I get around to it: Desolace, Southern Barrens, Thousand Needles.