WoW Memories #14: January 16th, 2007

I'm celebrating WoW's 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 following was originally posted on January 16th, 2007 under the title "Burning Crusade!": 

So today was WoW expansion day! We saw the first Blood Elves being made at midnight¹, but that was about the most exciting thing that happened then. (Though we were all surprised that the servers didn't collapse right away.) I had preordered my own copy of Burning Crusade from Amazon but didn't expect it to arrive on release day, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found a parcel in the hall when I came home from uni this afternoon.

Installing it was quite annoying though. The installer froze up every time it reached the point where I was supposed to insert the second CD, but fortunately for me plenty of other people had the same problem and there was a thread on the support forum telling people that copying the CD contents and installing from the hard disk would circumvent the problem. Of course I had to reinstall two patches after that while my internet connection was extremely erratic and kept cutting off every other minute, so...²

Don't really have that much to say about the new content yet. I didn't much fancy questing in Outland alone, though I did eventually go through the Dark Portal after a friend kept linking me to some of the new items. I hadn't quite believed Mecha when he predicted that there'd be greens in Outland better than the old epic stuff, but it looks like he was right. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw the green wand you get as reward for one of the first quests I accepted...³

Also, Draenei > Blood Elves. From what I had seen of them on screenshots and such I thought that they were both nice-looking races but I didn't have any strong feelings about either. After fiddling around with the character editor for a bit however I really fell in love with the Draenei and their strangely twisted spines and legs (even if they walk funny) while the Blood Elves only struck me as pretty but bland.

I couldn't resist making a little Draenei mage of my own⁴, even if I don't know what I'm going to do with her and only got her to level six so far. The starting area was just so flooded with people fighting over quest mobs and spamming the chat that I couldn't stand it for long.⁵ Will see how long it takes for that to cool down.

¹ By that I meant that I was questing in Ashenvale on my tauren hunter and opening the /who window around midnight, constantly refreshing a "/who blood elf" query (or something like that) and watching the first results appear.

² Ah, the good old days of installing MMO expansions from physical media. Can't say I really miss that part.

³ I think that would've been the Desolation Rod. Doesn't look that impressive now with retail stats, but back then it probably had two or three times the number of whatever blue I'd last gotten in a Vanilla dungeon, so it seemed absolutely jaw-droppingly powerful.

⁴ That's this one!

⁵ This was actually kind of comforting to read because it shows that my disdain for the mega-server crowds that have come to dominate Classic is not just me being a grumpy old lady shaking her fist at the kids these days, but something that does go way back.

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This seems like a good point to end this series for now, with the launch of the first expansion and the anniversary event in WoW also just having ended. This wasn't the last entry about WoW on my old personal blog, but they did become more irregular over time and also... changed a bit in nature I guess? A lot of posts were just random screenshots, and aside from marking some milestones that I was particularly proud of (such as when my guild cleared Gruul's Lair for the first time or when I got my first talbuk mount), they became more about my relationships with the people I was playing with than the game itself, and I'm not actually sure that would make for great material for this blog.

Not that I never talk about the people I play with nowadays, but a lot of those old posts definitely seem like "you had to be there" material on re-reading, such as when I talked about our GM tanking heroics for us late at night while drunk, or about how I met a shadow priest from another guild in real life and laughed at him while he threw up on the street. I might re-evaluate that at some point in the future, maybe when the Burning Crusade turns twenty or something. In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane; I hope you found at least some of it interesting!

Draenei Heritage

It tickles me that every post I made on this blog in May has been about a different version or mode of World of Warcraft. First I talked about Classic Cataclysm, then Hardcore, then the upcoming War Within, then Classic era, and finally Pandaria Remix. The only thing missing at this point is something about what's currently going on in regular Dragonflight, so why not do that?

I wrote a little about what I thought of various heritage quest lines last year and always meant to continue doing more of them, but other things ended up distracting me and caused that particular project to fall off my radar again for a bit. However, the most recent patch added heritage quest lines for both Draenei and trolls, two races I associate with characters that are particularly dear to me, so I figured it was a great opportunity to have another go at this. I decided to start with the Draenei.

My first ever Draenei lives on the same server as my original priest and has gathered a similar amount of dust over the years. I originally created her back when Burning Crusade came out, and levelled her with a group of friends I'd made early in the game and who also rolled new Draenei alts for the expansion. (I also met them in real life at one point... those were different times. I was always a bit sad that we didn't really manage to stay in touch after that.)

I remember we jokingly referred to our little posse as "The Blue Man Group". One person quickly lost interest in that particular alt, but the rest of us levelled all the way to the cap together from what I remember, even if that meant doing dungeons with a group of four and without a dedicated healer. Our pally tank mostly spent a lot of time healing himself... For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of us struggling with the last boss in Uldaman due to this but we eventually figured out a way to beat him. (This was before any of us knew about the trick with pulling him into the room upstairs to make add management easier.)

Anyway... even after the group drifted apart, I kept levelling my little blue mage through the following expansions as I quite enjoyed playing her. Though I must have given up in Cataclysm as she was level 30 post-level squish, which would have been something like... 83 in the old times? Which would mean that she saw some play time in Cata, but not enough to get to the cap.

I accepted the gear upgrade at the character selection screen and chose to stay arcane spec, though I was surprised to be presented with this as I thought she'd been frost or fire last I played. Since I'd opted not to clear my quest log, I had a breadcrumb to talk to the guy in the Cataclysm portal circle, which I thought was the introduction to Deepholm, but when I handed it in, there was no follow-up. I decided to go there anyway, first questing in the "regular" version of the world and eventually switching to Chromie Time when things started to go green.

Finishing Deepholm felt like it didn't take all that much time, though it also struck me that Cataclysm really was kind of a low point for the game's questing, regardless of whether you prefer Vanilla's more "worldly" approach to questing or the more modern storylines. By Cata they had streamlined the hell out of the process so there was no exploring or finding quest hubs involved at all anymore, but at the same time the voice acting and cut scenes were still pretty sparse, so you didn't exactly get a "cinematic" experience either... just a looong chain of formulaic quests (always in sets of threes, usually one kill quest, one collect quest, and one that required you to talk to someone, use an item or kill a boss), many of which gated access to things like portals or quartermasters back in the day and required doing on every character.

Anyway, after completing the zone storyline I was still only level 45, so I started doing Therazane dailies for nostalgia's sake, until it hit me that levelling up without collecting any more gear upgrades was probably not a good idea. On returning to Stormwind I found intro quests for Hyjal and Vashj'ir waiting for me, which confused me because surely I must've done at least one of those back in the day? Either way I opted for a bit of questing in Mount Hyjal until I hit level 50, though I didn't get many gear rewards there either.

I just mention this as I've often expressed annoyance with the way Blizzard's scaling really affects your character's performance if your gear can't keep up with your levels, and by the time I hit 50 I reckon my gear was about 40 item levels lower than it should've been once again. Combined with the fact that I found arcane spec confusing and didn't really know what I was doing, this didn't make for the best experience with the combat portions of the heritage quest line.

For example there was one part where I was suddenly put in combat with two mobs and managed to die... on top of a ledge. I spent a couple of minutes trying to get back to my body until I gave up and just took the spirit res, just to be reminded that the debuff you get from that in retail only lasts a minute nowadays anyway. And the final fight with the add waves followed by a boss was quite a pain too. I actually thought it was kind of funny that I complained in the context of the night elf heritage quest line that it felt kind of boring to have three powerful NPC escorts, and as if someone from Blizzard read that, the NPCs you get to help you out in the Draenei scenario do almost nothing and might as well not be there in terms of how helpful they are in combat.

Anyway, my 100th rant about awkward world scaling aside... this quest chain was really good. It starts a little slow, and I was once again reminded that I've become too good at recognising certain voice actors as I immediately spotted Darin De Paul and Max Mittleman again, but things quickly became more interesting.

Because it was such an enjoyable quest line, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll say that it was interesting that the Draenei quest chain used the same framing device as the orc one, that of a people reviving an old celebration to look towards a better future... though the Draenei's problems are of course a bit different from those of the orcs.

We got to revisit several important Draenei locations, including the Exodar, Auchindoun and Bloodmyst Isle, a lot of known Draenei NPCs returned, and there were some nice touches with the dialogue. For example the Soultender in Auchindoun noted that he could sense that I had "already partaken of our ritual to see the dead", which I think was a callback to that one Burning Crusade quest line which I clearly must have done back in the day. I'm told there are also some dialogue variations for characters that have one of the new red skin customisations. I didn't look up anything until after I'd finished the quest line myself, but I wasn't surprised to find that reddit absolutely loved this one as well.

The ending definitely tugged at my heart strings... though I wonder if anything will ever come of the Draenei's plans to build a new city for themselves in game. Either way, it was a great piece of content that really struck the right tone and did a lot of world building.

Questing, Flying and Riding Dragons

I wasn't even playing WoW during Warlords of Draenor, but I still remember the big hubbub about the idea that Blizzard was considering not having flight in that expansion. It was just being talked about everywhere (as you can see from the "here's what other bloggers are saying" section in the linked post). At one point I considered reviving the blog purely to tell everyone that I thought they were being stupid, but fortunately I had enough sense not to do that. I don't think that lecturing devs or players of a game you're not actively playing about how they're doing it all wrong is a good way to spend one's time.

What I was thinking though was that I found both the complaints from players and the devs' attitude annoying in their own way. As someone who fell in love with WoW in Vanilla, back when there was obviously no flying, the wailing about how the game was literally unplayable without it made me roll my eyes every time. At the same time though, I didn't get why Blizzard were being so weird about it with these arguments about how flying supposedly trivialised the content. It's possible to design things like questing with flying in mind, and I had seen them do that in both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King; why were they suddenly acting as if they couldn't do it?

In the end we got an awkward compromise in which Blizzard still designed the content for ground-bound play and then would let people fly over it by the end of the expansion after they'd "done their dues", as if questing was some sort of chore and AFK-flying through a whole lot of nothing while ignoring all the action on the ground was some sort of amazing reward. Because make no mistake - letting people fly in content that was designed around players being ground-bound does mess things up.

Playing Burning Crusade Classic was actually a good reminder of that, because while it did have content designed with flying in mind, the early levelling quests generally weren't, and if you went back to those with a flying mount later, they were kind of dumb: the stereotypical situations where you were supposed to fight your way through an enemy camp but would then just fly over it to pluck your objective straight out of the air.

Blizzard's decision to design Dragonflight with flight in mind from the very start has been a huge sea change after all those years, and to be honest it's been great. Aside from the first few intro quests, everything is meant to be done with a flying mount, and it really shows. There is more verticality than we've ever had in WoW before and it's very fun.

The fact that dragon riding functions differently from normal flying plays a huge part in this as well. In my opinion dragon riding is honestly so much better that it makes old flying kind of feel like a mistake in hindsight to be honest, with its slow and boring "swim through the air" mechanic. Dragon riding isn't difficult, but it does take a bit of practice to get used to, and it does require continued engagement, meaning that travelling is part of gameplay instead of "time to AFK" (though flight paths still exist if you do find yourself wanting to go for a bio break while flying from one end of the Dragon Isles to the other).

Actually engaging with the game while travelling in turn gives it meaning and opens up opportunities to get distracted and sucked into other activities. It's kind of like the travel in Vanilla, where crossing the landscape would give you a sense of scale, and while doing so you might find yourself discovering something interesting by the side of the road or running into other players. This isn't to claim that Dragonflight is totally like Vanilla (please don't @) me) - it's still a more modern game where everything is much more fast-paced and requires more key presses, but my point is that the vibe in the open world is similar.

Often when I log into retail and fly across the Dragon Isles with a certain goal in mind, I'll end up soaring over something interesting on the ground and landing to pick it up, then I spot a rare just a little bit away and go to that instead, and before you know it I've almost forgotten what I meant to do originally and been playing for much longer than I intended to. This is not something that happened to me in Shadowlands, but it's definitely something that has happened to me in Classic and I'm digging it in Dragonflight too... even if it means that I'm often spending more time playing it than I had planned.

Zul'Aman and the Pain of Nostalgia

I've said pretty much since the beginning of Classic that while nostalgia is a powerful draw, to truly be able to enjoy Classic, you need to be able to keep it at bay to some degree. If playing Classic starts to feel like you're trying to re-create the exact experience of being a young student with endless free time and (relatively) few worries in the world, things are likely to go down a dark path fairly quickly. The joy of Classic should lie in playing a game again that you've missed and that is still good fifteen years later, but while still being aware and leaving room for the reality that it couldn't ever feel exactly the same as it did fifteen years ago.

I think I mostly managed to do that throughout Classic's original run. The familiar environments stirred up memories for sure... but I tended to play different characters, and I actually participated in endgame in a way in which I never really did in vanilla, which very clearly made it a new and different experience.

I think part of my struggle with Classic BC has been that I did much more of BC's content in its original iteration, and that all of this happened during my most formative WoW years, meaning that I have a lot of powerful and positive memories associated with pretty much everything - more so than I did in old Azeroth, and no matter what I do in Classic BC, it has often felt like it pales in comparison to the original game if the experience isn't totally amazing.

With that in mind, I've been anticipating the opening of the Zul'Aman raid with very mixed feelings. I wrote a post on here two years ago in which I described the experience of raiding with my fixed Zul'Aman group back in Burning Cursade as "the height of my WoW raiding career". No matter how much I may have wanted to practice self-awareness to temper my expectations of the re-release, that kind of high was always going to be a very tough act to follow.

I don't have detailed records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day, but I strongly remember the sense of camaraderie as we came together for every reset, goofing off in the entrance area until it was time to ring the gong to open the gates - which was the signal to put our serious hats on and be intensely focused for the next forty minutes or so.

We messed up the timed run many times, but we did get better over the course of weeks and months, and there was a strong sense of progression and of overcoming a challenge as a team. When we finally beat the timer for the first time, it was glorious and felt well earned.

The previous paragraph was originally supposed to start with "I have no records of my Zul'Aman runs back in the day", but I did actually find a text document on my hard drive in which I'd saved the write-up of our first successful bear run that I'd originally posted on our now defunct guild forums. Let me reproduce it here in full to give you a sense of the general vibes I associated with ZA:

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17/6 [2008] - Onslaught's first bear mount!

It started with one man having a simple idea. This Zul'Aman place is nice, Kanoth thought to himself, I think I'd like to go there every week, even if it's not part of the official raid schedule. Some of those timed chests contain amazing rewards! Always being a man of action, he soon started to assemble a group for this very purpose.

At first it was a bit of a struggle. Our gear wasn't quite up to the intended level, and it took some time to figure out the ideal strategy for each boss. Sometimes people stopped playing or just couldn't make the raid times anymore so the group makeup had to be changed. In the end this became the final "Team Bear Mount":

Arkiza - Noggenfogger addict and shooter of chain heal lasers
Drokhnar - suicidal killing machine and provider of windfury
Kanoth - cookie dispenser, crowd controller and frosty aoe master
Kordac - unsurpassed circle of healing spammer
Koreth - stabmaster supreme
Minox - whirlwinding bringer of death
Marasha - crazed warlock alt of Iarwain
Odious - amazing Tuesday tankadin
Shintar - neverending source of mana
Verment - strong bear and fierce cat in one

Two chests were a guaranteed reward for us in no time, soon three. Losing Kordac for several weeks as he moved house set us back a bit and made our runs considerably less spirited, but we persisted. As we got closer to the fourth chest the many ways in which you could just mess up the timer made us want to tear our hair out. Make sure you wear your tanking gear on the boss, Verm! Oh god, Marasha got too close to the hut! How did Odi just die there? What the hell is wrong with Shintar's computer, we're practically nine-manning this! [Note: I'd forgotten that this coincided with the time when I was struggling with an utterly crappy PC, lol.] ARGH.

However, in the end it was only a matter of time. Tonight we knew it would have to happen. People were excited before we had even started, and Minox got subjected to many vicious pokes by impatient people while trying to cook his dinner until he finally decided to leave it for later. We rang the gong and were off.

As usual Odi tanked a large part of the eagle gauntlet in one go and we just aoed it down. Akil'zon only had a chance to cast three storms before he bit the dust if I recall correctly. Barely a few minutes had passed by the time we engaged Nalorakk. He too went down fairly quickly and we rushed on to Jan'alai's gauntlet, the hardest bit of trash in the instance. However, people were really on their toes this time and all scouts were quickly intercepted and disposed of, without a single one getting a chance to call for help. On the dragonhawk boss himself there was a brief moment of panic when a hatcher didn't get killed in time and the whole right side of eggs got hatched before we were really ready for it, but fortunately we had just managed to kill off the left side before so Odi was free to pick them up. Flame debuffs were everywhere but nobody lost their cool and we were able to regain control while the healers did an amazing job keeping everyone up. As Jan'alai fell, Arkiza was so exhausted already that she stood on one of the remaining bombs and died right after the boss, becoming our first casualty. 😂

At this point we had almost twenty minutes left on the timer and Kanoth cautioned us to better move a little more slowly and carefully now rather than risk a wipe. The troll spirits smiled upon us as we sneakily wove our way through huts, past trees and across the lake without incidents, as all the patrols were conveniently in just the right place wherever we went, not even requiring us to wait for them to move. Our hearts pounded in our chests as the last of Halazzi's trash mobs died at our feet and we still had almost ten minutes left. After one last check that everyone was buffed and ready, Odi and Verment charged in... and only a few minutes later Halazzi was dead, with about five minutes left on the timer.

VICTORY!

We were all happy and laughing as we freed the last prisoner, a chatty little gnome that zoomed all over the room before finally revealing the fourth chest to us. And then it was ours, our very first Amani War Bear! 😀 Arkiza was the lucky winner of the first roll but I think we were all equally happy really.

Here's a shot of the happy team with Ark on her bear, unfortunately we suck at lining up properly. 😉 Also, here's a bigger one of just Ark and the bear in all its glory. Now to farm nine more bears for the rest of Team Bear Mount!

A video of the event made by Odi should also be forthcoming. [Note: I actually found that this video was still up on YouTube fourteen years later! You can tell it's authentic from the minimal editing and the stamp-sized resolution, which means that you can't even read people's names, but you can make me out as the shadowy blob mind-flaying Halazzi from the side.]

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I kind of dodged the matter of Zul'Aman opening in Classic for a few days since I wasn't playing much anyway, but then the Monday raid got cancelled once again and someone suggested going to Zul'Aman instead. "Screw it," I figured, "I didn't reserve this evening for a raid for nothing, so I might as well make this ZA run happen." (It fell on me to organise it since no actual officers or raid leaders were present. Yeah...)

After poking a lot of different people, I managed to assemble a group of ten, even if some of us were on alts. I had to play on my druid to fill one of the tanking spots myself, and the other tank was a warlock's paladin alt. People were asking whether we were going to try for a bear mount and I firmly told them no. Not only did we have a bunch of alts in the group, for many it was their first visit to ZA altogether! Obviously things weren't going to feel quite as challenging as they did back in the day, but the notion of people expecting to get a bear the very first time they set foot into the raid seemed ludicrous to me.

And in a way, my assessment wasn't wrong. The first boss, Akil'zon, took us three tries, meaning we already failed at the very first chest. I didn't feel too bad about this either, because as I said, my expectations were based on how hard I remembered this timed run being in the original Burning Crusade. The bear boss went down on the first try (even if my health bar yo-yoed to a scary degree), but then the dragonhawk took two tries, and the lynx no less than five. That last part threw me a little because I didn't remember that one being that much of an issue.

After four more wipes on Hex Lord (the penultimate boss), we had to call it because some people wanted to go to bed. And I'm not going to lie, at that point I did feel disappointed. I didn't expect us to get a bear, I didn't expect us to get any chests, and I did expect us to wipe repeatedly... but I'd hoped that we'd at least be able to complete the instance.

For that extra bit of salt in the wound, a friend joined us on voice chat just as we were finishing, to ask how we were doing, and when someone else told him that we'd only killed four bosses, his counter-question was: "Did you at least get a bear mount?" At least! Bears are now the bare minimum you should get out of this instance, pun intended!

The next day while I was doing business in Ironforge, as if to taunt me, a random parade of bears formed up between the bank and the auction house, as if to say: "Look how easy this is nowadays, we're only a week in and there's loads of these around already!"

It's not so much a matter of envy - I don't really crave a bear mount for myself in Classic - as being made to feel that the general vibe and the expectations around Zul'Aman are totally different now than they were fourteen years ago. The goal posts have moved from "here is a new raid and if you really work on it you can also earn a mount from it eventually" to "if you don't get the bear every single time from day one, you suck", and my memory - nay, my knowledge of how it used to be is so strong that the clash between then and now is painful.

Back then our gear was mediocre (if you look at the above group shot I used as my desktop background for a while, you can see a lot of tier four in there still, as well as gear from Zul'Aman itself, which we had farmed over time and which had actually been upgrades for us), everything wasn't as well documented, and the ZA timed run was a challenge on which we failed over and over again as a group until we got better, something that truly felt like an achievement.

In Classic, it feels like everyone's already running around in Black Temple gear, doing enough dps to steamroll everything with ease, and the ZA bear run is just treated as another item on the checklist of "objectives to complete in Classic BC" before moving on to Wrath. I hate it!

I can't really hold it against anyone who enjoys this type of play, but it's so fundamentally unlike what I've wanted out of my Classic experience that I honestly find the realisation kind of depressing. I wonder if people who spent months on the vanilla raids back in the day already felt something similar during OG Classic...

I also find myself missing our old server once again, because I have a hunch that this "issue" wouldn't have been quite as pronounced on Hydraxian Waterlords where we only had a small number of guilds doing hardcore progression. Over there, a bear mount would still have been a rare sight in week one, and we all would've gone, "Oh yeah, that guy's in Caelum, of course it's easy for them". Things feel very different when you're on a server where dozens of guilds have been farming Illidan for months.

I'm a Priest Again!

A common piece of advice given to new bloggers is to not make the name and theme of their blog too specific, because interests change over time and you'll want to be able to seamlessly expand the focus of your writing as required, without having anything feel out of place. I've always discarded the part about not being too narrow with your theme, because I've been happy to just make new blogs with different themes anyway... but there's something to the name thing I suppose.

I've never exactly regretted naming this blog "Priest with a Cause", but even aside from Google's initial confusion about whether my writings had anything to do with clergymen, it's sometimes felt a bit awkward as time went on. Back when I started this blog, it seemed impossible to fathom that I'd ever want to main anything other than a priest - my mains on both sides of the faction divide had been priests for years, after all. However, after I first quit the game in Cataclysm, things got weird:

• When I came back for a few months to check out Mists of Pandaria, I levelled a druid.
• Most of my time on Classic private servers was spent on levelling a paladin.
• Most of my time on official Classic has been spent maining a hunter.
• And during my casual adventures in retail, I've mostly been either a monk or a demon hunter.

In other words, it's actually been a full decade since this blog really lived up to its name, and that has sometimes bothered me at least a little. I tried my hand at playing priest here and there during my private server years, and I did eventually make a dwarf priest in Classic too, but she never really got levelled very much or quickly.

Until recently, that is. As I said in my last post, with all my previous max-level characters at 70, it was time for a new alt to rise up from the ranks, and my most progressed was actually my priest, so I kept working on her here and there. Soon my levelling buddy expressed interest in having her team up with his warrior once she got high enough for Outland. Warrior/priest, the original OTP... who could say no to that?

Originally I thought she was going to be shadow spec, like I was for most of original Burning Crusade. Back in the day shadow priests were the new hotness and everyone wanted one or more in their raid. I remember I was pretty much recruited specifically to be part of one of my guild's Kara teams because they "needed" a shadow priest for crowd control and other utility. And in the 25-mans we ideally always wanted to run with three shadow priests, one for the two ranged dps groups and one for the healers. I remember that people absolutely loved shadow priests, and I loved being popular.

In Classic BC though... things feel very different. Shadow priests still have their role to play, and nobody dislikes them, but it's much, much more low key than it used to be. People hardly cared about CC in Karazhan even at the start of Classic, and in 25-mans you apparently want exactly one shadow priest to power your arcane mages and that's it. Nobody minds if you want to bring a shadow priest to a dungeon or Kara, but if you're in the process of building a group and thinking about what classes you'd like to bring, you're likely to think of almost every other ranged dps before a shadow priest. That's just how it is, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I guess Classic's increased min-max culture has brought it into starker relief that shadow priests do less damage per second than other classes (back in original BC, with so many of us being bad, the waters remained muddy about these things for much longer), plus average dps is so much higher, leading to fights being over much more quickly, so that "running out of mana" (the main thing a shadow priest in the group helps to prevent) just isn't as much of a concern as it used to be.

I still levelled my little dwarf as shadow of course, because anything else would have seemed masochistic. She spent most of her time questing on her own after all, and when I did get into a dungeon group on occasion I could still both dps or heal as shadow spec. But as I approached Outland, I got thoughtful. My levelling buddy was going to go for a hybrid spec to be able to both tank or dps in levelling dungeons, but healing as shadow was likely going to get rough after level 60 in a group of levellers with average gear.

So when the time eventually came to start adventuring in Hellfire Peninsula, and step into Ramparts in specific, I hearthed to Ironforge, respecced to holy, and then asked for a summon back. And I didn't really mind. My night elf priest back in the day did something very similar, respeccing from shadow to holy in early Outland to focus on being the group healer, and it was fine. And even my troll priest, who was shadow throughout most of BC, ended up going holy when we suffered a healer shortage towards the end of the expansion.

What surprised me though, was that it wasn't just fine: I absolutely loved it. I've enjoyed healing on my paladin, but she only has two healing spells: big heal and small heal, and while that comes with its own challenges, especially in AoE situations, it's not exactly very mentally stimulating to decide which of the two to press next in any given situation.

But even though it's been so many years now since I played a priest at anything but lowbie level, it somehow still felt like coming home. So many different heals to keybind, and oh the fun of deciding which one to choose moment to moment. My brain and fingers even seemed to long to return to keybinds from a decade ago that I couldn't possibly remember on a conscious level, but I could still sense my fingers twitching towards certain combinations if that makes sense. I also instantly found myself missing Prayer of Mending and Binding Heal, abilities I won't get until later down the line but which I kind of automatically wanted to slot into my rotation already. It was honestly kind of surreal how familiar and comfortable it felt.

We blasted from level 60 to 62 within two days by mostly running Ramparts and Blood Furnace, and it just made me so happy it's silly. I'm not saying anything about wanting to change mains or anything at this point, but boy, do I really want to play this character more.

Priest can be rough to play solo because while the class can be specced and equipped to play "okay" on its own, it will still always pale in comparison to the power of a dedicated dps class, and if you've ever had a taste of the latter, it will always feel like a downgrade. But a priest's power to keep a group of friends alive (and in interesting ways!) is perhaps unmatched... it's just that the only way to really enjoy this is to have multiple friends that are reliably playing with you, ideally both a tank and dps to actually kill stuff. I went for a long time without having this sort of group setup... but I'm thinking I might finally be back in a place that makes it worth it.

Old Azeroth in Burning Crusade

I had four Alliance characters at level 60 by the end of Classic. With all of them having reached 70 and me finding myself increasingly running out of interesting short-term goals to pursue on them, the time had come to look at levelling some more alts from scratch (or close to it).

Spending time in "the old world" again has been kind of nice - I hadn't even realised how much I missed it. I do love Outland, but there's something special about many of those original zones as well.

I read a YouTube comment the other day in which the author said something along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing heavily) that Classic made them realise that what they loved the most about Burning Crusade was actually levelling through the old world while having Outland to look forward to. This really resonated with me.

Back in the day, I wasn't someone who jumped through the Dark Portal on day one - I did have an Alliance character at level sixty, but I wasn't in any particular rush. I also levelled a Draenei mage with a group of friends, and started over on Horde side to join a guild there. At the time, it was all one large game to me, and I didn't feel the separation between the base game and the expansion that strongly. My levelling buddies and I would get some quest rewards in Hellfire Peninsula and then go back to Blackrock Depths anyway just to finally be able to beat the Emperor.

This feels very different in Classic. My priest hit level 58 the other day and everyone seemed to be flabbergasted that I wasn't running off to Hellfire Peninsula instantly. However, she had so much profession catch-up left to do, and so many dungeons she never even set foot in! I'm not saying I'll stick to old world content until I've done every last thing, but I don't see anything wrong with pursuing a few more goals in Azeroth before moving on. I'll still get to spend more than enough time in Outland later.

Sadly, spending more time on my lower-level alts has highlighted how everything feels ever so slightly "off" already. This isn't the levelling experience that I remember from original Burning Crusade... because in those early days the old world was still largely unchanged - things like the big levelling nerf and removal of most outdoor elites weren't implemented until later, but in Classic Burning Crusade, they've been there from the start.

And these were changes that were largely praised as good things. There were always people who complained that the levelling in Vanilla was badly balanced, with whole stretches of levelling "where you had to grind mobs because there weren't any quests to do" - but thanks to these changes, no more! The issue for me was, I never remember having that problem to begin with, so the "solution" just threw things out of whack for me instead.

It took me until now, levelling my alts in Classic BC, to realise that this is because levelling in Vanilla/Classic was actually really well balanced - but it was balanced around the idea that you would want to take part in all aspects of the game: do quests, run dungeons and skill up professions. And since that's what I did, things (mostly) worked out pretty well for me - the dungeons would plug any "holes" in the levelling curve where there weren't that many solo quests available, and the materials I grabbed on the way would be about enough to keep up with my professions without too much additional effort required (in most cases anyway).

The Burning Crusade XP nerf on the other hand rebalanced the game around just levelling solo via quests and doing nothing else... which means that things like dungeons fall by the wayside, and professions require additional grinding or heavy investment in the auction house to be kept up to par. I've been feeling the loss of dungeons particularly hard though, because while I do enjoy running them, I also like questing, and by the time I've managed to pick up all the dungeon quests I'm already almost out of the instance's level range, leading to me ultimately being funnelled into just skipping most of them.

But even on the occasions when I have tried to form a group, it's a time-consuming process that often results in people giving up before ever getting anywhere. Even if you do succeed in getting through a dungeon it might not be in the form of getting a proper party together but rather some kind soul giving you a free boost because they feel sorry for you after seeing you spam LFG for an hour. Nethergarde Keep isn't the kind of dystopia where everybody just buys and sells boosts the way people describe it on Reddit, but I've seen for myself that it can be discouraging to spend what feels like way too much time on forming a proper group simply because the rebalanced gameplay makes levelling dungeons not really worthwhile in the same way they were in Classic.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. I guess it just shows that the seeds of WoW messing up its own levelling experience were planted much earlier than I thought. Because at first glance it sounds so sensible: just reduce the XP required for each level, it still takes long enough to get to level cap! Make more mobs non-elites, so people can just do everything solo when there are fewer levellers around! But it all has knock-on effects, so that people group less because you made the group content less rewarding, engage with fewer aspects of the game because they just breeze past them while levelling, and it all snowballs from there.

Lonely in a Crowd

Burning Crusade is mostly remembered for its intricate raid attunements and the raids themselves feeling pretty hard at the time, but the classic version has been a reminder for me that it actually also did loads to expand the endgame for non-raiders. I've said before that I defy the notion that the vanilla endgame was all about raiding, but I'll fully admit that most activities outside of raiding didn't reward great gear and were mostly pretty undirected. This changed massively in Burning Crusade.

Regular quests were increased in number and gave more and better rewards, so that you had lots left to do after levelling up and could fully kit out your character in a decent set of gear purely from quest rewards. Once you were done with that, the game introduced what would soon become a staple of the whole genre: the daily quest, a straightforward, repeatable source of money if you had no other quests left to do and didn't really know how or care to make money by farming materials for other people.

Reputations went from a somewhat random feature that didn't really do much or anything at all in most cases (What was meant to be the point of Steamwheedle Cartel reputation anyway?) to a massive gameplay focus, with lots of new reputations that had vendors in obvious locations and offered amazing rewards at higher reputation levels.

Crafting became insanely powerful - I heard someone say the other day that they thought crafting in Burning Crusade was the best that WoW's crafting has ever been and I'm not sure many people would agree with that, but it did allow you to create gear that was as good if not better than a lot of raid gear if you were willing to invest the time into grinding out those skill levels.

Dungeons became more accessible, straightforward and farmable, and heroic dungeons were meant to offer a proper alternative to raiding.

Sadly I've come to realise over the past month that I don't care all that much about any of that in isolation. I mean, it's fine, these things are good ways to pass the time if you have nothing else to do... but frankly, I do have other things to do. I'm finding myself oddly close to my position back at the start of 2020, when I felt like I was "done" with levelling my night elf hunter and could only get myself to log in sporadically to work on some random goal or other.

But Shintar, you might say, I thought you were hyped for doing BC dungeons with your guildies? Whatever happened to that? Aren't you all caught up now and able to run with the other 70s? The answer is... that it's not what I expected.

Simply put, people aren't running dungeons the way they used to. I remember BC dungeons as these adventures with my friends that we did just because it was fun and to maybe help a particular person get a piece of gear or complete a quest. I don't remember them as these hyper-efficient affairs that are focused on checking as many boxes in as little time as possible, so I'm not nearly as charmed by hastily assembled pugs that are in and out within less than an hour and then never speak to you again. Or even runs with guildies that just want to repeat the same dungeon five times in a row to reach some goal of theirs as soon as possible and then want to move on and never come back. Yes, it gets things done, but it lacks soul.

I knew that WoW evolved towards appealing mainly to achiever types over the years, but I guess I'd never realised how much of that already started in BC, probably because player attitudes took a while to change. As someone who identifies primarily as a socialiser/explorer, it's just an incredibly sad affair. The best time I've had playing Classic BC in the last couple of weeks has been when I did the Blade's Edge quests with a friend. It was not efficient and way down on the totem pole in terms of upgrading my character's gear (earning some gold is always useful I guess, but not exactly a priority when you're not saving up for a specific upgrade), but it was fun. We read the quests, were surprised by things we didn't remember (very well) and joked about how much sense the tasks we were being given made or didn't make in context. I'm just not sure that sort of quest session every once in a while is going to be enough for me.

I've really been struggling to articulate this as well... I've had this cloud hanging over my head almost since BC started, but I thought that maybe it was just the changes happening to the guild and feelings of FOMO. But honestly, I wasn't nearly as fazed by player churn back in Classic, and in regards to the FOMO I sadly had to realise that catching up didn't help. I thought I wasn't getting to experience the things I wanted to experience because I was falling behind, but the truth is they weren't going to happen anyway.

Nobody was dying for me to join them at 70. Everyone's busy working on their checklists, and when it comes to dungeons, it's a dog-eat-dog world for damage dealers, where if you want to get into any runs, you have to be online 24/7 in order to be able to shout "me" within seconds as soon as a tank comes online and a dps spot opens up somewhere. From a utilitarian standpoint, I'm but one in a now endless sea of FOTM hunters. It's a bit of a running gag in the guild that people can't even remember my name and will call me by some other hunter's name, and I know that it's not malicious, but right now, on top of everything else... it does kind of sting.

I guess it turns out that my friendships with most of the guild apparently aren't as good as I maybe thought they were. This isn't to diss anyone or make them feel like a bad friend, because it's normal for bonds to strengthen or weaken as people's paths cross and diverge. It's just that... original Classic had us on the same wavelength a lot more often I guess. With all the "good stuff" requiring lots of people, there was nearly always room for more. Now whenever I log in, everyone's always already busy chasing some of their many personal goals, and while I'm sure many people would absolutely be willing to group up with me if I asked emphatically enough, I don't want to drag anyone away from what they really want to do, because getting my own objectives done over theirs isn't the point.

I am oddly reminded of the early days of Cataclysm, when I found myself somewhat frustrated by the fact that while the new dungeons were great fun in a guild group and often less so in pugs, everybody just pressed the dungeon finder queue button the moment they logged in because waiting for other guildies to come online was inconvenient. It was particularly tragic when we had what would have been a full guild group online within ten minutes, but of course the queues for tanks and healers were shorter than that so the people playing those roles had already been whisked away to some random pug. There may not be a dungeon finder in Classic BC, but with how focused and efficient modern players are, the LFG channel hardly takes much longer a lot of the time.

We'll see how 25-man raiding goes, which is supposed to officially kick off this week (somehow I managed to make it into the core team by the skin of my teeth). I also retain some hope that maybe things will settle down a bit over time as people run out of things to do (as weird as that may sound). As I mentioned before, things seemed pretty crazy at Classic launch as well; I just wasn't that close to the endgame part of that so I don't really know what it was like. Maybe everyone was also always busy spamming Stratholme for their pre-BiS gear? I don't know. It does seem like BC will continue the trend of giving people lots of solo goals to chase though, what with the introduction of more dailies/reputations with every patch as well as new tiers of badge gear. Plus anyone who seemed to be getting close to being "done" with things on their main so far has then immediately started all over again on an alt.

I'm just kind of sad that this is where I find myself one month into the Classic expansion I was looking forward to the most. I don't want to blame my guildies for enjoying the game in a different way than me. And blaming Blizzard for making the content more solo and small-group focused (more than a decade after the fact no less) seems silly. The obvious solution would be for me to be online more, put myself out there and work on earning more of my guildies' time to be more than just another nameless hunter, but... I just don't have that kind of time and energy anymore. I thought that after nearly a year in the guild I had earned some recognition, but it seems Outland means starting over from scratch on that front as well and I just... can't.

My Raiding History, Part 2: The Burning Crusade

The Burning Crusade hadn't been out long when I rolled a troll priest on a different server. The raiding friend I mentioned in my previous post had abandoned his alt in order to return to his home server and tackle the new raid content with his guild, and my levelling partner had rolled up a tauren druid there to join them. There was a certain amount of peer pressure on me to go along.

Like I said previously, my adventure in AQ hadn't really left me with any particular urge to raid, but I missed the company, especially as our little group of friends that had formed on Alliance side started to fracture and people were around less and less. Seeing things from the Horde's point of view while having some company didn't seem like such a bad option in comparison. And I wasn't really committed to anything.

Being a (relatively) lone leveller in a raiding guild, I didn't have a lot of interactions with my new guildies, but they did seem nice enough in chat, and a couple of them did take a liking to me and helped me out by boosting my priest through some dungeons. I remember getting pretty much all the caster drops from Shadowfang Keep for example.

I also remember a guildie who had rolled and levelled a pally for the guild (new to the Horde back then) running me through Razorfen Kraul and then using Divine Intervention on me at the end. I had never seen that ability before and was wondering whether he was doing something similar to a hunter's Feign Death. When I realised that he had literally killed his character for the sake of a laugh it absolutely blew my mind. I started to become fond of these silly people.

Just as I got close to the level cap, there appeared to be some minor guild drama - I was still too far removed from these things to really know what was going on, but the result was that the old guild/raid leader and some of his friends left the game, supposedly to start playing Lord of the Rings Online instead, which they thought was going to be so much better than WoW. It's the sort of thing that can really cripple a guild - but this one made it out fine. The new guild and raid leader was very good at what he did and determined to mould the guild into a raid force to be reckoned with. And moulding is definitely something it needed.

I think the first raid I joined may have actually been Gruul's Lair, since unlike Karazhan it didn't require an attunement (plus the scaling up from 10- to 25-man meant that there was more of a need for additional warm bodies to fill out the raid). I think it's hard to comprehend for people nowadays just how extremely clueless we all were - not just me, but most people in the guild. In the context of Classic people often mention how things were different back in Vanilla because players didn't have all those resources in the form of guides etc. and at the start of BC that was definitely still true to some extent as well.

This was particularly evident on Gruul himself, who was an extremely easy fight mechanically but involved a bit of a dps check... that we failed time and time again. Many of these people had been raiding casually throughout Vanilla, but in most of the Vanilla raids dps just outright wasn't required. Questions such as how to optimise one's gear or rotation hadn't even crossed people's minds. The raid leader had to tell us to shape up and threatened that people would no longer get invited if they couldn't hit at least 500 dps. This wasn't a particularly high requirement even back then, but for many of us it was still a challenge. I felt motivated to prove myself though, and started to work on things such as improving my gear and achieving my hit cap (also a new concept, as hit rating wasn't even displayed on Vanilla character sheets, even though it existed as a stat).

I also got into Karazhan eventually. Getting attuned wasn't really a problem as there were always people happy to help others through the required dungeons. The bigger challenge was to balance two to three 10-man teams with the consideration of 25-man progression - something of which I was blissfully oblivious at the time, as my involvement was limited to showing up when I was told to, but in hindsight it must have been one hell of a headache for leadership.

Karazhan was another place that taught me a lot of lessons. Again, most of the bosses were laughably simplistic compared to many fights today, but keeping in mind that many of us had little to no clue about anything it was just what we needed. Attumen the Huntsman taught people to watch their threat or die. Moroes taught people to apply, re-apply and respect crowd control... or die. Maiden of Virtue taught healers to keybind their cleanses so they could hit them quickly enough to save people's lives... or they would die. And so on and so forth. I wrote about my memories of Karazhan in a bit more detail previously.

I was having a good time, learning things alongside my guildies, killing new bosses and getting a lot better at the game. People were always happy to have me in their group because shadow priests were this strange new thing that hadn't really been considered viable in Vanilla but was suddenly extremely useful to have around. And we just got along well too. Looking back at screenshots I took during that time, I ended up capturing a lot of silly banter in guild chat.

We cleared Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and eventually Magtheridon's Lair (even if getting that damn cube clicking right wiped us way too many times). We were somewhat behind the curve, meaning that by the time we were ready to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye, the attunement requirements for them had been removed (though some of us still did the quests for laughs). That didn't make our journey any less meaningful though, and while there was some turnover in the roster obviously (my former levelling partner left to join a more progressed guild for example), we continued to go from strength to strength. It was a bit of a blow when our combined guild and raid leader suddenly lost interest in the game seemingly overnight, but by then our momentum was so strong that someone with a less powerful personality was able to take over and keep the show running anyway.

We killed Lady Vashj and Kael'thas, and started working on Mount Hyjal and Black Temple (also after their attunements had become non-mandatory). When Zul'Aman came out, a mage friend made it a personal goal to build a hand-picked 10-man team that would practice the instance until we could successfully complete the "bear run" - a timed challenge that would result in a unique mount reward for one person - and I was one of his picks because I was his friend and just that good by then. Beating that challenge as a team was probably the height of my WoW raiding career. I also wrote a post about that before.

We never made it into Sunwell, but didn't really care much at the time either. That instance felt like something that Blizzard had kind of tacked on at the end to keep the super hardcore busy - after all, Illidan was the real end boss of the expansion, right? We were working on Mother Shahraz in Black Temple when the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch applied a blanket nerf to all raids, but fortunately it didn't completely remove all challenge from the last few bosses. It wasn't quite the same when we finally killed Illidan, but we were still proud and felt that we had finished the expansion on a high note.

Things were about to change, however... (to be continued)

Blizzard Polls People About Classic Burning Crusade

So Blizzard accidentally made it official that they are already working on a classic version of Burning Crusade by sending out a survey to players asking how they'd want it to work (and pleading with them to please not spill the beans about this on social media - how quaint). This is great news for me, considering that I've said before that BC is my favourite version of WoW and I'd be over on a Burning Crusade Classic server in a heartbeat! I also said in my "What Will Come After Classic?" post from before launch that I considered a continuation into Burning Crusade the most likely option, so I'm pleased to see my suspicions confirmed..

Now, the specific question that players were asked concerned the matter of how characters should arrive on Burning Crusade Classic servers, with the following options provided:

1) Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server as it progresses to the Burning Crusade expansion, with the option to transfer to a Classic server that will never progress past level 60.

2) Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server that will never progress past level 60, with the option to transfer to a Burning Crusade server.

3) Start a brand new character from level 58 on a new Burning Crusade server.

4) Start a brand new character from level 1 on a new Burning Crusade server.

5) None of the above.

One thing this does confirm is that the current version of WoW Classic isn't going anywhere. You'd think that shouldn't surprise anyone considering how the project was pitched originally, but I saw at least one YouTuber be very vocal recently about how "obviously" all classic servers would have to progress into Burning Crusade because you can't just "split the community".

He's not wrong that this will further split the community, but I can't say that I consider this a large problem. People used the same argument to make the case against having classic servers to begin with, and yet here we are. I suppose if you've genuinely never played an MMORPG other than WoW you might not know this, but you don't need ten million people playing the exact same version of the game as you to have fun; all it takes is enough of them to keep a couple of servers buzzing and you're golden.

Anyway, accepting that there will be another community split with this doesn't mean that it's not going to be important to consider how this occurs. The first two options in the survey are interesting that way because I hadn't really considered what a difference it would make to put the onus of transferring on either the people wanting to progress to BC or the ones wanting to remain in Classic. Basically whoever gets picked to be the default gets to retain their server community, guild structures etc. while those transferring off under this model would have to rebuild from scratch - they might even get thrown in with people from several different origin servers. (I saw someone comment on Reddit that they thought this would be a great opportunity for Blizzard to fix faction imbalances during the transfer process, which is another interesting consideration.)

The two options talking about brand new servers initially surprised me because they immediately seemed off to me - how can you have an authentic Burning Crusade launch experience without people having the option to take their existing characters to Outland? And while I get that some people hate levelling, why would anyone choose a fresh level 58 character over taking what they already have? Is there a large community of people who hate levelling, haven't touched Classic but would jump into Burning Crusade to go straight to Outland? It just seems weird to me.

That said, I thought it was notable that WoWcrendor pointed out that even if these options are unpopular, there isn't really much of a reason to not have at least one or two completely fresh servers for the people who like the idea, as it wouldn't conflict with allowing everyone else to transfer to other servers. It would certainly be an interesting experiment, probably creating a slightly different economy and more importantly, an environment where new blood elves and draenei would be on equal footing with everyone else.

The notable thing missing from the survey options is any talk about copying characters instead of transferring them, which would be my preferred way of handling the matter. While most people are unlikely to have the time to seriously play multiple versions of the game simultaneously, it would be nice to have the option to play either version of WoW Classic without having to completely start over. Plus, forcing people to choose between one or the other is simply going to be an uncomfortable decision, and it seems inevitable that there would be those who would later regret their choice. Why make things hard for players and risk making them unhappy if it's not needed?

The one risk I've seen people mention in regards to character copy is that someone could load up a character with lots of gold and valuables before transferring and that this would then imbalance the economy on the destination server. That's a fair point but one I'm sure could be worked around with restrictions if needed. Though my favourite suggestion in the linked Reddit thread was to simply copy the entire server wholesale once Burning Crusade is ready to launch, so that things like guilds are preserved, there are no economy shenanigans, and players can easily jump on one or the other without having to worry about keeping or losing characters.

Since it's still early days one can hope that Blizzard will consider something like this when we actually get there.

What Will Come After Classic?

It may seem pre-mature to worry about this when the game hasn't even launched yet, but with MMOs the long-term prospects are always interesting to consider and Blizzard are clearly already thinking about them as well.

Syp made a pretty good post about this a few weeks ago, which I'll use as a jumping-off point. Like him, I see four overall options, though I'd group them slightly differently.

1) Do nothing

Likelihood: If Classic is even a moderate success, I'd say the likelihood of them not doing anything with it except maintain it is pretty low. They've clearly given it zero marketing spend, so I'll be surprised if they don't fully recoup their costs and then some from the subscription uptick on launch day alone, at which point ActiBlizz will want to know what they could do to make even more money from it.

My preference: Honestly, I would actually be OK with this. I'm not going to no-life Classic, nor is it going to be my only MMO, so assuming that I dip in and out of it to casually level multiple characters, just the content that's there will be enough to keep me busy for years. To be honest I find it kind of funny how many people seem to be concerned about lack of new additions when the average MMO player doesn't spend nearly enough time in any game to even get through just the launch content.

2) Fresh start servers

Daybreak has made a proper business model out of launching new Everquest servers, sometimes with special rule sets, and then merging them back into the existing ones once interest dies down. People just love that rush of a pristine new server where the world feels fresh and low-level zones are buzzing. We see this in the private server scene too, where many people love to jump in for the launch of a new server even if they've previously played a lot elsewhere, just to be part of the launch day crowd.

Likelihood: Medium. While it's obviously a proven model, I also think that it feels very obviously cheap, an easy way of wringing some fun and engagement out of very little effort. If the Classic team is really devoted to the game's old-school charms, I don't think they'd be in favour of this, as it goes counter to maintaining a sense of persistence and community cohesion. Generally speaking, "seasons" are all the rage in a lot of modern Blizzard games though, so I can see the idea finding traction among ActiBlizz decision makers. The question is who'd win out.

My preference: I like that "fresh start" feeling as much as the next person, but I also like persistence, and if I'm only going to play casually I'd probably rather continue working on my "main" characters than do Elwynn Forest for the umpteenth time. So while I don't think this would harm my own experience (unless they force everyone to start over somehow), it doesn't particularly appeal to me either.

3) Give more expansions the Classic treatment

Likelihood: High. To quote from a Forbes interview with J. Allen Brack:

Interviewer: So there's the opportunity for, if folks wanted it, the vanilla server, the Burning Crusade server, the Wrath server?

Brack: Yes. I don't want to trivialize the amount of work that's required to do that, or the amount of time. It's not something we can just dial up and dial down at any moment. But assuming a wildly successful Classic, we'll see what the future brings.

My preference: This would be my personal favourite option. I'm looking forward to Classic because Vanilla WoW is what I originally fell in love with, but Burning Crusade was easily my favourite expansion. So I'd like it if they made an entirely new BC server where people can either re-roll or copy existing Classic characters over to start at a higher level. I do think that the original Classic server should be preserved though, and nobody should be "forced" into a new expansion that they might not even like.

4) Start developing Classic in an alternate timeline

Also known as the Old School Runescape option.

Likelihood: Low. Again, while there is a precedent for this working successfully, it would require the largest effort and carry the biggest risk. I just think that all of the other options must look that much more appealing to Blizzard.

My preference: I get why people like the idea of this, but to me personally this is my least favourite option. First off, tacking anything new onto Classic would go counter to their original intent of (among other things) treating the Classic project as a restoration and preservation effort. We'd lose the original game a second time! Plus, and this may sound harsh, but I don't trust the team to come up with new content that's sufficiently in the spirit of Classic to not "ruin" the game for me a second time as well.

Which option would you prefer to become reality? I think the odds for my own preferences are pretty good right now!

The Power of Song

Just a little random story that I felt like writing down, and this blog seemed like the best place for it.

In my office at work we tend to have a random Spotify playlist playing in the background throughout the day, and it never ceases to amaze me how different songs coming up can instantly trigger all kinds of memories in me. One might remind me of an ex-boyfriend, another one of a place I used to work at, yet another one makes me think of a specific film.

Today a song came on that suddenly made me think of WoW, and for a rather silly reason at that. The song in question is Waterfalls by TLC.

Back in Burning Crusade I remember my guild working on Gurtogg Bloodboil in the Black Temple. I don't remember all the details of the fight, but I know that positioning was critical to it, and people had to make sure to stand in certain places and to move at certain times to make sure that the blood boil debuff would go on the right players. Also, the encounter was set in a room where there was water flowing down the sides of some walls for some reason.

One time after someone had caused us trouble by running too far away from his dedicated position, our main tank chided him: "#Name, don't go chasing waterfalls!" I'm sure it was nothing but a throwaway joke, but to me it was extremely hilarious at the time... so much so that just hearing the song now instantly takes me back to that moment even more than ten years later.

Funny how these things work.

Love for Burning Crusade

This week, Syp made a post getting nostalgic about the Burning Crusade expansion, and I was surprised by how little of a response it got (my own comment being one of only three).

With all the talk about Vanilla WoW I suppose it deserves saying that if I could choose to "live" in any WoW expansion, it would actually be The Burning Crusade. However, Vanilla is close enough (especially when you compare it to current WoW) that I'll take it. And as much as I'd love for Blizzard to also host BC servers (one day... in the far future... even though they've only just started on WoW Classic...) I fear that there isn't as much demand for that simply because all the Burning Crusade content still exists in the live game - strictly speaking anyway, unlike the Vanilla content, which has literally been wiped off the face of Azeroth: geography, NPCs, quests and all.

In one of those discussion threads about what WoW Classic should be like I saw someone make a comment which I thought was very pertinent. They said that if you're longing for Vanilla WoW with better class balance and the biggest annoyances removed, you don't really want Vanilla: you want Burning Crusade. "Like Vanilla, but improved" is definitely a good way to describe Burning Crusade.

Class balance in particular had its golden age during that time in my opinion. In Vanilla you didn't really want to bring a lot of classes/specs to raids. And from Wrath of the Lich King onwards, you wanted to "bring the player, not the class" aka it didn't matter at all what you brought. Only in Burning Crusade did we have a situation that actively encouraged diversity, making it beneficial to bring a mix of classes because they all brought different benefits to the raid. It was a great time if you wanted to be more than just "a damage dealer". I'm not saying that this system didn't have its issues too, such as that feeling of "needing" a certain class or spec that you might not actually have available on a given night. I still preferred having to put up with that to simply having my favoured play style (that of the buffing shadow priest) completely erased though.

Aside from class balance, BC also fixed a whole bunch of other little niggles. Like I mentioned in my reply to Syp's post, quest rewards actually became useful to most classes. Gear for specs like protection paladin actually started existing. The introduction of daily quests made it a bit more palatable for the casual player to grind for gold. Gear token drops and badges of justice mitigated bad RNG without sacrificing the joy of getting a good drop.

It was also my personal golden age for dungeon running. I can appreciate people's love for places like Stratholme and Blackrock Depths on a cerebral level, but personally I always found them confusing and tedious. BC's more straightforward challenges, such as the not-at-all-mazelike Shadow Labyrinth, were much more up my alley and I never grew tired of volunteering to run the heroic version and feeling accomplished by being able to down Murmur.

If I had to point out BC's biggest weakness, I might actually choose the setting. I seem to remember that back in the day, quite a lot of people found Outland to be pretty alienating. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, I heard more than one comment about being glad to be back on Azeroth. However, for me it was never an issue because I only came to Vanilla WoW relatively late, and the alien landscapes beyond the Dark Portal felt like just another natural extension of the world to me.

World of Warcraft Cinematic Reactions Over Time

Vanilla WoW



Cinematic message: This is Azeroth, a world full of varied locations and fantastic races who get into badass-looking fights with each other.

My Reaction: This looks amazing, can I be a shape-shifting elf lady too?

Burning Crusade



Cinematic message: Here are some new races you can play. Don't worry though, the old ones are still badass too. Watch a mage sheep a guy and a warlock incinerate murlocs. Hilarious! Also, something about entering the realm of a guy who says that we're not prepared for him.

My Reaction: I have no idea who that demon guy is, but still: looking great! Bring on those new races!

Wrath of the Lich King



Cinematic message: Watch this guy who looks like Sauron raise a skeletal dragon from the ice in a faraway frozen land. He also has a zombie army. The narration implies that he was once a good guy and that there's something like dramatic irony at work.

My Reaction: Well, I'm not sure what this has to do with me, but I guess someone's got to fight that zombie army.

Cataclysm



Cinematic message: Watch a giant, angry dragon wreck the world.

My Reaction: Oi, I was still using that! Quick, let's get him while he's still in Stormwind!

(I wish.)

Mists of Pandaria



Cinematic message: An orc and a human fight each other in a foreign jungle, which seems quite foolish considering that they are shipwrecked with nothing but the clothes on their body. A panda appears and kicks their butts in a humorous fashion.

My Reaction: So, are pandas the bad guys? And will this usher in a new age of peace between the Horde and Alliance as they unite to fight a common foe?

Warlords of Draenor



Cinematic message: Some orc in the past is about to do something very unwise by drinking green goo. But then things don't go as expected and the orcs beat up the big demon and the clearly evil guys.

My Reaction: Go orcs, I guess? Whose side are we on anyway?

The bottom line is, for an MMO trailer to inspire me, it has to make me feel like I want to be part of the pictured world. I can kind of understand why Blizzard moved away from the "look at random characters engage in cool fight scenes" style of the first two trailers, as it probably would have been hard to keep making them that way without things getting repetitive and boring after a while. But especially the trailers for the last two expansions have felt increasingly directionless to me. Why should I be invested in this as a player? This isn't advertising for a movie, where I'll be happy to watch someone else's story play out for two hours. I need to know what this expansion means for me.

Sure, some lore fans will go nuts over seeing Grom again, and seeing him refuse the demon blood and survive. But I reckon that for a lot of people, this is just going to be a bunch of orcs doing stuff that doesn't really relate to anything.

Burning through the Burning Crusade

After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, our Worgen duo is back on the levelling track. Having done a round of all the Blackrock instances meant that we entered Outland about halfway through level sixty. We then left for Northrend just after hitting seventy-one, and after only about two days or so of playing (though we did admittedly binge-play quite a bit during those days).

Questing in Hellfire Peninsula was indeed quite a break from the rhythm we had got used to in the revamped old world, with its very linear "get two or three quests at a time" formula. While there were still some mini quest chains with two or three follow-ups that needed to be done in order - generally speaking, the world was our oyster. I was strangely delighted to see a dozen quests or more in my log at once, and the whole map of the area lit up by quest markers. It was a little overwhelming, but also liberating. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted, in whatever order we wanted to! Of course this also had the side effect that we had the freedom to make "mistakes" by doing things in an inefficient manner, such as by going into certain sub-zones before we actually had all the available quests for that particular area. I didn't find it overly annoying though; mostly I was just slapping myself on the head and telling myself that I should have known better, seeing how I had done all of this before (even if it was quite some time ago now).

As an aside, we were surprised to find that cross-realm zones had turned Hellfire Peninsula into a hotbed of PvP activity, due to that quest to capture the fortifications. Nothing like level ?? death knights one-shotting innocently flagged questers before you've even had a chance to realise what happened. Some of them also flew into Honor Hold to gank the quest givers there and then do a little teabagging dance on them while all the people actually trying to level stood around /facepalming. It was funny to me in so far as I have a screenshot from circa 2007 of Hordies raiding Honor Hold and killing our quest givers, so the whole thing certainly brought back memories. However, at least the invaders had to put up a fight back then. It's less fun when they literally have fifty times as much health as anyone or anything in the area and are just ganking out of boredom.

We were sixty-three by the time we finished all the quests in Hellfire and decided to set out to duo some instances next. Every time I set foot into an Outland dungeon it strikes me just how formative those BC years have clearly been for me, because I instantly remember all the difficulties we used to have in each instance, the tricky pulls, which mobs had disruptive abilities and needed to be crowd-controlled. Yet every time I'm also disappointed by how easy those very same dungeons are nowadays, even when you're two-manning them. Somehow the lesson of "that's just how it is these days" never seems to stick.

One thing I did kind of like was what they've done with the quest givers. I knew in theory that they moved all the instance quest givers inside the actual dungeons some time in Cata, but I hadn't actually done any instances beyond the level sixty ones since then, so all the changes from Hellfire onwards were new to me. Basically they seem to have added some quests to dungeons that didn't have many to make sure that there would be a roughly even amount in each instance, and they changed the story and quest givers to make the whole experience more coherent if dungeons are the only thing you're doing. In some way that's sad I guess, considering that many of the Outlands dungeon quests were very intertwined with the story of the outside world, but to really get the whole context you needed to do both loads of quests as well as all the dungeons, which - let's be realistic - is just not happening these days, not with how quickly the levels fly by and the convenience of the dungeon finder. Considering that harsh reality, it made sense to edit some storylines out of the quests and just focus them on the quest givers that are actually there in the instance. And there is at least some internal consistency now. For example you save Naturalist Bite in the Slave Pens (well, in theory you do, assuming you don't let him die in the naga attack like we did...) and he then shows up as a quest giver in the Underbog and the Steamvault, so even if you've done nothing but dungeons there is some sense of recognition and progression.

After a couple of instance runs we continued our questing in Zangarmarsh. This is where I have to admit that my TBC nostalgia took a bit of a nosedive. In Hellfire I had felt liberated from the linearity of Cataclysm-style questing... but Zangarmarsh reminded me that, for all the progress the Outlands quests demonstrated from Vanilla questing, they still weren't without their flaws. Too much running back and forth all over the map, too many quests to kill ten rats or gather five boar livers with little variety to spice things up. When we finally finished the zone, I was pretty tired of Outlands questing and ready to just go the rest of the way via duoing dungeons. Which we did, as they gave more than enough XP, and since Outland has so many instances we never had to repeat anything either.

Somewhat disappointed by how easy things were, we continually worked our way up from doing dungeons a little below our level, to ones the same level, to ones up to three levels above us. By that point things did actually get moderately challenging, but mostly because any mobs that my pet tank didn't maintain solid aggro on would grind me into the dirt before I could even blink. Still, duoing Black Morass at sixty-eight for example was pretty fun as we rushed from one portal to the next, remembering just how challenging it used to be back in the day to control all the little adds.

We finished our tour of Outlands with a round of Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, after having done all of two zones worth of quests and all the normal mode dungeons once, all within the span of two days or so. It pains me to think of how busy this whole expansion used to keep us, and how it's reduced to barely a blink during levelling time now... but at the same time things like the tedium I felt in Zangarmarsh show that there is no going back to some things even for those of us with cases of severe nostalgia.

Oh, and I really wish they'd make the Shattrath cooking and fishing dailies available at level sixty. That "must be level seventy" restriction is very out of touch with the way the game works now, only giving people access to something that is effectively levelling content just as they are leaving for the next expansion.