Fortnightly Classic Update

I haven't been playing Classic very much these last few weeks, partially because the new SWTOR expansion is still keeping me very engaged, partially because Classic has been a source of melancholy for me more than anything else.

About the most interesting thing I did was some questing on my little warrior alt - which is where I ran into what may well be Classic's last remaining mystery: how to get the assassins in Southshore to spawn in order to unlock the quest Assassin's Contract. It's a quest that I picked up on many previous characters more or less by accident, but curiously I never ran into the little event while in town with my warrior.

I started researching it and was surprised to find - as evidenced by the top comment on the Wowhead page linked above - that to this day, nobody really knows how to trigger it. There are all kinds of theories, from timers to it being set off by players starting or completing certain other quests, but at the same time every idea seems to have been disproven so far. I did my own bits of experimentation, going as far as to bring another character to Hillsbrad to do other quests in the zone while periodically relogging to my warrior in town to see whether anything was happening, but to no avail. So much for a "solved game"...

Aside from that little bit of fun though, I've been feeling a bit gloomy. My questing buddy let his sub lapse for no single reason that I'm aware of, and I've been feeling his absence all too keenly. We'd been working on levelling not one but two characters together, my shaman and my priest, and I keep staring at the character selection screen with thoughts along the lines of:

• I really love both of those classes, I want to continue levelling them so badly...
• But we worked so hard to be in sync in terms of levels, I don't want to play without him and mess that up.
• When is he going to be back though, if ever?
• When I think about it, levelling these characters without him would feel very empty, I don't think I'd want to do it anyway...
• I do have his contact details outside the game, I guess I could just ask when/if he's planning to come back? I guess I'm afraid that I might not like the answer though...

That's the downside of getting too attached to someone in a gaming context. It's great to have someone you like and whom you trust to always be there and to provide help and entertainment, but when that partnership comes to an end for whatever reason, it can be hard to go back to the solo lifestyle.

Not that there aren't still other guildies whom I like... one of them in particular keeps asking me to do dungeons with him and I always feel bad when I have to turn him down, because I do enjoy his company too (and I have run a few dungeons with him and others in the meantime). But it's just not the same.

The raiding situation has also continued to be very meh. At first we continued to cancel raids due to lack of attendance, until one such evening led to people having a bit of a chat on voice about the future of the guild. There was still a surprising amount of desire to turn things around somehow, which was nice to see. A lot of people (including me) spoke out in favour of opening up the core raids to community members, because even if that meant sacrificing some control over loot and things like that, it would surely be better than not getting to raid at all.

Then it took the officers a full week to set up these new events, and during that time another bunch of people posted goodbye messages about stepping down from raiding or the game altogether. This Saturday (a change of raid days that was welcome to me as Wednesdays were now out due to work) we were supposed to go to Black Temple, but almost half the group was pugs.

On the night, we struggled to find a third tank, and when we started to clear trash with just two tanks, we wiped three times on the same pull of naga just before the first boss. One of the pugs dropped group silently. It was looking pretty grim from my point of view.

However, somehow we pulled through. Leadership soldiered on undeterred, and eventually we filled the raid and succeeded at killing that trash pull. Nothing we encountered after that was quite as bad either, and we finished the night with four bosses killed, which didn't seem half bad for our very first foray into the instance.

Of course, before I'll even get a chance to go again, Blizzard will be releasing Zul'Aman next week... which to be fair, is a small catch-up raid and not a replacement for Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, but it still feels very soon for them to drop another patch, which in turn provides more evidence that they want to get everyone through the remaining Burning Crusade content quickly, potentially to be able to release Classic Wrath before the end of the year.

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.

The Day Tier 11 Died

Tonight was my guild's first foray into tier 11 content since the patch. We had saved our old raid IDs that only had Al'Akir and Nefarian left alive, as those were the only two bosses that we hadn't managed to kill before the nerf. Al'Akir was a two-shot, to many exclamations of incredulity and some maniacal giggling from our guild leader. Before the patch, we had still been working on perfecting our phase two execution, though we had seen phase three a couple of times. A lot of the time the soft enrage caused by stacking Acid Rain had wiped us, when it got up to about sixteen stacks and was doing 8k damage per second to the entire raid. After the nerf, it doesn't stack anymore. At all. Sometimes it even dropped off completely. I felt completely superfluous as a healer, and was mostly standing around and twiddling my thumbs in-between the occasional Circle of Healing. That is not what I call a twenty percent nerf, Blizzard.

After our Al'Akir kill, we went down to Blackwing Descent to kill Nefarian. Unlike Al'Akir, we had never even attempted him before the patch, which I suspect helped my enjoyment of the fight a lot, since I didn't have a frame of reference for how things should have been, only a vague idea that a lot of small mistakes that people made and that were easily fixed with an extra heal here or there probably would have wiped the raid before the nerf. However, I couldn't know for sure. Also, because we were completely new to the fight, there were tactics to learn regardless, which was reasonably entertaining. Still, by the end of the night, Nef was dead as well. Everyone was quite happy to earn a new achievement, mount and title - including me - even if we were late to the party. Now we'll just try to get a couple more kills for the raiders who couldn't make it tonight, but otherwise we're completely free to focus on Firelands.

When the news about the big nerf to tier 11 in patch 4.2 came out a little over a month ago, I didn't make a post about it. Not because I didn't have an opinion about it, but because I felt that I had already expressed it well enough in a comment on this editorial at the MMO Melting Pot. (All the comments seem to have disappeared since then, but oh well.) Basically I was agreeing with Rebecca that the nerf wasn't a very good idea, as I still remembered the last time the devs implemented a raid nerf of such scale: patch 3.0.

Back then my guild was working its way through Black Temple and had just killed Mother Shahraz. After the patch we blew through the remaining Illidari Council in one or two nights and killed Illidan shortly afterwards. I remember healing through some insane AoE damage on the latter fight and thinking, "No way we can be doing this right, before the patch that would have wiped us three times over." In the end I was always left with a vague feeling of embarrassment in regards to finishing off that tier, because it just didn't feel like we had really earned it. To this day I always talk about how we made it up to Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, because anything that came afterwards didn't really count and just left me feeling empty.

I was worried that this would happen again with the tier 11 nerfs, and I think I was at least partially right. Killing Nefarian was still elating, because as I said we were all lacking a frame of reference, but I doubt that it will be a very memorable kill in the long run. Downing a boss after less than ten attempts simply doesn't make for a grand tale to tell the newbies about. Al'Akir was a complete downer for me though. The fact that the one mechanic that had made phase two interesting as a healer was culled completely and left me feeling unnecessary was depressing, and after all the work we had done to improve our performance before the patch, the actual kill felt like it took less effort than many of our previous wipes. Thank you, Blizzard, for reminding me once again how pointless it can be to even try in this game.

There was one positive side to the whole ordeal that I hadn't considered though: it allowed us to make our peace with tier 11 quickly and move on. In previous years we often suffered from internal disagreements about which bosses to prioritise if a new patch opened up better loot for less effort. Why "waste time" on Kael'thas if we could progress through Mount Hyjal and Black Temple instead? Why spend any more time in Ulduar and wipe on Yogg-Saron if Trial of the Crusader and the bloody daily heroic gave us better gear anyway? At least tier 11 is not presenting us with such a choice. (Going back for that one night hardly counts.)

This makes the situation somewhat different from 3.0 after all, because back then it was the end of the expansion and everything getting nerfed into stupidity was like a big "game over" sign. There was nowhere else to go. Now on the other hand we have the Firelands to dig our teeth into, and I'm actually looking forward to it. Let the trade pugs have fun in tier 11 if that's what the devs want. (One of my fellow raiders said that he cleared Bastion of Twilight on an alt in under an hour and that there were no wipes despite of lots of fails.)

Of course, we'll see what things look like in a few months. If we've killed Ragnaros by then and are only left with boring heroic modes, I might still find myself wishing that Blizzard had allowed us to finish tier 11 on our own time instead.

Revisiting the Black Temple

Tonight my guild decided to visit the Black Temple again, partly for nostalgia reasons, partly to show some people around who had never had a chance to go there before. It was great fun, but it also highlighted how different TBC raids were to WOTLK ones in places.

For example almost all the bosses and a lot of the trash mobs were completely immune to taunt. I noticed this pretty quickly since I was tanking on my paladin, and our aggro-happy cat druid in particular was very good at pulling mobs off me again and again. He died a few times and always apologised somewhat sheepishly afterwards, saying that it was alright to let him die for getting aggro all the time. The thing is, it wasn't actually my choice. If people pulled aggro off me and the mob was taunt-immune, there simply wasn't much that I could do about it. It was oddly frustrating and made me feel... emasculated, which is quite a feat considering that I'm a woman. Maybe that's why Blizzard made pretty much every mob and boss tauntable in WOTLK, as part of their project to make tanks feel more powerful and fun to play? In hindsight I'm not so sure whether it was such a good idea though, considering how careless it has made people with their aggro. After all, if they mess up, the tank can always just taunt it back, right? I think this is another area where I'd like Blizzard to go back to forcing the dps to think a little, even if it comes at some cost for the tanks.

Nonetheless we breezed through most of the trash and bosses with ease. On Naj'entus I had fun dragging the boss all over the place to collect the spines, since most people didn't seem to know what to do with them. I still had my old "/use Naj'entus spine" macro too! Popping the bubbles was completely trivial, but I remember when you actually had to wait for the healers to get everyone topped up before doing it. Waiting for the healers? Another strange concept these days.

Supremus was an uneventful exercise in not standing in the fire (not that it really mattered), though the sight of the volcanoes still made me twitch. I remember dying to those buggers so many times back in the day; their radius always seemed to be larger than was visually apparent!

The Shade of Akama was a lot quicker than I remembered, but as easy as expected. It was also a reminder that some jokes never get old. "Nobody talk to Akama!" "What was that? Talk to Akama?" Hands up if your raid ever wiped to him because someone chatted to Akama when they weren't meant to. Yeah...

I didn't bother to explain Teron Gorefiend to people as I expected us to kill him quickly enough that shadow of death would never become relevant. Since our group was very small this didn't turn out to be correct however, and one of our healers nearly got buried in a pile of constructs but was fortunately able to heal through the damage. I can't say that I miss mechanics like that. Nothing like throwing one person in the raid into a finely-tuned vehicle and expecting them to figure it all out within two seconds or the raid wipes. When you need a non-WoW game to practise for a raid, something is a bit off. (Too bad the original flash file seems to be gone; I would have liked to give it a go again.)

I remember Gurtogg Bloodboil being an extremely challenging fight back in the day. People had to watch their aggro and healing was intense, with non-tanks being forced to tank at regular intervals and the bloodboil DoT requiring constant dancing around and targetted healing (back in the day before all those raid-wide heals, bah). Not much left of that, alas, but then encounters whose defining difficulty lies in how much damage they deal are always among the ones that are easiest to brute-force once you outgear them by a sufficient margin.

The Reliquary of Souls was where we had our first wipe - and in a somewhat hilarious manner too, as nobody bothered to interrupt the spirit shocks in phase two, which led to most of the raid being permanently disoriented and doing no damage, until everyone's mana bars eventually reached zero and we died. It was an obstacle that was easy enough to overcome, but once again the whole fight struck me as very... unlike WOTLK raids. We remembered that back at level seventy the boss had to be debuffed to slow his casting as well, otherwise it was impossible to stay ahead of the interrupts, but of course you can't have requirements like that in current content anymore since you can't guarantee that you'll have the right classes for it in the ten-man version. (We didn't have a rogue or a warlock in our run either.) Phase one was also interesting with its complete inability to heal, the random aggro switches and the enrages that used to be tanked by a rogue with evasion up. Again these struck me as things that simply don't fit into the current raid philosophy anymore. What, you can't blame the healers for not healing enough? Aggro isn't firmly in the hands of the tank at all times? Non-tanks tanking? I think it's a bit of a shame to be honest, as I'll always remember this as a very interesting and challenging encounter, and I think the fact that it can still wipe you at level eighty if you're sloppy says a lot.

Mother Shahraz nearly killed us as well, though this time it was because someone pulled before we had a chance to remind people of her fatal attraction gimmick, which caused several deaths. I had to laugh when the aforementioned feral druid hesitantly looked at the purple line connecting him to two other people and asked whether he was supposed to run towards them or away from them, and I couldn't remember either. Encounters like Yogg-Saron and Blood Queen Lana'thel have definitely conditioned us the wrong way for this fight!

We spent a little time scratching our heads in front of the Illidari Council, trying to remember what they were all about, seeing how even those of us who knew the Black Temple inside out had only killed them two times or so before. Eventually we just bumbled in and attacked things at random, and as we died a slow death to all kinds of annoying abilities, the memories came flooding back. Oh right, the rogue vanishes! The mage has all these annoying AoE abilities (which still hurt at level eighty by the way, at least if you don't bother to move at all), the priest needs to be interrupted etc. On our second attempt we planned things properly and the fight went a lot more smoothly.

Illidan himself was a pushover in comparison, though an ardent defender proc while tanking one of the flames of Azzinoth let me know that I was doing so very sloppily. We also giggled at the way he was sitting there, all emo with Gul'dan's skull in his hand... and his dialogue and voice-acting sound so much like a cliché villain, Azerothian Super Villains pretty much asked to be written.

Overall it was a very enjoyable trip down memory lane, but as I said it also made me realise that there are some things that I miss about TBC raiding, such as threat actually being a concern for dps, as well as the fact that the demise of twenty-five-man-only raids in WOTLK meant that a lot of the crazier mechanics, like rogue-tanking or large council-type fights had to be abolished because they couldn't realistically be transferred to a ten-man format. I mean, the closest thing we have to the latter at the moment are the Blood Princes in ICC, and even I admit that they are more annoying than fun on ten-man because there are so many specialised jobs to do that you have few people left to do any actual killing. But in the larger raids I always considered that kind of specialisation very entertaining, maybe because my first ever twenty-five-man raid boss was High King Maulgar, and I thought that the whole idea of having a mage tank, a lock tank, two hunter tanks and what not was simply awesome.