The Continued Adventures of Tirrona

If all the recent posts about my Horde hunter's adventures made you think that I've completely given up on playing Alliance, let me assure you that this is not the case. As mentioned previously, I was holding off on playing the clones of my high-level characters since they were stuck with bad names after the transfer to Pyrewood, and I was hoping to reclaim their old names once Blizzard deleted all the inactive clones.

However, I eventually grew tired of having no information on what was happening in regards to that and being unable to tell whether anything had been done, so I went ahead this week and transferred all four clones to the era version of Nethergarde Keep. Two could reclaim their old names there, and the other two could at least get the variants of their names that I'd also chosen for them when taking the free server transfer in Classic BC, and I was ultimately happy enough with those. Now to learn a bit about the endgame scene on Alliance side...

In the meantime though, I've also still been playing my little night elf rogue Tirrona. She's both a herbalist and a miner, and unlike on Horde side the auction house is reasonably active, meaning that she's been doing quite well for herself financially just from me logging in every so often and putting up/re-listing some auctions.

In terms of play I did a second Deadmines run with her to finish off the last quest I had there (those damn miner's union cards...) and I've casually been running up and down Darkshore to finish up questing there before moving on to Ashenvale.

The other night I even had a fun little adventure when a level 20 paladin whispered me to ask whether I could help him out with killing some of the elites outside of Blackfathom Depths. I was literally on the opposite end of Darkshore but said that if he had a bit of time and didn't get lucky with a drop before then, I'd make my way down to help him out. So I did, and once I got there we got his Kor Gem after killing only three mobs or so.

I told him that I had a paladin of my own and remembered the epic quest for Verigan's Fist very well. When he mentioned going for the part in Shadowfang Keep next, I said that I had duoed that with another paladin back in the day (all the way back in 2020...) and that I'd be happy to help him out with that as well. So we set off towards the Wetlands, and I was happy to have an early excuse to pick up the flight points in Arathi and Hillsbrad, as well as the expert first aid book from Stromgarde.

Inside Shadowfang Keep, I enjoyed being able to use all my rogue's tools to maximum benefit, sapping enemies on multi-mob pulls and gouging them to give my pally friend a chance to heal up. We did really well and only had to run out to reset once. The first boss was pretty tough with his adds, but we managed due to the paladin blowing every single one of his cooldowns, including Lay on Hands. In the courtyard I led the way via expert pulls with my bow, and soon my paladin friend could loot his blacksmithing hammer too. The funny thing was that he then accidentally hit one of the horses and died from all of them aggroing on him, just as I was about to type: "Well, that went well!"

Still, he was really grateful, and I assured him that finding a group for Deadmines shouldn't be too hard. It was quite late in the evening by that point though, so I said my goodbyes, and the last thing I saw was that he was apparently a bit impatient and got a higher-level guildie of his to run him through the dungeon up to his quest item.

Either way it was a nice experience and made me want to play my rogue more just to have more small community interactions like this. I also once again joined a guild that threw me a random invite - it's not one of the bigger ones but a newly formed one called "Dusk". I don't know if it'll really do anything for me but at least being in it should protect me from more random guild invites for the time being. It also tickled me that I recognised the guild master's name as someone who had randomly waved at one of my Horde chars in Stranglethorn Vale. Later I found out that he'd previously also been on Hydraxian Waterlords like me, and I even found a screenshot among my older captures that showed him sitting next to my paladin. Classic era is a small world indeed.

Rhok'delar Again

A bit less than two years ago I wrote about my night elf hunter's acquisition of Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers, the epic bow from the max-level hunter class quest that starts in Molten Core. I already had a weapon better than the bow at the time, but I still enjoyed facing off against the four elite demons you needed to kill as part of it as a test of my skills and to prove myself as a "real" hunter.

Much to my delight, the first time my tauren hunter on era did a full MC run with my new guild, Majordomo dropped the Ancient Petrified Leaf that starts the quest chain, and I won it. This time the bow would be an upgrade too! Still, I wasn't in any particular hurry as I didn't have the Mature Black Dragon Sinew from Onyxia yet, so I took it rather slowly.

Also, having a blog was definitely a godsend in this instance - while the overall experience of completing the quest chain had definitely been memorable last time, it's not as if I had committed every single piece of tactical advice in regards to the demons to memory. I was really grateful to past me for taking such detailed notes about what helped me achieve victory against each demon last time, making the whole endeavour significantly easier this time around, despite my gear being a bit worse.

Artorius in Winterspring was my first target again, and things went pretty similarly to last time. I did die once when he managed to get his DoT on me, and had to reset a couple of times when things got hairy, but then I got him down quickly enough (and unlike last time, he didn't finish me off with his DoT either). I thought it was noticeable that I had a weaker weapon this time though as I had to kite him nearly all the way to Everlook. The most time-consuming thing was actually getting him to stop in a good place to start the fight - I initially got a bit confused about his pathing and actually wasted a lot of time clearing mobs in an area that ultimately wasn't actually relevant.

I didn't attempt any other demons that night, as I ended up assisting a guildie with some quests in Winterspring after depositing my demon head in the bank, so some time passed until I picked things up again. I think it was more than a week later when I found myself doing a few leftover quests in Silithus, and as I approached the south-western Twilight cultist camp, I thought to myself that I might as well have a go at challenging Nelson.

He had been by far the toughest opponent for me the first time around, killing me multiple times, but this time around things went much better and I didn't die once (just had to reset the fight a few times). More by sheer luck than any sort of planning I ended up encountering and stopping him very close to the Scarab Wall, and as it turned out the ruins in that area are far better suited to kiting the little bugs he summons than the ramp that I had tried to make work for me so desperately last time, based on what was apparently the recommended strategy.

Encouraged by my success, I hopped over to Un'goro to track down Simone there. Like last time, quite a few resets were required until I got the initial pull right, but aside from that she was once again not a tough fight. That said, my health got very low towards the end and I had to use a health potion, which I think was due to the fact that I had been slacking on my melee weapon skill this time around. As it was only around 280, I got a lot of dodges and parries, meaning I did a lot less damage to her and she more to me.

After that I had another break for a bit, with a small, related interlude: One day during my lunch break while working from home, the call went out to come online for Azuregos. Our five-manning adventures back on Hydraxian Waterlords not notwithstanding, I'd never actually killed Azuregos "properly" with a guild group, so I was happy to be in on the kill. I also won the Mature Blue Dragon Sinew, which can be used to redeem a quiver from the same set of quest givers that give the bow quest. On Tir I'd not gotten the quiver until much later, and not from killing Azuregos but from a random drop while farming elite dragonkin in Winterspring. It kinda tickled me that things went so differently this time.

Not much later I figured that I might as well lop off the last demon's head and I went to the Burning Steppes late at night to confront Franklin the Friendly aka Klinfran the Crazed. Here, too, my lack of weapon skill came back to bite me as he actually killed me once when several of my wing clips missed in a row, but it did not take long at all to re-try and get it right.

So now I've got my Ancient Rune Etched Stave, ready to be turned into a nice bow... but I'm unlikely to get it any time soon as I'm still not even attuned to Onyxia, meaning the sinew will likely remain a bottleneck for a while. Annoyingly, the Horde attunement chain features a step where you need to kill four elite dragons across the world, and basically nobody wants to do that unless they are on the quest themselves (understandably), and I haven't had any luck finding anyone else who is on that step right now. I also haven't quite reached the level of comfort or desperation to ask anyone outright to just help me out, even if it doesn't do anything for them, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came to that eventually. Still, I don't think I'm likely to get the crossbow from BWL in the meantime, seeing how it seems to be a rare-ish drop and somewhat in demand. Can't be lucky with everything!

On Trading and Farming

The state of the economy on my era cluster, specifically on Horde side, continues to both fascinate and vex me. Except for a handful of highly sought-after items, it's very hard to sell anything on the auction house, but I just have this urge to keep trying. (And I have noticed that the odds seem to be a bit better on weekends.)

It's really crystallised for me that I just see the auction house in a very different light compared to most players, who tend to view it either as an easy way of making money (sellers) or as a convenient way of having anything and everything they could potentially need delivered to their mailbox (buyers). It's not that I don't benefit from those things too, but they are not what matters.

I have this vague memory of my first days in WoW, levelling my night elf in Teldrassil alongside a more experienced friend, and him saying something like: "Don't vendor those light feathers, priests and mages need those for a spell." Somehow this instilled in me the notion that any drop that could be useful to somebody else is valuable and it should be my goal to get it to them. It made me view the auction house as a kind of community trading post where people share the bounty of rare materials that the game has bestowed upon them, and exchange items that aren't easily accessible from a vendor.

It's not really something I had to think about in a while because there just hasn't been any room for that kind of thinking in Classic, because there were too many people on each server that knew all too well what's valuable or not and tried to make money from it. I'd often loot an item that I thought would be useful to somebody, just to check the AH and find that there were already dozens of listings there, so that there wasn't much point in adding my own unless it was a trade good that was in demand in high volumes.

But in era, with only a few hundred of us per faction, things are different. I'll keep re-listing that Breath of Wind if it kills me, because eventually someone will need one for a greater resistance enchant on their cloak, I just know it, and I'll be their unsung hero for saving them from having to go out and farm air elementals.

Because that's what you have to do when the auction house doesn't yield any desirable results and you can't or don't want to rely on the generosity of your guild: You have to go farm it yourself. This isn't necessarily hard, depending on the level of the mobs that drop what you need, but it can be pretty time-consuming.

I mentioned in a previous post that I got a Barb of the Sand Reaver from AQ40 - since this is the best two-handed weapon for hunters outside of Naxx, I wanted to get it enchanted. A quick check for the required materials revealed a bunch of max-level enchanting materials and four Essence of Air. The enchanting materials are a bit of a tricky one - I do have my low-level mage to disenchant all kinds of stuff so I could get most of them myself, but Large Brilliant Shards are a bit hard to get solo, so I might have to lean on the guild for those.

Essence of Air was an obvious thing to farm myself though, and after a quick check on Wowhead I was reminded that those only drop from the air elementals in Silithus. So I spent a few nights camped out there, doing the rounds around the area. I generally think that these elementals are terribly unsatisfying mobs to farm, because most of the time they don't drop anything at all, not even vendor trash, but even so there was something very Zen about the whole thing. People need Essence of Air for their enchants. The only way to get it is to kill air elementals, because there isn't any being sold by other players. By doing this job, I was generating value. It felt strangely satisfying.

It all made me feel very philosophical really, about how we have this weird love-hate relationship with virtual worlds in that on the one hand, we want to use them as escapism into a simpler society, but on the other hand constantly strive to make them more like the real world that we're trying to escape from. That whole "everyone is moving to mega-servers" phenomenon is a perfect example of this, because on the one hand we want to pretend to live in a kind of medieval society, but on the other we want to have a virtual equivalent of Amazon where we can have access to thousands of consumer goods at any time with the mere push of a button.

I'm not saying I've had some huge revelation that having a barely functional auction house is somehow preferable to having a healthy economy, but dealing with the complete opposite extreme of what "regular" Classic has become does kind of highlight for me what has been lost along the way and I'm actually finding it kind of charming. It might well still be a while until I get that polearm enchanted... but when it happens, it will be something that I earned through actual gameplay and it will be all the more meaningful for it.

Musings on Shadowlands from a Casual Returner

I knew that it was a smart business decision by Blizzard to put Classic and retail on the same subscription when it was first announced, but I didn't think at the time that this was going to be very relevant to me (though I did comment in that linked post that I might "check out some of the new quest content while I'm subbed for Classic anyway").

What I didn't expect was that my husband had apparently secretly been pining for me to give retail another try, so when curiosity about the Shadowlands level squish and Chromie time got the better of me and got me to reinstall it, he pounced on the opportunity to play with me. We had done some levelling together during Mists of Pandaria many years ago, but I got bored after a few months, unsubscribed and concluded that the game just wasn't for me anymore.

But with Shadowlands... things have been different. I don't know if I would say that it's a better expansion than Mists of Pandaria, but the fact that I'm primarily subscribed for Classic has made it easier to drop in and out of retail without having to worry about justifying the subscription. This means that Shadowlands is the first retail expansion since Wrath of the Lich King that saw me subscribed and playing for its entirety (I'm assuming for now that I won't suddenly end up cancelling before Dragonflight).

This is kind of funny to me because it's also been my impression that community reception of Shadowlands hasn't been great, though I'm not sure how many people consider it "bad" exactly. For a long time there was this idea that WoW alternated between good and bad expansions, kind of like Star Trek movies and versions of Microsoft Windows. By that logic, Mists of Pandaria was good, Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, BfA bad, and Shadowlands was supposed to be good again but didn't live up to that expectation.

Do I think that Shadowlands was a good expansion then? Kind of, but I'm honestly not even sure what to compare it to. I used to feel bitter about retail because of everything it had turned into, but the creation of Classic largely neutralised those feelings, because now I can go back, and retail is just this "other version of WoW" that also exists and I'm okay with that. I treat it entirely differently, like a free-to-play game that I just dip in and out of, and so I don't have the same expectations and don't hold it to the same standards I would have had ten years ago. But then I also wonder: Does my opinion even matter? Saying that Shadowlands managed to clear the bar of ultra-low expectations set by a very casual returner isn't really saying very much, is it?

Regardless, I thought I'd jot down some of my final thoughts about Shadowlands, with the caveat that these are opinions coming from a very casual point of view, and I completely understand that more invested players have reasons to feel differently about some of these things.

First, let's talk about the world and zones. I do love my home of Bastion and its ethereal beauty, and I recently talked about how I think Zereth Mortis is very pretty, but all in all I've found Shadowlands a bit disappointing in terms of zone design. All the zones I didn't mention were "meh" at best for me, and I absolutely loathed the way verticality was done in Revendreth, even after unlocking flying. The fact that each zone was its own little "island" made the world feel kind of small, and having your home base in your covenant sanctum while having to go to Oribos for amenities and then still having to go to Stormwind for auctions felt unnecessarily inconvenient and awkward. Oribos as a hub city also never really grew on me. I appreciated that unlike in Boralus, everything was very clearly laid out, but I guess something about the whole city effectively being a giant indoor environment made it feel a bit oppressive.

I thought the theme of Shadowlands was very interesting to begin with, and I liked the way the levelling storyline introduced you to the different afterlives. I thought that had a lot of potential, and with so many important characters in lore that are already dead, there was a nearly endless supply of story threads to pick up and utilise if desired. Unfortunately Blizzard didn't really end up doing a lot of that. Instead we were mostly focused on the soap opera of Sylvanas and her victims, and the Jailer being the blandest of bland big bads, with the realm of death becoming just another generic backdrop for this.

I'm not mad about that, just a little disappointed, and I suspect that in terms of storytelling, Shadowlands will be relegated to a similar level as Warlords of Draenor, aka "that was an alternate timeline/dimension, we prefer not to think about it anymore". Honestly, they pretty much have to do that, because otherwise every future story death is going to be cheapened by a feeling of: "No worries, see you soon in the Shadowlands!" In hindsight, unravelling the mysteries of death in Azeroth so thoroughly may not have been the greatest idea from a lore point of view...

Covenants I really liked, and they are one of the systems where many of the criticisms levelled against them kind of made me roll my eyes. Did covenants have to be tied to abilities that affect player power? Probably not, but I don't think it was that big of a deal either. I was mostly annoyed by all the commentary about how covenants were bad because obviously nobody would choose RP flavour over maximising their output, so as someone who did exactly that with all of her characters, my opinion was mainly that the people who kept claiming that players like me don't exist can sod right off.

I also quite liked anima as a resource... at the beginning it was kind of annoyingly hard to come by, even if that fit with the theme of there being a drought, but I listened to the people who said that this was clearly a system that was meant to be used over the course of the whole expansion, and treating it as such worked really well for me, as it started out slowly and ramped up over time. In Zereth Mortis anima flows freely by now, and I kind of have it as a low-key goal to buy all the anima cosmetics for my main by the end of the expansion and then finish with a full reservoir.

Soulbinds and conduits were just unnecessarily complicated, made little sense lore-wise and I largely ignored them as a result, just setting some sort of default whenever they became available and then leaving it at that forever.

I liked Torghast because I never really cared about legendaries (and therefore never felt pressured into doing it for materials), plus it was a great duo activity for me and the husband. It was very fun to see how we'd get overpowered in different ways on each run as we ascended the tower, though regular runs tended to end too soon to let you really get the most out of it, meaning that Twisting Corridors was probably the best mode in terms of raw gameplay fun, while also giving almost zero rewards for some reason. I will say that most of the changes Blizzard made to Torghast throughout the expansion, such as adding a timer, were not improvements in my book and sidegrades at best. 

In terms of everyday activities, I was once again kind of confused by the criticisms I saw in some corners about there being nothing to do, that there were too few world quests and that they took too long. When an activity takes a couple of minutes at most and people already consider that too long, players' attention spans are even shorter than I feared. Personally I liked the variety and that there were a fair few that didn't necessarily require combat, and I was also quite content that there weren't a billion things to grind every day - which was definitely a criticism I had seen levelled against Battle of Azeroth.

Whatever the current solo power grind was for each patch usually kept me entertained for a few weeks at least - covenant callings, Korthia dailies, Zereth Mortis, but I'm at the point where I know that there is no point in doing these things longer than they are fun, because any power rewards will be totally obsoleted by the next patch anyway. Zereth Mortis has actually had surprising staying power for me as I maxed out the Cypher of the First Ones, bought all the toys and stuff from the Jiro vendor and still keep coming back for more because it's just so relaxing to fly circles around the zone.

As far as WoW's "core content", dungeons and raids go, I didn't do much of it. I mean, I did all the base expansion dungeons on normal and heroic, but those modes don't really "matter" for anything nowadays since it's all about Mythic+. I still need to check out Tazavesh one of these days... and in terms of raiding, I wrote about doing LFR for the first two raids and what an experience that was. The last raid is still on my bucket list. But beyond going once to see the sights, that content isn't really of interest to me at this point.

Reading all this back, I guess it sounds more mixed than positive, but the proof is in the pudding and fact is that I have continued to log in and play casually all throughout this expansion, sometimes even without my husband, which is the real litmus test for whether I'm enjoying myself or not.

Raiding in Classic Era

When I first started raiding in Classic, I quickly realised that I really liked the 40-man raid format, and unsurprisingly, it did not feel good when we downsized to 25-man for Burning Crusade. With that in mind, it's been enjoyable to get back into the bigger raiding format in era.

There basically seem to be two different approaches to raiding in Classic: the min-maxers who pump themselves up with every possible consumable and constantly try to improve their parses and clear times, and the "dad guilds". As far as the latter go, the name isn't really about having children or being male, but more about evoking the general vibes of middle-aged people who are mostly there just to hang out, tell bad jokes and might have to go AFK due to some real life disturbance at any point (which is obviously massively at odds with things like speed). Order of the Holy Fork was definitely the latter type of guild, and as far as I can tell it's the more prevalent mode of raiding on era in general. I've seen some signs that speed runners seem to exist somewhere, but I haven't seen any evidence of them on the EU PvE cluster at least.

With the generally purveying chill attitude and the small population, combined with the large number requirements to fill a raid, it's been very easy to get raid spots. (Conveniently, Warriors of Sunlight also seem to mostly raid on days when I don't have any clashes with my SWTOR ops team.) Here's my experience with each raid so far:

AQ20

This is the one raid for which I've not seen a sign-up in guild yet. The other day someone asked about it and was told that they "don't want to open up that can of worms". Basically it's not a very popular destination and I guess I'm not surprised because I saw the same in OG Classic. With a couple of exceptions the loot is pretty crap, and it doesn't have the same sort of long-term appeal that ZG does with its head and leg enchants and rare mounts. I guess the class books are something that should allow it to retain some relevance in theory, but based on how quickly I was provided with the hunter books from the guild bank, there doesn't seem to be enough of an influx of new players at max level to create huge demand for these.

ZG

I've been to ZG twice and both times were very fun. I didn't get showered with loot in quite the same way as I did during my first ZG in OG Classic, but I did win several drops including the Heart of Hakkar (again). I was kind of impressed that we did the Edge of Madness and the fish boss both times, with no shortage of materials to summon them. (Wushoolay blessed me with a very cool-looking bow.) Guildies also helped me with taming a Son of Hakkar to learn the highest rank of lightning breath for my wind serpent.

More than anything else though, ZG just seems to be the perfect place for people to clown around and do silly things, which was very much my experience in Classic as well. During my first run we actually wiped two or three times on the way to Jin'do due to trash cock-ups and I just thought it was funny because I'd seen the exact same kind of thing happen so many times before (there's clearly just something about those voodoo trolls). At one point an enhancement shaman standing next to me got mind-controlled and insta-deleted me with a giant windfury proc, which I think led to what must have been my first comment on voice chat as I couldn't help giggling: "That was amazing!" And during the second ZG, we somehow ended up with nine druids in the group. It made me smile when we were up to the first boss and instead of pulling, people got distracted by all the druids going into bear form and dancing together. These are my kind of priorities.

Molten Core

I've been in two partial Molten Core runs, because it seems to be that place where the guild primarily only goes for Thunderfury bindings, or if there's some kind of issue on the night that prevents the raid from doing something harder. I did get my Tome of Tranquilizing Shot at least, remembering with some bemusement how much stress that had caused me in OG Classic. I also won two pieces of tier one, which is pretty decent for hunters. More importantly though, Garr actually dropped his Thunderfury binding during one of those runs, which made a certain warrior very happy (he still needs the Geddon binding though).

Onyxia

Haven't been yet as I'm not attuned and while I'm working on it, the Horde Ony attunement is even longer than the Alliance one. I'm also under the impression that the guild doesn't go very often... I've been in a couple of raids where someone suggested also doing "a quick Ony" and it was always shot down.

Blackwing Lair

I've only been to BWL once so far, since it took me a bit to sort out my attunement, and once again I scored some phat loot in the form of two pieces of tier two, which is best in slot for hunters until Naxx. It's really easy to come in as a newcomer and get lots of loot because many of the regulars have been doing this for so long that they don't need that much anymore. It actually makes me feel a bit bad and I usually hold off with rolling/bidding to see whether anyone else wants the loot, but if it's just going to get sharded otherwise anyway... actually, in BWL we had a couple of ranged weapons drop that are not at all great for hunters as far as I'm aware, and one member of the raid whispered me repeatedly and seemed to get almost annoyed with me for not bidding on them. As if I wasn't already hoovering up half the drops anyway... felt very strange. On a different note, I learned that the black dragon eyes needed for the Horde Ony attunment and which you're supposed to get in UBRS also drop in BWL, which is neat.

AQ40

I've been to AQ40 three times now but only killed C'thun once. It's tough because AQ40 is where the difficulty starts to ramp up somewhat, to the point where having to underman the raid due to lack of sign-ups really hurts. I also remember this not being many people's favourite raid in OG Classic just because of how much of a slog the trash was and because most of the loot is only really useful for a select number of classes and specs. I didn't expect much of this one as a hunter, mostly just tagging along for fun and rep, and was shocked that I ended up with both the Silithid Claw and the Barb of the Sand Reaver in my last run, two really good melee weapons for hunters that we rarely saw during OG Classic and that were always in high demand.

Naxxramas

The guild runs Naxx once a week on Sundays, and my understanding is that they have six bosses on farm (Spider Wing, Noth, Heigan and Razuvious) but have been lacking the time to really progress any further. My hunter's not currently attuned to Naxx, but it is a lower-tier goal of mine to get that done eventually. I did push her Argent Dawn rep from friendly to honoured already, but I'd like to be at least revered and have better gear before I even consider going there.

However, even then I'm honestly not sure about it. The guild's current Sunday slot clashes with SWTOR for me, but that aside, while I'll always remember clearing Naxx in Classic with a lot of fondness, it was definitely another step up in difficulty from AQ40, meaning it's harder to just hang out and have fun in there because you absolutely do need to do some prep in terms of consumables and have to really focus during all the boss fights. We'll see I guess.

Classic Era Housekeeping

Aside from "normal" play, there've been two housekeeping matters on my mind in regards to playing on Classic era: names and bag space.

As far as names are concerned, my Horde characters were created on Pyrewood Village at launch and could therefore keep their original names once I activated/cloned them on era, but my Alliance characters all had to be transferred from Hydraxian Waterlords... onto a server where tens of thousands of names are already taken, including all the ones I had originally chosen for them. I quickly tried out different variants for my transfers until I found something that was available, but I immediately ended up hating almost all of my choices, either for being too different or for being what I call "accent abominations". (Some people are perfectly happy to play as "Lüké Skywàlkër", but I'm not one of them.) To be honest, this has been one major reason I haven't really felt like playing my Alliance clones so far.

However, with the retiring of the cloning service, there was suddenly hope. You can't buy name changes in Classic, but you can effectively force a name change during a server transfer by creating an appropriately named alt on your destination server. And since era has connected multiple servers into clusters, you can move from one server within the cluster to another without really going anywhere. Or that's been my theory anyway; I haven't had a chance to test it. I do feel vaguely dirty even thinking about the idea since it'd essentially mean paying Blizzard a premium for being awkward (a character transfer costs more than twice as much as a name change in retail), but names are important to me, damn it!

Unfortunately though, even though it's been over a week since the official retirement date for the cloning service and the relevant support article was updated to state that "all clones that were not activated before July 26, 2022 have been deleted", this has not actually been the case. I know this because I had some inactive clones of my own left, and they are still there, making the current situation the worst of both worlds, with people being unable to use the cloning service, and era players still locked out of all those names taken up by inactive clones. Responses to inquiries on the forums have been unhelpful.

All I can keep doing is check on those inactive clones of my own every other day to see whether anything has changed. Because as soon as those tens of thousands of inactive clones are gone, maybe there'll be some hope for reclaiming some "good" names for my characters - the number of actually active era players is relatively low after all.

The other issue I've been wrangling with is bag space. It's nothing new that Classic is quite stingy in that regard, which is why "bank alts" have been a thing pretty much since forever. I'd so far resisted making any in Classic though, because with only ten character slots per server I wanted to actually use them on playable characters, not on some level one doomed to sit in town and shuffle mail around. I tried to be efficient with my storage to some degree, e.g. by sending all my cloth to my tailor, but that was as far as it went. This is also another reason I've always been an active auction house user - because I'd rather sell things to people who need them right now than hoard them for some unknown future requirement, while hoping that I'd be able to buy anything from other people in turn that I actually might end up needing later.

However, Classic era has finally broken me in that regard. My troll mage tailor is only up to small silk packs, which are quite small, and my high-level characters just don't have room for all those currencies and endgame materials that I definitely can't rely on finding on the auction house later. Plus, with all those servers in the cluster adding up to thirty character slots, I figured I could spare a couple, leading me to create not one but two bank alts, one for food and consumables and another for currencies and other miscellaneous valuables. I still couldn't resist playing them a little though and got them up to level six - plus I could see myself levelling them even higher as time goes on. I just can't create characters and not play them.

P.S.: I already mentioned it on my SWTOR blog, but I'm taking part in Blaugust again! Whether you're a blogger yourself or just a reader, there's something for everyone. Read all about the event here.

Remember Rades

Yesterday I found out via Twitter that Rades of the Orcish Army Knife blog passed away this weekend. 

Okay, I’ve received his brother’s blessing to share this with Twitter at large. With deepest regrets, I’m sorry to tell you that the inimitable @_Rades passed away suddenly this weekend. To know him was to love him. He was the most creative, hilarious and kind person.

— Stacey (@_vidyala) August 30, 2021

He's still there on my blog roll, even though he stopped being a regular WoW blogger quite a few years ago. He never really quit or anything, he just moved on to other endeavours, only using his blog to occasionally post Onion-style news articles about whatever was going on in Azeroth at the time.

I can't say that I knew him well, but I knew him in that way bloggers often know each other... where they sometimes read each other's posts and occasionally leave a comment. Even if the majority of our interactions happened more than a decade ago now, I still thought of him fondly. Back in 2010 I nominated him for "best writer" for the Pink Pigtail Inn list of the year. (I wonder whether that still means anything to anyone other than Redbeard.) It's not a lot, but it's not nothing either.

So hearing the news of his passing made me sad. Death is always a gloomy affair, but even more so when the person affected was still very young and full of life. The "suddenly" in Vid's announcement indicates that there hadn't been any ongoing illness previously.

In a way I find these sorts of news even more profound when the person was a blogger. I think it's because with the way we put small parts of ourselves onto the page day after day in a way that feels quite permanent, it feels like we as people should also be around forever... even beyond that youthful sense of immortality that most of us have at some point whenever we manage to spend enough time not having to think about death.

But then something like this happens and the updates just... stop. It seems strange that his post from March this year mocking the Horde's talent for picking terrible warchiefs (as well as Activision-Blizzard's hiring choices... topical!) will now be the last thing to ever appear on Rades' blog. He was more active on Twitter, where his last update will now forever be a quip about (what I think was) his D&D campaign from a little over a week ago.

I suppose one bright spot is that with so much of what he did written down somewhere on the internet, he's left everyone with lots of tangible memories to go back to and remember him by. I went back through some of his old blog posts and it was quite a trip down memory lane. Like how his paladin alt Fabulor turned into this whole comic personality - on some posts I even found comments from my past self expressing my amusement.

I also enjoyed people on Twitter sharing their own favourite memories of him, showing off some of his post-WoW endeavours - from Vid reposting strips of From Draenor With Love, the webcomic the two of them created together for several years, to Anne Stickney highlighting his creations in Animal Crossing (also inspired by Fabulor, clearly) to a race track entirely made of beer signs he built in Wildstar.

It's clear that he was an awesome person beyond WoW and blogging, and I can only express my deepest condolences for his friends and family, for whom this must be a horrible loss. All the rest of us can do now is remember.

Classic News

Blizzard posted a "development update" yesterday, which is mostly about the next Shadowlands patch, but also contains some juicy news for Classic players.

First off, we've got confirmation that the next phase of Burning Crusade Classic will launch on the 15th of September, in a little less than three weeks. This will include the opening of Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye, which once again makes me glad that I stepped down from progression because I haven't bothered to continue working on my Eye attunement, and if I was still a core raider the raid's opening being imminent now would freak me the hell out.

I do wonder what the overall raid team's attunement status is... there's a channel to track this on Discord, and according to that not everyone's even attuned for SSC yet, and only ten people completed their Tempest Keep attunement. This might not be 100% up-to-date, but it does make you wonder whether people's efforts will suddenly kick into overdrive in the coming weeks... or whether the guild as an entity will actually have to start taking a more active role in helping raiders get attuned than it has been.

The thing I'm looking forward to with the new phase is the introduction of the TBC group finder - which was nothing like the dungeon finder introduced in Wrath, but simply a sort of bulletin board that allowed you to display your interest in different activities in a single place without having to repeat yourself in the LFG channel every couple of minutes. I used to love that tool and got a lot of great use out of it back in the day, even if a good chunk of the community at large seemed to find it too difficult to use for some reason. This is one case where I think the way people's attitudes have changed will actually be a net positive, as I wouldn't expect modern players to have any issues with using this feature - there are even addons for Classic that already try to simulate something similar by curating information from the LFG channel as it scrolls past, but obviously having it built into the default interface will be so much better.

Aside from the announcement of the next Burning Crusade phase, the other big piece of Classic news was that they're also "working on something for WoW Classic players who’ve told us they’d like a chance at a fresh start". There were already rumours about this flying around as the Classic PTR was recently updated to host OG Classic's phase one again, but with some of the quality of life changes that were added later, such as the Chronoboon.

The popularity of the subject of fresh Classic servers is something that still baffles me a little. I did expect Blizzard to release some eventually, but we're barely finishing up Burning Crusade's first phase at this point, and the state of original Classic is anaemic. Sure, there's something to be said for the excitement of everyone starting from scratch on a brand new server, but I struggle to imagine that this will draw in a significant number of players that aren't already subscribed for one of the existing Classic products or that it will retain a healthy population once the novelty has worn off. At best it might pull people off the existing Classic era servers and leave those even more dead than they already are.

Personally I can't see myself playing on such a "fresh" server at this point beyond maybe poking my head in at launch to satisfy my curiosity about how busy it is. It has taken me long enough to level any characters in Classic as it is, plus I've come to be very put off by any pressure to rush through content to keep up with the mob, so starting over from scratch while feeling hounded to level faster to keep up with the majority of the server's progression sounds like the opposite of fun to me right now.

Strange Times to Have Fun

In terms of public perception, WoW may be in the deepest hole it's ever been in, with the perfect storm of patches taking too long for the player base's liking, unpopular storytelling decisions, and now the whole behind-the-scenes shitshow on top of everything else. And yet... I've been having more fun in retail than I've had in a long time.

Sure, having a game to play with the husband that we both enjoy to some degree is always nice, but there's more to it than that. I watched a video a few weeks ago that contained the following line after the creator admitted to really having enjoyed Warlords of Draenor, previously widely considered the worst of all WoW expansions: "If you start playing WoW, no matter how bad [current expansion] is, you're probably going to have a great time because there's fifteen years of shit to explore!" And while I'm not exactly a WoW noob, I've been away from retail for so long that yes, I'm not just sitting here on the content of one patch, I've got about six years of quests and stories that I never did when they were current to look into! And that's been fun to explore on a casual basis.

As a bonus, a couple of friends from our SWTOR guild have also had their interest in WoW rekindled, to the point that we even made a little levelling group to take through dungeons together. It's been interesting to see some of the changes that had been made since I last played... for example I was already familiar with the new versions of Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance, but I didn't know that Blackfathom Deeps and both Razorfen dungeons had also been given a new coat of paint during Warlords of Draenor. Makes the dungeon levelling experience in retail even more different from Classic.

Levellers at the end of Gnomeregan. I'm the second from the left.

It's also been interesting to see just how much of the XP gains from running dungeons are tied to choosing the "random" option. We've been queueing for each one specifically since we wanted to do them all exactly once and in order, and that results in only about half the XP that you'd get with the random bonus. About one level per dungeon still isn't bad, but less than I'd expected.

The only thing I've been struggling with is how extremely boring my character has been to play so far, which is very ironic in a game that prides itself in being all about engaging moment-to-moment gameplay and interesting rotations. I went elemental shaman since that's a spec I never really played before (for a number of reasons) and a static group environment seemed like a good opportunity to give it a try.

The problem is that whoever designed the current iteration of elemental shaman clearly gave absolutely zero thought to how it would feel while levelling. Most glaringly, you're given a secondary resource called Maelstrom the moment you choose the elemental specialisation, but with my character in my twenties I still don't have a single ability to spend that resource, so it's just a coloured bar that slowly fills up and then sits there, permanently full, while I spam the same three spells that I've had since level eleven, never getting anything interesting from levelling up. From what I can tell I won't actually get my first way of spending Maelstrom until well into the thirties, so why give me that bar at level ten at all? At least I'm about to be able to start using chain lightning...

Classic Era

When I cloned my nelf hunter to the Classic era version of Hydraxian Waterlords on Burning Crusade pre-patch day, I noted that it was kind of sad to see only 32 people online there. Three months later, seeing 32 players online feels like a good night, as there've been times when I logged on and the concurrent player count revealed by /who was in the single digits. Not that I've logged on that often.

I first poked my head into Classic era on a Sunday afternoon shortly after the split, because I suddenly had the whimsical idea that I might be able to win the Stranglethorn fishing tournament a second time without competition. As it turned out, I wasn't completely by myself - there were a few other anglers there - but as it happened I did get lucky with my casts and won anyway. That was fun.

Someone whispered me then and invited me to their guild, aspirationally called <Choose Life>, where I recognised a few names from a number of different raiding guilds. Sadly the guild hasn't been able to live up to its aspirations as far as I can tell... of the 160+ characters in it, less than thirty have actually been online in the past week - not that I can cast stones, having moved on to Burning Crusade myself. Then again, I'd never planned to make "Classic era" my permanent home anyway.

One of the people who remained active on era was a guy that used to join my guild's community raids sometimes, which is why he was still on our guild Discord. A couple of weeks ago he suddenly whispered me to ask if I wanted to come kill Azuregos on Classic era (he's in <Choose Life> too, so he knew I had a character there). I said yes because the idea had novelty value to me - I'd been interested in killing Azuregos back when I was hunting for a Mature Blue Dragon Sinew for my epic quiver, but he was very heavily camped for most of Classic.

What I didn't expect was that there'd only be five of us, with the tank being a hunter pet. I also had to switch to my paladin (whom I'd cloned too at some point) so that we'd have two healers. I remembered hearing back in the vanilla WoW days that Azuregos could be tanked by a hunter pet if the hunter was specifically specced and geared for it, but I never expected to see that in action myself.

The experience managed to be both fun and boring: fun because it was novel and weird to kill a Classic world boss with only five people, but also boring because with only five of us the fight took half an hour.

Since then I've been back to help with killing Azuregos two more times, though I'm not even sure why. A lot of the loot gets thrown away with such a small group, which feels a bit pointless, and after the novelty wore off, spamming Flash of Light for twenty to thirty minutes straight is now just kind of boring. But I guess it's a tenuous connection to the WoW Classic I enjoyed so much, plus I can't deny that it makes me feel good to be wanted for something (even when I know the reasons behind it are purely utilitarian).

More generally speaking though, the state of Classic era makes me a bit sad. It was a no-brainer that most people would move on to Burning Crusade in my opinion, but I didn't expect the servers we left behind to be quite so desolate. The cities that once bustled with crowds waiting for world buffs are now just empty set pieces, and with auction house listings barely exceeding the single digits, the player economy has effectively ceased to exist.

From what I hear from the connected server clusters it isn't quite as bad there (as mentioned previously Hydraxian Waterlords wasn't connected to anything due to its status of the sole European English RP-PvE server), and while numbers are still small compared to what they used to be, things like pugs and raiding are still somewhat feasible on other servers. In fact, I've heard some people praise the atmosphere for being so much purer and friendlier now that the only ones left playing are those who really, really love Classic era, and I can believe that. Hydraxian Waterlords already had a pretty good community as it was though.

It does make me wonder what the future will bring for Classic. Will the BC servers suffer a similar fate once Wrath of the Lich King Classic comes around? And assuming the Classic train ends with that expansion (which I'm not so sure about anymore, considering Holly Longdale's Everquest background), what's going to happen to those servers once the Lich King (or should I say Halion?) is dead?

I suppose I just feel a little disappointed that the way Classic has been going is feeling more and more like just another new MMO release, where there's big crowds on launch day, but then massive drop-off over time, and once everyone's done the content once or twice they just move on to something else. I'm not sure what I expected exactly, but I guess I thought more people would be happy to stick around and simply exist in this beautiful virtual world that they missed so much when it went away. Currently it doesn't really look like it though.

Allied Races

Are y'all ready for another episode of "Shintar talks about game content or features that people cared about four years ago but that are very much old hat by now"? Well, ready or not, here it comes.

Allied races were introduced with the Legion expansion and even though I wasn't playing at the time, I remember there being quite a bit of hubbub around their inclusion back then. They are basically different species available at character creation that (in a post-level squish world) start at level 10 instead of 1, don't have their own starting zone, and don't have unique animations but offer different skins. People love additional customisation options of any kind, and I recall cries to make pretty much everything and everyone into an allied race, something I could only shake my head at.

Accordingly, I didn't pay too much attention to the feature when the husband I started playing retail again, but the other day I realised that with us having completed both BfA and Legion at this point, I had most of the requirements for all the Alliance allied races unlocked and only had to actually go through the associated scenarios/intro quests to trigger the unlock properly, so off I went.

The Kul Tiran quest chain was honestly pretty cool, even if I was a bit exasperated by the amount of flying back and forth cross-continent that it required. The scenarios for the other races were noticeably less impressive, though the one for the lightforged draenei still resulted in a very memorable experience for me, for reasons that were probably not intended.

You see, I did this scenario on my demon hunter, who's currently level 54 without ever having set foot into Shadowlands, but is wearing the best gear you can get from Legion content. The lightforged draenei scenario scales to your level, which means that it was filled with mobs my level or one below. Should be easy enough, right? NO! A single level 53 mob in that scenario was enough to absolutely destroy me.

After a couple of deaths I quickly learned to let T'paartos, the friendly NPC I was supposed to be accompanying, do most of the fighting as he was pretty strong and sturdy anyway. But then disaster struck, when one pull resulted in several adds and I followed my gut instinct of starting to AoE, which meant that I went squish instantly. Oh well, what's another death, right?

The problem was that dying in that particular spot caused me to respawn away from my NPC friend and on top of another mob, meaning that I got killed again right away. I tried to get up again a few more times but without much success - if I managed to evade one mob, I'd just aggro another. Eventually I waited for Metamorphosis to come off cooldown before reviving again and managed to clear a little safe patch for myself. Then I slowly and carefully started making my way back to where I last left T'paartos, taking great care to never start a fight with less than full health and several cooldowns available and to never get more than one mob at a time. Eventually I made it back to him and the quest could resume.

After that I was even more careful and did okay for a while, until we got to the big end boss, who seemed to do some kind of hard to avoid/unavoidable(?) AoE that killed me in a few hits even with cooldowns up. I tried to make it back in time while T'paartos was still fighting but got delayed by more mobs in my way. While I was still busy getting lost inside the cave this was all happening in, I suddenly got the message that the scenario was complete, as T'paartos had managed to finish off the boss on his own. That guy really earned his lightforged status, is all I'm saying. My entire armour was yellow from all the deaths by the end of that, but I guess it was kind of funny.

I did make both a lightforged draenei and a Kul Tiran alt so far and quite like them. I think I'm coming around to this allied race idea... if for no other reason than that still being able to earn meaningful rewards in old expansion content is something I like, as it flies in the face of the sort of planned obsolescence model that Blizzard applies to too much of its modern content in my eyes.

Wind and Fire

Stepping down from progression raiding was an immediate relief in so far as I went from constantly worrying about what I should be doing whenever I logged in to simply thinking about what I'd like to be doing that day.

Items on the "should" list included things like:

• Hit LFG for Mechanar and Botanica runs, to work on completing my Beast Lord set, which is best-in-slot for hunters until Black Temple or something silly.
• Farm Primal Air to finally get my gloves enchanted.
• Prioritise levelling my druid's alchemy to build a sustainable consumable pipeline for myself. (I said this in OG Classic but it's still true in BC - people who have a herbalist or alchemist can't really appreciate what a PITA consumable requirements can be if you can't get anything yourself but instead have to buy everything, all the time.)
• Figure out what I need to do for my Eye attunement and work on it.
  

None of these are things I definitely don't want to do, but only in moderation I guess? So I'm glad that I can now just do some quests or putz around, levelling fishing on an alt without feeling like I'm not being a "proper" raider because I'm not putting in the time to make my character the strongest she could be.

One thing that had been bothering me for a while and that I really wanted to rectify was that I still only had the slow flying mount. People who only played later expansions or retail probably have no idea just how slow "normal" flying used to be in BC. It's slower than your epic ground mount! Which often means that it's not actually any faster to go as the crow/gryphon flies than to take the scenic route via a flight path or even to follow a path on the ground.

It's not so bad when everyone's in the same boat, and I remember back in the original Burning Crusade, people with epic flyers were a rare sight during the early phases. This time around though, it seemed like everyone else was buying their epic flyers the moment they hit 70, seemingly without effort. (Obviously I wasn't the only exception... but the trend has pretty much been the reverse of back in the day, in that people crawling along on basic flyers stick out as rare oddities.)

This made me feel envious and I wanted to fix it... but I'd also set myself the extra challenge to go straight for the Cenarion War Hippogryph (the only appropriate mount for night elves in my opinion), which would also require me to hit exalted with Cenarion Expedition and raise an extra 1600 gold on top of the "regular" cost of epic flying.

Free to spend some time and money focusing on this particular goal, I was pleasantly surprised to read on Redbeard's blog that the Fire Festival was a great way of making money. (I feel a bit bad linking to that post like that because it was really about something completely different and that was only a side note, but it was where I first heard it mentioned...)

And what a way it was! Just visiting beloved locations in the old world (of which I hadn't seen much since BC's launch) and clicking on bonfires to be rewarded six to twelve gold for each. I don't remember that being a thing back in the day, but sometimes it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. My main visited all of them over the course of a few days and racked up several hundred gold that way - I stole the flames from the enemy capitals as well while I was at it and didn't even die once. Good fun!

This just happened to coincide with a heroic Slave Pens run finally pushing me over the edge for CE rep as well, so it "finally" happened:

With that major gold sink taken care of, I checked on my alts. My mage and druid didn't even have epic ground riding yet, but I'd forgotten that the price for that had also been reduced with BC, so I was pleased to have both of them be able to afford that right away as well.

Then I just kept doing the torch tossing/catching dailies in Stormwind for the rest of the event, because I found them a fun little mini game and they rewarded 24 gold for about five minutes of effort a day. 

There are plenty of other things left for me to do besides running Karazhan with my guildies, but I'm glad to be rid of that feeling of urgency. One thing I always wanted from Classic was the knowledge that the game I enjoyed wasn't going to go away in a few months or years and that there should be no need to rush to complete your goals. It's odd how easy it's been to get caught up in the rat race anyway.

A Step Back

I think it's been obvious from my posts about BC Classic that I've not been entirely happy with it. The "problem" is that I've not been entirely unhappy with it either. Instead, my feelings about the game have been oscillating in strange ways. Some nights I'd have fun with a friend, or a really good dungeon run, and I'd think to myself: Yes, this is it! This is what I love about this game. But then I'd log on the next evening and it wouldn't be like that at all; I'd just feel slightly weird and uncomfortable and log off again. What do you do in that sort of situation?

Other people have been having their own version of Burning Crusade malaise and there's been some discussion about it on the guild Discord, and a sentiment that many people supported in that conversation was to give it time. The launch of a new expansion is always a weird period of transition and so on. And they were not wrong in that! But how long does it make sense to wait for things to just magically improve and feel better?

I was hoping that getting back into large scale raiding would reinvigorate my passion by giving the guild as a whole something to rally behind. And it did work to some extent, but sadly that feeling was only temporary for me. I told myself that I'd continue raiding for at least a month, to give it a fair chance and not make any rash decisions based on a single evening's mood. However, the longer I allowed the thought of taking a step back to simmer, the more appealing it became - until I finally told the officers that I wanted to step down from the core raiding team. I felt a little bad during the conversation we had, because when you tell someone in a leadership position that you're not having fun I think it's easy for them to feel like they're to blame somehow, but I still think that it was the right thing to do.

Ultimately, there were three main factors to my decision.

First off, redoing raids I already progressed through fourteen years ago is just not everything I'd hoped it would be. The other day I found a diary entry in which I briefly described my guild's first Magtheridon kill back in 2007. Back then I wrote: I just have to mention that my Horde guild was finally victorious over Magtheridon tonight. After getting progressively worse at every attempt during the past few weeks, we finally got him down tonight. What a turnaround! As one of my guildies put it, Teamspeak was a "mass orgasm while trapped in a burning building". 

What a contrast to our mild surprise at everyone's cube-clicking competence in 2021! And yes, you could ask: What did I expect? I knew it wasn't going to be the same. But I had hoped that it was still going to be sufficiently fun, the same way levelling and running dungeons in Classic has been fun despite of those things also being activities that I've done before. It turns out that something about raiding is different though.

You could argue (and at least one of the officers did) that it might just be an issue with tier four being a bit short and boring and that things will be more interesting in tier five for sure. After all, that has Kael'thas and Vashj! And I do have very emotional memories of those as well... but in a way, that's only more of a reason to not want to do them again. Looking at how tier four has gone, I'm honestly a bit worried about just tainting my good memories of those fights as well by seeing them go down with a whimper instead of a bang.

Which sort of leads me to my second point: the raiding atmosphere. Again, I knew that there was going to be turnover, the way there always is with a new expansion in every MMO I've ever played, and I knew that some people wouldn't get raid spots. But I underestimated just how much I'd miss certain characters because of how much they contributed to the general mood that I loved so much.

Possibly the most striking example of this has been the departure of the guild's bard and recruiter, the paladin healer in full plate that recruited me back in August last year. I knew that leadership considered him a pain in many ways: not bothering to read Discord, constantly asking redundant questions during raids, always insisting on wearing his terribly sub-optimal suit of full plate gear for the sake of RP. Apparently he was told in no uncertain terms that he didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell at a core raid spot in BC unless he was going to change his ways from the ground up. And as someone who's familiar with being in an officer position... I kind of get why that was! Plus he and I weren't even really close anyway.

And yet... without him, I never would have joined the guild. His sub-optimal gear was what gave me the confidence to try raiding with the Forks in the first place, because as he himself acknowledged: If he could get away with healing raids in full plate, there was little to worry about in terms of pressure to min-max. There was that time when I had a bit of a fight with someone on Discord and he whispered me to ask if I was okay and offered comfort through some surprisingly sensitive insight. He also had a reputation for being extremely hard of hearing and unable to recognise anyone's voice on Discord, even that of the raid leader - but I remember one evening during some post-raid chatter on voice, I said something and he responded, addressing me by name... leading to me exclaiming, "oh my god, Inquiz, you recognised me by my voice" and feeling strangely yet incredibly flattered - a particularly poignant memory with all the recent instances of people seemingly not even remembering who I am. Many of the funny memories I captured in video clips or in writing on this blog featured him as well. And now he's gone, off to heal and recruit for some other guild in his plate suit. It's strange how much even people you barely know can contribute to the comforting tapestry of a familiar environment.

And with all these people leaving, and some others joining, things change. I'm not alone in struggling with this, so I was initially going to chuck it all up to a generic fear of everything simply being different, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised it wasn't as simple as that, which brings me to my reason number three for stepping down: The guild has been taking some very clear steps towards being less casual, even if it's hard to admit for some people. No more free consumables from the guild bank, more expectations to follow rules. And there's nothing wrong with that! But I don't really think it's what I want from the game, not anymore.

I started raiding in Classic almost bristling at the thought of gathering consumables and world buffs, but as time went on and we progressed into harder content, I saw the difference that they made and decided to put more of an effort in. I felt inspired by other people's dedication and work, and soon aspired to be more like them, and to in turn lift other people up by doing things like helping out with Tribute runs when I could, even if I didn't necessarily need one myself. But I also knew that if I couldn't get my buffs or consumes one week for whatever reason, it was going to be fine. We weren't concerned with how much dps people did; we just wanted everyone to show up and follow the raid leader's instructions please.

Yet now we have rules to bring consumables, and people like to talk about dps a lot. And neither of those things is wrong, but I've realised that they're not something I want to deal with at this point in my life. Fourteen years ago bringing flasks to every raid was a complete non-issue to me and I cared about my spot on the dps meter too. But now I just feel bad when someone (anyone!) gets told off to stop being a slacker and flask up already, as I'd rather deal with people not having consumes than being told off for not having them. And having raided without live damage metres in SWTOR for nearly ten years has made me realise how much toxicity they encourage, so that I really prefer for people not to be involved in this sort of e-peening, never mind mid-combat.

I'm kind of wondering whether a gradual move towards being more hardcore is inevitable for any kind of guild that manages to stick around for a certain amount of time. As content gets harder, games kind of force you to evolve with that increased difficulty or be left behind - and Burning Crusade raids are definitely a step up from Classic. The Forks did become at least slightly more progression-focused on our journey to and through Naxx as well - and it was the same thing for my old Burning Crusade guild back in the day. Being a complete noob myself and constantly improving my own gameplay alongside everyone else, it was certainly satisfying for me too at the time.

The problem is, I've been through this whole song and dance before. I didn't come to Classic for that. I kind of stumbled into raiding because the guild's atmosphere was so great and the company meant so much to me. They needed a hunter and I felt that I was being helpful by coming along. I was hoping that we could just continue hanging out in the same kind of chill raid environment that we'd had before. When I agreed to new rules like bringing full consumables to every raid it didn't feel like a big deal, but considering the ease with which we've killed everything, it seems that was about as necessary as worrying about world buffs in Molten Core - the exact sort of situation I'd been keen to avoid ever since I first heard about how people raided in Classic. The moment I realised that I'd kind of become what I used to despise was really quite eye-opening to me. Maybe more preparation will be needed to down bosses later on... but considering the limited amount of time I'm willing to devote to Classic in general, I just don't want to be spending most of it worrying about farming/preparing for next week's raid.

There are still many good people in the Forks, and I've certainly not disliked any of the raids I've been to. Any of the three major issues I just discussed probably wouldn't have caused me to quit progression raiding on their own, but everything put together is just... meh. I'm in a place in my life where I have so many things vying for my attention that reserving seven hours a week for something that's merely okay does not strike me as a good use of my time. I was willing to go the extra mile and raid in two MMOs at once last autumn because it didn't used to matter if I was feeling a bit grumpy one evening... in a Classic Fork raid, I'd usually be smiling or giggling about something or other within five minutes. People still make me smile sometimes, but not as much - after all, some of the players that were the funniest to me have been victims of the downsizing or disappeared for other reasons. Overall, progression raiding in BC Classic has felt too much like simply going through the motions to me... and that's just not something I've got time for anymore in my hobbies.

A Shaman's Life

Wilhelm writes about taming his first hunter pet and Syncaine is forced to learn how to play a rogue. One of the great things about Classic is that all the classes are very unique both in terms of gameplay and in terms of world view/narrative as it's portrayed through their class quests.

Shamans for example have their totems, and those totems have meaning to them. To you they may just be glowy sticks on the ground that give you buffs, but to a shaman, every totem they've acquired had its price.

I mentioned in my post about picking a class that I didn't actually level a shaman to cap until Wrath of the Lich King, but I did at least dabble in the low levels back in the day. Also, a lot of class mechanics were still intact in early Wrath anyway, though there were additional conveniences such as a decent UI for totem management.

One thing I'd completely forgotten though is that totems took up bag space back in the day. What, these items that my character is supposed to be carrying around with her at all times actually go into my bags? What does this game think it is, some sort of roleplaying game or world simulation? Shocking.

Something I hadn't entirely forgotten were the quests to acquire each elemental totem, though apparently I'd forgotten when you get the first one. I actually made it all the way to level ten without acquiring a single totem and was then surprised when my trainer offered me the quest for the fire totem, which I knew to be the second one. Turns out I'd completely missed the one for my earth totem in the starter area, something I immediately had to go back and rectify.

Shamanism mostly seems to be about imbibing strange liquids and then seeing things that other people don't see. The earth totem quest has you going to a place where all you see is a rock, but then you drink some sapta and ooh, a giant elemental appears! Groovy.

Shamans also like going to weird corners of Azeroth that you wouldn't even know exist if you're not a shaman yourself. For example the fire totem quest has you climbing an extremely narrow path in the very corner of Durotar to visit an elemental shrine on top of a high mountain. I actually thought I might have mentioned that one on the blog when I did it for the very first time back in the day, but I can't find any evidence of it now.

The quest also asks you to steal something from some cultists in a cave in Durotar, and I went to completely the wrong cave at first and spent about twenty minutes killing mobs inside until it started to dawn on me that something might be wrong. Then I googled the correct location, yet still had trouble finding it for ages because again, it requires you to follow a very specific path just to find that one small cave with half a dozen cultists in it who are just there to have their stuff stolen by shamans.

But the worst/most interesting one is the quest for your water totem that you get at level 20. Ask any shaman about their call of water and watch them break out into cold sweat at the mere memory. It's not actually hard... but for some reason it involves a ridiculous amount of running around.

You start just south of Ratchet, then get sent to the Southern Barrens, then to Hillsbrad Foothills (!), then back to the Barrens, then to Ashenvale, then back to the Barrens again, then you get sent back to Ratchet and since that's where you started you think that you might finally be done but nooo, one more detour to Silverpine Forest (!) please before it's back to Ratchet once again. And all that on foot, because remember, in Classic you don't get mounts until level 40. I suppose the fact that shamans also get the ghost wolf ability at level 20 soothes the pain a little, but it's still quite a trek to make for a single low-level quest chain.

Ironically, the call of air is then really easy from what I remember... though I might be wrong, as my tauren shaman hasn't gotten to that one yet.

Anyway, while all that may sound a bit ranty, I actually think that these quests are really neat, and the fact that you have to pay attention or overcome some obstacles just makes them more memorable. That every class gets these little stories that form a shared experience among all members of that class - and that class only - is pretty cool.

A Cow Goes To Westfall

After two days of binging on World of Warcraft Classic, I've already got so many stories to tell that I hardly know where to begin... but since what I'm thinking of today is a particularly easy post to make, I'll jump right ahead and tell you how my little shaman and friends went to run the Deadmines as Horde.

Basically, Nemi and I were undecided last night: we wanted to run another dungeon but couldn't decide which one. We'd just done Wailing Caverns in the early afternoon (and it had taken quite long), so we didn't want to do that again right away, and we weren't really of a high enough level yet to go for the next obvious targets, Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deeps.

Then she had an idea: How about... doing Deadmines as Horde? It's quite a hike and there are no quests, but it would certainly be an adventure! A quick shout-out in the guild we've joined immediately yielded some volunteers.

After a brief discussion about what would be the quickest way to get to Westfall as Horde, we took the zeppelin to Grom'gol and made our way from there, trying a number of different routes. Personally I went for "trying to swim up the coast", but being too close to the beach I got killed by crocolisks and murlocs multiple times. I should have followed the example of our priest, who had ventured much further out into the water and didn't die once from what I could tell.

 

I found it quite interesting to see this giant gate at the very Northern edge of Stranglethorn - presumably that's where the Defias ship actually goes out into the sea (if you ever wondered how and why there is a ship inside a cave).

We hung out at the meeting stone for a few minutes while some members who had travelled differently had to wait for their res sickness debuff to wear off. A number of Alliance came over and gawked at us, understandably. I'd been similarly surprised when I crossed a group of Alliance players upon exiting the Wailing Caverns earlier in the day.

Our group was quite a nice one, and the rogue amused everyone by insisting that the mage should conjure water for him too because he was thirsty, and then sat down to drink with the casters every time. (We're not on an RP server by the way.)

Also, at one point another guildie noticed our location and basically broke out in giggles in guild chat about what a mad bunch of nerds we were.

Most of the run was pretty smooth (not least because we were on the high end of the level range for Deadmines) but we did suffer two near wipes: one on an accidental pull of Captain Greenskin with loads of trash and one on Van Cleef himself. Someone with a res always managed to escape by jumping off the ship though, which caused the mobs to evade and then the rest of the party could be revived without having to do a corpse run.

As mentioned there are no quests for Hordies in the Deadmines, but I briefly got excited when I could loot the quest item that drops from Van Cleef. It turned out to just be a racist letter though.

Overall, it was a fun little adventure to occupy our evening. It's not something I'd ever done back in Vanilla or on private servers. However, one thing that's quickly becoming apparent about Classic is that it invites people to be playful and that old content is no reason not to have new adventures.