Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.

Discovering the Level 25 Dungeon Endgame

I last talked about my priest in Season of Discovery in the context of her hitting level 15 after running Ragefire Chasm once and doing some questing in Silverpine Forest. I didn't want to spend too much time questing in the Barrens - I have no particular love or hate for that zone, but solo questing as a priest can be a bit tedious in general. It's not necessarily inefficient - shield, DoT, wand plus being specced into extra wand damage and spirit tap means that you can keep grinding mobs one by one with almost no downtime; it's just not particularly fun (in my opinion anyway).

At least for me, being a priest is about playing with others and forming a team that's more powerful than the sum of its parts, so I focused on doing the quests in and around the Barrens oases to get all the dungeon quests for Wailing Caverns. I was level 18 and about halfway to 19 by the time I was done with that... those raptor horns, man. Because of how busy it was, I actually found it hard to find many Scytheclaws alive, and a quick check on Wowhead revealed that they share a spawn point with ornery plainstriders, so in the end I just picked a corner with a lot of those birds and went on a killing spree to actually get some raptors to respawn.

With all the quests sitting ready in my log and my bags freed up as much as they were going to get at this level, I opened the LookingForGroup channel, expecting to find a group quickly, considering how many of them were running at all times. However, as is Sod's law, what I found instead was at least three other healers specifically looking for Wailing Caverns groups. I rolled my eyes at how typical that was, but then spotted a tank looking for dps and a healer for Deadmines instead. And I thought, why not? There are no quests for that on Horde side, but it still drops some nice loot, and it would be something different. So I ended up whispering him for an invite and made my way to the zeppelin tower.

On the zepp I actually met up with our tank in person, another shaman like I'd had in RFC. I wistfully recalled the launch of Classic and how I visited the Deadmines on a Horde character for the first time. I remembered getting there by swimming along the coast and was planning to do so again, but when we arrived in Stranglethorn, the shaman set off straight into the jungle, and my inner urge to trust in and follow the tank kicked in, prompting me to follow. Of course, I then saw him get eaten by raptors within less than a minute, which quickly caused me to swerve back to the coastline, but I hadn't counted on just how many crocolisks were lying in wait there, causing me to die quickly too.

However, my spirit then appeared at the graveyard in northern Stranglethorn, and I saw the shaman take res sickness and continue north from there. That actually seemed like a pretty clever idea, so I followed his example. He immediately died again as he got eaten by a panther, but his death allowed me to get past without drawing attention myself, and I actually made it into Duskwood without further incident. From there I just followed the road to Westfall and was lucky enough to not encounter Stitches or any other mobs on the road. The shaman followed a couple of minutes behind.

It took a little while to fully fill the group and get everyone to Moonbrook as we had no summon available, but eventually we were off, with a group of all melee (our shaman tank was supported by a feral druid, a rogue and a dps warrior). They killed everything incredibly quickly, as they were all above level 20 and pretty well geared already. I thought how interesting that was, considering that on a regular server, people usually try to run dungeons at as low a level as they can get away with, to maximise XP and gear rewards before moving on the next thing.

Despite a mess-up on the boat that led to a massive over-pull and two people dying, we finished the dungeon in something like forty minutes. Since we were already there, I was happy to just reset and go again, and so was the rest of the group - with the exception of the warrior, who had to go. He was eventually replaced by a hunter... who was in Orgrimmar, so it took something like another half hour until he was actually able to join us in person.

I tried to make good use of the time at least by doing some herbing and fishing along the coastline. I also learned that the Defias Profiteer on the first floor of the Moonbrook inn is happy to trade with Hordies as well, which was handy for bag-clearing between runs.

We then did the dungeon two more times, which is kind of nuts to me because I usually never chain-run dungeons like that. But it was just going so fast, and it had been such a pain to get there in the first place that it made sense to make the most of it while we were there. I didn't get much XP out of it, probably because of how high-level the damage dealers were, and I only gained about a level from the whole adventure, but I got very lucky with loot, picking up several greens as well as the Emberstone Staff and the Corsair's Overshirt. Those were huge upgrades and I could immediately feel the difference in my mana regen after I equipped them.

I'm now planning to spend most of the rest of my time levelling to 25 in Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep. I know that's perhaps not exactly in the spirit of making discoveries in the outdoor world, but it is in the spirit of being a healing priest, and I can always do more exploring later, once I hit the current level cap of 25 and have geared up a bit.

As an aside, when I said goodbye to my group, I did so without any expectation to see any of them again, because I'm such a slow leveller nowadays, everyone else always gets away from me almost immediately. But one of them said "see you soon in BFD" and it hit me that I actually might see them again, because at least for now, they couldn't out-level me any more than they already had. And that was an oddly nice feeling.

Hardcore: I Like Caves

My ultra-casual approach to hardcore, as in, playing for an hour or two maybe once a week, has been pretty beneficial towards my mage's survival, as it means that I'm always rested and it's easy to stay ahead of the levelling curve, so the mobs I fight for various quests remain safely a level or two below me.

I did eventually get up and quest my way through most of Westfall, though I also did another brief stint in Loch Modan. One thing I realised during this (to my great amusement) is that I'm actually kind of starting to like caves, the very things hardcore experts always warn you away from as death traps.

I'm not denying that they're dangerous, but when you're in an extremely busy zone where it's hard to get tags on mobs and you need fifteen of a particular type, the local cave can end up being the only place offering some respite from the constant competition, even if it's dangerous. There's a certain risk vs. reward appeal to that.

I found it most noticeable when I entered the Silver Stream Mine in Loch Modan - I mean, I needed to be there for multiple quests, but even so there was a moment of hesitation when I tripped over about half a dozen player corpses right at the entrance. It was like a big warning sign that the kobolds in there were not messing around, and I noticed it for myself in my very first fight as well, as the fireballs from the caster types hit quite hard, even with Dampen Magic up and my character being two to three levels above them.

Nonetheless, even the entrance area to the cave was still annoyingly busy, so I decided to venture forth to the very back of the cave where seemingly nobody else dared to tread. Admittedly there was one scary moment when I found myself surrounded by respawns, but being a mage with sheep and first aid, I was able to make it through. (I'm starting to think that above anything else, hardcore is about being able to do basic maths on the fly to figure out at which point you're at risk of running out of health and need to take appropriate steps to counter that.) In turn I was rewarded with two ore spawns, two chest spawns, and a rare that dropped a nice green that I managed to sell on the auction house - I mean, that seemed pretty worthwhile! I had a similarly good time inside the Gold Coast Quarry in Westfall, a place that I'd usually rather avoid.

Another cave beckoning me to enter it were the Deadmines. I've noticed that people on hardcore tend to want to over-level their dungeons to some degree before going in (which makes sense), but I figured that my usual plan of going in at level 19 was probably still good enough. I sent most of my cash off to my bank alt and imagined my mage writing a letter to her to say that she was about to embark on an adventure that she might not return from... really puts running dungeons into a whole new light!

I have to admit that I was in fact a little worried about running a dungeon on hardcore. I'm the kind of person who's usually very chill when it comes to pugs and people making mistakes, but I couldn't help but wonder how it would make me feel to suffer perma-death due to someone else's mess-up. Fortunately that's a question I didn't need to answer this time around (yet). To be honest I can't remember the last time I wiped in the Deadmines anyway, and my group was never at risk this time either.

Actually getting a group was more difficult than I expected though. The server is still crazy busy (marked "full" on the server selection screen) and there are always new levellers, but a lot of people have also moved on to endgame. I don't see nearly as many death announcements as I used to, and the server-wide proclamations that yet another character has reached level 60 are coming in quite frequently at this point.

Also, another reason for me usually preferring medium to low population servers is that at high populations, Looking for Group chat is a sea of extremely fast scrolling text that's almost impossible to parse without an addon. I felt like I was going cross-eyed trying to keep an eye out for someone building a Deadmines group and eventually just decided to start my own when I saw a tank looking for a group. I thought that having a tank should make it a breeze to fill out the rest of the party, but it still took me about ten minutes to snatch up three dps from the fast-scrolling LFG chat (nobody ever responded to my own "LFM"), and for the healer I eventually just did a /who priest 20-23 and whispered one that was close-by in Elwynn Forest. I was surprised that they immediately accepted.

The run itself was super smooth and everyone was very friendly. For example two of the others were also miners, and we took turns on the tin nodes so that we could all get skill-ups. The tank was a level 23 paladin with engineering, and when I commented on his extremely professional pulling, he shyly responded that he'd watched a guide. Later he expressed concern whether he was pulling too slowly for us, but we all reassured him that he was doing great and that we would all rather be safe than sorry dead. We also all had a good laugh when we found a chest and not one but two people rolled a 1 on the roll-off. Basically, it was the perfect dungeon pug. I also hit level 20 during the run and completed all the Deadmines dungeon quests.

In other news, when I was back in town I spotted a guild name being advertised in chat that vaguely rang a bell. I looked at the name of the poster and it was "Eagle". I whispered him to ask whether he was the same Eagle that was a pretty infamous trade chat personality on Hydraxian Waterlords ca. 2020 and he confirmed that he was. Small world!

As for my mage, she's still in the same random guild and it's still active. Last time I said that its numbers appeared to have dwindled a lot, but since then I've seen what I assume to be the guild master go through several sprees of spam-inviting more people to get us back to the member cap as well as booting those who'd been inactive for over a week. To be honest I'm surprised that I've not fallen victim to one of these inactivity purges myself yet, considering that I log on pretty irregularly.

We'll see how things go from here. To be honest the first twenty levels or so are always the most fun on a new alt (on normal servers too) but as I have to roam further afield to get things done, my interest tends to dwindle. On the other hand, doing a few quests once or twice a week is a pretty low time investment as it is and not that hard to keep up with.

Pug Tales

I just wanted to share some notes about three pugs I had recently.

Blackfathom Deeps

This was on my mage. A warrior tank was the last one to join and in the same guild as the priest healer. This guy must have been a genuine newbie because he had virtually no idea what tanking means other than that he should be the first to hit things and wear a shield. I didn't see him use sunder or taunt even once, just rend and more rend. Unsurprisingly, this meant that aggro was all over the place as he couldn't hold threat at all, but nobody ever said anything. After all, his healer buddy didn't seem to mind!

Fortunately, everybody else was also really on the ball and we survived both pulling most of the murloc room at once and another really bad pull at the entrance to the water area. This prompted the warrior to say how awesome we were, at which point the ret pally whispered me that this was the worst tank she'd ever seen... though with a smiley, so she was clearly also more bemused by the whole thing than anything else.

In Kelris' room the warrior suddenly piped up to say that people in WoW Classic were all so kind and that he'd added us all to his friends list. Big "d'aww" moment. Then, as soon as Kelris was dead, someone - not the newbie, mind you - lit three of the braziers at once. I could feel the panic in the priest's voice as she quickly asked for the warlock to soulstone her, but we actually managed to pull through as everyone was very much on the ball again.

Just goes to show how much carrying you can do if you know what you're doing. Still, I would totally group with that warrior tank again. Though next time I might politely suggest using taunt at least.

Stratholme

On New Year's Eve I spent a good chunk of the evening being the pug in someone else's guild group. There was a call for a healer for a full Strat run (both sides) in LFG so I responded on my pally and it turned out to be a group of four guildies who were just looking for a fifth. They ended up inviting me to their Discord and we had lots of laughs - it was a fantastic run all around, and not just because we got lots of good drops too. My pally got the teal dress from Baron (which is BiS in terms of +heal for all healing classes until some pretty high-end raid drops), everybody got a Righteous Orb, and the mage book and flask recipe dropped for the happy guildies.

It was a bit of a bittersweet experience as it made me realise that it's been a little while since I had such a run with my own guildies. Since I've cut back on my playtime just a little bit in order to preserve my sanity I always seem to miss the five-mans - either because my role just isn't needed by the time they ask for more or due to timing. I've had multiple chats with people about wanting to run this or that dungeon, but then they are busy while I have time and vice versa and then they end up going without me. I miss that.

Deadmines

I ended up joining a Deadmines run on my dwarf priest that was... colourful. At least two of the other players were extremely weird stereotypes. The warrior tank, whom I got quite fond of, seemed to be an over-excited kid - he was friendly and competent enough, but loved talking in all caps for some reason and was always speaking his mind. The other priest was kind of the opposite and rubbed me the wrong way almost immediately - and not just because he joined as dps and then kind of usurped my healer spot. I didn't really mind dpsing that much, but he was just... weird. The best way to describe it is that he sounded like someone who had read an extremely detailed guide about Classic and therefore considered himself highly knowledgeable about the game but never actually played it before.

First he made everyone wait for ages because he wanted to finish levelling one more time because he thought it was of the utmost importance that he upgraded his spells before going to the dungeon. Then he handed out potions of mixed usefulness to everyone. He also tried to lecture us about kill order at one point. On the other hand though, he didn't even know that priest shields don't stack, and when we killed Mister Smite he thought that the environmental chest deco next to him was lootable. Just... weird.

Sadly, with all the delays to actually getting started (coughtheotherpriestcough), the whole thing took way too long. One guy then DCed by the first boss so that we ended up four-manning the rest of the instance, which made things even slower. With the lack of dps we wiped on Van Cleef and then another guy had to go so I didn't even end up getting the boss's head. Not a big deal I suppose as I meant to run the place more than once anyway, but one of my stranger pug experiences for sure.

An Epic Paladin Adventure

Amusingly, after complaining in my last post that my paladin alt just didn't seem to click with me, I naturally ended up playing her for hours and hours this weekend and had an absolute blast.

It started with me rejoining the LFG channel at level 19 to look for a group for Deadmines. This was a bit of an epiphany for me as I realised just how much I had missed being social and engaging with the server community in the past few weeks and months. There's something comforting even about simply sitting in the LFG channel and watching the mix of acronyms and inane chatter scroll by - it just makes the world feel so much more alive, and I'd missed that in my recent time spent doing almost nothing but solo.

The actual grouping experience itself was as entertaining as ever as well. I ended up finding a DM group pretty quickly, and while it was a relatively uneventful run in the grand scheme of things, it easily could have provided material for a whole blog post of its own. The group makeup was just so on point, it was almost like something out of a comedy skit: the tank was the competent straight man, the healer the self-professed noob, and the other two damage dealers were a night elf warrior driven by what I can only guess must have been an overexcited thirteen-year-old (based on the amount of bouncing around and typing in caps he did) and a quiet rogue who later turned out to be Spanish.

At one point the healer noticed a chest and pointed it out to the rest of us, just to then go ahead and loot it himself while the rest of us were doing our /rolls. I was incredibly amused by this, remembering that I had done that exact same thing during my first DM run back in the day, so I typed in complete earnestness: "It's customary to do a /roll for who gets to loot a chest :)", which I thought was perfectly polite, but the nelf warrior felt the need to follow it up with a "SAVAGE!!!" of his own, which I think changed people's perception of my intent somewhat and made the poor noob all defensive.

Later on, we did an accidental overpull on the boat and jumped on the wheel to evade it - all except the healer, who just stood there with a baffled look and let himself slowly get beaten to death while typing: "I don't get it." Also, the first time we pulled the boss, the tank went down without getting a single heal because the healer had been busy talking to the rogue about trading the parrot cage the latter had picked up from trash earlier. Good times all around.

Anyway, I dinged level 20 during this run and it suddenly hit me that it was time to start the quest for Verigan's Fist. I remembered it being quite epic when I did it on my paladin on Kronos, but since I struggled to get a group for Shadowfang Keep back then and wasn't particularly fussed about completing the quest, I didn't actually finish it until I was level 32. I also remembered Rohan writing about getting the Fist for his own pally the other day and talking about how satisfying it had felt. I decided to make it my new goal to get my own Verigan's Fist as soon as possible this time around.

I started with the ore shipment in Loch Modan, though I promptly got distracted by some other quests in the zone. (I finished the timed one to kill six buzzards with only seconds left on the clock because the area was annoyingly busy.) When I saw someone looking for more to do the two elite quests in the ogre area I happily volunteered. I knew that the ore was there as well, and while you didn't necessarily need a group to pick it up, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately it turned out that the ore requires you to first get a "sub-quest" in Thelsamar, which I'd forgotten to pick up, an embarrassment that I had to confess when we reached the broken cart with the ore and the other pally in the group tried to helpfully nudge me into picking it up. Fortunately he then had the brilliant idea to try sharing the sub-quest and it worked! So I got that done alongside the two ogre-killing quests.

We were chatting a bit during the whole thing - as you do - and on the subject of the paladin class quest I mentioned that I thought getting the hammer from SFK was the most annoying part as few Alliance players ever want to go there. My fellow pally noted that it was technically soloable, which I conceded while insisting that it was quite a pain to do so. "Well, we could do it together after this if you like!" he offered cheerfully. I couldn't believe my luck and happily agreed.

I just went to clear out my bags a bit while the paladin's player was meant to get some food, but he soon returned saying that he was feeling too ill to eat. He had been going on about having the mother of all hangovers earlier already. So we got going.

We did the orc quest in the mountain pass and actually managed to wipe on it, though we had a good laugh about the absolutely insane number of orcs we'd managed to aggro in the process. We detoured to Menethil Harbour to pick up the flight path there and then proceeded through Arathi and Hillsbrad.

We chatted a bit on the way, again as you do - he kept going on about his hangover and I had to laugh when he said that he usually hated the simplicity of Classic paladin gameplay but in his current state he was glad that it wasn't more demanding. We talked about retail and how neither of us had played it in years, and how you didn't get the sort of adventure there anymore that we were having right in that moment, trekking across half the continent on foot together. There were quiet times as well, when we put on auto-run and looked at something else for a bit, but it never felt uncomfortable.

Eventually, after a journey that seemingly took forever (though I hadn't been bored enough to ever look at the clock) we reached Silverpine Forest and the keep. We didn't have any trouble dispatching the early trash one careful pull at a time, though we got a bit too many on our first attempt at the boss. I died, but my comrade managed to make it out alive and was able to give me a res when he came back in. After that we were able to proceed to the stables without further incident, where we grabbed Jordan's Smithing Hammer and then hearthed out. We thanked each other for the company and logged off.

Later in the day I decided to log back on for the Purified Kor Gem. I was happy to just solo that one as I was a bit low to join a full BFD run anyway, plus I'd picked up the quest for brain stems from the naga outside the instance to go with it. I actually got the gem after only a few kills but then felt compelled to hang around to finish the other quest too.

I'd started my farming pretty buffed up as there'd been a head drop in Stormwind before I left, but annoyingly I then died from a cocky mistake, which meant that finishing off the remainder of the quest suddenly became that much harder without the buff. I'd just come back after my second corpse run when I spotted the same paladin that had run to SFK with me at the entrance of the cavern. We briefly reunited and killed some more naga and satyrs together (much easier as a duo!) until I had all my brain stems and he had his own Kor Gem. Then we said our farewells and hearthed again.

I figured that I probably wasn't going to get my DM run done on that same day as it was getting pretty late by that point, but when it was closing in on midnight I saw a group LFM dps in chat, and since it was a Saturday I thought eh, what the heck.

This run ended up being fun as well, though in a different way. We started with a warrior tank, a druid healer, two paladins and a hunter. The warrior offered that I could tank since I was higher level but I happily declined. I was doubly glad I did so because the hunter was constantly pulling for the tank and if that had been me it would have driven me utterly bonkers. Fortunately our warrior seemed to be much more patient, and even gave the hunter some of his own bullets when the latter realised that he was running low on ammo (how very authentic).

I think it was shortly after the first boss when the druid healer suddenly disconnected and never came back, so I whipped out my healing dress (no good paladin should leave the house without one) and took over the healer role for the remainder of the run. We did just fine four-manning, though it was a bit slow and the hunter started meleeing towards the end to "conserve ammo" which once again gave me flashbacks to me having an eerily similar experience on my own nelf hunter.

I know the way I'm describing this it sounds as if the hunter was quite annoying, but in reality we just had a good time. People got loot and there was silliness and banter. I made a gif out of the hunter trapping a mob and then accidentally hurling himself off the boat, which was the sort of thing I just found hilarious at half one in the morning:

Anyway, I got my lumber and returned to Ironforge so that Jordan Stillwell could craft my new hammer for me. I was pleased as punch that I had achieved my goal by level 23 and it had been one hell of a day.

More Nelf Huntering

I continue to work on my nelf hunter because playing Alliance again makes for a nice change of pace. She's up to level 24 now.

I spent a lot of time doing pretty much every single quest in Darkshore. Now there's a zone where I'll fully admit that I'm blinded by nostalgia, because I always remember it so fondly from my early days in the game... yet on redoing it I can't get over the stupendous amount of running up and down the road you have to do. I swear it's worse than the Barrens.

I guess I didn't mind so much back in the day because I was too utterly enchanted by the world to worry about things like efficiency, and I had friends levelling with me that I could chat with during our time on the road. Nowadays it's just tiring.

I also made the trip to Stormwind to do the Deadmines. Doing the pre-quests for that was an interesting reminder of all the little details that private servers get wrong: When I got to the step where I had to hunt down the Defias Messenger, I found him right away, but unlike the last time I met him on a private server, the little bugger was actually running and I couldn't catch him!

Eventually he dived into a whole cave full of Defias, including the notorious Pillagers, and I had to hit the brakes to clear out some room for myself. Then I waited until he had finished his business inside the cave and foolishly came strolling out again, thinking he was safe. That felt like a little mini-adventure of its own.

The actual Deadmines run after that was relatively uneventful, though I think it's noteworthy that our tank was a retribution paladin and that setup actually worked surprisingly well. Of course it helped that she was the highest level in the group and we were all very well-behaved, always letting her pull and giving her a chance to get aggro.

At 19 my hunter was actually the highest level damage dealer at the time, what with the other two being casters who were only level... 16? 17? I forget exactly, but I was definitely worried that we'd struggle to kill the last boss. Struggle we did, by wiping once, but we did get him down in the end. Things did get very slow towards the boat though, as the casters faced a lot of resists and it basically came down to me slowly shooting things to death by myself.

This meant that despite of having started with a full quiver, I noticed that I was almost out of arrows by the end, and decided to start preserving ammo by meleeing things on the easier trash pulls, to make sure I wouldn't suddenly run out at a point where it actually mattered. Being the seemingly dumb hunter meleeing things felt very old-school.

One interesting note related to grouping in general is that I've found the LFG channel on Hydraxian Waterlords to be pretty whack. On Pyrewood Village it's rare that people try to hold off-topic conversations in there, and if it happens it usually doesn't last long, not least because the channel is always very busy with actual LFG requests that would make it hard to have an unrelated chat.

On HW though, people are almost always chattering away about some nonsense in LFG, as if there weren't enough other channels for that. Last night they were on politics when I joined and talked about the taste of human flesh by the time I left for the evening. And here I thought people on roleplaying servers were supposed to be the sensible ones.

Finally, another piece of hunter-specific news: I couldn't quite get the idea of getting a unique cat skin for my pet out of my head, and became somewhat infatuated with the idea of taming Humar the Pridelord, who has a distinctive look that literally isn't shared by a single other mob in the game.

Undeterred by the many Wowhead comments about how he only spawns every eight hours or so and tends to be camped to hell and back, I jogged down to Ratchet to check under his special tree, and what do you know: He was right there, the very first time I looked.

So now I have two cats. I didn't plan to level two pets on this character, particularly two pets of the same family, but I'm feeling strangely attached to Spotty the saber and am not sure I'll be able to part with her. Then again, this is an RP server - maybe I can be a crazy cat lady?

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.

Tirri's Dungeon Journal

Just like during my previous nostalgia trips back to Vanilla WoW, I only really find the time to do dungeons on the weekends, which strongly limits how many of them I can do, but even so I've managed to squeeze in four runs on my druid so far. I thought I'd make a short post about them, since in Vanilla WoW, no two dungeon runs feel the same and it's always interesting to talk about your pugs.

Part of the idea of rolling a druid this time around was that I would have an easier time getting into groups, since tanks seemed to be in much higher demand than healers while I was levelling my priest. It hasn't quite worked out as expected.

I tried to put my first Deadmines group together myself, but despite of my (what I thought were) inviting shouts that a tank OR healer would be fine for the last spot, nobody took the bait. Suddenly a level 60 night elf hunter whispered me and offered to simply run us through. I've never been a fan of dungeon boosts, as they kind of defeat the point of having fun with the group gameplay, but at that point I was getting sufficiently tired of spamming LF1M that I accepted his offer (once I had checked with the rest of the group that they were OK with it too). The result wasn't very exciting and gave little XP, but I did get all my quests done in record time and the last boss dropped his Blackened Defias Armor for me, so I called it a win.

Later I joined another run as tank, and things went well enough until our healer suddenly disconnected while we were on the pirate ship and then never came back. We managed to clear a couple more trash pulls with the use of crowd control and by having me back off to heal myself when needed, but Captain Greenskin proved too much for us without a healer, which eventually forced us to call it a day. I would have been more disappointed if I hadn't already completed all my quests and also scored Smite's Mighty Hammer on this run.

Up next was Blackfathom Deeps, this time as a healer. Fortunately I do enjoy healing as well and had made a point of starting a set of healing gear early. This was a very smooth and fun run with a pleasant group, with the only disappointment being the realisation that the quest Twilight Falls is simply impossible to complete as a healer. I had the same issue on my dwarf priest earlier in the year. The problem is that quest items for some reason seem to ignore the normal loot rules on this server and are always treated as free for all, which means that they inevitably get picked up by the tank and melee dps before anyone else can get to the dead mob, and there aren't enough cultists in the instance to produce drops for a full party all on the same quest. If I happen to get into another run I'll give it another go (maybe if I can tank that one so I can hog all the drops for myself), but if not I'll just have to dump it - again.

Finally I picked up all the quests for the Stockade except the one from the Wetlands that has a prerequisite chain. The nice thing about the Stockade is that due to how short and easily accessible it is, people run it all the time and at all times of day. I actually logged on with only about an hour to go until bedtime and simply watched general chat for a few minutes - and what do you know, "Anyone for the Stockade?" popped up within five minutes. I was initially asked to heal again, but then the party leader (a paladin) suddenly decided that he'd rather heal himself, and we already had a tank, so I actually ended up doing kitty dps! Not my favourite thing ever, but if it gets the job done...

It amuses me that with a character specifically designed to make use of the apparent tank shortage I experienced previously, I only actually tanked one out of four runs so far. But then that's part of the beauty of rolling a druid - being able to play whatever role is needed.

Dungeons and Drama

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I'm continuing to level my dwarf priest on Nostalrius Elysium PvE, but progress is slow. One of the downsides of Vanilla WoW gameplay that I absolutely admit is there is that it doesn't lend itself very well to short play sessions, so I only really play on the weekends when I have the time to play for several hours at once. Unfortunately one or two such play sessions don't necessarily provide me with enough content for a proper blog post, so the blog stays silent even if I'm happy with having made a level or two of progress, especially since there isn't as much novelty to the process as there was when I rolled my first character on Kronos.

I'm currently sitting at level 25 and have only really quested in Redridge since leaving Westfall and Loch Modan behind, with all my other experience having come from dungeons.

First I tried to give the Deadmines another go, but that run was pretty awkward and ended up getting aborted halfway through. I should have known that it wasn't a good group considering that the leader was advertising via /yell instead of general chat. Still, the real problem wasn't anything anyone did... as far as I could tell anyway. We'd had a wipe in the forge and had just run back in, then had to run back out again when someone pulled a nearby patrol before we'd all reassembled, and the next time I ran in, it suddenly said that everyone had left the group simultaneously, which was way too much of a coincidence to have occurred naturally. Some sort of group disband bug? I don't know. Either way, since things hadn't been going so great anyway, I made no effort to whisper anyone about putting the group back together, and they didn't contact me either.

Then there was Blackfathom Deeps. What was funny about that one was that we spent ages looking for a warrior tank since the group leader (a ret paladin) insisted that this would make for the smoothest run. Then we finally found one, but the moment we actually stepped into the instance it turned out that he had neither a shield nor any interest in tanking. I don't know if he was intentionally deceiving us, didn't know what he was doing, or if the invitation issued by the paladin had been unclear, but nobody made a fuss and we just moved on with the hunter pet tanking. (Could have had that experience without waiting for half an hour, that's all I'm saying...)

Ironfur the bear was actually doing a pretty decent job at it for most of the instance too, but when we reached the part with the Twilight cultists, our pally DCed, never to return, forcing us to continue with one man down. This did not go well on the part with the braziers, where we wiped on every single one as far as I recall, and on some of them more than once. When we didn't wipe, I at least still died on every single pull (since I instantly got healing aggro from everything and the hunter was the only one trying to get things off me) and had to make the long corpse run from Darkshore every time because nobody had a res. By the end my armour was nearly broken and I was seriously losing the will to live, but at least I got a Rod of the Sleepwalker out of the whole ordeal.

In contrast to these, running the Stockades was a breeze, with a tank who seriously knew what he was doing and made it a great experience. I happily joined him for another round when it turned out that his friend had forgotten to pick up some quest items and needed to go again. I was disappointed only when I got my Seal of Wrynn at the end of the lengthy quest chain, as it was only a pesky green! I can only guess that this is another one of those "back in patch 1.x it hadn't been upgraded to a blue yet" things that the Nost team seems to love...

Speaking of the Nost team though...

The Vanilla WoW community continues to provide endless entertainment in the form of pointless drama. Remember how this whole Nostalrius relaunch came about? Because the Nost devs were ticked off that Blizzard wasn't responding to them and released their code and database to former rival server Elysium to recreate Nostalrius. While many were happy to get the server back, people were also shaking their heads at the Nost team's behaviour, as acting like that was an obvious slap in the face of Blizzard after they had considered themselves the champions of getting official WoW legacy servers previously.

Well, it seems that a couple of months later, they've finally realised this too, and are akwardly backpedaling by asking the Elysium team to stop using the code and data that they've been given only a few months prior. Unsurprisingly, the Elysium team replied with what can be summed up as: "Sure, we'll change the name from Nost to something else and go back to using our own core. Thanks for gifting us this massive community!" So nothing really changes except that the former Nostalrius team has officially disavowed private servers I suppose? One can only guess that this has something to do with Blizzard, whether they privately expressed an unwillingness for any further talks because of what had happened, or whether the Nost team is actually dealing with legal action that forces them to officially cut all ties with the project.

Little to nothing should change for those of us who are simply playing on the servers. Maybe my Seal of Wrynn will actually turn blue. And I guess I'll have to go back and re-tag the previous posts about this project "Elysium" instead of just Nostalrius.

Kalimdor Calling... and Other Travels

There's one thing no recreation of Vanilla WoW can bring back, no matter how faithful it is, and that's the ignorance of being a truly new player. I recall that when I started playing the game back in 2006, Elwynn Forest alone seemed huge to me. Then I realised that it was just one zone of many. Then I realised that there was a whole other continent waiting for me... well, you get the idea.

This time around, I know almost exactly where I need to go. I say "almost" because while I achieved Loremaster pre-Cataclysm, I "only" did so on Horde side, and even that was several years ago by now. I haven't been truly surprised by any of the content I've encountered on Kronos (yet), but there were definitely a few "Huh, I'd completely forgotten about that" moments.

For example, it had been quite a while since I last had to buy a book from a special vendor to train my secondary professions past 150. It was quite a trek over to Ashenvale to get the Expert Cookbook. With what little money I had, I bought a spare to sell on the auction house and I managed to sell it with a markup of 100%. Yay, arbitrage! A similar scenario played out when I had to wander up to the Arathi Highlands to learn expert first aid, and again I was able to make a tidy profit off the journey.

I also encountered my first Horde player while travelling. As I was making my way along the mountain road from Loch Modan to the Wetlands, I was suddenly faced with a "skull level" tauren druid in travel form coming my way. I froze like a deer in the headlights, but he just looked at me for a moment and then moved on. I don't know if he didn't want the dishonourable kill or just didn't care to gank either way. One mustn't forget that not everyone on a PvP server is necessarily out to kill the opposite faction non-stop.

Quests feel like they are all over the place by this point. There are half a dozen zones that contain mobs of the right level somewhere, but there only ever seems to be a small handful of quests that are in the right level range, so I'm constantly travelling round and round.

Finally of course, I'm dealing with the absolute insanity that is the paladin class quest for a levelling weapon. (This being Vanilla, I can't currently see my reward, but I've been reminded that it's Verigan's Fist.) Its instructions are so long that I received a "note" item in my inventory that's six pages long. Do you remember when quests used to give those? For this class quest, a blacksmith that works in Ironforge asks you to bring him supplies from the elite ogre area in Loch Modan, wood from the Deadmines, tools from Shadowfang Keep and some other thingamajig from Blackfathom Deeps. Considering that an instance run takes about two hours, and that's without even taking the travel time to places like SFK into account, wanting to complete this quest means that you're looking at about 6+ hours of play time just to finish what is essentially a single task.

It feels insane... but of course there is a certain pride to be had in completing your class quests. What kind of paladin would I be if I couldn't gather some simple blacksmithing materials? So far I've managed to get the stuff from the ogres and the wood from the Deadmines. (For my second run I healed and it went much more smoothly... just don't tell anyone that I stood at the back wearing a dress; it's very un-paladin-like.) Shadowfang and Blackfathom worry me a little because they are both in fairly remote areas where people don't often go - but on the plus side, levelling being fairly slow means that there is plenty of time for an opportunity to present itself before I completely outlevel the content.

(On a side note, I have now outlevelled the "real" Isadora - my first ever WoW character, whom I tried to recreate here - because back then I switched to playing a night elf priest on an English server fairly early on. Now there is definitely something very new about this journey.)

Welcome to the Deadmines

 This video was an instant classic - though in hindsight the part about the old instance getting buffed to 80 seems bittersweet.

After my less than stellar grouping experience in Redridge, the next time I logged in and had finally sorted out my bags, I decided to look for a Deadmines group again, vowing to not let myself get distracted this time. I mopped up some leftover quests in the Westfall area and kept an eye on general chat.

At first I ended up grouping with a mage, but after we hadn't got a single response to our looking-for-more requests in about fifteen minutes, he said that it seemed like the server was too quiet at that moment and that he'd try again later.

Not much later a guildie expressed interest in a Deadmines run and we teamed up. I didn't keep an eye on how long it took us to assemble a full group, but I reckon that it still must've taken at least twenty minutes. It didn't feel too bad though because I was using the time to run some more errands in Stormwind, such as smelting ore, putting things on the auction house and so on and so forth.

Eventually we had assembled the following group: me on my prot paladin, supposed to tank. I'm not sure going protection was a wise choice - I had initially forgotten that pallies didn't get their taunt until 2.0 (I started playing shortly before that, so my memories of what was introduced when are a bit fuzzy). The prospect of tanking without a taunt seemed more than daunting, but after I had seen people talk about it in guild chat for a bit I felt reassured, as most of them seemed to agree that it was manageable in dungeons and for off-tanking in raids. My guildie, a feral druid, said that she would be happy to dps or heal, and so did the retribution paladin we invited. Finally we also got a hunter and a warlock.

We were lucky that everyone was quick to make their way towards the instance, because when we tried to use the summoning stone, we didn't seem to be able to get it to work. I can't tell if this is a bug or another one of those things that weren't actually introduced until a patch or two after I started playing.

I felt proud that I had managed to gather up all the quests for the instance and shared the ones that others didn't seem to have. I said in chat that I would like to do the two quests with the dead miners just outside the instance and people were like "sure", but whenever I tried to go towards the area they were in, everyone else just ran off in the opposite direction until we were actually at the instance entrance. This didn't feel like the best start.

Things got worse: my tanking was useless. With nothing but a judgement every ten seconds and auto-attack (I had forgotten that consecration also used to be the 11-point holy talent), I simply didn't stand a chance against the warlock and hunter pulling things from range. On top of that, the druid only had bear form to dps in. The warlock yelled at me to taunt once, and I explained that paladins didn't have a taunt in Vanilla. I'm not sure he believed me. Either way, the feral druid soon started taunting instead and effectively usurped the tank position because I couldn't taunt back. It's a good thing I don't have much of a tanking ego or I might have felt offended.

As it was, we seemed to be doing okay the way we were doing things, with me sort of off-tanking, and there were no further complaints or accusations about bad tanking... or bad anything really. Things felt quite chaotic compared to the well-orchestrated trinity song-and-dance that I'm used to performing in today's MMOs, but we managed. Mobs were running all over the place, first because aggro was such a fickle beast with limited tanking tools, then because almost without exception they were all the type of enemy that tries to run away when they get low on health. However, everyone seemed to accept that this was just the way things were and made the best of what we had. We only wiped a couple of times when we accidentally ended up with too many mobs due to accidental overpulling. The hunter and warlock mostly stayed quiet, but the druid and the other pally were quite cheerful, and everyone was unfailingly polite. There was no ninja-looting, and people were constantly asking whether they could need on this or that or if someone else needed it more.

At the very end I even got to enjoy a moment in the limelight after all, when the dps decided to burn down Van Cleef while ignoring all his adds, which resulted in a massive amount of Defias spawning in quick succession... and I tanked them all. I even happened to record it! I liked how people initially even stopped what they were doing and just stared at me tanking the whole pile of adds (and typed "wow" in chat).



I didn't keep track of the exact time we spent in the dungeon, but I can confidently say that it was about two hours from start to finish. I'll be honest and admit that I actually felt pretty tired after that, even though it hadn't been a bad run! It's weird to think that people can probably run the revamped Deadmines on live in about fifteen minutes, even though the instance is the same length. In Vanilla everything just took so much longer to kill.

Pugging for science!

The other night I decided to finally pug my first heroic on my own, because after all, what would this blog be without bad pug stories? And how can I talk about enjoying pugging if I'm too afraid to go out there and do it myself these days?

I decided to do the illogical thing and not conduct this experiment with my priest, even though the fact that she's my main and almost fully geared from heroics by now probably would have increased my chances of success. Instead I decided to queue up with my druid, thinking to myself that if I failed too badly I could at least blame it on the character not being my main and not being very well geared. I guess there is a warped kind of logic there.

After about five minutes of waiting in the healer queue I was pulled into a heroic Deadmines in progress, just after the Foe Reaper 5000. The tank was in the process of explaining to some damage dealer that he was supposed to avoid something or other, to which the dpser replied with "it's just a game gtfo" and left the group. The tank thought that this was hilarious, and I have to admit that I was vaguely amused as well. An interesting moment to join in, but the fact that the person that didn't care about tactics was the one who was leaving gave me hope.

We made our way to the boat in a very messy manner, with several deaths on the way. Either a lot of those trash mobs have random aggro mechanics or our tank just wasn't very good. Or maybe he was just lacking focus... he randomly went AFK more than once, supposedly because his girlfriend was distracting him.

Ripsnarl gave us problems, and after a couple of wipes I made sure to double-check all the fight mechanics online to make sure that I wasn't doing anything wrong, since we had had one or two wipes due to me running out of mana after the boss had been beating on the tank for ages with full stacks of Thirst for Blood. More often than not we got blown up by adds though. The tank also yelled at the shadow priest for supposedly not dispelling some disease and ignored my comments about there not being a disease mechanic on this fight. I decided that it wasn't my fault and that all three damage dealers barely doing 5k dps was probably just a little too low. Just as I was pondering how to best bring this up, two of them decided to leave without a word and we got a death knight and a hunter as replacements.

The hunter alone did 10k dps, which immediately improved things significantly and we only ended up wiping at 1% after I had been buried under a pile of untanked adds and died. The hunter left again. Why? We were so close! Fortunately the next hunter we got as replacement did just as much damage and we eventually got the Admiral down.

Cookie was not a problem fortunately, but Vanessa ended up being somewhat tricky again. We actually wiped on Glubtok's nightmare because people randomly died in fires before we even had a chance to do anything to him. On the mechanical nightmare there were a couple of expected deaths to the lightning rods. I waited in a safe spot for everyone else to catch up and when I healed the last arrival, the death knight, to full, I suddenly had aggro from the boss - I guess he had pulled unintentionally? I died and so did almost everyone else but they managed to burn the boss down at the same time.

On Vanessa we stalled again, much to my surprise because I remembered that part as a fairly easy tank and spank from my last visit. For some reason the tank ran straight into the part of the ship that was a fiery inferno and died. I asked him why he did that and he said: "Stupidity. Sorry." What are you supposed to say to that? On the next attempt he fell off the boat and the boss reset. Hunter #2 left as well. Once again I could only wonder, why? We had beaten Ripsnarl and Cookie and were this close to completing the instance, why drop now of all times?

His replacement was a warlock and the tank asked to be summoned back because he thought that there was no way to get back onto the boat from the water. Rrright. Once he had found his way after all and we were trying to buff up and get ready to kill her for real this time, the death knight's ghoul decided to pull the boss for us while everyone was on half health and mana and we eventually wiped again. It's a good thing that I have a much higher tolerance for incompetence than for malice.

Being a very bad pug scientist, I forgot to actually count the number of times that I died, but considering that my gear had gone from fully repaired to yellow by the time we killed Vanessa and that my guild has the Reinforce (rank two) guild perk, I must have racked up eleven or twelve deaths. I was rewarded for this with 210 justice points, my druid's first 70 valor points, no useful loot and a Chaos Orb that I can't use yet but which defaulted to me anyway since nobody else in the group had any of the right crafting professions. I'm not sure it was worth it.

Still, I think the experience showed that it's quite possible to pug Cataclysm heroics if you're sufficiently patient and persistent. I mean, I wonder how many of the dpsers that left the group after a wipe then went on to complain to someone about how much we all sucked and how pugging heroics is clearly impossible.

Reporting from Ragefire Chasm and the Deadmines

Even without heirlooms or restedness, levelling still feels too fast to me. I want to see the new quests, but I also can't stay away from instances entirely and that's already enough to throw my questing completely out of whack. By the time I finished the Northern Barrens, most of the quests and mobs there were already grey to me, and all because I had done a couple of RFC and DM runs... I guess it's good for people who like to level using only one part of the game or who really like to pick and choose their content, but for me... not so much.

I chose to make my new troll druid feral but didn't feel like tanking, so I queued as dps... and as healer, since I healed low-level instances as an off-spec very successfully in the past. I do have to say though, I'm now not sure anymore whether that's such a good idea, at least not with random groups. It's far from impossible, but I still found it a lot harder than I expected, even though I had collected a full set of int gear for healing.

Mana was the biggest issue - healers all get meditation at level ten now if they choose to go resto or holy, and I reckon that not having that as an off-spec healer was what made the biggest difference. Spell scaling was another problem: in the past I used to compensate for off-spec healing by only queueing for instances for which I was on the higher end of the level range, using the fact that the extra levels had increased my mana pool to my advantage. However, nowadays the cost of my spells increases with each level as well, meaning that being a few levels higher doesn't help at all - my mana pool will still only be good for x number of spells. If anything I found it more difficult to heal once I hit twenty or so, since it was around that time that I seemed to lose the massive regeneration bonus that all the low levels get these days.

Some of it might also be a class-specific problem however. For example I had a run in which I was a kitty and our healer was a shaman in pretty crappy gear, but his mana bar hardly ever seemed to move at all. After observing him for a little while I noticed that he was making a point of using his super mana-efficient heal, healing wave, most of the time. Paladins and priests get their version at low levels as well, but druids still don't get nourish until level seventy-eight. Ouch! This left me with only rejuvenation, regrowth and healing touch in my toolbox. (Compare the 26-35% of base mana cost to nourish's 10%!) Rejuvenation worked reasonably well, but I needed a direct heal to cover damage spikes as well, and neither regrowth nor healing touch worked really well for that. The former is fast and heals for a good amount but too expensive to use all the time, and healing touch is so fricking big that it's hard to use it effectively as you'll overheal a lot of the time, and that while it's still quite expensive. (In my runs it healed for a little less than 400, with the tanks having between 400 and 600 hitpoints. I could hardly wait with casting until they were near-dead every time!)

Still, I don't want to make it sound as if healing was completely horrible or anything, but the instances as a whole are definitely not as facerollable as before. It's hard to make a judgement on how much more difficult they've become, because it still depends a lot on your group. If you've got a tank in full heirlooms you'll probably be fine. However, I've also had non-heirloomed tanks that were at the lowest level for the dungeon and went splat so quickly that I could barely even get a healing touch off in the time in which they went from full to nil. I actually started pre-casting and cancelling my heals in some cases, the humanity! Talk about something that gave me vanilla flashbacks. Actually, that's probably the best way to describe the state of these revamped low-level instances: they have a certain vanilla WoW feel about them. They'll still go a bit faster, but overly crazy pulls are definitely not recommended. Crowd control is not strictly necessary but can be helpful.

I already mentioned in my last post that Ragefire Chasm hasn't changed much. Mobs have been thinned out and moved around a bit (for example Oggleflint is right up ahead now instead of up in that cave up on the side), they have more health and hit harder now, but otherwise it's more or less the same. I expect that this is the way Blizzard handled most of the old five-mans.

Both the achievement system and the dungeon finder also still claim that the instance has been completed once you kill Targaman the Hungerer, which is just as silly as it was before, seeing how he's only the second boss. However, due to the new dungeon maps which show more skulls further ahead and the fact that there's now a quest at the start to kill Jergosh the Invoker and Bazzalan as well, you should have better luck with convincing your party to do a full clear than you might have had in the past.

The quests at the start are noteworthy as well I suppose. Blizzard did mention that all dungeon quests would be available inside the instance from now on, and they weren't kidding: a full contingent of quest NPCs awaits you, offering about three to four quests for the instance at once. As if the dungeon finder wasn't efficient enough already... still, I'm not complaining. Having everyone on the same quests has its advantages (see above) and it saves you all the running around you used to have to do to pick up all the dungeon quests. Just remember to go back to the instance entrance at the end to hand in instead of leaving the group and teleporting out right away.

My only complaint with this system so far is the rather awkward way in which it works with one quest in the Deadmines. One quest giver there has a whole chain to kill all the bosses in the dungeon, except that you don't know that right away. So you get the quest to kill the first boss, clear the instance - then at the end all the quest NPCs conveniently show up so you don't have to run back, and when you hand in, this quest giver tells you to go and kill another boss. But, but... I just killed everyone in here, you're standing right on top of their corpses, lady! I ended up having to do three runs in a row or so just to complete this one quest chain, which felt a tad silly. Why can't she show up after I killed the boss she wanted me to kill and give me the follow-up then?

The Deadmines as a whole have been changed a lot, presumably so that the level eighty-five heroic version would be on par with other heroics. This means that the boss fights are fairly involved for such a low-level instance, though still not too difficult. Almost all the bosses have some sort of ability that requires you to move away, but you shouldn't die immediately if you don't - you'll just make your healer cry. Still, compared to the usual tank-and-spank in other dungeons of that level that's a huge difference.

Also, all the bosses (with one exception) are different from the classic Deadmines. If you're Horde, you'll probably just go "What's going on? Who are these people?" and then kill them anyway. If you're Alliance you can level an alt through Westfall (which I did afterwards) and learn all about the story behind the changes there, with little nods to pretty much all of the new characters. If you're at all into lore, it might be worth levelling an Alliance alt just for that, even if you're usually Horde.