Tier Four Cleared

Well, that was faster than expected. I mean, I always knew that tier four wasn't going to keep even my casual guild progressing for too long, considering that it only consists of Karazhan and three 25-man bosses, but the sheer speed with which we cleared it has still been a surprise to me.

Karazhan was fully clearable for us from day one; a wipe here or there just meant that it initially took too long to clear in a single night, meaning that people had to come back for the last two or three bosses another evening. Still, for the last two weeks, the groups I was in were already pulling off full one-night clears, including Netherspite and Nightbane.

Our first official 25-man raid was two weeks ago. We had a few quick wipes on High King Maulgar (mostly from early mage tank deaths) but once we got that down he was a relatively easy kill. Gruul himself was a somewhat tougher nut to crack, with his combo of RNG and personal responsibility to not wipe the raid during Shatter, but we still managed to kill him that same night as well. We then had a brief look at Magtheridon but didn't get very far. There was supposed to be a follow-up raid dedicated purely to Mag's Lair that same week, but we had to cancel it as we had zero warlocks available that night and the fight just seemed too daunting to progress without one.

This week we returned to clear Gruul's Lair on Wednesday, though the big gronn still required a lot of wipes until we got him down again. Tonight was then dedicated to Magtheridon. I chugged a flask and settled in for a long night, as I still remembered the endless wipes due to people messing up the cube-clicking back in the day... and as far as I recall that was when the fight had already been nerfed to only require ten clickers instead of twenty. BC Classic still has the twenty-clicker version right now.

We had one instant wipe when someone accidentally triggered the fight before we were ready, and then two more where things went wrong early on while killing the channellers. Then Mag himself was finally free and we could start practising our cube-clicking! And believe it or not, all twenty clickers aced their job on the first try and we killed him that very attempt. The overall mood after he died was more one of slight bafflement than joyous victory I think.

At this point I reckon that many people spent a lot more time collecting their pre-raid best-in-slot gear than actually clearing the raids. What now, spend one night a week farming these while slowly working on the Eye attunement chain in preparation for the next phase?

If only there were other things to do in this game than just chasing your BiS gear...

The Karazhan Rollercoaster

I didn't mark the date, but I think my hunter hit level 70 the day after my previous post. That means that in reality, only a few days have passed since then, but somehow it feels much longer already. Time in Outland seems to flow faster somehow, with people achieving within hours what took me days or even weeks to do back in the day.

Those not yet level 70 feel they're already miles behind those who are. Those who only just hit 70 feel they're miles behind those who've already maxed out their reputations. Those who've already maxed out their reputations are (probably, I have no idea) wishing that everyone would stop accusing them of no-lifing just because they're enjoying the game and have a lot of free time. Either way, there's constant tension in the air, or that's how it feels to me at least. It might be that I'm projecting, but let's just say I've been in similar situations before...

It's funny actually, because the other day I thought to myself in slight exasperation: What happened to the Classic community? I don't remember people fretting so much at original Classic launch! But then I immediately paused and realised that I was lying to myself. People were like this at original Classic launch too; I was just in a different place myself.

I was a social member in a guild where I didn't really know anyone and was perfectly happy to trundle along at my own pace, but even from my very limited point of view I could see that some new sort of drama erupted pretty much every week, about how people were supposedly forming cliques that only helped each other, or accusations of the guild being too casual or hardcore relative to its mission statement (yes, there were people complaining from both ends). Remind you of anyone you know? It just feels a bit like some kind of blow-up is inevitable sooner or later.

Anyway, to get back to my actual story, I hit 70 in a beautifully chill way, by helping a druid healer from the guild complete the Nesingwary chain in Nagrand. One of the rewards is a nice healing idol, but he found the idea of slaughtering 100+ mobs by himself in healing spec a bit daunting. Good thing I'm always happy to help out with killing things that I can skin.

The first official Kara sign-up appeared on the guild website around that time. I felt a bit wistful and asked if anyone was up for the Arcatraz (which was the attunement step I was on) but got no responses. I was happy to leave it until later, but then a friendly raid tank whispered me and asked if I'd got a group yet. I said no and he offered to join. A few more friendly souls followed and much to my own surprise, I got the last two instances in the chain done in no time. The key to Karazhan was mine!

I added my name to the guild sign-up and it brought the number of signed characters to exactly twenty. I had a quick look at people's roles and we seemed to have a good balance of tanks and healers as well. Yes, we could run two Kara teams right away and it was going to be great!

My excitement turned out to be premature though, as the officers ended up fiddling with the sign-ups and moving one group to Thursday to accommodate some people that couldn't make the Wednesday... but this of course meant that now some of the Wednesday sign-ups wouldn't get to go, and that included me. I'm sure there was some sort of logic to it, but since it wasn't really fully transparent and the sheet had looked like my sign-up had been "just in time" to get into the second group, I was bummed. Yeah, a day ago I'd thought that I wasn't going to get to run Kara at all, but somehow getting the key quest done and then being sat out was worse. This wasn't like being on the bench for Naxx either, where there was some rotation and you earned EP for being online. It was just a simple "no run for you" sign.

I always knew that something like this was likely to happen since we were unlikely to end up with the exact number of sign-ups for multiple ten-man teams with no spares and that it wasn't personal, but that didn't make it feel any better to be benched for the very first official guild Kara.

I felt rejected and poked someone in another guild whose community runs I'd joined a couple of times in Classic to ask if they were running Kara too and maybe had any spots this week. The first response was a maybe, with the caveat that they couldn't make any promises, but the next day I got confirmation that I was definitely in, and I was hyped again.

So I ended up doing my very first Karazhan run... with a different guild. It was actually very nice. They kept a good pace but everyone was friendly and joking around. They also had a priest with a name that was abbreviated to "Shin", which confused the hell out of me every time they were called out on voice chat.

That first night we killed all the bosses bar Shade of Aran and Netherspite (well, and Nightbane I guess since nobody had an urn yet). We actually one-shot everything except Maiden, on whom we had one wipe when we tried to step into her Consecration just in time to be broken out of the AoE stun, but the timers were off and she ended up chaining half the raid to death the moment we got too close instead. We wiped three times on Aran, who was much harder than I remembered, and then moved on to chess and Prince since leadership didn't want to make it too late. We came back to kill Shade and Netherspite the next night. I also got extremely lucky with loot, getting boots from Moroes, legs from Netherspite and the shiny Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle from opera. Above all though, I felt welcomed and appreciated, as they were very glad to have me along to fill their open raid spot, which made for a lovely soothing balm for my bruised ego.

But now... I don't really know what comes next. I signed up for next week's guild run, but there's been no word on whether they'll make any sort of attempt to rotate people. Even if I get in this time, someone else who gets asked to sit out may end up kicking off. There's also been more news about the 25-man raids and based on what's been said, there's a good chance I might not even make the cut for those. Nothing's set in stone yet, but let's just say that at the moment things don't look too good for me. It would be the ultimate irony if, after being dragged into raiding in Classic despite having no plans to do so, I'll end up getting kicked to the curb in the expansion in which I really did want to raid.

Regardless of what's going to happen, I don't want to be caught off-guard, so I have a lot of thinking to do about what I really want out of this game and what I should be doing if things end up going south. While I know that expansion launches are always a time of upheaval, I have to admit that this particular situation is not one I expected to find myself in.

My Raiding History, Part 2: The Burning Crusade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Karazhan Memories

I just noticed that I didn't even have a Karazhan tag yet before writing this post. The humanity! Like pretty much everyone who started raiding in Burning Crusade, I spent a lot of time in that place and it was a crucial part of my formative months of becoming a raider. I even remember one time, admittedly already towards the end of the expansion, where I did two full clears of the instance in a single day. Some guildies called me crazy for it, and I do remember feeling slightly dizzy afterwards.

But it wasn't always like that, breezing through the entire raid in a few hours. I remember repeatedly wiping on the trash to Attumen and being completely unable to get even the first boss down. I also remember learning to be sensible about aggro, because the last thing you wanted to happen when Attumen spawned or mounted up and the aggro reset was for you to stand out as the noob who couldn't wait for the tanks to get a solid grip on the boss (again).

I remember huddling on the stairs leading up to the ballroom, and having to trust the tanks blindly to pull the trash correctly because you literally couldn't even see what was going on up there. Most of the time it was fine, but sometimes there would be an exclamation of "uh oh" and we'd get more than we could handle. I also remember standing on those stairs when we first noticed that Blizzard had added music to the instance, and discussing our opinions on it.

I remember wiping a lot on Moroes as well, and learning how to kite, crowd control and use a focus macro. I'd position myself in a far corner and as soon as the tank pulled, I'd grab my CC target's attention with a Shadow Word: Death and then shackle it a safe distance away from any AoE. I was very proud of that at the time.

I remember Maiden of Virtue forcing me to fiddle with my UI and keybindings for the first time in order to be able to dispel her Holy Fire quickly enough so that people wouldn't die from it. Up until then the old point and click had always been good enough, but not anymore.

Everyone always seemed to love the Opera Event, especially the Big Bad Wolf - his "Run away, little girl!" was DBM's default warning for any bad effect that needed avoiding for a long time. Myself, I was never a big fan, and I vaguely remember never being very good at kiting him. My favourite was always Oz, because I loved how it gave different people different things to do, such as someone who did fire damage having to tank the strawman. I get the impression that a lot of people hated the idea of fights requiring specific classes though.

I remember the Curator and being exempt from flare duty as a shadow priest because we had absolutely no burst back in the day and switching targets actually harmed my main utility of regenerating other people's mana. I remember the trash afterwards that was immune to magic and all the casters meleeing with their staves and daggers.

I remember Illhoof's sacrifice always making me nervous and me reminding people to make macros to target the chains. Deaths remained frequent for a long time. I also remember what an extreme novelty it was to have a paladin tank the imps. Hah!

I don't actually remember anyone ever blowing up the raid by moving in the Flame Wreath in the Shade of Aran fight. Instead it was always people dying to the Blizzard, or the Arcane Explosion or what have you. He forced people to dance even back then.

I loved Netherspite because shadow priests were the best tanks for the blue beam after warlocks, and I enjoyed the way this enhanced my special class abilities. I became so fond of this boss that I was frequently happy to do the beam assignments for everyone during later runs, even if I wasn't the raid leader.

Wait, didn't I forget another dragon? Of course, Nightbane! I remember being so proud of getting my own Blackened Urn to summon him myself, and I felt my heart break when Blizzard turned it into a useless grey item in Wrath and encouraged me to vendor it. And yet another extremely gimmicky fight! Blizzard would never make a boss like that again, with a deadly cleave and an AoE fear on a short cooldown. I mean, you can't require a ten-man raid to have multiple fear breakers just like that! Outrageous!

The Chess Event: a fun little distraction, including the shame of "wiping on chess" (which we did, more than once).

And finally Prince Malchezaar and his infernal infernals. I remember wiping on him so many times simply due to bad infernal placement, and always people chucked it up to bad luck, though I could never quite shake the feeling that maybe we were just doing something wrong?

It's really kind of funny to remember all these little things. Karazhan is often cited as a "raid done right", and I actually agree, but at the same time it was chock-full of gameplay that Blizzard and many players would consider awful these days: Watching your aggro? How terribly un-fun! Crowd control? Boring and just slows things down. Having boss fights that heavily favoured or even required at least one of a certain class? Way too limiting! The thing is... while I understand why many of these things were changed, I don't think that their replacements are necessarily that much better. I mean, is needing a ranged dps with healing dual spec really that different from needing a certain class? And is it really that big a deal if your spec does kind of poorly on one fight due to its limitations, as long as there's another one where your strengths really get to shine?

Anyway, you might wonder why I'm feeling nostalgic about Karazhan in the first place. Before my boyfriend cancelled his subscription, we ran the place a few times for transmogrification gear, and after he stopped playing I wasn't in the mood to go back for a long time. However, I finally decided to go back to complete my druid's transmogrification outfit the other week, and it's been... interesting.

Opera still nearly kicked my butt on my own. Nothing like being little red riding hood on the Big Bad Wolf all the time, only having a chance to attack him for three seconds every thirty seconds or so. You'd think that he wouldn't hit that hard on a level 85 character, but it still adds up when you can't do anything to fight back or defend yourself for ages and ages. I was also terribly fail at interrupting Julienne's heals, but got there in the end.

But oh, the biggest problem when soloing Karazhan is definitely the Chess Event, that former joke. While Medivh moves his units all over the place and cheats left and right, you can only use one unit at a time, and you get a debuff that forces you to wait ten seconds before controlling another unit. And without your control, your pieces are dumb as rock, willing to auto-attack whatever's in front of them but nothing else - so if they get mutilated from the side, they'll be happy to just stand there and stare off into space until they die.

On my first run, it took me about four hours until I finally beat the game, and I was close to bursting into tears out of sheer frustration by that point. I had looked up a variety of guides online but nothing quite seemed to work. Yesterday I went back and beat it on the first try, though Blackhand only had 6k health left at the end. The sad thing is, I can't even tell whether I got better at it or whether it was just sheer dumb luck, as Medivh's moves can be quite random and screw you over big time at the worst moments.

The only things I've learned for sure are that the fire cheat always happens at roughly the same time, and you have to be ready to move your king (and/or possibly one other important unit) out of the fire patches as soon as they spawn, and that the castles are good pieces to push forward and then leave alone, as their main attack is a non-directional AoE and thus useful even if they refuse to focus on the "right" enemies. Otherwise it's largely about flying by the seat of your pants and hoping that your king and queen can kill the enemy king off before it's too late.

It's really funny how these things can work out, with the former joke boss becoming a soloers nightmare two expansions later.