Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Riding the Winds of Mysterious Fortune

I've noticed that there's a very clear pattern to the way I've come to play retail WoW. It goes something like this:

New content! → Check it out on the main to see what it's all about → Repeat a few times for rewards if applicable → Occasionally do said content on alts for a while → Engage with said content less and less as rewards become less frequent/more RNG-dependent or I just get bored → New content!

The slump before the next new content patch is usually when I'm the most likely to start messing around on random low-level alts. I've got to admit that ever since I got one of each class to 80, I've started to question that gameplay a little bit ("Do I really need another shaman?" etc.) but sometimes it's just fun to revisit old zones and quests or try to learn more about a spec I've never played.

Lately, one of those characters has been the human paladin that was the very first character I ever created. She lives on a German server, so I had little reason to play her once I migrated to playing in English, but after the introduction of warbands made all those alts relevant again in a way, I decided to take her out for a spin. Originally I just did a bit of questing and gathering in her old human starting zone haunts (back in Vanilla I got her to level 20 or so), but eventually I decided that the Cataclysm versions of those zones just weren't doing it for me and that I'd rather take her to the Dragon Isles, since I'd been meaning to replay the Dragonflight story for some time anyway.

(Am I the only one who's feeling somewhat nostalgic for Dragonflight? I think The War Within is good, but I loved the zones and the general vibe in Dragonflight, and War Within just doesn't hit quite the same way for me.)

The other day I logged into her again (she was sitting at level 32) and did a couple of quests when I noticed that I had some "mysterious satchels" in my inventory. It was only then that I remembered that there's a levelling event going on right now, which is something I usually ignore since I think that levelling in retail is plenty fast and I don't necessarily need a boost to it. As such, I hadn't really looked too deeply into the special twist they added this time either: that you occasionally get these satchels as bonus loot from quests and drops, and they contain gear appropriate for your spec and level. The first one I opened contained a two-handed weapon that was a massive upgrade from what I had, and I equipped it with delight.

I then continued questing and was surprised by how much I fell in love with the whole satchel idea. It has long been my main complaint about levelling in retail that normal gear acquisition can't keep up with the speed at which you gain levels, meaning that if you don't wear heirlooms, you'll quickly get weaker and weaker due to scaling until even simple quests start to feel unplayable. These satchels came in so frequently that they finally addressed this problem.

You could tell that it was still a bit of a struggle, as even with the bags constantly showering me with new gear, each new piece would be about 50-100 item levels above the one it just replaced, but it was still a dramatic improvement from how this process normally goes. Some satchels also contained "fun" consumables instead of gear, such as the Night Elf Mohawk grenade making a comeback, which I certainly didn't mind either.

Within two days I blasted through several zones and gained close to 35 levels. I generally find Classic's slower-paced levelling more meaningful, but every now and then I achieve good "flow" in retail as well and this was one of those instances. I was really surprised though by just how well the little goodie bags addressed the usual gearing issue, and while it feels more like a band-aid than a "clean" fix for the scaling problem, I've got to admit I'm kind of hoping that they make these satchels or something similar a permanent part of the game as, at least for me, this would go a long way towards making random alt levelling more enjoyable again.

I Dislike Delves but Not for the Reasons I Expected

So, hey! My first negative post about The War Within! Like I said, the bad things always take a bit of time to come out. To be clear, I'm still enjoying the expansion overall, but this post is about the one major gripe I have with it so far.

Delves were actually on my list of TWW features I was concerned about, but those original concerns could basically be summed up as me expecting delves to be boring and inconsequential, which is how I felt about Mist of Pandaria's scenarios.

As far as the inconsequential part goes, delves have actually been the opposite: This past week they have been the best way to get gear, giving higher item rating than was even possible to acquire in dungeons or raiding, meaning they were the "meta" thing to do. As I was already feeling only lukewarm about delves at this point, being made to feel like I "should" be doing them to gear up didn't endear me to them any further. But let's start at the beginning.

I did my first few delves duoing with my husband, and my first impression was actually that they were pretty alright. Unlike scenarios, they didn't throw you into the middle of some ongoing story or overwhelm you with gimmicky mechanics. Earthcrawl Mines, the first delve and the one you get led into as part of the story, was a pretty straightforward little mini-dungeon in the sense that you go into a hole in the ground and clear out some baddies. There were some unique mechanics like the sticky spider webs, but it wasn't too much. I actually enjoyed that it seemed to reward slow and thorough exploration over speed-running, as there were little treasures to be found in every corner.

As we continued to explore different delves, the gimmicks started to ramp up a bit, like the candle circle that shrinks with each step you take. Having the husband yell at me to stand still with the candle while he pulled all the mobs was a bit less fun (thankfully the devs added a "drop candle" button later so I could do that and move too). Then we found that there were delves that were underwater, with constant fear of drowning. Ugh! There are air bubbles you can run through but they are finicky in their respawns and positioning. We had more than one death from drowning or falling off a cliff when trying to pick up a bubble close to an edge. (Why do you die from "falling off a cliff" in an underwater setting anyway?!) These definitely feel like something you shouldn't even attempt without a warlock or underwater breathing potions.

I also kept being a bit baffled by the delves' length, as Blizzard had been promoting them as something quick to do when you only have fifteen minutes, but I don't think we ever managed to do a delve in less than half an hour. They looked shorter than a dungeon based on the map, but every mob was a massive hitpoint sponge that took forever to die, which made things quite tedious gameplay-wise.

At one point the husband and I were about to do Waterworks together when he suddenly felt a bit unwell and wanted to lie down for a bit. I thought I'd give soloing it a try, as we were only on tier four and my item level was way, way higher than the recommended one already, so I figured I was going to be okay even as a healer.

My preservation evoker ended up being absolutely destroyed by the very first mob. I immediately decided that this clearly wasn't going to be worth my time and left again.

On reading around a bit, scaling for different specs, classes and group sizes has apparently been all over the place, and Blizzard has been applying hotfixes pretty much daily that could vastly change your experience even on the same character from one run to the next.

So you simultaneously have people talking both about how delves are a big cakewalk and should really be made a bit harder considering the high-level loot they give, and people saying that the bosses they're encountering are numerically impossible to beat even on lower difficulties. And both groups may be telling the truth, because depending on your class and spec, both of these scenarios, plus a number of ones in-between are all possible.

However, because you don't really know what others are experiencing, people just end up resenting each other over the whole thing, because if they are having an easy time, they think that WoW is full of bad players who are entitled and want loot for nothing, and if they are having a hard time, it's no fun to listen to others humble-brag about their easily earned loot showers while you're being told that you just need to learn to play.

Oh, and I haven't even talked about Brann yet! Brann Bronzebeard is your companion in this first season of delves and just... bloody hell. It's funny to me that Blizzard made such an effort to turn Magni back into a more serious character after how much of a meme he had become in BfA with his constant yells about the wounds of Azeroth, and then they went ahead and turned his brother into an even worse meme. He's just an absolute ball of chaos, firing off random abilities accompanied by voice lines non-stop. It's honestly pretty funny at first, but gets kind of annoying quickly. (I'm not surprised that there's already an addon to mute him.)

I've heard people complain about companion pathing in SWTOR on occasion, but after seeing Brann in action, I feel the SWTOR devs deserve more mad props than ever, considering how much our dwarven friend just leaps and teleports all over the place. "Where is Brann now?" is a question you'll find yourself asking often.

Oh, and unlike SWTOR companions, Brann can only be set to dps or heal, not tank, and his performance in either role also seems completely random, just to add to the pile of massive imbalances already described above. I've heard both reports of him being supposedly absolutely godly, making you unkillable while he's healing, or basically soloing the entire delve for you while dpsing, while others say that he's utterly useless, doing virtually no dps or healing, and that he just dies at the drop of a hat.

So ultimately, what we're left with is a mini-dungeon that somehow takes longer than a regular dungeon, with gimmicky mechanics that are sometimes fun and sometimes annoying. Promoted as TWW's new solo progression path, it can technically be soloed, but you gotta be the right class and spec. Healers (which is what I still main at the moment, but more on that another time) seem to be having a particularly terrible time, what a surprise. I actually think an argument could've been made for this kind of content simply not being designed with solo healers in mind, but apparently Torghast was perfectly fine to do as a solo healer during Shadowlands (I didn't try that myself) so I'm not sure why it's suddenly a problem.

I guess you can always go in with a group, but another thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there's a death counter as well, and if there are too many deaths during the run you lose the big prize at the end of the delve. Just to make sure healers don't have too much fun while doing these in a group either I guess.

It's just an all-around unappealing situation from my point of view, to be pushed into content that seems broken and un-fun in so many ways. I can only hope that Blizzard will eventually achieve some kind of balance for delves, or more importantly that they will lose relevance as the gear rating from other game modes ramps up. I feel like I'm clearly not the target audience for these so having them be the most optimal way to gear up right now is just not something I like.

Inventory Management in Retail vs. Classic

With the launch of The War Within coming up soon, I had to knuckle down and finally get at least some of my characters ready for the expansion in a major way: by cleaning up their bags. And it made me think about how it's weird that I find inventory management in retail to be so much more of a chore than in Classic.

Classic WoW is extremely stingy with bag space, while absolutely overwhelming you with crap to pick up. Look up a random low-level mob on Wowhead and it will show it dropping from a loot table of literally a hundred different items while you're starting out with a 12-slot backpack which is already partially filled up with things like quest items. Earning any extra slots is extremely slow, and you'll find yourself running to see a vendor all the time.

And yet... I enjoy that. I'm that person who has to loot absolutely everything, and I generally enjoy the decision-making process involved in deciding what to keep and what to throw away if I run out of space while out in the field - though there is definitely a pain point where I feel I have nothing but "must-keep"s left and I'm just upset that I really can't pick up anything new anymore.

Retail has evolved into a very different game in that regard. It's pretty generous in terms of bag space - if you're a returning player, you can instantly get a full set of 22-slot bags for free, and it's not hard to get up to 30+ slots per bag. At the same time, they've dramatically reduced the amount of random crap that drops out in the world (I bemoaned this as early as Wrath of the Lich King). M+ has no loot drops at all to avoid the inevitable friction of someone like me slowing the group down just because they want to pick up their well-earned silver from the trash. So... keeping your bags clean should be easy, right?

Well... it is and it isn't. It is in terms of everyday gameplay in that you shouldn't find yourself running out of bag space after every dungeon run or session of questing. I saw a post on reddit the other day where someone showed that it's possible to level a character from 10-70 without visiting a vendor even once (though by that point their bags were very full).

The problem is that your available inventory space will shrink over time as your bags fill up with items of questionable utility. In Classic, there are very few of those. Almost everything can either be classified as gear, consumables, vendor trash or "useful whites" which are usually either relevant to crafters or for some kind of reputation hand-in. It helps of course that everything in Classic is a known quantity, but even so, I think that even if you were to approach it as a completely new player, you can make sense of how to manage your inventory relatively quickly.

Now, retail has theoretically optimised inventory management in many ways over the years. Mounts, pets and toys are no longer items you have to carry around but simply go into a dedicated tab of their own. Same for currencies. Even quest items don't always exist in your bags and often get relegated to just being clickables in the quest tracking UI, though I honestly find that a bit confusing sometimes... the point is, it should all be optimised and extremely easy.

However, the reality is different. For some reason, even though we have all these dedicated tabs for things, they love giving us currencies that don't go into the currency tab, and toys that don't go into the toys tab. All those world events they added in Dragonflight often have some currency or event item associated with them that will go into your bags. They removed the keyring years ago but that doesn't stop them from giving you keys for stuff. The Zkera Vaults in the Forbidden Reach were particularly terrible for this, giving you both a stack of keys and an endless mountain of items that were only useful in that particular instance and nowhere else (but you better save them for next week!)

In Dragonflight in specific, someone also thought it would be funny if a lot of vendors wouldn't accept gold as currency, but would instead insist on bartering for random crafting mats or even gear items. I remember being excited to unlock some new rep reward from Wrathion and Sabellian just to find that I didn't have enough bear spines or whatever on me to purchase it. There was also that trader in Iskaraa who wanted jewellery in exchange for one of his mounts and would literally take off people's equipped rings and necklaces if you weren't careful. Just fun times all around. I picture a WoW dev coming up with this idea as "fun and quirky"... but in practice it was just a pain.

More to the point though, it created this environment where you were never quite sure whether to get rid of some things or whether they weren't meant to be extremely useful for something later that you just hadn't quite figured out yet. I hated that. I enjoy having to choose what to keep in my inventory based on items having different values. I don't like not having a clue what the value of anything is and having to spend the afternoon trawling through Wowhead to figure it out.

Anyway, I finally bit the bullet the other day and actually threw a bunch of stuff away, including thousands of Artisan's Mettle. I strongly identified with this reddit post. I mean, I could tell from the tooltip that it was used in crafting, but never came across anything that used it myself (never mind the "myriad of uses").

On the plus side, with the pre-patch making those coins for the Niffen account-bound, I was able to pool those and buy a few mounts (after looking up where to find what). It was all just a bit exhausting. I can only hope for less of that in War Within.

Mess of Pandaria

Pandaria: Remix has been out for more than two weeks now and it's been quite a wild ride.

Our initial levelling duo hit level 70 after a little over 19 hours /played. The best personal reference I have for levelling speed is this post from when the husband and I first levelled characters just after the pre-Shadowlands level squish, at which point it took us over 26 hours to get to level 50 (the cap at the time). So our levelling in Remix was indeed sped up, but not by as much as I would've thought, especially considering that I did read all the quest text in BfA, while I'm mostly just skimming it in Pandaria. I'm sure there are people who level much faster than that even in regular retail.

Of course, I figured maybe the real speed levelling was meant to occur with alts, since the cloak with all the stats (including an XP bonus) was meant to be account-wide. This turned out to be somewhat false advertising though, as it doesn't actually work that way. Once you push your first character's cloak past a certain threshold, new alts do start with a bit of a boost, but it's much smaller than your main's numbers and static, so they still have to build up their own cloak from scratch after that. The levelling still goes quite a bit faster the second time around, but still... it was just a little bit disappointing.

The second pair of characters we made was a protection warrior (me) and my husband on a resto shaman. They're level 38 right now, as we're basically just doing a random dungeon every other day or so. Because he had last week off work and (as I mentioned before) always goes all-in on this sort of project, he also levelled a paladin to the cap without me during my work hours.

Happenings in the wider community have been pretty wild. Blizzard nerfed the "froggers" and keeps playing whack-a-mole to nerf new bronze farming spots as they emerge, but it doesn't really seem to matter, because at this point the first no-lifers and professional WoW players have ground out their gear one way or another and once you're at maximum item level, you're meant to be OP. The lofty days of week one when heroic dungeons actually felt kinda hard and LFR bosses would at least get to do one mechanic before dying are long gone. Everything just dies in seconds and every group just zergs to the end.

And that's... alright, I guess? I'm not here for the challenge so I don't mind getting a free carry towards some rewards. But I have been questioning my purpose with this game mode a bit. I don't care about using my bronze to upgrade my gear as it's only really useful in the extreme short term anyway (as is often the case in WoW) and to get all the transmogs and mounts you'd need something like over a million bronze, which is a lot. I honestly don't even feel like I need all of these cosmetics anyway, but since I'm unclear on just what my goals are, the sheer number of things I could miss out on is still daunting somehow.

In the usual way of retail WoW, they make it very easy to get a quick dopamine hit from a reward that only takes minutes to earn, but you're then meant to repeat that process hundreds of times during a specific time window, which is the point where I usually nope out. The rush of quickly levelling an alt can be fun for a while, but again... to what purpose? I have no particular interest in having a stable of alts at the level cap "just because". It'll just mean that I'll have fewer character slots available to level alts through other content later.

The only thing I know for sure is that I'll want to keep completing content with our first levelling duo, in order to polish off most of the questing for our nostalgia tour, and that I'll probably want to level at least a couple of alts for a different gameplay experience. Being a healer quickly started to feel pointless with all the self-healing that characters do in Remix, and on the rare occasion where healing could still be useful it doesn't scale well with the mode's massive stamina numbers, meaning that my biggest heal fills five percent of a tank's health bar at most, which is effectively useless. It's all just a little bit crazy and I suspect not entirely in the way Blizzard intended.

Starting Over in Phase 2

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with/in WoW Classic in the near future, but one thing was clear to me after my last post: that I needed a change of scenery. So I logged into the European RP-PvE server Lava Lash and created a dwarf priest there.

It's almost silly how relieved I felt almost immediately, spawning into a zone that wasn't stupidly over-crowded. There were other players around, sure, but it wasn't heaving, and that was nice. I actually took note of the presence of other players again instead of constantly feeling surrounded simply being the default. I handed out drive-by buffs again! Remember when at the start of Classic, everyone was like "wow, playing this reminded me of how nice it felt to give and receive drive-by buffs"? You don't get that on mega-servers because even if you wanted to buff everyone you meet, there are just too many gosh-darned people.

My casual interactions with others also immediately felt better somehow. It's a bit hard to explain, because it's not as if people on regular PvE servers are unfriendly, but so many interactions there just feel incredibly... business-like, as if everyone's always busy following their personal check-list of things to do, without any interest in the people they are doing it with. On RP-PvE, you get the sense that more players are there for the experience of just existing in that virtual space, and while they have goals too, they tend to pursue them at a more relaxed pace where allowing yourself to be distracted for a bit isn't really a huge problem. I definitely found it noticeable that I saw quite a few higher-level players ambling around lower-level zones for example - presumably they were still doing something, but they weren't obviously chasing the new level cap.

Realising this honestly made me feel a bit stupid for rolling on the regular PvE mega-server to begin with. I've been through all this before! I know that mega-servers make everything but finding pugs and the auction house worse! I don't know why I thought it was going to be different this time. People just always talk about them like they're the bee's knees but they are not. Anyway, end random mega-server rant.

It was only while playing on Lava Lash that I noticed some of the changes that Blizzard made to Waylaid Supplies with phase two. They can no longer be turned in without being filled up for example, but you do have the option to just vendor them for one silver now. Also, they are no longer unique, which is nice, but I was surprised to see that you can own up to twelve of them. My first thought was "why would anyone need that many" but I quickly realised that there's method to the madness, as I got about half a dozen of them as drops in Dun Morogh alone, and all before I had the means to actually fill any of them up. That definitely made me feel grateful for the option to stash them away in my bank for later.

Levelling with the new 1-25 XP buff feels extremely fast, and even with all my casual ambling about, I hit level twenty in less than 14 hours of /played. I'm honestly not sure that's a good thing though, because being put on this levelling fast-track also means that you end up earning a lot less gear and money on the way. I'm still sporting several white/grey pieces at twenty when I'd usually have full greens by that point, and I couldn't even afford all my new spells initially.

I feel like there's going to be a huge chasm of economic inequality between those who managed to play at the level cap of 25 and do a bunch of quests for gold, and those who start now, because while the former are going to be much richer than anyone would normally be at their level, newly fast-tracked characters are having the exact opposite experience (being poorer than they would normally be at their level). That means that the best way to catch up is to rush to the new level cap, ignoring everything else, and hope that you can start earning gold and truly catching up at that point. This kind of thing is why I've never been a fan of "just make levelling faster" as a solution to anything...

Anyway, I don't know where things will go from here, whether I'll feel compelled to play this priest more or not. But at least it's been a breath of fresh air.

Season of Discovery Phase 2 Preview

Season of Discovery's phase two is less than a week away, and Blizzard decided that in spite of the discovery aspect being key to the concept, they didn't want us to go in completely blind. A recent news post on the WoW website goes into quite a bit of detail about what to expect. I won't go into all of it on here, but I did want to highlight a few items that I found interesting.

The Gnomeregan raid has been confirmed to come with six bosses, which aligns with the number present in the regular dungeon, which means that unlike in BFD, nobody got eaten I guess. The news post shows some of the new items to look forward to, but the only one that really stood out to me was the Automatic Crowd Pummeler. The Manual Crowd Pummeler from the regular Gnomer dungeon is a mace with three charges of an on-use effect, which due to the janky nature of Vanilla's design, is actually the best max-level weapon for feral druids - until the charges are depleted that is, at which point it's time to vendor it and grab another. This means that competitive feral druids need to spend a lot of time farming the Gnomer dungeon, which is... bizarre. The new item has a cooldown but unlimited charges, which should get rid of that meta - though it does make me wonder whether it'll still be the best weapon for ferals at sixty in SoD too.

There will be some new runes, though as far as I'm aware it hasn't been revealed how many there will be per class. I was surprised to find that I'm kind of hoping it's not twelve again. Finding new runes is fun when you just start out, but because of how powerful they are, it turns into an exercise in "needing" to acquire them all pretty quickly.

Runes aside, they'll also be introducing some quality of life spells via new spell books dropped from dungeons, such as giving rogues the ability to move combo points and enabling shamans to move their totems. I find it quite interesting how the Classic devs are trying to square the circle in SoD by keeping a certain degree of inconvenience (which was simply part of Vanilla) while also attempting to introduce some quality of life changes without making things too easy and smooth. It's interesting to watch.

They also revealed more details about the new Stranglethorn PvP event, which will apparently turn the zone into a free-for-all once every three hours (though there is also a way to opt out). Grouping is allowed, but converting to raid will apparently be punished in some way. I'll fully admit that I'm less interested in a PvP event that requires actual PvP in a vanilla setting - then again, the free-for-all nature should make it less one-sided on PvE servers than the Ashenvale event has been. I don't know, I might try it once just to see what it's all about, but I tend to quickly get tired of getting killed in open world PvP.

As an aside, they'll also change the Battle for Ashenvale to simply occur once every three hours to make it more predictable. I guess that'll make it easier to join in, though there was definitely something very vanilla-like about not knowing when the fight was about to happen unless you were already in the zone or got intel from someone else who was.

In a move that took many by surprise, the news post also announced that they'll be disallowing GDKP runs from phase two onwards - I wonder if they have enough GMs to deal with the whack-a-mole of ban-hammering that's likely to require. I don't have strong feelings on the matter as I've been lucky to always play on servers where GDKPs are not a thing - I just always hear the horror stories about how ubiquitous they're supposed to be on PvP servers ruled by gold buyers. I suppose it's at least going to be fun to watch the various types of drama that are bound to arise from this.

The news post finished with a paragraph titled "It is Not too Late to Join in Season of Discovery" - presumably a play on the meme of people asking "Is it too late to play [game]/[patch]" five minutes after it's launched. It notes that with the arrival of phase two, they'll increase XP payouts from the BFD raid and from waylaid supplies, and there'll be a general 50% XP buff up to level 25. I'm definitely glad about the buff to BFD experience, as I'd like to see it stay relevant while levelling, but I'm a little more conflicted about the general XP buff. I guess it's one way to battle the FOMO inherent in joining a temporary server like this, but at the same time, SoD is kind of meant to be about levelling, so it still feels a bit odd at the same time.

In spite of all these exciting news, I'm still not too hyped about phase two myself. Things haven't been working out too great for my era guild's little off-shoot on SoD. Basically people tended to fall into one of two categories: either they casually levelled a character just to see what the runes were all about and then decided they didn't care too much about the BFD raid, or they went all-in and farmed BFD with five alts every lockout. There are much fewer of the latter than of the former, so the ones still interested have increasingly had to look elsewhere to fill their runs and in-guild activity has kind of died down. So I'm not too optimistic that I'll actually get to experience the new content in a guild setting, and while there are pugs aplenty, wading into the giant pool of anonymity that is a mega-server holds a lot less appeal to me, even if I'm curious about the new gameplay.

Level 25 in Season of Discovery

So this actually happened before my LFR adventure in retail; I just had the urge to write about that one while it was still fresh on my mind. But yes, I hit level 25 on my priest in Season of Discovery, woo! What an achievement.

Actually, I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but I do think people overestimate just how quickly the "average" player progresses. Blizzard released a video with some SoD statistics a week ago, and in that they said that only about 10% of the population had hit the level cap after the first week, and less than 2% of characters had cleared the BFD raid. I shared this with my guildies who were already talking about how they were "done" or bored and called them filthy one-percenters.

My own journey to the level cap involved more dungeons, as I predicted in my last post about SoD. I ran Wailing Caverns twice, mostly to finish off all my quests in there, though I got lucky and also won this excellent ring off Mutanus the Devourer in my second run. As a side note, I found it pleasant how easy it was to get all those collection quests done for a change. When Wailing Caverns is just one step along your levelling journey and you want to get everything done in one run, getting enough herbs, ooze and hide drops for everyone is always a pain, but with the dungeon essentially being "endgame" you can get endless runs in which most people will already have done their quests, with way less competition for drops.

Anyway, what was truly memorable about those WC runs to me was that they were complete opposites in some ways. In my first run I had a warrior tank who was massively overgeared for the place and who was just barrelling from one pack to the next one-stop. I was trying to eat dinner at the same time as healing (don't judge me, I like multi-tasking like that) and I could hardly get a bite in because the guy just never stopped. We were done in less than an hour, and that was with one of the damage dealers being AFK for the entire run, which was another funny thing to be honest. This mage was the last to arrive at the instance and then immediately put me on /follow. I think I saw him cast a fire blast once or twice, presumably so he wouldn't be logged out for inactivity, but that was all he did until the last boss, where he came back just in time to roll need on - and win - the caster ring. I learned from this that the infamous "ledge jump" is in fact so easy that an AFK character on follow will simply walk over the gap without falling, so if you ever do fall down that hole again, know that you're worse than someone auto-running.

In my second run on the other hand, our tank was completely clueless, didn't talk, randomly went AFK a few times, and otherwise just ran off in seemingly random directions. We ended up doing the right side of the dungeon before the left side (something I hadn't seen done before), and when we returned to the druid at the entrance we realised he wouldn't talk to us because by simply following our tank's errant pathing, we'd completely missed one of the bosses. It took me to take charge and lead the group back to him to actually finish the dungeon (something I was actually quite proud of as I'm not at all good at navigating the maze that is Wailing Caverns either).

Next I was off to Shadowfang Keep, which had fewer quests but which I knew offered several juicy cloth drops. I got incredibly lucky in that regard as well, as I won everything I could possibly want in only three runs: shoulders on the first run, belt on the second and the robe on the third. I can't say that it was all well-earned either as I body-pulled and caused deaths in "that room" (you know the one) in two of those three runs.

Due to my good loot luck I was only level 24 at that point, and there was another wave of competing healers sweeping LFG, so I decided to just earn the rest of my last level via questing. While doing so, I found one more priest rune in Silverpine, which brought me up to a total of four. I didn't catch the actual level 25 ding, but I levelled up after handing in to Kadrak at the Ashenvale border as seen below.

A funny side effect of the season's timing is that everyone's running around with winter hats because there are very few useful head slots available at this level so you might as well wear the fluffy hat for fun.

What now? Well, I was keen to get into BFD, but with the imminent holidays there weren't enough guildies available, plus I had some family obligations as well, so that adventure will have to wait for another day.

I had a brief look at the Ashenvale PvP event, which seems to be occurring quite frequently and appears to be quite rewarding, but I don't know if I care enough to make it a focus. I did notice that it seems to involve shared tagging, as when I ran up to an Alliance boss and asked to join the raid group there, I was told they were full, but I was still able to contribute from outside the group and received both loot and kill credit for the boss.

At some point I'll probably want to look up the runes I'm missing and go hunt them down. There's at least one very powerful healer rune that I'll probably want to get before setting foot into the raid.

My professions are another thing to work on. While I've been levelling them as I've been going along, I'm only maxed out for my level in herbalism and cooking, so alchemy, first aid and fishing all have some ways to go to be truly useful.

And of course there is questing - Blizzard made it so that like when you quest at level 60, "unused" experience point rewards get converted into money instead, which means that completing any at-level quest at the cap of 25 rewards at least one gold, which is pretty huge. Again, I don't think I'll make a habit of grinding these, but even just doing a few adds up quite quickly. I can't see many people having issues affording their mount at level forty if they get to spend any time at all playing at the level 25 cap and accumulating quest reward money.

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.

Wrath Classic Adds WoW Token, Community Goes Ballistic

I thought that my next post on here was going to be about some interesting changes that are coming to Classic era, but then I found out this morning that Classic Wrath is basically on fire, and that seemed like it might be worth talking about as a priority.

It started innocently enough for me, when I noticed a tweet from loyal commenter Pallais on my timeline, which contained a link to this Wowhead article and the comment: "I have to say I'm enjoying the popcorn-worthy drama some Wrath Classic players are experiencing because of this. ^_^" Funnily enough, I didn't even have any reaction to the WoW Token announcement itself, I just thought "well, that's not very kind towards people who might not like that" and scrolled past.

But then I got curious and checked the WoW Classic subreddit, just to find that it was basically one giant dumpster fire. I can't claim to be enjoying the show, but like a train wreck it's just hard to look away from (and I get what Pallais meant now). The mods have officially dropped the rule that previously forbade talking about private servers, and of course said private servers have happily taken up the opportunity to advertise. In general, people are mad at Blizzard and shouting a lot. And it's weird to me because while I think you can have plenty of reasons to dislike Blizzard or WoW, this seems like such a random hill to die on.

I searched my blog archives to remind myself of what sentiments I expressed about the WoW Token in the past, but I couldn't actually find a single mention of it. It came out during WoD when I wasn't playing, and I clearly didn't have sufficiently strong feelings about its introduction to comment on it in any way.

I can't say that I've taken any real notice of it since picking up retail again either. Obviously there's been a crazy amount of inflation during the years I was away, but I feel that I'm earning more than enough to cover everything I need. In the services channel in town, I often see people advertise carries through heroic raid clears for a mount or achievement, and I'm always surprised that these are actually cheap enough that I'd technically be able to afford one even with my super casual level of play. (Though I would be completely broke afterwards, not gonna lie!) Either way, my point is that it doesn't feel like buying gold confers a significant advantage to anyone; presumably it's something for the impatient or people who want to collect expensive cosmetics without putting too much effort in.

It's funny because on some level I feel like I should dislike the WoW Token more, simply because it's another micotransaction and in an ideal world I'd prefer a return to a pure subscription model. Considering it's very hard to find an MMO without a cash shop nowadays though, I've become pretty desensitised to it, and the simple truth is that not everything you can buy in a cash shop has the same impact on the game. Something like the WoW Token feels like it should be a big deal, but the more I thought about it, the more it hit me that basically, buying gold (whether from a cash shop or a gold seller) only causes problems if that gold in turn buys you things that we feel perhaps shouldn't be for sale (with either currency) but should have to be earned through gameplay.

To bring up an example that I mentioned before, someone who joined the Forks in Burning Crusade as a brand new player and bought gold to be able to power-level leatherworking and enchanting to max within days of creating his character. He was then super generous by always handing out free goodies to other guildies. When I found out about what happened, it ticked me off because I'd been trying hard to work on my professions to help the guild, and here this guy basically bought himself not just a pay-to-win shortcut on the profession front, but it also bought him clout with the guild, which just felt unfair.

In Classic, on servers where GDKP runs rampant, it essentially makes the game pay-to-win in terms of gearing, as the person with the biggest pile of money gets the best gear. As far as I can tell this is particularly prevalent in Wrath, which I guess does make the WoW Token a problem for players in that situation, especially if they bought gold from gold sellers before in order to gain an advantage. With everybody being able to buy gold legitimately, it will likely drive prices in these kinds of runs through the roof.

It doesn't really matter in retail because there are no GDKPs and loot just generally works differently. It wouldn't even matter that much on my server in Classic era either - when the news broke, someone in my guild Discord asked whether we were worried about the Token being added to era as well, and another guildie asked in return what you would even buy with it, which I thought was an excellent point. A new player might purchase a shortcut to their epic mount, or someone might use it to finance repeated respecs, and obviously that wouldn't be ideal... but it also wouldn't be a huge deal.

So I'm not worried. Again, that doesn't mean I think the WoW Token is a good thing, but I'm not going to pretend to feel sorry for people who opt to play in an environment where you can buy your way to victory, being upset that they'll now have to spend even more to keep up. If you think playing WoW should be all about how much money you have, I can't exactly blame Blizzard for agreeing.

Hunting Rares for Fun and Profit

I'm still puttering around on my paladin alt on Gehennas occasionally and have got her up to level 20 at this point. Now that the main PvE cluster has reached a more "normal" level of population, I'm almost getting nostalgic for the quieter times, and playing on Gehennas currently scratches that itch. I almost consider it a special challenge to play there, what with being all by myself most of the time. I'm generally not someone who uses the AH a lot, but I do use it sometimes, and I'm usually all over opportunities to do group content. Having to limit myself to soloing and having to procure any and all items I might need by myself just feels kind of novel right now.

Around the level when I would usually start looking for a Deadmines group, I was killing some murlocs on the coast of Westfall when not one but two rare mobs barrelled into me almost simultaneously, which got me to wonder just how many rares there were in the zone. This quickly evolved into a fun new pastime.

Rares in Vanilla honestly weren't that amazing, often just dropping a generic random green, if even that. I mean, in Vanilla even getting a green feels pretty good, but I'm thinking in comparison to later iterations of the concept, when their loot was upgraded considerably and they were changed to give massive amounts of bonus XP when killed.

Anyway, like with so many things in the human starter zone, you can tell that the devs had time to think about the rares a bit more than they did in later zones, and there are some pretty unique ones with special loot tables. For example there's a zombie called Leprithus that spawns either on a small graveyard or near the border to Duskwood and only at night, and his drops are a great pair of leather gloves called Ghoul Fingers as well as a cursed sword that shoots shadowbolts.

My favourite so far however has been the rare Foe Reaper 4000, which can spawn on most of the fields with harvesters on them and seems to be almost guaranteed to drop a non-unique ten-slot bag. As bag space became a real issue when I moved to Westfall and started picking up all the various quests asking me to collect animal parts, this discovery was an absolute godsend. I've killed him four times so far and actually feel pretty good about my bag space for my level now.

I've tried to hunt him down more often than that, but some days other players on the server actually make their presence known even if I don't see them personally, just because all the rares in the zone are dead. While the population is extremely small, there seem to be a few genuine levellers, and I suspect that all the higher-levels are on the cluster specifically for easy farming of PvP ranks or raw materials, and since you're still able to freely transfer from Gehennas to Firemaw, their activities might even feed into the Firemaw economy for all I know.

This isn't all bad for me though, because I've been surprised to find that I can actually sell things. The auction house is usually empty aside from my listings, but I guess that's precisely what gives them so much exposure and someone is usually happy to snatch up a cheap green or stack of trade goods. And then, just as I was starting to feel good about my financial situation and like I'd earned enough gold to be able to at least afford all my training for the near future, I found this in the mail:

So now my little throwaway alt has 100 gold at her disposal randomly and is basically set for life. I also replied to the sender to thank them and let them know that if they were feeling lonely, there are other servers they can go to that are actually active and free transfers are available. I don't know if they'll ever see the reply, but I'll remember their kindness. Their mission to make me smile succeeded.

Adventures on Gehennas

I mentioned in my last post that I made a little paladin on Gehennas just to have a look around, and I'm finding myself strangely enamoured with her. There's just something about human paladins... even if the first character I ever levelled properly was a night elf priest, the first character I ever made was a human paladin, and even though I rerolled to play with friends after only a few days, those first few days of playing the game as a human by myself clearly had a major impact on me.

I've got a lot of nostalgia for the early night elf starter zones as well, but for some reason I never imprinted on the Horde zones in quite the same way. Mulgore probably comes the closest in terms of filling me with warm, fuzzy feelings, but even so it's not really a contest when compared to human lands.

Revisiting all the quests in Elwynn Forest once again, I've got to say that the whole zone is just damn well done though; it's not just nostalgia. You can really tell that Blizzard built this starter zone first and had more time to reiterate on it than on any others. The quests flow together and across zone lines in a way that they rarely do anywhere else in the early game. There are lots of little details like NPC conversations taking place and neutral critters ambling about everywhere. And all the unique mob pathing! I remember Bhagpuss wrote a whole post about being fascinated by it when he played WoW Classic. Of course mobs wander around in all zones, but it seems to me that there's distinctly more complexity to it in the lower-level zones... I'm sure all the wandering Murlocs in Elwynn did their share to contribute to the whole species earning its reputation as a multi-pull menace.

I've only seen a couple of other players during my journeys so far, and I've been surprisingly unfazed by this lack of company. It may sound strange - deranged, even - but I kind of feel like I've transcended the need for other players in WoW. I still enjoy having them around, and I'm happy to see era's growing popularity, but I'm actually okay with playing by myself as well, and I realised that this makes me a rare minority.

Every day someone comes on the era Discord to ask how many players there are on this or that server, because they're scared of investing time into levelling a character somewhere where they can't do instances or shop at the auction house. I don't think I was ever that bad, but when I first started playing on era and it was still very quiet, I do remember having the occasional moment when I noticed that I was the only person in a given zone and it felt a bit like staring into the void. However, I persisted and found contentment in playing by myself when I needed to, and I feel like that's made me more resilient in a sense.

People install the hardcore addon to lock themselves out of the auction house to challenge themselves, but I'm simply playing on a server where there is no active auction house - though this hasn't prevented me from putting up a couple of auctions for useful lowbie items just in case someone does come by. I sold a pair of green mail trousers, so I know it can happen! Also, I just kinda enjoy seeing my name up there, being the only person to have items listed on the auction house. As far as anyone randomly checking in is concerned, I pretty much own this place!

Inventory management and making money have been the biggest challenges so far. I'm considering looking into buying some small bags from a vendor to fill my remaining currently empty bag slots, because I just don't have room for anything. I also always loathe to vendor things that could be useful to another player, but Gehennas just isn't in a place where anyone's looking for things like trade goods right now, so I've got to learn to bite the bullet if I want to be able to afford new skills at some point. I still don't expect to take this little levelling challenge very far, but for the time being it's a nice little distraction.

Raiding in Classic Era - an Update

Back in August I wrote a post about my early experiences with raiding in Classic era - how some raids weren't run that often by my guild, and how I got a lot of loot early on. Looking back at that post now, so much has changed that I thought it might be a good time for an update.

AQ20

Back in August this was the raid that nobody wanted to run... but eventually a lovely shaman stepped up to put it back on the calendar, and since then it's been run on average once a week - a good thing too, as we've had so many newcomers requesting books and idols that the guild bank has actually had trouble keeping up with demand despite of having had a huge stockpile of all of them at one point.

I'll admit that AQ20 is probably the least interesting place in terms of gear, so it didn't take long for my hunter to run out of things to get from there, other than Cenarion Circle rep, which I don't really need to max out. I started bringing my druid instead, but even she's starting to run low on items to soft reserve at this point. Still, I'm sure I'll keep coming up with excuses to go, since it's just fun.

ZG

Not long after I joined, the officer who'd been running the regular ZGs at the time had to step down from that task and since nobody else was available to take over, there was a period where no runs happened at all. Fortunately the aforementioned shaman picked up the slack here as well, and like AQ20, ZG is now being run about once a week.

I'm still going to this one on my hunter even though she stopped benefiting from any potential gear drops a long time ago, simply because the grind to exalted reputation for the shoulder enchants is looong - I never actually got my night elf to exalted in original Classic. However, I feel like I can see the end of the tunnel this time, and then I'll be happy to start taking my druid to this one as well.

Also, the other week the guild actually saw one of the rare mounts drop for the first time, Mandokir's raptor - it went to a loyal long-time officer, so even though we teased him about it, it felt well-deserved.

Molten Core

Back in August I noted that the guild rarely seemed to do full MC runs - with all the recent newcomers those times are long over as well, because we have lots of new raiders that want to gear up and Molten Core is the natural first stop. We still go for the bindings every week, but do full runs pretty much every other week, and they are no longer the severely understaffed affairs of the early days either. With a full group of forty it actually goes by pretty fast even at a casual pace.

We haven't had another Thunderfury since Tefflar's in December, but we've got two more people that have Garr bindings sitting in their bags, so it feels like it can't be too long now until Geddon will cough one up again as well.

In terms of loot, my hunter has nothing useful left to get from there, just Hydraxian Waterlords reputation for fun, so I do try to bring my druid when I can but I have to admit I haven't been super enthusiastic about it since I realised that being a resto druid in Vanilla raids sucks ass. I mean, I knew in theory that the HoTs didn't stack and all that, but even that aside, it just feels so clunky. I've seen people debate the usefulness of resto druids in multiple places and there's always someone arguing that they're totally awesome if you can only get all these specific gear pieces from higher-end raids, but that doesn't help your average druid alt at all. Even downranked Healing Touches are slow AF compared to other classes' heals, and I just end up feeling like a geriatric paladin without any of that class's fun tools.

I don't mind so much in the 20-mans because when you're doing AQ20 with only three healers, there's still something to do even for the slowest healer, but in the 40-mans with multiple Naxx-geared priests and shamans... forget it.

Either way, despite all that I still enjoy going to MC to some degree, simply because with it being the easiest of the 40-man raids, it usually has the most amount of silliness and the best banter.

Onyxia

Ony is another raid we rarely seemed to do when I started but which we now visit quite regularly - and both of my level 60s are attuned as well, hurrah! Mostly the guild needs that never-ending supply of dragon heads for world buffs, but the 18-slot bags she drops are nice as well.

Funnily enough, unlike how I experienced the fight in original Classic, the boss always dies so quickly in these runs that she doesn't even do her Deep Breath mechanic. I think I remember one run where she actually did a Breath, and everyone promptly went "oh no, she's actually doing the thing", followed by half the raid being burnt to a crisp while running around like headless chickens (including me) because nobody's used to dealing with it anymore.

Blackwing Lair

I still like Blackwing Lair. It has such great loot and bosses that are interesting without being too tough or tedious. In an ironic twist of fate, after getting Ashjre'thul in what was only my second BWL back in Classic, it has stubbornly eluded me in era for the past eight months. I've got absolutely everything else I could possibly want from BWL for my hunter, including the coveted Prestor's Talisman from Nef, but the bloody crossbow just never drops when I'm there.

As there's also been a huge influx of new hunters lately, I think I'm starting to make my peace with potentially using my Rhok until Kel'Thuzad, cause even if I'm not in the raid whenever the crossbow does drop, at least some other hunter will be able to use it. This last week I finally gave up and brought my druid to the raid instead, and it felt worthwhile. Healing BWL was a bit more fun than MC (Vael is a great boss to be a druid on for example), and I scored no less than three pieces of druid tier two, which is very strong.

AQ40

The strengthening of our roster has fortunately meant that AQ40 has become slightly less of a slog and we can actually kill C'thun more reliably. Though we still haven't ever gone for Viscidus, and for some reason we also stopped visiting Ouro after originally going for him every time in the earliest AQ40 raids I joined.

AQ40 has always been kind of crappy for hunter loot, and unsurprisingly I'm running out of gear to chase in there as well. I could technically go for the ring from C'thun, but Patchwerk is in reach now and he drops an even better one, so... I'm thinking that taking my druid there some time might be interesting both in terms of as an experience and in terms of loot opportunities, but we'll see.

Naxxramas

Naxxramas remains the main destination of interest for most of the established raiders, but progression has been absolutely glacial. Within seven months, the guild only went from 6/14 to 10/14. Mainly this was due to a prolonged shortage of healers, which turned Patchwerk and Loatheb into unsurpassable roadblocks for many months. This has now been overcome, but I think progression is still being held back by the fact that only one of the three main raid days is dedicated to Naxx, which just isn't enough to achieve much of anything in there at a casual pace. I can't say I envy the officers having to square the circle of "focusing on Naxx" on the one hand, and funnelling a never-ending stream of newcomers through the earlier raids to gear them up for Naxx at the same time.

Personally I rarely go there because the regular Naxx night is Sunday, which often clashes with other commitments for me, but I have been a few times at this point - enough to get all the intro quests done and pick up three pieces of tier three. I'm just glad that I got the whole "progressing through Naxx" experience done in Classic, meaning that I feel little pressure to achieve anything in era on a personal level. I'm happy to be there whenever I can and to see the guild progress, but there's no clock ticking down to Naxx becoming obsolete, so more bosses will happen when they happen.

Return to the Forbidden Reach

Retail WoW had a minor patch last week, which the husband and I went to check out over the weekend. Blizzard made it clear that they want to avoid any long stretches of no new content this expansion, and their way of doing this is by having minor patches between the major ones. So far this seems to be working out well! For a "minor" patch, 10.0.7 feels pretty chunky, with a few new quests and a whole new island to explore.

I say "new" but it's admittedly recycled, as the Forbidden Reach originally served as the Dracthyr starter zone. Now we just get to return to it in a different state, but even so it's been decent fun. I like that it just appeared on the coast and you can immediately fly across seamlessly. The constant chasing after rares and the bind-on-account gear token rewards you find everywhere gave me strong Timeless Isle vibes. It's one big gear catch-up bonanza basically, and particularly friendly towards alts.

There's also this thing called the "Zskera vaults" (though as SWTOR players we've taken to calling them the "Czerka vaults" which is easier to pronounce and amuses us). It's basically a personal little instance where you can collect some treasure every week by doing some really basic puzzles, such as using a fiery potion found in one vault to melt a bunch of ice in another vault. It's very chill compared to most of WoW's endgame - there are no timers and very few mobs, and you can go out at any point and come back later to continue where you left off (until the weekly reset that is). Considering that this is likely only meant to tide us over for a few weeks until the release of 10.1, I'm really impressed.

The only thing I slightly disliked about the vaults was that they can only be done solo as far as I can tell, which sort of makes sense but is still a bit annoying if you like spending a lot of your time in game playing as a duo. Also, the number of random items you find in there is insane in terms of the inventory clutter it creates. I don't know why Blizz does this - they made all these tabs for currencies, mounts, toys etc. in the past to declutter our bags, and then they give us all this other random stuff to take up space, like A Box of Rocks, or all those special gems for the new ring that's clearly modelled after the moddable Mechagon trinket.

Three Short Classic Tales

Monday

I've been trying to look into some guilds on Alliance side, not because I'm in any way unhappy with my Horde guild, but because I figure I've got all these high-level characters on Alliance, it would be nice to be able to also take them out for a spin at least occasionally. I've been finding it more difficult than expected to find a good fit, but that's really a story for another day. The point is that I finally did my first era raid on Alliance side on Monday!

It was a bit of a weird evening as there was nothing in particular going on in SWTOR, my Horde guild had no event on, this Alliance guild I'd been watching had no event on, and the Alliance guild I had just joined on my hunter and pally was running Naxx, for which you (understandably) have to be vetted in another raid first. But hey, the local French guild was hosting an MC pug! I decided to sign up on my holy paladin Sarelle, since they seemed to be short on healers and there's some good healing loot in MC that was potentially going to be useful for her, and then parked myself in Blackrock Mountain well ahead of time.

Unfortunately, when I logged in just before raid time, there were only a small number of people there, and there was some talk about going to Zul'gurub instead since there weren't enough sign-ups. I whispered one of the organisers for confirmation and sadly that was indeed what was happening. I spent about a minute quietly pouting to myself. I had got myself all hyped up for MC! Did I even want to go to ZG? Plus there may not have been "enough" sign-ups for MC, but there were more than twenty, so not everyone would get to raid now anyway.

Then I wondered what else I was going to do that evening and whispered the guy again to ask for an invite to ZG after all. Fortunately Sarelle's hearthstone was still set to Booty Bay for world buff reasons from back in the olden days, so it was easy enough to get down there.

And honestly... it was a nice enough run! We didn't do Edge of Madness and the fish boss, but the pace was good and we only had one wipe on the trash leading up to Mandokir when we somehow got overwhelmed by those life-draining trolls and they slowly wore us down.

It was a bit odd to raid with a group of primarily French people though - they asked everyone to join Discord, but apart from the occasional instruction in English such as "sheep diamond" all the chatter was in French so that I didn't really understand most of it. I did find myself thinking that for someone like me who really values the banter during raids, this was not an optimal solution. At the same time I'll say that even though I didn't understand most of it, the French chatter generally sounded pretty upbeat, and the overall mood did feel good as a result.

I didn't win any boss loot, but a BoE world epic dropped on trash, I won it and was able to sell it on the AH for a couple hundred gold, so I certainly can't complain.

Tuesday

Tuesday was an office day for me, which meant that I came home late and very tired. Even so I still did a BWL clean-up and my first Onyxia with my Horde guild. Sadly the latter didn't drop the sinew I needed for my bow, however I did win both her head and the hunter tier helm. As I said to my guildies: one dragon head to hold and one to put on my head. As they were continuing to Naxx afterwards, I bowed out at that point and popped over to my little rogue on Alliance side.

I quickly decided that I was too tired to do anything "proper" but she had a bunch of breadcrumb quests to talk to people in different zones, so I figured I could just do a bit of running around before bed time. I was just emerging into Stormwind from the Deeprun Tram, when the GM of the little social guild I joined asked whether anyone wanted to join for a Stockades run.

I've mentioned in the past how I'm not too fond of dungeon boosting, but context matters and it seemed serendipitous that he had one spot left and had popped the question just as I'd arrived in Stormwind after not spending any time there in weeks. So I joined and got two quick runs through the Stockades which effectively earned me a "free" level before going to bed. Really can't complain.

Wednesday

After another office day I was once again not feeling up to much, so I just logged through a few characters to check on their mail, auctions etc. However, as I did so on Horde side, a guildie piped up that Azuregos was up and they were forming a group for it. I learned last time that Horde claiming an Azuregos kill as the minority faction is a rare occasion, so I wanted to help out even though I didn't need anything from him anymore.

I hopped on a Windrider from Orgrimmar (getting to Azuregos is one occasion where Horde has it sooo much easier than Alliance) and soon a bunch of us were assembled around the big blue dragon. It took us a while to kill him, but we did manage and a number of people were able to claim some nice loot.

I really like how Classic has these kind of slow and not too rewarding activities that involve a lot of running around, meaning you have reasons to be online and do stuff, but at the same time it's easy to abandon what you're doing in favour of some more exciting group activity without feeling like you're losing out.