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.

Raiding in Classic Era

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

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

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

AQ20

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

ZG

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

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

Molten Core

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

Onyxia

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

Blackwing Lair

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

AQ40

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

Naxxramas

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

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

Things I Learned in Classic

Wilhelm posted some reflections about his Classic experience two days ago, and that finally nudged me into writing this post as well (something I'd already been thinking about for a while).

I suppose I'm slightly unusual in that Classic wasn't this big nostalgia trip for me, or a revelation that the game still holds up surprisingly well two decades later, simply because I already went through all of those things during my time on private servers a few years ago. Sure, they were a less accurate representation of Vanilla than Classic is, but it was close enough.

I did learn oodles about the endgame in Classic though. Having originally started WoW in October 2006, I never touched on the original endgame very much. I remember getting lost in BRD a few times, but never actually making it to the Emperor until we came back in TBC with our characters having significantly grown in power. I wiped in Strat and Scholo a few times, plus there was that one time I got invited to AQ20, but that was pretty much it.

You can tell we had done at least the first few zones in Outland when this was taken due to both me and my warlock friend wearing the full set of TBC starter clown gear.

While I didn't have plans to raid, getting to know the vanilla dungeons a bit better was definitely a goal of mine in Classic, and one at which I ultimately succeeded. I still get lost in Blackrock Spire sometimes because I don't deal with the verticality well, but I can find my way around BRD with some confidence for example.

The main thing I learned was that the old vanilla dungeons had a lot going on. I remember back in my first Classic guild Group Therapy, being on voice chat with them once when a druid was talking about "going fishing for Jed". I wasn't confident enough to simply ask what that meant, but I kept mulling it over and over in my head trying to make sense of it. It was obvious that she wasn't talking about literal fishing since she was in Blackrock Mountain at the time, but I didn't know of any boss called Jed, and I still wasn't sure how you would "fish" for a mob anyway. Maybe stealth up to him and try to tag him before someone else?

I didn't get my answer until  much later, once I'd joined the Forks. The Jed in question is Jed Runewatcher, a rare mob in UBRS that drops an amazing healing trinket and a shadow resistance wand (relevant for warlocks wanting to tank Twin Emps in AQ40). And "fishing" for him means trying to find an instance ID in which he is up. You do this by stealthing far enough into the instance to be able to target him if he's there, and going out again and resetting it if he's not.

That's just one example and basically the vanilla instances are full of stuff like that. And while it's much better documented nowadays than it was fifteen years ago, the way everything fits together is still hard to wrap your head around. At least as far as I'm aware, nobody's written or recorded a guide to "all the weird things you can do in Blackrock Spire" for example, if you get what I mean. A lot of it you still learn by doing or through word of mouth.

I also got to experience both the opening of the Gates of Ahn'qiraj (twice!) and the Naxxramas Scourge invasion, both of which were really cool. Here's the short video I made of the gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords - it was just an all-around amazing day for me that I'll remember forever, ridiculous server lag and all:

And well, I got to raid, saw two Thunderfuries made and even killed Kel'Thuzad, none of which was part of my original plan for Classic. I got to experience the wonders of what it means to be in a 40-man raid, and after having done so I'm actually a bit sad about the downscaling that will come with TBC, even knowing that it'll be a big relief for the officers having to organise it all (and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes).

Seeing the endgame was also interesting on an intellectual level though, as it placed a lot of what I experienced back in the day in a new context. For example I remember at original TBC launch, thinking how cool that new armour was that many of the quest NPCs in Hellfire were wearing, or that Blizzard added those new spider models in places like Bloodmyst Isle. Now I know of course that they weren't new at all, they were tier three armour and recolours of spider wing mobs respectively, but at the time a lot of stuff from Naxx just wasn't commonly known or seen!

It was also interesting to me how Blizzard changed the acquisition of tier gear over time. In Molten Core and Blackwing Lair it just drops off bosses like other pieces of loot, but in AQ40 they first introduced shared class tokens, probably because raid leads were frustrated with constantly having to shard drops for certain classes that weren't highly represented in the raid. They also added requirements for extra items to turn in with the tokens though (idols and scarabs) and I still wonder what that was supposed to be about. My best guess is that it was supposed to encourage guild loyalty, since you couldn't just grab a drop and run, but had to request those extra items from the guild coffers, and depending on your loot luck might even find yourself going on a waiting list for a bit.

The Naxx tier requirements for rare crafting materials such as Arcanite bars, cured hides and Mooncloth at least made a bit more sense to me as an attempt to throw crafting professions a bone at a time when demand for those rare materials was stagnating (or in the case of the hides, had never really been there - signed, a leatherworker).

I will say though, that the whole thing did give me an appreciation for how certain things have been streamlined over time. We may poke fun at Blizzard for constantly filling the game with new and convoluted systems nowadays (and rightly so!), but frankly, having everything be items that go into your bags and then having to use those items for "quests" that aren't really quests was not a good way of doing things either. The amount of space that Zul'Gurub coins and bijous can take up on their own is already ridiculous! More importantly though, I remember finding it very frustrating as a casual player back in the day to get to a place like Cenarion Hold or Light's Hope Chapel, get excited by all the exclamation marks, and then be let down by the fact that most of them weren't actually real quests at all, just raid or reputation trade-ins, and with no easy way of telling what's what.

I've already talked about the weirdness of all raids continuing to have value, even as the next tier was released and dropped better loot. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that now, but if it was Blizzard's design goal back then to keep everyone doing all the content, they definitely achieved it.

I'm curious to see how Classic BC will change my views on that expansion. I did play pretty hardcore back in those days and did do most of the content, but I was also clueless and not very good at the game to start with, so we'll see how that colours my perceptions of the Classic experience.

A Night to Remember

The Classic Crusade cometh... for sure now, on the 1st of June. The announcement about the release date, accompanied by the news that we'd only have two weeks of pre-patch, filled me with a mix of excitement and anxiety. Less than a month's notice meant that I pretty much had to say goodbye to my dreams of booking a whole week off to binge on Classic BC, but also, my guild still hadn't killed Kel'Thuzad, the last boss in Naxxramas.

We did actually kill Sapphiron a week ago, after some strategic readjustments. After several nights of wiping and making (what felt to me like) very little progress, I was chatting to one of the raid leaders one day and we both independently came up with the thought that being the hopeless casuals that we are, we clearly needed more micromanagement, as the problem was always that people started running around like headless chickens during air phase, with everyone trying to dodge out of everyone else's way at the same time. We had been given vague positions in the form of a dedicated "slice" of the room, the way many guilds do it on C'thun as well, but clearly that wasn't enough. We would need to be assigned spots within each slice as well.

Once that plan was hatched, we spent some time discussing it in the Four Horsemen's room the next Monday, and it ended up working like a charm. It still took us a few tries to iron out the last few kinks of course, but it immediately went much, much better. The "Chronobooner" (as our druid class leader likes to call it) was a huge help as well, as it allowed us to stow our world buffs away while we were learning, and then unleash them once we were reasonably confident in what we were doing for that extra bit of "oomph". The kill vid I recorded makes it all look surprisingly easy, not once betraying the huge amount of predetermined co-ordination involved. (And yeah, I was healing on my pally again on that one:)

We only had enough time left for one try on KT that night, but we were so excited to even be there that we agreed to put in an extra raid day on Tuesday in hopes of killing him before the reset. Sapphiron had felt so tough, more than one of us was probably worried whether we'd even be able to kill him a second time. That extra raid night on KT was interesting and did teach us a few things, but we didn't get him down.

The farm raid on Wednesday was a bit meh after that. The previous week we'd set a new personal record by clearing out twelve bosses in a single night, but that evening was a lot less good and we only ended up killing ten, meaning that we had Loatheb, Gothik and 4H left to do this Monday before we'd even get to attempt Sapph and KT again.

The Monday raid was off to a good enough start with Loatheb and Gothik going down quickly and smoothly, but the Horsemen were quite a mess. I was killed by an early meteor and then accidentally released spirit, so I didn't even see what was happening other than that more and more people were showing as dead in the raid frames and I was sure it was going to be a wipe, but somehow they managed to eke out a win with the last few people standing.

Then it was time for Sapphiron. More core healers had shown up that evening than on any previous night, so I was hopeful that maybe I'd get to dps the fight for a change, but I got conflicting responses from different officers. Eventually it was settled that I could stay on the hunter, but there was clearly still some confusion going on among the leadership as I found myself moved back and forth around the raid repeatedly, and there was vocal disagreement about who should be standing where and whether we should immediately use frost protection potions or not.

We'd stored our world buffs away in the chronos again, which was good as the first try was quite messy, with some people in the raid who hadn't been there on the kill night and were therefore not yet familiar with the tactics, and others maybe just not being properly focused yet.

In guild chat, our bard said that he'd managed to lose his mini map and asked what the keybind was to restore it. "Alt+F4," replied our mage class lead, which was immediately followed by a notification about our bard going offline. People howled with laughter, barely able to believe what had just happened. A minute later our bard came back online and was asked whether restoring his mini map had worked. "Yeah, but isn't there a less drastic way than restarting the game?"

Everything seemed to be going well enough except for some continued confusion about the exact group setups (while the hunter class leader had tried to prepare them in advance, our actual raid comp on the night deviated from the plan and that was causing chaos). Suddenly the raid leader said: "Sorry, I have to go" and started hearthing out. As I've come to consider him a good friend, I was instantly filled with concern. Had something bad happened to him IRL?

But then he continued, saying something about how he was the raid leader and people should accept his calls, but that the other officers continued to argue with him regardless. He logged off moments later, leaving us all in that befuddled and slightly concerned state you experience when that sort of drama occurs and you're not quite sure what just happened. I'd not seen a proper rage-quit like that in years!

The other members of the leadership team were clearly taken aback, but quickly recovered and tried to keep things going. We had one more "dry run" on Sapph, which went quite well despite of being two people down, and then took a brief break to fill those two empty slots. Fortunately there were people available, though after what felt like an eternity of waiting, they both arrived in Sapphiron's Lair realising that they'd forgotten their frost resist gear. "Whatever, let's get out those world buffs and go," was pretty much the reaction from leadership, so we pulled him with two people wearing zero FR gear but killed him just fine anyway.

Then it was on to KT once more. We re-bottled our world buffs and had one attempt without them that was kind of "eh", as we didn't even make it to phase three. Then again, we'd already established that KT is a much more forgiving fight than Sapph, one where you can still win even with half the raid dead. As we realised that we only had about fifteen minutes of raid time left, it was agreed to get the buffs out again and just go for it.

The result was an absolutely glorious mess, but we powered through somehow. I have yet to review the video footage but I think I got mind controlled twice and wasn't crowd controlled once (I ended up killing one of our priests too). Once the guardians spawned, they seemed to be all over the place. More and more people went down, including me, with just a sliver of health left on the boss... and then he died, with eleven people left standing (mostly paladins, unkillable bastards that they are).

The coveted crossbow dropped and went to the hunter class leader, but aside from that I didn't even pay much attention to the loot. We'd beaten Classic in time for the pre-patch, and that was all that mattered. I just wish our raid leader could have been there too; he certainly would have deserved to be part of it with how much work he put into herding these cats week after week.

All in all though, it was a night to remember with a little bit of everything that makes Classic Classic: guildies trolling each other, drama, near-wipes and an exciting first kill of the last boss of a raid (and in this case, also the whole of Classic). (Edit: I also made a kill vid eventually.)

Time Waits for No Man... Or Does It?

Even though we still don't have a release date, the Classic Crusade looms ever closer. Last week's patch added a big badge to the character selection screen to make sure players who don't follow outside news sources wouldn't be caught by surprise by what's coming.

It also was a big patch in another way though, in the sense that after one and a half years of (mostly) #nochanges it introduced what I consider the first big deviation from Vanilla to Classic by adding the Chronoboon Displacer to the game, an item intended to address the worst issues with the world buff meta.

It's a consumable that's available for purchase from Chromie in Andorhal at ten gold a pop (if you've done the quests for her), and what it does is bottle up any world buffs you have on you at the time of using it and safely preserves them in an item inside your bags. For PvP servers, this means no more griefing by dispelling or otherwise causing people to lose their lovingly gathered world buffs, and for us PvE carebears it simply means that we're freed of the pressure of having to plan so much of our play time around just when to pick up which buff and then making sure to stay logged out until raid start. Now we are able to pick them up early in the week even, bottle them up, and then go about our business grinding, running dungeons or what have you, without having to worry about losing buff duration. Once we're actually ready to pull the first boss, the buffs can be unleashed with the click of a button and we're good to go.

The thing is, I really don't know how I feel about it. I've written about my changing relationship with the world buff meta, and honestly from a practical point of view I absolutely love this change. Especially since I often used to gather buffs on both my hunter and paladin, just to watch one character's go to waste if that one wasn't actually needed (much) on the night. Now I can just pick up the buffs whenever it's convenient and then just not worry about them anymore until they are actually needed. I don't even need to get fidgety about wasted buff time anymore if the raid leaders get caught up in some sort of discussion at raid start. The ten gold price is worth it but simultaneously encourages you to think about when you want to use it, so you don't just mindlessly capture and release buffs all the time.

On the other hand though... this is a pretty big change. I've mostly been on board with the #nochanges movement, never mind things like tweaking the spawn rate of herbs to adjust for larger server populations. This item didn't exist in Vanilla and it introduces a whole new level of gameplay for raiders. Sure, it feels good now, but I've been playing these games for long enough to know that there are always long-term consequences that may result in the final experience not being quite as expected. For example I've started picking up the songflower buff now, when previously I usually didn't bother since it was the shortest, most fickle and most out of the way of all the world buffs. If I can pick it up at my convenience and then bottle it instantly until I'm actually at the boss though... there's no real excuse not to get it now, is there?

It also changes the way raids can approach certain bosses. People might argue about when they think it's best to use or preserve their buffs. A friend got quite cross when he died and lost his own buffs in Naxx after pulling aggro from the main tank, who'd quietly decided to bottle his own buffs after Patchwerk and was therefore suddenly generating a lot less threat. On the other hand, the very same friend was able to stow his buffs away before Vael in BWL, correctly predicting that he was going to die from the boss's unavoidable kill mechanic, and could then whip them out again for the later bosses.

Our last Naxx farm night we managed to hit a new personal record by clearing twelve bosses in one night, largely due to the Chronoboon Displacer allowing us to use a different kill order and strategy. Usually we'd start fully buffed at Patchwerk and then just keep going, with more and more people losing their buffs to deaths etc. as we continued, so that we had to save Loatheb for the next night or else we wouldn't be able to approach him sufficiently buffed. This time around we banked our buffs safely, started by doing Noth and Heigan without them (so we wouldn't randomly lose them to dancing fails) and then got them out for Loatheb and proceeded to Patchwerk right afterwards.

New buff release animation

It just feels a bit like the end of an era, as it's Blizzard more or less acknowledging that purity of vision and accurate preservation of how Vanilla used to work is less important to Classic now than keeping the game fun for the current player base, which simply isn't approaching WoW the same way as people did back in Vanilla. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it does make you wonder where they'll draw the line, and what other changes may end up being implemented later on. Retail-style connected servers seem almost inevitable already, considering that the game keeps trying to add the server name to character names whenever you whisper or mail people since the patch (e.g. "Shintar-HydraxianWaterlords" instead of just Shintar). I just don't want to watch history repeat itself.

Too Much To Do

One reason I was originally hesitant to join a guild in Classic was that I was worried that I might end up liking it too much, leading to me wanting to spend more time in game than I realistically have available for this particular endeavour. This pretty much happened. D'oh! I sort of already wrote about it back in October, though I focused on the pull of wanting to be social with my guildies back then. However, another dimension that I haven't really talked about is that - once you get into the group content - it feels like there's just so much to do in Classic at max level, especially right now.

I've often expressed my disdain for the way Blizzard changed retail WoW to basically always be just about the latest patch, with any and all content from previous patches being obsoleted almost instantly unless you're into farming cosmetics. I will admit though that I hadn't considered just how exhausting it could be to on the other hand have everything be relevant to your power progression almost forever.

Just looking at the raids, Classic WoW has six of them at this stage of the game, with all the original content released: Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Ruins and Temple of Ahn'qiraj, and finally, Naxxramas. You'd think that if you're clearing most of Naxx, there wouldn't really be any reason to go back to any of the older raids unless you want to gear up an alt or something, right? Weeeell...

Molten Core is probably the closest to being truly "obsolete" at this point except for fresh sixties, however the legendary Thunderfury remains alluring, giving warriors in particular a reason to keep dragging everyone else through the place regardless.

Blackwing Lair drops some much better pieces of gear than MC, but still, most of them are superseded by Naxx gear, right? Again, weeeell... most of them, but there are some rare trinket drops that are Classic best in slot forever, giving people chasing their BiS incentive to keep coming back for a shot at those rare drops if nothing else.

Zul'Gurub was introduced as a smaller-sized catch-up raid for fresh sixties, so you'd think it would be in a similar position as Molten Core by now, but something that I didn't immediately realise was that it's also the source of the only real worthwhile enchants for the head, shoulder and leg slots. Head and legs require idols, of which you can only ever get two per run. Shoulders require exalted reputation as well as a lot of tokens farmed from trash drops. Basically, have fun farming this place forever until you've got your final BiS and got lucky with rolls often enough to enchant it all.

AQ20 is another easy raid in a similar vein as Zul'Gurub, but here the perpetual draw is that it drops max-rank spell books for three spells for all classes. At least these can be traded between players, so you don't necessarily have to go there yourself to get them all, but someone's got to keep running the place to supply the market. Those books don't appear out of thin air.

AQ40, being the last raid before Naxx, is another interesting one because while for some classes it's pretty pointless to go there if they can get Naxx gear instead, there are sets in there for certain classes and specs that don't really get superseded by anything else, meaning you'll have a particular niche of your raiders forever clamouring to re-visit this raid as well. I guess I've got to give those Vanilla game designers credit for succeeding at keeping players interested in all the raids.

Now, lest you get the wrong idea, I'm not actually raiding all these places every week, and neither does my guild as a whole. We haven't been to MC since just before Naxx release for example. But everything else... people do go back to at least sometimes, and I in turn feel a certain pressure to come along if I can, both to work on still improving my pally's gear to help with our Naxx progression but also just to simply help make up the numbers.

So in addition to everything else I'm now actually also looking forward to Burning Crusade for the simple reason that we'll only have one tier to work on to begin with, leaving a lot more "free" time to spend on alts or dungeoneering. And any character copies that I keep on original Classic realms will simply have forever to achieve their goals there, with no more changes coming after that. I guess right now there's just a sort of unique pressure to "finish off" as much as we can, as anything achieved now will benefit both characters moving forward into Classic BC and those staying in the Vanilla world.

Four Horsemen and a Paladin

It's been two months since I last wrote about my guild's Naxx progression, which is really kind of surprising considering that I spend two nights a week in there right now. I guess I just don't have that much to say about the day-to-day of it, but after two months an update certainly feels in order.

Monday night was a good night not just for Redbeard, but also for the Forks as we got the Four Horsemen down for the first time. This brings us up to 13 out of 15 Naxx bosses killed, compared to the 8/15 we were at when I last posted at the end of January.

Gluth was really just about figuring out a kiting strategy. We eventually ended up going for a paladin spamming Blessing of Kings as the kiter, with mages and some warriors helping to slow the mobs. It still feels messy every time though, and the kiter is usually dead by the time the fight is over.

Thaddius took a few attempts for everyone to get comfortable with the polarity shift mechanic but wasn't as bad as I had feared.

In regards to Loatheb I mentioned last time how we wiped at five percent or something - well, eventually we got there. Ironically, we then had another two or three weeks of failing on him again due to healing screw-ups that needed sorting out, until we finally got him to something you can fairly call farm status.

Gothik, for me, was a lot of boring waiting around while people endlessly discussed what to CC and what to kill and when, none of which was anything I could help with. Eventually something was figured out that worked, or maybe it just took us that long to actually get it right.

But then, the Horsemen! The fight known to give guilds of all levels pause and put their skills to the test. As I told Red, this was actually one challenge I wasn't worried about, because we've spent so much time failing on easy stuff, failing on a harder fight for a while should be a piece of cake in comparison. And it was... fine.

We started off using an addon that's supposed to show everyone where to move during each part of the fight, but it conflicted with some things so eventually dropped it, though it was a good tool to get a grasp on the basic mechanics of the fight. By Classic standards, it's a relatively unforgiving one with quite a lot of personal responsibility, and losing a single tank or healer usually meant a wipe, which meant that as a dps I barely got to practice one or two rotations before the call to mop up went out on most attempts, but eventually we got there. I made a kill vid too!

Next it's onwards to Sapphiron. We had some attempts on him so far and the main takeaway from them was that we should probably get some more frost resist gear than we brought originally, as well as some more healers. Speaking of healers...

At the end of January I paid to attune my paladin to Naxx. It was with an eye on Sapphiron, where we knew we'd need some dps to go on healers at least during the learning phase, but as it happened we actually found ourselves short on healers quite a few nights before that. Theoretically we have enough of them on the roster, but sadly a number of them have pretty poor/irregular attendance, which threatened to throw many a night into disarray if some people hadn't changed to healer alts.

 

I'm one of about four people who've been doing this regularly and it's been... alright. It's no secret that I enjoy healing, though I have to say that healing in a forty-man raid is comparatively boring, as it rarely feels like you make a difference being one of three to five people spamming the tank. Also, if you think grabbing and retaining world buffs on one character is already a pain in the butt, let me say that doing it on two (when you're not sure which character you'll be needed on for which fight) is worse.

Ultimately though, I'm glad that I put in the work to gear up the pally to help out as I know that on quite a few nights, me and others having these healing alts has probably been what made the difference between being able to kill Patchwerk or Loatheb or not, even if you don't really feel your personal impact as the twelfth healer during the fight itself.

Two bosses to go, and while the beta for TBC Classic has started, we still don't have a release date, so I'm hopeful. We can kill ten bosses on our first night pretty consistently now, which then leaves the second night to clean up the remaining three and work on progression. While I didn't even plan to raid when I started playing Classic, after coming this far, I'd really quite like to see Naxx through to the end.

A Naxxramas New Year

I rarely make posts just to promote other people's work but I can't believe this video only has 25k views three days after being posted... it's the best WoW machinima I've seen in a long time and made me both laugh out loud and tear up. Particularly relevant to Naxx raiders but I'm sure most people with some knowledge of WoW can enjoy it. I'll never hurt Mr Bigglesworth again!

Riding the World Buff Train

I've mentioned Classic's "world buff meta" before, but for those not in the know, it basically works like this: With the general difficulty of outdoor content, Blizzard thought back in the day that temporary buffs were a good way to reward players, because you really do feel them making a major difference to your performance and survivability.

They were mostly designed in an organic and fun way, without any real concern for balancing. You slay the dragon and hang its head from the city gates, so everyone in the city is happy and excited and gains a buff called Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer for two hours. Makes sense, right?

The thing is that those buffs are incredibly overpowered. For example the Rallying Cry gives 140 attack power among other things - for reference, my hunter in a mix of tier two and three gear has about 1300 attack power unbuffed - so even for someone who's already pretty geared, that one buff alone still increases their power by ten percent. In a way the buffs are even more attractive for lowbies though (at least in cases where they don't scale with level), as a levelling warrior with 150 attack power hanging out in Stormwind for example can turn themselves into murder machine with twice their regular power level for their next round of questing!

The problem is that players realised that they could control the timing of these buffs and use them to their advantage by simply holding on to those smelly dragon heads for a bit. Sure, it may be a one-time quest, but with forty people in a raid group you can easily start your nightly raids by having someone hand in the quest and trigger the buff for weeks or even months in a row, and that's without taking into consideration that multiple guilds can cooperate to coordinate their timings.

The dragon head is the easy part though, because assembling in town before the raid is easy. But then you also want to go to Booty Bay for the heart of Hakkar drop, do a Dire Maul tribute run and get the buffs from there, find and cleanse a songflower in Felwood... considering the amount of travel time in Classic and the fact that all these buffs only have a limited duration, wanting to min-max your performance turns into a logistical challenge before the raid's even started, something to tackle potentially even days in advance, though you then have to make sure to stay logged out until raid start once you've acquired your buffs.

It's a very odd meta and I was very uncomfortable with it at the start, especially when the content was so easy that people in greens who weren't even max-level could clear Molten Core just fine. As some players described it at the time, it basically meant spending two hours gathering buffs to finish the raid fifteen minutes faster. Relevant to speed runners going for records for sure, but surely not for the wider population?

And that's without even getting into the fragility of these buffs, and I'm not even playing on a PvP server. As I noted the first time I went to AQ20 with my guild, I picked up the head and heart buffs because it was a low-effort thing to do, just to lose them five minutes into the raid when we wiped on a bad trash pull. Imagine how that feels if you spent hours setting up travel all over Azeroth to get those buffs!

My guild being truly casual, nobody's ever been required to pick up any world buffs, but getting the head and heart just before raid time has always been considered a good thing to do. The guild mistress and a few others also used to advocate for Dire Maul Tribute runs before AQ40 sometimes, but those seemed to be a lot less popular, what with the effort of getting down to Feralas (since you couldn't necessarily count on a warlock summon being available) and back to town (again, since you might not be able to catch a mage portal). I did them a few times and admittedly the first time it was pretty exciting to see my threat and damage shoot up (especially back when my gear wasn't great yet), but ultimately I still decided that it wasn't worth the effort of making it a regular occurrence. After all, few others ever seemed to bother, we'd often lose the buffs early due to wiping on something silly, and we could clear the instance just fine without them, so what was the point? The allure of just being higher up on the damage meters by the end of the night wasn't enough for me.

Naxx has been different though. None of us really bothered with buffs the first couple of weeks because we all knew that we were going to wipe early and a lot (and we did), but once we started to have at least the first few bosses on farm, speed did become a concern. My guild raids Naxx twice a week and the instance has fifteen bosses in it. Speed runners clearing the place in an hour notwithstanding, we knew it was always going to be a challenge for us to clear things fast enough to have consistent progression time on the newest bosses. (I'm amused every time I see some meme that lists "three hour AQ40 clears" as shorthand for a guild being unacceptably bad and slow. Whenever we cleared AQ40 in three hours we thought we did pretty well!) Plus some of the fights in Naxx are hard enough that going in with world buffs can actually make a big difference to whether we can get them down with ease or not at all.

So the drum beat to gather world buffs more often has become louder - not in a top-down way, but presented as a "we need to do everything we can to beat these bosses" team effort. Tribute runs have become more frequent, and warlock alts were placed to be able to offer summons. Last week the Darkmoon Faire was in town, and you can get one of a selection of buffs there as well by having your fortune told. The fact that it was making camp in Mulgore, a Horde starting zone, did not put the guild mistress off and she organised another bunch of alts to taxi people over there as well.

A lot of other guilds were doing the same, so there was a plethora of lowbie alts with names like "Summonbot" in attendance. I remember one particularly bizarre moment when a conversation ensued in /say about which of the available buffs to pick from the fortune teller. Someone from another guild commented that the resistance buff was best for Sapphiron, to which our guild mistress countered that we needed the damage buff for Loatheb - we were way too casual to worry about Sapphiron yet. At that point I felt the urge to chime in with: "Yeah, we are the casual Mulgore summoning squad!"  and then I had to laugh at myself because of how absurd it sounded. Surely there's nothing casual about parking alts in three different locations to ferry your guildies around Kalimdor for faster buff pick-up.

But then, this is how it always goes for me. I'll never be a top player and I despise the kind of min-max culture that looks down on anyone who doesn't follow the current meta even if whatever they're doing instead is perfectly fit for purpose. But when I care about the game and I find that what I've done so far isn't good enough anymore, then I step up. Even if that includes gathering temporary buffs in odd places, or farming awkward consumables from frost giants in Winterspring and giant scorpions in the Blasted Lands. Because I want us to win. And as bizarre as this whole buff meta is, there is something satisfying about approaching it as a team: from the warm fuzziness you feel when a guildie hands you a stack of consumables for free, to the relieved smile of another guildie who was late to log on but you held the cleared Tribute instance open for them anyway.

It almost makes me wonder whether I'll miss these odd rituals once Burning Crusade comes around...

Naxx Update

I haven't written about my guild's Naxx progression since the post about the raid's release in early December, when I expressed some concern about us having gotten only three bosses down during the first week - a week when the news were all about how more hardcore players had once again cleared the raid within hours of release, and our own initial forays felt slow and clumsy even by our more casual standards.

To the Forks' credit though, we have persevered... and in fact appear to have slid into a unique niche on our server as the one Alliance guild that's consistently progressing at more old-school speeds. Everyone else seems to either be (nearly) done or have given up. This has actually led to us picking up more recruits and our roster is the strongest it's been since I joined, to the point that we even have to bench people occasionally.

I missed out on our Maexxna and Razuvious first kills, but was there for Heigan, Patchwerk and Grobbulus.

Getting back into the groove for the Heigan dance was easier than expected (after having learned it during Wrath of the Lich King) and both times we've killed him so far I was one of the few still alive by the end, with half the raid dead (though I have yet to successfully make it out of the gauntlet he teleports you into, something that wasn't present in this form in the Wrath version of the fight).

Patchwerk required a lot of wipes (though they were no skin off a hunter's back as I could always just run into a corner and feign death) while tanks and healers figured out what to do, but then things just suddenly clicked and we went from a 48% wipe to a kill on the next try.

Grobbulus is the biggest loot pinata in the instance, to the point that even we could one-shot him! Figures that a boss like that was hidden behind Patchwerk...

Gothik the Harvester has eluded us so far for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. I remember this fight being so easy in Wrath, and the Classic version isn't really any more complicated mechanically, but somehow we always end up getting overwhelmed by adds on one side or the other just before it's time for him to come down. I'm sure the raid leaders will figure out what's going wrong eventually.

One fight that's very different from how I remember it in Wrath is Loatheb - in Wrath he has this necrotic aura that prevents healing for most of the fight, so healers had to time big heals to go off at just the right time during the brief windows when the aura dropped off for a few seconds. In Classic, there is no such aura, and healing can be done at any time - but casting any healing spell as any class will put all your healing abilities on cooldown for a full minute, meaning that the healers have to set up a strict rotation to keep the main tank topped off and not a single heal can be spared for the dps, meaning that we have to follow our own strict rotation of using consumables to stay alive for five minutes.

We gave it some "dry runs" without consumables just to practice the positioning of the spores and things seemed to go well enough, but when we tried "for real" our dps felt way off. I suggested that we might have to try him as the first boss of the evening with as many world buffs as we could muster (casualness be damned), and when we did that we wiped at 3%. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get him down this reset.

So things are going... decently! We've come a long way from that first night of constant stumbling, followed by other nights of wiping five times in a row on the exact same spider trash pack, to being in a position where we at least have the first few bosses on farm and can progress a little bit more every week. Which is all I could ask for really! Huge kudos to the leadership team for keeping it all together in what honestly seems like pretty challenging circumstances to me (and no, I'm not writing this just to suck up to them in case one of them reads this).

I don't actually know whether we'll even be able to clear the instance before Classic TBC comes out if the rumours about how soon it's supposed to be released are true, but I'm happy to be along for the ride either way.

Slay the Undead or Be Slain by Them

Sooo... Naxx is out and the undead are invading. What have I been up to?

I mentioned previously that I'd bought the materials to buy the raid attunement at honoured level with the Argent Dawn, but I'd heard that the Scourge invasion event was pretty good for reputation so I wanted to give that a go before actually completing the attunement quest. It wasn't really as good as I had hoped, but killing the mobs does give reputation until you reach revered, and teaming up with a bunch of guildies the rep gains kept coming in pretty quickly. I ended up grinding like mad with a rotating roster of guildies for about one and a half days until I hit revered, at which point I bought the attunement for a reduced price and was properly pleased with myself.

The next best thing about the whole event was helping out a guildie who plays a priest and who had been very downtrodden about only having just hit honoured, at which point the attunement was still too expensive for him. I coaxed him into coming along to farm invasions and before I knew it he was farming them harder than I was, meaning that he also managed to hit revered and get attuned just in time for our first Naxx run on Monday. That just made me happy in a "knowing I actually made a difference" sort of way.

In general, the event brought back a surprising amount of memories. I always say that I don't recall anything about the much-praised zombie invasion event that occurred in the run-up to Wrath, but floating citadels and mobs dropping runes? I remember seeing those at the end of BC and farming them in Blasted Lands. Funny how people rarely talk about that part of the Wrath pre-expansion event replicating the original Scourge invasion.

Monday night we went to Naxx for the first time and it went... okay-ish I guess? My guildies had all been going nuts farming herbs for potions in the run-up to the patch, especially with an eye on Loatheb, but I was saying to one of the raid leaders that I considered that premature because we definitely weren't going to get to Loatheb on the first night anyway. I was told not to be so pessimistic. If you'd asked me to bet, I would have hazarded that we'd maybe clear the spider wing on our first night and possibly kill Noth as well. Four of the easier bosses out of a total of fifteen seemed pretty reasonable for our level of casualness.

As it turns out though, that estimate was still too optimistic, as we finished the night with only two boss kills under our belt. I guess it's a plus that we avoided dying to the first trash pull (after this hilarious video made us all super paranoid), but Anub'Rekhan still took us five attempts to down, and was then followed by more wipes on Faerlina's trash. The Grand Widow herself was a one-shot, interestingly enough, but then we didn't have that much time left by the time we got to Maexxna and just wiped on her twice before calling it a night.

Tonight we returned to a freshly reset instance. Anub only took two tries this time, but Faerlina was suddenly a major struggle for some reason and we wiped twice before getting her down with only a handful of people left alive. The raid leader decided that since we were somewhat short on healers it was better to try Noth instead of Maexxna, and we got him down on the second try. The rest was more dying to trash.

And.... I don't know how I feel about all of this!

I know I don't quite share the excitement of some officers who seemed to be having the time of their lives, but I didn't exactly have a bad time either. The company was enjoyable as usual and the general mood positive, and I'm not someone who minds wiping (or else I wouldn't be running the endless progression reset treadmill in SWTOR). Frankly, that one time when one spider patrol after another respawned right on top of our heads after we were only just trying to recover from the last one was friggin' hilarious, and our struggle with the gauntlet to Heigan was pretty epic as well.

Buuut... I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but I guess I thought we were a little better than this? I suppose since I joined the raid group with AQ40 already on farm I didn't really know what to expect on progression and my expectations were a bit too high. Seeing us wipe so many times on bosses like Anub and Faerlina does make me a bit worried when it comes to the more difficult fights in the instance. Plus I'm not a huge fan of 30-40 gold repair bills per night. Yes, I'll fully admit it: I'm spoiled as a hunter and used to being able to avoid a lot of repairs by using my feign death ability, but the fights in Naxx make it hard. I just don't like the idea of having to start farming purely to keep up with my repairs. Finally, I'm a bit worried about the general health of the raid group - the roster seemed to have recovered to a pretty healthy level a couple of months ago, but lately it's been feeling somewhat anaemic again, leading to us permanently undermanning things, which isn't helpful when it comes to progression either.

Sooo... I guess we'll see how things go from here. One thing that stuck with me was a conversation we had on the way to Maexxna when we were talking about some of the more hardcore guilds on the server putting in crazy hours in order to be able to claim realm firsts, when the guild mistress said that the difference between us and them was that we were used to wiping. This elicited some chuckles, but there is a truth in there in that familiarity and generally being comfortable with wiping makes it less of a problem in a way, whereas in a guild of min-maxers expecting smooth kills it's more likely to create resentment and drama. Looking at how Naxx has been going so far I guess I'll soon find out how resilient the Forks really are.

The Naxx Waiting Room

Back in Vanilla I remember joining an Alterac Valley and seeing people from another server in my raid group that were in a guild called "PVP SUX WHENS NAXXRAMAS". At the time I had no idea what Naxxramas even was, but the odd name with the double x certainly drew my attention, plus I was intrigued by the fact that this was a thing people were apparently waiting for. (Considering that I started playing WoW in late 2006, Naxxramas had actually already been released by that time, but I guess nobody felt the need to petition for a guild name change.)

I was reminded of this when I saw a conversation in the LFG channel the other day in which someone was once again bemoaning the lack of groups for whatever it was they wanted to do, and someone else responded that we were all "in the Naxx waiting room". It certainly seemed like an apt description for how the last few weeks have felt.

You may remember that I wrote about having to prepare for the Naxx release a few weeks ago. In practice... I was already honoured with the Argent Dawn, so I just bought the materials needed to pay for the attunement at that level, sent a few consumable materials to the guild bank and called it a day. It's just not the sort of grind I enjoy.

However, as it turns out a lot of my guildies are the complete opposite. Outside of raids, it's been nothing but "anyone for Scholo" or people farming herbs or ore night after night after night, and it's been a bit disheartening. Of course wanting to be prepared is laudable, and it's not my intent to tell anyone how they should play the game, but while I personally like a good dungeon run, I only do so in moderation and as part of a varied diet, not the same dungeon ten times a week. As a result I haven't been interacting with people as much outside of raids, and it's felt a bit odd. I know I said I could do with some more time to pursue my solo goals, but I didn't mean for things to go completely the opposite way! So I've certainly been feeling like I'm sat "in the Naxx waiting room", waiting for my guildies to return to some sort of normalcy and hopefully have time for some fun adventures outside of raiding again.

I guess it doesn't help that I'm personally not all that excited about Naxx. I mean, I'm sure it'll be cool and exciting to go there with the guild, not to mention that it's full of shiny gear drops, but I'm not part of the demographic for whom playing Classic has been all about achieving that mythical goal of clearing 40-man Naxx because they couldn't do so back in the day. Remember, I didn't plan to raid in Classic at all! I'm sure it'll be interesting to spend two nights a week going there, but I don't care for it seemingly being the centre of everyone's thoughts at all times whenever they're logged in. 

This self-enforced retreat into more solo play to avoid the Scholo farms hasn't been all bad, mind you. It's been a great time to level my alts (especially their trade skills) and have adventures with strangers again. For example there was the time my priest (yes, I finally made a priest in Classic after more than a year) befriended a druid playing under self-imposed hardcore rules in Loch Modan. This meant that they would have to delete the character if they died and weren't allowed to formally group up - but we started chatting in whispers and took turns tagging troggs and killing them together. It ended up being quite an adventure and I received the amazing compliment of: "I don't know why, but I quite like you" afterwards.

Meanwhile my paladin repeatedly healed her way through Uldaman and Zul'Farrak, and my hunter pugged Onyxia and made friends with an orc rogue in Winterspring (limited communication through joint fighting and exchange of emotes is such a beautiful thing). Fortunately there are always interesting things happening in Classic if you know where to look, guild or no.

Naxxramas Looms

Alongside the announcement of Shadowlands' new release date, a short blue post on the forums also revealed that Classic's phase six will begin on the 1st of December, with Naxxramas unlocking two days later. I've seen a lot of grumbling about this from people who play both versions of WoW (or think that a lot of other players do), as it means that Blizzard will be dropping two major content updates within the space of a week, when the previous idea seemed to have been to keep players dipping into both versions by alternating releases for the two games.

I can't say I'm particularly bothered in that regard as I'm not currently planning to buy Shadowlands, but even so, hearing that Naxx is only a few weeks away has been a bit troublesome. I didn't care about Classic's raid releases before because I wasn't raiding myself (duh), and I was only invested in the opening of the AQ gates because I really wanted to be there for the world event. Now that I'm raiding though, the opening of a new raid means a major change of pace, and it just feels a bit soon - I don't really get the vibe that people are tired of AQ already and itching to sink their teeth into something new, but that's where we are. I'm guessing ActiBlizz is keen to round out the quarter with record subscription numbers or something like that.

When I was gathering nature resist gear for AQ I bemoaned the fact that I was so behind, and that surely all this farming had been much easier when people had weeks and weeks to prepare for the opening of the new raid. Well, this time I have those weeks to prepare myself... and I still don't like it much, haha. I guess I'm just too much of a casual. At the basic level, there are three levels of preparation to consider:

Attunement

The attunement for Naxxramas is extremely straightforward: be at least honoured with the Argent Dawn and pay them some rare materials and money. At revered level the cost is reduced, and if you're exalted they'll let you in for free. Now, obviously exalted reputation by the start of December would be ideal, but I also know that's realistically not going to happen, because I'm only a bit into honoured and getting to exalted within three weeks would require endless grinding of Strat UD and Scholomance.

I'm hoping that the Scourge invasion event tied to the launch will at least nudge me into revered, as I've been told repeatedly that it's supposed to be great for rep. If the effect of the AQ opening event on Brood of Nozdormu rep was any indication of how these things go however... we'll see I guess.

That leaves me with having to make sure that I have all the rare materials required to pay for access in the bank in advance, because I can imagine that if half the sever suddenly decides to go shopping for them on opening night, no amount of money is going to buy you everything you need if there just isn't enough supply.

Frost Resistance Gear

It's a bit of an unknown how much of this will actually be needed, considering that people have been running AQ40 with a lot less nature resist than back in the day as well, but the current assumption is that you'll still need the whole raid to have some frost resistance for Sapphiron at least.

At first the guild's official line was that it would be good to try and gather some pieces in the current environment already, which I did, but then it changed to: Actually, we'll get much better frost resistance pieces from the early Naxx bosses and other new sources included with phase six, and since we won't be getting to Sapphiron right away anyway, we'll probably be better off going for those better options then.

The good thing about this is that it means I won't actually have to worry about frost resistance gear much until Naxx releases, yay! Though one thing I could/should do is upgrade my AV trinket - I'm still only friendly with the Stormpikes. Then again, AV as Alliance, ugh... that could be a whole post of its own.

Consumables and Crafting Mats

There are two dimensions to this: One is that tier three doesn't drop as fully formed pieces of gear, but rather tokens that you have to trade in with the Argent Dawn alongside some rare crafting materials such as arcanite bars etc. The other is that a lot of consumables such as flasks and resistance potions will be good to have as we're progressing through Naxx... though I don't think it's known just how much of each type we'll realistically need. The guild has put out a call to arms to farm up as many herbs, fishes and elemental parts as possible.

This is the one I find hardest to find motivation for, and I think it's for two reasons: One is that I'm just not that into farming. I don't actively hate it or anything, but most days there are a hundred other things I'd rather do, so it's just never really a priority either.

The other is that what goal to achieve for Naxx launch is kind of fuzzy. The number of materials I'll need to get full tier three is finite of course, but as I won't be talking into Naxx on day one and getting a full set, there seems to be little point in aiming to have everything ready for release day. For all I know I might never get full tier three anyway, seeing how luck with drops plays a role as well.

Likewise the consumable requirements are not very clear either, and with bag space being a precious commodity, I don't really fancy filling up my bank with various potions "just in case". I guess I'll be aiming to send some Stonescale Eels to the guild bank to make myself feel like I've done something, but realistically I can't see myself pushing for more than that.

Interestingly, the thing I feel most like doing and that might end up being beneficial in a different way is to continue levelling my paladin and my druid (yes, I have a night elf druid as well now). The pally is almost at the point where she can mine Thorium, and being able to hunt for Arcane Crystals myself would be a real boon. The druid has a longer way to go, but being able to gather at least some lower-level herbs might also be useful already, plus I would eventually gain my own Arcanite transmute cooldown as well.

Classic is all about playing the long game.

Voices of Wrath

Back when I reviewed the Cataclysm cinematic, one of the negative points I mentioned was the fact that I didn't really care for Deathwing's voice. This then made me think about what I thought about WOTLK's voice acting in general, what I thought was good and what was... less good.

The latter doesn't take that long to sum up, as it only consists of two points really. The first one is simply Arthas himself. I didn't have a problem with his voice acting per se, but I swear that the pitch of his voice changed every single time he made an appearance. People joked about how sitting on the Frozen Throne all this time had given the guy a cold, but what it came down to in the end was that the voice of the major villain of the expansion changing all the time hurt immersion and generally gave the impression of Blizzard doing unusually shoddy work with him, as if the sound editor randomly came up with a new mix of settings every time they had to record more voice work for Arthas.

The second thing that I didn't like was that all the NPCs just talked too damn much. I know that certain upcoming MMOs are really priding themselves in the fact that they include a lot of voice work, but personally I don't think that this is a good thing. An MMO is not an audio book, is not a film, is not a single player game... it's not a medium where you should have to spend extended amounts of time just sitting back to listen. If a boss wants my attention they have to be snappy; otherwise I'm just going to tune their yapping out eventually, in order to focus on, you know, actually playing. (Gruul's "Come... and die" is one of my favourite lines to this day, simply for being short and to the point.)

For all the time that I've spent in ICC in the past year, I'd have trouble quoting most of the bosses from there, with the exception of Sindy's terribad "BETRAAAY you" line. I mean, I know that they talk a lot and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but what I really hear in my head is something like "Arthas blah blah Tirion blah blah Bolvar blah blah". Not really memorable to me at least.

That said, when they don't go into endless monologues, a lot of WOTLK's NPCs had some pretty good lines coupled with solid voice acting. My personal favourites from Wrath's five-man instances are:

1. Keristrasza: Finish it! Finish it! Kill me, or I swear by the Dragonqueen you'll never see daylight again!

I have a suspicion that her voice work was done by the same woman that did Sindragosa, only without the annoying screechiness, and she does a pretty good job at conveying emotion with her voice (maybe overacting just a little bit, but that's okay). Whatever you thought of Keristrasza's story in general, her last lines in the Nexus are a heart-wrenching mix of aggressive insanity (threatening to kill the players) and what's left of her original personality (swearing by the Dragonqueen and wanting her torment to end). I like all of her lines really, including the "Preserve? Why?" upon pulling her and her last words asking for the Life-Binder to preserve her after all.

2. Scourgelord Tyrannus: Rimefang! Trap them within the tunnel! Bury them alive!

Scourgelord Tyrannus is actually one of those characters that talk way too much, even if he has a very nice voice, but the above line shows that he can get to the point when he thinks it's urgent. I've been known to randomly call this one out whenever we're fighting Rimefang in ICC.

3. Skarvald the Constructor: Pagh! What sort of necromancer lets death stop him? I knew you were worthless!

I love this line for the simple reason that I've always felt that the Scourge's necromancers have a tendency to look a bit sissy, and Skarvald not only shares these feelings, he expresses them better than I ever could.

4. Ionar: Master... you have guests.

Ionar must be British or something, because that's quite the understatement when talking about people storming your castle and slaughtering everything in sight. Even in death he retains the elemental equivalent of a stiff upper lip, and I can dig that.

5. The Black Knight: No! I must not fail... again...

I always thought that the Black Knight was a bit of a weird character, because on the one hand he's supposed to be this really powerful Scourge lieutenant, but on the other hand he's very obviously a Monty Python joke. How do you reconcile these two images? Well, I thought his last words do a decent job at it, by showing that his constant getting up again is not a sign of overconfidence, but rather the last desperate attempt of someone who knows that he messed up before and can't afford to do so again. The way that last line is delivered is enough to actually make me feel sorry for him a little every time.

The "So bad it's good" award: Devourer of Souls: You dare look upon the host of souls?! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE!

If you've ever done Forge of Souls, this needs no explanation. You just want to tell this guy to chill the hell out.

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

1. Sara/Yogg-Saron: I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!

This phase-transitioning line is probably the single most amazing piece of voice acting I've ever heard in WoW. Even just playing it back in my head gives me the shivers. The transition from Sara's almost sensual voice to Yogg's fury is just so incredibly well done; it completely blew me away the first time I heard it.

2. Thorim: I remember you... In the mountains...

I never actually got what the fuss was about with this line. I remember our main tank and raid leader repeating it ad nauseam and I just didn't see the appeal, but the longer they went on, the more ingrained it became into my own brain. Then I found out that it had even become an internet meme and... well, now I can't help it anymore either. (Seriously, search YouTube for this phrase and you'll find loads more.)

3. XT-002 Deconstructor: New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!

While having to hear XT's voice over and over again whenever I run past someone with the mini pet has demoted his voice from amusing to annoying for me, I still have to give credit where credit is due: I still remember pulling him for the first time and vent erupting into laughter upon hearing his squeaky voice - and I know we weren't the only guild that had this kind of reaction.

4. Lord Jaraxxus: You face Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

I suppose I have a bit of a thing for eredar lords, considering how many times I abused Malchezaar's lines to announce to people at large that they weren't facing our raid alone, but the legions we command! Jaraxxus has a similar kind of thing going on, and like Thorim he's made it to YouTube as well. Hard to get that out of your head again after a while.

5. Anub'Rekhan: I hear little hearts beating. Yesss... beating faster now. Soon the beating will stop.

Being a product recycled from Vanilla, Naxxramas wasn't exactly innovative and new in terms of voice acting, but bloody hell, Anub'Rekhan's voice is still amazing. Especially the line quoted above is just so creepy, delivered in a way that makes it very clear that the big bug won't just eat you, he's also perv enough to enjoy it in a very naughty way. /shudder

The "So bad it's good" award: Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!

There couldn't really have been any other choice for this. There's just something about Sindy's voice that makes it grate so very, very badly, and you'll hate her for that alone - not to mention the many wipes that most of us will have gone through on this fight at some point. However, making a boss hated by the players is not entirely a bad thing, and if nothing else that BETRAAAY is very memorable. Though personally I almost prefer her intro line of: "You are fools to have come to this place! The icy winds of Northrend will consume your souls!" I now find myself wanting to continue any sentence that starts with "You are fools" with this line.