WoW Memories #5: October 28th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on October 28th, 2006 under the title "Another Lazy Day":

... another day of playing with Nemi. Sorry, I wish I had something more interesting to talk about, but I've simply been enjoying a lazy weekend.

As for WoW, Nemi made me travel a lot today, and we did our first quest in a larger group - as in, about half a dozen people. It was fun, even if we died a few times and the NPC involved was quite weird. (He would complain about being hurt while moving along at snail's pace, spot an enemy, run and fight it, then run back to where he was and go back to walking really, really slowly.¹) We even repeated the whole thing three or four times, once because we failed and another time just because we wanted to be nice and help the other people doing it.

It was a fun experience all around, death and all, because everyone involved was very nice and fun.² There was this guy from Poland who fought until his weapons disintegrated, a level ten warrior who insisted on following us around even though he kept dying and talked about wanting to buy a horse for a few silver coins... it was rather endearing. I also liked being the priest in a group of close-combat specialists³, because I got in relatively little trouble (except when all of us died). I need to work on keeping track of where people are though - it's very annoying when someone dies and you have to send out the whole party to look for the corpse to be able to resurrect them.⁴

¹ I can tell from the description that this was my very first escort quest: Mission In Action in Redridge Mountains, which involves escorting Corporal Keeshan from being imprisoned at the back of a cave all the way back to town. You can tell I was not yet familiar with the tropes of the genre.

² And thus, my love for pick-up groups was born...

³ Imagine if this had become the common term to describe melee dps... LF CC would have a whole different meaning!

⁴ It may be that I was just being dumb, but I do seem to remember that in those early days you indeed couldn't target someone for resurrection via the unit frames (at least not if they had already released) so you had to find their corpse out in the world to cast the spell on them... which could sometimes be challenging if the death had occurred during a bout of absolute mayhem involving fears and the like.

More on Starting Over on Lava Lash

This is a follow-up to last week's post about me deciding to try a fresh start in Season of Discovery phase two by re-rolling on the RP-PvE server.

As mentioned, I got to 20 incredibly quickly due to the XP buff, but with basically no cash to train abilities or do anything else. So I decided that it was time to put on the brakes and take care of business other than levelling for a while, namely by doing some travelling to unlock access to additional flight paths (I hadn't even been to Kalimdor yet), working on my professions, and working the auction house to make some money.

Fishing turned out to be surprisingly lucrative here, because for some reason there didn't seem to be a lot of active fishermen about - or maybe they are all still busy levelling to 40; I don't know. The point is, I found pools of firefin snapper, oily blackmouth and sagefish everywhere, and while each fish only sold for a few silver, it added up quickly. I think fishing may actually be my highest skill right now.

I also developed a strange fascination with chests. While I've played dwarf characters before, I don't think I ever got any to a very high level, and they usually had some other form of tracking (ore or herb nodes for gatherers, different types of mobs for hunters) that took priority over using their "treasure finding" racial that highlights chests on the mini map.

My newest priest on the other hand is a tailor and enchanter, so she doesn't have anything else to pay attention to, and I've been very surprised by just how many chests there are about. I always thought I was pretty good at spotting them with the naked eye, but apparently there've always been a lot more hiding in corners and behind sheds that I never knew about. It's turned me into a proper treasure hunting fiend, as I'll randomly fight my way into buildings or caves just to access a chest at the back.

When I revisited Ashenvale, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some life had returned to the PvP event, mainly level 40s that had decided to come back for more reputation I guess. The groups tended to be about 80-90% max level characters, with the rest being made up of levellers like me that just happened to pass through the zone. I now have first-hand experience of how much easier it is to get rewarded for taking part in this event as Alliance, as I hit friendly with Silverwing Sentinels after only two battles.

I also made good progress collecting more of my runes - knowing where to pick them up along the way after already going through the whole process on Horde side in phase one made things a lot simpler. I also found out that Alliance have it significantly easier when it comes to collecting their Meditation buffs, as Meditation on the Light and Elune can be picked up almost right next to each other in Stormwind.

As one of the priest runes drops from the elite orcs in Redridge, I decided to join a group for the quests there. Even considering that Lava Lash's population is much lower than Wild Growth's, it was crazy busy there that evening, meaning we spent a lot of time just running about without being able to tag anything, so people got to chatting.

I was surprised to hear from several of my group mates that they had only just started in phase two, and was slightly amused when our ret pally declared that they were both a mythic raider and a streamer in retail. Far be it from me to doubt the truthfulness of that, but that same paladin stood out to me for not casting a single seal all evening... just goes to show again that retail and Classic are two very different games and knowing your way around one doesn't automatically translate into knowing anything at all about the other.

Not that it mattered either way... we had a good time, and me, the pally and the rogue who had started the group actually stuck together to complete a few additional quests once we were done with the elites, such as collecting pendants from the gnolls and escorting Corporal Keeshan. The whole experience had that good old-fashioned pug feel to it, reminding me of the way I first made friends in WoW nearly twenty years ago.

I also spotted some familiar guild names in town, and in fact am pretty certain that I even ran into the GM of a guild I used to be friendly with on Hydraxian Waterlords back in 2020. I just wasn't able to 100% confirm it as they were AFK when I encountered them and therefore didn't respond to my emote. It's just fascinating to me how these RP server communities persist over the years and across different versions of the game. This is one of those things I love about Classic and that the megaserver aficionados just don't get I guess.

That said, I'm feeling surprisingly little pull to get to level 40 and start raiding Gnomeregan now. I'm not super interested in raiding without being part of a group going into it together, and to be honest what I've been hearing about Gnomer isn't helping. I noted about BFD that while I thought it was fun overall, some of the bosses were kind of bordering on being "too much" for a relaxed Classic raiding experience, and from everything I've read, Gnomeregan is much harder (something that people tend to frame as a good thing, but to me it's not - supposedly it's particularly punishing for healers as well).

So while I'm having fun for now, I'm still not convinced that Season of Discovery is really "working" for me. I liked the level cap being 25, but it occurs to me that when it was raised, it was essentially like a microcosm of an expansion release... oh, you've been working on learning how endgame works and getting better gear? Forget all of it! Everything is different now! And while that sort of thing generates excitement, it can also be exhausting in a way, even more so on a sped-up schedule. I wonder how many players have already dropped off for similar reasons.

Adventures in Redridge

This post is a sort of part two to my epic paladin adventure from Saturday, because it was followed by more (if slightly less epic) adventures on Sunday.

It started with me wanting to test my new Verigan's Fist against the gnolls in Redridge that had given me some trouble before and realising to my chagrin that it had been a while since I'd last wielded a two-handed mace as my attacks kept missing completely. Fortunately it only took a couple of gnolls to level up to a more useful skill rank, at which point the low-level gnolls started to melt before me like snow in the sun.

I wasn't content with this and proceeded to the area with higher-level gnolls east of town, where I had the quest to kill Lieutenant Fangore. Alas, while I could take on two same- or slightly higher-level gnolls with ease now, they were just too tightly packed in that area (Fangore himself came with something like three or four adds as well), so after several aborted attempts that always ended with me either running away or dying, I had to admit that my newfound strength had made me a bit cocky.

Fortunately a distraction awaited in general chat, where someone was looking for more to do the elite quests in the orc keep. I love that place! We ended up with a full group of five, and after a couple of pulls I just kind of slipped into the tanking role while the other pally in the group focused on healing, without us having had any formal discussion about it. The other three players in the group were all squishy clothies (a warlock and two mages), so it just made sense, you know?

We had a wipe or two at the entrance to the keep (it's easy to overpull there, and sometimes other mobs in the area that you might have killed earlier will start to respawn unexpectedly) but we didn't let it get our spirits down. I made sure to pull more carefully from then on and we cleared the place out.

Only problem for me: I only had one of the three quests for the area and the other two weren't shareable. I'd only really noticed after joining the group and didn't mind running the place twice. Typically, I was given the two missing quests as soon as I handed in what I had after the first run. Fortunately, another group was forming up already, so I volunteered again. One of the mages came with me as she'd had the same issue with the quests. "Fancy seeing you again," I joked.

In this run we were only four and had a dps warrior taking on the tanking role. The fourth person was another paladin, and this time around there was some confusion about who should be healing. The other paladin seemed very keen on healing people to full after every combat so I thought I'd leave her to it, but then I noticed that she rarely paused to cast heals while in combat and in fact her mana bar barely moved at all... but we made do. We had a few more wipes around the entrance with this group, presumably due to having been a man down but also because the warrior had issues not getting too many mobs out of the keep at once, and eventually I volunteered to make the pulls since I already had experience (/flex).

In both groups we continued to run around and kill things together for a bit even after finishing the keep, easily getting Fangore down and even doing the quest in the easternmost tower, which I couldn't remember doing before.

All of this took quite some time, so once the second group had finished, I needed a bit of a break. I logged back on in the evening to finish off the northern area with the orcs and the escort there. To my disappointment, nobody responded to my inquiry in general chat, but I just started slowly killing orcs by myself and suddenly the warrior from earlier zoomed past me into the cave with Corporal Keeshan. I asked if he was here for the escort as well and he replied in the affirmative so I threw him a group invite.

With the two of us, we were unstoppable. In fact, I slacked off a bit and wandered off to mine an ore node here and there while my warrior friend killed things, just pausing to top his health bar back up every so often. By myself, things had been slow, but together we were a whirling ball of death. The warrior also confessed that he'd tried to solo the escort earlier and had failed, but with the two of us AoEing things together and me keeping both of us topped up we didn't even break a sweat. It was a great finish to my weekend of WoWing.

I keep hearing comments from people saying that levelling content is dead and that it's hard to find groups for things, but that's definitely not my experience on Hydraxian Waterlords, even a year after launch.

Also a Vanilla Grouping Experience

After hitting level twenty, my next major goal was to get into a group for the Deadmines. I kept an eye on chat as I continued my questing, but at the time nobody seemed to be building any Deadmines groups - a guildie just kept spamming guild chat with looking-for-more requests to do the escort quest in Redridge. Finally she called me out directly, as I was obviously in the right area, and I caved and agreed to join. After all, that escort quest would earn me some nice XP too, right? My mantra before the introduction of the group finder had always been to take the bull by the horns whenever an opportunity presented itself, because waiting until everything lined up perfectly so that you could do the content you wanted, at exactly the time you wanted, with exactly the group you wanted, was generally a futile endeavour.

I joined a group consisting of the guildie on her level 23 or 24 (can't remember exactly) gnome mage, and another guildie on a dwarf warrior of the same level. When we trekked up to the area with the cave in which the escort starts, I realised that I was somewhat in over my head, with all the mobs being around level 25. However, I just hung back and healed the two dps while they laid waste to the enemy and that seemed to work out fine.

Then we got to the escort quest, and I saw that the exclamation mark over corporal Keeshan's head was grey to me. When the others started the mission, I received nothing but an error message that I wasn't eligible for the quest (due to me being too low level). This was somewhat disappointing, but I didn't feel too bad about it as we slowly walked down the mountain, because at least I had got two quests to kill orcs and gather their axes done on the way.

Once Keeshan was safely back in Lakeshire, the mage asked if we wanted to stick together to also do the elite quests in Stonewatch Keep. We agreed and picked up a level 19 druid on the way as well.

However, it soon turned out that in the keep, we were all in over our heads. The mobs were just too strong and numerous. While we could slowly whittle them down by pulling very carefully, it took so long to kill anything that we pretty much had to deal with respawns before we could ever get anywhere. The druid and I were actually more of a liability than helpful, due to our low level giving us an absolutely massive aggro radius. There was one particularly humorous moment when we had suffered some deaths in the first hallway of the keep and slowly reclaimed our bodies while carefully tucking ourselves into a corner. The moment the druid got up however, an orc immediately started throwing spears at him, killed him, and then walked away again.

Eventually it seemed that most of us agreed that we weren't going to be successful with this group and we decided to part ways for now. I had been lucky, as I had at least got enough quest drops from the caster mobs we had killed to complete one of the elite quests.

So far, so good.

Just after I had taken a flight back to Westfall, the gnome mage suddenly whispered me again to say that she was building a new group and that she had a tank in the high twenties now, so this group was bound to do much better! I agreed to re-join and made my way back. They were clearly desperate for a healer.

This time the rest of the group consisted of the mentioned level 28 paladin tank, a hunter and a warlock, but the two latter were once again of quite a low level. The warlock also realised almost immediately that he didn't actually have all the quests and had to jog back to Lakeshire to hand something in so he could pick up the correct follow-up. Meanwhile the paladin tank asked us to clear a tower on the side which did nothing for the rest of the group.

When the warlock came back, he got killed by respawns and the mage told him to watch where he was going, to which the warlock replied somewhat testily that she should drop the condescending attitude. We killed some more mobs.

Just as we were making our way to the boss inside the courtyard, the mage was suddenly removed from the group. I typed a question mark into chat and was kicked from the party as well. I'm still not sure why, because the mage had been a bit snarky I guess and we were in the same guild? We regrouped with the level 28 pally who had apparently suffered the same fate as us and wedged ourselves into a corner while we waited for another mage to join us to build our group back up to strength. The gnome advised the second mage to just run through all the mobs on his way, which didn't work out and he died. The gnome then went out to "help" him... and they both died.

When they were finally about to re-join us at the right spot, the warlock and hunter who had kicked us suddenly swooped in with a level fifty shadow priest in tow who murdered everything for them in seconds. Since the boss' respawn was going to take a while, we gave the inside of the keep another shot but died again. It was quite late by then and I finally excused myself, having achieved nothing but a lot of deaths.

I felt utterly drained by the whole experience, the constant dying with no progress, fighting the same pulls over and over again, and then having other people swoop in to kill the mobs we needed before we could get to them. To be honest, the gnome mage's aggressively hyper attitude also started to grate on my nerves after a while. At one point early on, a level 60 swooped past us with someone he was boosting and the mage called him names in /yell. When the other group "stole" the boss right in front of our noses, she also suggested running after them into the keep and trying to steal their tag on the boss in there. I just didn't want to hear any more of it.

I didn't play for several days after that.

Azeroth Trek III: The Search for XP (and Cash)

When I had finally wrapped up all my business in Elwynn, I checked my /played time and was surprised to see that it was sitting at just under six hours. (This included a couple of trips to Stormwind for things like the paladin class quest to learn the resurrection spell. Remember the days when you would run into pallies who couldn't res because they'd never bothered to do that quest? Good times.) I was quite impressed that the starter zone alone had managed to keep me busy for so long, but of course things were only going to become more time-consuming.

I remember having that plank and nail on live!

In Westfall, I was off to a good start. I picked up pretty much every quest that I could find (of which there were quite a few) and then just started running around killing things almost at random, which worked surprisingly well, as nearly everything in the vicinity counted towards some quest objective or another. It was only towards the end that I had to range further to hunt down the last couple of remaining targets specifically.

The Defias in Westfall gave me even more trouble than the ones in Elwynn had done, especially as there were some nasty casters among them. I suffered my first death, and more followed soon. Mostly they were caused by me getting unexpected adds in a confined space such as inside a mine, where I had no space to run away. Since Vanilla WoW mostly restricted itself to one graveyard per zone, the corpse runs were quite substantial, though still not nearly as bad as I remember them being in other zones such as Darkshore, the Barrens or Blackrock Mountain.

Hello again...

I was a bit dismayed to find that once I had completed nearly all of the quests in the zone aside from a couple of higher level ones, I was still only level 15, far too low to go to the Deadmines. It made me realise just how little XP most of the quests awarded compared to what I'm used to these days. Most of them gave less than you would earn from killing about ten mobs of your level, so whenever I returned to a quest giver to hand in, I was a little disappointed by just how little my experience bar seemed to move. It was a stark reminder that while WoW gave rise to the quest-centered theme park MMO, Vanilla WoW still bore the clear marks of its mob-grinder predecessors. Sure, WoW was revolutionary in regards to the sheer amount of quests it launched with, but it still expected you to run around and kill a lot of mobs to actually level up.

I was sent to deliver a message to Lakeshire and noticed that the quests there did start around level 15, but considering the trouble the Defias had given me and what I remembered of the local gnoll camps, I really didn't want to go in there at the absolute minimum level. Instead I decided to make the journey to Loch Modan, where I had another delivery to make.

I have fond memories of my first Vanilla character, the paladin I tried to recreate here on Kronos, questing in Loch Modan. I distinctly remember getting into a group with nothing but dps to kill troggs for the quest at Ironband's excavation and it being pretty manic as I became the dedicated healer of the party and people were charging off in all kinds of different directions. I had a really fun time with that.

Fortunately, Kronos didn't disappoint in regards to recreating that experience either. I hadn't even got to Ironband's yet, but I was working my way through the quest chain to kill regular troggs in Stonesplinter Valley when a dwarf priest and a hunter threw me a group invite. Even though we quickly established that I wasn't even on the same step of the quest chain as them yet, they were happy to help me get caught up. We had a good laugh at the hunter's boar pet bugging out like crazy inside the caves, aggroing things left and right and evading others. Just like Vanilla WoW indeed! Initially I felt a bit flustered by the kindness of the two dwarves and their willingness to kill troggs they didn't even need for their own quest anymore, but of course this also goes back to what I wrote about quest XP: it's not all that. Just being in a group that can kill a large number of mobs quickly and safely isn't half bad even if you're not on the quest yourself.

More positive grouping experiences followed. I grouped up to kill ogres in the Mo'grosh ogre mound in the north-eastern corner of the map, and even though we died a few times in there, we were always in good spirits as we ran back to our bodies, keen to give it another try with a slightly different strategy (which repeatedly turned out to be: everyone with the ability to heal, spam heals on the warrior). I also joined a guild almost by accident, as one of the people in that group started throwing everyone guild invites while we were in the middle of a cave fighting ogres. I wanted to ask what sort of guild it was, explain how I wasn't sure if I should even join one etc. but in the heat of battle I just clicked accept. At least the guild name, "You had me at LokTar", is vaguely amusing. It does seem to be a levelling guild as well, as I checked the guild roster a bit later and the highest level character in the guild was only in the low forties at the time.

I more or less finished up Loch Modan by killing Ol' Sooty, the elite bear on the mountain south-east of Thelsamar. That was quite funny too, as I got a mage to help me who didn't even have the quest, and at first the two of us didn't seem to be powerful enough as Sooty killed us on our first attempt. On our second one however, we got him down via some epic kiting by both me and the mage, and even though the mage still died eventually, I managed to finish Sooty off with less than ten percent of my own health left on my bar. We had a good laugh about that. The only downside was that I was still only level nineteen.

Next to experience points, the other thing I found myself struggling with was money. Mobs generally only dropped a few copper, quests awarded a few silver... and everything I needed seemed terribly expensive in comparison. Even taking a flight was not a decision to be made lightly, considering that it would cost me at least one silver. More than once I slunk away from the paladin trainer with my metaphorical tail between my legs, unable to actually afford all my ability upgrades. Though I suppose I didn't help my case by trying really hard to keep up with all of my professions, including the secondary ones - I had forgotten just how much of a money sink profession training could be, especially the training of new ranks and recipes.

On the plus side, this constant need for money also gave me more reasons to not be shy about killing mobs in my way, and turned even minor surprises into major events for me. For example I fought my way inside the very heart of a kobold cave, even though the associated quest didn't require me to do so, and found a rare mob there. When I killed him, he dropped no less than three green items. What riches!

One of my guildies commented that he was excited about hitting the milestone of having earned one gold, and we mused on how it was funny how valuable money felt in early Vanilla.

Eventually I moved on to Redridge, and after a couple of rounds of killing gnolls and wildlife, I hit level twenty with a /played time of 25 hours.

Outdoor mobs and me

The recent news and discussion about Blizzard buffing monster damage output in the beta got me thinking. I don't want mob-fighting in the open world to be completely trivial, but I don't want it to be too hard either. What do I want then?

To be honest, I don't think I actually want the average mob to be truly challenging, assuming it's of the same level as my character and on its own. I'm not saying that you couldn't make a good game where every single fight pushes you to your limits, but I don't think that WoW should be that game. It wasn't even that way back in Vanilla, back when many other things were generally harder.

Still, killing monsters should cost you some resources at least, so it shouldn't be a case of waltzing in and insta-gibbing things with two dagger stabs. I guess to me personally "a third" sounds like a completely unscientific but decent rule of thumb. If killing a mob takes off a third off your health bar (as a melee class) or costs you a third of your mana bar (as a caster), I'd consider that quite reasonable.

However, at the end of the day I think it's actually a mix of other factors that eventually decides whether I enjoy going out into the world to kill things. For me these factors are: variety of mob types, positioning and dangerousness. Let me illustrate what I mean by example of Redridge Mountains, a zone that I feel does all three of those things pretty well (or at least used to, before they removed all the outdoor elites).

As far as mob types go, Redridge offers a decent amount of variety. Leaving aside the human settlement, you'll encounter three kinds of humanoids: murlocs in and around the lake, gnolls in the hills and Blackrock orcs spilling forth from the Burning Steppes in the north. In addition there's a solid amount of wildlife: boars, black dragon whelps, condors, tarantulas and threshers in the lake. There are even some undead, demon hounds, a rare giant and a rare elemental spawn. The differences between these mobs aren't purely cosmetic either. Some of them cast spells, some frenzy, some poison, some stun and so on. This guarantees some variety as you quest your way through the zone, and different mobs encourage you to use different abilities based on what class you play.

It should be a bit of a no-brainer that this is something that makes the game more fun, but somehow this hasn't prevented Blizzard from making zones where a single type of mob dominates so strongly that it gets tedious rather quickly. For example silithid aren't strictly the only type of mob in Silithus, but considering how much of the map is taken up by their hives it often feels that way, and it makes the area a very boring place to quest in.

Then there's positioning. As a general rule, mobs in WoW are positioned in a very "gamey" way to make it convenient to pull them one by one, while leaving as little map space as possible completely empty. That's always pretty unrealistic of course, but to a certain extent willing suspension of disbelief works around it. To use the Redridge example again, gnolls tend to band together in camps, where groups of them sit close together around campfires, and others patrol around the edges of the camp. This makes at least some sense, and provides some interesting opportunities to practice proper pulling and crowd control. Can I get this patrolling guy without aggroing any other mobs? How can I get past this group of three without dying?

In other parts of the world however, especially in the more barren areas, you'll often look out across the land and the mobs will look very much artifically arranged to stand at a certain distance from each other, often not even moving much. Again, that makes for pretty boring gameplay regardless of how difficult the mobs are to beat on their own, as you can do little but simply pull one after the other.

And finally, there's the sense of dangerousness. This is the aspect where variety is more important than anywhere else. To use Redridge as an example again: when you're questing there (as Alliance), the town of Lakeshire is obviously the ultimate "safe space". But the world outside isn't equally dangerous everywhere, regardless of the mobs' levels. For example there are a lot of neutral boars in the immediate vicinity of the town and near the roads, mingling with the hostile mobs there and lowering the average danger per sqare mile so to speak. With neutral mobs among the hostile ones you're less likely to overpull by accident, and if you suddenly need to go AFK for a minute it's easier to find a reasonably safe spot to stand. One step up is the area around Alther's Mill, where all the mobs are hostile but still somewhat spread out. The densly populated gnoll and orc camps are a lot more dangerous already, but the ultimate danger used to lie in Stonewatch Keep, back when all the mobs inside it were elite. You just knew that this wasn't a place where you wanted to go alone.

Different areas threatening you with different degrees of danger keeps you on your toes and makes the game more intersting and immersive. The reason variety is so important here is that veering too far into either direction has a negative effect as well. If you make everything neutral and unthreatening, like Blizzard has done in the starting zones a few patches ago, the game leaves you bored and bewildered (because those "evil" quillboar not minding your presence makes no sense). If you make every monster really dangerous on the other hand, you discourage solo play, which isn't really what WoW is about either. I remember old Silithus being a nightmare before they removed the outdoor elites, simply because all the silithid were elite, and with a couple of additional elite monsters and elite Twilight cultists the whole zone just felt like a place where you couldn't do much on your own. I quested there with a friend for a few days and then never came back, not even on my alts. It was just too off-putting.

Assuming that a zone presents the player with different types of mobs; some grouped and some alone; some neutral, some hostile and some really hard; I don't think Blizzard needs to turn every individual mob into a hard hitter. As long as the mobs are not completely trivial, easy and challenging areas can be implemented simply by adjusting the aforementioned factors.