Level 25 in Season of Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Continued Adventures of Tirrona

If all the recent posts about my Horde hunter's adventures made you think that I've completely given up on playing Alliance, let me assure you that this is not the case. As mentioned previously, I was holding off on playing the clones of my high-level characters since they were stuck with bad names after the transfer to Pyrewood, and I was hoping to reclaim their old names once Blizzard deleted all the inactive clones.

However, I eventually grew tired of having no information on what was happening in regards to that and being unable to tell whether anything had been done, so I went ahead this week and transferred all four clones to the era version of Nethergarde Keep. Two could reclaim their old names there, and the other two could at least get the variants of their names that I'd also chosen for them when taking the free server transfer in Classic BC, and I was ultimately happy enough with those. Now to learn a bit about the endgame scene on Alliance side...

In the meantime though, I've also still been playing my little night elf rogue Tirrona. She's both a herbalist and a miner, and unlike on Horde side the auction house is reasonably active, meaning that she's been doing quite well for herself financially just from me logging in every so often and putting up/re-listing some auctions.

In terms of play I did a second Deadmines run with her to finish off the last quest I had there (those damn miner's union cards...) and I've casually been running up and down Darkshore to finish up questing there before moving on to Ashenvale.

The other night I even had a fun little adventure when a level 20 paladin whispered me to ask whether I could help him out with killing some of the elites outside of Blackfathom Depths. I was literally on the opposite end of Darkshore but said that if he had a bit of time and didn't get lucky with a drop before then, I'd make my way down to help him out. So I did, and once I got there we got his Kor Gem after killing only three mobs or so.

I told him that I had a paladin of my own and remembered the epic quest for Verigan's Fist very well. When he mentioned going for the part in Shadowfang Keep next, I said that I had duoed that with another paladin back in the day (all the way back in 2020...) and that I'd be happy to help him out with that as well. So we set off towards the Wetlands, and I was happy to have an early excuse to pick up the flight points in Arathi and Hillsbrad, as well as the expert first aid book from Stromgarde.

Inside Shadowfang Keep, I enjoyed being able to use all my rogue's tools to maximum benefit, sapping enemies on multi-mob pulls and gouging them to give my pally friend a chance to heal up. We did really well and only had to run out to reset once. The first boss was pretty tough with his adds, but we managed due to the paladin blowing every single one of his cooldowns, including Lay on Hands. In the courtyard I led the way via expert pulls with my bow, and soon my paladin friend could loot his blacksmithing hammer too. The funny thing was that he then accidentally hit one of the horses and died from all of them aggroing on him, just as I was about to type: "Well, that went well!"

Still, he was really grateful, and I assured him that finding a group for Deadmines shouldn't be too hard. It was quite late in the evening by that point though, so I said my goodbyes, and the last thing I saw was that he was apparently a bit impatient and got a higher-level guildie of his to run him through the dungeon up to his quest item.

Either way it was a nice experience and made me want to play my rogue more just to have more small community interactions like this. I also once again joined a guild that threw me a random invite - it's not one of the bigger ones but a newly formed one called "Dusk". I don't know if it'll really do anything for me but at least being in it should protect me from more random guild invites for the time being. It also tickled me that I recognised the guild master's name as someone who had randomly waved at one of my Horde chars in Stranglethorn Vale. Later I found out that he'd previously also been on Hydraxian Waterlords like me, and I even found a screenshot among my older captures that showed him sitting next to my paladin. Classic era is a small world indeed.

An Epic Paladin Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Lowbie Dungeons on Horde Side

It felt oddly satisfying to do Wailing Caverns on my hunter at level - I mentioned that I never managed to do this back in actual Vanilla times (probably because back then I was levelling my hunter shortly before BC launch, so most people were focused on the upcoming expansion already), so this sort of "better late than never" experience was oddly cathartic.

As you'd expect of these old-school dungeons, each run was quite an experience.

During my first run, things seemed to be going almost too smoothly for a while, until we had a near wipe deep inside the instance - me and the mage were the only ones to survive, due to him re-sheeping one mob while I turned my cat's taunt on and spammed mend pet on it until the situation had stabilised. The warrior tank and the warlock decided that they were going to wait for the healer to run back and res them, but in classic Wailing Caverns fashion, our priest got lost on the way back. He did eventually find his way back to the rest of the group (I think he dug up a map from the internet or something), but not until a good fifteen minutes or so had passed.

Killing all the bosses was also a shocking drain on my ammunition - and I'm not some noob who goes into an instance with a half-empty ammo pouch. It got a little nerve-wracking towards the end (I didn't want to have to start meleeing things), and by the time we killed Mutanus, I had exactly five bullets left. Dodged that particular bullet (excuse the pun)!

That could have been it if I had actually managed to get all my quests done in that single run, however for two of them I was still short on drops, which prompted me to look for another group several days later. Pro tip: While watching the chat for LFG requests, a great way to pass the time in a productive manner at this level is to fish at one of the oases in the Barrens. Deviate Fish sell quite nicely.

Just as I was starting to get a bit impatient and began to think that it probably wasn't going to happen that day, I saw a lonely tank looking for group for Wailing Caverns, quickly snatched him up, and about five minutes later we were on our way.

I was kind of amused when this tank asked if we all knew how Vanilla dungeons worked - he was apparently quite old-school and the healer soon commended him on his excellent pulling. The tank explained that in Vanilla, the art of pulling was what tanking was all about, prompting me to add that the art of dealing damage was all about not pulling, which earned a few chuckles.

About halfway through, our warlock disconnected and didn't come back, which prompted the group to replace him with a mage. Said mage actually showed that the tank's question at the start had not been unreasonable, because he had trouble finding the instance entrance and expected all the quests to come from the NPC at the door. We finished without any further issues, I got a nice new bow and managed to complete both of my remaining quests. We also must have killed everything considerably more quickly than last time, because even though we did the entire instance once again, I came nowhere near close to running out of bullets this time.

Once again, this could have been it, except that someone suggested that we should continue to Shadowfang Keep as a group since we were doing so well. Everyone but the shaman healer agreed, and he was soon replaced by a priest.

I'd forgotten just how packed with trash mobs and claustrophobic SFK was in Vanilla. More than once I actually found myself unable to shoot things and forced into melee range since I couldn't get to the minimum distance required to use my ranged attacks (damn those spiral staircases).

Still, initially things seemed to be going well, until our healer DCed somewhat suddenly. He had been saying something about his baby waking up, so we figured that this was the reason for the sudden disappearance. We eventually replaced him with a level 18 priest, which is a tad low for the instance but seemed reasonable considering that he didn't have to hit things. However, we soon ran into trouble in the room with the many stairs and ramps after Odo the Blindwatcher, where our healer's immense aggro radius caused way too many mobs to descend on us all at once. We wiped and tried again more carefully, but still got too many of them, simply doing too much damage to us. I eventually lost count of the number of wipes we had in that room - five or six perhaps - but eventually we had whittled the problematic group down to a manageable size and were able to proceed.

Sadly we didn't have much luck once we actually made it to Arugal, who once again wiped us in short order. (I suppose it didn't help that he was level 26 and I was the highest level in the group at 24.) I think we had two attempts on him, and then found after running back that everything up to the courtyard had respawned, which prompted several people to throw in the towel. Bit of a shame, but it was still a productive run overall - I got lots of leather for my leatherworking and as mentioned, my little tauren dinged 24.

Verigan's Fist

With my nostalgia for WoW as it used to be rekindled by BlizzCon, I decided to log onto my paladin on Kronos for the first time in several months. Her quest log was a hot mess with leftover quests in half a dozen different zones, and I was bumping up against the limit of only being able to hold twenty quests at a time. Argh! As I really wanted to move on to Stranglethorn Vale, land of numerous, glorious kill quests, I made an effort to clear things out a bit. Those leftover group quests from Redridge? Not gonna go back for those... abandon! A quest for Gnomeregan? Bah, whatever... abandon!

But there was one quest I definitely wasn't going to let go: The Test of Righteousness! After all I had already braved the Deadmines for that Whitestone Oak Lumber, fought elite ogres in Loch Modan for Refined Ore and descended to the Blackfathom Deeps for a Purified Kor Gem. All I needed was that darned hammer from Shadowfang Keep!

I figured that since I was past level thirty now, I was probably going to be OK soloing this last step, even though my gear was atrociously bad for my level. Fortunately I already had all the flight points up to Southshore from when I travelled north in search of the Expert First Aid book. I took it slowly, cleaning up a couple more quests on the way, but eventually I stood at the border to Silverpine, faced with giant red text warning me that I was entering Horde territory. I did not encounter any Horde however. Kronos' not particularly high population is definitely an advantage when it comes to avoiding PvP on a PvP server.

I killed the first couple of trash packs inside the instance with no issues but died once to the boss, since I didn't realise that he came with no less than three adds, which was a bit much for me in my gear, even at my level. Fortunately I managed to kill at least one of them before I died, and when I came back for more I was able to handle the remaining two adds before tackling the boss himself. I wouldn't have been able to tell you his name before I came in; I have to confess that Shadowfang Keep is one of those dungeons that I didn't run many times back in its Vanilla incarnation.

After successfully dispatching of Rethilgore, I found the captured Dalaran mage in his cell and talked to him so he would open the door to the courtyard for me. Surprise! The cell door closed behind me as I walked in to chat with him and I ended up trapped! I can't tell whether this was a bug or an actual Vanilla mechanic (after all you were supposed to come in with a group, so someone else would have been able to pull the lever from outside to let you back out), but it sure was annoying! Since there was no way to kill myself, it looked like my only way of escaping might be using my hearthstone... which was set to Darkshire. Ugh! However, then I had one last idea, which fortunately worked out - by casting Consecration close to the wall, I managed to pull Deathstalker Adamant from the adjacent cell, and as he was not held back by trifling matters such as walls or gates, he came over and helpfully agreed to kill me to save me from having to hearth out. Dodged that bullet!

I was kind of baffled by just how packed the courtyard was with mobs and patrols, but once again I managed to fight my way towards the stables with no further issues. At last, there was Jordan's Hammer!

I decided to pull the "horse boss" as a last hurrah, since I wasn't sure anymore whether the other horses would aggro as well. They did, and they stomped me. But I had got my quest item, so it was all good!

It didn't matter that I was prot/holy and had no real use for a two-handed mace. In Vanilla, there were just some things that you had to do because your pride demanded it, and owning your own Verigan's Fist was definitely one of them. Not to mention that getting it felt like completing one hell of a quest, in the truest sense of the word.

Level 30, Loving Duskwood

Isadora hit level 30 today, with a /played time of 2 days and a little less than 11 hours. I was really hoping that I would be able to start this post with a screenshot of her proudly wielding Verigan's Fist, but alas, the quest for it is still in her log and has gone grey by now. I just can't seem to get a group for Shadowfang Keep. At one point I tried to form one with a druid, but we gave up after nobody responded to our LFM requests for too long. He joked that people probably didn't even know what "SFK" was. Alliance just doesn't like to go there - it's too far away, and I believe that other than the paladin class quest there are no other incentives to go. I wonder at what level I might be able to solo the first boss? I only need to get to the stables to complete my quest...

In regards to Blackfathom Deeps, reader Shandren had commented that the quest item also dropped from the elite mobs outside the instance and that I should be able to get it solo if I was careful. As it happens, I did end up finding a group for BFD though and completed a full run of the place. (We even killed the thrasher boss!) The way the party was formed was a bit bizarre. We only needed a tank, but as soon as we invited one, she immediately left again, citing the presence of two other plate wearers in the group as the reason. I had forgotten how peculiar people could be about that back in the day. It seems all the stranger considering how hard it can be to get groups at all, never mind your preferred group composition.

Anyway, at this point our level 23 dps warrior offered to tank instead (even though her level was slightly on the low end for BFD) and we started to look for a dps. We got... another dps warrior, several levels higher. "Well, you'll end up tanking then," she was told unceremoniously... and was perfectly fine with it. She just strapped on a shield and tanked the whole instance like a boss, even though she could have complained that we had originally invited her as a dps. It was just such a stark contrast to the previous tank leaving simply because she didn't like the group composition.

Other than that BFD run I haven't found much time for group content, so I've been questing instead. It's starting to become a bit of a drag at the moment because I'm having trouble finding gear upgrades (I don't want to waste money on the auction house) and my weapon is now more than ten levels below me. As if being a prot/holy hybrid wasn't enough to make me hit like a wet noodle... At least I get to squeeze some extra dps out of Exorcism whenever I'm fighting undead. (Yay, class flavour!)

A lot of my recent questing has taken place in Duskwood, and somewhat to my surprise I've been loving it (even if the constant running back and forth between Darkshire and Raven Hill is annoying as anything). The thing is, I don't recall being very fond of Duskwood back in Vanilla... in fact I seem to remember not liking it very much at all, because I wasn't a fan of the gloomy atmosphere. But looking at it now, it seems like the perfect example of why many things about Vanilla WoW just worked so well, even if people would probably call them bad game design these days.

For example, who thought that it would be a good idea to have a level 35 elite mob patrol among regular skeletons that are ten levels lower? Or to spawn another level 35 elite who'd then make his way to Darkshire on the road, squashing innocent players and quest NPCs alike if they happened to cross his path? Things like that really made the world feel dangerous and served to underline the background of Duskwood being a cursed and dangerous place.

 Just like the good old days...

Quests aren't always connected in a perfectly linear manner either. For example you get a quest to bring some food to Jitters in Raven Hill, but that quest simply ends there with no follow-up. Later however you receive a quest from a guy called Sven, who wants you to hunt down the last person he saw at the house where his family was killed, and after a fair bit of running around and collecting clues, it turns out that this person was the very same Jitters to whom you delivered that food parcel. The Legend of Stalvan also has you running all around the houses to find out more about this Stalvan guy, after the local medium has a vision of him bringing doom upon Darkshire. People may have argued that this made the stories too hard to follow or whatever, but it's hard to deny that actually having to read the quest text and connecting the dots also made the whole experience so much more rewarding for those who actually cared to pay attention.

Duskwood as a whole is bursting with what I would call "old WoW flavour", portraying a world that is cartoony and sometimes a little silly but still takes itself seriously. (I read all 20 pages of Jitters' completed journal - the bit about him witnessing the death of Sven's family was rough!) I feel that this is something that has been lost in current WoW - while it still has some serious quests, the overall tone is much less so, with people riding around on increasingly ridiculous mounts and areas like the goblin starter zone setting a very different tone for new players.

Remember when worgen were fierce monsters instead of dogs with top hats and bad English accents?

Now I just have to find out more about this "Scythe of Elune" - Jitters' journal mentioned something about it having been found inside a mine... (Read: I can't really remember where that particular quest line starts, but I'll be happy to find out.)

Kalimdor Calling... and Other Travels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures in Dungeoneering

If you asked me which aspect of WoW I missed the least in the past two years, I definitely would've chosen the dungeon finder. As such, I wasn't at all keen on reacquainting myself with its "gogogo" culture and had originally planned to avoid it altogether. My pet warrior had different ideas however, as he really wanted to tank some dungeons, so who was I to say no?

Initially I thought that I was going to play off-spec healer for him while staying feral for our questing, however I soon found that the talent changes in Mists of Pandaria seem to have made that kind of thing pretty impossible. By the time we became eligible to queue for our first couple of dungeons, I still only had a single healing spell as feral - a heal over time at that - and my mana pool was limited to a piddly 200 or so, no matter how much int gear I put on. So I settled for queuing as dps.

Interestingly, our queues were still near instant almost all the time - with one notable exception when we just couldn't find any other damage dealers and spent about ten minutes waiting to fill the other two dps slots, which was probably more time than we then spent in the actual dungeon (Stormwind Stockade in this case). If anything, there seem to be too many healers in the low-level queue: in more than one run we ended up with a healer filling one of the dps slots. The holy pally in Wailing Caverns at least seemed to give ranged dps a pretty good go, but the disc priest/resto druid combo in Shadowfang Keep were both convinced that since they had both queued as healer, they didn't need to do anything but stand in the back and look pretty. (The druid literally had my pet tank on /follow for most of the run.) Since our third dps wasn't particularly on the ball either, this led to a rather odd experience where it felt like my tank and me were pretty much duoing the instance, while everyone else just tagged along to collect loot.

I suppose I mustn't complain too much though - at least we haven't run into any rude people... yet. For the most part, the players in our runs have been what you could call enigmatically silent, leaving their thoughts and motivations up to individual interpretation. Being a cynic, you could certainly interpret the fact that two dps dropped out of our Wailing Caverns run within the first five minutes as a sign that they were extremely impatient and even a minute of walking the wrong way (which we were doing at the time) was already too much of a waste of time for them to tolerate. For all I know though, they might have been some perfectly relaxed people who only just happened to remember at that time that they forgot to feed their cats.

Overall it seems to me that the "rush rush" culture is as alive as ever though. It's not that much of an issue in our case, as my tank is the sort of person who actually likes charging madly from one objective to the next, and I know that I can always tell him to stop if I need to. Gameplay-wise it's pretty dull from my point of view though, just running along, mashing my AoE buttons and collecting shinies along the way. I couldn't help feeling wistful in Blackfathom Deeps in particular, remembering how deadly so many of the trash pulls and boss encounters used to be, while it's now just a race to see who can round up the next room first.

One thing that mystifies me a little has been the loot. I suppose it's positive that we didn't encounter any ninjas, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that this was due to some sort of change to the loot system rather than people suddenly being more considerate. Most of the time I couldn't even see anyone but myself rolling (which among other things resulted in me winning four pieces of the "of the Fang" set in a single Wailing Caverns run), and I just can't believe that everyone was always passing on everything.

Not quite as I remember it...

Taken on its own merits, the most interesting instance so far has probably been Ragefire Chasm, because I had completely forgotten that Blizzard was going to redo that one for MoP. Imagine my surprise when upon entering I found mobs that looked like they escaped from the Firelands instead of a bunch of troggs! Now I'm curious to see what they've done to the Scarlet Monastery (which I know was redone).

Pug Tidbits

After taking a bit of a break from instancing for several weeks, I've finally started to hit the dungeon finder again, partly because I was starting to feel somewhat guilty about basically collecting no valour points on my main at all outside of raids, partly because I felt like seeing some low-level instances on my alts again after having levelled several of them purely through questing as of late. I've noticed that I generally seem to go through certain cycles in my play patterns, alternating between max-level and low-level play, instancing and questing, feeling very enthused about the game and feeling very burnt out.

Anyway, as usual many of my pugs didn't leave much of an impression either way, but here are some things that stood out:

Best Player

When I zoned into heroic Lost City of the Tol'vir, the bear tank called Bob immediately asked everyone to be patient with him because it was his first time tanking the instance. I told him not to worry, and as it turned out he didn't really have to ask us to be particularly patient because he did a great job anyway. It might have been his first time tanking the place, but he was clearly already familiar with tanking in general and knew the pulls and boss strategies of the instance inside out.

Since it was such a smooth and pleasant run, the entire group immediately requeued for another dungeon. This time we got Blackrock Caverns, which went slightly less smoothly due to no fault of Bob's, but he managed to save several bad situations through good cooldown usage. If only all tanks in LFG were like him...

Worst Player

Me! Okay, I probably wasn't the worst player among all the people I grouped with, but I've definitely had some serious herp derp moments in my last couple of runs. In the aforementioned BRC run I managed to aggro and die to one of the patrolling dragonkin just as the rest of the group had jumped down the slope to Corla and pulled two additional packs. Fortunately Bob managed to salvage the situation by shifting out of bear form and throwing me a combat res.

Then there was the Zul'Gurub run where, while trying to dodge Venoxis' poison maze, I managed to fall off his terrace and into the water, where I immediately died to the various mobs there. Fortunately the dps was very good and they managed to down the boss anyway, but I still felt like a huge dolt.

And then there was the Grim Batol run with the paladin tank who kept pulling as if he had ants in his pants, so that I could barely keep up with healing even while outgearing the instance by two tiers. I think this threw off my mojo right from the start, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when I managed to die to General Umbriss' Blitz. I just remember thinking: "Oh good, he's not targeting me with it, I can stay where I am... wait, he's still facing in my general direction, so I do have to - oh poo, I'm dead". Again the group managed to down him even with me dead (who needs healers anyway) and I was even rewarded with an achievement. Way to go!

Then the group skipped the last two trash packs in the inner circle of the city and I somehow managed to aggro one of them even though I usually never have problems running past them. Since everyone else had already charged way ahead while I was still looting a mob, I was the only one who died. They just continued to kill the next pack without me and said nothing while I corpse-ran back. In a way I almost found myself wishing that they would laugh at me or make some sort of snarky comment... somehow just being ignored and left behind felt even more humiliating, especially as a healer. I have to admit I felt a certain mix of glee and relief when the tank's rogue friend got himself blown up by one of the adds on Drahga, as it at least meant that I wasn't the only one who had made a stupid mistake during the run.

Player With The Best Attitude

On my low level draenei shaman I had a slightly messy but strangely enjoyable Dire Maul West run the other day, in which I ended up with a paladin tank who was retribution spec. No biggie in a lowbie instance as far as I'm concerned, as long as he knows what he's doing and isn't too squishy. He did do reasonably well at holding aggro, and healing him wasn't a problem either with the exception of a couple of bosses where he went splat, but the rest of the group still managed to beat them without wiping.

Still, he was clearly new to the instance, as he felt the urge to run back to the quest giver immediately every time he completed a quest objective and kept going the wrong way. He also might not have been able to speak English, as he never said anything in chat and more importantly never reacted to anything that was said in there either. All the party's well-meaning attempts to tell him "no, this way, over here" were in vain. Eventually we just gave up on trying to steer him and followed him during his meandering through random trash packs, because sooner or later there'd be nothing left but the boss anyway.

Now, all this might sound pretty bad, but somehow I still couldn't help liking the guy. Yes, I generally prefer to have some communication going on, but on the plus side he never complained about all the times he died either. In fact, he never even waited for a res and always released instantly and started running back, even if he had been the only one who had died. This was in fact another thing that convinced me that he must have been a newbie, because he clearly wasn't jaded or entitled - instead he was curious and driven. Death was merely a minor setback, and he was always happy to pick himself up again and try again. In a time where the game has made it so easy to drop any group activity at the drop of a hat without any negative consequences, that kind of perseverance impressed me. Here's to you, little newbie tank. Just keep working at it and you might go far in this game.

Player With The Worst Attitude

In heroic Shadowfang Keep I got a raid-geared bear tank who had some serious issues. After Baron Ashbury's first Asphyxiate I healed the party up to about thirty percent health, as that's more than sufficient to survive the occasional tick from his (dispellable) dot. But Mr Bear Tank didn't think so. He started to yell at me to heal more, then in all caps, then calling me a whore. I politely told him to calm down and that there was no need to top everyone off until near the final phase since the boss just kept putting people back down to one hit point anyway, but he wouldn't believe me.

He and his dps shaman friend then stopped attacking and interrupting the boss and just stood there, letting him heal back up to full repeatedly while the bear claimed to have problems with his mouse. I don't know, maybe it was true, but considering how worked up he had just got about me not topping people off it seemed more like a passive aggressive attempt to wipe us, especially since the shaman stopped too. Eventually they seemed to get bored of it though and we managed to burn the boss down. Then there was an awkward pause during which I can only guess he tried to kick me, but if he did it didn't work, so both he and his shaman friend then dropped group. Their replacements were more sensible fortunately.

Anyway, raging at people in the dungeon finder is generally never a good idea, but raging about people doing it wrong when in fact you are the one who doesn't seem to understand the mechanics just makes you look like an even bigger idiot.

More dungeon reports: Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep

Last night I specifically queued for Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep, to make sure that I'd get a chance to run them before they fell out of my level range. I feel like I have to throttle my gameplay very carefully right now to not miss out on content I want to do, which is really rather bizarre.

Wailing Caverns was a bit of a disappointment because it didn't appear to have changed at all. Now, WC is one of the old instances that I'm slightly less familiar with, so I can't completely exclude the possibility that they removed a side passage or two, but it looked exactly the same to me. The changes that the developers were talking about at Blizzcon, where they mentioned making the instance less confusing and putting all the bosses into separate rooms definitely haven't been made. I can only guess that they ran out of time before the Shattering and that this is something that they'll patch in later - or at least I hope they do, because otherwise WC is going to feel horribly outdated compared to other instances.

The only positive change that I noticed, other than the quest givers sitting inside the instance now, was that the Disciple of Naralex actually runs once you start the escort event now - instead of walking at a snail's pace, as quest NPCs that claim to be in a hurry are so often wont to do. Thanks for that.

Still, for what it's worth I enjoyed that run, because I had a group that was both nice and competent. The trip to Shadowfang Keep that followed afterwards was exactly the opposite.

SFK itself has been changed drastically, just like the Deadmines, but I couldn't really warm to those changes yet. In the Deadmines, even before I had played through Westfall to learn about the story behind it, it was at least somewhat apparent that we were breaking up a rather shifty operation in those caverns. I mean, mining monkeys? That can't be legal.

SFK on the other hand just confused the hell out of me. Gone are Arugal and his werewolves, and instead there are... evil Forsaken? The quest giver at the entrance greeted me like an old friend and went on about avenging some insult against Sylvanas, but I had no clue what the hell he was talking about. The fact that three of the bosses looked like they were identical triplets or something didn't help either.

This basically strikes me as story gone wrong: instead of the background enhancing your experience by giving you additional motivation to clear out the evil guys' hideout, the story is your only motivation to take action... otherwise it's just random. I mean, this stuff was clearly designed to be a sort of follow-up to whatever happens in Silverpine - about which I've only heard good things - but without that background it's just weird. I guess I'll have to roll an undead hunter soon and maybe I'll change my mind once I understand what it's all about.

Like in the Deadmines, the new bosses are considerably more complex than what you'd usually meet in this level range, and pretty much all of them have some kind of big flashy move that you're supposed to avoid. Oh, and the first boss seems to have no other purpose than to scare the crap out of your healer. You're dead! No, you're not! You're dead! No, you're not! Arrrgh.

Most of my unhappiness with my SFK pug came from the fact that my entire party absolutely loved standing in the bad stuff, even though several of them wore heirlooms and really should have known better. I didn't have the mana to save them all the time and there were multiple deaths. On the last boss we even wiped twice, though our warlock managed to finish him off on our second attempt as the last man standing.

The tank also aggravated me because he kept pulling whole rooms at once, which led to loads of unnecessary damage on him as people were killing things off one by one, so I was constantly oom and left with no time to regain mana as he kept charging off into yet more mobs over and over. This sealed my decision to not queue as a healer anymore until I can get dual spec at thirty. At least then I won't have to constantly feel guilty and question the validity of my off-spec healing whenever someone dies to playing stupidly; I'll know that it's their fault.