Viscidus Victory

Viscidus in AQ40 is probably Vanilla's weirdest raid boss. He's kind of out of the way and therefore optional, doesn't drop anything particularly exciting to most players, and he's very oddly designed in the sense that he requires a whole special set of gear to kill, a silly amount of consumables, and can't be overpowered with world buffs. The Forks only ever killed him once... we did go back and tried a couple more times after that, but we weren't particularly enthused to keep trying when we didn't immediately succeed.

With the Warriors of Sunlight, I never got to kill Viscidus either. When I joined, I was told that they'd done him in the past but didn't find the amount of consumables required to be worth the hassle of revisiting him, which seemed fair enough.

However, there was one member in particular, an undead warlock, who was obsessed with killing Viscidus for some reason. In specific, he was after the Sharpened Silithid Femur - again, it's not entirely clear to me why, considering that there are better caster weapons in Naxx, but chasing after certain rare items just seems to be this guy's thing. When I first joined the guild, he was on an epic crusade to acquire Pattern: Rich Purple Silk Shirt for example.

It basically became a well-known meme that he'd always ask to do Viscidus and we'd never even try. I remember waking up early on Christmas Day and having a quick look at my phone while still in bed, just to be greeted by this "Christmas card" made by him on the guild Discord:

It gave me a good chuckle! (Seal of the Archmagus is another meme within the guild...)

My own feeling on the matter was that I didn't really care one way or the other, though I did feel vaguely bad for the warlock as I did get the impression after a while that for all the memery, the whole thing was genuinely important to him and he was starting to feel let down by the fact that so many months had passed without a single Viscidus kill.

In terms of gear and consumables, I wasn't really ready to fight Viscidus myself. In the Forks, I had been required to assemble a full set of nature resist gear before even setting foot into AQ40 (something that caused me a certain degree of anxiety at the time). I only learned much later that it was apparently a bit of an oddity that we never had enough people playing melee characters and therefore needed the hunters to help with soaking damage on Huhuran. In the Warriors of Sunlight, it didn't matter that my hunter didn't have any gear since we never did Viscidus and had plenty of melee to soak on Huhu.

I did farm up a pair of Coldrage Daggers at one point when it had sounded like we might finally have a go at Viscidus soon, but then that didn't end up going anywhere.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised when one of the raid leaders pinged everyone a few hours before raid start today to announce that we were going to kill Viscidus tonight and that we were to come prepared. I immediately confessed to my utter unpreparedness and that it would make complete sense to take someone who actually had nature resist gear, but somehow I ended up on the roster anyway.

Fortunately the guild bank provided a lot of consumables, and in the end, we actually did it. It took us five attempts, but we got there in the end! I've got to say, for all of Visci's awkwardness, Horde have it comparatively easy with shamans and their cleansing totems, as there was almost no need for poison cleanse consumables, the main thing that made the fight so prohibitively demanding on Alliance side. I just had to keep an eye on the shaman in my group and stay near him.

Even though it wasn't a guild first or anything, it was the guild's first kill in over a year, so it still felt pretty good to get the boss down. And even better, he did actually drop the Femur for our warlock friend! So yay for him!

The only downside is that we might now decide to revisit him more often, which means that I really need to get onto that nature resist gear. Ugh...

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.

Return of the Horde Hunter

I forgot how quickly things can escalate in Classic when it comes to finding adventure.

One of the most fun things about Classic era for me right now is the renewed sense of exploration it provides. Sure, I've played all this before, but I've been playing BC for the past year and a bit, so it takes some mental effort to rewind certain gameplay changes (such as being unable to drop traps in combat again as a hunter), plus all my characters require a certain degree of re-acquainting. What did they have in their bank and bags at the time of cloning? What quests were they on when I last played them? And so on and so forth.

On Wednesday I logged onto one of my Horde characters for the first time, and within five minutes I'd received a whisper inviting me to a guild. I used to be more coy when it comes to accepting guild invites for a while, when I wanted every guild to be a forever home and therefore wanted to vet it carefully before joining, but more recently I've become a bit more relaxed about that, so that me accepting or declining such random invites comes more down to my mood.

In this case I felt sufficiently upbeat, and promptly found myself invited to "Warriors of Sunlight", one of what appears to be only two active Horde guilds on the EU PvE cluster. (Seriously, I'm running the census addon right now and it hasn't spotted any other Horde guilds so far aside from this one and Trinity.) I read and participated in guild chat for a bit and also joined their Discord, and quite liked what I saw there too. I quickly found myself thinking that maybe I could do some casual raids with these guys some time.

This is where the point about escalation mentioned at the beginning becomes relevant, because I also saw that they had an AQ40 sign-up for Thursday evening which seemed to be quite short on numbers. I didn't have any plans for Thursday night, so listening in on that seemed like a good way of checking what their raiding atmosphere was like. In fact, if they were sufficiently short, maybe I could even join them...?

This is where it really pays off that I've been through all of this before. When I first ascended to raider rank among the Forks, I was perpetually terrified of doing something wrong and being a burden on the rest of the raid. However, now that I've been there, I know what the fights are like, and I remember all too well the nights when leadership was asking every person online whether they didn't want to come fill out the raid, because having a warm body of any sort along was pretty much always preferable to undermanning things. So I felt little shame in offering to join on my tauren hunter, even though she was only in greens and blues and had never done anything harder than UBRS.

Mind you, a little shame is still not the same as no shame. For example I was a bit embarrassed when I remembered that my tauren was Beast Master spec instead of Marksman like every good Classic raider should be, and that her gear only had 1% hit rating on it, though I managed to dig up a helmet from her bank that added at least another two.

Never mind consumables, I didn't even have appropriate amounts of pet food for a raid on me, so I quickly stuffed my bags with fruit before it was world buff time, just to realise inside AQ that my wind serpent didn't like fruit, or any of the other food in my bags except a few bits of cheese I had left. So much for remembering which pet likes which food... I was already contemplating the embarrassing possibility of being a pet-less BM hunter when I remembered that wind serpents do eat bread, so I had a friendly mage conjure some rolls for me and the day was saved.

Ultimately I need not have worried too much. While I did feel a bit awkward about my poor performance, I wasn't even the one doing the least damage, and in general the mix of people and their attitudes reminded me a lot of the Classic Fork raids, with some people preparing themselves as much as possible in order to top the damage meters while others would go AFK in town, miss even the free world buffs and then need a summon.

Leadership performed a similar level of hand-holding to what I used to see in the Forks in Classic, reminding people of some key mechanics before every fight (not that this prevented one guy from killing himself in the green goo left behind by the Silithid Royalty, because of course there's always one) and handing out free nature protection potions where it was helpful. Again I was fondly reminded of the Forks, and felt like I was being a good raider just by following all the instructions.

There was one moment where people got cross with the hunters in general because apparently this guild has issues with hunter pets on Twin Emps, but ultimately it wasn't a big deal. Overall the atmosphere was nice, the banter full of dad jokes, and there was occasional friendly teabagging. It also cracked me up/I thought it was cute how the raid leader always asked for reses with the phrase "let's res our fallen heroes". It was a fun night that definitely left me itching for more, even if we didn't fully clear (just due to general slowness, and people wanting to go to bed after a certain point).

So now I'm actually kind of motivated to work on my tauren hunter - and there's a lot of work to do for sure. The only raid she's attuned to is MC, as mentioned she's missing a lot of hit rating, and she doesn't even have an epic mount. Making money looks like it's going to be harder than on Alliance side, as the number of auctions on the AH is a lot lower and I've not succeeded at selling anything other than a vial of Winterfall Firewater so far. For an extra bit of irony I actually found a BoE world epic in EPL, but who was I going to sell it to in this economy? I just mailed it to a lowbie hunter in guild who's still levelling up.

Either way, I've been reminding myself that while it's nice to be excited by the idea of catching up in order to become more involved with the guild, there's no rush as Classic era isn't going anywhere - which is a nice change from the way I've felt about Classic raiding for the past one and a half years.

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.

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.

Into the Unknown

I could join you... but I won't.
Some look to raid here, but others don't.
There's a thousand reasons I shouldn't log in today,
should ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away!

Oh-oh-oh.

You're not my friends, you're just temptation in my ear!
And if I liked you - which I don't! - I'm spoken for I fear.
Everyone I love's already with me in SWTOR;
I'm sorry, raider sirens, but I really don't need more.
I've had my adventures, I don't need something new.
I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I go with you

Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!

What do you want? 'Cause you've been keeping me awake...
Are you here to nag me 'til I make a big mistake?
Or are you just some people who play a lot like me?
Who can tell just what a great fit our union would be?
Every day's a little harder as the urge inside me grows
You just seem to know there's part of me that longs to go 

Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!

Wait, what? That's it? That was somewhat less exciting than I expected... guess I've beaten the game now?

I suppose that means the part where I get a cool new mount and find my hidden inner power has to wait until another time.

Playing Catch-up

I've been playing so much Classic lately; it feels almost embarrassing. I pretty much could have been writing daily blogs about all the things I've been doing, but instead I've just been spending all my time actually playing the game. I haven't been in this deep for a while.

Since that first AQ20 I've been to quite a few more raids: more runs of AQ20, one Zul'Gurub, two Onyxias and two Blackwing Lairs. In the last BWL run I won Ashjre'thul, Crossbow of Smiting, the best weapon for hunters until Naxxramas. My little nelf hunter is starting to kick some serious butt.

Unsurprisingly, the gentle nudges to join the raid team proper have continued, and not just from the hunter class leader either. I was quite surprised for example when, after watching one of the priests stream an AQ40 run, he commented to me that it was a shame that I was only watching and that I should be there with them next time. It's been strangely flattering to be courted this way.

At this point I'm about ready to cave, because I'm a firm believer in embracing serendipity, and that if life gives you something nice you should appreciate it to the fullest while you can. I wasn't looking to raid, but I also wasn't looking to join a guild that would turn out to be an awesome fit for me - it just happened. It's not that I absolutely can't raid "properly" in WoW, I've just been prioritising my hobby time differently. I think it may be time to make some changes in that regard.

So with that in mind, I've been looking at what it would take for my little hunter to be raid-ready for current content. Unfortunately, the answer at this point in the game is: more than I expected.

In general, gear level isn't as much of an obstacle as you'd think. I got myself hit-capped through dungeon drops and quest rewards, and everything else is pretty much a bonus. In terms of dps, the tuning in all the Classic raids up to Naxxramas is so low that there isn't really that much pressure to perform. More is nice of course because it makes things go faster, but it's not a big deal unless topping the meters is a personal motivation for you. It's mostly just tanks and healers who have to worry about having enough stats to stay / keep each other alive.

But there are other obstacles. For example, a big hunter utility in Classic is the use of Tranquilizing Shot, an ability that is key to preventing certain bosses from smooshing the tanks while "frenzied". The ability has a cooldown, and on the bosses that frenzy, it happens often enough that you need several hunters rotating their tranq shots.

The ability is learned from Tome of Tranquilizing Shot, a guaranteed drop from the first boss in Molten Core that binds on pick-up. While people were doing MC regularly, it was trivial to get this for every hunter in the raid. However, one year later, people are mostly sick and tired of farming MC and I still haven't been on a full run of it even once.

On the bosses that require tranquilising in BWL, one of the officers has repeatedly called for me to tranq, just for me to have to remind him yet again that I don't have it. It was fine because we had enough other hunters to cover it, but more than any lack of gear, it really highlighted how much I relied on others to carry me and that's something that makes me feel kinda bad every time. The guild finally put an MC run up for next week, so I'm hoping that I'll at least be able to fix that particular problem soon. This is relevant because tranq shot is still used in AQ40 as well.

A seemingly even bigger hurdle is the nature resist gear though. Resistance gear as a whole is a bit of an odd beast in Classic. In Vanilla it was commonly assumed that you needed fire resist gear for Molten Core for example, but in Classic hardly anyone seems to bother except for a few pieces for the tanks. Similarly, nature res for AQ40 doesn't appear to be quite as big a deal as it was back then, but it's still recommended for some bosses at least. I asked in guild what would be required for a hunter and was told to aim for 200 NR buffed, mainly for Princess Huhuran, which may not sound like much to some, but you have to consider that resistances in Classic are generally parcelled out in stacks of 10-20 per gear piece at the most, so that's a lot of different gear slots that need to be filled.

My heart kinda sunk when that realisation hit me. My understanding is that the guild worked on building up everyone's resistance gear for weeks and months before the opening of the gates, so that's potentially quite a lot of work to get done just to get caught up. People have of course been kind enough to offer help, but a grind with help is still a grind, and proper catch-up mechanics are largely absent, so it really is all about farming materials for crafts and going back to old dungeons for rare drops.

Maraudon is one major go-to for nature resist gear, so I trundled over to Desolace last night to see what I could solo in there. I was relieved to see that I could run past pretty much all the trash mobs (the only time I aggroed any of them was when I had my pet out and doing its "running into places I didn't want it to be" thing) but the bosses were still somewhat of a challenge. I couldn't get Noxxion down for example, and while I found a video of a hunter soloing him, that seemed to require a very specific setup. Razorlash was easy enough, as was Meshlok the Harvester (who was actually up), though the latter only gave me a pretty dress instead of the mail helmet I had been hoping for. Celebras the Cursed was very doable as well, though I didn't handle the adds very well so that we ended up knocking each other out simultaneously, which was at least amusing.

In the end I'd had a decent refresher of the earlier half of Maraudon, and the value of the things I vendored just about covered the repair bills for my multiple deaths, but in terms of gear I wasn't really much better off than before. (Razorlash dropped a pair of leather leggings, but the legs are one slot I would've been able to cover with crafted stuff anyway.)

In short, my whirlwind romance with being guilded and trying raiding in Classic continues, but at times it's also emotionally confusing and finding myself face-to-face with some of the more... eclectic-seeming design choices definitely makes me more sympathetic to why the devs decided to change these things later on to make it a bit easier for people to play together.