A trip to Mount Hyjal

No Cataclysm spoilers here, this is about the old Mount Hyjal, the instance. My guild didn't have enough people for a "proper" raid last night, so we gathered what we had and went for a trip down nostalgia lane by fighting the battle for Mount Hyjal once again.

I had a feeling that it would be a fun run when our mage discovered that there were Brewfest banners on the tower in the Alliance base.

Time travel and impending doom can't stop Brewfest!

It did indeed turn out to be a fun run; we revelled in nostalgia and so on and so forth - but it also made me think.

The feelings of nostalgia that I experienced in Black Temple not long ago for example were bittersweet. It was nice to see the bosses again, and kicking butt with ten more levels under our belts was fun in a "getting revenge for all the wipes back then" sort of way, but the realisation how much the game had changed and how a lot of mechanics had become completely obsolete was also accompanied by a certain sense of melancholy, knowing that we'd never get to experience the game that way again - because even if it had been hard and frustrating at times, it used to be fun too.

Mount Hyjal evoked almost nothing of the sort. Maybe it's the scenery, as I'm generally less prone to feeling down in a bright and sunny environment, but there was little that I felt we were missing out on, even as we were steamrolling the instance with seven people of a way higher level than intended.

Take the trash for example: Hyjal was always the home of AoE, the main difference being that this heavily favoured paladin tanks, warlocks and mages back in BC, seeing how they were the only classes with spammable AoE damage abilities. For everyone else it was just pretty dull, single-target stabbing or nuking a lot of relatively low-health mobs, while only a select few people in the raid got to bask in the glory of their unbeatable AoE dps. Going back there at level eighty, with everyone being able to make a contribution, actually felt nothing but right, and almost as if we were only now able to finally clear the content the way it was meant to be played.

Likewise all the bosses except Archimonde were always pretty much tank and spank with only one major gimmick and a couple of minor abilities - they kind of had to be that way back in the day, seeing how the trash made every single boss attempt take about half an hour, and if they had been much more difficult, nobody would've ever got very far without going insane. When coming back at level eighty this has the advantage that even though the fights are obviously still considerably easier, they don't feel completely different and trivialised (unlike several fights in Black Temple for example, which used to have lots of fiddly mechanics that can mostly be ignored these days).

The NPCs also got me thinking, as I watched them die pathetically during the trash waves because nobody really gave a damn about saving them.

Back in the day they were actually really well balanced when I think about it now, because they were genuinely valuable. We used to have people dedicated to kiting single mobs into the NPCs to get them to help out and tried to save them if they got aggro, because they really contributed - but at the same time they were nothing without the players. Jaina and Thrall were powerful, and again, strategies often included positioning that would help to get them engaged, but they still died quite quickly without the rest of the raid.

I do wish that this was something that Blizzard remembered, as I feel that they've thrown way too many NPCs at us during this expansion that were either totally useless in a fight (like the guys "helping" you to get to Valithria Dreamwalker) or so powerful that they could solo everything and made you feel redundant (the leaders in the Battle for Undercity, Tirion stealing the show on the Lich King). Friendly NPCs can be cool, but only if their power is balanced correctly against the player characters.

And then there was Archimonde, oh yeah. I know some of my fellow raiders hate him with a passion, but I still love the fight to this day, despite of the many weeks we spent wiping on him before we finally killed him. I just love fights that force you to think on your feet, where you start with a strategy but have to be able to make small adjustments on the fly depending on circumstances, while at the same time not descending into complete chaos. (Why hello there, Doomfire!)

I also felt a weird sense of pride, always timing my tears correctly so that I didn't even take the tiniest bit of falling damage. It's hardly a transferable skill, but maybe it's because of that that there is something deeply satisfying about still remembering how to do it. Shows just how much time I spent on that fight, when the right way to click is still ingrained in my muscle memory years later.

Attunements: sense and sensibility

I recently worked my way through the old Onyxia attunement quest chain for the Horde. If you've never done it yourself, this series of "interactive movies" by Wowcrendor gives a pretty good impression of how tedious and annoying it is, gameplay-wise. Though I really liked getting to dress up as a black dragontaur, something that is not shown in the movie. These things have a pretty ridiculous waddle.

Now, while I definitely wouldn't consider this chain a fun attunement as a whole, I have to admit that the idea behind it, that you need to acquire a magical item to access Onyxia's Lair, rang very true for me. She's a powerful black dragon, but she's not stupid. She wouldn't let just about anyone wander into her lair unchecked, would she?

This in turn made me think about WOTLK's raid instances, and how I really feel that they are missing something in terms of story by not having any kind of attunement. The only WOTLK raid that does have one is Malygos' Lair, which requires you to get a key from Sapphiron in Naxx. Sapphiron used to be a mighty blue dragon in life, so I guess it makes sense that he would have something that allows access to the leader of the blue dragonflight. That's fair enough. If we look at any of the other raids however... oh dear.

First we have Naxxramas. What, does the Scourge really have no magical wards or anything that prevent people from just wandering in? Even worse, there's nothing in the game that even encourages you to go raid the place. The Alliance NPCs in Wintergarde Keep are chatting about the floating citadel and its inhabitants for a bit, but there are no quests telling you to go there or anything. The Horde has it even worse, because they don't even acknowledge its existence. I think I once saw a line of quest text that said something about the Alliance being under siege from Naxx, but that this was something that didn't concern the Horde. Seriously, the only reason to go there was the meta-game knowledge about it being Wrath's introductory raid. Poor storytelling, that.

Sartharion is even worse, as there is absolutely no explanation for why he is even there or why we should kill him. I believe that I read somewhere that Blizzard did have plans to include a story for him but it was cut out due to time constraints.

Then we have Ulduar. This one gets a pass from me because even though they are not required for being allowed to enter the instance, there are quests in the Storm Peaks that serve as a sort of introduction to the place. There was also this video on the official website. And the fact that anyone can just go inside can be explained by the fact that Brann has already kicked down the door.

Trial of the Crusader not requiring any kind of attunement on the other hand was terrible in terms of in-game logic at least. The whole point of the Argent Tournament was to put together an elite team of fighters to face the Lich King. That's why you go from aspirant to champion to crusader, proving yourself over and over again along the way. Yet anyone can enter Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader, even if they haven't proven their skills at the tournament in any way? No, just no.

This logical error then continues in Icecrown Citadel. Yes, the Ashen Verdict have kicked down the door and made the place accessible, but again, wasn't the whole point of the Argent Tournament to make sure that only the ones with the highest chances of survival would enter ICC? Yet once again, they take absolutely anyone. This is in direct contradiction of a whole patch worth of story. Bad Blizzard, bad!

That said, I think we can all agree that story and gameplay can easily come into conflict, and what's good for one can be detrimental to the other. For example, requiring people to actually have the Crusader title before they could enter Trial of the Crusader would have been the harshest attunement ever, seeing how the title takes almost a month to acquire even if you do all your daily quests every day. Still, I don't think that excuses Blizzard from making a nonsensical story just to facilitate easy gameplay. For example, they simply could have given the Argent Tournament instances names independent of the titles, such as "The Grand Coliseum" or whatever; that alone would have alleviated a lot of the concerns mentioned above.

Lately I realised however, that attunements are important for more than just story. People have derided them in the past as being nothing but artificial obstacles to keep content exclusive, but I think that this expansion has proven that hardly anyone really wants everything to be equally accessible to everyone anyway.

Why do you think Blizzard released TotC's bosses one at a time and delayed the opening of ICC's different wings? Because they didn't want everyone to complete all the new content right away. Why didn't they just keep attunements then? They serve a similar purpose and at least they leave the ball in the player's court and give them something to do: "Okay, you can't go in there - yet. But you can complete a couple of tasks which will then open the place up. Go work on them!" In contrast, the gating that we saw in this expansion gives people nothing to do but sit on their arses and wait, because they have no way of influencing their access to the raid. Dead boring if you ask me - I'd take a long attunement chain over that any day.

More importantly though, the players themselves also have an interest in keeping people out of content if they aren't ready to cope with it yet. That's why you see all these silly pugs that require achievement linking and GearScore numbers. After all, Blizzard themselves have drilled it into our heads that gear is the only thing that matters. WOTLK heroic dungeons require no attunement - the dungeon finder will only check your gear. And what was the argument for rewarding top-tier emblems from heroic dungeons again? To allow people to get the gear to raid ICC - the implication being that that's all they need, actual experience with raiding or other group content is completely optional.

Good attunements on the other hand can be so much more useful for judging a player's readiness for content. I always thought the heroic Magister's Terrace attunement was brilliant - all it requires is that you do a quest while completing the instance on normal mode. That way any person who joined your heroic group was guaranteed to at least have a clue about the instance.

The Karazhan attunement was pretty good as well in my opinion - a bit lengthy maybe, but it required you to take an interest in the instance and to tackle some reasonably challenging content with a group - if you couldn't make it through normal Black Morass for example, you really had no business being in Karazhan yet.

The way I see it, the main problems with attunements in BC were that some of them were way too convoluted, and that they were very alt-unfriendly. These issues would have been relatively simple to solve though by making keys account-wide (maybe leaving the quests as something optional for alts) and generally easing up on the complexity. Blizzard was making good progress on the latter towards the end of BC, but then they threw the baby out with the bathwater in WOTLK when they just got rid of attunements altogether (with the exception of Malygos).

Unfortunately I haven't heard anything good about Cataclysm in that regard either. From what little I've heard it sounds like instances and heroics will once again have nothing but annoying gear checks - I remember hearing a story of someone who had to go quest before an instance run just to get a new ring, which had worse itemisation but a higher ilevel, just so the game would allow him to enter an instance.

I don't mind having to work to get to see all the content, but it should happen in a way that makes sense story-wise. Doing nothing but grind gear to get to the next tier is boring and creates an environment where people are judged by nothing but the numbers on their epics.

More weekend pug adventures

I had a string of friendly pugs yesterday and today - though it's kind of sad that nice pugs have become something noteworthy to begin with.

First I healed a heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run where the tank suddenly said "brb" as we were getting ready for the second boss encounter. And nobody shouted "gogogo" or decided to start the event anyway! People just waited and chatted. The rogue apologised for his low dps, explaining that he had only just dinged that day. And he was doing nearly two thousand dps anyway, nothing to be ashamed of! When the tank came back he apologised too, explaining that he had had to get the doorbell.

On Skadi our hunter picked up all the harpoons without prompting and shot the boss down in one flyby. So nice, considering the amount of bickering I've had to observe in regards to that simple task over time.

Then, just as we were going down the stairs after the boss, the tank suddenly went afk again. The hunter pulled anyway and we wiped, but he said that it had been an accident and once again apologised profusely. Everyone ran back on their own (!), except for the tank, who was still afk. However, he didn't complain about his death either once he came back, just told us instead that he had been gone because he had to attend to the workers in his house that were there to fix a leak in the roof. I told him that that was definitely one of the better reasons to go afk and that it was all good. It was nice to see people act laid-back about things like brief interruptions and mistakes without immediately flying into some sort of nerd rage.

Today I was healing a heroic Halls of Stone run, where the tank asked us after the Brann event whether we'd be willing to do the Abuse the Ooze achievement, since that was the only thing he really wanted from this instance. "In that case... hell no! Just kidding," responded one of the dps, which made me smile. We discussed briefly how it worked and then completed it without any problems. It's amazing how much of a difference to the general tone and people's willingness to help it can make if someone just bothers to phrase their requests politely.

Ironically I was the one who broke the lucky streak - sort of, at least. When I queued up my mage for a random right after the run mentioned above, I got Halls of Stone again. After a few pulls I noticed that our dps paladin was putting out really good damage and went to inspect him because I wanted to see what kind of gear he had. Except... I accidentally clicked on "vote to kick", which is right above inspect on the drop-down menu. I immediately said in chat that it was a mistake and apologised... just to see the vote-kick go through two seconds later. What? WHAT?!

I was shocked and flabbergasted. Why did people approve of kicking someone who had done nothing wrong?! We got a replacement immediately and nobody commented on what had just happened in any way. I quietly completed the run but felt terribly guilty the entire time. So guilty in fact, that I went to create a level one alt on the kicked guy's server afterwards to apologise to him. He said that it was fine and that I shouldn't worry, which made me feel a lot better.

Still, the whole incident was stupid. I kind of want to say that Blizzard should implement some kind of confirmation screen for vote-kick initiation, but then the rest of the party is sort of supposed to work as a safety catch to prevent you from kicking people wrongfully anyway, isn't it? Too bad that this doesn't work if they just mindlessly click "yes" to whatever questions you put in front of them.

Trollfest 2010: total disappointment

So I was listening to the live stream of Blue Plz!, the WoW podcast by TotalBiscuit tonight. At some point he mentioned that he was organising an event called Trollfest on the Ahn'Qiraj server and invited people to come and join. There didn't seem to be much point to it other than to create a few minutes of video footage of lots of trolls dancing in Sen'jin for him, but I've heard a lot of good things about large events like that in the past and thought that it could be fun. So I decided to create a little troll hunter of my own on Ahn'Qiraj. The dedicated starting time was still over an hour away, but I figured that that would give me at least a bit of time to level, which is good fun after all (and would prevent the scorpids around Sen'jin from pwning me).

At first I was pleasantly surprised to actually see the troll starting zone be full of life for a change. I hadn't seen a starting zone this active since the start of BC. I actually had to work to hunt down those mottled boars because so many other people were trying to do the quests too!

Unfortunately that's already where the positive impressions ended. Despite of there being some questing activity, the majority of people didn't seem to have any interest in actually playing and set off for Sen'jin straight away. And the spam was crazy. I'm not just talking about general chat being very active (which it was), but pure, undiluted stupidity. People constantly seemed to be making macros to spam yet more pointless crap, whether it was "for the alliance" or "mosh mosh" - and all in caps of course. It was hard to keep up with all the spam reporting, so I eventually just gave up on trying to make any kind of sense of the chat window.

Also, from comments that TotalBiscuit made live on the show and the occasional coherent sentence in general, it quickly became apparent that there was trouble. People were complaining about constantly getting disconnected and claimed that the server was crashing - the latter definitely wasn't true during my time online at least, as I was happily questing away in the Valley of Trials without even the slighest lag.

There did seem to be problems in the immediate Sen'jin area however, and as it turned out at least one GM actually appeared and asked people to log off since their behaviour was "having a negative impact on the normal users of this realm". TB went along with this and said that the event was cancelled, while complaining about how weak Blizzard's servers were. Keep in mind that the Trollfest guild capped out at five hundred members and I reckon that there were at least another five hundred people around who wanted to join, and all these people were trying to get into Sen'jin! Considering that I reckon that each WoW server is only optimised to manage a few thousand players at a time, that was a considerable chunk right there.

Thus the event was cancelled before it had even begun. I made it over to Sen'jin a bit later, once I had hit level five, and there were still a fair number of people around, still dancing, still spamming, and becoming more embarrassing by the minute. A lot of people who had come to the event apparently didn't even listen to the radio show itself and had no clue that it had been cancelled, which quickly led to a war in chat as some people were claiming that TotalBiscuit would arrive soon or that he was just observing things anonymously, and that anyone who tried to relay the message that the event had been cancelled was just a dirty, dirty liar. Is this how new religions get started? I eventually logged off because the whole thing just became too awkward.

I suppose part of the problem was that the whole event had no point other than to have people standing around in Sen'jin and doing the /dance emote, which meant that the whole zone pretty much degenerated into nothing but a glorified chat room. I wonder if the GMs had felt the need to interfere in the same way if more people had actually played in some fashion, whether it was just doing quests, organising a communal run to Thunder Bluff or whatever. At least then the activity would have been spread out a little bit.

But yeah, I'm definitely going to stay away from any more "massive" events of that type in the future. Too many people with nothing to do in one spot just breeds dumb behaviour and no fun at all.

Just how fail is YOUR Halls of Lightning pug?

Answer the following questions honestly and add up the number of points next to your answers. Consult the table at the end to find out just how badly your pug rates compared to the worst possible case. Note that general pug failures like the tank being unable to hold aggro or unnecessary wipes are not included in this questionnaire, because these things can happen anywhere. This is about people showing a very specific kind of incompetence that can only be observed in Halls of Lightning.

The test

1. Is your tank trying to skip groups of trash mobs by hugging a wall very tightly and outmaneuvering patrols, and it inevitably backfires?
Yes 1 / No 0

2. Does this happen more than once?
Yes 1 / No 0

3. Are people running around like headless chickens whenever they get arc welded?
Yes 1 / No 0

4. Does anyone actually manage to kill themselves that way?
Yes 1 / No 0

5. Is anyone but the tank getting hit by General Bjarngrim's whirlwind?
Yes 1 / No 0

6. Are the ranged dps and/or the healer getting hit by General Bjarngrim's whirlwind?
Yes 1 / No 0

7. Are people attacking the slags the moment the tank aggroes them or is the healer spamming heals on the tank before the group has made it to the stairs?
Yes 1 / No 0

8. Are people standing in the slags' blast waves as you dps them down?
Yes 1 / No 0

9. Are the ranged dps and/or the healer standing in the slags' blast waves as you dps them down?
Yes 1 / No 0

10. Does anyone die due to this?
Yes 1 / No 0

11. Are people trying to kill Volkhan's adds instead of dpsing the boss?
Yes 1 / No 0

12. In the hallway with the statues that come to life, do people run ahead of the tank (being feared doesn't count)?
Yes 1 / No 0

13. Do you observe anyone using any sorts of anti-fear measures available to them in this hallway (warriors breaking it, will of the forsaken, tremor totem, fear ward etc.)?
Yes 0 / No 1

14. On Ionar, do people inexplicably hug the rest of the party when they get static overload?
Yes 1 / No 0

15. When Ionar disperses, do people run away from him?
Yes 0 / No 1

16. Does anyone run off to the side and aggro an extra group of mobs during the disperse?
Yes 1 / No 0

17. Is your whole party getting hit by forked lightning from Stormforged Constructs?
Yes 1 / No 0

18. Is anyone except a hunter repeatedly getting charged by Titanium Vanguards?
Yes 1 / No 0

19. Are poison tipped spears and/or sleeps getting dispelled?
Yes 0 / No 1

20. Are charged flurries getting interrupted?
Yes 0 / No 1

21. Does anyone die to a charged flurry and then express complete bewilderment about what happened to them?
Yes 1 / No 0

22. Are the ranged dps and/or the healer getting hit by the Stormforged Giants' thunderstorm?
Yes 1 / No 0

23. Is anyone taking any visible measures to decrease the damage they take from Loken's lightning nova (running out, ice block, nature resistance aura or totem, survival cooldowns)?
Yes 0 / No 1

24. Is Loken getting more than two lightning novas off?
Yes 1 / No 0

25. Did you not know how to answer several of these questions because you weren't actually paying attention yourself?
Yes 1 / No 0

How did your pug score?

0-5 points: Admit it, that wasn't actually a pug. Can I join your guild?

6-10: Eh, some people were slacking a little, but things weren't too bad overall.

11-19: Someone's going to be in for a harsh wake-up call come Cataclysm. There's still a good chance that you managed to complete the instance though, simply due to overgearing and/or someone compensating a lot for other people's failures. Unfortunately this is pretty average these days.

20-25: Holy crap, are you alright? That can't have been good for your sanity! Did you at least make a blog post about that run?

And in conclusion...

If so desired, this test can also be turned into a drinking game, where you simply take a shot every time someone does something that would score a point.

Interestingly enough, the pug that inspired this post "only" scored a 13... I guess it wasn't that bad after all.

Sunday night pug musings

Last night I took my death knight out to pug a few instances, to balance the large amount of solo-play that I've been doing lately. Since I gave her a tank spec I've found grouping with her much more enjoyable - I just think that melee dps is kind of annoying and boring. In fact, I've generally started to warm up to her a little.

I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.

But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.

I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.

I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.

Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.

I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.

My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!

After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.

That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!

I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.

My ravasaur and me

Let me start this off by saying that I'm not a mount collector. According to the armoury I currently have seventy-six mounts on my main, but that's mostly due to feelings of "well, these vendors want to sell me some mounts and I have cash to spare, so why not" than anything else. In practice I've been riding the same land and flying mount for nearly two years.

Unsurprisingly I didn't care much when the Venomhide Ravasaur mount was released a couple of patches ago. I caught some information about it being intended to give the Horde an equivalent to the Alliance-only Wintersaber grind, but that was about it. It just wasn't something that interested me.

During my Loremastering however, I inevitably ended up running into Mor'vek in Un'goro at some point and well, he did have some quests to offer. I was kind of wary of him to be honest, going by what little I knew of the Wintersaber grind. I just knew that if he asked me to do anything more than once I was so going to be out of there.

I was surprised to find out that unlike the Wintersaber trainers, he didn't have a faction associated with him, he just told me that venomhide ravasaurs were too toxic too ride and that I'd have to become immune to their poison if I wanted to make one my mount. The following quest was pretty funny to do as a level eighty, as I was initially very confused about what to do - all the venomhides I approached died way too quickly to do anything to me. I then learned from the comments on Wowhead that I needed to let them hit and poison me, but level eighty strength posed a problem to this. Even meleeing them with my caster dagger and no strength killed all the raptors in only a few hits. Eventually I ended up in a pathetic fist-fight with one venomhide which managed to give me most of my debuff stacks. I thought it was most amusing.

Next I was asked to retrieve a couple of eggs, and before I knew it I had a venomhide hatchling in my bags. I summoned it and discovered that it used that relatively new "baby dino" model with the ridiculously large head, while being absolutely tiny and... it just looked too funny and cute. It also offered me a daily quest to collect some silithid eggs. Hey, I thought, that doesn't even require me to kill anything, I'll do that.

Days went by. Since I was still questing in the area anyway, I also continued to do my little hatchling's daily quests, especially as there seemed to be a couple of different ones for variety. (Though I swear that in the end, about two out of three times I got the one for roc feathers anyway.) After a while I started to wonder... was it growing? Surely not, but I seemed to remember it being so tiny, and it did look a bit bigger now... I got a definite answer on the eleventh day or so, when it actually changed model into that of a normal raptor, only still a lot smaller. It was growing!

I still had a couple of days of questing left by the time I finished with Silithus, but hopping through the Caverns of Time portal in the Violet Citadel made it easy to get down to Tanaris quickly if I wanted to. Also, I was starting to feel quite attached to the little bugger. The fact that it seemed to like feathers more than food gave it a sort of personality, and watching it grow as the days went by felt strangely fulfilling.

Yesterday it finalled shed its last baby tooth, and as I stood in front of it (picture above), I realised that it had - most appropriately - almost reached the size of a normal raptor. Handing in the quest to get my mount actually made me really happy. With the way things had been going, the game had truly given me the feeling that I was raising my mount myself, and finally being able to put the bridle on its head so I could ride on its back was a most memorable moment.

Me, Harvey the venomhide ravasaur, and Mor'vek with his own mount.

For the first time in years I'm actually riding a different mount around Dalaran again - I don't know whether I'll stick with it, but I like that this one isn't just a prize for grinding a reputation to exalted or getting lucky with the RNG. This little dino has a story.

I can only heartily recommend this experience to other Horde players, even if they are not usually ones for collecting mounts. Seeing that little bulge-headed hatchling grow into a fearsome raptor has been an experience unlike anything else I've done in WoW.