I Am the Master Angler!

You may remember me writing about wanting to win the fishing tournament back in September. I didn't post about it again after that, but in game I kept at it pretty faithfully week after week... it became such a routine that even the husband knew that I was not to be disturbed between 1 and 1.30 pm on a Sunday because that was fishing time.

I also took a screenshot whenever the winner was called out each week, to be able to keep track of my progress. Unfortunately it was nothing to write home about most of the time - I'd usually have only between 20 and 30 Tastyfish at that point, so I wasn't anywhere near claiming victory myself. One time I even got so caught up in chatting with a guildie that I completely lost track of what was going on and even missed the winner being called altogether. There was only one exceptional run, where I was actually on 39 fish and casting for my 40th by the time the winner was announced... that one stung a little.

I didn't really get any closer to figuring out a secret strategy to winning throughout all those weeks. Besides the RNG of getting "trash" out of the pools sometimes, it mostly seemed to be down to the distribution of players along the coast, but that was very unpredictable as well. For a while it felt like I was doing pretty well for myself at the relatively unpopular, very northern end of Stranglethorn, but then it got busier every week, until one time I ended up competing with three or four people for a single pool there and decided to say "screw it" and relocated.

I also learned that one of my guild's main tanks had actually won the fishing tournament before, as he whipped out the trinket that allows you to turn into a fish when we went to kill the giant shark in Azshara one day. I asked him whether he had any advice for how to win and he responded with something along the lines of: "Nah, it's all RNG. Just keep at it and you'll win after a couple of weeks." As I had been trying for more than two months by that point, I wasn't feeling particularly heartened.

The funniest fail came only a couple of weeks ago, when the yell about someone else having won went out and I recognised the name of another guildie who had joined only recently. I congratulated them and asked how long they'd been trying to win, just to get the response that it was actually their first time, and they couldn't even use the Arcanite Fishing Pole they'd just won because their fishing skill wasn't high enough. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry!

The week after that I skipped the tournament in favour of an Uldaman run on my pally. I hadn't really intended to skip it, because I was kind of hoping that we'd be done in time for me to log back onto my hunter, but I didn't mind missing one week. In a way it turned out to be a good thing anyway as I had already positioned my hunter for the tourney but later found out that I'd actually forgotten to set her hearthstone to Booty Bay like I usually do. Imagine if I'd got my 40 fish and then hearthed back to Ironforge by accident! As it was, the guild tank used this opportunity to take part again and got his second win.

It was the week after that when things finally worked out in my favour. I'd like to think it was because a friendly mage (who is also the aforementioned tank's partner... I think?) made a point of wishing me good luck after I'd "let" the tank win the week before due to my absence. I ended up fishing along the middle stretch of the coast and for once it wasn't too badly crowded there. Also, another thing that might have made a difference was that I noticed for the first time that pools were actually spawning before the yell had officially announced the start of the tournament - I think I already had two Tastyfish in my bags before the event was supposed to have started "officially".

Anyway, I got my forty Tastyfish with only a minimal number of "wasted" casts, hearthed to Booty Bay, handed in and that was that! It was a joyful day. I was asked if I was planning to try for a second win to get the trinket as well but I honestly don't know. I don't care about that prize as much as I did about the fishing pole, and as hard as some may find it to believe, I actually found the tournament to be quite an adrenaline rush whenever I was having one of my better runs and it felt like I could be getting close to winning. I'm not sure I can deal with all that excitement a second time around!

Naxxramas Looms

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

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

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

Attunement

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

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

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

Frost Resistance Gear

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

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

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

Consumables and Crafting Mats

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

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

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

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

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

Classic is all about playing the long game.

A Confusing Retail Journey

Pretty much as expected, my interest in retail is already fading again, but the husband seems to be quite keen on it so we're still doing some questing together. Yesterday was also the last day of Hallow's End, and I had a couple of event quests left in my log that I hadn't finished yet, so I decided to do that. What followed was pretty much a perfect encapsulation of how foreign and confusing retail feels to me nowadays.

The two quests I had were Hallow's End Treats for Jesper and A Time to Lose. The former requires you to visit NPCs in Stormwind, Ironforge and Darnassus (yes, really), and the latter asks you to put out the Horde's Wickerman at the entrance to the Undercity.

I started in Stormwind and then realised that due to my monk having been ferried straight to Kul Tiras after Exile's Reach, she had zero flight paths unlocked anywhere in Azeroth. No biggie though, she'd unlocked the ability to fly on her own at this point, so I put on auto-run/fly and set off northward. Making it to Ironforge and finding the relevant quest NPCs there was easy enough.

After that I continued northward to Tirisfal. I actually saw the Wickerman but there was an optional objective to speak to Ziodormi to "visit Tirisfal Glades in the past". I'd read somewhere that the zone had been revamped after the BfA intro that saw the Alliance attacking Undercity and now existed in two versions, and that a member of the bronze dragonflight could be consulted to allow players to switch between both states.

As there was no quest marker for this optional objective however, I got a bit lost and eventually had to consult Wowhead. I couldn't find the NPC in the location described there either, however there were helpful comments talking about also being unable to find her, and finally one that stated that you had to be in the past version of the zone to be able to see the Wickerman and do the quest. At this point it dawned on me that I was apparently already in the past by default... just with no option to go into the future. Or at least the whole Battle for Lordaeron scenario had not been part of the new levelling experience; I'm not sure if you can still go back and do it later. Either way, I accepted that the optional objective was clearly not for me, doused the Wickerman and moved on.

This is where things got tricky because I realised that to complete the second quest, I'd have to move to the western continent. My last memory of retail was that they had changed the boats in some manner that confused me, but I flew back down towards Menethil Harbour anyway. As I picked up the flight point there, I was reminded that it's been underwater ever since the Cataclysm and that boats were redirected to the (then new) Stormwind Harbour at that point.

So I continued my trip back down the map and flew around the waterfront in Stormwind for a bit. There were some boats parked there seemingly as decorations but I couldn't find anything that I could clearly identify as a functional pier. I tried looking for an NPC that would tell me what boats were going where since I remembered that being a thing at one point but had no luck on that front either.

Remembering the portal room in the mage tower, I decided to try my luck there instead and found a portal to the Exodar. Close enough!

From the Exodar, I rode to the Azuremyst Isle pier, where I was greeted by... another portal? This one lead to Darkshore, so once again I clicked on it. It took me until my arrival there to remember that Darnassus does in fact not exist anymore in retail, and that Darkshore, too, has undergone a transformation in the latest expansion. Fortunately I had no trouble finding the time-travelling person in this zone, who sent me right back to the Cata version of Darkshore, from which I could then fly to Darnassus, casually defying space-time to have a cheerful innkeeper there hand me some marzipan.

At that point I was glad that my hearthstone was on cooldown, because hell if I knew how to get back to the Eastern Kingdoms manually.

I don't know if my scattered memories of how things used to be are actually helpful or more of a hindrance at this point... but navigating a world with all these portals, no directions, and now also time-travel on top honestly seems pretty confusing to me.

The Social Hunter

It does strike me as deeply ironic that I ended up joining a raiding guild on my nelf hunter, a character I created on a server where I didn't know anybody, with the intention of doing nothing but level through the solo content (and maybe do the occasional dungeon pug), while my poor little cow shaman, whose big aspiration was to level as part of a group and heal her friends, sits lonely and abandoned elsewhere.

People in the guild have started talking about potential re-rolls whenever Classic Burning Crusade comes around, and I'm definitely considering the idea. I've started working on some alts and could see myself returning to my true calling of healing... but things will obviously depend on what other people want to do and what sort of revised roster we end up with. I'll also still definitely level and play Tir either way as I did enjoy hunter back in BC a whole lot too. Good old Pukaja was pretty much my main alt back in the day, and I even remember taking her to Mount Hyjal at least once (for whatever reason) and comparing dps numbers with our raid leader (who mained a hunter as well).

Regardless of what class I'm playing, the way I'm playing Classic in general has changed massively since I got involved with Order of the Holy Fork. I've found it to be one of the most common criticisms of MMO endgame and raiding that it's totally different from how you play while levelling, and while I've always thought that this was technically true, it was never really an issue for me personally as I genuinely enjoy both play styles, and I also tend to transition into group content more gradually.

In Classic though, it feels like the change has been super abrupt. While I was playing on my own, I would only log on fairly irregularly, with very modest and objective-oriented goals, such as "get that one quest done" or "farm some of these mobs". My play time tended to be fairly quiet and zen, and at times I even viewed it as a way of getting away from people for a bit while still playing an MMO (if that makes sense). At the same time, individual play sessions tended to not be very long as I'd either get bored fairly quickly or feel quite exhausted after a single dungeon pug.

Since joining a guild, most of my play time has been following heavily regulated patterns, because you can't herd 40+ raiders without some sort of structure. I'm not a big believer in the whole buff meta, but heart and head drops tend to be very regular on Hydraxian Waterlords, so it's easy enough to log in 20 minutes early and go AFK in Booty Bay for a bit before setting off to the raid instance.

Even outside of raids, I find it pretty much impossible not to be social though. I'll just log onto an alt to check their mail and I can rarely be online for more than fifteen minutes without someone suggesting some group activity or another. I've got into the habit of constantly checking the guild roster because I know if certain people are online, some sort of action is pretty much imminent. Play sessions can last hours and hours as it's tempting to just do one more thing as long as others are willing to go along with it.

I don't regret this at all because it's terribly fun, but it is kind of weird how I'm almost finding it difficult to get certain solo tasks out of the way because it's so easy to be roped into doing something else instead whenever I'm online in game. Plus it means that in terms of overall activity balance, you could say that I'm currently a bit overbooked in the grouping department (especially when you take my SWTOR guild into consideration as well) while having very little online "me time", so to speak. It's just something that makes me think and that I suspect I may need to address in some way sooner or later.

Level 50 in BfA

We didn't quite get there last Sunday since we didn't end up having as much play time that day as expected, but it didn't take long afterwards. For the curious, my /played time to get to 50 was just under 26 hours. For comparison, my two 60s in Classic took 9-10 days to level each. Even in SWTOR, which I consider to have an extremely fast levelling track these days, my last max-level character took a few hours more to get there than my monk. And even that was with reading quest text and plenty of idling. Blizzard weren't kidding when they said that they just wanted to get you to max level asap with this new system.

In terms of content, we cleared all of Tiragarde Sound (which is mandatory to do first on this new levelling path) and most of Drustvar. We probably would have had to finish Drustvar to ding if we hadn't padded our XP gains with some Cataclysm profession dailies and Halloween event quests. My understanding is that there's a lot of story content left to do, not just Stormsong Valley but also the zones added in later patches and the whole of the war campaign. We'll see how far we get before I lose steam as I so often do with questing once the XP gains stop.

I do want to say though that the immediate experience of hitting max level was awkwardly and hilariously disconnected from everything that had come before. In terms of look and feel, the trip through Exile's Reach and into BfA provides a fairly coherent tale of adventuring in a classic fantasy environment and even if you're a new player or don't have much of a lore background, the story should be straightforward enough to follow. But then you ding 50 and you get this pop-up quest from some crystal dwarf who wants to see you urgently in Silithus, a place you've never been. There's a handy portal to get you there in Bolarus, but other than that there's no real context for what's going on. In the Chamber of the Heart there's a console that lets you watch the Legion end cinematic if you like, but again... if you don't already know these characters and what's been going on, it's pretty incomprehensible and just teaches you that apparently some giant fire dude stuck a sword into the planet while you were hunting witches in Drustvar and you didn't notice.

Then the Heart of Azeroth and your first piece of Azerite armour are dumped on you with little to no explanation. I even needed my husband to point out that the heart's Azerite level had now replaced my XP bar. I know that with Shadowlands coming it's all going to be irrelevant anyway, but why bother new players with this thing at all at this point? It just breaks the flow big time and is unnecessarily confusing if you ask me. It's like saying: "Hey, I know you're enjoying your questing at the moment, but please come and pick up your pointless grind mechanic first, it's very important."

Classic Guild Life

After spending so many years officering in my SWTOR guild, I'm finding it interesting to just be a rank and file member in a Classic raiding guild that has to operate in a very different way compared to what I'm used to. I just can't stop myself from still looking at certain things with an analytical eye.

For example I was quite confused by how, as I started to find my feet in the guild, some people seemed to become almost overly attached to me from one day to the next. I mean, I took a fast liking to many of them as well, and I don't really have major self confidence issues nowadays, but even so I'm well aware that I'm not that amazing if you get what I mean. It just felt weirdly disproportional how keen some of them seemed to be on simply seeing me online and talking to me.

This meme came to mind.

Things did calm down a bit after a few weeks, but I was reminded of the whole thing again when I logged in by the Stormwind mailbox today and saw next to me a rogue that had recently joined the guild... but now with another guild's tag over her head. I hadn't really got to know her very well - in fact we'd only really exchanged a few lines - yet I briefly had to fight the urge to whisper her and express great sadness about her leaving, perhaps even beg her to reconsider her reasons, whatever they might be. I stopped myself, especially since guild chat on the subject of her departure seemed to indicate that it had already been discussed with her, but it still gave me pause that I'd felt the urge to run after this person like an overly attached girlfriend even for a moment.

The thing is, we had only really exchanged a few lines, but she seemed nice. We are woefully short on raiding rogues at the moment (we only have two!), and she seemed like a promising candidate. And it's not just rogues we've been short on - raids as a whole have been a bit anaemic, often starting with the group being several people short and then only slowly filling up as the night goes on and social members and latecomers get dragged in. That sort of situation is bad for a myriad of reasons and ultimately endangers the stability of the regular raids, meaning that every member has a vested interest in filling any vacancies with decently competent and agreeable recruits as soon as possible. They don't have to be your new best friend, but just being "kinda nice" is honestly enough to want them to stick around.

I suspect that everyone who's ever been an officer in a raiding guild of any size knows what a challenge it can be to maintain a stable roster over the long term, and with Classic raids requiring 40 people this is only magnified. There are also additional challenges caused by other parts of the game.

Unlike more modern MMOs for example, it has no freebies or tasks on timers that encourage you to log in on a schedule... which is something I quite appreciate about it to be honest, and it can still be very addicting in its own way, but if you get distracted by something else for a few days that also means that it's very easy to just forget to log in again and "fade away". In raid terms this means that people sign up and attend raids for weeks or even months and then just... stop. With the sheer size of the roster, chances are that there isn't necessarily the sort of personal connection that you have in smaller guilds and that enables you to chase the person down via other channels in such a situation, so they're just suddenly gone and you have a hole in your roster.

And of course there's the matter of loot being scarce and oddly distributed for different classes, which means that there are a hundred reasons why you might find yourself craving to try a different approach if your guild isn't delivering the results you want, whether it's because there's too much competition for your class, the guild rarely runs the raids that actually drop your best-in-slot for whatever reason, or the loot system makes it hard for you to actually secure the drops you want vs. alts and pugs. With so many guilds being desperate to keep their rosters full, you have little to lose by throwing your lot in with someone else from one day to the next just to see if it works better for you, meaning that recruitment can be a bit of a revolving door at times.

The part of me that likes getting shinies can certainly see the appeal - I look at the 17 pieces of equipment that make up my hunter's current gear, and even after weeks of running dungeons and raids with the guild, more than a third of my gear actually still comes from two pug runs I attended weeks ago. AQ40 is surprisingly rubbish for hunter gear, and if I just wanted to maximise my chances of increasing my dps, I'd be better off looking for regular MC and ZG runs. Of course, in my particular case that's not really why I'm here so it's ultimately not that relevant, but I can definitely see why this sort of situation can be frustrating and why people don't waste any time to look elsewhere if it feels like their current guild's offerings don't help with their personal goals.

tl;dr: There are very strong incentives at work when it comes to raiding guilds in Classic, both to leave one that isn't a perfect fit, and to recruit and hold on to as many people as possible at all times if you are happy where you are. It's no wonder people can get very passionate about this stuff.

Strange New Retail World

This week the Shadowlands pre-patch dropped for retail WoW, and my feed of WoW blogs is full of people complaining that it's a "nothing patch" for them. Of course, for people who don't own the current expansion it's an exciting time because it means that BfA is now accessible to all subscribers without an extra purchase, and without all the grindy crap to boot.

As I mentioned back in July, I was quite interested in the new starting zone and general changes to the levelling experience. It's not the sort of thing for which I would resubscribe, but since it basically comes "free with Classic" for me I thought that I might as well have a look.

I started by rolling up a Draenei shaman on Azuremyst Isle and revelling in the general confusion of someone who hasn't played retail since Mists of Pandaria. For example the intro cinematic had been updated to narrate about the Draenei's current status post-Legion (I think?) but the quests were still the same old "we just crash-landed here". I also kept looking at my mana bar, daring it to move when I used abilities, but it seemed impossible to make it budge in any meaningful way. There was a first aid trainer that only had tailoring recipes on offer since first aid doesn't exist anymore as far as I can tell. And so on.

By the time I reached Azure Watch, I was level 7 just like in the good old days, but considering that the level cap has now been squished to 50, this seemed kind of unsettling. It doesn't feel like Blizzard really tuned the XP gains in the old zones much at all. I wonder if you still end up being level 20+ by the time you finish Bloodmyst Isle?

I didn't get to find out, because by that time my husband had reinstalled WoW and we were off to our scheduled duo levelling adventure - eventually. The first few days after the patch the EU servers were plagued by login issues (my Classic guild had to cancel its Wednesday raid night since half the guild couldn't even log in), but eventually we managed to roll up a pair of humans on Exile's Reach. He made a warrior because he always defaults to tanky classes, and I made a monk because I'd never played one and this seemed like the best setup to avoid feeling like the class I was playing was all wrong (compared to how I remembered it).

I originally thought that I was going to make a whole post about Exile's Reach, but to be honest I don't have that much to say about it. From what I can tell, happy retail players seemed to praise it for being more in line with the way questing works in the modern game, while salty Classic players considered it a somewhat dumbed down/childish experience. From what I can tell, they are both right? It's a fun little romp that gets you to level 10 quite quickly, but it's also very "generic tutorial level" if you get my drift, and the writing is super on the nose, seemingly assuming that WoW players are unable to pay attention to or retain anything for more than five minutes. (Take a shot every time the Garricks reference their familial relationship for example, just in case the player already forgot again that they are mother and son.)

We had originally planned to level the rest of the way by revisiting Wrath of the Lich King, but the new starter experience segues so smoothly into the BfA intro that we just rolled with it, as it was new content for both of us anyway. (The husband actually played through the BfA story at launch, but only on Horde side.)

The start felt like quite a long stretch of just passively watching cut scenes and listening to NPCs talk, which made us a little stir-crazy, but ever since we've been set loose to make our own fun it's been an enjoyable enough experience. They really weren't kidding about the increased levelling speed though - after about 8 hours of casual play, our duo is already level 26. At this rate we might even hit the new level cap of 50 before the weekend is over! We'll see what happens then.