My Classic TBC Plans

It may seem a bit early to make detailed plans for Burning Crusade Classic when we don't even have a release date for it yet, but there's a lot of context to this already and I thought I might as well commit my thoughts to writing. If nothing else, they will be interesting to look back on in a few months' time to see how many of my plans actually panned out.

I've explained in the past why Burning Crusade was my favourite expansion, and even when work on Classic had only just started I was already dreaming of a Classic Crusade.

In the run-up to Classic's launch, there was a lot of sneering from many corners of the internet about how Classic fans were all just blinded by nostalgia, how the game was actually pretty bad and people just viewed it through rose-tinted glasses because they associated it with a time when they were younger and more carefree. I already knew that this definitely wasn't true for me, as my experience on private servers had reminded me that vanilla WoW was indeed simply a damn good game and an extremely enjoyable virtual world to spend time in.

However... I have to admit that I had some doubts about Burning Crusade Classic at certain points last year. Sure, WoW's first expansion objectively expanded the game world and improved class balance in major ways, but at the same time all the things I really loved about it back in 2007 were heavily tied up with meeting people, playing with friends and overcoming challenges as a group. Around the time when I felt at my lowest and loneliest in Classic, I was starting to doubt what a Classic Crusade could really offer me. Just questing through Outland on my own and maybe running a few dungeons with pugs was unlikely to be all that thrilling.

Of course, then I got recruited into a guild and that changed everything, including my outlook on Classic BC. Now that I will have a friendly group of people to run dungeons and raid with, I'm ecstatic. Sure, it won't be exactly the same as it was back in the day, but I do expect the content to still be as fun, and with some good company (even if it's different company) I'm likely to have an excellent time.

This shift in focus also means that I'll be approaching the expansion's launch in quite a different way compared to Classic. While I did binge a bit on Classic at launch and spent some time playing with my friends (even if they didn't hang around for long), my focus was largely on exploring the world and re-familiarising myself with its quests. Comparatively, Outland is more like a giant puzzle waiting to be unlocked with all its reputations and attunement quest chains. The land mass is much smaller and all relevant to endgame to some degree anyway, so there isn't as much of an incentive for me to slowly enjoy my journey through Zangarmarsh or whatever, because I'll continue to spend time there at max level anyway.

So I'll be going what you could call the min-maxer's route to puzzle-solving, by focusing on running dungeons with my guildies to maximise my early reputation gains and avoid the literal hell that is going to be Hellfire Peninsula on launch day. (Even with layering, Classic's many starting zones were packed at launch - now picture all of those people piled into a single zone instead...)

This wasn't my own idea, mind you... my guild's main bear tank just happens to be an absolute TBC junkie, and many months ago already it came up during a half-joking conversation that some of us should form a levelling group once Classic BC comes out. That half-joke eventually turned serious and I was like: Sure, why not? Let's do it. Though with no launch date we obviously haven't been able to hash out all the details in regards to time investment etc.

I'm planning to level my hunter first, who'll go from being a middle-of-the-pack class with underwhelming profession choices for Classic to a top dps with almost perfectly min-maxed skills. I expect to do a lot of hipster-style complaining about how I was a hunter/leatherworker before it was cool. I also expect that chasing various attunement and profession goals will keep me busy for a while, but should I need a break from all that grinding at some point, I'll probably be levelling my pally and my druid (who should hit 60 before the expansion's release) next - perhaps in a less min-maxed manner, but we'll see how I'll feel about that closer to the time.

Wish me luck! And if you're playing Classic yourself, have you given any thought yet to how you're going to spend your time come Burning Crusade?

Building My Legacy

From what I understand it was extremely uncommon back in Vanilla to have more than one max-level character, what with how long it took both to level and to get things done in max-level dungeons and raids.

This is another area in which Classic is very different - while you still get people who just don't like levelling much or simply prefer concentrating all their efforts into a single character to make that one the best it can be, I think it's far more common for players to have more than one character at the level cap after one and a half years of Classic than it ever was back in the day.

While I've been playing since launch as well and have been levelling characters at what I feel is a decent clip for a casual player, the fact that I started on Horde side and then switched to Alliance on a different server has made me feel somewhat behind compared to my guildies. I have to admit I'm rather in awe of the alt stables that some of them have.

Especially when it comes to professions, having multiple max-level characters is a significant boon in Classic, as characters will need the services of most professions at some point, and many professions rely on materials provided by other professions, so having all of that unified under your own roof so to speak allows for an impressive degree of independence. There are limitations of course: For example an enchanter can only enchant their own gear and that of other players; there is no way to transfer an enchant to an alt character. On the whole though, there are a lot of synergies.

This really hit me when I got into raiding properly and started to require a steady supply of certain consumables, mostly potions and crafted arrows. For the arrows, you need a close-to-max-level engineer with a rare-ish schematic or you'll have to buy them on the auction house every time. Fortunately the hunter class leader's rogue alt is an engineer and he offered me early on that I could just mail him the materials and he'd craft the ammo for me for free.

Potions and elixirs make for an even bigger expense and highlighted my dependencies even more as it seemed like absolutely everyone had at least a herbalism alt. Grousing about the prices of potions on the auction house would pretty much inevitably get me the reply that I should just gather my own herbs and send them to a friendly alchemist - as if everyone automatically has that option!

If I sound a bit envious that's because I am, but at the same time the goal of strengthening my own alt stable has become a major motivator for me, even more so with an eye on TBC. Having my paladin at max level has allowed me to do my own mining at least, netting me ore, stone and the occasional Arcane Crystal without having to buy it from the auction house. And part of why I've been so enthusiastic about getting my druid levelled up has been the fact that she's a herbalist and alchemist. She's level 47 now but already has both of her primary professions maxed out. I just need to get her a few more levels before she's able to visit zones where she can pick her own Dreamfoil and I'll be close to having gained independence of the auction house for my potions as well.

My mage who is a tailor and enchanter isn't too far behind at level 44, and while enchanting is a major pain to level she hasn't been doing too badly on that front either. I like the idea of being able to craft my own bags come TBC, and if I want to create my own enchanting materials she'll need to be levelled up too. In Classic you can disenchant gear of any level with an enchanting skill of 1, but in TBC they introduced skill requirements for disenchanting different levels of gear as well, so once again, that's going to come in handy.

I guess if you really dislike professions all of this could be seen as a lot of annoying busywork, but I really like the way this slow and steady investment of time and money really pays off after a while. There are still reasons to go to other players for certain rare or specialist recipes, but being able to cover a lot of ground via DIY is nonetheless extremely valuable.

Shadowlands Systems in a Nutshell

This isn't apropos of anything in specific, just something I first thought of after completing the Shadowlands levelling process, and for some reason it came back to me the other day.

Covenants!

Throughout the main Shadowlands story you learn that there are all these different afterlives for different people, depending on whether in life they were virtuous, naughty or something else, and each one has its own faction attached to it. You are introduced to all of them in an organic way, and at the end of your introductory tour, when a big threat to all is revealed, it's suggested that you should join one of the covenants to be able to benefit from their powers in the battles to come.

This process is super-streamlined, because when the time comes to make your choice, there's a representative from each covenant nearby to show and tell you about anything and everything that might even be remotely relevant to your choice: what sorts of mounts they ride, what kind of armour you'll earn there, you can even take the covenant abilities for another spin if you're unsure how you felt about those the first time around. Five star design, would choose a covenant again.

Anima!

Throughout your questing you also learn that anima is the sort of universal fuel powering everything in the Shadowlands and that there's been a shortage of it for a while. Some of the exact mechanics of how this works are a bit fuzzy, because sometimes it sounds like everything's made of anima, while other times you need to seek out some pretty specific sources of it... but the gist of it is clear enough. Your covenant tasks you with helping them collect anima to restore their particular slice of the afterlife to its former glory after the drought.

And I've been okay with that! The scale of it can be a bit annoying sometimes (e.g. one world quest awarding you 35 anima when you need 5000 for your next covenant upgrade) but I suppose that's what you get when a resource is supposed to be scarce. Good system, makes sense.

Soulbinds!

One of the early Kyrian side quests has you deliver a flower from one Kyrian to another and the recipient's like "ooh, this means so-and-so wants to become my soulbind" and it honestly feels a bit like a marriage proposal or something. Then you get to the bit after choosing your covenant where they introduce you to the soulbind system and...

Basically, someone just flat out tells me that I'm going to soulbind with this guy whom I helped in one of the earliest Kyrian quests and not even all the Kyrians in the room agree whether he's the best choice, but all I can think of is that earlier side quest with the marriage vibes and I'm wondering with some distress why nobody's asking my opinion. Later two other people also become my soulbinds so maybe the marriage comparison was off from the beginning, but I can never quite shake the feeling that it's all wrong somehow...

Conduits!

After you get your first soulbind, there's this brief comment about how you'll become more powerful as your connection with your soulbind deepens, and then they show you some talent tree-like thing with empty spaces where you can slot items called conduits which drop out in the world and randomly enhance some of your spells and... what does any of this have to do with anything? No, thanks.

Let's just say I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm digging my covenant and am happy to gather anima but have never quite warmed up to the soulbind system and its conduits...

A Naxxramas New Year

I rarely make posts just to promote other people's work but I can't believe this video only has 25k views three days after being posted... it's the best WoW machinima I've seen in a long time and made me both laugh out loud and tear up. Particularly relevant to Naxx raiders but I'm sure most people with some knowledge of WoW can enjoy it. I'll never hurt Mr Bigglesworth again!

My Shadowlands Situation

I haven't really talked about it much, but I'm still casually playing retail with the husband. We dip in and out for short play sessions during the week, mostly to do our callings, and when we have a bit more time we also run the weekly dungeons (only on heroic level, and yes, I've given in and agreed to queue for pugs for these), do dailies in the Maw and run Torghast once or twice a week.

As a strange side effect of this, I've grown incredibly tired of WoW fan content, which is very odd. Even during the years when I was unsubscribed from retail, I generally still enjoyed reading blog posts and watching videos about it to some degree. You'd think that now that I'm getting some first-hand experience of what they're actually talking about I would enjoy them more, but for some reason the opposite is the case.

I don't know if it is because I can only stomach so much retail WoW each week and actually playing it myself means that reading or watching content about it would be too much, or because there's such a disconnect between the way I play and the audience that most WoW content seems to be targeted at. I mean, I see all this talk about class balance on my feed, about how people feel forced into certain covenant choices, about chasing gear upgrades or transmogs and crafting legendaries... and none of it has any relevance to the way I play whatsoever.

I chose my covenant based on what I thought would fit my monk's personality best, even though I don't like the Kyrian covenant abilities much and keep forgetting to use them. We upgraded our covenant gear as far as the game would let us and don't really have much left to work on in that regard unless we wanted to raid, PvP or run Mythic+ dungeons. We haven't crafted any legendaries because to a casual solo player some of the materials required are prohibitively expensive so we only run Torghast for fun. (I think we're up to layer seven of the normal mode and have cleared the first two layers of the twisting corridors.) We also enjoy slowly increasing our Renown week by week for some personal rewards, as well as chipping away at our sanctum upgrades at a snail's pace.

I suspect that without the gear grind we'd eventually run out of things to do, but I'm sure patch 9.1 will be around and offer some new activities before that has time to become a problem. It's just strange to me that even while I'm having some fun in retail again, I continue to feel alienated from much of the player base and the way most outspoken players seem to approach the game.

Classic Burning Crusade... Yay, I Guess?

It's been a week since BlizzConline came and went, and faithful readers may well be wondering why I haven't said anything about the Burning Crusade Classic announcement, considering how excited I've been about this prospect for almost a year.

Truth be told, I thought the actual announcement was somewhat anticlimactic (though I didn't help myself by only watching it on my second screen while tormenting my class leader's newest tanking alt in Strat Undead). We all knew it was coming; it was just a matter of getting the details, most importantly the actual launch date - and that we didn't get. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed because I was really hoping to be able to book time off work soon (hah), but on the other hand Blizzard not wanting to commit to a date yet implies to me that the rumours about an early summer launch may well turn out to have been overly optimistic, and that wouldn't be an entirely bad thing for me as it would give my guild more time to clear (and re-clear) Naxx.

What we did get is confirmation of how expansion/character progression is going to work, and I have to hand it to Blizzard on that front as it seems like they managed to find a solution that should at least come close to satisfying the maximum number of players. By default the existing Classic servers will progress into Burning Crusade, but you'll get a prompt for each individual character whether you'll want to take them along for the ride or transfer them off to a perma-Classic version of your server instead. The character copy option I wanted will exist too though, if only as a paid service. And there'll even be level 58 character boosts!

You could be cynical and call those last two things greedy cash grabs, but to be honest I think the restrictions put on these services make sense. As much as I would have liked to be able to just copy everything to save myself from having to worry about making any wrong choices, if this was the default for everyone it would probably clog up the servers and databases with millions of effectively "dead" duplicate characters that people didn't plan to play anyway, and I can see why Blizzard wouldn't want to do that. By putting a price tag on the service it'll be limited to those who actually want to use those characters and I guess that makes sense. I'll definitely be copying my hunter main and possibly some alts as well, depending on the pricing (which we don't know yet either).

It's a similar thing with the character boosts. I'm not really a fan of that kind of thing in general - though probably not for the reasons people usually cite - but I can see the appeal in this particular instance. Does anyone who started playing Classic with existing friends not know someone whose interest fizzled out before they hit the level cap but who might be interested in coming back for Burning Crusade? There are sensible restrictions in place to cater to this particular audience without opening the doors for people to skip ahead or boost farm bots (only once per account, no draenei or blood elves, no professions trained etc.).

The other major reveal was that unlike current Classic with its #nochanges approach, Burning Crusade will have #somechanges. I would have been worried if this had been the direction for the current game from the start, but to be honest after one and a half years Blizzard have shown themselves to be respectful of what Classic means to people. They have in fact made some small changes to the current game as well, such as increasing the spawns of Black Lotus to align better with how much more populated Classic servers are compared to Vanilla, but these changes were always made with great care and have made a lot of sense.

From the sounds of it they'll take a similar approach to Classic BC, for example by giving the faction-specific paladin seals that turned out to be horribly unbalanced to both factions, or by not having Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep open on launch day. Draenei and blood elves are also supposed to be released with the pre-patch instead of the actual expansion launch to give people time to get their new shamans and paladins caught up in time for the opening of the Dark Portal. While that's definitely a departure from how things were "back in the day", it honestly sounds great and I'm perfectly happy with those tweaks.

So yeah, basically the reason I haven't had much to say about the official BC Classic announcement is that it all sounds very solid but what details we've had aren't very exciting to me personally. Without an actual release date my focus will remain on Naxx and simply getting more of my alts levelled up for now.

Riding the World Buff Train

I've mentioned Classic's "world buff meta" before, but for those not in the know, it basically works like this: With the general difficulty of outdoor content, Blizzard thought back in the day that temporary buffs were a good way to reward players, because you really do feel them making a major difference to your performance and survivability.

They were mostly designed in an organic and fun way, without any real concern for balancing. You slay the dragon and hang its head from the city gates, so everyone in the city is happy and excited and gains a buff called Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer for two hours. Makes sense, right?

The thing is that those buffs are incredibly overpowered. For example the Rallying Cry gives 140 attack power among other things - for reference, my hunter in a mix of tier two and three gear has about 1300 attack power unbuffed - so even for someone who's already pretty geared, that one buff alone still increases their power by ten percent. In a way the buffs are even more attractive for lowbies though (at least in cases where they don't scale with level), as a levelling warrior with 150 attack power hanging out in Stormwind for example can turn themselves into murder machine with twice their regular power level for their next round of questing!

The problem is that players realised that they could control the timing of these buffs and use them to their advantage by simply holding on to those smelly dragon heads for a bit. Sure, it may be a one-time quest, but with forty people in a raid group you can easily start your nightly raids by having someone hand in the quest and trigger the buff for weeks or even months in a row, and that's without taking into consideration that multiple guilds can cooperate to coordinate their timings.

The dragon head is the easy part though, because assembling in town before the raid is easy. But then you also want to go to Booty Bay for the heart of Hakkar drop, do a Dire Maul tribute run and get the buffs from there, find and cleanse a songflower in Felwood... considering the amount of travel time in Classic and the fact that all these buffs only have a limited duration, wanting to min-max your performance turns into a logistical challenge before the raid's even started, something to tackle potentially even days in advance, though you then have to make sure to stay logged out until raid start once you've acquired your buffs.

It's a very odd meta and I was very uncomfortable with it at the start, especially when the content was so easy that people in greens who weren't even max-level could clear Molten Core just fine. As some players described it at the time, it basically meant spending two hours gathering buffs to finish the raid fifteen minutes faster. Relevant to speed runners going for records for sure, but surely not for the wider population?

And that's without even getting into the fragility of these buffs, and I'm not even playing on a PvP server. As I noted the first time I went to AQ20 with my guild, I picked up the head and heart buffs because it was a low-effort thing to do, just to lose them five minutes into the raid when we wiped on a bad trash pull. Imagine how that feels if you spent hours setting up travel all over Azeroth to get those buffs!

My guild being truly casual, nobody's ever been required to pick up any world buffs, but getting the head and heart just before raid time has always been considered a good thing to do. The guild mistress and a few others also used to advocate for Dire Maul Tribute runs before AQ40 sometimes, but those seemed to be a lot less popular, what with the effort of getting down to Feralas (since you couldn't necessarily count on a warlock summon being available) and back to town (again, since you might not be able to catch a mage portal). I did them a few times and admittedly the first time it was pretty exciting to see my threat and damage shoot up (especially back when my gear wasn't great yet), but ultimately I still decided that it wasn't worth the effort of making it a regular occurrence. After all, few others ever seemed to bother, we'd often lose the buffs early due to wiping on something silly, and we could clear the instance just fine without them, so what was the point? The allure of just being higher up on the damage meters by the end of the night wasn't enough for me.

Naxx has been different though. None of us really bothered with buffs the first couple of weeks because we all knew that we were going to wipe early and a lot (and we did), but once we started to have at least the first few bosses on farm, speed did become a concern. My guild raids Naxx twice a week and the instance has fifteen bosses in it. Speed runners clearing the place in an hour notwithstanding, we knew it was always going to be a challenge for us to clear things fast enough to have consistent progression time on the newest bosses. (I'm amused every time I see some meme that lists "three hour AQ40 clears" as shorthand for a guild being unacceptably bad and slow. Whenever we cleared AQ40 in three hours we thought we did pretty well!) Plus some of the fights in Naxx are hard enough that going in with world buffs can actually make a big difference to whether we can get them down with ease or not at all.

So the drum beat to gather world buffs more often has become louder - not in a top-down way, but presented as a "we need to do everything we can to beat these bosses" team effort. Tribute runs have become more frequent, and warlock alts were placed to be able to offer summons. Last week the Darkmoon Faire was in town, and you can get one of a selection of buffs there as well by having your fortune told. The fact that it was making camp in Mulgore, a Horde starting zone, did not put the guild mistress off and she organised another bunch of alts to taxi people over there as well.

A lot of other guilds were doing the same, so there was a plethora of lowbie alts with names like "Summonbot" in attendance. I remember one particularly bizarre moment when a conversation ensued in /say about which of the available buffs to pick from the fortune teller. Someone from another guild commented that the resistance buff was best for Sapphiron, to which our guild mistress countered that we needed the damage buff for Loatheb - we were way too casual to worry about Sapphiron yet. At that point I felt the urge to chime in with: "Yeah, we are the casual Mulgore summoning squad!"  and then I had to laugh at myself because of how absurd it sounded. Surely there's nothing casual about parking alts in three different locations to ferry your guildies around Kalimdor for faster buff pick-up.

But then, this is how it always goes for me. I'll never be a top player and I despise the kind of min-max culture that looks down on anyone who doesn't follow the current meta even if whatever they're doing instead is perfectly fit for purpose. But when I care about the game and I find that what I've done so far isn't good enough anymore, then I step up. Even if that includes gathering temporary buffs in odd places, or farming awkward consumables from frost giants in Winterspring and giant scorpions in the Blasted Lands. Because I want us to win. And as bizarre as this whole buff meta is, there is something satisfying about approaching it as a team: from the warm fuzziness you feel when a guildie hands you a stack of consumables for free, to the relieved smile of another guildie who was late to log on but you held the cleared Tribute instance open for them anyway.

It almost makes me wonder whether I'll miss these odd rituals once Burning Crusade comes around...