Fun with Retail PvP

I've never been what I'd call a "PvP person" when it comes to MMOs. By that I mean the type of player who constantly has their PvP flag on, can frequently be found inside instanced battlegrounds or arenas, or loves to seek out fights in the open world. However, neither have I been truly averse to PvP.

I think in WoW I dipped my toes into Alterac Valley fairly early on, but my first real attempt at doing more PvP didn't come until Burning Crusade, when a guildie of mine was looking for a 2v2 arena partner. We played together for a bit until we stopped gaining ranking, by which point it was time to admit that I was holding him back and he found someone else to play with. I don't recall doing a lot of PvP during Wrath outside of joining for Wintergrasp sometimes, but during Cata my ranked battleground team actually became one of my main raisons d'être for a while, until I quit WoW altogether for SWTOR (but also, I had once again reached the point where my performance was holding others back). In SWTOR I enjoyed the casual PvP right from the start and it has been a staple of my in-game activities ever since.

In Classic I tried PvP again but found it to be horribly unbalanced and not very fun, a perception that didn't really change when I gave it another try in Classic BC. However, a few weeks ago I started dipping my toes into casual retail PvP, and to my surprise it's actually been kind of fun.

A rare Alliance win in Deepwind Gorge, aided by the warrior who kept guarding the market with me all match.

The catalyst for this change was that my Lightforged Draenei priest, whom I'd been levelling through healing dungeons, hit Shadowlands and I didn't really want to deal with nothing but Shadowlands dungeons for another ten levels. They're alright, but I've honestly seen enough of them in the past two years. I didn't really want to solo quest or do Torghast as holy either, so I decided to give battlegrounds a try, since those are suggested as an alternative levelling path for Threads of Fate, and there's a daily quest to win one battleground that awards a piece of gear and a decent chunk of XP.

I've also become a bit more interested in collecting transmog sets in the last few months, and apparently a lot of old sets can now be bought from various PvP vendors if you've got the correct currency, so that served as an additional incentive.

I complimented this hunter on their pet naming.

Anyway, as someone who hadn't really done retail PvP since Cata, there were quite a few changes that I had to take in. You queue for PvP with a role now, and you do get scaled up in the levelling brackets so that everyone's the same level. Those features have probably been there for a while, but it was my first time really seeing them.

Battlegrounds are now split into normal and "epic", with the latter including things like Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest, but in the levelling brackets not many people seem to queue for the latter so that I only got into a few "epic" matches. Mostly they were Ashran, the addition made during Warlords of Draenor that I was completely unfamiliar with. To be honest I'm still none the wiser in terms of how it's supposed to work as most of my time in there was spent in giant slug fests on the main road, during which the Horde would push us further and further back until we lost. But hey, Jennifer Hale does the voice-over for the intro!

There were also a lot of changes to the rotation of the regular/smaller maps. I only found out in the context of people talking about Wrath Classic that Strand of the Ancients was removed from retail some time ago because apparently everybody hated it, but in turn a whole bunch of new battlegrounds have been added since I last played: Mists added Temple of Kotmogu, Silvershard Mines and Deepwind Gorge, and Legion added Seething Shore. I quite like Temple of Kotmogu as it's fast-paced, objective-focused and easy to understand ("u have more ball u win" as someone put it in chat the other day). Silvershard Mines I'm a bit ambivalent about, and Deepwind Gorge is basically Arathi Basin 2.0, which means that Alliance loses a lot and I'm not a fan, even if the map layout at least seems a bit more balanced. Seething Shore seemed to be another very fast-paced and objective-focused map, which I thought was quite enjoyable the couple of times I've been there.

The different ways in which people explain Temple of Kotmogu in chat are always fun.

It was interesting to me that I found myself making comparisons to SWTOR a lot, and I do think that Bioware had the right idea with the changes they made to the WoW formula such as giving tanks an actual role in PvP, adding a built-in stun breaker instead of requiring you to earn a piece of gear for it, and having interrupts be less powerful, as it can be quite frustrating at times to get crowd-controlled, locked out of casting spells and silenced in quick succession.

Still, casually doing the daily PvP quest once a day has been pretty fun and my win-loss ratio hasn't felt too bad. People running around like headless chickens and fighting on the road are still a thing, which still frustrates me in the base-capturing battlegrounds (especially in those Arathi Basins where we only cap two bases at the start and then people instantly start quitting and yelling about how everyone but them is stupid, and then it just snowballs from there) but in a way the addition of more maps with mobile or changing objectives has kind of helped to alleviate the issue a bit because it makes it so that running around a lot and fighting in different locations can actually be a good thing.

Anyway, I got my priest all the way to sixty that way (which means that I now have two priests at max-level... at least the way I play retail is still living up to the blog's name to some degree) and I've also done a few battlegrounds at max level, during which I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I could get a full set of at least basic PvP gear and that I didn't feel horribly underpowered as a fresh sixty. I might keep coming back to this at least every now and then.

Holy Crap, That Orc Voidwalker Quest

About two months ago, I mentioned that I created two Horde bank alts on era and played them up to level six - an undead warrior for my food and consumables, and an orc warlock for currencies and miscellaneous valuables. I've played them a little more since then (being a bank alt doesn't mean you can't get play time) and got them both past level ten.

Warlocks get the quest to learn how to summon a voidwalker at level ten. While I've never got a warlock to a very high level, I previously levelled a few of them past that point at least, and I didn't recall the voidwalker quest ever being a big deal. However, I noted that the orc version of the quest sends you to loot a tablet from a chest inside Skull Rock, the cave east of Orgrimmar full of Burning Blade cultists, and even though it had been a while since I last quested through Durotar, I had a vague memory of that place being pretty unpleasant.

So I stuck my nose in the door just to remind myself of how bad it really was... and it was very bad. The cave is mostly populated by two types of mobs: fanatics, who are melee fighters that aren't too hard to kill, though it's noteworthy for warlocks that they are immune to fear; and apprentices, who are warlock types themselves and come with a voidwalker pet of their own. It was mostly the latter who reminded me of why I remembered the place as nasty: at level ten you don't really have the tools yet to deal with multi-mob pulls very well, and due to the voidwalkers being tanky adds with a lot of health, every single apprentice was basically a multi-mob pull by itself. I quickly noped out of there and decided that it was more prudent to come back in a couple more levels. After all, I was doing just fine questing with my imp and there was no rush.

I decided to return at level thirteen, after having completed every other quest in the zone (bar the other ones that also ask you to go inside the cave), and confident that I was surely strong enough by now to rock the place. Spoiler: I was not.

I mean, I did slowly make my way through the cave and completed the other quests, but the apprentices hit really hard, and even with chugging health potions and eating healthstones, I still died a couple of times on the way.

Still, eventually I reached the back of the cave with the chest - however, it was guarded by no less than four mobs: a named level 14 with a voidwalker pet who drops a quest item, and a an elite(!) rare spawn, also with a voidwalker pet. My following attempts to get at the chest are a bit of a blur - I know I managed to kill the level 14 at least once, as I did get the quest item from him, but mostly I just died a lot.

I consulted the Wowhead page for the quest, and was quite amused by the old Thottbot comments that were advising people that it was much easier to travel to Undercity and do the voidwalker quest for undead instead, until Blizzard made it impossible to do that. There were also some comments about how you could deal with two mobs at once by setting your imp on one mob and fearing the other and then quickly looting the chest, but that didn't account for the two additional mobs I had to deal with. Bottom line is, I died a few more times and eventually respawns all around me doomed the whole endeavour, resulting in me giving up for the day.

I hadn't gained any more levels when I eventually returned, but there had been one piece of advice in the Wowhead comments that stuck with me: If you have a level 60, just clear out the cave with that, and then relog your lowbie warlock to quickly run in and grab the quest item. I decided to give it one more go the regular way (after all I'd had some success the previous time), but with my hunter parked at the entrance in case things went badly and I ran out of patience.

And it did go badly again - in fact more so than last time, since the level 14 spawned closer to the entrance this time, and he and his voidwalker jumped at me from around a corner and killed me twice. At that point I was like "screw this", relogged my hunter and had her carve her way through the cave. Naturally the rare elite next to the chest was up again too.

The funny thing is, when I relogged my warlock, I quickly revived and started running without healing up, since I just wanted to get the chest and get out, but even though I'd just cleared out the cave with my hunter, a fanatic respawned right on top of me as I was running. I instinctively tried to fear him, but of course he was immune, so I started running again, just to die right next to the chest and find myself being forced to do yet another corpse run. Fortunately after that, I was finally able to grab the tablet and hearth out. The part of the quest where you actually summon the voidwalker and fight it was complete cake in comparison.

The really funny thing though was that when I logged back on my hunter a little later to get her out of the cave, I found the space around the chest completely empty - not because anyone else had been through, but because the rare hadn't respawned, and the level 14 had respawned in a different, out-of-the-way location inside the cave. So I'd basically been very unlucky to encounter both the rare and the level 14 next to the chest several times in a row. Still, what a quest! I'm not against making some of the class quests in particular somewhat challenging to make them memorable, but that was just brutal.

Musings on Hunter Life

This blog is called "Priest with a Cause" because once upon a time, I mained priests on both Horde and Alliance side, and at the time I couldn't even imagine ever wanting to be anything else. I didn't just play a priest; I was a priest. The classes and roles we play in an MMO define how we interact with the world and how others see us, and the way priests took care of others and were popular in groups just seemed to fit me to a T, even though me becoming one had been more coincidental than a conscious choice.

Mainly I'd rolled a priest because my friends suggested it, telling me that it was a class that was useful and in demand. Back then I didn't have any point of comparison to realise just how slow and awkward it was to solo as a priest compared to pretty much any other class, but I also spent a lot of time playing with my friends anyway, who were always happy to have a healer around. It just seemed to fit.

However, ever since I originally quit WoW during Cata, I've been eyeing priests with a certain weariness. I think initially I was just worried that becoming a priest again would feel too much like trying to turn back time and doing it all over again the exact same way, which is not something I wanted to do, but as time has passed, I've started to miss being a priest. The problem is that I now know how comparatively un-fun it is to play a priest (or any kind of healer) on your own, and I haven't had much luck with finding long-term companions to team up with. Remember how I started Classic as a resto shaman wanting to heal my friends, and then they all fell by the wayside? I also recall being so excited when my little dwarf priest first made it to Outland - and a couple of weeks later my guild fell apart.

So I've been a hunter for most of Classic more out of necessity than out of passion. Don't get me wrong; I like hunters... but it's just not the same. Naturally, it's always after I've levelled a hunter on my own that I actually find myself being pulled into the sort of social setting that I missed while levelling, and switching roles at that point is kind of awkward. I mean, in the Forks I did end up healing on my paladin for a good chunk of Naxx - and oddly, one of my friends told me that he thought the paladin felt more "me" than the hunter in a way he couldn't quite pin down - but ultimately, I was still considered a hunter main.

Back in Vanilla, hunters did not have a good reputation. However you may feel about them, terms and phrases like "huntard" and "all loot is hunter loot" didn't come about for no reason. Hunters were generally thought of as lazy, stupid and greedy. Mind you, that wasn't my personal experience.

The first hunter that really left an impression on me was a night elf called Drorion (whose player I would later go on to meet in real life once!) - I can't recall for sure how we first met, but it was somewhere in the higher levels, as I remember having him in our group for something or other in Feralas. Drorion was a clown and a bit of a troll (I remember how much he enjoyed winding me up with feign death, back when using that ability also showed you as dead to your fellow group members), but he was good company and also pretty good at the game. I have a screenshot of him soloing elite ogres outside Dire Maul while a small group of us just watches on. Nowadays a hunter soloing an elite isn't really that noteworthy I suppose, but to little noobish me it was pretty impressive!

He was also happy to do dungeons with us, where he would hang out near my priest at the back and protect me if a mob got loose and decided to come for me due to healing aggro. I liked Drorion, and by association Drorion made me like hunters. And honestly, it's continued to be my experience that people who play a very solo-focused class but make a conscious choice to join groups anyway often make for the best buddies, maybe because you know they really don't need to be there to have fun in the game but have chosen your company because they enjoy it. I've encountered this with both hunters and rogues.

My experience with the Forks certainly fit into that mould as well. Being a hunter may not have been my first choice, but boy, did I luck out joining the Fork hunters. Their leader was both an officer and everybody's darling, the kind of person who is online all the time and knows and talks to everyone. He made me feel very welcome from the beginning, but even aside from that, I guess the fact that he was both in a position of power and popular kind of set a certain tone for what it meant to be a hunter in the Forks.

We did have one guy who bucked the trend a bit by having a reputation for being a cantankerous old man, but the others... the second most respected hunter after the class leader was so beloved that he was chosen to be the guild's Scarab Lord, I became quite popular when I started uploading my first YouTube videos featuring the guild, and finally there was a young mother who was also always going on about how much she loved the guild and everyone in it.

We were loyal attendees to every raid, we were reasonably well-liked, and our leader demanded a certain degree of attention. While the way we were always asking for buffs for our pets was a bit of a meme, it was accepted that pets should be buffed, and also healed if any heals could be spared. I remember one time one of the druids even used his combat res on my pet, which I thought was hilarious. With that power came a certain degree of responsibility too, as we were assigned a number of special duties in certain fights even in places where it was perhaps not customary to use a hunter. (We had a special strat for Faerlina trash in Naxx for example which required all of the hunters to kite one mob each for a short amount of time.)

I'm recounting all of that to say that even though I perhaps didn't consider the hunter class the perfect fit for me and they weren't really Classic's big stars, being a hunter in the Forks was a pretty sweet deal due to the way circumstances had shaped their community. I may have "only" been a goofy hunter, but in their own way, the hunters were considered important and valued.

Now, the reason I bring this up is that for as nice as I've generally found my new Horde guild on Classic era, this is one area where things have sometimes felt a little "off" somehow, and I'm struggling to explain it in any other way than it being related to the class I'm playing. Basically, the Warriors of Sunlight seem to have a more - how shall I say it - "traditional" view of hunters, meaning that not much seems to be expected of them and the established hunters don't seem particularly sociable. For example it was only after I pointed out on Discord that all classes and roles except the hunters seemed to have an in-game chat channel that someone bothered to create one.

To be honest, that complete lack of expectations and interest in newcomers wasn't so bad during my first few raids, as it basically allowed me to look around and get a feel for the culture in a relaxed environment. (Bit of a contrast to the way the Forks immediately made me the designated puller in my first AQ20!)

However, as I've become more comfortable with how everything works, I've got to admit that the position of quiet tag-along has started to feel a bit "off" to me and I found myself craving both more social interaction as well as opportunities to prove myself. I've actually been really happy when the most senior hunter, who is (naturally) the only one who's given some responsibility every now and then by having to handle certain pulls, decided to bring his druid alt to BWL in recent weeks.

The raid leader actually seemed kinda surprised that I basically just stepped up and "usurped" the kiter/puller position without anyone asking me to when this happened, but where many hunters prefer to quietly meld into the shadows to avoid responsibility if they can, I was just weirdly desperate to make myself useful in some way. Those runs have felt more satisfying, but I've also found myself wondering whether I wouldn't be better off just returning to a healer role if I'm in this for a long run, which is something that more naturally creates situations where you talk, cooperate and have to take on some responsibility.

Looking Forward to Dragonflight

This week Blizzard presented us with a release date for Dragonflight: 28th of November. When they originally posited that the expansion was going to be out towards the end of the year, the husband was hopeful that it could also serve as a Christmas present for me, but with a November release that's pretty much out. (Sorry hubby, you'll have to find something else.)

I'm kind of pleasantly surprised by how much I'm looking forward to the Dragonflight release. The last time I looked forward to a retail WoW expansion was... Wrath of the Lich King, when I was excited about Cataclysm? That's a looong time ago now.

My initial reaction to the Dragonflight announcement was cautiously optimistic, in that I thought that all the promised expansion features sounded at least decent, but nothing really excited me. However, after what I've heard coming out of the beta, I'm still not "hyped" or anything, but I am more certain in my optimism.

I haven't heard a single bad word about dragonriding for example - seemingly everyone that's tried it has found it to be amazingly fun, with the only question mark potentially hovering over the issue of long-term appeal.

I was a bit lukewarm on the new class initially since the dracthyr aesthetic didn't immediately appeal to me, but after watching videos of them in action, I've kind of grown used to their look, and the gameplay looks like great fun. It also took some time for it to really sink in that this is going to be the first ever hero class to directly appeal to my gameplay preference of being a healer or ranged dps - getting to be a bit OP in my favoured role for a change should be fun.

I also like that there currently don't seem to be any plans for any convoluted temporary systems, with player power being condensed into gear and talents again, which I think will make it easier to keep track of everything your character can do for more casual players like me. The levelling process will most likely also feel enhanced, with talent points returning some actual meaning to the experience of gaining a level.

I'm looking forward to exploring the new zones with the husband - from what I've heard each one offers a new non-combat activity.

Interestingly, one of the main worries I've heard content creators express after playing the beta is that there aren't enough bullshit grinds in Dragonflight, which might make people feel like there's nothing to do. To me that just sounds like a perfect opportunity for some more alt play, without having to worry about how to keep them all "up to date". It would certainly be nice if Dragonflight turned out to be a positive turning point for Blizzard that way.

Why Play a "Static" MMO?

A couple of weeks ago, a newer member of my era guild asked on Discord what it was that kept people playing Classic era. Surely everyone had "done it all" multiple times over by this point. I found people's responses very interesting to read.

The question of why one should invest in an MMO that isn't going to receive any more content updates is one I've seen brought up many times before - heck, people were raising it in the run-up to Classic, before it was confirmed that there was going to be progression into Burning Crusade.

Honestly, I've always found that concern a bit weird. I get that new content is exciting, and that a big update always generates a lot of interest, but surely you don't specifically play to experience some unknown future updates? I thought we played because we were enjoying the here and now? People revisit old games, films and books all the time, and you wouldn't consider that strange just because there isn't a sequel in the works, would you?

Often there seems to be a worry of getting invested in a game in which you might eventually run out of things to do, but this is coming from the same people who rarely spend more than a month at a time in any new MMO anyway. If you're having fun now, why does it matter? Running out of things to do is a problem for much, much later, not to mention that most people get bored before they've done everything anyway.

In addition, I think many people who ask these kinds of questions overestimate how much time everyone else spends playing. Let's assume it takes about ten days /played to level a character to 60 in OG Classic. (Yes, I know it can be done faster, but let's assume a more casual approach that isn't super-optimised and includes some idling as well as spending time on non-levelling activities such as professions.) Even if you play forty hours a week, levelling a single character to 60 will take you six weeks. If you play twenty hours a week, it'll be three months. If you take things super casually and only play four hours each weekend, it will take you over a year just to level a single character from one to 60, and at that point you haven't even touched endgame or created a single alt. Suddenly it shouldn't sound so strange that there are plenty of people who weren't "done" with Classic by the time it progressed into Burning Crusade, considering that it lasted for less than two years in total. Era provides a home for those who couldn't keep up with that pace but still wanted to keep playing.

And there are things that era offers that you can't get in any other version of WoW. I personally didn't mind the themes of Burning Crusade, but if you liked Warcraft in its original, mostly traditional fantasy state (without space goats etc.), it doesn't get any closer to that than Classic era. It's also "sandboxy" enough that people are pretty good at coming up with their own challenges and making their own content. There's a server community on era that's closer to the way community worked in Vanilla than you'll find anywhere in current Classic. And I know many people hated 40-man raids, but some weirdos (like me) really liked the bigger raid sizes and you can't get those in any other version of WoW either.

I have to say that even without further updates, I'm really not worried about running out of things to do in Classic era. I have limited hours to play and don't spend them solely on WoW, so just looking at my current stable of characters I feel like just levelling and gearing them all is something that could keep me busy for many years to come. And if I do eventually get bored of it... so what? If Blizzard stick to their plan of maintaining era indefinitely, I can just take a break and come back to it later whenever the nostalgia cravings hit me. Unlike in a progressive MMO, taking a break won't mean that on returning you discover that suddenly, everything is different and you're massively behind. For some of us, that's a feature, not a bug.

And yes, I did it again.

The (Lack of) Allure of Classic Wrath

Ever since I decided that I definitely wasn't going to bother with Wrath of the Lich King Classic, I haven't really been keeping up with the latest news about it. However, with the launch being only a few days away now, it's been kind of hard to escape the subject as someone who's still involved with and plays other versions of WoW.

My old levelling buddy decided to resubscribe and run endless AVs on all his alts to gear them up just before the expansion, which has been kind of baffling to me. Bloggers I follow who don't always play WoW have jumped back into Classic for the Wrath pre-patch. Blizzard's promotional emails have been trying to lure me in with interesting behind-the-scenes videos about subjects such as designing the continent of Northrend, death knight class design, or the making of the Wrathgate cinematic.

WoW's official social media accounts have seemingly been all Classic, all the time for the past week or so. Today I marvelled when they shared a video called "Wrath of the Lich King Classic Journey Trailer", which looks pretty amazing. I learned that it was done by a fan called Hurricane, whose work I'd actually encountered years ago in promotional materials for the private server Kronos, such as this AQ trailer. His style is very distinctive as he drains a lot of the colour out of his videos (presumably to make WoW look more "serious" or adult), which is actually an artistic choice I don't agree with as I think WoW's bright colours are a big part of its charm, but that aside he definitely does some fantastic work and it was actually nice to learn who'd created all these amazing clips that I'd seen previously.

To get back to the subject of Wrath however, Blizzard is even offering people a free mount for retail if they complete the death knight starter zone in Classic... and I have to admit that was probably what pushed me over the edge. I mean, I'm playing retail at least casually now, right? And getting a throwaway death knight through the starting zone takes like no time at all, right? So I re-installed Wrath Classic today and created a night elf death knight on my old home Hydraxian Waterlords. The server was actually meant to be on the chopping block back in August, but for some reason Blizzard changed their minds about that, and after previously emptying the server out by offering free transfers away from it, there are now free transfers available onto it from selected realms. Have I mentioned yet that Blizzard have really fucked up managing server populations in Classic?

Anyway, I was actually surprised to find the server not completely dead, with some chatter going on in the LFG channel, including some server personalities whose names I recognised from back in the day but who I thought had transferred away. Still, I wasn't here to socialise but rather to get a job done.

I'm kind of relieved to say that the whole experience did not leave me with an overwhelming urge to suddenly play Wrath Classic after all. I know people are gaga over death knights because of how OP they were at launch, but for me the class never really did that much personally, probably because melee dps is my least favourite role. I mean, it felt okay to play, but not amazing.

In a similar vein, I can appreciate on an intellectual level that the death knight starting zone is a pretty well-crafted experience, but playing through it doesn't exactly fill me with joy - or any other emotion really. (Except that part where you have to execute the prisoner; that one still tugs at my heart strings every time, not gonna lie.)

Instead, I often found myself cynically noticing small flaws or inconsistencies, such as that several quest givers addressed my character as "Unknown" (but who reads quest text anyway, right), or that the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel was a rather annoying affair in practical terms that involved mobs getting punted all over the place and evading all the time. When I arrived in Elwynn Forest, I also had to chuckle at the fact that Brewfest was being celebrated right next to a Scourge invasion. The descent into nonsense starts with small things...

Anyway, I got my mount and I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity. All the hype was starting to affect me, but that little play session was a good reminder that I decided not to get invested in Wrath Classic for good reasons. I hope that those who do decide to play it have fun, though I maintain my suspicion that a large chunk of the community will soon find out that what many consider WoW at its peak does perhaps not hold up as well on repeat as they remember. But I guess we'll see.

Horde Master Angler

Two years ago, I wrote about my trials and tribulations related to winning the Stranglethorn fishing tournament in Classic. I then won it a second time the next year, when Classic era had just split off from BC and I decided to participate again on a whim. However, after that, I didn't really give it much thought again.

Several weeks ago now, I was doing the pirate quests in Stranglethorn on my tauren druid when I noticed a fishing pool in an unusual location. A closer look revealed it to be a school of Tastyfish - I was surprised to see them spawn on the eastern side of Stranglethorn, but it did serve to remind me of the event, and that now that I was playing era again, it might be worth revisiting. About an hour later I was questing in another part of Stranglethorn when the victory yell for the tournament went out - yes, you read that correctly, more than an hour later. My reaction was pretty much: What? It took over an hour for someone to win this thing? I should be able to win pretty much by default then!

Naturally it wasn't much later that I decided to revive my old routine of setting my hearthstone to Booty Bay late on Saturday and positioning my hunter on the coast to be ready for Sunday's tournament - only this time on Horde side.

In case you were wondering though... I did not win on my first try. That time the tournament took over an hour must have been a fluke or something, as when I actually tried to take part again, it was over after only eighteen minutes and I'd only just crossed the twenty fish mark. But hey, I'd learned enough from last time to know that there was a lot of RNG to the contest and that I was capable of winning it if I only kept trying.

Since I hadn't had a lot of good luck in the lower half of Stranglethorn, I decided to revisit my old hunting grounds north of Grom'gol this Sunday. While I waited for the tournament to start, a level 60 undead warrior not from my guild rode up and killed a nearby crocolisk. I just stared at them - I didn't want to be rude, but I'd claimed this spot first. Eventually they moved south a bit.

When the Tastyfish started spawning, I started fishing as usual. The warrior provided competition for a little while, but when we reached Grom'gol, I decided to turn back around while they continued further south. The northern coast always seemed to have fewer pools than the southern one, but I didn't remember it being quite so barren - I'm guessing that the lower number of participants also resulted in a slower respawn rate for pools all over the zone. Rather suddenly it also started to rain really heavily, and while I'm generally rather fond of the weather effects in Classic, I actually had a bit of trouble seeing the edges of the pools in the downpour.

I was doing terribly with catching "junk" fish as well, so that I quickly resigned myself to the idea that this week wasn't going to be a win either, but of course I kept going. I remembered from past contests that the average duration until someone claimed victory was about twenty minutes, so I kept looking for the giveaway yell from about eighteen minutes past the hour. However, it didn't come.

The spawn rate of pools seemed to pick up and my numbers were starting to look better and better. I'd been pretty chill about the whole thing until then, but with only three fish to go my heart started to race a bit. I began to provide running commentary to my husband, who was as usual perpetually bewildered by how much fishing could excite me. "I hope that someone wins soon, because if I get forty fish, hearth, and then they beat me that'll feel pretty crappy."

I was on thirty-nine fish with one more cast to go before exhausting my current pool. I cursed when my last cast resulted in an Oily Blackmouth and quickly continued to the next pool, which fortunately wasn't far away. My first cast there netted me my fortieth Tastyfish, and I hit my hearthstone to return to Booty Bay.

I ran out of the inn and didn't see anyone already there. I clicked on the goblin when I suddenly saw a male human warrior come up next to me (incidentally, I recognised the name as he'd been in my paladin's ZG run on Monday). For just a second, I panicked and struggled to find the right reward to click on, but I managed to complete the hand-in in time to be declared this week's Master Angler. The warrior did a /cry emote on me. The crappy situation I had been so keen to avoid had now happened to him. I gave him a /pat in return.

So now my tauren hunter is properly armed to engage in high-level fishing with her Arcanite Fishing Pole. As a bonus, she also caught the rare fish that rewards the High Eternium Fishing Line during this contest. Now who to take next? Maybe my paladin...