My Raiding History, Part 2: The Burning Crusade

The Burning Crusade hadn't been out long when I rolled a troll priest on a different server. The raiding friend I mentioned in my previous post had abandoned his alt in order to return to his home server and tackle the new raid content with his guild, and my levelling partner had rolled up a tauren druid there to join them. There was a certain amount of peer pressure on me to go along.

Like I said previously, my adventure in AQ hadn't really left me with any particular urge to raid, but I missed the company, especially as our little group of friends that had formed on Alliance side started to fracture and people were around less and less. Seeing things from the Horde's point of view while having some company didn't seem like such a bad option in comparison. And I wasn't really committed to anything.

Being a (relatively) lone leveller in a raiding guild, I didn't have a lot of interactions with my new guildies, but they did seem nice enough in chat, and a couple of them did take a liking to me and helped me out by boosting my priest through some dungeons. I remember getting pretty much all the caster drops from Shadowfang Keep for example.

I also remember a guildie who had rolled and levelled a pally for the guild (new to the Horde back then) running me through Razorfen Kraul and then using Divine Intervention on me at the end. I had never seen that ability before and was wondering whether he was doing something similar to a hunter's Feign Death. When I realised that he had literally killed his character for the sake of a laugh it absolutely blew my mind. I started to become fond of these silly people.

Just as I got close to the level cap, there appeared to be some minor guild drama - I was still too far removed from these things to really know what was going on, but the result was that the old guild/raid leader and some of his friends left the game, supposedly to start playing Lord of the Rings Online instead, which they thought was going to be so much better than WoW. It's the sort of thing that can really cripple a guild - but this one made it out fine. The new guild and raid leader was very good at what he did and determined to mould the guild into a raid force to be reckoned with. And moulding is definitely something it needed.

I think the first raid I joined may have actually been Gruul's Lair, since unlike Karazhan it didn't require an attunement (plus the scaling up from 10- to 25-man meant that there was more of a need for additional warm bodies to fill out the raid). I think it's hard to comprehend for people nowadays just how extremely clueless we all were - not just me, but most people in the guild. In the context of Classic people often mention how things were different back in Vanilla because players didn't have all those resources in the form of guides etc. and at the start of BC that was definitely still true to some extent as well.

This was particularly evident on Gruul himself, who was an extremely easy fight mechanically but involved a bit of a dps check... that we failed time and time again. Many of these people had been raiding casually throughout Vanilla, but in most of the Vanilla raids dps just outright wasn't required. Questions such as how to optimise one's gear or rotation hadn't even crossed people's minds. The raid leader had to tell us to shape up and threatened that people would no longer get invited if they couldn't hit at least 500 dps. This wasn't a particularly high requirement even back then, but for many of us it was still a challenge. I felt motivated to prove myself though, and started to work on things such as improving my gear and achieving my hit cap (also a new concept, as hit rating wasn't even displayed on Vanilla character sheets, even though it existed as a stat).

I also got into Karazhan eventually. Getting attuned wasn't really a problem as there were always people happy to help others through the required dungeons. The bigger challenge was to balance two to three 10-man teams with the consideration of 25-man progression - something of which I was blissfully oblivious at the time, as my involvement was limited to showing up when I was told to, but in hindsight it must have been one hell of a headache for leadership.

Karazhan was another place that taught me a lot of lessons. Again, most of the bosses were laughably simplistic compared to many fights today, but keeping in mind that many of us had little to no clue about anything it was just what we needed. Attumen the Huntsman taught people to watch their threat or die. Moroes taught people to apply, re-apply and respect crowd control... or die. Maiden of Virtue taught healers to keybind their cleanses so they could hit them quickly enough to save people's lives... or they would die. And so on and so forth. I wrote about my memories of Karazhan in a bit more detail previously.

I was having a good time, learning things alongside my guildies, killing new bosses and getting a lot better at the game. People were always happy to have me in their group because shadow priests were this strange new thing that hadn't really been considered viable in Vanilla but was suddenly extremely useful to have around. And we just got along well too. Looking back at screenshots I took during that time, I ended up capturing a lot of silly banter in guild chat.

We cleared Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and eventually Magtheridon's Lair (even if getting that damn cube clicking right wiped us way too many times). We were somewhat behind the curve, meaning that by the time we were ready to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye, the attunement requirements for them had been removed (though some of us still did the quests for laughs). That didn't make our journey any less meaningful though, and while there was some turnover in the roster obviously (my former levelling partner left to join a more progressed guild for example), we continued to go from strength to strength. It was a bit of a blow when our combined guild and raid leader suddenly lost interest in the game seemingly overnight, but by then our momentum was so strong that someone with a less powerful personality was able to take over and keep the show running anyway.

We killed Lady Vashj and Kael'thas, and started working on Mount Hyjal and Black Temple (also after their attunements had become non-mandatory). When Zul'Aman came out, a mage friend made it a personal goal to build a hand-picked 10-man team that would practice the instance until we could successfully complete the "bear run" - a timed challenge that would result in a unique mount reward for one person - and I was one of his picks because I was his friend and just that good by then. Beating that challenge as a team was probably the height of my WoW raiding career. I also wrote a post about that before.

We never made it into Sunwell, but didn't really care much at the time either. That instance felt like something that Blizzard had kind of tacked on at the end to keep the super hardcore busy - after all, Illidan was the real end boss of the expansion, right? We were working on Mother Shahraz in Black Temple when the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch applied a blanket nerf to all raids, but fortunately it didn't completely remove all challenge from the last few bosses. It wasn't quite the same when we finally killed Illidan, but we were still proud and felt that we had finished the expansion on a high note.

Things were about to change, however... (to be continued)

My Raiding History, Part 1: Vanilla

A couple of months ago I listened to an episode of the WoW Killer podcast in which the two hosts were talking about how they got into raiding. I really enjoyed that episode because I always find these kinds of stories fascinating. Pretty much nobody ever starts their first MMO with the intention to raid, so the journey from fresh newbie to seasoned raider inevitably involves a lot of personal growth, changes in attitudes and often humorous detours. It struck me that my own journey along the same lines would be interesting to reflect on and also make for a good subject for a series of blog posts, so here we are.

I, too, didn't start playing World of Warcraft with the intention to raid. In fact, I didn't even know what raiding was, or that it was a thing anyone should know anything about - hell, I barely knew what kind of gaming experience I was about to get myself into that very first night I loaded into Elwynn Forest.

I can't exactly pinpoint when I first learned what raids were... presumably it was through chatting with other players. A friend that was already playing and rolled up an alt to level with me had his main in a raiding guild on a different server and probably talked about it at various points. It didn't really sound particularly relevant to my interests though.

One thing I do recall very vividly however is the day my night elf priest was standing by the Ironforge bank, either just before or a little after hitting level 60, when someone whispered me seemingly out of the blue and asked me to join their guild for a raid of the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj that night. I assured them that I was wholly unsuitable for such a venture, having neither particularly good gear nor any kind of clue what I was supposed to do in such a setting, but for some reason they really wanted me to come anyway and I eventually agreed.

In hindsight I can only surmise that with the Burning Crusade already looming very close by that point, some people were rapidly losing interest in raiding, knowing that better gear and whole new adventures were going to await on the other side of the Dark Portal soon, which probably made it a struggle for many guilds to still fill their raids, presumably to the point where they were happy to bring in pugs just to make up the numbers. That's just a guess, however.

Anyway, thanks to repeated reassurances on the whisperer's part that it was completely fine that I was shadow specced and had no gear, I did show up to the raid, and even though it was "only" a 20-man, I still remember how utterly overwhelming I found the experience. This was the biggest organised group of players I'd ever been a part of, and everyone but me seemed to know exactly what to do. Mages were conjuring water and warlocks were handing out health stones, all of this seemingly unprompted. It was quite awe-inspiring to me, if also somewhat intimidating.

I remember us killing trash and people dying to it, with some questions about healing assignments being raised. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do and had the uncomfortable feeling that the deaths might have been my fault. Was I supposed to be healing that guy who died? There were no major complaints though, and it was over soon enough.

Kurinaxx and General Rajaxx had already been killed, so we were headed to Buru the Gorger straight away. Tactics were explained, something about running away when he targeted you and killing eggs. Again I remember feeling mostly useless and terrified of getting things wrong. I probably didn't mess up in any major way, or at least I can't remember doing so. I don't recall how many tries it took us to kill him, but we did, resulting in the one screenshot I have of that night:

Dead Buru with his German name tag showing because I was using the German client back then.

We then proceeded to Moam, where I was told that I was allowed to go into shadow form and should just spam mana burn on him. This pleased me greatly, as it was much simpler than anything we had dealt with previously and something I actually understood how to do! Still, I can't even remember whether we killed him or not, just that we didn't proceed any further before the raid came to an end.

I don't think I ever talked to anyone from that guild again afterwards. Maybe I was terrible and they didn't want me to come back. Or maybe they did ask me to join them again another time and I declined. I do know that while it had been a very memorable night, it had also been more overwhelming than fun and didn't leave me with any particular urge to experience more of the same.

For that, Burning Crusade would have to roll around first. To be continued!

Blizzard Polls People About Classic Burning Crusade

So Blizzard accidentally made it official that they are already working on a classic version of Burning Crusade by sending out a survey to players asking how they'd want it to work (and pleading with them to please not spill the beans about this on social media - how quaint). This is great news for me, considering that I've said before that BC is my favourite version of WoW and I'd be over on a Burning Crusade Classic server in a heartbeat! I also said in my "What Will Come After Classic?" post from before launch that I considered a continuation into Burning Crusade the most likely option, so I'm pleased to see my suspicions confirmed..

Now, the specific question that players were asked concerned the matter of how characters should arrive on Burning Crusade Classic servers, with the following options provided:

1) Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server as it progresses to the Burning Crusade expansion, with the option to transfer to a Classic server that will never progress past level 60.

2) Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server that will never progress past level 60, with the option to transfer to a Burning Crusade server.

3) Start a brand new character from level 58 on a new Burning Crusade server.

4) Start a brand new character from level 1 on a new Burning Crusade server.

5) None of the above.

One thing this does confirm is that the current version of WoW Classic isn't going anywhere. You'd think that shouldn't surprise anyone considering how the project was pitched originally, but I saw at least one YouTuber be very vocal recently about how "obviously" all classic servers would have to progress into Burning Crusade because you can't just "split the community".

He's not wrong that this will further split the community, but I can't say that I consider this a large problem. People used the same argument to make the case against having classic servers to begin with, and yet here we are. I suppose if you've genuinely never played an MMORPG other than WoW you might not know this, but you don't need ten million people playing the exact same version of the game as you to have fun; all it takes is enough of them to keep a couple of servers buzzing and you're golden.

Anyway, accepting that there will be another community split with this doesn't mean that it's not going to be important to consider how this occurs. The first two options in the survey are interesting that way because I hadn't really considered what a difference it would make to put the onus of transferring on either the people wanting to progress to BC or the ones wanting to remain in Classic. Basically whoever gets picked to be the default gets to retain their server community, guild structures etc. while those transferring off under this model would have to rebuild from scratch - they might even get thrown in with people from several different origin servers. (I saw someone comment on Reddit that they thought this would be a great opportunity for Blizzard to fix faction imbalances during the transfer process, which is another interesting consideration.)

The two options talking about brand new servers initially surprised me because they immediately seemed off to me - how can you have an authentic Burning Crusade launch experience without people having the option to take their existing characters to Outland? And while I get that some people hate levelling, why would anyone choose a fresh level 58 character over taking what they already have? Is there a large community of people who hate levelling, haven't touched Classic but would jump into Burning Crusade to go straight to Outland? It just seems weird to me.

That said, I thought it was notable that WoWcrendor pointed out that even if these options are unpopular, there isn't really much of a reason to not have at least one or two completely fresh servers for the people who like the idea, as it wouldn't conflict with allowing everyone else to transfer to other servers. It would certainly be an interesting experiment, probably creating a slightly different economy and more importantly, an environment where new blood elves and draenei would be on equal footing with everyone else.

The notable thing missing from the survey options is any talk about copying characters instead of transferring them, which would be my preferred way of handling the matter. While most people are unlikely to have the time to seriously play multiple versions of the game simultaneously, it would be nice to have the option to play either version of WoW Classic without having to completely start over. Plus, forcing people to choose between one or the other is simply going to be an uncomfortable decision, and it seems inevitable that there would be those who would later regret their choice. Why make things hard for players and risk making them unhappy if it's not needed?

The one risk I've seen people mention in regards to character copy is that someone could load up a character with lots of gold and valuables before transferring and that this would then imbalance the economy on the destination server. That's a fair point but one I'm sure could be worked around with restrictions if needed. Though my favourite suggestion in the linked Reddit thread was to simply copy the entire server wholesale once Burning Crusade is ready to launch, so that things like guilds are preserved, there are no economy shenanigans, and players can easily jump on one or the other without having to worry about keeping or losing characters.

Since it's still early days one can hope that Blizzard will consider something like this when we actually get there.

Big Cats and Quests That Aren't

So it ended up taking me an extra four levels until my night elf hunter was able to afford her mount. I'd forgotten just how much I love nightsabers; they are so majestic. Unlike my taurens' kodos, whom I see as purely functional, I actually love watching my hunter ride along on her big new cat, especially with a smaller cat running alongside it. It's just a joy to watch. Now I only have to remember to actually mount up more often - turns out that simply throwing on Aspect of the Cheetah for 24 levels is a hard habit to shake.

As usual I'm really loving the fourties - circling between Stranglethorn Vale, Tanaris, Feralas and the Hinterlands is just good fun all around. One thing I found interesting to revisit and which I hadn't thought about in a long time were the hippogryph eggs in Feralas. It's an interesting mechanic that's kind of like a repeatable quest but not exactly.

Basically there is this gnome in Gadgetzan that has a couple of conversation options about hippogryphs in Feralas, how they are threatened by the Gordunni ogres and how she wants to preserve them by collecting their eggs. You may find yourself reading through these gossip options after another quest sends you to talk to this NPC, but she doesn't actually give you a quest for hippogryph eggs.

However, if you do find yourself in the mountains near the ogres in Feralas and you keep an eye out, you might find nests with eggs in them, and somehow you can stuff an egg that's almost as tall and twice as wide as your character into your backpack. (Though I guess the size might explain why it's labelled as unique and you can't carry more than one at a time.)

If you then return to the gnome in Tanaris, you can stick the egg into the machine next to her and it assigns the egg a quality (bad, ordinary, fine, or extraordinary). Based on the quality of the egg, she will then offer you a reward box. So like a quest really, but not using the usual language of floating exclamation marks and quest log entries.

There are a few of these in Classic (another one I can think of is the Shady Rest Inn - while there are a number of quests associated with it, there is a big "gap" in the middle where after being sent to Theramore and talking to various people there who bring it up, you need to actually find the place on your own and pick up the clues scattered around the area before being given more "proper" quests).

I do think these are pretty neat, and I quite like picking up another egg every time I'm in Feralas now. It also makes me wonder how I'd feel about playing an MMORPG where all the quests required more "discovery" like that instead of simply always being indicated by UI markers... (though chances are I'd not find it as intriguing and more tedious if it was just the default).

Not Uldaman Likely

I've mentioned on this blog repeatedly that Uldaman is not one of my favourite instances. (I remember referring to it as "Ul-damn" among my group of friends back in the day.) But as the saying goes: absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after giving my little nelf hunter a break from instancing for more than ten levels (yep, I didn't even bother with Scarlet Monastery this time), I was actually starting to look forward even to Uldaman. It also helps that its proximity to Ironforge makes it a significantly more attractive destination for Alliance players than for Horde.

So when I saw someone LFM for Uldaman the other night, I jumped right in despite of being very much on the lower end of the level curve for it at level 42. (The last boss, Archaedas, is level 47.) Imagine my surprise when I realised that actually, nobody in our group was higher than level 43. I was in fact the highest level damage dealer, with the others sitting at 41 and 39 (!) respectively.

This is the sort of situation I think many people would have noped right out of, but I didn't mind because I was just happy to have got a group so quickly and I figured we'd just see how far we could get.

It was around the area with the troggs that we started to feel the strain in the sense that our healer had to take a mana break after pretty much every pull... but both the tank and healer were very much on the ball and kept performing admirably under pressure.

By the time we got to the stone constructs, things got really hairy as it has all these groups of one big elite and lots of weaker mobs and we didn't have any good AoE either (the other two dpsers were another hunter and a feral druid), so we had to slowly pick them off one at a time, putting even more strain on the tank and healer as every pull took for-freaking-ever. Yet still we persevered, and nobody died.

Eventually we reached the last boss, who showed as red for everyone due to the immense level difference. Thinking of the dps check involved to deal with the adds, I was not confident, even with the "pulling him to the upper level to slow the spawns" strategy, but we went ahead anyway, with both of us hunters being assigned to add killing to make up for the lower dps. (At level a single dps is usually enough to deal with them.)

And it was... epic! So much so that I felt the need to make a little video about it:



In a nutshell, the fight took about five minutes, as we plinked away at Archie's health really slowly (in the video I fast forwarded through the boring bit). Near the end when the two big adds came in everything went a bit manic and people started dying, but the tank and I managed to finish off the boss together, which fortunately caused the last adds to despawn. Happy days!

I'll certainly think twice before considering someone "too low" for Uldaman next time...

Level 40 the 3rd

Well, who saw that coming? I certainly wouldn't have guessed, looking at my roster at the beginning of the year, that my third character to level 40 would be a brand new nelf hunter, but here we are. I'm just enjoying the solo experience as a hunter way too much, and playing as Alliance feels refreshingly different after focusing on Horde side for months.

I even remembered to take a ding shot:

This one doesn't have the money to buy a mount yet, but I decided not to fret about it this time. So instead of proudly showing off my new ride, have some random screenshots I took while levelling on Alliance side:

 

The very first screenshot I took of my hunter in the starting zone. It was raining so hard that night! Also, I really love the female night elf bow-drawing animation.

The night I made the run to Ironforge. I never realised how you can see the city's lights up on the mountainside at night.

 

Remember when the Titans were this big mystery from Azeroth's past instead of overused and annoying?

 

Ashenvale contains a fair number of ruins, but it didn't really hit me just how pompously those elves must have lived back in the day until I considered the sheer size of that half-buried statue.

There's this quest in the Wetlands that has you fighting cursed undead, and one of their abilities temporarily passes their curse on to you, turning you into an undead as well. To my great amusement this applies to pets as well, meaning that I ran around with a pet undead for a while. (And I guess it confirms that Spotty is a girl? Unless everyone gets turned into a female undead.)

Hunting at night on the Shimmering Flats. I've said it before but I'm astounded by how beautiful I find Thousand Needles in Classic, because I don't remember being particularly fond of it in Vanilla.

Always gotta keep your eyes open on the road through Duskwood, you never know when you'll run into Stitches!

Whenever I spotted him wreaking havoc in Darkshire, I sometimes decided to help out.

I noticed there's an impressive amount of yells associated with Stitches spawning as well. It's interesting and somewhat old-fashioned design if you think about it: There is no quest to kill him, he's just a really hard mob (for the level of the zone) that spawns when someone completes a certain quest and is basically like a cat set among the pigeons, making the road unsafe and killing lonely questers left and right if they aren't careful. Makes for a very memorable experience.

Stranglethorn can be quite beautiful when you take a break from killing wildlife and trolls every now and then.

Logging in one evening I was baffled to find such a crowd in Stormwind, considering the server's usual population levels. Turns out it was just before someone dropped Onyxia's head to give everyone a buff. There is a whole system to this where guilds take turns I think, everyone assembles just before the event to get buffed, then mages put up portals to take the big guilds away to raid and the city empties out again. Quite fascinating to watch.

The Hall of Explorers in Ironforge is such an RP place, with all those oddities on display, including plaques that you can actually read.

Looking out over the beauty of Loch Modan. Destroying that was one of those things I could never quite forgive Cataclysm.

Finally, a sunset over Theramore.

Hunting in Warsong Gulch

When battlegrounds were added to Classic I mentioned that I might give Warsong Gulch "a try in one of the lower-level brackets if there are enough people queueing to keep wait times at a reasonable level". I was reminded of this resolution when my nelf hunter travelled through the Arathi Highlands and past the (currently still non-functional) Arathi Basin entrance.

As she was level 29 at the time, I decided to queue up for some WSG the next time I was in Ironforge. Being at the top of your level range is never a bad thing, and I thought I remembered hunters being pretty good in the lower level brackets.

My queue pops weren't quite instant, but close, and I played a total of four matches that day, three of which the Alliance lost. It was a pleasant enough nostalgia trip, reminding me of all kinds of details about the battleground that I hadn't thought about in ages (a speed buff spawns in that nook here, there's a gap in the fence over there etc.). I realised that I really liked the map and its music, and the experience also stirred some pleasant memories of playing with my rated battleground team back in Cataclysm.

Lowbie pugs have nothing like the co-ordination of a rated team of course, though considering the number of twinks on both teams, things were certainly more organised than they could have been. Each match lasted between 10 and 35 minutes, and the latter was a stark reminder of why I really didn't like this battleground much in its original incarnation: spending more than half an hour fighting just to lose anyway and end up with zero bonus honour doesn't make for the most fun of experiences.

That said, I have a knack for seeing the upside when evaluating the scoreboard at the end of the match. Sure, we lost horribly and only got four kills throughout the entire match, but at least I got the killing blow on all four of them! Or: Sure, we lost, but nobody died as many times as me - I win at dying!

(As an aside, I've come to the conclusion that this is because I'm the objective-orientated mirror image of "that guy who fights on the road" - note that I'm not saying "opposite": I have a tendency to blindly run towards the objective with no regards to my own safety, which is why I die a lot when things aren't going well. Not really that much smarter than road guy I guess, just a different kind of stupid.)

Anyway, my favourite thing that happened during all of these matches and which I just have to recount on here was when I hopped down from the graveyard, unsure of which way to head after just respawning, and a human mage beckoned me to come with him. The enemy was holed up in their base with our flag, and he thought that we could take them on. In fact, he had it all planned out as he explained to me in whispers: we'd both nuke the warrior who was carrying the flag, and he would take care of the warlock and priest that were guarding him by sheeping one and using his Gnomish Mind Control Cap on the other.

So we went into the tunnel together and up the ramp on the inside, where we ran straight into the warlock. My mage friend hit his magic button to mind-control him and... I got to watch his name turn red as the cap backfired and turned him into an enemy instead of turning the warlock into an ally. I died soon after but was laughing too hard to do anything useful anyway. It's these kinds of moments I play Classic for.