Hunting Rares for Fun and Profit

I'm still puttering around on my paladin alt on Gehennas occasionally and have got her up to level 20 at this point. Now that the main PvE cluster has reached a more "normal" level of population, I'm almost getting nostalgic for the quieter times, and playing on Gehennas currently scratches that itch. I almost consider it a special challenge to play there, what with being all by myself most of the time. I'm generally not someone who uses the AH a lot, but I do use it sometimes, and I'm usually all over opportunities to do group content. Having to limit myself to soloing and having to procure any and all items I might need by myself just feels kind of novel right now.

Around the level when I would usually start looking for a Deadmines group, I was killing some murlocs on the coast of Westfall when not one but two rare mobs barrelled into me almost simultaneously, which got me to wonder just how many rares there were in the zone. This quickly evolved into a fun new pastime.

Rares in Vanilla honestly weren't that amazing, often just dropping a generic random green, if even that. I mean, in Vanilla even getting a green feels pretty good, but I'm thinking in comparison to later iterations of the concept, when their loot was upgraded considerably and they were changed to give massive amounts of bonus XP when killed.

Anyway, like with so many things in the human starter zone, you can tell that the devs had time to think about the rares a bit more than they did in later zones, and there are some pretty unique ones with special loot tables. For example there's a zombie called Leprithus that spawns either on a small graveyard or near the border to Duskwood and only at night, and his drops are a great pair of leather gloves called Ghoul Fingers as well as a cursed sword that shoots shadowbolts.

My favourite so far however has been the rare Foe Reaper 4000, which can spawn on most of the fields with harvesters on them and seems to be almost guaranteed to drop a non-unique ten-slot bag. As bag space became a real issue when I moved to Westfall and started picking up all the various quests asking me to collect animal parts, this discovery was an absolute godsend. I've killed him four times so far and actually feel pretty good about my bag space for my level now.

I've tried to hunt him down more often than that, but some days other players on the server actually make their presence known even if I don't see them personally, just because all the rares in the zone are dead. While the population is extremely small, there seem to be a few genuine levellers, and I suspect that all the higher-levels are on the cluster specifically for easy farming of PvP ranks or raw materials, and since you're still able to freely transfer from Gehennas to Firemaw, their activities might even feed into the Firemaw economy for all I know.

This isn't all bad for me though, because I've been surprised to find that I can actually sell things. The auction house is usually empty aside from my listings, but I guess that's precisely what gives them so much exposure and someone is usually happy to snatch up a cheap green or stack of trade goods. And then, just as I was starting to feel good about my financial situation and like I'd earned enough gold to be able to at least afford all my training for the near future, I found this in the mail:

So now my little throwaway alt has 100 gold at her disposal randomly and is basically set for life. I also replied to the sender to thank them and let them know that if they were feeling lonely, there are other servers they can go to that are actually active and free transfers are available. I don't know if they'll ever see the reply, but I'll remember their kindness. Their mission to make me smile succeeded.

60 Raiders Walk into Molten Core

I mentioned previously that with the way the population on the PvE cluster has been growing, raids in Warriors of Sunlight actually started to become oversubscribed and we had to start thinking about things like how to handle a bench. For this week's Molten Core we actually had more than fifty people signed up, which basically led to the officers saying, "Enough! We might actually be able to run two groups at once with this many people..."

So this Thursday, Warriors of Sunlight fielded two Molten Core raids consisting of thirty people each, running in parallel for the first time - and it was really fun! The smaller groups meant that bosses were a bit tougher than usual, and that I actually had to pay proper attention while healing on my druid - with only six healers in each raid there wasn't room to cruise in quite the same way I fully admit I often do in MC runs. It didn't feel stressful or tedious to underman the raid this way though, rather the opposite - plenty of laughs were had and it just hit differently knowing that working that little bit harder enabled everyone to join the raid that night and that we'd get double the loot.

In short, it was good fun and the officers had clearly done a good job balancing the raids as both runs finished only minutes apart. The loot gods also smiled upon our efforts - the group I was in got no fewer than three rare profession recipes, and the other group had both an Eye of Sulfuras and the Geddon binding drop.

The latter meant that both raid groups were off to Silithus afterwards to slay Thunderaan together and celebrate our rogue officer becoming the server's newest wielder of a Thunderfury. It was just an awesome night all around and I love that this old game is still able to generate this level of joy and excitement after all these years.

A Fun Guild Event

This past Saturday my guild's GM advertised that he was hosting a "fun social event". I immediately signed up, even without knowing what exactly to expect, because as an explorer/socialiser I usually find these sorts of events in MMOs pretty fun. From team competitions to races to trivia contests, playing the game in ways the developers didn't intend can be pretty entertaining.

This particular event ended up consisting of two distinct parts. Apparently there were plans for a third, but the second part ended up taking so long that it was decided to save the third activity for another day.

The first part was a treasure hunt that was conveyed via a lovingly written in-character letter from our GM's undead alt Lagbunny (you'd think he used to play on an RP server or something!) - little Lag wanted our help with procuring six items that were meant to be useful to him during a date. And yes, undead dates are apparently very weird. He wanted:

• an Ivory Boar Tusk, mostly found on the swine in the two Razorfen dungeons
• a white quality gun obtainable from one of three different vendors
• one of the First Aid training books
• a Large Hoof found in Shadowfang Keep or on selected stags
• a pair of Dirty Leather Pants sold by vendors in the immediate starter zones
• and a selfie with Captain Grayson, the ghost that hands out quests to Alliance players by the lighthouse in Westfall
  

We were allowed to look the items up on Wowhead to check where to get them, but we weren't allowed to get help from other players or buy things on the auction house. I ended up zig-zagging across the map pretty inefficiently while trying to research where to find each item, but I guess the other contestants weren't much better off.

In Razorfen Kraul, I got lucky with the tusk dropping pretty quickly, though I'd got a bit confused with my directions and took a huge detour to get to the right mobs. Initially we were all in a raid group so we could see where everyone else was going, which led to funny complaints from those coming to Razorfen later that "all the pigs are dead already".

For the hoof most people apparently went to Shadowfang Keep, while I decided to try my luck with the stags in Ashenvale. I got lucky and got the hoof on my second kill - apparently another guy who also went for the stags got extremely unlucky and had to kill something like eighty stags before one of them dropped the right kind of hoof. Oops!

In general it was funny to listen to the kinds of issues people were encountering. One officer who took part apparently managed to get lost inside RFK (in his defense, I think he was a bit tipsy), then finally found his way out again just to fall to his death into Thousand Needles, then abandoned his body for a bit to go for a smoke. I realise that sounds like it could've been frustrating, but honestly it was just very funny.

Once we had all the items, we were supposed to find Lagbunny and deliver them to him, with the hint as to his location being that his date was with an only recently deceased orc lady... which of course meant that he was sitting in a certain hut in the Barrens. I was the third contestant to make it there, and we all sat down inside the hut to wait for everyone else to make it, which itself developed into a fun little mini-game of jumping out at innocent low-level questers that were just looking for Mankrik's wife and yelling "Surprise!" at them.

Aside from that, people spent their time duelling and being silly, until the last contestant - who was only in his low 40s and therefore slower than everyone else - had reached the hand-in point as well.

After a brief award ceremony for the winners at the Orgrimmar bank, we were told to create level 1 undead characters for a race. I don't know what I expected from that, but for some reason I thought it was going to be fairly short. I think I made a joke like "You're not going to ask us to race to Booty Bay, right?", which resulted in one of the old-timers whispering me to say that our destination was probably going to be the Gates of AQ, since he'd done that particular race before and it had taken two hours back then. "Now I'm scared!" I replied. "As you should be," was his reply in turn. And he was right - both about the destination and that I should've been scared.

After a brief explanation of the rules (no ghost-running to spirit healers or anything like that, we always had to revive at our bodies) we were off to the races. We successfully made it to the Undercity zeppelin as a pack and then made our way south from Orgrimmar. In southern Durotar the first real split occurred, with most people opting to run through the Barrens, while some brave individuals decided to swim along the coast. At this point only one or two deaths had occurred.

It was only in the southern Barrens that things started to get bloody, and then they got worse once we entered Thousand Needles. It's funny, because I didn't remember there being so many hyenas and cougars right next to the road... either way, the caravan soon became a stream of ghosts running back from the graveyard at the Great Lift, reviving at their bodies and running for a few more metres before being slapped down by wildlife again. Reaching the graveyard at the edge of the Shimmering Flats felt like blessed relief, and the flats themselves were surprisingly non-deadly to level 1s (or 2s, as we'd levelled from exploration XP by that point).

The swimmers had a hard time with the murlocs in northern Dustwallow initially, but were apparently off scot-free after that, and yet for all that, both the runners and the swimmers arrived in Gadgetzan at roughly the same time.

Making it from there to Un'goro was an even worse death march than Thousand Needles though, as there was no road in the desert, just loads of wildlife everywhere that would one-shot naked little undead people. Interestingly, several older players had predicted that Un'goro was going to be even worse, but the first person to make it down there found that they could actually cross completely safely by sticking to the edge of the northern stream - I'm not sure a single person actually died while running across Un'goro. Then it was just a matter of getting ganked on the road in Silithus a few more times on the way to the gates, but compared to Thousand Needles and Tanaris that was nothing.

Unfortunately for me, I was much worse at this race thing than at the earlier treasure hunt. I was roughly keeping up with the pack until the end of Thousand Needles, when I fell behind until I was eventually trailing the rest of the group at some distance. Crossing the border from Tanaris to Un'goro featured a particularly nasty trap though, where it was possible to die in a spot that you could only access from Tanaris but have your ghost spawn in Un'goro, requiring a particularly lengthy corpse run across both zones to get back to your body. A couple of people had this happen to them once... but to me it happened no less than three times, which meant that by the time most were arriving at the gates, I was still trying to properly get into Un'goro.

The guy who'd "warned" me earlier actually whispered me in amusement when he saw my predicament, as he'd just given up when the same thing happened to him (only one time?). I was honestly getting pretty tired and a little exasperated myself by this point, but after coming this far I didn't want to give up and leave little Shintar as a ghost in limbo, so I was determined to keep going even if everyone else was done and going to bed. I was indeed still running when people returned to their mains in Orgrimmar to see the prizes awarded, but at least some came back to their lowbies afterwards to cheer me on as I finally completed the last stretch.

Just when I thought that I'd finally be allowed to go to bed (it was past midnight at this point), the guy who'd given up earlier was clearly so inspired by my persistence (that's my story anyway and I'm sticking to it) that he logged back onto his own lowbie at the Tanaris/Un'goro border and completed the run on him as well. It was... an experience for sure! I wonder what all those players we encountered on our journey thought about all those naked low-level undead running around...

Classic Culture War

One thing that immediately impressed me when I started playing on Classic era last year was the community. It was small, but precisely because of that, it was also very tight-knit. You didn't meet many people out in the world, but when you did, it was a pleasant surprise and you knew that player was there because they really liked Vanilla and wanted to be there; they weren't just following a recommendation from their favourite streamer or riding the latest trend. If anything, it was the opposite: choosing era over regular Classic would mark you as a bit of a weirdo who wasn't afraid to go against the flow.

I've often mentioned the Classic era Discord in my posts here, which has both been a great community resource as well as just a nice place to see community spirit in action. I saw some pretty interesting discussions there, and I was often impressed by how hard people tried to stay respectful even when their in-game interests were pretty much diametrically opposed, because driving people off just for enjoying the game in a different way wasn't going to be in anyone's interest.

Now, as much as I've enjoyed watching era's population grow, I also had a feeling that this was eventually going to change its culture as well... and things came to a head for me last week when I finally gave up and put the general chat channel on the Classic era Discord on mute.

In many ways that shouldn't be a big deal, because I ignore general chat in many MMOs and larger Discords, as it's just too busy and often serves as nothing but a place for a certain crowd to shoot the shit in public. But I really liked the chats we used to have in the Classic era Discord... until I didn't anymore.

Recently the general chat there has been nothing but the same few trolls repeating the same old "jokes" at each other, or endless arguments about GDKP or when Blizzard's going to release fresh servers so people can go and leave era already. It was just starting to annoy me, and eventually the ratio of this "spam" vs. actually interesting conversation became so bad that it just wasn't worth following anymore.

Yesterday I decided to take a quick peek to see whether there'd been some sort of change since I applied the mute and promptly saw someone telling another person that they should kill themselves, followed by another poster chuckling about how the mods on the server are so laid back nowadays that clearly anything goes. I still use the smaller channels that are limited to specific topics, but general's basically become toxic and useless as far as I'm concerned.

In-game, my server has fortunately fared better, and while there's been a lot of growth, it hasn't felt in any way unpleasant yet. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to retain that state of affairs, mainly because I know it can be done - Hydraxian Waterlords remained a pleasant medium population server all throughout Classic's original run, even while the general community perception in places like reddit was that all of Classic was basically a bunch of min-maxing sweatlords that wouldn't play anywhere but on the biggest megaserver.

Nonetheless I have to admit I've been wondering what all this growth is going to mean for my guild, Warriors of Sunlight. It's easy to be inclusive when you're always short on people and every extra person adds value, but as I saw with the Forks, being able to cherry-pick your roster changes people, and it sneaks up on you slowly. Since every WoS raid is overbooked nowadays, I found myself wondering when someone would raise the question of why we still take just about anyone - why not take the people with more dps as a priority? Plus we've had some newcomers that were clearly expecting things to work more like they did in 2020 - you can usually recognise them by the fact that they come to MC buffed up to the teeth and then die from getting aggro on some random trash mob because none of the old-timers (including the tanks) bother with popping their world buffs in Molten Core.

And there have been early signs: more talk about how to optimise your damage, and the other day a new hunter openly complained that so many people parsed green or grey in our logs and accused them of being semi-AFK during the raid. There was pushback against that, and later one of the officers made a big post about how this is a laid-back, casual guild and how that's what's it's going to stay, and if people want things to be run a different way, they can always leave and make their own guild. I really appreciated this doubling down on the guild's ethos, but we'll see how well it holds up. Like I said, it sneaks up on you. I still remember all the banter in the Fork raids slowly turning into brags about how much dps so-and-so had done on each trash pull...

However, Classic era is different, and the people that are currently holding the guild together have not forgotten what got them through the lean times, nor are they chasing any lofty achievements just to be able to tick them off and then move on. I'm hopeful that as long as we keep this core that wants to maintain the game as their casual space to chill, things will hopefully work out in our little corner of Classic era at least.

Adventures on Gehennas

I mentioned in my last post that I made a little paladin on Gehennas just to have a look around, and I'm finding myself strangely enamoured with her. There's just something about human paladins... even if the first character I ever levelled properly was a night elf priest, the first character I ever made was a human paladin, and even though I rerolled to play with friends after only a few days, those first few days of playing the game as a human by myself clearly had a major impact on me.

I've got a lot of nostalgia for the early night elf starter zones as well, but for some reason I never imprinted on the Horde zones in quite the same way. Mulgore probably comes the closest in terms of filling me with warm, fuzzy feelings, but even so it's not really a contest when compared to human lands.

Revisiting all the quests in Elwynn Forest once again, I've got to say that the whole zone is just damn well done though; it's not just nostalgia. You can really tell that Blizzard built this starter zone first and had more time to reiterate on it than on any others. The quests flow together and across zone lines in a way that they rarely do anywhere else in the early game. There are lots of little details like NPC conversations taking place and neutral critters ambling about everywhere. And all the unique mob pathing! I remember Bhagpuss wrote a whole post about being fascinated by it when he played WoW Classic. Of course mobs wander around in all zones, but it seems to me that there's distinctly more complexity to it in the lower-level zones... I'm sure all the wandering Murlocs in Elwynn did their share to contribute to the whole species earning its reputation as a multi-pull menace.

I've only seen a couple of other players during my journeys so far, and I've been surprisingly unfazed by this lack of company. It may sound strange - deranged, even - but I kind of feel like I've transcended the need for other players in WoW. I still enjoy having them around, and I'm happy to see era's growing popularity, but I'm actually okay with playing by myself as well, and I realised that this makes me a rare minority.

Every day someone comes on the era Discord to ask how many players there are on this or that server, because they're scared of investing time into levelling a character somewhere where they can't do instances or shop at the auction house. I don't think I was ever that bad, but when I first started playing on era and it was still very quiet, I do remember having the occasional moment when I noticed that I was the only person in a given zone and it felt a bit like staring into the void. However, I persisted and found contentment in playing by myself when I needed to, and I feel like that's made me more resilient in a sense.

People install the hardcore addon to lock themselves out of the auction house to challenge themselves, but I'm simply playing on a server where there is no active auction house - though this hasn't prevented me from putting up a couple of auctions for useful lowbie items just in case someone does come by. I sold a pair of green mail trousers, so I know it can happen! Also, I just kinda enjoy seeing my name up there, being the only person to have items listed on the auction house. As far as anyone randomly checking in is concerned, I pretty much own this place!

Inventory management and making money have been the biggest challenges so far. I'm considering looking into buying some small bags from a vendor to fill my remaining currently empty bag slots, because I just don't have room for anything. I also always loathe to vendor things that could be useful to another player, but Gehennas just isn't in a place where anyone's looking for things like trade goods right now, so I've got to learn to bite the bullet if I want to be able to afford new skills at some point. I still don't expect to take this little levelling challenge very far, but for the time being it's a nice little distraction.

More on Era Server Populations

On the WoW Classic subreddit it's a bit of a meme that era players can't stop talking about how busy the era servers are and there's certainly some truth to that, but if you're someone who's been following the development of era for a while, it's just been utterly fascinating to see how much the star of this MMO with no active development continues to rise.

When I started playing on era last year, my Battle.net friends seemed to consider that a weird move at best, and nobody had any desire to join me. Yet in the past couple of weeks, two of my old guildies suddenly contacted me after rolling characters on the PvE cluster, and I briefly chatted with two others who'd created characters on Hydraxian Waterlords to try out hardcore mode. Suddenly, era is "in".

I mentioned in January that the EU PvP cluster as well as Hydraxian Waterlords - now unofficially designated "the hardcore server" - had both grown to medium population. In March, they ticked over to high, and just the other day their status changed to "full". I'm actually not sure what that means nowadays - Wowpedia states that "players cannot create a character on a full realm unless they already have characters on that realm", but I'm not sure whether that's true anymore, considering that there's also "locked" (which doesn't apply to any era realms at the moment, but has been used in Wrath). Either way, it's pretty clear that those servers are full to burst, and one has to wonder what that will mean for any potentially upcoming "overspill".

I logged into the hunter I made on Hydraxian when it first hit medium to see how the population growth had affected the experience of playing there, and it was a stark reminder that to me personally, "high" population is not actually appealing at all. Teldrassil was being scoured of mobs as they spawned, and I completed two quests by basically just running back and forth between a couple of spawn spots where mobs re-appeared mere seconds after having been killed. Trying to hand the quest in at the end was a chore as the quest NPC does a little bit of RP every time someone completes a quest with him, and there was a whole huddle of night elves around him just spam-clicking to get in there first. I logged out again shortly after that because the whole experience was just giving me hives.

On the other end of the spectrum, with the PvP cluster being classified as full, I suddenly found myself wondering about the other, abandoned PvP cluster on EU, centred on the Gehennas server. I don't usually play on PvP servers, but what does it matter when there's nobody around to fight you? So I made a human paladin there to have a look around - I was pleasantly surprised that the first three-letter name I entered was not even taken. I actually had a pretty good time questing in Elwynn all by myself - like Redbeard, I find the experience of replaying certain starting zones to be the virtual equivalent of "comfort food".

The census addon didn't see much activity there - never more than 20 people online at a time, which does not make the cluster appealing to a mainstream audience right now, but if Firemaw runs out of room, who knows what the future will bring? Hydraxian Waterlords was deader than this less than a year ago and look where it is now.

The PvE cluster (where I play) is also still classified as having low population, though we've been growing so much, I feel like we should be ticking over to medium any day now. I really want that to happen as well because I feel with how slowly we've been growing compared to PvP and hardcore, people are starting to not take us seriously as a "main" cluster anymore - which is a silly thing to worry about, I know, but being active on the era Discord as I am, it does bother me a little. More importantly though, officially being classified as medium would help to make it clearer to more casual players that we're one of the currently active realms. It may not be apparent on the server selection screen, but there's a big difference between a "low" realm with thousands of players and one with virtually none - even if the last few months have demonstrated that things can change surprisingly quickly on that front.

Raiding in Classic Era - an Update

Back in August I wrote a post about my early experiences with raiding in Classic era - how some raids weren't run that often by my guild, and how I got a lot of loot early on. Looking back at that post now, so much has changed that I thought it might be a good time for an update.

AQ20

Back in August this was the raid that nobody wanted to run... but eventually a lovely shaman stepped up to put it back on the calendar, and since then it's been run on average once a week - a good thing too, as we've had so many newcomers requesting books and idols that the guild bank has actually had trouble keeping up with demand despite of having had a huge stockpile of all of them at one point.

I'll admit that AQ20 is probably the least interesting place in terms of gear, so it didn't take long for my hunter to run out of things to get from there, other than Cenarion Circle rep, which I don't really need to max out. I started bringing my druid instead, but even she's starting to run low on items to soft reserve at this point. Still, I'm sure I'll keep coming up with excuses to go, since it's just fun.

ZG

Not long after I joined, the officer who'd been running the regular ZGs at the time had to step down from that task and since nobody else was available to take over, there was a period where no runs happened at all. Fortunately the aforementioned shaman picked up the slack here as well, and like AQ20, ZG is now being run about once a week.

I'm still going to this one on my hunter even though she stopped benefiting from any potential gear drops a long time ago, simply because the grind to exalted reputation for the shoulder enchants is looong - I never actually got my night elf to exalted in original Classic. However, I feel like I can see the end of the tunnel this time, and then I'll be happy to start taking my druid to this one as well.

Also, the other week the guild actually saw one of the rare mounts drop for the first time, Mandokir's raptor - it went to a loyal long-time officer, so even though we teased him about it, it felt well-deserved.

Molten Core

Back in August I noted that the guild rarely seemed to do full MC runs - with all the recent newcomers those times are long over as well, because we have lots of new raiders that want to gear up and Molten Core is the natural first stop. We still go for the bindings every week, but do full runs pretty much every other week, and they are no longer the severely understaffed affairs of the early days either. With a full group of forty it actually goes by pretty fast even at a casual pace.

We haven't had another Thunderfury since Tefflar's in December, but we've got two more people that have Garr bindings sitting in their bags, so it feels like it can't be too long now until Geddon will cough one up again as well.

In terms of loot, my hunter has nothing useful left to get from there, just Hydraxian Waterlords reputation for fun, so I do try to bring my druid when I can but I have to admit I haven't been super enthusiastic about it since I realised that being a resto druid in Vanilla raids sucks ass. I mean, I knew in theory that the HoTs didn't stack and all that, but even that aside, it just feels so clunky. I've seen people debate the usefulness of resto druids in multiple places and there's always someone arguing that they're totally awesome if you can only get all these specific gear pieces from higher-end raids, but that doesn't help your average druid alt at all. Even downranked Healing Touches are slow AF compared to other classes' heals, and I just end up feeling like a geriatric paladin without any of that class's fun tools.

I don't mind so much in the 20-mans because when you're doing AQ20 with only three healers, there's still something to do even for the slowest healer, but in the 40-mans with multiple Naxx-geared priests and shamans... forget it.

Either way, despite all that I still enjoy going to MC to some degree, simply because with it being the easiest of the 40-man raids, it usually has the most amount of silliness and the best banter.

Onyxia

Ony is another raid we rarely seemed to do when I started but which we now visit quite regularly - and both of my level 60s are attuned as well, hurrah! Mostly the guild needs that never-ending supply of dragon heads for world buffs, but the 18-slot bags she drops are nice as well.

Funnily enough, unlike how I experienced the fight in original Classic, the boss always dies so quickly in these runs that she doesn't even do her Deep Breath mechanic. I think I remember one run where she actually did a Breath, and everyone promptly went "oh no, she's actually doing the thing", followed by half the raid being burnt to a crisp while running around like headless chickens (including me) because nobody's used to dealing with it anymore.

Blackwing Lair

I still like Blackwing Lair. It has such great loot and bosses that are interesting without being too tough or tedious. In an ironic twist of fate, after getting Ashjre'thul in what was only my second BWL back in Classic, it has stubbornly eluded me in era for the past eight months. I've got absolutely everything else I could possibly want from BWL for my hunter, including the coveted Prestor's Talisman from Nef, but the bloody crossbow just never drops when I'm there.

As there's also been a huge influx of new hunters lately, I think I'm starting to make my peace with potentially using my Rhok until Kel'Thuzad, cause even if I'm not in the raid whenever the crossbow does drop, at least some other hunter will be able to use it. This last week I finally gave up and brought my druid to the raid instead, and it felt worthwhile. Healing BWL was a bit more fun than MC (Vael is a great boss to be a druid on for example), and I scored no less than three pieces of druid tier two, which is very strong.

AQ40

The strengthening of our roster has fortunately meant that AQ40 has become slightly less of a slog and we can actually kill C'thun more reliably. Though we still haven't ever gone for Viscidus, and for some reason we also stopped visiting Ouro after originally going for him every time in the earliest AQ40 raids I joined.

AQ40 has always been kind of crappy for hunter loot, and unsurprisingly I'm running out of gear to chase in there as well. I could technically go for the ring from C'thun, but Patchwerk is in reach now and he drops an even better one, so... I'm thinking that taking my druid there some time might be interesting both in terms of as an experience and in terms of loot opportunities, but we'll see.

Naxxramas

Naxxramas remains the main destination of interest for most of the established raiders, but progression has been absolutely glacial. Within seven months, the guild only went from 6/14 to 10/14. Mainly this was due to a prolonged shortage of healers, which turned Patchwerk and Loatheb into unsurpassable roadblocks for many months. This has now been overcome, but I think progression is still being held back by the fact that only one of the three main raid days is dedicated to Naxx, which just isn't enough to achieve much of anything in there at a casual pace. I can't say I envy the officers having to square the circle of "focusing on Naxx" on the one hand, and funnelling a never-ending stream of newcomers through the earlier raids to gear them up for Naxx at the same time.

Personally I rarely go there because the regular Naxx night is Sunday, which often clashes with other commitments for me, but I have been a few times at this point - enough to get all the intro quests done and pick up three pieces of tier three. I'm just glad that I got the whole "progressing through Naxx" experience done in Classic, meaning that I feel little pressure to achieve anything in era on a personal level. I'm happy to be there whenever I can and to see the guild progress, but there's no clock ticking down to Naxx becoming obsolete, so more bosses will happen when they happen.