Viscidus Victory

Viscidus in AQ40 is probably Vanilla's weirdest raid boss. He's kind of out of the way and therefore optional, doesn't drop anything particularly exciting to most players, and he's very oddly designed in the sense that he requires a whole special set of gear to kill, a silly amount of consumables, and can't be overpowered with world buffs. The Forks only ever killed him once... we did go back and tried a couple more times after that, but we weren't particularly enthused to keep trying when we didn't immediately succeed.

With the Warriors of Sunlight, I never got to kill Viscidus either. When I joined, I was told that they'd done him in the past but didn't find the amount of consumables required to be worth the hassle of revisiting him, which seemed fair enough.

However, there was one member in particular, an undead warlock, who was obsessed with killing Viscidus for some reason. In specific, he was after the Sharpened Silithid Femur - again, it's not entirely clear to me why, considering that there are better caster weapons in Naxx, but chasing after certain rare items just seems to be this guy's thing. When I first joined the guild, he was on an epic crusade to acquire Pattern: Rich Purple Silk Shirt for example.

It basically became a well-known meme that he'd always ask to do Viscidus and we'd never even try. I remember waking up early on Christmas Day and having a quick look at my phone while still in bed, just to be greeted by this "Christmas card" made by him on the guild Discord:

It gave me a good chuckle! (Seal of the Archmagus is another meme within the guild...)

My own feeling on the matter was that I didn't really care one way or the other, though I did feel vaguely bad for the warlock as I did get the impression after a while that for all the memery, the whole thing was genuinely important to him and he was starting to feel let down by the fact that so many months had passed without a single Viscidus kill.

In terms of gear and consumables, I wasn't really ready to fight Viscidus myself. In the Forks, I had been required to assemble a full set of nature resist gear before even setting foot into AQ40 (something that caused me a certain degree of anxiety at the time). I only learned much later that it was apparently a bit of an oddity that we never had enough people playing melee characters and therefore needed the hunters to help with soaking damage on Huhuran. In the Warriors of Sunlight, it didn't matter that my hunter didn't have any gear since we never did Viscidus and had plenty of melee to soak on Huhu.

I did farm up a pair of Coldrage Daggers at one point when it had sounded like we might finally have a go at Viscidus soon, but then that didn't end up going anywhere.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised when one of the raid leaders pinged everyone a few hours before raid start today to announce that we were going to kill Viscidus tonight and that we were to come prepared. I immediately confessed to my utter unpreparedness and that it would make complete sense to take someone who actually had nature resist gear, but somehow I ended up on the roster anyway.

Fortunately the guild bank provided a lot of consumables, and in the end, we actually did it. It took us five attempts, but we got there in the end! I've got to say, for all of Visci's awkwardness, Horde have it comparatively easy with shamans and their cleansing totems, as there was almost no need for poison cleanse consumables, the main thing that made the fight so prohibitively demanding on Alliance side. I just had to keep an eye on the shaman in my group and stay near him.

Even though it wasn't a guild first or anything, it was the guild's first kill in over a year, so it still felt pretty good to get the boss down. And even better, he did actually drop the Femur for our warlock friend! So yay for him!

The only downside is that we might now decide to revisit him more often, which means that I really need to get onto that nature resist gear. Ugh...

Winds of Sanctuary

I've seen a fair amount of talk about Classic Wrath's Joyous Journeys XP buff, but of course retail does this kind of thing even more often - I've just never really cared about it, seeing how levelling in retail is ridiculously fast nowadays anyway. It only came to my attention this time around when I logged into my Worgen rogue on a whim, started doing a couple of quests and gained two levels in less than ten minutes, which seemed abnormally fast even by modern retail standards. When I looked it up, I learned that the "Winds of Sanctuary" buff had in fact already been active for a week and was meant to last until the 11th of July.

Much to my own surprise, I actually felt inspired to make use of it, getting my Lightforged Draenei priest to 70, and pushing two of my lower-level alts to 60.

One of those lower level alts was the aforementioned Worgen rogue - I actually posted about it on the blog when I created her last year. After leaving Gilneas, she'd quested through Thousand Needles and Feralas before opting for Cataclysm Chromie Time and making her way through Mount Hyjal. I think I got about halfway through the zone back then, maybe two thirds, before I lost interest. She was the character I was playing when I became aware of the XP buff, and ultimately all it took to level her from the high thirties to 60 was doing a few more quests in Hyjal and visiting a few Midsummer Festival fires. In the end I didn't even finish Hyjal... I basically just did that section where you pretend to be a Twilight cultist and that was enough to get me there most of the way.

I mentioned it before, but lack of gear upgrades while speeding through the levels is a real problem if you're questing, as you get weaker and weaker relative to the constantly scaling mobs and after a while even killing a single normal mob can become a life-or-death battle. At some point I picked up a quest that turned out to be the Heritage Armour chain for Worgen and it was an absolute wipe fest. I was honestly pretty proud of myself for completing it successfully despite of that; it was just incredibly hard while wearing gear meant for levels 20-30 (I think) at 50+.

The other low-level character that got a good chunk of levelling done was the human hunter I originally created during Cataclysm. I'd picked her up at some point after returning to retail and levelled her up to the low thirties by questing through Westfall and Stranglethorn, but it hadn't been super satisfying. I decided to use Chromie Time to go to Northrend a do a bit of questing there, but again, thanks to the buff I didn't even complete all of Borean Tundra before hitting 60 and getting ejected again.

I will say that Blizzard has made one nice change here in that they at least give you a bit more warning... I always thought the one-minute timer that starts counting down the moment you hit 60 (or previously 50) was stupid, because what are the odds that you'll be able to finish what you wanted to do in 60 seconds? Now at least you get a quest pop-up at 59 that tells you that you're needed in the present and that you should finish up your business in the past "soon". That way you at least know it's coming and have a bit more time to finish things up before you get teleported back to Stormwind.

I was really kind of surprised that this double XP incentive actually worked on me, considering that I generally prefer slower levelling, but I think partially I was simply fascinated by the novelty of just how obscenely fast it was, partially it's that I think levelling in retail is kind of too messed up to properly enjoy nowadays anyway. When the level squish was introduced in the Shadowlands pre-patch, I was on board with the concept and liked the idea of Chromie Time in theory, to avoid the disjointed levelling experience of hopping from one expansion to the next while barely doing anything in each one, but the truth is, you don't end up fully enjoying a single expansion with Chromie Time either - you still level up too fast to get even close to finishing the story of any given expansion (even without the XP buff), so it's still a disjointed experience. The only difference is that you end up with a character who hasn't really been anywhere except for a couple of zones in a single expansion and who has no flight paths unlocked.

It seems to me that at this point, if you do want to enjoy more of the older, lower-level content that retail WoW has to offer, your best bet is to simply level to cap and then go back afterwards. Sure, combat will be boring/non-existent as you'll just one-shot everything, but if you have goals like wanting to see the story, working on a profession or maxing out a reputation, trying to do any of these things "naturally" during the extremely truncated levelling experience is just a futile endeavour anyway.

Official Hardcore Rules

I always feel a bit conflicted talking about hardcore because I've previously established that it's not my cup of tea, and I feel that one shouldn't be too opinionated on forms of entertainment one has no personal stake in. On the other hand though, it is the biggest thing currently happening to WoW Classic era, so I'm curious to see how it will shake out.

Official hardcore logo

With that said, I thought it was worth mentioning that Blizzard announced the rule-set for official hardcore servers last week, and they opened up the hardcore test realm as well.

The unofficial hardcore addon has a lot of rules beyond permadeath, and there was much debate around how many of them should be incorporated into the official game mode. As it turns out, Blizzard did make a few more changes to this new realm type beyond making death permanent, but they kept it relatively light touch overall.

Above anything else, there seemed to be a focus on preventing griefing, something that was apparently a pretty popular activity on the unofficial hardcore servers, whether it involved high-level mobs getting kited into low-level zones and wiping out the lowbies, or various ways of tricking people into flagging themselves for PvP so that they could be killed. While I don't condone griefing, I've got to admit that some of these got quite creative. I remember seeing a video on reddit of a bunch of troll players that were pretending to be mobs in a cave in Dun Morogh... I didn't even realise what I was watching at first glance until I read the explanation underneath; that's how convincing their "roleplay" was.

Anyway, none of that will be possible on the official hardcore realm(s) as no quests will auto-flag you for PvP, and accidental attacking will also be impossible as you'll only be able to flag yourself by typing /pvp or attacking opposite faction NPCs. Mobs will also have tighter leashes to prevent people from kiting high-level enemies into low-level zones.

PvP in general won't really be a thing, with battlegrounds and battlemasters getting removed. If people want to take part in any kind of organised PvP, they can do so, but death will still be permanent and there'll be no honour to be earned. The only sort of semi-supported form of PvP will be the newly added option to duel to the death, with the winner earning a cosmetic buff called "string of ears" that shows how many people they've bested this way. I thought that was kind of a neat touch actually.

There'll be no restrictions on grouping or trading; level 60s just won't be able to group with lower-level players to prevent boosting, and while levelling, characters will also be prevented from doing more than one dungeon every 24 hours to keep people out in the open world. I get the idea behind that one but I wonder how it'll work out in terms of finding groups...

That abilities like a shaman's reincarnation or a warlock's soulstone will be disabled was to be expected, but I was kind of surprised to also see them officially disable the paladin's ability to bubble-hearth, considering that many max-level hardcore players apparently achieve a similar effect on all classes by using certain consumables, but okay.

Should your character die, you can still log in as a ghost to chat, and you won't have to delete the character - there'll be a free transfer to a non-hardcore realm available. That's another nice touch and I wonder how many people will choose to take that option. I assume that the Pyrewood cluster will be the target destination for these in Europe.

Either way, like I said before - while this isn't really my thing, I'm very curious to see how it will play out.

Aberrus LFR

After my pretty positive experience with Vault of the Incarnates in LFR, I thought I might as well continue seeing Dragonflight's raids in LFR while they are the current tier. I did hold off on Aberrus just a little bit initially, partially because I wanted all the wings to be out so that I'd have the option to do the whole raid in one go if time permitted, partially because I knew that doing a whole raid in LFR was still going to be a pretty significant time commitment and I needed to not have anything else more urgent going on for a few hours.

Well, this Saturday I finally did it! I got up reasonably early, queued up for LFR once I'd taken care of a couple of things, and managed to get the achievement for raid completion by about lunch time.

It felt to me that the bosses were somewhat more varied than in Vault of the Incarnates, as there was more than one boss that made me go "huh, that's actually kind of interesting mechanically". I liked how it felt very organic to have the raid split in half for the Zaqali Assault for example, and on Rashok I wondered what kind of plan people must be coming up with on the higher difficulties to deal with the Lava Vortices. Echo of Neltharion's gimmick with splitting the room was also kind of intriguing. I felt pleased with myself when at one point a warlock cried in chat that they'd been trapped and I was able to pull them out with my Rescue ability - I think I did that successfully at least... it's not like I could actually see properly amidst all the spell effects going off.

On Magmorax, I looked at the boss abilites in the adventure guide and thought that the handling of the Magma Puddles would surely be interesting, but then it turned out that in LFR they don't matter at all as they disappear mere seconds after being dropped! I'd heard that this raid tier was one of the easiest ones in years, and this simplicity also seemed to be reflected in LFR. We one-shot all the bosses, with zero explanations, no wipes and very few deaths.

Until we got to Sarkareth that is. We did pretty well on him as well at first, with the raid eventually wiping to attrition as his health got lower, but I figured hey, it's the last boss, it's okay for him to be a bit harder. However, somehow, things only got worse on the next few attempts, with people occasionally blowing up the whole raid with Void Bombs for example. Interestingly, nobody felt the need to explain the mechanic despite those wipes... instead there was just endless complaining about someone using Bloodlust too early. Some people started to drop out and we stood around for quite a while waiting for replacements. At one point we had to wait twelve minutes to fill a single dps slot.

"What have I just joined?" a dps asked after looking at our four stacks of Determination.

"You have no idea," sighed the pally tank.

However, on the fifth attempt we did finally get the boss down, though it was an extremely close thing yet again, with only the two tanks and a rogue left standing for the last five percent or so. Good thing that tanks have such overpowered self-healing nowadays...

I myself did pretty terrible on all attempts to be honest, never getting the "hide behind a rock" one-shot mechanic quite right. I knew what I was supposed to do in principle, but I didn't immediately twig that I wasn't supposed to hide from the boss, plus the position of the rocks was often awkward and on at least one occasion the "wind" sweeping across the platform pushed me off the edge while I was trying to squeeze into the small space between a rock and the edge. My only comfort was that I was far from the only one this happened to, as the bodies of all who fell to their deaths got teleported back to the middle of the platform, and we had quite a "pile of shame" going at some points.

Either way, despite all of that it was quite a fun experience again. Sarkareth is perhaps a bit overtuned for this mode, but for the other bosses I fully support making them this easy in LFR. If you have a difficulty setting that's meant to be a dedicated tourist mode, there isn't really any point in making people wipe that many times.

My Continued Adventures in Mythic Plus

Back in February I wrote a post about trying out Mythic Plus in retail for the first time. And I had a pretty good time! So we did more in the weeks that followed... but the moment additional affixes were introduced, things got messy quickly. I'm not sure we timed anything past a +10, and the main reason we finished those at all was our friend's brother, who was an experienced retail player and did a lot of carrying. Basically, both me (the healer) and the other two dps would die all the time, and he'd be the one to combat res me and/or just finish killing the boss by himself.

I found it quite stressful. I can't exactly claim that I wasn't having any fun, but it was kind of draining all the same. It's hard enough trying to learn how to get the most out of your healing abilities while also dealing with boss and trash mechanics, but then the dps who are also noobs take lots of avoidable damage and you can't keep up, and also there's an affix that requires you to stack up, immediately followed by another one that requires you to spread out, and it's all just too much.

I remember one week in particular where I was just absolutely spent after our usual afternoon of dungeoning. Looking at the season one affix rotation, I think it must have been bursting (trash mobs explode and deal damage on death) and grievous (once you take damage, you take damage forever until you either die or get healed to full). I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that turned every single trash pull into absolute mayhem. I just kept muttering about how grievous used to be enough for an entire boss back in Burning Crusade (that crab thing in Slave Pens) and now it was just one of multiple trash mechanics. I took little comfort in finding out later that apparently a lot of healers (including much more experienced ones) also hated that affix combo.

After that, we ended up taking a break from running mythics for a few weeks for unrelated reasons, but I was honestly just relieved. I finished the season with this record, if that means anything to any of you:

However, season two came around and we wanted to try again. As a twist, we'd actually gained a fifth noob for our little team, so no more carrying.

In the first M+ we stepped into, Legacy of Tyr, we wiped on the first boss due to dps standing in fire. One of them actually commented: "Wait, that actually hurts?" We finished the dungeon fine after that, but up next was +2 Vortex Pinnacle, and that was another shitshow. The husband and I had been reasonably confident that we'd know what to do in there since we ran that dungeon many times back in Cataclysm, but as it turns out Blizzard added a completely new mechanic to the second boss that kept utterly obliterating us. I think we wiped three or four times before I gave up and googled a guide which finally told us how to deal with that new mechanic. We did finish the dungeon after that, but the timer had long expired.

Despite that rough start, I've actually appreciated this change of pace with nobody there to carry us, because it means that we have to learn from our mistakes together instead of just being carried to higher and higher keys even as we keep messing up. We're currently successfully timing +6s and looking at taking the step up into +7, which brings in an additional affix.

We did actually try Brackenhide Hollow on +7 already, but that was another disaster with a failed timer. The afflicted affix gave me another thing to watch out for as a healer (because apparently healers don't have enough to do?) but our biggest problem was that we wiped three or four times on the first boss fight. The damage was just insane and I couldn't keep up. After the husband started to lose it and threatened to just call it without even finishing the run, we suddenly sailed through the encounter with barely anyone taking any damage on the next attempt. At least that answered my silent question about whether we'd just been wiping due to my inadequacy as a healer.

The husband and I had a good talk after that, and I said to him that I could see from that run why I often see people say that it's actually the low-level keys that make people the most toxic - "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" as the saying goes, and at that level you've probably done the dungeon quite a few times on normal and heroic, leading you to think that you know what's going on, but in reality you've barely touched the complexities of Mythic Plus and are probably messing up left and right.

I remain conflicted about the whole thing. On the one hand, it can be fun. I feel I've gotten better at playing evoker (even if I'm far from great) because I'm forced to make better use of all my abilities and when it all comes together it feels great. I remember managing to heal us through a massively scuffed trash pull in Freehold and feeling very proud of myself. Learning how to deal with all the different mechanics and how to execute them correctly as a team is satisfying.

It's just... there's so much going on, and with the added time pressure I just find it overwhelming a lot of the time. At least with Burning Crusade heroics, you could start by learning slowly and then increase your pace as you got better. Mythic Plus just slaps you down with a whole new pile of mechanics the moment you think you've gotten the hang of anything.

I'd also forgotten how miserable it feels when your job as a healer is to constantly make up for damage dealers' mistakes, even more so when you're not entirely sure what's even going on and aren't confident that it isn't your fault somehow. So we'll keep at it for now, but I'm not sure how long it'll hold my attention - I expect I'll either feel burnt out at some point or we'll all just throw in the towel after getting mad at each other one too many times.

Little Moments

It was Thursday evening and I was in Undercity trying to get ready for Naxx. To be honest, I was supposed to be ready already, as I'd logged out at Light's Hope Chapel in preparation for the raid, but then I realised at the last moment that I'd forgotten something and had to fly back to Undercity to retrieve it.

As I was flitting around the central area surrounding the bank, I noticed a low level character emoting /wave at me. I didn't recognise the name, but I figured it might be an alt of someone I knew, so I politely /waved back, not really thinking anything of it.

As I continued my running around, trying to get my act together, I noticed that the lowbie had done a /kneel where I'd just stood a moment ago. Was he... trying to kneel in front of me? Why? Was he roleplaying a beggar?

Several thoughts wrestled for my attention in my mind. The Pyrewood cluster isn't officially an RP server, but as a former RP server refugee, it still delights me whenever I see people with more of a roleplaying mindset. Then again, I'm generally not too keen on people begging strangers for money or boosts - though my response does kind of depend on my mood and how exactly they're going about it.

I walked back to him and quickly inspected the character. He was an unguilded level 10 rogue, dressed in nothing but some grey and white rags - definitely looking like a genuinely new player. "You look kind of poor," I commented in /say, before opening a trade window, handing him one gold, and then once again returning to the task of finding all my stuff.

This is when I noticed that my whisper window was flashing. I've separated whispers from the rest of my chat so I don't miss any messages scrolling by during the announcement spam that happens during raids, but what happens in practice is that I often miss my whisper window flashing instead and don't immediately see direct messages when I first get them. I'll usually see them eventually, but it might be much later.

In this case, I found two whispers from the little rogue. First: "Huhu, do you have 5 silver for me, that I can learn how to fight with a sword?" And then: "OMG, thank you very much!" I had a good chuckle and responded that I hadn't even seen his whisper; he'd just been too good at RPing being poor. "This is something I hear very often 😑," he replied. Finally, I told him to go forth to train how to stab things, and he promised to do his best.

I just loved this little encounter because situations like these are the sort of thing you just don't get in more modern MMOs. They have other parts that are fun, sure, but random community interactions like these are usually lacking.

Though I did wonder whether I had somehow placed a mark on my head now, as literally the next day, a level 38 from another guild whispered me to ask whether I was up for donating to his personal fund for his first mount. I gave him five gold. Is it all the Naxx gear that makes me look rich?

In totally unrelated news, except that it's also an example of a "little moment" I guess, we've got a new guild on the server that advertises as follows: "Are you a boomer? Have kids? A job? Big cock? Then <Quitting In A Month> is the guild for you. We've got an honest name to match our realistic expectations. Join us and be welcomed into a casual guild where you'll get some free rose tinted glasses." For obvious reasons, I'd love it if they actually stuck around.

Interesting Classic Era Developments

Classic era being what it is, I don't really expect it to have any kind of active development. We can have different kinds of servers that try new things (Season of Mastery, hardcore mode) but the era servers are a museum piece in maintenance mode and that's fine.

That said, sometimes even the maintenance (aka bug fixing) can be slow. At some point in autumn last year, a client update that was made primarily for Wrath of the Lich King introduced an odd bug to era when it comes to NPC pathing near water. Basically friend and foe alike would get very confused about where the ground was when near a shoreline, and they'd either evade or randomly disappear underground.

The first time I came across this myself was while doing the chicken escort in the Hinterlands on my druid, because the chicken is stranded on a little island surrounded by water and has to go through a little moat before continuing its journey on land. The first time I started the quest, the chicken walked into the moat and then just disappeared. I ran in circles for a bit, wondering how I'd managed to lose sight of it, and eventually the quest failed as it got too far out of range of me. When it respawned and I tried again, I made sure to put a star marker on the chicken's head to make sure I wouldn't lose it again. Again it traipsed into the little moat, and then I could see its star slowly descend into the abyss under the world until it once again disappeared and the quest failed. I got lucky though, because when I tried for a third time, it just walked through the moat as normal, showing that the bug wasn't 100% consistent. I later learned that people also reported seeing it a lot when fighting mobs near rivers and lakes, such as the turtles in Hillsbrad, crocolisks in Durotar, or water elementals in Eastern Plaguelands.

It was the kind of bug that isn't exactly game-breaking, but still noticeable enough to be encountered regularly and to be quite annoying, and it didn't get fixed for almost a year! Needless to say, we got very excited when Aggrend shared on the Classic era Discord that the dev team had finally deployed a solution to the problem about two weeks ago. He also had this to say about it: "Apologies that this took as long as it did to resolve. Won't bore you with the technical details, but it was a very very unique bug that took a lot of time and testing to untangle and find a safe fix for. I hope we are someday able to write a tech blog about or something as its very interesting if nothing else." So, you know, yay!

Bug fixes are one thing though... what I didn't expect was to get news about the devs planning to actively make a larger change to Classic era at this point. We don't even know what exactly it's going to be yet, but Aggrend also took to the forums two weeks ago to warn players that they are going to make a "large update" to the Vanilla honour system and that this will include a complete honour reset - something that's quite a big deal in a system that requires weeks of furious grinding to work your way up a ladder.

I'll say up front that I have no real horse in this race, as PvP is one aspect of WoW Classic I don't really like. I had fun dabbling in AV but that's at least partially PvE, and any other battlegrounds I tried quickly reminded me of all the things I really don't like about the way PvP works in Classic. That said, I've seen my guildies struggle with the way ranking works on Classic era and have witnessed a fair bit of drama surrounding this system. (Bracket breakers, anyone?)

Basically, your PvP rank determines your access to certain rewards from vendors, and to rank up you need to grind a certain amount of honour for several weeks. You also compete with other players though, and for the highest ranks, only a limited number of spots are available each week. In fact, if the overall population taking part in PvP on your server isn't large enough, the top ranks aren't even available.

This has led to a practice called "pool boosting", where people create an army of low-level alts and kill each other over and over again at the Ratchet or Booty Bay graveyard (for instant reviving and re-killing), just to earn enough honour to count as "PvP participants" and increase the overall PvP pool size. If your server is big enough to have the top ranks available "naturally", this also works to open up additional positions.

Now, we don't really know what exactly Blizzard is planning to do - I've seen some speculate that they could do away with the Vanilla ranking system entirely and replace it with something similar to Burning Crusade's honour grind, but personally I don't think that's likely to happen. Whatever you may think of the state of "progressive" Classic, the dev team has been pretty respectful of keeping things authentic for era's small but dedicated population, so I don't think they'd do anything that drastic.

I do suspect that they'll want to address the issue of pool boosting though - while I'm not sure I would call it cheating exactly, it's definitely a case of degenerate gameplay, with people engaging in a very dull activity that was never intended to be there just to gain full access to the ranking system. So if I had to guess, I'd expect Blizzard to either decouple the ranks from population size somehow, or at least change the ratio so you don't need quite so many characters in the pool for a single person to be allowed to become Grand Marshal/High Warlord.

I'm very curious to see what they've come up with and how it'll be received by the PvP player base. I actually think that a lot of PvPers aren't hugely in love with the way the system works right now and will be quite open to some sort of tweaking as long as Blizzard doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.