Too Much To Do

One reason I was originally hesitant to join a guild in Classic was that I was worried that I might end up liking it too much, leading to me wanting to spend more time in game than I realistically have available for this particular endeavour. This pretty much happened. D'oh! I sort of already wrote about it back in October, though I focused on the pull of wanting to be social with my guildies back then. However, another dimension that I haven't really talked about is that - once you get into the group content - it feels like there's just so much to do in Classic at max level, especially right now.

I've often expressed my disdain for the way Blizzard changed retail WoW to basically always be just about the latest patch, with any and all content from previous patches being obsoleted almost instantly unless you're into farming cosmetics. I will admit though that I hadn't considered just how exhausting it could be to on the other hand have everything be relevant to your power progression almost forever.

Just looking at the raids, Classic WoW has six of them at this stage of the game, with all the original content released: Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Ruins and Temple of Ahn'qiraj, and finally, Naxxramas. You'd think that if you're clearing most of Naxx, there wouldn't really be any reason to go back to any of the older raids unless you want to gear up an alt or something, right? Weeeell...

Molten Core is probably the closest to being truly "obsolete" at this point except for fresh sixties, however the legendary Thunderfury remains alluring, giving warriors in particular a reason to keep dragging everyone else through the place regardless.

Blackwing Lair drops some much better pieces of gear than MC, but still, most of them are superseded by Naxx gear, right? Again, weeeell... most of them, but there are some rare trinket drops that are Classic best in slot forever, giving people chasing their BiS incentive to keep coming back for a shot at those rare drops if nothing else.

Zul'Gurub was introduced as a smaller-sized catch-up raid for fresh sixties, so you'd think it would be in a similar position as Molten Core by now, but something that I didn't immediately realise was that it's also the source of the only real worthwhile enchants for the head, shoulder and leg slots. Head and legs require idols, of which you can only ever get two per run. Shoulders require exalted reputation as well as a lot of tokens farmed from trash drops. Basically, have fun farming this place forever until you've got your final BiS and got lucky with rolls often enough to enchant it all.

AQ20 is another easy raid in a similar vein as Zul'Gurub, but here the perpetual draw is that it drops max-rank spell books for three spells for all classes. At least these can be traded between players, so you don't necessarily have to go there yourself to get them all, but someone's got to keep running the place to supply the market. Those books don't appear out of thin air.

AQ40, being the last raid before Naxx, is another interesting one because while for some classes it's pretty pointless to go there if they can get Naxx gear instead, there are sets in there for certain classes and specs that don't really get superseded by anything else, meaning you'll have a particular niche of your raiders forever clamouring to re-visit this raid as well. I guess I've got to give those Vanilla game designers credit for succeeding at keeping players interested in all the raids.

Now, lest you get the wrong idea, I'm not actually raiding all these places every week, and neither does my guild as a whole. We haven't been to MC since just before Naxx release for example. But everything else... people do go back to at least sometimes, and I in turn feel a certain pressure to come along if I can, both to work on still improving my pally's gear to help with our Naxx progression but also just to simply help make up the numbers.

So in addition to everything else I'm now actually also looking forward to Burning Crusade for the simple reason that we'll only have one tier to work on to begin with, leaving a lot more "free" time to spend on alts or dungeoneering. And any character copies that I keep on original Classic realms will simply have forever to achieve their goals there, with no more changes coming after that. I guess right now there's just a sort of unique pressure to "finish off" as much as we can, as anything achieved now will benefit both characters moving forward into Classic BC and those staying in the Vanilla world.

A Shadowlands Achievement

While discontent bubbles in the retail WoW-sphere due to the longest content drought following the launch of a new expansion in the game's history, I'm actually having a pretty good time with Shadowlands. I've long found retail WoW's "expected" content cadence unpleasant, not because getting new content is inherently bad (duh!) but due to it also always involving a relentless push to forcefully consign everything current to the dustbin of obsolescence at the same time.

The big project the husband and I have been working on for more than two months now are Torghast's twisting corridors. Initially I wasn't too thrilled by the idea, because while I liked normal Torghast well enough, our runs tended to last up to an hour as it was, and with the twisted corridors being three times as long, the thought of repeated play sessions requiring an uninterrupted three hours seemed a bit daunting. The game mode grew on me however, with the additional floors allowing for some truly ridiculous power combos by the end that set it apart from normal Torghast and made for a varied and entertaining experience.

I was wondering whether setting our eyes on the ultimate goal of completing layer eight was maybe a bit ambitious for our casual weekly adventures, considering that the recommended item level for the final layer is 225, while the husband and I are both capped at 200 or less due to the solo/duo-centric nature of our gameplay. As it turns out, it's perfectly doable with a lower item level though, and today we finally became the proud owners of our very own corridor creeper mounts. Since 9.1 appears to still be a couple of months away, we'll even get to enjoy the prestige of being able to ride in the Maw for a short while, before that patch turns that into business as usual for everyone.

I do suspect that going in as a duo meant that we had it relatively easy in terms of scaling, and I also haven't heard anything about either prot warriors or mistweaver monks having a hard time in Torghast in general. Not to mention that we'd also already maxed out our reputation with Ve'nari and bought all the possible power-ups for Torghast... still, it felt like an achievement, if nothing else for the sheer amount of time it took, and we did have to fail on the final layer twice before getting it down.

The first time we'd already lost several lives on the way to floor 17, at which point we got an awkward layout in Mort'regar where two elite deadsouls with particularly nasty abilities got the drop on us at the top of a staircase, causing us to die repeatedly and run out of lives, leading to our first and only encounter with the Tarragrue. The second time things seemed to be going smoothly until floor 12, where we ran into Patrician Cromwell, who absolutely destroyed us with one-shot abilities. I tried to look up some strategies and tips, but the comments on the Wowhead page I linked above mostly consist of people complaining about how overtuned that boss is and that they couldn't get him down either, so we eventually gave up before we'd even run out of lives as we just couldn't see a way of dealing with him.

Conversely, our run today was among the smoothest we've ever had, with only two deaths in total, both of which happened on the Coldheart mid-levels when I fell victim to ambushers from above. The final wing we had to contend with was Fracture Chambers and actually felt oddly chill in comparison, with the last floor before the boss consisting of more pottery than enemies. Such is the luck of the draw, but it still felt great to get it down. Now we'll actually have to start thinking of some new goals to pursue!

Four Horsemen and a Paladin

It's been two months since I last wrote about my guild's Naxx progression, which is really kind of surprising considering that I spend two nights a week in there right now. I guess I just don't have that much to say about the day-to-day of it, but after two months an update certainly feels in order.

Monday night was a good night not just for Redbeard, but also for the Forks as we got the Four Horsemen down for the first time. This brings us up to 13 out of 15 Naxx bosses killed, compared to the 8/15 we were at when I last posted at the end of January.

Gluth was really just about figuring out a kiting strategy. We eventually ended up going for a paladin spamming Blessing of Kings as the kiter, with mages and some warriors helping to slow the mobs. It still feels messy every time though, and the kiter is usually dead by the time the fight is over.

Thaddius took a few attempts for everyone to get comfortable with the polarity shift mechanic but wasn't as bad as I had feared.

In regards to Loatheb I mentioned last time how we wiped at five percent or something - well, eventually we got there. Ironically, we then had another two or three weeks of failing on him again due to healing screw-ups that needed sorting out, until we finally got him to something you can fairly call farm status.

Gothik, for me, was a lot of boring waiting around while people endlessly discussed what to CC and what to kill and when, none of which was anything I could help with. Eventually something was figured out that worked, or maybe it just took us that long to actually get it right.

But then, the Horsemen! The fight known to give guilds of all levels pause and put their skills to the test. As I told Red, this was actually one challenge I wasn't worried about, because we've spent so much time failing on easy stuff, failing on a harder fight for a while should be a piece of cake in comparison. And it was... fine.

We started off using an addon that's supposed to show everyone where to move during each part of the fight, but it conflicted with some things so eventually dropped it, though it was a good tool to get a grasp on the basic mechanics of the fight. By Classic standards, it's a relatively unforgiving one with quite a lot of personal responsibility, and losing a single tank or healer usually meant a wipe, which meant that as a dps I barely got to practice one or two rotations before the call to mop up went out on most attempts, but eventually we got there. I made a kill vid too!

Next it's onwards to Sapphiron. We had some attempts on him so far and the main takeaway from them was that we should probably get some more frost resist gear than we brought originally, as well as some more healers. Speaking of healers...

At the end of January I paid to attune my paladin to Naxx. It was with an eye on Sapphiron, where we knew we'd need some dps to go on healers at least during the learning phase, but as it happened we actually found ourselves short on healers quite a few nights before that. Theoretically we have enough of them on the roster, but sadly a number of them have pretty poor/irregular attendance, which threatened to throw many a night into disarray if some people hadn't changed to healer alts.

 

I'm one of about four people who've been doing this regularly and it's been... alright. It's no secret that I enjoy healing, though I have to say that healing in a forty-man raid is comparatively boring, as it rarely feels like you make a difference being one of three to five people spamming the tank. Also, if you think grabbing and retaining world buffs on one character is already a pain in the butt, let me say that doing it on two (when you're not sure which character you'll be needed on for which fight) is worse.

Ultimately though, I'm glad that I put in the work to gear up the pally to help out as I know that on quite a few nights, me and others having these healing alts has probably been what made the difference between being able to kill Patchwerk or Loatheb or not, even if you don't really feel your personal impact as the twelfth healer during the fight itself.

Two bosses to go, and while the beta for TBC Classic has started, we still don't have a release date, so I'm hopeful. We can kill ten bosses on our first night pretty consistently now, which then leaves the second night to clean up the remaining three and work on progression. While I didn't even plan to raid when I started playing Classic, after coming this far, I'd really quite like to see Naxx through to the end.

My Classic TBC Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building My Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shadowlands Systems in a Nutshell

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

Covenants!

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

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

Anima!

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

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

Soulbinds!

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

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

Conduits!

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

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

A Naxxramas New Year

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