Alts in Outland

Considering that I went into Classic BC with four characters at the old level cap and how gung-ho I felt about the expansion at first, I didn't think it was going to take me this long to level more than one character to 70, yet here we are. On Saturday I finally hit level 70 on my mage.

One reason I struggled to work up enough enthusiasm to level my alts was that I'd forgotten just how samey the 60-70 experience feels in BC. Sure, there's enough content there that you could technically mix it up a bit by e.g. skipping straight ahead to Zangarmarsh and mostly ignoring the quests in Hellfire Peninsula, but it's most of those quests that give the best rewards to help get you started in Outland, so do you really want to skip them? But then doing the same few quest chains over and over within the course of only a couple of months gets old pretty quickly.

I would have expected that my natural tendencies would push me towards getting either a tank or a healer up next, for their utility in group content but well... that turned out to be more complicated than expected - more on that in a bit. The mage had the advantage that I could farm and quest with ease even while keeping an eye out for dungeon groups, but more than anything else, her professions were an incentive to work on her before any of my other alts. Specifically, I really wanted to level her tailoring to be able to upgrade my bags across all my characters without having to pay anyone any money, and while her enchanting is still very behind, I at least got it high enough to be able to disenchant Outland greens and blues and keep myself supplied with my own enchanting materials.

Even so, her actual progress in terms of levels happened in fits and spurts, meaning big pushes followed by periods of complete inactivity, the latest of which had set in just after she'd hit level 69. Interestingly, what ended up finally motivating me to get that last level was the fact that last Thursday, on her 13th Prince kill, my hunter finally got her Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix - meaning that in terms of loot, she's now more or less done with Kara. But I want to have an excuse to keep running it without contributing to all the loot getting sharded! So I ground out that last level on my mage at last so that she can be my replacement in tier four going forward... after all, Blizzard went ahead and took out the Kara attunement early (yes, even though we're only in phase two you can already get in there by having someone else open the gate for you), so it really was just about hitting the level cap, not even necessarily about completing my own attunement.

My holy pally and feral druid are both still level 62 and in somewhat of a weird place. Since Sarelle was the alt on which I raided Naxx, I naturally assumed that she would be my next priority after Tir, but healers were actually somewhat in overabundance right after the Dark Portal opened. I blame the 40-man raids... because if you look at their group make-up and then were to split them up into nothing but five-man groups, you'd actually end up with about the right amount of dps, but too few tanks and too many healers. That's why our little dungeon group on launch night ran with not one but two healers... so there really was no demand for healer alts on top of that.

In addition, the nerfs to holy paladins and buffs for all the other healing classes meant that they also feel somewhat less fun to play than in Classic, relatively speaking. I mean, you look at something like a healing druid getting tree form and compare it to holy pallies getting a mana cost reduction cooldown that only slightly compensates for the fact that their mana regen was hit with a massive nerf bat to begin with, and... yeah.

My feral druid on the other hand has had very different but no less interesting problems. Tanks are always in demand, right? The thing is, I tanked one dungeon for my guildies and it was strictly speaking a success... there were no wipes and I'm not sure we even had a single death, but aggro was all over the place and my health kept bouncing up and down like a yo-yo because I was so badly geared. (Having only hit 60 during the pre-patch, my druid was the least geared of all my alts.) This ultimately left me feeling bad about the whole experience and I vowed to myself to not tank another dungeon until I'd got some gear upgrades from Outland quests, plus I also specced out of my hybrid spec into full feral to get the extra threat generation from Mangle.

And that's... where I'm still sitting now. Her gear is much better already, but I'm still hesitant to tank again. I'm not afraid of tanking in principle, but tanking roles in BC have also shifted from how they were in Classic, and at least when it comes to dungeons, paladins are very much the flavour of the month expansion. It's not that warriors and druids can't do the job, or even that I'd think a group that has been "LF tank" for a while wouldn't be happy to take any class, but warrior and druid tanks have to work so much harder than pallies to keep aggro and of course the dps don't like waiting two seconds to give you time to build threat, so it makes for an unsatisfying experience all around and I'm actually not sure I want to deal with that.

Maybe you're reading these last few paragraphs and find yourself wondering: Why not just swap roles? Make the druid my healer and the paladin my tank? And indeed, why not? It would certainly solve a lot of my gameplay issues... but at the same time it doesn't mesh with the identities I envisioned for either of these characters, and that's still something that matters to me too, so I don't know. It's a slightly awkward situation.

Burning Crusade Daily Quests

One of Burning Crusade's big new features back in the day was the introduction of daily quests in patch 2.1. Before that, infinitely repeatable quests hadn't really been a thing... there were a couple in vanilla WoW, such as from that goblin on the coast of Feralas, but they didn't reward anything other than a bit of rep and were definitely edge cases more than anything else. 99.9% of the time, quests were a one-and-done thing.

It's hard to recall my own feelings about the first daily quests so many years later since I wasn't blogging regularly about WoW back then, but I think overall I liked them? I didn't do them religiously (I wrote about how I never even bothered with the Netherwing for example) but the Ogri'la dailies played a bit part in me being able to afford epic flying the first time around. I also remember that I actually liked how many of them didn't require much or even any combat, which was a godsend on my holy priest in particular, who sucked at solo grinding.

Classic approached things slightly differently in that it had four daily quests in Shattrath available from launch, which originally weren't actually added until later: the cooking daily, the fishing daily, the daily dungeon quest and the daily heroic quest. I can't say that I minded as I definitely found all four of these very valuable.

The fishing daily is a great incentive to finally level up your fishing skill in small, discrete chunks. It randomly rotates among five different quests and only two of them require a fairly high skill - two of them can be done at medium skill and one already at really low skill, so you can just pick it up whenever it works for you. My hunter maxed out her skill a long time ago but I still keep checking back every day to see whether Crocolisks in the City is up, which also has a rare chance of rewarding you with one of four baby crocolisk pets.

The cooking daily is a good way of keeping yourself supplied with meat and fish for buff foods without having to go out and farm them, and also has a chance of rewarding a selection of rare recipes. I stopped doing it once I had all the recipes on my main and also didn't need to keep myself supplied with buff food anymore, but I'll likely pick it up again whenever I get an alt to level 70.

The two dungeon dailies were the very first iteration of what would later become the daily random dungeon reward - every day you'd be incentivised to do a different dungeon for a little extra gold, rep and currency. I don't think anyone ever did these religiously, but their rotating nature did help provide a bit of variety, discouraging players from simply spamming whichever dungeon they found easiest and making it easier for people to get groups for a less popular dungeon whenever it was also one of the dailies.

Still, these were all small fries really. When Classic Burning Crusade opened the doors to Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, it also unleashed the first "real" daily factions onto the player base: the ogres of Ogri'la and the Skyguard.

I didn't check them out immediately because I wasn't playing much anyway, but I have to say when I finally went I was decidedly underwhelmed. I remember them being these bustling hubs where there were always people, but I've only seen very few players around whenever I've gone this time around. I guess the rewards are mostly inferior even to Karazhan gear, and with how easy it is to get into a Kara run in Classic, why bother grinding the rep? Lack of gold also seems to be much less of an issue for modern players than it was for us back in the day. Even I've got my epic flying already.

But the quests themselves also left me feeling slightly bewildered. First off there was the bombing run, which I hardly remembered at all, until I placed the bomb clicky on my action bar and something stirred in the back of my brain to remind me that I used to have that on there pretty permanently back in the day too. I think I didn't like the quest as much back then because without epic flying it's a bit awkward and back then I didn't get that speed increase until later.

Nether ray wrangling was still decent fun, but the Simon Says game was a nightmare. I even died once! I don't know if I just don't remember this or if it's a bug in Classic, but often when I click I'll get the visual effect for when you made a mistake even though I'm clicking the correct sequence, which just throws me off. Also, my short-term memory seems to be much worse than it used to be as I just couldn't make it to the end of a sequence unassisted for the life of me. Eventually I gave up and started taking notes from the fifth round onwards, but I still felt vaguely ashamed for needing them.

Ultimately it seems to be just another thing that's not as good as I remember. We'll see whether it'll be more interesting to potentially have a look at the Netherwing at level whenever those get added.

Character Transfers & Season of Mastery

In Classic era news, there are now free character transfers available for a number of realms in both the US and EU regions, including away from Hydraxian Waterlords and to Pyrewood Village. A keen member of one of the Discord servers I'm on noticed the option before it had even been officially announced.

My impression is that quite a few of the old max-level players on era are taking the option to transfer, and the guy who invited me to Azuregos a couple of times has been talking to me like he assumes that I'll come along as well, but I'm still not sure about it. If I was serious about continuing to play on era it would definitely be the sensible option, but I'm not sure that I am, so why bother?

If the destination server was empty for me, I could still do it easily just because, but even though the PvE server cluster consists of several realms, for some reason the transfers are only available to Pyrewood Village - which is the server on which I originally started playing Classic as Horde, meaning that half my character slots are already taken and I'd have to make choices about who to move and who to leave behind or whether to delete any characters. That just feels like too much decision-making energy for something I'm not too sure about, but I guess we'll see. Just putting my thoughts about this into writing kind of makes me want to do it more to be honest.

In other era news, Blizzard provided more details about the fresh servers they hinted at a bit over a month ago. The whole project will be called "Season of Mastery" and will include #slightlymorechanges as they put it, including a condensed 12-month release schedule, more health for raid bosses, no world buffs inside raids, and the addition of selected quality-of-life improvements from Burning Crusade, such as no debuff limit, faster levelling and meeting stones becoming summoning stones.

That sure does sound somewhat intriguing, but I was already dubious beforehand how relevant this was going to be to me personally, and hearing that they'll be trying to cram all of Classic's content into a single year only confirmed to me that this one's going to be a hard pass for me. I suppose it might be interesting to watch from the sidelines though. If nothing else this initiative's popularity will show how representative the people always clamouring for fresh servers really are of the wider player base.

At a Crossroads

In case you're wondering why I haven't really written anything about Classic in a while, truth be told, I haven't really been playing much. I just log in once a day to check whether the fishing daily is Crocolisks in the City (I think the baby croc pets are cute, so sue me) and then I log out again.

For a while I was still running Karazhan with my guildies on Thursdays as well. Even if I didn't really feel like playing the rest of the week, that one event at least gave me a reason to log in and it was nice to still be social with my old raiding buddies on Discord after I'd demoted myself to non-raiding member. However, recently I had to sign off for two weeks, and when I returned I found that the Thursday Karazhan sign-up sheet had disappeared due to lack of interest. Now there's only the Sunday run left, which clashes with other obligations of mine.

I'm not sure where that leaves me with Classic to be honest. In some ways it feels like I've come full circle and am back to where I was at the start of OG Classic two years ago: being a social member in a guild where I don't really interact with people and just do my own thing. The main difference being that this time around I've got baggage, and it's hard not to feel a little melancholy comparing my situation in the guild now with the fun times I had as recently as half a year ago. (Has Classic BC really only been out for four months? Hot dang.)

There are still goals I could pursue, that I likely will pursue at some point, but at the moment I'm not really feeling it. I miss that innocence I had at the start of Classic, when I didn't care about anything but taking in the beauty of the virtual world around me and following whatever breadcrumbs the game laid out in front of me. Stepping down from raiding hasn't entirely rid my brain of some of the trappings that came with that activity, so that I log on to find three different addons screaming at me about how they need updating, or I end up looking at certain pieces of gear and feeling dissatisfied that I haven't upgraded them yet, even though it really doesn't matter now. (I'm still wearing my tier three helmet from Naxx...) It all just feels... tainted somehow. I honestly feel a little jealous when I read about something like Wilhelm tackling the Blood Furnace with his friends for the first time (in Classic) only this month, with not a care for anything else going on in the game.

At the moment I see three potential ways I can go from here: I can continue doing what I'm doing (as in, barely log in) and hope that I'll eventually settle into a new, casual routine that I'm content with. I could try to have a kind of clean break from where I'm now and focus my play on an area where I don't have the same emotional baggage (revisit my Hordies, roll a new character on a different server etc.). Or my time with Classic will come to an end for now.

The Toxicity of Damage Meters

I've been thinking about damage meters lately, for three different reasons.

One is that I found it interesting how in a recent post by Kaylriene about toxicity in the WoW and FFXIV communities, a lot of the bad behaviour he talked about seemed to at least be partially inspired by people's reading of damage meters. The second reason is that part of the feeling that my Classic guild became too competitive for me to continue progression raiding was due to people suddenly talking about damage meters a lot. Thirdly, in our little retail levelling group, one of my guildies decided to install a damage meter and started commenting on people's dps, and I was surprised by how much that instantly irked me.

First off, to get the obvious out of the way first, obviously damage meters are not inherently evil, and in harder content they are a useful tool to diagnose problems. The problem I have with them is their seeming ubiquity in WoW and the way players use them to turn absolutely everything into a competition, no matter the circumstances. (When I returned to WoW two years ago, I never bothered to install a damage meter addon myself by the way.)

When I expressed some of my disappointment in the constant damage meter talk during raids on the guild Discord prior to stepping back from progression, I got some pushback along the lines of: "But people are only saying nice things, such as congratulating the top dps [after every single trash pull...], what's wrong with that?" At which point I disengaged from that conversation because trying to get people out of that box was clearly getting too deep for random guild Discord chatter, but the question behind it has continued to bounce around in my head ever since.

It's not that I don't get where they're coming from. I, too, used to be that person who unthinkingly had their damage meter open all the time. There's a post on this blog from back in Cataclysm when I mused about how odd it felt to do some dungeons without it after a patch had briefly broken my addon. Back then my ultimate conclusion was that while I kind of enjoyed the experience of not having to worry about anyone's numbers, harder content simply made it mandatory, as wiping all the time without understanding what's going on isn't exactly fun either.

The thing is, since then I've spent the last ten years playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, which doesn't have universal combat logging, and found that to be an improvement in pretty much every way. The thing is - and while I initially found this system kind of clunky I actually think it's genius now - SWTOR allows personal combat logging, so if you care that much about your own numbers, you can see them, but you can't see anyone else's without their explicit permission. The latter requires you all to log into a third party program together, which is absolutely what we do when we do harder progression content and need to see in detail what's happening. But that random pug you decided to do? Has no idea about your actual numbers, and neither do you about theirs, and I'm glad because not everything has to be a bloody competition. (Also, it means that if there's a problem, everyone has to work together to try and solve it instead of simply trying to identify the weakest link according to the meter and kicking them, but that's just a bonus really.)

There is nothing wrong with competition, I can be quite competitive myself under certain circumstances, but there's a time and a place for it. There's nothing wrong with running a race, but if I invite you to a stroll in the park, you starting a stopwatch and constantly bringing up our current walking speed is going to feel odd at the very least! At worst, loudly comparing and rating people in various categories of your choice is generally considered quite rude.

And let's be clear here: A lot of MMO content is definitely not designed to be competitive. Sure, you can absolutely do a Maraudon speed run to see who can clear the place the fastest, and if I see that sort of thing on YouTube I genuinely admire the effort, but that doesn't mean that every Maraudon run ever should be a speed run from then on and that people who just want to see the sights and kill bosses are in the wrong.

And that is my problem with talking about damage meters, in a nutshell. It shifts the conversation away from the stuff that I enjoy, the stuff that we all got into the game for in the first place. We choose the framework through which we view a game like WoW, and fixating on damage meters is a choice to turn the game into a competition, even in content that isn't meant to be. It doesn't matter to me if your constant talk about "pumping" is positive or negative, because I reject the whole idea that we should be spending our evenings measuring who's got the biggest coloured bar to begin with. I log into an MMO for the explorative aspect of solo play and the fun of grouping.

I know that different people have different priorities, but I do find it frustrating that we seem to have reached a point where many WoW players seem to struggle to even conceive of a world where we simply don't think about things like dps very much, and don't understand how it can be a burden to be unable to opt out of that, to be publicly rated every moment you're grouped whether you want to or not, whether you're struggling to hit a dps check in a raid or merely breezing through a lowbie dungeon.

And I do think it's telling that for the dozens of different addon functionalities that Blizzard has incorporated into the base game over time, live damage meters are something they have refused to touch with a bargepole to this day. I think it's because they know that this functionality is something that actually makes the game worse for many people, and if things like dps numbers were literally visible to everyone, all the time, by default, it would make for a horrible experience. Just something to think about next time you feel like giving unsolicited commentary about someone's position on your meter addon I guess.

My First Shadowlands Alt

It took a while, but I actually got a second character to sixty in retail this week - the demon hunter I started in May. Her levelling journey could be described as... unconventional. As mentioned in the linked post, the demon hunter duo I started with my husband actually made it to fifty in no time at all, but we resisted Blizzard's push to continue into Shadowlands - because what for? So we spent the next few months puttering about in Legion content and gaining practically no XP. (One day I'll finish that draft about what I thought of the rest of Legion.)

Much to our surprise, we did eventually discover one source of XP inside old expansions though: archaeology, which for some reason hasn't been split out into different sub-professions for each expansion (unlike every other profession) and allows you to skill up and level seemingly anywhere without penalty. We stumbled upon this as Legion featured a fortnightly archaeology quest which we got into the habit of doing. So we slowly but surely started to gain levels from that. Just don't tell Blizzard please, you know they'll nerf anything into the ground that causes people to "play the game wrong".

Anyway, I was already entertaining the idea of how amusing it would be if we got all the way to sixty from nothing but archaeology... but every now and then I'd find myself fighting a mob of my own level (usually one of those guys that can spawn at archaeology dig sites), and it became very noticeable that while my level was going up my gear had remained static, which due to the nature of WoW's scaling meant that my character was actually becoming weaker and weaker - that's also why I had so much trouble with the scenario to unlock lightforged draenei.

I was starting to worry that I might end up entering Shadowlands in a position where I'd actually be unable to kill anything, what with mobs scaling to my level... so I decided to give in and do the introduction to Shadowlands at least. Turns out this was already considered low-level content for me as well, so it wasn't too much of a problem, though sadly it didn't reward a single piece of gear.

Once I reached Oribos, I was presented with the option to skip re-doing the Shadowlands storyline and level via "Threads of Fate" instead, which I took. It honestly was a bit disappointing though because I thought this meant that I would be completely free to choose my own sources of XP. I guess technically I was, but for some reason Blizzard still felt the need to also give you a quest flagged "campaign" which requires you to do a fill-the-bar routine in every zone. I guess they figured that just leaving you to fill your XP bar at your own leisure wasn't providing enough direction? I don't know.

At least you can pick the order of the zones, so I decided to go to Revendreth first since I'd made my demon hunter a Venthyr. I almost instantly regretted my choice though when it took me about ten minutes to find the entrance to the covenant sanctum... Revendreth is just a horrible zone to navigate. Fortunately the husband at least reminded me that the Shadowlands flight unlock is account-wide and also applies while levelling.

The final couple of levels to sixty then came in what felt like no time at all, though they were filled with a lot of dying on my part because it was just such a struggle to kill anything with my low-level gear. Whenever I managed to find and complete a quest that rewarded a gear upgrade, it more than doubled my stats in that slot.

After filling my Revendreth bar I was finally awarded a new weapon too, though this then led to the bizarre dilemma that my legion twin glaives were considered a single item that couldn't be split up, but my quest reward was only a single warglaive. I didn't really fancy fighting one-handed, but fortunately a world quest was up that didn't require any combat and rewarded a fist weapon to put in my off-hand.

I'm not sure where I'll take this character from here. I might do some casual work on the covenant campaign over time and get a few more gear upgrades, but I don't really fancy grinding Shadowlands content on a second character. I just wanted to not punch like a wet noodle anymore when fighting mobs of my level, but once that's sorted I might just go back and see whatever's left to do on the Broken Isles.

Remember Rades

Yesterday I found out via Twitter that Rades of the Orcish Army Knife blog passed away this weekend. 

Okay, I’ve received his brother’s blessing to share this with Twitter at large. With deepest regrets, I’m sorry to tell you that the inimitable @_Rades passed away suddenly this weekend. To know him was to love him. He was the most creative, hilarious and kind person.

— Stacey (@_vidyala) August 30, 2021

He's still there on my blog roll, even though he stopped being a regular WoW blogger quite a few years ago. He never really quit or anything, he just moved on to other endeavours, only using his blog to occasionally post Onion-style news articles about whatever was going on in Azeroth at the time.

I can't say that I knew him well, but I knew him in that way bloggers often know each other... where they sometimes read each other's posts and occasionally leave a comment. Even if the majority of our interactions happened more than a decade ago now, I still thought of him fondly. Back in 2010 I nominated him for "best writer" for the Pink Pigtail Inn list of the year. (I wonder whether that still means anything to anyone other than Redbeard.) It's not a lot, but it's not nothing either.

So hearing the news of his passing made me sad. Death is always a gloomy affair, but even more so when the person affected was still very young and full of life. The "suddenly" in Vid's announcement indicates that there hadn't been any ongoing illness previously.

In a way I find these sorts of news even more profound when the person was a blogger. I think it's because with the way we put small parts of ourselves onto the page day after day in a way that feels quite permanent, it feels like we as people should also be around forever... even beyond that youthful sense of immortality that most of us have at some point whenever we manage to spend enough time not having to think about death.

But then something like this happens and the updates just... stop. It seems strange that his post from March this year mocking the Horde's talent for picking terrible warchiefs (as well as Activision-Blizzard's hiring choices... topical!) will now be the last thing to ever appear on Rades' blog. He was more active on Twitter, where his last update will now forever be a quip about (what I think was) his D&D campaign from a little over a week ago.

I suppose one bright spot is that with so much of what he did written down somewhere on the internet, he's left everyone with lots of tangible memories to go back to and remember him by. I went back through some of his old blog posts and it was quite a trip down memory lane. Like how his paladin alt Fabulor turned into this whole comic personality - on some posts I even found comments from my past self expressing my amusement.

I also enjoyed people on Twitter sharing their own favourite memories of him, showing off some of his post-WoW endeavours - from Vid reposting strips of From Draenor With Love, the webcomic the two of them created together for several years, to Anne Stickney highlighting his creations in Animal Crossing (also inspired by Fabulor, clearly) to a race track entirely made of beer signs he built in Wildstar.

It's clear that he was an awesome person beyond WoW and blogging, and I can only express my deepest condolences for his friends and family, for whom this must be a horrible loss. All the rest of us can do now is remember.