A Tale of Two Extremes

One of my unwritten rules about pugging is that I don't go all in until I get a feel for how a tank and healer operate together. It obviously goes without saying that such a conservative approach would not be good if I were to ever get the urge to run Mythic+ instances in Retail, but it's served me well over the years. My credo boils down to "Don't do anything stupid, pull threat, and wipe the group while people are feeling each other out."

Well, I figured I hadn't been on my two Horde toons in a while, so why not pull Neve out of the garage and go visit Scarlet Monastery? Neve is a Frost Mage*, so she consequently has a lot of utilitarian/crowd control abilities. When you combine that with my 'starting off slow' approach, what could go wrong?

Almost from the beginning, the Healer kept pushing us to go bigger. "I can heal through it," she said.

When I used single target for the first couple of mobs, she said "Mage, AoE to save mana instead of single targeting when over 3 in a mob."

I was annoyed at that because we originally had three in the pull but two additional enemies came wandering in midway through that fight, and I mentioned as much. 

"I main a Mage," the Healer replied. "I'm used to it."

"I main a Mage too," I replied, "and I want to make sure how well tanking is working before I go ham."

"You'll pull threat. It's what we do, get used to it."

I grumbled at that. There's enough tanks I know who dislike that belief and the behavior it encourages that I was immediately sympathetic toward the tank, who said nothing.

We got partway through the instance, and then the tank said "brb 5 min" and then stayed put.

Well, the Healer was having none of that, so she started pulling mobs one by one and we slowly worked our way forward. I suspected the tank was just going to basically go AFK and then vanish, and sure enough he did just that. So the Healer got another tank and we continued on and finished the run. 

Once we finished it, the Healer dropped and we got a new Healer. The tank, after the first few pulls asked me to go single target because he was having trouble keeping threat with me constantly AoE-ing so much. "I know you want big numbers and all," he began...

"I'm fine with single target. Whatever you need," I finished. "We don't have that first Healer around, and that's fine."

"Whew," our new Healer said. "I'm still learning healing." 

"No biggie. I want to go at a pace you're comfortable with."

***

It goes without saying that while that first Healer was definitely skilled, I preferred the second Healer because I worked at the pace that the Tank and Healer were comfortable with. I didn't need any extra drama, and I think that's a problem that some people seem to relish causing. 

This reminded me of the time back in 2022 when I attended an AQ20 raid where our Raid Leader had pugged one of the two tanks, who turned out to be from the top raiding guild on our old Myzrael-US server. Yes, the guy was good at what he did, but he wasn't interested in listening to what the Raid Leader wanted, which drove all of us nuts. He began freelancing his way through the raid, ignoring our Raid Lead and essentially directing people to do it his way.

Well, our Raid Lead kicked him, top guild member or no, and our Guild Master also kicked him from our Discord. Sure, the tank we got as a replacement wasn't as good, but at least he could work within the raid team paradigm.

There comes a point where you have to relinquish your desire for big numbers to work with the rest of the group. MMOs have "multiplayer" in the acronym, after all, and the entire point is to work with people to accomplish a singular goal. If you're not interested in that, maybe finding a group of likeminded people is best for you, so that I can grab a bowl of popcorn and watch the fireworks when they start.

*Cardwyn: "I approve."
Me: "That's nice and all, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't need your approval."
Cardwyn: "We mages stick together. End of story."

Me: ::sigh:: "Why can't the voices in my head be more normal?"

Second Verse Same as the First

After my previous post about how leveling seems to have been subtly speeded up, I decided I was going to make some changes how I was going to approach leveling in Outland.

As of April 15, 2026.

I was originally planning on leveling Briganaa all the way to L70 and then go back and level other toons one at a time. After the process of slowly leveling what eventually became 4 toons at once, I figured changing the methodology was in order. 

Well, then I met the speed of leveling in Outland.

In the two weeks that I've been enjoying the view in Hellfire Peninsula, I now have one toon at L62 and two at L63. I suppose it's slipping back into old habits, but I discovered the quickest way to combat a game that insists on pushing me faster toward max level is to simply spread out the leveling process among several toons. At the moment I intend to stick with three, but I think that I'll eventually bring five into Outland.

Something I have been wondering about is what I intend to do once I start getting toons to max level. Even if the leveling slows down the farther in I go, I expect some of these toons to be getting to L70 by July. What to do then?

Well, the first thing I've thought of is to simply not get flying. 

Blizz opened up the quest chain for the nether drake mount
right when the Dark Portal opened, so you can't go a couple
of minutes without seeing a player on one. It's almost
as bad as seeing the paid boost ground mount "reward"
everywhere as a reminder that people paid money to
skip playing the game.

I don't need it to get to max level, and since I'm not raiding I don't need to do the Tempest Keep instances as part of any attunement quests.* I don't intend to impoverish myself just because, and I'm still expecting  a lot of players to stop running instances as time goes on. Other than getting to Tempest Keep, there's no real reason to get basic flying: a fast ground mount is quicker, a Druid's fast flight form is much quicker at diving in and obtaining gathering nodes**, and it does cost a bit of gold.

Is it a hipster move? I'm sure some people would say yes, but I pushed back on it even in 2021 and then in late 2022 in Wrath Classic. I simply don't want to be a slave to having to make gold just to get a mount that I won't really use, and I don't like standing around somewhere, preening and showing off my new fancy mount and/or gear.*** 

If I'm not doing flying, and I'm not raiding, I'm starting to think about running some Alterac Valley battlegrounds. I'm not interested in Arenas because I know I'm not good enough for them, but I would like to go out and play some AV for a change. I could also run some instances, so long as I'm not required to utilize flying for them.

And, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Horde toons around. I ought to work on them too.

*You need flying to get to the Tempest Keep instances. No way around it, as the time of posting you can't even summon a player in front of the instance entrances themselves. I do think that'll change as time goes on, but I'd not count on it just yet.

**That happened in 2021, where Druids with fast flight form would frequently pick entire zones clean of gathering nodes because they were so fast compared to anybody else. So, why should this be any different once a Druid's fast flight form becomes available in Phase 2?

***Yes, I'm the sort of guy who, when presented with a cost-is-no-object choice, would likely end up buying a decent quality-built sedan to drive around with. I don't want to be seen, and I don't want anything flashy. In my experience, people noticing you isn't really a good thing; as I like to tell people who I am introduced to in meetings, if you don't know my name it's because I'm doing my job well, and if you know my name it's probably because people were shouting it during emergencies.

Meme Monday: Work Intruding on Real Life Memes

Yes, yes, I know: work IS real life.

Yeah, but on the argument of "live to work" vs. "work to live", I'm definitely on the side of "work to live".  I can be a workaholic as necessary, but I prefer to keep work to a minimum. I have work acquaintances and friends, and I have acquaintances and friends outside of work (in various hobbies). Never the twain shall meet, and I prefer it that way. 

I've learned that even though I work in a "geeky" job, that doesn't mean that people in that career are into geeky hobbies. Quite frequently, the people involved are as anti-geek as you can possibly imagine, almost to the point as if they were deliberately trying to prove they were NOT geeks.

But no matter, these memes are for those times when you want to do your geeky hobby but work intrudes...

Pretty sure this started out life as a TikTok meme.
From Instagram.

Been there. This past week, in fact.
From Instagram.

I have had bosses who told me I didn't have the fire to
go all in on whatever the job I had was. Well, call me
crazy, but I think I get more motivation out of my hobbies
than most work. Period. From Reddit (and Mematic.)
 

I've heard that one before. Still, on a Mac? Impressive.
From Memedroid.

Yeah yeah yeah. From Reddit (and Imgflip).

Uh....
From Memedroid.
Although originally from
Pizza Cake Comics.*

*Reference courtesy of Shintar.

We've Gone to Irrelevance Speed

I suppose that it's inevitable that I would have more thoughts about being in Outland for the third time.

Okay, it's not the third time ever, to be certain, but going there fresh as part of either a first time through WoW (back in 2009) or through WoW Classic when the TBC portion was current (2021 and now 2026).

It's definitely not my first rodeo in Outland, but it's my first time going there in a fresh context in almost 5 years. This is also the first time I'm heading to Outland --period-- without a further goal in mind. In 2009 it was to get to Northrend and to the current expansion to meet up with Souldat and his wife who got me into WoW in the first place, and in 2021 it was to get to max level and ready for the initial tier of raiding within a specific time limit. Here, in 2026, I don't have any further goal other than exploring Outland and just getting to L70. No raids, no Endgame, no Heroic Instances, nothing more than the Journey itself.

Late Sunday I got Briganaa 2.0 to Zangarmarsh, the second zone in Outland. There's one questline I refuse to do in Hellfire --the one that eventually leads me to killing Maghar Orcs-- so I was largely finished with Hellfire Peninsula. I arrived at the Cenarion outpost in the marsh, collected a bunch of quests, and ran up to the initial Alliance base in the zone and did the same*, then a strange sensation began to take hold of me, so Monday over lunch I dusted off Card and sent her over to Outland to see if that sensation went away.

Yes, getting the Robe of the Archmage sewn
was one of the goals I'd set before she crossed over.

The Burning Crusade questing feels like it's designed to push me into going faster, and I can't shake that.

It's all relative, of course, but it certainly feels less organic than Vanilla questing does. Some of this is explicit to the Anniversary servers, where the sparklies that indicate that something is the object for a quest is now present on the Anniversary servers**, which completely eliminates the need to look around with your eyeballs on the screen and remember what the quest text said. Considering that I'm practically the only person on the Anniversary servers to not use Questie*** I'm probably the only person to notice, but it's pretty obvious to me that Blizz said "here you go: you want it, you got it" and there it is. Quest markers all pop up on the mini-map just like they did in Wrath Classic, so I've suddenly found myself staring at the mini-map far more than actually paying attention to where I'm going, which is never a good situation to find yourself in when there's Fel Reavers wandering around. 

When you combine those quality of life changes with the questing hub changes, it's become far more explicit that Blizz is streamlining the leveling process further than in 2021. Wrath brought in the concept of the zone stories, complete with phasing, so that's not present in TBC, but it's only when you decide the journey is the destination do you begin to realize that the pace of the journey changed. 

***

It did feel that while Brig was leveling in the Old World she was almost effortlessly moving forward, but not so quickly as to outlevel her ability to pay for training, gear, and consumables. When the Joyous Journeys buff made an appearance in late TBC Classic in 2022, it was tuned to level you so quickly that you'd outstrip your ability to make gold to pay for those associated costs. I found that similar to the leveling process on the original WoW Classic Seasonal servers, Season of Mastery. When you can't afford even the basic spells for L10 because you leveled so damn fast, then yeah, you've got a problem. Apparently Blizz tuned the Anniversary servers better without creating an explicit buff, so that while the leveling was faster in the Old World, it wasn't so fast that you couldn't afford to level so quickly. 

But now, in Outland, everything seems tuned just enough to make it easier and quicker to go through the leveling process. Mobs do seem to respawn faster (except named mobs, as one of my friends noted the other day), they go down quicker, and the XP feels... chunkier, maybe? That last one I'm not sure of, but I do know that when you combine these changes with the TBC-specific tweaks to the concept of quest hubs****, boy do I get the urge to just keep going and not pay attention to things such as sleep, food, etc.

At first I wanted to describe the leveling in Outland Anniversary Edition as hollow or boring, but that's not it. It feels like the leveling is being pushed toward irrelevance by speeding it up. Given that TBC Anniversary will only be around for a year, I guess it's not that great of a surprise, but it certainly shows that speeding up the leveling process doesn't make for a better experience by itself. Leveling on these Anniversary servers is merely a means to an end, and you're in the wrong place if you want to enjoy leveling itself.

If there's a Wrath Anniversary Edition coming this Fall, then we can expect some further streamlining going forward. It wouldn't surprise me if the concept of Follower Dungeons gets ported back to the Anniversary edition, in a bizarre reversal of Retail being the testing ground before being added to the Old Game. However, that will only come into play if we have a repeat of the collapse of instance grouping as happened in 2021, and the No Changes crowd has sufficiently been cowed into submission.

***

*Blink blink*

I just thought of something. 

Could it be that the "big thing" that Holly Longdale teased in the Community Update video be a release and support of "official" private servers for Vanilla WoW?

It's most definitely NOT Classic Plus, but it would eliminate the private server problem in one fell stroke.

*Plus getting the flightpoint.

**It was in Wrath where that first began showing up.

***If there's somebody out there who doesn't, I've not seen it yet. Whenever I'm in a group, and I'm talking about every single time, if someone gets all the items for a quest the Party chat immediately is spammed with an announcement saying that they're done. Another reason to not want Questie is that it can snoop on you and share your progress with others in your group, providing they also have Questie installed. 

****Unlike Vanilla WoW, the quests are congregated more completely into centralized quest hubs. If you go into Ashenvale as Alliance in Vanilla, quests are scattered throughout the zone and you're constantly running back and forth across the entire length of the place. However, if you go there in TBC and Wrath, several of the quests for the eastern part of the zone are moved out of the Shrine of Aessina area and to Forest Song, which becomes a fully developed quest hub. Blizzard centralized things further in Outland, where the questing equivalent of "one stop shopping" allows a player to blow into a quest hub, grab everything, and head straight on out into the field.

Meme Monday: Car Memes

We've come to the realization (meaning I've come to the realization) that my old 1997 Honda Accord is probably headed for the end of its life. When the repairs are no longer just "routine maintenance" and more like "well, this nearly 30 year old part just wore out", it's time to start looking at replacements. I'd have considered keeping the car around longer were it not for potential repair bills in the next few years being more than what the car is worth.

You get the idea. From pleated-jeans.

So... I've come to the reluctant conclusion that it's time to start looking around again. 

In honor of that experience, I figured a few car memes were in order...

This is a warning to all potential car buyers.
From pleated-jeans again.

So there are pitfalls when looking at a used car... 
From of all sites The National Kidney Foundation.

But I do have to maintain a budget.
From Bored Panda.

I guess he likes the old movie Death Race 2000.
From Wrench.com.

I'm pretty sure I would have had an accident
from laughing too hard if I'd have seen
that on the road. From pleated-jeans.

Uh.... OUCH. From Instagram.

Space Goats Coast-to-Coast

Thankfully, I've not run into my griefer the past several days.

That doesn't mean I've not been in instances over that time --I have been in two-- but my little friend was not a participant.

However, Briganaa 2.0 has made it to L60*, and after working on getting a few skills up to snuff, this happened early on April 1st:

Some things never change.

Given that the date was April 1st --aka April Fools Day-- I avoided posting anything yesterday lest people think I was pulling their leg.

I've noodled around Hellfire Peninsula a bit...

It almost got me, but here's proof that it didn't.

Killed a few things...

Sorry I didn't get a more dynamic screencap, but
I was a bit busy actually killing him. That green thingie
is an moustache-twirling Villain saying "You killed
my minion! I'll get you next!"

And I have a few thoughts.

• Outland is easier in 2026 than in 2021.
  
  That's not just a generic impression left to the nerfing of the Heroic 5-person instances and the raids, but fighting out in the field. As I explained to my Questing Buddy, whereas she had PvP gear when she crossed over (her Tier 3 gear was all healing stuff so it wasn't useful for questing) I had pretty much the same gear when I crossed over in 2021: a mix of quest greens with a decent amount of dungeon gear from Zul'Farrak, Maraudon, Sunken Temple, and Blackrock Depths. And about half of those items have already been replaced by quest greens from Hellfire Peninsula, so I'm definitely on similar footing with what I had back then. I even have the same Class (Shaman) and Spec (Enhancement) that I had in 2021.
  
  And to me, it's pretty obvious that the mobs aren't as difficult as they were in 2021. 
  
  The Expedition Armory, the ghost area directly south of Honor Hold, was a place that bedeviled me back then. This time around, I have no issues single pulling an enemy at a time, and even holding my own with two of them at once. The road toward Shattrath City, which is crawling with Ravagers, were also no problem at all.
  
  Could this be simply due to experience? Perhaps, but I doubt it. It's been 5 years since I last was in Hellfire Peninsula, and I have forgotten a few things in the intervening time.** I have been playing as if I were in 2021, taking my time and being cautious, but I certainly feel like I can move faster if I chose to. I also suspect the XP rewards are higher than in 2021, because the leveling seems quicker as well. I'm almost to L61 and I'm not even halfway through the zone itself.
  
  
• There are people here, but not even close to what you'd expect in the early part of an expac.
  
  Seriously.
  
  
  
  
  
  The only place where I was constantly running into too many people were in the initial quests just outside of Honor Hold, where I found an L70 killing mobs for an L58-L60 toon --who said boosting was dead?-- and over on the path toward Hellfire Citadel. Aside from that there was plenty of space to spread out. I also noted plenty of queries for group quests in Gen Chat, but not so many that it was overwhelming.
  
  There was also ample evidence that during the day the crowd was not very large, as the layers were about 6 deep:
  
  
  
  
  But did balloon back to 10 deep at night:
  
  
  
  
  There were some people who were hanging around, showing off their flying mounts (no, I didn't get a screencap of them), and there was a steady flow of activity around the PvP locations in Hellfire Peninsula***, so when you add that activity and the L70s going to raid or run instances at Hellfire Citadel, it seems more active than it is. Most L70s are likely raid logging at this point, although once I reach Shattrath City I'll get a chance to test that theory.
  
  
• Finding some gathering nodes are easier than others.
  
  Brig 2.0 is a Skinner/Leatherworker --and, uh, I need to work on the Leatherworking side of things-- so she doesn't have any issues killing beasts and then skinning them as part of her questing activities. I've also seen plenty of herbs around, just waiting for people to pick them.
  
  But mining nodes? Good luck with that.
  
  Every time I've been close to a mining node, someone comes swooping down from above and farms it within a few minutes. That's kind of crazy, given that Hellfire Peninsula isn't exactly where you'd expect the Miners to be congregating at right now; they're probably at Blade's Edge Mountains or Shadowmoon Valley if I'd a guess.
  
  I'm also aware on an existential level that the bot farms are fighting back against the current state of anti-bot behavior with the WoW Classic team by mass reporting so-called "legitimate" farmers as bots, and letting the (presumably) Copilot-driven AI automatically ban them. At least one member of my Questing Buddy's guild has been banned (and then unbanned when he complained) by a bot farm for farming the same area the bot farm wanted for themselves.
  
  
• The more I read Gen Chat in Outland, the happier I am not joining the Rat Race.
  
  If there's one thing I've learned over my raiding experience from 2020-2024, it's that raid teams and raiding philosophies are always in flux. No matter your stated goals for a raid, they never remain static. There is always a trend toward either more hardcore raiding or being a "farm team" for another raid. If you're a good raider, you'll get contacted by someone from another raid to snap you up and join their raid team as that raid team loses people to other raids. 
  
  That's the lie that nobody talks about: you can play with friends, but how long will those friends play with you if they hear the siren song of faster progression or a better raid team? I've watched my raid team fall apart due to regular defections from the best players, who even though they knew the pace we were going to run at decided to push for changes almost immediately after joining the raid. I've also seen friends leave because they were also members of another raid team and that raid team demanded faster progression out of them. So, when push came to shove, friendship wasn't quite as important as that other raid team.
  
  Maybe after a decade of raiding with the same people (as in well-established raid teams in EQ/Retail WoW/etc.) you have had all of those issues shaken out, but I've yet to see that happen. 
  
  As much as I hear my Questing Buddy downplay how hardcore her raid team is, I can speak as someone looking in from the outside that they are very hardcore. While they may not have explicit raid materials requirements that other raid teams do, the expectation is implicit because they utilize Loot Council to distribute gear: If you're not pulling your weight, you won't get gear. It's quite amazing how that tends to focus the mind if you want to progress. 
  
  Are they a top guild on the server? No, absolutely not.
  
  Are they hardcore enough that the only places that people can go to are either sideways (skill-wise) or to a top guild? Yes. There's not very many levels between them and the top guilds, so if you want to leave their raid team to go to a "better" one, you're going to end up on one of the top guilds' raid teams. They also have an advantage in that they're one of the few raid teams that raid on Pacific Time as opposed to Eastern Time (or China Standard Time), so they will attract the top players for their time slot.
  
  Now, the $100,000 question: would I like to raid again?
  
  Yes, but only on my terms. 
  
  I know what the pressure of expectations are, and I'm sick of it.**** I don't play video games to get all the best gear, I play for the satisfaction of having done a good job my way. (Or, given the circumstances, a good story.) I'm not interested in speed runs or what the meta is, because both of those assume you can not only understand what needs to be done (yeah, I can do that) but have the physical skills to accomplish that (I'm in my upper 50s; I know my limitations). I was one of the oldest raiders on the Valhalla raid teams, and despite my Mage Class Lead being happy with my performance, I used to get harassed by people who wanted to "help" me play better because I was always a step or cast slower than the others.***** And my experiences in Wrath Classic with our little 10s social raid taught me that --no matter what-- I was always going to be a step slower than everybody else. Therefore, I'm not going to force myself past my limits just so I can raid and make my friends uncomfortable with my inability to keep up with them. 
  
  But would I like to put my ghosts to rest? Absolutely.

I've successfully navigated things this far, and once I crossed the Dark Portal and settled in, I began to relax. Another ghost vanquished.

This encounter was even closer, as I had to
transform into a Ghost Wolf and run away from
a fight, but the Reaper er, Reaver never got me.

And it needs to be said, I'm glad I haven't ended up on a Fel Reaver's specimen listing...

*I didn't get the "Ding!" screencap because I forgot.

**I don't use Questie or any other quest aids, so I'm utilizing only the game's default settings.

***There were pretty regular complaints in Gen Chat about "The Horde is not playing by the rules", to which I laughed. I've seen the same complaints on the Horde side in the past, so I think it's safe to say that both sides are violating The Shattrath Convention, as I tongue-in-cheek call it.

****I get that IRL at work, so why should I want that at home?

*****This continued into my progression raiding in 2021 TBC Classic. I was always middle of the pack in DPS, and always a cast or physical attack slower than the other Shamans on the raid team. The only one who was comparable to me quit pretty early on in the Phase 1 raids in 2021, because TBC Classic didn't turn out what she hoped it would be. And she was one of the few people in my age range (she was a few years older).

EtA: Corrected a couple of misspellings and some grammatical errors.

Meme Monday: Griefer Memes

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I dedicate today's Meme Monday to the practice of griefing.

If you want to know why, just look at the last three posts I made.

The certainly are, Buzz.
From Imgflip.

I sometimes wonder if that's how they look.
From Reddit.

You do yeoman's work, sir. Just accept that
you did it for the greater good. From Reddit.

Yeah, imagine that.
From Imgflip via Reddit.