What Would Frank Think?

"I hate this song. I HATE THIS SONG! I got it up to here [with] this God damned song!"
--Frank Sinatra on My Way, 1979

 

Last Thursday, when I finished and posted this post around lunchtime, I was about halfway through L69. Several hours later, after work, it became obvious to me that if I wanted to ding 70 I could do so Thursday night.

I'd been working on both Shattered Halls and Karazhan attunement via the quests and pugs --and courtesy of a serendipitous encounter in Netherstorm-- I didn't have to try to find someone to group up with to finish the last quest up there. The XP from those quests alone took up about a 1/4 of a level, so by the time the evening rolled around I only had 1.5 bars to finally cross the finish line and complete leveling Briganaa.

So, I took the rest of the evening off and helped my leveling buddy with her L34 Priest by killing mobs for her. Oh, and in the process I worked on leveling my skinning as well.*

I'd been at L69 for a couple of days by then, and I'd started getting whispers from people saying that surely I was going to ding soon.

"Soon enough," was my typical reply.

My leveling buddy knew I was close and accepted that I was going to do what I wanted to do. She'd been patient with me while I bitched about how TBC Classic had played out on the server**, and she was happy to get a chance to get her Priest leveled a bit as I'd left it in the dust a couple of weeks ago. So we knocked out about 4-5 levels for her while I brought my skinning to the point where I needed to head out to the Hinterlands to work on pushing it closer to 300.***

***

Even then, she sprung a surprise on me during a conversation we had early in the week. The conversation began with my concerns about getting enough gold for flying, because that was going to be the big sticking point in Karazhan attunement. She told me not to worry, because the gold rewards are a lot higher than even I'd be expecting. "You're talking upwards of 20 gold for quests in Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley," she told me.****

"So how are the quests in Shadowmoon Valley?" I asked.

"I wouldn't know, because I've been waiting for you to reach L70 so we can quest there together."

My breath caught. She'd been at max level since shortly after I arrived in Outland, which while it had been a short time overall, it felt like an eternity to someone who leveled a Shaman from scratch. "You waited for me?" I finally typed out.

"Sure! Why?"

I completely lost it. 

I put my head in my hands and began to cry. "Because all of my MMO career," I finally typed out, "nobody has ever waited for me. Ever."

"Isn't that what friends do?"

"Well, yes, but.... That's never happened to me before."

This Penny Arcade comic from 2004
has been my MMO experience. And I'm
never the one on the cat.

For me, the MMO experience has largely been a solitary one because everybody I ever made contact with or joined up with while leveling has eventually left me in the dust in the pursuit of max level. Or, in the case of my current situation, I was already at max level so there was nothing to wait on. But the past month and a half has been an exercise in awakening all of the old resentments and demons concerning leveling out in the field, and how isolating that can be when you want to be playing with friends. 

I guess I'd just gotten used to raiding with regulars that reverting to my solitary MMO experience has been a shock to the system, particularly when bare lip service has been paid to the Leftovers while everybody else has been "leveling together".

But this.... This was proof that someone was out there who cared enough to do something I'd never experienced in game before. And I proceeded to lose my composure for about 10 minutes. Thank goodness I wasn't on voice, or that anybody else in the house wandered over during that time.

***

The promise of questing together weighed on my mind while people who hadn't said crap to me during the entire leveling Death March suddenly started becoming interested in my progress just as I was finishing up. It was then that I decided I wasn't going to give people the pleasure of self congratulation by saying congrats to me that evening.

I was going to ding my way, and my way was doing it when nobody was looking.

After helping my leveling buddy get her Priest 5 levels, I logged for the night with several completed quests in my queue. If things worked out right, I'd be on first thing Friday morning before work and get this done.

As the sun rose on the 25th, I got up, helped get my wife out the door to work, and settled in with some coffee. I logged in, found that I was literally the only person in guild online, and smiled.

I ran over to drop off several different quests, and afterward I found myself about half a bar short. 

"I suppose I could drop by Blade's Edge and knock out a quest there," I mused.

Then a request to assistance kill Teribus came across LFG.

"I can help," I replied, and rode over to the eastern side of the wasteland surrounding Auchindoun.

Even though Teribus has three people recommended, we knocked it out with just the two of us. It helped that the other player was a Hunter, and between their pet and my Fire Elemental (courtesy of the Fire Elemental Totem) we one shot Teribus.

I rode back to turn the quest in, and found myself exactly 1000 XP short. So I flew up to Blade's Edge mountains. During the flight one person in guild logged in, but I wasn't too concerned about that. I landed, found a couple of lynxes, and....

There was nobody in Blade's Edge either
that morning.

I nodded in satisfaction. It was done and only one person was online to notice.

And that person didn't notice for 10 minutes or more, in which I got a belated "I didn't notice you'd dinged!" gratz. 

At lunchtime, I logged in, got some quests done, and much to my delight nobody noticed. Or noticed enough to say anything that one of the Leftovers had finally made it to L70.*****

After work I logged in to run some more quests and I joined up with my questing buddy to start work on Shadowmoon Valley.

 

Some things about Shadowmoon Valley never change.

By then I got maybe one or two whispered congrats of the "I didn't notice you'd dinged" variety. My standard response was "I snuck in the back door first thing in the morning, when nobody was looking. Pretty much as I liked it."

That night was a guild first attempt at Gruul's Lair, and I was happy to not be in attendance. I had gold to make via questing and a mount to attain. By early evening, I was sitting on about being 150 gold short if I pooled all of my gold, and I blinked. "That's a lot closer than I was at the beginning of the day," I told my leveling buddy.

"Have you been looking at the gold rewards? They're 10+ gold per quest."

"Well yeah, but I still wasn't expecting it to rise that rapidly."

Later that evening, my leveling buddy took off for the Gruul raid, and I continued to quest and get across the the gold finish line. Sometime before the raid started, I pooled all of my gold, took a deep breath, and set off for Shadowmoon Valley again. I handed over what was for me an obscene amount of gold for the flight skill (800 gold), and then selected the nondescript "standard" looking griffon as my flying mount (another 100 gold).

And, because I'm me, I was flying around in Blade's Edge and accidentally dismounted.

Oops. And given the proximity of all those
baddies, I had to take rez sickness. Double oops.

 

At least I provided entertainment.

***

And then, after supporting me for so long, it was my turn to support my leveling buddy.

She went into the raid feeling like her DPS was lousy and that she was going to be carried by all of these players who'd raided Naxx while she hadn't gotten inside the place at all. Luckily for me, one of the raiders streamed the Gruul event, so I hopped on to watch.

I turned on my analytical mind and watched the first couple of pulls on the first boss, and I was impressed by what I saw. "You're doing really good," I told my questing buddy. "Seriously bringing the heat there!"

"Yeah, but we wiped."

"That happens. It's how it was for us in Naxx: we work and get things down and then finally once we figure it out we've suddenly got it."

And then they brought down the King on a subsequent attempt.

"Did you see my DPS?!!" she asked excitedly.

"Hell yeah!! You're doing great!!"

Gruul Dragonkiller was next.#

I watched the first couple of wipes, and although the spacing wasn't the greatest, I saw the potential. 

"You've got this," I told my leveling buddy on the third try.

The first shatter phase came and went with minimal deaths.

"As long as they can keep Team Evil## upright, you've got the DPS to take him out."

Another shatter phase, and then another, and critical DPS pieces stayed alive.

"GO TEAM EVIL!"

Gruul was rapidly approaching a growth point where he'd simply deal too much damage for the healers to keep up with, but the DPS was still there and steadily bringing him down. 

"10%."

"7..."

"5..."

"3..."

"1..."

"Boom!"

"Yay!" my questing buddy exclaimed. 

"You did it!!"

It turned out later, courtesy of Warcraft Logs, that the Gruul kill was the "worst" on the server. One healer mentioned that her gear was so bad that she didn't even get a parse rating. That, to my mind, means that without the gear it was mostly skill --and some luck-- that helped bring about the kill.

And I was incredibly proud of my questing buddy, who acquitted herself well.

 

*Let's not talk about my Leatherworking skill level. Let's just say that it's in the Apprentice range.

 **I continue to hear stories about how people quit their guilds based on the behavior of guild leadership and others favoring one raid over another or one group over another. All of this was entirely preventable given enough planning and proper management, but the more I see how things shake out the more I realize that "proper management" is sorely lacking in the majority of guilds out there.

***I did that later, and then after a bit of time in Eastern Plaguelands, aka "nobody goes there to skin so it's a good place to skin if you want to be left alone", I moved on to Silithus. When I was skinning there, the average number of toons in the zone was... 6. Pretty much how I'd always found the place before Classic came along.

****Again, I didn't record the conversations in this post, so it's approximate.

*****There's an addon that the guild promotes for use, called Guild Roster Manager, that has a ton of automatic tracking features and alerts when things happen, such as leveling or when people go AFK for a while. Maybe that's good for a large guild to have officers use it, but from my perspective it's pretty damn invasive for joe average to utilize. And, as it goes without saying, every level that I made that I never got a gratz on (unlike the main leveling bubble that sprinted to Outland the moment the Dark Portal opened) is highlighted there by GRM and their users, so I knew pretty much that a decent subset of the guild didn't give a crap about the Leftovers if they weren't gonna say anything even though the alerts were right in their faces. 

#To be perfectly clear, I'm not exactly sure why we're trying to kill Gruul at all. Anybody who kills all of those Black Dragonflight dragons is an okay person in my book, but that's how the raid goes.

##My nickname for the Warlocks.