Sunday Musings on the WoW Hardcore Servers

After having spewed out content on a daily basis in August*, I took this week off. 

Work had something to do with it as well, since I have some big meetings coming up and with yet another new platterful of stuff to work on.

Still, thoughts about games and whatnot haven't been too far from my mind. 

Mainly, what do I think of the Hardcore WoW servers?

***

Okay, let me get this out of the way early: I have already made peace with the likelihood that my toon is going to die. I mean, I even named her Deathwyn and instead of long black hair she has short blonde hair. The polar opposite of ol' Card.

There ya' go. Same blue eyes, tho.

The playstyle is exactly as it was for Vanilla Classic and Classic Era, so me playing on Era servers for the past 8+ months it has been a smooth transition.

But beyond that, I play like I did when I first played on Stormscale-US all those years ago.

In a nutshell, I play in a similar fashion to how I've always done, but since Stormscale was a PvP server I learned very early to have my head on a swivel and always take into account any and all potential threats.

See a bear waaay over there? I'm killing that before I attack the mobs I was here to kill. I'm not taking any chances. 

In a normal situation, I might just kind of wing it until said bear is a bit closer, but I'm not messing around on the Hardcore servers. In the same way as what I learned during my first exposure in Hillsbrad on a PvP server, you can't take anything for granted.

I'm already looking ahead to what instances might look like.

Normally, as an Alliance player, I'd expect to enter into the Deadmines as maybe L18 or L19. I'd even accept grouping up with an L17 as long as they knew to not overpull; several months ago when Era Cardwyn was starting out, we even took an L14 and got most of the way through until we got to the boat**.

On these Hardcore servers, I think L21-22 minimum is a safer bet for everyone involved. And if someone wants to be an idiot and take a severely underleveled toon into that place, go ahead. I'm not coming along.

And I'm fine with that.

To be honest, I can get away with that because a lot of the decent gear a leveling Frost Mage has are the items that they can make via Tailoring.

I'm used to playing conservatively, so Hardcore servers just make me slow down even more. And I don't even bother with baddies like murloc packs or gnolls in Westfall because I know that 2-3 coming after me is a recipe for death, so it's much smarter for me to relax, pull back, and make like predators on the Serengeti: hit the isolated and weak ones.

Outside of that mental adjustment, the vibe from the HC servers isn't as bad as it was when the Hardcore Challenge was merely an app. Sure, it can get crowded, but it's not terrible. (The phasing has helped a ton with this.) And without people being able to run boosts and whatnot --or try to do anything vaguely resembling a GDKP run*** there's a dearth of bots and whatnot. Those few bots I've seen out in the wild --they tend to have junk names that don't mean anything at all-- have died pretty early in the leveling process. 

One thing that hasn't changed: the idiotic arguments in Trade Chat.

For example, I left Stormwind the second day I logged in because people were arguing over what shorthand to call Dire Maul versus The Deadmines. Both can use DM, hence the bitching, but as I pointed out before I left there's probably only a handful of people on the Hardcore servers who could even enter into Dire Maul, so there's absolutely no reason to fight when for 99% of Hardcore Server players Dire Maul isn't even an option.

So, not everything is hunky dory in Hardcore land, but that's fine. It's an engaging diversion from when I'm playing Era, but not something I'm going to go all in on. 

I think.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Atheren, who managed to track me down already on Skull Rock-US and send me some Health Potions and some bags. They have been much appreciated, even though I've been mainly stockpiling the potions for emergencies.

*One day I missed because I miscounted and thought I'd already posted, but I made up for it by posting twice in the next day.

**Said L14 told us "they were almost L15", but after not leveling through the entire Deadmines instance I was calling "bullshit" about that to my questing buddy. As proof, when Card was high enough she helped out some friends through Deadmines and all of them leveled at least once during the instance run.

***For the uninitiated, all raid participants have to have a certain amount of gold on their person --you have to have proof before you're invited to the raid-- and have to bid in gold for items that drop. This is apparently the "meta" on Wrath Classic servers these days, and on large servers such as Atiesh-US that has colored everybody's approach to the game. If you want to pug things, you'd better be able to buy gold or you have to put up with the gatekeeping on 5-person instances if you want to do group content. On smaller servers --such as what Old Blanchy-US or Bloodsail Buccaneers-US are-- the culture is different, so it's not as bad there. But for me, I don't feel like giving Blizz money for the privilege of avoiding the mess they helped to create. I've said this before, but in the off chance you missed it, there ya go. And to be fair, I had a hard stop on Wrath Classic servers anyway, because Cataclysm Classic will be coming next year. 

EtA: Corrected grammatical errors.