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| "There's a place out there on the savannah where you can see forever, and it stirred something primal in us," I whispered. |
A lot of my problems with playing TBC Classic didn't have to do with playing a Shaman per se; I found the class very much the Horde analogue of a Paladin, and the Vanilla version of a Shaman's solo attack rotation is very similar to that of a Paladin's. To be blunt, it was the circumstances behind my playing a Shaman --and everything that developed out of that-- that I disliked. Unfortunately, that means that the poor Shaman became associated in my mind with everything that went askew in TBC Classic.
Playing a Shaman in the Anniversary servers meant I was going to pick at a scab that should have healed by now, and I knew it wasn't going to be a pleasant experience. Still, I felt that I couldn't really avoid this forever, and confronting this problem now rather than waiting until I experienced the triple whammy of leveling a Draenei Shaman in the TBC portion of the Anniversary servers was likely the best option. I could control a lot of things this way: the speed of leveling, reacquainting myself with the Old World Horde quests*, and even disappearing into the ether, truly playing solo on the "other" faction from most of my current stable of toons.
I'm not going to lie: the first few levels were hard.
I wasn't expecting the welter of emotion when I went forward into the Valley of Trials. After all, there's only a single auto-attack and a single magical attack available at the beginning, so it's not like I was doing anything complicated such as totem twisting. But I still had to get up and walk away for a bit after those first couple of quests, because apparently association is a real bitch.
A few days later and I was back again, pushing forward a little at a time. Some quests here, some quests there. The freshness of the Orc/Troll starting area and both Durotar and The Barrens helped a lot. Sure, there's a lot of running back and forth in The Barrens --that's pretty much the Old World in a nutshell-- but I don't mind that much. And doing just a little bit at a time does help to separate the Shaman from the 2021 Leveling Shaman experience.
The real question is what's going to happen when in November 2025 the TBC pre-patch drops. I don't intend to get swept up in a mad dash to level a Shaman, but given the sheer lunacy of some people to sprint to L60 on the Anniversary servers**, I can foresee some problems for myself.
But that's all about sprinting: I'm back in the crawling stage, and I have plenty of time to learn to walk first.
*My other Horde toons in Classic and Retail were Blood Elves, and their starting area will get a player to L20-L22 in Classic by the end (or whatever the level is in Retail nowadays), so you could skip the Barrens or Silverpine Forest entirely. Being a Blood Elf has it's advantages.
**Not my Questing Buddy, who admittedly is almost at L60, but those who were already getting their pre-raid BiS gear in early December.
Man, I had no idea it was that bad for you... or rather that the bad-ness was associated with the shaman in specific. I thought it would've made you more bitter about TBC in general, maybe not wanting to replay that expansion. I wouldn't have expected just playing the same class in a different context to be upsetting.
ReplyDeleteI didn't expect it either, to be honest. I knew that dredging up bad memories was a potential issue, sure, but I didn't expect it to be so ingrained with a specific class.
DeleteThe pressure to get my DPS up as a Shaman in that last month of progression raiding contributed to my distaste with the whole thing. It wasn't the worst part by far, when the leveling and raid leading experiences topped the list, but it did contribute to a huge sense of relief when I left the progression raid team.
I suppose the next step is what will happen when TBC drops in November. Given the behavior of the player base so far, there's a significant number of people who are like me and refuse to rush this time around. I'm banking on that to keep me grounded. I've even had conversations with a few people whom I haven't talked to in a couple of years who came back for the Anniversary servers, and like me they burned out on TBC Classic. They intend to go slow this time around too, because there's no pressing need to see all the content.
And I really really hope that Blizz turns these Anniversary servers into TBC Era servers at the end, so I can have all the time in the world to explore Outland.