The Winter of our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
--Richard, Duke of Gloucester, from Richard III by William Shakespeare

My Questing Buddy has had a bit of a rough time on the WoW Classic Anniversary server lately. She wanted to raid but she lives in the Pacific Time Zone, so she wanted to join a guild that raids on PST evening hours. Luckily for her, she found one, so she joined the guild and pushed to get raid ready by their start date.* Despite my reservations at how she was pushing herself --and believe me, I'm kind of sensitive to that sort of thing now-- she managed to pull it off and also get most of her pre-raid BiS gear** prior to going to her first Molten Core and Onyxia raids.

She's a very experienced Classic raider, so other than the "herding cats" portion of 40 person raids, she knew what she needed to do. Oh, and she's a damn good healer too,*** so no issues there. Given that the guild wanted to operate in a semi-hardcore manner, I figured that everybody going in was experienced in the early Vanilla raids.

Oh, how wrong I was.

The day after her first raid with them, I asked her how it went. "It was a shitshow," she replied, and then proceeded to discuss in detail some pretty standard rookie problems in Molten Core, such as line of sight issues and whatnot, but to top it off there were some questionable raid team decisions, such as taking your world buffs out of the Chronoboon**** before Garr, a boss well known to wipe undergeared MC raids. As you can guess, that exact thing happened, so everybody lost their raid buffs in one fell swoop. Well, except for my Questing Buddy, who sensed disaster looming and refused unboon her buffs as asked.

This is actually Baron Geddon, not Garr, but
you get the idea. I think they wiped on Geddon
too. From The Lurker Lounge.

There were also petty issues with loot, because instead of using DKP or Loot Reserve or even Main Spec rolls they went with a variety of Loot Council called "That's My BiS". Knowing that Loot Council was involved was bad enough, but the raid itself not going well kind of exacerbated loot issues.

After unburdening everything about that first raid night, she told me she'd give them two weeks to clean up their shit or she was leaving.

The next week, I was surprised to hear from her that the raid went really smoothly. I chalked up the first raid night to just getting people on the same page, and figured things would continue to get better.

(I did mention about being wrong, correct? Yep, I did.)

This past week was another shitshow, with similar line of sight issues, tanks yelling at healers (and vice versa), and DPS pulling bosses or not knowing where to stand, and then to top it off there was even MORE loot drama, but this time with the That's My BiS system itself and how the Guild Master let friends change their loot lists after certain loot had already dropped. It's more complicated than that, but the gist of it is that a lot of people were really upset that some people were allowed to change things after they saw what other people had wanted for their loot lists. 

Yes, I know, it's petty, but that's MMOs for you.

So, over the weekend, there was a guild meeting to see if they were going to disband or not, and the net result was that the worst offenders were given the boot and a new guild created with most of everybody else --my Questing Buddy included-- joining. I guess we'll see how that goes.

***

As for me, things have been slow.

Unlike some other versions of Linna, she's got
a serious look. That was a mistake as I was in a hurry
to make sure nobody took the name, but I do kind
of like it. When Paladins are "working", they tend
to be pretty serious. This is a listing as of January 27, 2025.

Not slow as in "not leveling fast" --okay, there's that too-- but slow as in "not doing much". 

I spend a bit of my time moving from place to place, doing this and that, but just am not really feeling into playing the Anniversary servers very much. Or truth be told, WoW in general. I had 1.5 days off last week, and you'd think that I'd have gotten online and played a bit, but... nah, I didn't. I did other things, such as cleaning. Or napping.

Or, worse, upgrading my PC to Windows 11.

No, I'm not thrilled about that, but if we were going to be forced into it by Microsoft, I was going to be the one to go first and upgrade my kids' laptops later.*****

When I am online, I've discovered I've leveled so slowly that even people I've had conversations in Westfall about taking their time while leveling are in their upper L30s and lower L40s now. As you can tell from the loading screen above, my highest toon is L22. I can now spend an entire evening on a single toon and not get that toon to go up a level once. I don't mind the lack of progress, but I do mind when people want to help me out. I get where they think they're helping or they just want to play with me, and there are times when I wonder if I'd still be kind of meh about WoW if I were closer to max level.

You apparently get a mustache too.

This old chestnut came out in March 2014.

The in-game boosters do play on this FOMO, but I don't think that's it. I've even begun avoiding my friends' alts when I play, because I'm just not really feeling it and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer.

Well, there's also the likelihood that my friends will want their alts to be boosted, but I have enough toons I'm working on that if I did get a boost run somewhere on one of them I simply won't play that toon until my other toons catch up. Given the slowness of the leveling pace, it may be a couple of weeks between playing on the various toons.

***

Just when I wasn't really feeling it, my game time expired on Monday. 

This was the first time in about a decade  --and the first time since August 2019 when WoW Classic launched-- where I sat there and gave serious thought whether I should purchase another 60 days' worth of game time or not. I've toyed with it in the past, but I don't think I ever really thought about it that seriously until now. In the end, I decided I was going to just let it lapse for a few days. I imagine that there's going to be a rush of FOMO at first --it happened when I unsubbed in 2014 before Warlords of Draenor came out-- but after that dies down in a few days if I still kind of feel like I want to play, I'll go buy another 60 days' worth. 

We'll see how it goes.

*Obviously, it was going to be much faster than I wanted to get to level cap.

**"You lucky bastard!" was how I put it when she described how many attempts it took to get her "blue dress" from UBRS. Something along the lines of 2 or 3 tries. And yeah, our other friends have been getting drops like the Hand of Justice out of Blackrock Depths or the Recipe for the Crusader Enchantment with such ease that it makes a mockery of the incredibly bad luck I have in getting gear and/or drops.

***Which is kind of funny, given that we met when she was tanking on her Druid, and she also raided on her Warlock in TBC Classic.

****Blizzard created a Chronoboon, a device used to store world buffs, as a single use item sold by a vendor in the Western Plaguelands. While not found in original Vanilla WoW, it was created to combat the problem generated by people who would accumulate all of their world buffs prior to raiding and then simply log out for several days until raid night. This way, a player could store the world buffs until they were ready to use them in the raid.

*****Things went very smoothly, to my surprise. There's a bad driver here and there, but nothing I can't fix.

EtA: fixed "over" with "other".