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| Yeah, Hoots again. No biggie. This is what the stable of toons looks like on April 8th, 2025. |
See that bar on the top? If you select the Mode button, you get this:
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| Five separate "Classic WoW" modes. |
The Shop (thankfully) doesn't have anything for the non-progression WoW Classic modes:
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| Soon.... Right? |
Well, given that the Cash Shop button used to be inconspicuously in the bottom left of the loading screen, such as what you can still find in Cataclysm Classic...
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| Ta da! |
That tells me they're aiming to utilize the Cash Shop in WoW Classic Era and its clones.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Operation Spread the Love update...
***
As you can see, I did not reach the so-called midway point in leveling any of my toons this past couple of weeks. Part of that is due to the slowdown in leveling itself, but another part of it was due to my interest in fishing.
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| I guess I should be happy that Card took advantage of that free port to Moonglade during the Lunar Festival. |
Since my toons were all over L25, they could spend a gold --not a cheap endeavor in a Vanilla Classic environment like the Anniversary servers are-- and get a book you can read to gain access to the next level of a lot of secondary professions: Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, etc. So Card picked up the Fishing and Cooking upgrades and then set about leveling both.
If you've never played Old World style of WoW, the process of leveling Fishing and Cooking is pretty much symbiotic: you fish to raise your Fishing skill, but also for the raw fish you can then cook to raise your Cooking skill. Once I got my Fishing skill high enough, it was late enough at night for me to go ahead and see if I could fish in Moonglade for that classic catch, the Nightfin Snapper.
Nightfin can only be caught at night in certain places around Azeroth, but as long as you have access to Moonglade, it's at least safe to be fished for there. Most other places are in high level zones, the lowest being Feralas with the upper L40s / lower L50s mobs, so that's definitely not safe for a lowbie toon like my stable. Nightfin can also be cooked to create a food beneficial for casters, so they tend to be in high demand by the raiding community and min/maxers.
How high? Right now 5 raw Nightfin sell for about 2 gold 50 silver to 3 gold, which is an enormous sum to someone still leveling.
I discovered that as long as Card added a bobber to her fishing pole, she could fish for a stack of 20 Nightfin over the course of about 45 minutes. Therefore, she spent several evenings fishing up a stack or two so I could build up a bit of a war chest for when these toons need a huge influx of cash.
The funny thing is, I enjoyed the fishing a lot more that I thought I would.
Usually, I fish because I need mats for a raid --well, not anymore-- or I'm waiting around before I go and do something else. This past week, however, has re-exposed me to the joys of in-game fishing once more. It also calms me down, because I don't have to spend time thinking about where to go next or what to do (or what a particular toon has already done); I can just relax and chill for a while. It may slow down my leveling, but given that Blizzard is now expecting TBC Classic to release in Q1 2026, I'm still in no hurry to get to L60.
Okay, that's not quite true, there are days when I want to get a toon to L60 so I can get into some of the L60 instances or run a Battleground. Then again, I see the stress that my Questing Buddy is under* to try to find more inventive ways to get gear, and I just shake my head.
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| I do fish a lot in Stardew Valley, though! From IGN. Alas that I have no screencaps of my variations on Red fishing. |
On those days, fishing sounds like a good idea.
*I should clarify this. She puts herself willingly under that stress, because that's the sort of person she is. I think that's the difference that the 15-16 years of age between us makes: I no longer care to chase after that sort of hardcore play (if I ever did, honestly) because I realize that it will only fuel my Imposter Syndrome. And I really don't need any extra help from that angle.
EtA: Corrected some grammar and reinserted another half of a sentence that I mistakenly deleted.
I went to go check that out... but it is a classic_era thing, not a classic progression thing, and I don't have classic era installed.
ReplyDeleteI did get a huge Photosensitivity Warning as I logged in and had to, once again, sign the "I promise to be nice" agreement before I landed on the character screen and was informed that all my addons were out of date.
Ah, the ways of WoW.
You'd think that they would move the Cash Shop button on top in Cataclysm Classic, given that's an actually active Cash Shop at the moment, but nope. Sometimes they telegraph their intentions in the most obvious ways.
DeleteIt's interesting how differently people can perceive the same thing. The first note I saw about this was someone saying "they added the mode selection menu from retail to make it easier for people to find the version of Classic they actually want to play" and I just thought "makes sense, I guess". Neither me nor the reporter even thought about the shop icon.
ReplyDelete(Also, there used to be paid server transfers available on era, which is what I used to rename my 2020 clones after they lost their original names on the single available destination server. I had no idea those had been turned off.)
The server transfers were free for a while --which is how I moved OG Card off of the West Coast Cluster and onto the East Coast Cluster-- and then turned off some months back. I did immediately think that what they did was to make WoW Classic more like Retail, but it was only Classic and not Classic progression, which I thought very odd.
DeleteThat does bring up another angle that I've seen already from Blizz: unifying the UI from Retail to Classic even when it's not wanted. That's how we got the Guild UI looking completely different than what it originally was. I consider that a matter of short sighted "cost reduction" from upper management by being able to eliminate developer/support positions because the code base is now the same as Retail. They also still likely view the various Classic modes as 'tourist locales' for Retail players; it would be nice if that data were shared with subscribers, but they don't.