Yeah, I'm Back

No I'm not.

Husky is not amused, either.
What, you expected John Wick? From YouTube.

But I am close to the so-called halfway point overall on Operation Spread the Love.

Shaluna was first created in Classic Era so I could see if
someone could dance on top of the Stormwind fountain
in skimpy attire and get tips, but I chickened out before I put my
plan into action. Ironically enough, Shaluna's Corsair Overshirt 
has generated... commentary... from passersby. (But no tips.)

As you can see, 4 of the toons are at L30 and 4 are at L29. 

In Vanilla WoW, when you hit the low L30s the leveling speed slows down a lot, and there's a 3-4 level gap before you can really keep questing going. When TBC came around, Blizzard fixed that by adding more quests --and a neutral quest hub-- in Dustwallow Marsh, but this is Vanilla and so you have to get creative if you want to level in the low-30s until Arathi and Desolace become viable questing areas. 

Oh, I suppose you could just run instances such as Blackfathom Deeps or the first Scarlet Monastery wing on repeat, but I was swept up in that one evening when I was leveling the original Cardwyn in 2019, and doing Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral wing 3-4 times in a row wasn't the most fun I ever had in game.* Sure, I went up a level and a half over the course of a couple of hours, but I was on my toes and struggling to keep up the entire time. 

At times like this, you create your own fun. Such as what I posted about the other day when I crept through a zone filled with enemies about 20+ levels higher than me. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a screed about how Retail doesn't allow you to just go and do your own thing, you're sadly mistaken. Retail may not want you to go and simply do some unstructured play --and the majority of Retail player-focused content certainly emphasizes that fact-- but you can just screw around on Retail. You just have to put in more effort to disconnect from everything there.

Unstructured play is not what Blizzard or folks such 

as Mike Bell are selling, that's for sure.

One of the things I used to do during my last year of playing Retail in Mists was to sneak through the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on the original Azshandra, creeping up into Eversong Forest or Durotan, just to look around. On a PvE server it wasn't that dangerous per se, but it still was a bit of a thrill just stealthing my way across multiple zones while lowbies did their thing, blissfully unaware I was there. 

I used to also return to Hellfire Peninsula in Outland, because it remained untouched by the changes wrought by Cataclysm, and it had more of a Vanilla-esque feel than Northrend did. I wasn't the only person to feel that pull, as we had periodic incursions of max level Horde into Honor Hold, and I was more than happy to help defend the keep from them. 

***

Under the header of "unstructured play", I decided last week to start pushing my toons to run through the Feralas wilderness to get to Feathermoon Stronghold out on the western islands. Running south from Desolace isn't difficult in theory, but trying to make that run when you're in your L20s can be similar to Azshandra's little adventure to Dire Maul. 

But you do get to say hello to Rexxar.
Yes, I still have a certain fondness for him.

While I'm happy to report there were no untimely deaths on the three toons who made the run --thankfully Frost Nova actually worked on the skull level toon that was chasing Cardwyn-- there were a collection of bodies along the road, indicating that something had been killing players out there.

But going forward I intend to lean more into unstructured play in Vanilla WoW so I can keep all 8 toons going. The decentralized nature of Vanilla WoW is ideal for that sort of thing.

*Even if --as I found out later-- I was in a guild group from the best guild on the Myzrael-US server. I was merely happy to just keep up, given that they were in Discord and obviously coordinating while I wasn't. I just had to watch for cues based on what they were doing so I didn't do anything too stupid.