A Return to the Glory Years

I was getting on one of my toons on the Anniversary servers when my Questing Buddy whispered me and asked if I could join her in exploring AQ40 in Retail for a bit. I knew that the lead-in to the opening of AQ40 --formally known as The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj-- had begun on the Anniversary servers, and she wanted to poke around inside to make sure she had the cadence of the raid down.

Having actually completed AQ40 before, she could pick my brains a bit as needed.

"What do you need?" I asked, thinking of the Retail toons that could get into AQ40..

"Doesn't matter."

"Which faction?"

"Doesn't matter, because cross faction grouping."

So I hopped on Neve, who was simply loitering around Silvermoon City, ported to Orgrimmar, and then took a flight down south. I had to make some adjustments to the UI, however.

Yikes. That was embarrassing.

I felt it wasn't going to be that big of a deal, only there was one thing...

"You'll have to timewalk a bit," she informed me. 

"Do I need to do that? I haven't played Neve since Mists."

"Yeah, you will. The giant sword is in the middle of Silithus."

What sword?

The irony, which I called out midway through the raid, was that she was on a Draenei Warrior, and I was on a Blood Elf Mage. 

"TBC forever!" I said.

Yes, this is the same gear Neve wore when I last ran a BG
with her in Cataclysm. Or thereabouts.

My Questing Buddy's warrior was significantly higher level than Neve, because Neve was still at L32 (where she landed after the level squish, going from L85 down to L32), and with the mobs there around L31 or so, my aggro radius was pretty broad. On more than one occasion I'd be typing something in and I'd get shellacked by a mob that wandered vaguely close to me. Even when I behaved myself and hid away from the fight, such as the final fight against C'Thun, one of his tentacles magically appeared in front of me and tossed me into his inside, where I died quickly.

Story of my life, dying to C'Thun.

Obviously, one shotting mobs and bosses don't give you a good feeling of how the fights really progress, and so I was just there to bounce my experiences off of her. However, I believe she's going to have a bit harder of a time of it in spots than we did in the fall of 2020. 

"You have to be able to decurse here, so casters can't just sit at the top and then DPS. You need to put them on the stairs so they can reach people for decursing."

"That means me, because our Mages don't decurse."

I was pretty disgusted at that behavior. You do what you can to help the raid. "If they behave like that, they'll die very quickly in Naxx, let alone here."

Still, for a brief diversion, it was fun. I really didn't do terribly much other than comment on how much things had changed, such as the Blizzard spell behaving completely differently in Retail versus Classic, and how you could now use any mount you wanted inside AQ40 whereas back in the day you could only use those Qiraji battle mounts, which worked only within the raid itself. 

Also, I have no idea why raid frames didn't appear like they're supposed to. When we were in a regular party, things looked normal, but as soon as my Questing Buddy converted the group to a raid, the frames vanished. And for the record, I don't have any addons in Retail, because this PC didn't exist when I last played Retail.

Speaking of not playing Retail...

NOTE: I don't want to hear anything about the cluttered nature of my bars. I haven't touched them in 13 years, so they're bound to messed up.