Well, my Hardcore experiment didn't last long.
My reincarnation of Neve didn't even get out of Eversong Woods. She got caught by multiple respawns in the Scorched Grove at Level 8. Briganaa at least lasted into the second Draenei zone, Bloodmyst Isle, but one of her Fire Totems inadvertently pulled multiple nearby mobs and she died at Level 14.
 |
| This was, ironically enough, about 1/2 hour before the fatal blow. |
 |
| He's also into being a therapist, for some strange reason. |
***
While there are still around 20 or so layers' worth of players out there, the Old World (except for the Capital Cities) has emptied out. You can find gold farmers around and there are people leveling, of course, but the swarm has moved on to Outland.
 |
| I had to turn off the nameplates for NPCs to show just how few people are at Light's Hope Chapel. A week ago, this place was still packed. |
My Questing Buddy has already reached L70 --I think she reached it two evenings ago-- and I'm sure she was just in the vanguard of that first wave of toons rushing to the end and now on their attunements. Most of the rest of our friends' group are around L62-63, although I do see a lot of people I've put on my Friends' List sitting in the mid-L60s at the moment. I guess that's overall not much of a surprise, as the raiding content opens on February 19th, less than a week from now. I guess we'll see how that goes and whether the player base continues to engage with the game, especially since the Tier 4 raids are launching in their post-nerf state. I can easily see this backfiring on Blizzard, because if the raids are too easy some people will get bored and lose interest, but more people overall might get a chance to raid from the get-go, so.... I guess we'll see.
I presume that the results of this experiment will influence the difficulty of subsequent raid tiers.
***
For me, what will be most interesting is how guilds handle the reduction from 40 people per raid to 25 (not counting the bench). If history is any guide, people are likely forming into cliques already, and that could prove disastrous to guilds and raid teams going forward. Hell, it could prove disastrous to even friends' groups. I guess we'll see how this all pans out.
Oh lol, I didn't realise you were trying to play your new characters as hardcore. I thought there were no BC hardcore servers, so this is unofficial, right? Are you going to delete them or keep playing?
ReplyDeleteThere's a buff you can receive that indicates if you've died or not; I know where the person is for that on the Horde side, but no clue who it is on the Alliance side. (I spent an evening hunting around to see if I could find them.) Horde side, it's an NPC in The Undercity, Watcher Morta, on the section of the Apothecary area close to the center of the "wheel" that UC comprised of.
DeleteSince it's unofficial, I didn't join a HC guild or anything, I was just doing it to see how far I could go without dying. I was sure I'd be fine in Eversong Woods because I'd done it so much over the years, but nope. Respawns are a bitch.
Since they've died, I decided to keep them going, and the moment of my death the buff turned into a debuff. Alas that apparently someone who can "cure" debuffs can wipe that clean, but I can go visit Morta again to put it back in place.