Channeling My Inner Boss

I've been dipping my toe back into some raiding. Nothing crazy, mind you, just regular old Molten Core on Wednesday nights. One of our little group got into that MC on his Paladin, and when I happened to login earlier than usual on that Wednesday, he asked if I wanted to come. My wife was already beat and was going to bed early, so I said sure.

Hmm... Have I been here before?

It didn't hurt that the Good Twin got a couple of pieces of gear, the Azuresong Mageblade --it's made for a Mage, because it has "Mage" in the name!-- and the (Mage Tier 1) Arcanist Bracers. Between those two pieces of gear --plus an offhand I had obtained as a reputation piece via Alterac Valley-- my damage on an unbuffed per Frostbolt hit went from mid-600s to mid-700s. Which ain't so insignificant when you think about it.

***

There's also been all sorts of sneaky activities that my Questing Buddy and I have gotten ourselves into.

Because I simply can't keep my mouth shut.

She and I --on my old Classic Rogue, Azshandra-- have been sneaking into Zul'Gurub and picking herbs, hoping for Bloodvine to drop. 

In case you're wondering, Az's spec is a customized mixture of Combat and Subtlety. I designed it so that I could go just far enough into Subtlety to pick up Improved Sap and then into Combat to get the bonuses for dual wielding daggers. (Oh no, a Dagger Rogue! And a non optimized one, too!)

Eh, it works for me. She's not raiding. As a bonus, she has advantages in stealth that a regular Combat Rogue would never have, and that means she can help my Questing Buddy with Operation Bloodvine.

When we're not dead, that is.

There's a reason why I'm still hidden.

Those of keen eyesight among you might notice that my Questing Buddy's Druid doesn't have any real gear on, and that's because she'd died enough times that her gear broke.

The idea is that we target an herb node, she casts heals on herself, mounts up, and pulls the nearby mobs. Then I stealth in and grab the herbs and any nearby Hoodoo Piles, then stealth away before the mobs come back. She typically manages to avoid the mobs long enough to find a reset point, but as you can see above she occasionally pulls too many enemies or she runs into one during her escape.

Still, the reward of Bloodvine for some of the best non-raid gear in Classic Era is worth it. The Bloodvine 3-piece cloth set is great for Warlocks and Mages up through Blackwing Lair, and only starts being replaced in the AQ40 T2.5 set pieces. Back in the Fall of 2020, once I obtained my Bloodvine set on OG Cardwyn, I kept it until I began getting replacement pieces in Naxxramas.* My Questing Buddy was hunting for Bloodvine to make the set for herself, but Bloodvine alone is worth a pretty penny on the Auction House. 

So the lure of "free gold" --minus the gear repair bills-- is strong.

When my Questing Buddy is running back from having died, I find myself with time on my hands. So I've taken up dancing and singing while hidden. Because I can.

Yes, I remember Born in the USA quite well.
Between that album, Purple Rain, 1984, and
a host of other classic albums, 1984 was a good year.

***

Oh! And I ran into an old friend in Feralas.

Fancy meeting you here.

It's good to see Rexxar out and about like this, and not tied up at a Horde-only base in Outland.

***

And, uh, this person is back too.

/sigh

Sometimes you just can't win.

*Why is it so good? Because the Bloodvine set has two distinct advantages over most other gear: it has superior spellpower bonuses, and it also has hit bonuses. If you want to go raiding, a Mage has to get to roughly +17 to their Hit bonus to reach the cap and have the greatest chance of hitting a raid boss that's roughly 3 levels higher than you. The Bloodvine set alone gets you a +4 to Hit, netting you a quarter of the bonuses you need to become "Hit Capped". The drawback is that there are absolutely no Stamina bonuses to the Bloodvine set, so you don't have even close to as much health as wearing Tier raid gear will get you. That is.... kind of deadly in places such as Blackwing Lair or AQ40.

EtA: Apparently I can't spell the word "keen". Fixed.

Speaking of Changes

I suppose with BC fast approaching, it was inevitable that the raiding schedule would change. The weekly runs of Molten Core --dubbed the Molten Core Fun Run-- have come to an end.

It was announced in last night's raid that this run was the last, which caused a bit of sadness on my part. MC had turned into a type of raiding 'comfort food', where you can show up and just feel that no matter how shitty of a day you had, things were gonna be okay.* Kind of a "where everybody knows your name" type of raid.

When I was in high school, one of my
nicknames was "Cliffy" because I was
a bit of a know-it-all.

In the back of my head I always knew it was going to happen, but it still felt like a letdown. You never forget your first time, I suppose, and my first real raid was an MC run that this Fun Run was a spinoff from. If you include that original MC raid, 11 months is a pretty decent time for a raid's lifetime, particularly since MC hadn't been on the progression raid schedule since, well, February 2020. Unlike Zul'Gurub, the other raid with a long lifetime, Molten Core won't remain relevant into BC (unless you count farming for recipes). ZG has the benefit of having enchants that remain useful deep into BC, just like Blackrock Depths has the benefits of being the place you farm for the Hand of Justice, which will absolutely remain a BiS item deep into BC.

Still, I'm going to miss that place.

*For the record, my comfort food is beef stroganoff, at least the way I make it. A good Cincinnati style chili 3-way is a close second.

The Cards Maketh the Man

It wasn't too long ago that I posted about the requirements to be an AQ40 raider, and my thinking that it would be a second job to simply keep up with the raiding requirements.

Well, I can confirm that yes, it does take a big chunk of your time to keep up with raid requirements.

At least the guild I raid with (or tolerates me, there are times I can't decide which) doesn't require flasks, but the requirements certainly cost a ton on the auction house. And to be fair, were it not for flasks --and their components-- costing so much* I'd not have been able to generate the gold to cover all the items needed for the other day's AQ40 raid.

It kind of left me hoping that I'd not be called off the bench for Monday's raid so I could preserve the pots and whatnot for another week.

After all, I was second off the bench that night. I figured that I'd sit around, play some solitaire, and once I was released I could go do some fishing for a while and collect mats for the Elixir of Greater Firepower.

About 10 minutes before invites were to be sent out, however, I got a ping from the raid leader that I'm #1 on the depth chart and I had a good chance at being called up. 

Oh.

I finished the farming I was doing, switched over to Card, collected the mats I'd bought, and headed off to Ahn'Qiraq.

***

I wasn't kidding about playing Solitaire.**

Yes, I know I need to clean the carpet.
(And no, the stain wasn't caused by me.)
However, I couldn't rent a cleaner throughout
the Summer due to that Covid-19 thing.

And yes, I suck at Solitaire. To be fair, most random Solitaire deals from a real deck of cards aren't solvable, so it's more of a method to keep yourself grounded and the mind occupied while waiting.

I kept checking to see if I was invited, but so far nothing. And then I got a whisper that one of the raiders hadn't showed up yet, so be ready.

And in a couple of minutes I got the invite. I put away the cards, saluted the raid leader (who was outside), and ran on in.

How'd it go? I thought the raid went pretty well. We got to Phase 3 on C'Thun, and I'm sure we'll take it down next week.

I got teased a bit by some of my friends in the raid, with one of them whispering "You are becoming one of us" repeatedly, which made me laugh. 

There were a couple of items that dropped that I was interested in bidding on, but I decided against it because a) I'm not a regular member of the raiding team yet, so I'd rather the item go to someone who is, and b) I had issues getting the Weakauras widget that was created for handling loot on this specific raid to work. So while I could see the loot, I didn't want to take up any more time in raid to fuss around with my inability to use the widget when we could be out there slaying internet dragons. Or Old Gods; your choice.

It was the same belief that I took into the raid last week, when I had friends kicking me in the ass to roll on a mount. I'm the guest, and until I become a regular raider I'll wait until others get theirs first. I'm not going to be known as "that guy" who showed up, got a mount or some gear, and split. I've too much self respect for that.

***

Compare and contrast with the Molten Core run on Az last night.

I've been coming to that raid for a couple of months now, and Az has gotten pretty far in collecting T1 gear. However, I still need to upgrade my other stuff, such as rings and weapons. And tonight should have been a bonanza, as I was the only Rogue in the raid for the first half of the run and the Rogue who showed up in the second half of the run was already BWL level geared. 

But naturally the WoW gods had other ideas.

With the exception of the shoulders, every drop up until Ragnaros was something I'd already looted before, and I'd seen numerous times already. But the shoulders' drop was worth the wait, as I'd lost a roll on those twice now.

Still, when Perdition's Blade and the Band of Accuria both dropped on Ragnaros, I pinched myself.

So, the Perdition's Blade came up for a roll, I rolled and waited for the timer to end. As the other Rogue there had one already, I was confident that I was going to walk away with this one at least.

Then another person outrolled me.

That's when all hell broke loose.

On one side there were people arguing for the Warrior who rolled for the dagger. He was a fairly fresh L60, and for him the Perdition's Blade would be a huge upgrade.  On the other side were people saying that the Perdition's Blade was a BiS Rogue dagger that's useful up until it can get replaced in AQ40. 

The chaos went on for close to a good 5 minutes, until the raid leader reasserted control and said she'd let me decide if I wanted it or not. 

For me, it was a no-brainer. I'd already won an item, the Warrior rolled and won, so it belonged to him. Whether or not he should have rolled is beside the point; he rolled, didn't have any other wins, and he won the roll.

Almost immediately afterward I got whispers from people basically saying "How could you pass that up? It's BiS!!"

Because I'd rather have a clean conscience than a BiS item, that's why. 

***

I play the game to have fun, not to Win All The Things. When it stops being fun, then I have to consider either changing my in game behavior or move on. 

And I guess that's what I don't get: when you quantify "winning" as in "winning all that phat loot", then you can deviate into ethically questionable territory. 

Like the time that two friends of mine back in college decided to cheat at cards so that they could win at Euchre.

Oh yes, that did happen.

And it went on for at least a month or two before another friend noticed their signals between each other while my roommate and I were buried in our cards, looking them over for possible moves. That other friend started laughing, and then after the hand was played he pointed out the cheating. My roommate was hurt, but I was infuriated.

We didn't play for money, and we didn't play for booze or anything either. We just played to have fun. But winning was so important to them that they felt they had to have that extra edge, and that's what hurt. And here I was thinking that my roommate and I were just having some long droughts of bad luck, but no, the reality was a lot different.

I've never forgotten that feeling of humiliation, betrayal, and anger. That's why I play games the way I play, so that others know that when they win, they've won fair and square. That there's no recourse for accusations afterward. And so that everybody knows that any winnings are rightfully gotten on both sides. You could argue that I've taken that to extremes and that I should assert myself more, but in the end I have to live with myself. And in the dead of night, when you're trying to sleep, your conscience can be pretty damn loud.

*Thank you, Dreamfoil, for costing so much.

**When I say "Solitaire", I mean "Klondike". That's the game that was known as Solitaire when I was growing up, and whenever I pull out a deck of cards to play, that's what I play.

Well, This Is Different

The last seven days were pretty eventful, game-wise.

Not for any earth shattering content update, or even for some in-guild or on server drama*, but for personal reasons.

A week ago, I began laying the groundwork to have Card begin showing up at the Tuesday Molten Core raid that Az currently attends. I figured I could switch off between the two for a while until I could determine a better long term plan. I knew where I needed to go --finish as much T1 as I could and obtain Zul'Gurub level gear with hit bonuses necessary to hit BWL (and higher) bosses-- but getting from Point A to Point B was the question.

My problem has always been that Rogues are far more in demand than Mages in Z'G for their ability to interrupt some of the bosses, so that even on those pugs when I do bring Card, the raid leader is frequently left trying to find a Rogue.** And so I volunteer to switch to help out.

Nevertheless, it looked like I could get Card moving in the right direction again, so it gave me the chance to relax a bit. I could go incognito, play around with an alt or two, and just keep an eye open for an instance that interested me and I could hop on Az or Card to see about getting in.

But some of my WoW friends had other plans.

***

By midweek, I began getting whispers from several of them, asking me to come along on Friday night. They were running MC after all, they said, so I had no excuse. Then on Thursday, I was tag teamed and leaned on until I cried "Uncle" and signed up.***

"I feel like I've been the subject of an intervention," I muttered as I clicked the sign up page.

The Friday Molten Core run went well --I don't think I've ever been in an MC run that was terrible, whether or not we actually kill Raggy-- and so I succumbed and said "okay" to signing up for Blackwing Lair on this coming Friday. What actually sealed the deal was that the guild sponsoring the BWL run decided to keep the MC run after all, but move it to Thursday.**** I still felt undergeared for BWL, but after last week I figured they were gonna pester me until I signed up anyway, so I decided to save them the effort.

We're here to kill you and all you can
do is whine about your beauty sleep?

Card found a new (old) home for Molten Core, and my friends successfully pulled me into Blackwing Lair. And that was that.

Or so I thought.

***

Monday was a holiday here in the US, and I had an eye to work on some projects around the house and begin work on a set of speakers for my wife's old mid-1980's all-in-one stereo.***** I got up early, and after I helped my wife get ready and out the door for work I pulled together a list, visited the hardware store, and began work on replacing a few rotted boards on the gate for our fence. I managed to free the boards but the bolts were stuck, so I hammered at them to free them up. Almost instantly ants boiled out of the so-called "good" wooden beams, and I realized that the entire gate would have to be junked.

Frustrated with that turn of events, I went back inside to cool off a bit and took my annoyance out on a metric ton of unsuspecting demons in Azshara.

While I was singlehandedly depopulating Azeroth of demons, I received a ping from one of my WoW friends.

"Hey, the guild is looking for a Fire Mage for their AQ40 raid team."

Then a separate ping from another friend announcing the same thing.

I sighed.

"I haven't even been in BWL yet and you want me to jump to AQ40? At least give me a chance to see how I handle BWL first."

Unlike Blackwing Lair, I did have at least some experience with AQ40. Back in 2010, my (now disintegrated) Horde guild decided that it would be fun to enter into AQ40 just to check the place out. We tried 5-manning it, and since we couldn't even get past the Prophet Skeram we returned a few days later with a full 10 man raid# and eventually made it through and downed C'Thun. I remembered Skeram for obvious reasons, but I also remembered the Twin Emperors because we a) didn't have a warlock along to tank the arcane Emperor, and b) because a Pally had magic damage, guess who got the job of trying (and largely failing) to tank that emperor. I also remembered C'Thun, because once you think it's dead, oh no.... You get C'Thun Part 2.

But I was told that I'd be fine, and respeccing as a Fire Mage was easy. I had my doubts, as I originally started Neve (remember her?) way back in pre-history as a Fire Mage and I knew the limitations of the spec, especially when not in a raid environment. After all, there was a reason why I spent a lot of years in WoW playing a Frost Mage. While I'd miss Frost, I could respec as necessary due to the synergy Fire Mages get when working together. (Greater synergy than Frost, to be fair.) 

But still, with very little T2 and almost no Z'G gear (like the Bloodvine set), Card was going to stink on the DPS meters. The guild's own documentation had a set DPS number goal for certain bosses --the ones you can just go balls to the wall and blast away-- and I knew I was likely not going to make that minimum number. So I told my friends that there was really no way around the fact that I needed to get my gear up in order to effectively raid with a main raid group. "I don't want to hold the raid back," I replied more than once.

"Go ahead and talk to the raid leader about it," I was told. 

"I did, a month ago, and I know where I need to go to get where I want to be."

And that, I thought, was that. 

Some hours later, I'd recovered from my disappointment at fixing the gate and was busy cutting wood for the speakers when my wife got off of work and came home.## After shaking off the dust, I followed her inside and we talked about her day while I grabbed a drink. I happened to walk by my work area and I saw Discord flashing, which I wasn't expecting.

It was the raid leader/co-GM.

"Somebody blabbed," I muttered, and I clicked to see what he had to say.

Sure enough, he'd heard that I was interested in the Fire Mage position and wanted to chat. 

"Well, here we go," I said, replying to his direct message.

I'm not going to discuss all that was said, but from his perspective the biggest barrier was whether I could raid late on Monday nights EDT. I paused a second, because I never even considered that part. Friday nights, and even Thursday nights are one thing, but Monday? But you know what, I'm up late enough that for me it isn't an issue, so I replied that yeah, I can raid on Monday nights.

But for every concern I had he had an answer, and he assured me that they'll work with me to get my gear to where it needs to be.

The next thing I knew, I agreed to go to AQ40 that night.

 

I almost went in the wrong instance.
For the record, this is AQ20's entrance.
The least the Qiraji could do is put a nice sign out front.

I'm actually surprised I didn't slice off a finger while I finished up my cutting, because I certainly wasn't that attentive at that point. I was thinking that "I've got to respec, then practice the respec, then figure out what pots to take to the run, etc. etc."

Then I got pinged in Discord by the Mage lead for the raid, and he dumped a metric ton of info on me about 2-3 hours before the raid invites were to start. There was a spec to mimic, Weak Auras settings to be installed/used/understood###, a basic rotation to work on, some pots to get, and some YouTube videos to watch to understand the mathematical and in-game underpinnings of how Fire Mages tick. (I still haven't gotten to that video yet. Sorry, Haldol.) Somewhere in there reading up on the strategies for AQ40 got lost, but oh well. I was going to do what I was told to do in raid, so I wasn't planning on worrying about that. Not with all this other stuff to absorb.

So here I was, at 9:30 PM EDT, drinking from a firehose and using the Scourge in Eastern Plaguelands as unsuspecting guinea pigs. 12 hours ago I was thinking about project lists, with saying hello to my old buddy C'Thun not exactly high on my priorities for the day.

***

And so that was how I went from looking for a new MC home to raiding AQ40 in one week.

What, you want to know how it went?

Oh.

It went well enough, I suppose. I made a decision to not look at the meters, because I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I only died six times on 4-5 total raid wipes. So not bad. The AQ40 mounts were dropping like flies, but since I was a guest I waited until everybody else from the guild got one first. That kind of got some of my friends upset, because they felt I should have been more assertive about that, but I wasn't about to barge in and do that sort of thing. That's not me, and I'm not going to change.

But what actually did keep me going throughout the raid were the whispers I got from my friends, who were really happy to see me up with them on the raid. And from the chat that the guild's Mages invited me into. Of course, knowing a couple of them already --Mages tend to stick together-- helped, but the espirit de corps of the group was infectious. 

The Prophet Skeram and the Twin Emperors were as I remembered them, so my memory isn't too far gone, but the "trash" in AQ40 definitely hit a LOT harder at level. So that wasn't entirely unexpected, but it meant that it took us a lot longer to get to the end than what I remembered.

Oh, we didn't down C'Thun, but I wasn't expecting us to beat that thing either. Burning down C'Thun at L80 is an entirely different experience at L60 in Classic, and things that don't hurt at L80 certainly do at L60. But I felt that the strategy that they were working out was fairly sound, it was just a matter of execution.

So that's it. I think it likely I'll be on the bench for next Monday's raid, because more than 40 signed up and I'm the new guy, but I'm fine with that. 

I presume the awkwardness will fade with time, and I've got a long ways to go before I feel like I'm actually contributing to the raid.

But yeah, this was a very different week than I expected.

Thanks gang. (And yes, I know that at least two people involved do read the blog. Commenting is always another matter, but I've been there, so I get that.)

*The guild I'm in has --on average-- about 3-4 active members as people have faded from playing or moved on to other guilds. It's purely social, as only two of us raid, and when I joined I didn't even raid at the time. It is one of numerous small guilds on the server that are frequently overshadowed by the medium and larger sized guilds on Myzrael.

**Yes, really. I'm not sure if it's just my luck or what, but in the Z'G pugs I've been in we always seem to be running short on rogues. At the time Az was still pretty much my main, so it wasn't a big deal.

***There were some issues getting the loot system for BWL properly configured so they ran MC once more. I was completely unaware of the switch until that moment, as I try not to poke around other guilds' Discord servers.

****I signed up for MC before BWL. Shh; don't tell anyone.

*****I've mentioned her stereo here before. I've gotten the turntable and radio working, but the cassette player will be a tough nut to crack as the rubber belt has disintegrated. The worst part of the stereo, however, are the speakers. They're crap, just a speaker in a box without any sort of engineering behind it.

#Until my first Zul'Gurub run earlier this year, that was my sole foray into raiding.

##Apparently I look hilarious wearing an N95 mask, but when you're cutting medium density fiberboard (MDF) you NEED one of those masks to keep the crap out of your nasal cavity. Saves you surgery and medical issues in the long run.

###I just want to know who came up with all of those settings/configurations. The amount of work it would have taken to initially come up with all of that would have been considerable, and that's not even counting the Weak Auras application/add-on itself. 

EtA: I have now gotten to watch that video, and after a week's worth of playing around with the Fire Spec, I understand what the video was talking about. I certainly wouldn't have understood it on Monday night, because after more than half a decade of being a Frost Mage, Fire was essentially a foreign language.

Change Changing Places

 

For some reason you're questioning why
I always believe it gets better
One difference between you and I
Your heart is inside your head

 

One word from you
One word from me
A clear design on your liberty
Who could believe when love has gone
How we move on like everyone

--Changes by Yes, from 90125

 

If there's one thing that's a constant in life, it's change.

And for me, change came to WoW Classic the instant the 10 hour war ended and AQ opened up.

The Molten Core run that Cardwyn had been attending for 2+ months is being shut down in favor of two separate Blackwing Lair runs --one from each guild that hosted the MC run-- which leaves those without sufficient gear to attempt BWL in need of a new home.*

Like Cardwyn, who has about half T1 and half T0 gear.

I realize that for some it's a minor inconvenience, and they can just go find another pug to run MC with**, but it was nice to have a regular run that I could count on to be there and develop friendships with. And with me being a bit of a night owl when it comes to playing, there aren't that many Molten Core pugs around Midnight EDT on the server. 

There's also one additional problem that has to be considered: everybody and their grandmother is running AQ20 or AQ40, and if you're running those you're not likely going to be in many other raids. 

And if you're doing AQ20/AQ40, when you're not actually in the raids, you're farming the mats for the raids.

I've seen references in the Myzrael Discord channel and in other spots online to the sheer volume of flasks and whatnot that some of the more progression oriented raiders are utilizing in the AQ instances, and it ain't pretty. Unless you've got a huge amount of gold coming in you're going to have to spend a ton of time farming mats to make the pots to just raid AQ40 once a week. And that's not even counting all of the scrounging you'll need to do to find Nature Resist gear to use in AQ20/40, which if you want to be in AQ40 right now that means even more time spent doing things in support of the raid when you're not in the raid.

And here's Az and Card with only half of a T1 set***, watching all this and wondering when did WoW Classic turn into a second (or third) job.

***

Such is the WoW Classic life now: the people who I like to run with have all moved on and aren't really available to run the instances/raids I'm running, and with Shadowlands on the horizon and coming fast, I suspect that the WoW Classic environment will take a massive population hit for at least the six months after the October launch.

Sure, one obvious solution is to focus more on what I can control, which means running Battlegrounds and finding instance pugs where I can, or maybe even level an alt. 

Like this young Paladin. I think Card knows her.

 

And I have been receiving whispers from people I know who have guilds who are recruiting --not really poaching, as the guild I'm in is only a few people and of the group only 2 of us raid with any regularity-- but the requirements are to be either AQ ready as-is or at least be Blackwing Lair ready, neither of which I am at present.**** It's not like I don't know the guilds or the people, because I've run with plenty of their guildies over the past 6 months or more and I'm fine with them, but the reality is that they're going progression and their entire focus is the immediate needs for the progression raids.*****

And to be honest, if AQ is so demanding on a player's time, I'm not so sure I really want to raid there any time soon.

I talked with a guildie about it, and he's planning on going to AQ only when enough people get geared enough to make pugs more practical, probably when Naxxramas starts getting close to dropping.

Until then, I guess I'll muddle through.

*One of the BWL pugs is purely recreational, if you can call a BWL run that, and the other is oriented at people who want to move into progression raiding. The guild running the latter intends to use that run as --more or less-- a farm team for their main progression teams.

**Myzrael is a medium population server, so higher pop servers may not have this issue quite so much. And it should be mentioned that Zul'Gurub runs continue on a regular basis, because of the "+hit" gear you can get out of Z'G which are necessary for BWL and later raids.

***If I had a dollar every time someone asked me "if you've been running Molten Core for over 2 months, shouldn't you be fully T1 geared yet?" I'd be able to quit my real job. Most of the T1 gear that Cardwyn and Azshandra are wearing dropped in the first 3-4 Molten Core runs, and just about every run since then has seen either a) repeat drops, or b) no drops at all. But boy, if I were a Druid/Warlock/Pally, I'd have been living large.

****And with Fire being the current "spec du jour", Card being Frost (for MC and BGs) sticks out like a sore thumb.

*****The recruitment blurbs for the guilds in the Myzrael Discord have changed over the months from being a mix of progression, casual, and somewhere in between to weighing heavily in the direction of progression. And it's not just that the progression guilds are recruiting more, the guild advertisements for the same guild have tilted heavily in the direction of progression as the War Effort ended.

Let Me Expand on That

Not too long ago, I mentioned that I'd gotten into my first true raid.

Ever.

That was a Zul'Gurub run that, looking back on it, was a fairly wipe filled run that lasted almost 4 hours.* However, I will say that the raid leader was a real saint; he kept calm and never raised his voice, as he patiently explained and reexplained how to handle each boss.

In that raid I learned three things:

• For a raid to be effective, you have to be in a voice app of some sort. You may not have to talk --I saw people reply in raid chat to requests-- but you must be able to respond to the raid leader's (and others) directions. We had one person in the ZG run who was not in chat, and that person was simply not following instructions, even the written ones.
  
  As a sub point on that, everybody not only has to be in a voice app, but be able to understand the language spoken. Being in a voice app does you almost no good if you don't understand what's being asked of you. And yes, that 4 hour ZG run had at least one person in the raid who didn't understand English, and also didn't know the raid. It made things difficult at times.
  
• I like to perform interrupts and stuns on Az as part of my work in regular 5-man instances, and that part of being a Rogue becomes important in ZG. In the ZG run Az was literally the only rogue, and I got assigned the job of interrupting the healer in the Raptor boss when he (it?) splits into three people. Once that boss was burned down enough, I and the off tank were the only ones on that boss for a large part of the fight, with me eschewing anything resembling DPS in favor of watching for the healing action and then delivering a solid kick to stop it. While my job in ZG overall wasn't very taxing --mainly don't stand in the bad, do what the raid leader says to do, and just keep my DPS Slice and Dice ability running-- at this one point I had the big job to make sure we don't make a boss fight that much more difficult. And I was able to do the job because I enjoy those little things about being a Rogue.
  
• Raids in Classic take about as long as the longer instances in WoW. If you compare a Classic level raid (Molten Core, Zul'Gurub, etc.) with the longer Classic instances (Blackrock Depths, Maraudon, etc.) the Classic instances are either as long or longer than the Classic raids. So the time commitment by me would be pretty much the same. The only thing that the raids have over instances are the buffs and the consumables, where Mages, Alchemists, and others who handle both items spend considerably more time in preparation than the people who don't have those classes and/or professions.

But despite my initial concern about what to do in ZG, I found the explanations easy to follow. And I learned very quickly that "bat riders go boom" as I put it in guild chat afterwards.

***

What?

Oh, that.

Yeah, I joined a guild. It's a small one, and not even close to being in the same orbit as some of the huge guilds on Myzrael-US, such as Sunrise or Stance Dance Revolution, both of which have over 400 members. 

More on this another time.

***

Anyhoo, I went on another ZG run a week later, and that run was as smooth as butter. It clocked in at just under two hours, and we only had one wipe, on the trash leading to Hakkar. We even handled the Jin'do fight without any problems.

So fast forward a couple of weeks, and a friend who I'd run quite a few instances with over the past months whispered me on Friday. One thing led to another, and this was the result.

Yep, still running with that BRD Green drop
for my chestpiece. Still, Card only died once,
the Majordomo teleported her up front. Twice.

It was an alt run put on by two guilds, and they pug the extra people.

The most amazing thing to me was that when I zoned in, I discovered that I knew about 1/3 of the people there. When I mentioned it to my friend, he laughed and said "that's the Vanilla experience for you."

Maybe I can do this raiding thing after all.





*This ZG run was on Az, for clarity's sake.