The Reincarnation

A couple of days ago I made a decision.

For some strange reason, I didn't get an initial
screencap. Oh well. Yes, this is a new Briganaa.

I decided that one way to combat the desire to rush to the end with four toons and do all the things was to start over with a toon that was most definitely blitzed through the process in 2021 and do it right this time in 2026.

After all, I have 9-12 months to go up 10 levels on 4 toons. So what's one or two more toons?

"Two. No more than two." --Gully Dwarf saying

As of Monday evening, my Questing Buddy was already at L68, so she basically went almost all the way to L70 in 4 days, most of that by spamming dungeon runs. By comparison, I'm happy to just be noodling around in the Old World, not rushing through anything. When I was asked when I was going to go over to Outland, I replied maybe in a couple of months. By then, everybody will be raid-logging, so I'll have the zones to myself.

That's not just hyperbole, as there's well over 20 Layers going in the evenings, which is kind of nuts.

This is what Nova World Buffs was able
to identify as separate layers on February 9, 2026.
The maximum number of layers they can observe
is 20, but given that this toon didn't have a layer assigned
meant there was ABOVE 20 layers active at this time.

***

If Blizzard wanted the WoW Classic community to put more money in their coffers, offering unlimited paid boosts was apparently the thing, as there were tons of L58 - L60 Blood Elves and Draenei out and about in the Old World prior to the opening of the Dark Portal. There were so many out there that I'm sure I was very much in the minority leveling a toon from scratch instead of simply boosting and heading out to Outland when the clock struck 6 PM EST on February 5th. 

This was right on top of of the Battle.net shop.
"Inspired by" my ass; they knew exactly what 
they were doing. This is as of February 9th, 2026.

Of course, Retail has Classic beat on the boost department, as unlimited paid boosts have been around for quite a while. 

I actually had to hunt for it in the Cash Shop, as it
was underneath the Pets, Transmog, and (in-game) toys.

However, the upcoming release doesn't have any new races or professions to power level or boost through paid services, so... I guess Classic's BE and Draenei invasion is "taking one for the team" in Q1 2026. 

I'm kind of prepared for the first time someone asks me why I didn't boost either of my toons. While it would be completely accurate to state that my budget won't allow it --$60 per boost is waaaaay too expensive for my taste-- my stock answer will be "If I'm not going to raid, why should I pay money to not play the game?"

Q: "Why not run dungeons?" 

A: "I don't run dungeons to power level. I run it to have fun, and my fun is not 'How fast can I make the thing go away', but to actually enjoy the scenery, the music, and the people while killing the baddies."

Q: "You'll be left behind if you don't."

A: "I was left behind the moment the Dark Portal opened and I didn't load up on a ton of quests to turn in like all the other min-maxxers. Unlike 2021, I was ready for the separation this time. I have accepted that."

***

You'd think --at least I did-- that my WoW friends wouldn't have prodded me about joining them in Outland like they did after the release of the Anniversary servers in November 2024, but nope. I had to have that conversation already once, and I expect I'll have to do it again once they reach max level and they start attunements for raiding. I expect them all to go and raid (my Questing Buddy will likely go all the way to Sunwell), but I've had my fill of raiding. In my experience, anybody who tells me they're a laid back and chill raid group are either self delusional, going to backslide into semi- to full-on hardcore raiding, or will get stripped for their best players by more hardcore raiding teams. I've played that game already and I'm not about to get emotionally invested only to get my heart ripped out again. 

(Or worse, watch a guild get torn apart by drama because people can't treat each other like adults. Or maybe that is the default behavior for adults these days. I sure hope not.)

Hmm... I kind of hope there will be a TBC Classic Era server or two, so that people like me who will stick around after the mob moves on can actually do some end-game content without any external pressures.

EtA: Apparently I can't spell 'pressures' right. Corrected.

The Crazy Still Lives

Yesterday, the WoW Anniversary Servers saw the Dark Portal open at 6 PM EST, heralding the start of TBC Classic, Anniversary Edition.

So... What did I do?

Stare at a Loading Screen for a while, because when you're playing around in the Blood Elf or Draenei Starting Zones, you're technically part of Outland.

And Outland was simply overwhelmed by people to the point where I was repeatedly kicked offline or had 10-20 second lag.

I don't even have a screencap of those (rather typical for Blizzard) moments because all of the screencaps I took didn't register. However, you'll have to understand that The Ghostlands were pretty empty compared to what Outland itself must have looked like.

Therefore, I shrugged and logged onto Azshandra for the first time in several months and screwed around a bit.

And gawked at some of the guild names people came up with:

Yes, that is a thing IRL. No, I'm not going to
tell you how I know, but when fifty something years
you reach, forbidden knowledge gained you have.

After roaming around for an hour or two and doing a few quests, I hung around in Stormwind to watch the substantially reduced crowd. Apparently nobody got the memo that world buffs were no longer quite as useful once you hit... L62? L63? because they were dropping like Halloween Candy. I joked that if you could simply stack world buff times on top of each other, at the rate the buffs were dropping I'd have well over 8-10 hours of a buff each.

My Questing Buddy was busy running dungeons*, and she claimed she was going to be doing it overnight, and others of my friends group were trying to pick up flight points in Outland and complete what quests they could. Only one other person was hanging around in the Old World, finally having the ability to level his Mining skill uninterrupted by swarms of bots and gold farmers.

But I was bored, and so I begged off after a while.

I've grown used to doing things my way, and I really don't like the crowds because all they do is get me agitated at the relentless pace. There really is no rush, but trying to tell MMO players that is an exercise in futility, so I don't.

At least not in Gen Chat or Trade Chat.

We've got some family activities planned for part of the weekend, so if I do get on the Anniversary Servers, it won't be for very long. I might even retreat to Classic Era for a while until the crazy dies down a bit and the lag is no longer so bad in the TBC zones, so I can go back to leveling a toon or two out of the Starting Areas and back into the Old World.

*She informed me that these dungeons were much easier now that she was in Naxxramas gear. Given that if my memory is correct that you don't replace Naxx gear until the very end of the leveling process (yes, it's that good), then she'll be able to store up a lot of gold simply by selling a ton of items to vendors.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

A Short Addendum

It's a bit earlier than my usual updates, but this happened over the weekend:

On January 24, 2026.

So the four have crossed the finish line.

There was something else I was doing on Saturday afternoon, related to my other recent hobby:

From Icom America's Instagram feed.
Uh, and apparently an AI generated pic
with an Icom amateur radio. Who'd have thought?

Winter Field Day is one of the big contest days in the US Amateur Radio community. Typically, clubs will get together and go outside somewhere to make as many unique contacts as possible; some clubs really get into the competition of it, while others simply are there to enjoy their time together and do some radio stuff while they're there. 

Luckily for my club, our facilities at the Red Cross building count as being away from your own home for purposes of the contest, so I got to experience Winter Field Day without freezing my ass off. (Or getting snowed in, which was also a possibility this weekend.) As the weather got progressively worse Saturday night, the club made the decision to go home and call it for Sunday, because the weather had just become too untenable.

So I dabbled in two of my hobbies on Saturday, which worked out well overall.

Almost At The End

Well, right on time for the TBC Classic v2.0 pre-patch, toons have crossed the finish line.

The listings as of January 22, 2026.

One got there shortly after the pre-patch...

Boom.

And the other two this past week.

(Sorry, no pics of the leveling graphic for the other two; I was busy killing mobs at the time.)

While I don't think the reworking of things in the pre-patch helped with Card --the Frost Mage was relatively unaffected by the pre-patch changes-- it did help a bit with Linna and Joan. Paladins got some extensive talent tree reworks in the pre-patch, and the net result was that Retribution Paladins have a bit more damage output than before. Same survivability, but with more oomph when swinging a sword. Joan's biggest change wasn't with her talents at all, but that her Voidwalker (aka "the Blueberry") could hold more threat, so she was able to deal more damage on mobs. So, for the latter two, they were able to kill more mobs before stopping to recoup mana and health, which to my mind was a good thing.

I look at it this way: even without the pre-patch changes, Card and Linna would have made it to L60 in the past two weeks regardless, but Joan would have been somewhere at either L58 or L59. 

In the end, I'm sure that Hoots will make it in the next week or so, and my goal of getting all four toons to L60 before the Dark Portal opened will have been accomplished. 

So... what now?

I'm not sure, exactly. I could start all over with a Blood Elf Mage or a Draenei Shaman, or I could keep going with these four to L70 before shelving them. I already know that my friends' group is going all in on raiding, and as I've already indicated I don't intend to raid in TBC Classic v2.0* I'm free to go and do my own thing. Luckily, L60 -> L70 doesn't take that long in general, so I'll have plenty of time to just goof around and do things at my own pace. I could even start this version by leveling a new toon from scratch just until I'm sure the insane wave of try-hards rushes through to the end, and THEN I'll switch back to level in Outland. 

I've got a year, right?

*The irony is that I got more whispers on Joan this past week than I did on the other two toons. I realize that Warlocks are more in demand in TBC Classic than Mages, but this was getting ridiculous.

Greetings from the New Year

One of the things that I've found interesting over this past year on the WoW Anniversary servers is that there tends to be two groups of people who play the game: those who are going all-in on getting the full raiding experience, and those who were merely there to reserve a place for the upcoming Burning Crusade re-re-release.*

Listings as of January 9, 2026.

Well, for the latter the Pre-Patch is less than a week away, and for the former the impending release of TBC Classic Anniversary means they have to come to grips with the raiding reduction from 40 people (20 for (Zul'Gurub and AQ20) to 25 people (10 for Karazhan and Zul'Aman). As much as there was a bit of occasional wistfulness about not getting into a Molten Core or Zul'Gurub run this time around, I am so happy I don't have to deal with the drama involved with who stays and who goes in the Great Raid Reshuffle.

And to be fair, there might be raid teams that have already worked this sort of thing out, but for most there's two options: cut the raiders or expand into two raid teams and bring in more raiders. both are fraught with peril.

From Yarn.Co. And the Pythons.

Since Blizz announced on Wednesday that TBC Classic Anniversary will drop on February 5th, guilds are probably feverishly mapping out what they can do and regimenting people's leveling experiences and attunement processes. And fretting over raid teams. 

I should break out the popcorn, but all I can feel is relief that I'm not dealing with any of that crap right now.

I figured there was a t-shirt FOR that, and
I was not disappointed. From Shirtbox.

As for what I'm going to do in a week, probably not much. I've already blocked off the names I want back when the Anniversary servers first launched, so that's not much of an issue there. I also am looking ahead to what to do once I get all four toons to L60, and I might just start over with another toon. After all, I'll have gotten four toons to L60 over the course of ~1.25 years, and I've no qualms starting over with a Blood Elf or a Draenei. 

*People like me, who generally just putz around and go their own way are very much a minority. 

Another Hump I'd Forgotten About

You know how leveling slows down tremendously in Vanilla WoW in the mid 30s and the mid 40s? Well, there's apparently another speed bump in the mid-L50s too.

I have discovered this the past month while I've been leveling the four toons, but especially Joan and Hoots.

Listings as of December 26, 2025.

Going from L54 to L55 took an absurdly long time from my perspective, but once I got over that hump the leveling from L55 to L56 seemed to go more quickly. 

Of all the four toons, Hoots was actually the slowest in leveling from L54 to L55. Part of that I chalk up to bad luck, where respawning mobs caught me multiple times in various zones --apparently quick respawns can also be observed other places than Felwood's Shadow Hold-- but I also didn't have to grind nearly as much to get some of these quests completed. If the RNG rolls go your way when you're looking for XX items, you don't have to kill that many mobs. Which also means less grinding, resulting in less XP per quest overall. I don't know the ratio of XP garnered by killing mobs versus completing quests in Retail, but I've found that in Vanilla Classic you get a lot more XP if you're grinding a lot of mobs just to complete a quest. Sure, it's not "fun" from the standpoint of wanting to get from Point A to Point B quickly, but it is a low stress way to level. You don't have to engage while level at the same depth in Retail --although Retail fans probably would point out that leveling in Retail is so quick it's not deep either-- but Blizzard designed Retail leveling to progress multiple stories. Outside of a few overarching questlines, there are very few newer-style MMO stories in Classic WoW.*

So I can grind while listening to a podcast, chatting with friends, and not really paying too close attention to what I'm doing in-game. Which is good, since I play a game to have fun and relax, not be hyper-focused.

***

My questing buddy is logging on far less often these days. She completed her Atiesh --oh wait, I didn't mention that she got selected for one, didn't I?-- and I think she only really needs one or two more items and her gear will be good throughout most of TBC Classic leveling. Therefore she's been taking a bit of a break, playing games with her husband, and when she's on she's basically pre-loading stuff for when the Dark Portal opens. 

I'm thinking that once the pre-patch drops in mid-January, she'll be leveling a Draenei Priest (basically the same one she used to help me level my Shaman in 2021's TBC Classic and she mained in Wrath Classic), but we'll see how things go.

*Those long burning questlines that are there, however, do tend to be epic in their own way. Everybody knows the Defias questline, but there's also the Marshal Windsor questline and some of the Class Quests (Paladin and Warlock epic mount quests, for example). The biggest difference between Classic and Retail is that as quest design progressed, every single (non-gray) thing you see out in the game world can be traced back to a quest objective, whereas in Classic WoW there's a metric ton of items and mobs out there that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. (Black Diamonds, anybody?) And that's fine. Not everything has to mean anything at all --in real life that is frequently the case-- and a lot of game designers (and fiction editors) seem to have forgotten that simple fact. 

Oh, Look at the Time!

It's been an interesting couple of weeks since I last posted an update on Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 12, 2025.

Although I haven't been playing that much --especially this week-- I have gotten some leveling done. Just not as much as I'd hoped.

The first thing you'll notice is that Card is now L57, which kind of goes against what I'd been doing the rest of this time: level all four toons a pair of levels at a time. The reason for that is simple: I was asked to come along for a couple of Scholomance runs, which resulted in that extra level. One thing is certain: Card did more damage as an L56 Mage than some of the other DPS who were all higher than her. Go figure.

I got Linna to L56, and when I have played this week I was working on Joan, but I haven't gotten her to L55 yet. While she is able to down some mobs by herself (such as the Drake in the initial quest for the Marshal Windsor questline), she's incredibly ill-suited toward other mobs. Linna has the reverse problem that Joan has, where she can take down other mobs, but that Drake hits way too hard for her to simply stand there and take it at the level she's at, compared to non-elite mobs of the same level.*

What have I been up to when I've not been playing? Holiday stuff, as well as, um, that other hobby I've mentioned a bit here and there. Pallais wants me to continue writing about my adventures there, and so I'm working on a post about that will likely drop in the early part of next week.

I guess I should be happy that Blizz decided to put the TBC pre-patch in January, which as things are going will be when I finally get all four toons to L60.

*At least in the gear she's at. That has quite a bit of impact on her ability to down some of these mobs as well.

Sightseeing and Travelling

In WoW Classic Anniversary land, things are progressing:

Snapshot as of November 27, 2025.

It's been a year (or so) since the Anniversary servers launched, and I have yet to reach L60 on any of my toons. So I guess you could say that my plan of not going all-in on rushing to the end (and getting burned out) has worked. After all, I'm still regularly logging in and progressing. This time, that's mainly in Un'goro Crater these days...

Or Felwood...

Or maybe even the Dire Maul area...

I'm at that point in the leveling process where you can begin to separate some classes from others. Card, for example, is able to defeat individual elites, whereas Linna struggles with those same elites. (I'd have inserted a "Dead Linna" screencap if I had one, but I don't. I was too busy corpse running back to her body.) At times like that, wearing plate armor doesn't exactly help much.

But I do occasionally poke my nose into Retail. Mainly just to observe people on Moon Guard...

I think that thing on the left is a mount. I'd just
like to know where you stable these things, because
when I'm writing you have to consider things such
as that. I mean, can you imagine having that thing stabled
at a farm? And what would it eat? How would you care for it?

That Pally is a bit of a flashback, with the 
Sulfuras Mace and the recolored Judgement armor.
Were it not for the post-Cataclysm Auction House
(and that it's a Draenei), she would fit right in on the
Anniversary servers.

I do get lost with the post-Cataclysm changes to the Old World from time to time, but consulting a map is always the smartest option...

Nevertheless, there are things I see that still do make me stop and ponder for a moment...

Something tells me that the device on the left
is related to the Dragonflight expansion.
Why? Oh, no reason...

I can't decide if that's a trinket effect or if
those are merely images of people. If I were
a betting man, I'd figure it came from the cash shop.

Okay, I inserted this screencap here because I
was fascinated with the eye patch. That 'pirate' look
isn't something you'd expect on your average Draenei.

But if one thing is certain, it's that Trade Chat never changes (profanity warning below):

Well Well Well...

I go and work at the car dealer's repair shop for the day, and I come back to find this in my mailbox:

On November 18, 2025.

I clicked on the link, and discovered that yes, the pre-patch is going to drop in January:

Found here on Blizzard's website.
November 18, 2025.

So, they're not going to hit the anniversary date of the TBC launch, but close enough for government work.

The Classic Era team will be allowing transfers to Classic Era realms from November 25th 2025 through January 12 2026. At present, no paid boosts are observed, but we'll see. 

I guess that means I've got until mid-January to finish getting my four toons to L60.

Highs in the 50s Today

Given that the past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful (see my previous posts this week), I'm kind of happy keeping the pace I have been:

As Linna gets more powerful chestpieces, her
protective area continues to shrink. Hence I put
on a blue shirt to at least make her look like a Knight
in blue and silver. The status as of November 13, 2025.

I'm finally getting some gear on Linna replaced that she's been wearing since The Deadmines. Yes, that's right. The freaking Deadmines. 

Or, as I like to call it, my dice rolls SUCK.

That notwithstanding, I've been keeping up steady progress given that I've only been on for an average of an hour a night. Two levels per week ain't that bad. I kind of expect to be hitting L60 on these toons around Christmas, which is perfect. Why? because I won't have to worry about doing any gearing up or anything, because I expect the prepatch for TBC on the Anniversary realms to hit in January, and TBC Classic to arrive in February. 

Not too shabby, really.

A Day to Brood About Stuff

It's been an interesting couple of weeks since I last checked in with my Operation Spread the Love on the WoW Anniversary servers.

By that, I mean very busy, and not playing very much either. 

Card's getting to the point where she'll have
some of her pre-raid gear on her, such as the Frostweave
gear (the purple tunic) that provide a pretty good bonus
to Frost spells. Although the screencap was taken today
this was the status as of Thursday, October 30th.

First there was the weekend trip up to visit my oldest and her partner, which included a stop at a coffee shop built in the building that once housed a pumping station for the Milwaukee River...

It was a chilly morning or we'd have sat outside.

And here you go, proof that there is a coffee
shop inside. (I had green tea as I'd already had coffee.)
At the Collectivo Coffee Lakefront in Milwaukee.

And an additional visit to the Milwaukee Public Museum...

Including a rebuilt saloon/taproom. Not sure
if the topless statues were added for effect or not,
but I did make a few snarky comments to my wife.

And you can't visit a museum gift shop
without seeing rocks for sale.

And a small restaurant next to an old train depot. Which of course brought out the train fanatic in me...

It's not a depot any longer, although the train
tracks are nearby.

Next to the depot was a statue of Czech
immigrants coming to this part of Milwaukee.
The irony of seeing this in our current political
climate wasn't lost on me.

On Tuesday, I spent some time over at my mom's house because her hot water heater has begun leaking, which is a good sign that the 20 year old heater has finally rusted through and needs replacement. I've had to argue with her about the immediate need to call a plumber to get this replaced ASAP, because you don't want a catastrophic failure and have 40 gallons of water on your floor.

Then, yesterday I attended the funeral of one of my brother's in-laws.* It rather understandably got me thinking quite a bit about mortality afterward.

It also brought up the very real question about what happens to our games and our characters when we die. I have a few boardgames that are difficult to find these days, such as Avalon Hill's old Civilization (and Advanced Civilization) game, and I've taken care of the game to make sure it doesn't fall apart. But what happens to it when I die? Will it end up in a landfill somewhere, like what happened to my grandfather's stamp collection?**

Or in terms of video games, who gains access to them when I'm gone? More than likely they'll vanish as well, given that someone else would have to take ownership of my Steam account (and other accounts, such as my Battle.net account). 

Orcish Army Knife may be gone, but Rades' old
toons are still present in Puggers Anonymous as
of October 31, 2025.

As you can see above, I logged into OG Balthan just to check to make sure Rades' old toons are present. I guess they'll remain until Microsoft purges accounts from Battle.net for inactivity, but I'm certainly not removing them.

Another reason for thinking about mortality and what happens to things after you die is all of those books that came out decades ago but are no longer published. The most obvious example I can think of David Eddings' Belgariad, which I never see anymore, but there's also other authors who published books in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that are now hard to find. I'm thinking of works by Barbara Hambly, Janny Wurts, Katherine Kerr, and Katherine Kurtz. Even older classics such as Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books are long out of print. I suppose you could go the ebook route, but you don't actually own those books and ebook publishers have shown an inclination to simply yank books away from you whenever they feel like it. 

Oh well. Just another thing to brood on, I guess.

*He died of a brain tumor at the relatively young age of 44.

**My mom and her siblings thought it would be worth something, but after consulting with a couple of experts on the collection the result was that the collection wasn't worth much of anything. It was merely my grandfather's obsession, and that was all it was really worth.

Say Hello to Sunken Temple for Me

When a toon reaches L50 in the Vanilla portion of WoW Classic, you get a quest for your class. (Okay, most classes; I haven't gotten all classes to L50, so there might be an outlier.) That quest chain inevitably sends you to the Sunken Temple dungeon, where you go get a McGuffin to bring back and get a (relatively) decent item as a reward. Sure, it's not world beating or anything, but I'll take it.

Hey, Joan. Don't worry, your turn is coming soon.
Just try not to think about farming Felcloth too much.
The listings are as October 16, 2025.

Typically there's a bit of a wait to find a group for a Sunken Temple run; nothing too terribly bad, but waiting on a Tank is pretty much a time-honored tradition these days. 

Except that this past week has been really bad for groups for ST.

At first I couldn't figure out why, since Sunken Temple does have enough people interested in running it, but then I remembered two things:

• Naxxramas opened up on the Anniversary Servers
• Legion Remix opened on October 7th

Yeah, those two things will do it.

In the meantime, I've been kind of doing other things than leveling my toons. Such as Linna spending time leveling Blacksmithing instead, which led me down the gold sink of working on Blacksmithing quests. (Yes, this was a thing in Vanilla Classic.)

I won't tell you how many times I farmed Mithril Ore
for this. Let's just say that I got to know all of the mobs
around Tanaris. ALL OF THEM.

Even after farming for ore for what seemed like forever, I still decided to buy some extra ore off of the Auction House because I was constantly fighting with other Paladins out there for those Mithril and Truesilver ores.* The net result was not only that I completed those Mithril Order quests, but I now have to go fish a bit to get my gold supply back up. 

Ah well. Not like I'm going to have to worry about an fast mount anytime soon. Or even in TBC, where I didn't get an fast ground mount on Briganaa at all until she hit max level L70.** And throughout all of my playing WoW Classic I never had enough gold to get an Epic flying mount because constantly farming gold and "playing the gold game" didn't interest me.

Remember, kids, when you talk about rushing out and getting your epic flying mounts and whatnot that there are people who didn't want to (or couldn't) spend tons of time min/maxing their gold farming to get their own epic mount. (And didn't want to buy gold illicitly or from Blizzard.)

If you say his name three times really fast,
@madseasonshow will appear and say "Told you so."

Given that I've been slowed down by external factors, I'm actually quite surprised that I've gotten to L52 on two toons by mid-October. With some luck I'll get all four to L52 by Halloween, and just continue onward. I'm expecting TBC Prepatch to hit in January 2026, but we'll see how it goes.

*Before you ask, yes, I'm aware that in Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien used Truesilver and Mithril interchangeably. The first time I saw a Truesilver Ore out in the field in 2009 my brain went "Wait, didn't they know that they're the same damn thing?"

**A little side effect of that Bataan Death March of speed leveling. Another side effect of that experience was that I had to go back and level Leatherworking and Skinning after I leveled to L70, and by then there was almost no reason to do it because by the time I'd have gotten Leatherworking high enough my gear would have been better coming from raid and dungeon drops (theoretically speaking) than anything I could make. 

This Just in: Toons Have Leveled Up. Film At Eleven.

The L50 boundary has been crossed.

Of course the Songshine sisters would be first
to L50. Because competition between siblings.
This is as of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.

You may now return to normal programming.

Seriously, though, it's nice to have gotten not only one but two of the four toons to L50 by the first week of October. I've not been playing as much as well, but I'll be mentioning the reason for that in about a month in another post. 

My friends have been saying they're going to get me running BRD once I have a toon that hits L50, but --surprise surprise-- The Scourge Invasion event prior to Naxxramas began yesterday, so I'm sure they'll be busy doing that. Not exactly as I planned it, but it's working out in my favor, I suppose.

I never really noticed it before, but that crystal
off the bottom of the Scourge floating fortress looks
a lot like those floating bases from Independence Day.

Before you ask, being in the upper L40s meant that I was running Maraudon a bit on the toons. Usually a run would take up most of an evening's worth of gaming, so I didn't do that too much. I kind of preferred having places like Feralas to myself, as most people don't tend to hang out there unless they're running Dire Maul instances. 

Sometimes the setting sun hits you just right...

That doesn't mean I shun human contact, because I do like it when people are around. It's just that I've been in a mood where when I'm not in an instance I prefer to just focus on questing and zone out, like how I used to approach Tetris as a zen-like exercise in meditation. And really, grouping up can generate some of the most oddball conversations if the group is up for it.

Now I've got that old song "Me and You and
a Dog Named Boo" stuck in my head.

See you in a bit!

Visit Sandy Tanaris! See the Rolling Hills of Arathor!

Well, I'm pretty much where I expected to be at this point of the month.

As of September 18, 2025.

My reality is that I still need to work on fishing, because I need to make gold in order to keep training my abilities, and the price of water and food (for every toon not named Cardwyn) can be pretty expensive if you're constantly drinking and/or eating after every couple of pulls. 

That's the real struggle of a Paladin: having to replenish mana more often than a Mage or Warlock.

Nothing says "fun" quite like quenching your thirst
in the middle of an ogre cave. Lens flares are a perk.

Of course, crafting your own gear in Vanilla is often the best way to get a steady influx of better gear, and I've rediscovered the joys of how lousy it can be leveling Blacksmithing and Leatherworking. To be honest, I never used Blacksmithing or Leatherworking in 2019 Classic and 2021 TBC Classic to get gear for leveling*, and by the time TBC Classic came along you didn't really need to craft any Outland gear until you hit L70. At that point crafting became a grinding/daily slog to get the materials needed for crafting your gear for the first few raids. 

On the bright side, you can mine for ore outside.
Even on a somewhat gloomy evening in the Arathi Highlands.

I can see that the Anniversary servers will be more of what we saw in 2021. I'm now convinced it's unavoidable. I also think that Blizz will enable a paid boost just like in 2021, but it's really Blizz's call to make. 

We'll see, I suppose.

*I never leveled Linnawyn high enough in 2019 to make it worth my while to level Blacksmithing to get gear, and I had to speed level Briganaa at such a rate that I only leveled Leatherworking after she got to L70.

Dead Things in Stormwind

Oh, look at the time!

It's September, and I presume that Naxxramas is coming quickly to the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. People have been raiding AQ40 and AQ20, doing goofy things such as pulling Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and in general causing a bit of a ruckus.

One of many little visits to Stormwind by Teremus.

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging along in my own little way.

The listings are as of September 4, 2025.

Getting a chance to melt enemies in Zul'Farrak is good for the soul. My soul, to be clear, not the souls of the trolls we've been fighting in there.

Speaking of pour souls, there's been a dead Tauren floating over the mailbox by the Stormwind bank for several weeks now. Every Patch Tuesday I think that a reboot will fix what has to be a perpetual amount of embarrassment visited upon this Tauren's clan, but he's not vanished yet.

Your eyes do not deceive you. There are two Tauren there.

For a while there were actually TWO dead Tauren there, but the last I checked we're back to one. Things like that demonstrate two things: that the denizens of the Anniversary Servers have a sense of humor, and Blizzard doesn't really devote much in the way of resources to the Classic Era-esque side of the house. If they did devote resources, this dead body would have been cleaned up by now.

I've also been experiencing class quests that I've never seen before, such as the quest chain for the Warlock's robe and offhand weapon.

This is part of the reason why I want to go back eventually and work my way through the other classes I've left behind during this leveling process: I've never seen a lot of these class quests, and it'll be interesting to go through them when you never can experience them in Retail (or Mists Classic) at all.

Well, onward and into Autumn.

EtA: Corrected grammar and reinstated the comment over the third graphic.