A Compliment is Sometimes the Best Thing

There are days when you just feel too ordinary for an MMO...

Whether you're just wandering the streets...

Or maybe just speaking to an auctioneer...

Or maybe you're just not exotic enough in all the right wrong ways...

But sometimes, you get a compliment that makes your day.

Yes, that 'epic sham' is me. 

And yes, I'd been out of mana on that 4+ minute fight since about 40-45 seconds in. This was a fight nobody wanted, because we kept getting runners that kept pulling other mobs, and things got out of hand really fast. I'm still not sure how we made it through that one.

Considering I was merely doing my job and trying not to get killed in that dungeon*, it's nice to see that someone thought I did pretty good.

And before anybody asks, I'm doing fine leveling Briganaa. I'm not pushing myself at all: I'm just relaxing and leveling at my own pace, which has been faster than I expected, but I'm not letting that get to me.

*This was Razorfen Kraul, if you're interested. There are plenty of spots in that dungeon where things can get so spicy that you'd think there were ghost peppers in that salsa.

Some Things Never Change

Last night I figured that I'd take Briganaa into The Stockades, since she was about at the right level and I knew that there were plenty of toons around to run the instance. 

Don't quote me on this, but Blizzard had apparently made some changes to how damage and experience are calculated if someone who has a much higher level is grouped with you, specifically designed to stop the Classic WoW practice of boosting by a max level toon basically pulling and killing off low level dungeon baddies while everybody else stays at the entrance.*

So theoretically there ought to be plenty of unboosted players wanting to get into a Stockade run, and it only took me about 5-7 minutes before I got a whisper.

Typically it's a "Want to run Stocks?" or something to that effect, but this one was:

"Spec"

I blinked. I mean, Deadmines is commonly the second dungeon that an Alliance player would run; would what spec my Shaman is really matter?

Oh why the hell not. "Enh," I replied, meaning I was the melee Shaman subclass, Enhancement.

I immediately got an invite to group.

"If this guy thinks that I can put down a Windfury Totem at L26, he's in for a surprise," I grumbled.**

At least this tank didn't ask me about it, so I threw him a bone and instead of providing a totem giving a bonus to armor, I put down a Strength of Earth Totem (which gives a bonus to Strength and consequently damage) and just rolled with it. 

Okay, I'll admit the dungeon run was fast, and the only death was at the end where the healer had been stunned and couldn't heal the Mage to save her***, but I was constantly drinking trying to get mana back while the tank kept running ahead. It's one thing if you're a Mage and you have to stay back anyway to cast spells from distance, but it's bad form if you're melee DPS is constantly running up about 5-10 seconds after you've pulled. Sure, I didn't have to worry about pulling threat, but come on, man. It's not a big deal to finish a few seconds slower.

As soon as humanly possible I dropped group (after thanking people, because that's how I roll). I honestly don't think the tank really learned anything about patience, but attempting to min/max a low level dungeon like this is... well, really quite ridiculous. When I grumped about this to my friends who were online tonight, my Questing Buddy agreed said that no, it didn't make sense in such a low level instance. 

*I understand the desire to stop boosting of bots and whatnot, but it isn't really a good look if you ban boosting but turn around and say "you can legally boost to L58 as much as you want for $60 a boost".

**A Shaman doesn't get access to the Windfury Totem until L32. Windfury is a buff prized by melee and tanks because of the often extreme bonuses to melee attacks it can generate.

***For the record, I rezzed the Mage while the healer ran out of the instance. Bad form in my book.

One Step at a Time

If you'll recall, my time in the 2021 version of TBC Classic did not end well. I got a "promotion" to one of the raid leads, which necessitated some changes in how I approached playing WoW Classic. When you throw in that I switched from a Mage to a Shaman as my raiding toon --which in turn forced me to level extremely quickly*-- yeah, there was already a lot of stress from the beginning, and it got worse as people left the raid team because "we weren't raiding enough"**.

Oh, and I had my little hospital adventure in the middle of this, which forced me to reevaluate how I approached all aspects of my life.

And my job changed, which meant I could no longer be functionally brain dead the first hour or two in the mornings (having done the same job for 20 years has its advantages), so that was the final push that led me to giving up progression raiding.

I still lingered on, raid leading a Friday Night Karazhan run, which was stressful mainly because it was difficult getting 10 people together on a regular basis for that raid on a Friday night. Once the raids began, it typically was a chill time and a blast, but actually getting to that point was the source of far too much stress.

There was also a few weeks where we tried Saturday afternoon Zul'Aman runs, and to be completely honest that bombed big time. We never had the right composition of classes to make the runs a success, people who signed up didn't make the raids, and some people would show up in quest greens expecting Zul'Aman to be just like Karazhan in terms of difficulty. Hell, even I was undergeared for those Zul'Aman runs because I mainly had Tier 4 level gear on my Shaman, which may have been fine for Karazhan but most definitely NOT fine for Zul'Aman. 

So yeah, I was wondering why I was back here in 2026 on the Anniversary Servers' TBC Classic implementation. Am I just a masochist or something?

You and me both, Brig...

I will freely admit that part of the reason why I'm here --a big part-- is that I like my friends' group. Yes, we all have our quirks which means there are parts of them I might not agree with, but all-in-all we get along well together. Once they finally understood that I wasn't going to go rush out to Outland and get involved in the leveling experience just yet, things settled down a bit. 

***

Last night I'd taken this new Anniversary version of Briganaa to The Deadmines, and my Questing Buddy was surprised there were even people running Deadmines in the first place. She told me she figured everybody was in Outland.

"Oh no," I replied, "I had no trouble getting into a run at all. I've even had no trouble getting into a Ragefire Chasm or DM run on the Horde side."

As I've said numerous times, "it's not a dungeon
run until the Mage bites it." As our healer didn't have
the ability to Rez, Neve had to run back to the dungeon.
Thankfully the graveyard she spawned at was the closest
to the instance, and not close to the closest Horde settlement.

I guess the legendary end-game bias that WoW has, coupled with the ability in the Anniversary servers to use paid boosts on Blood Elf or Draenei toons, meant that people exclusively in Outland think that everybody is there. The thing is, there were 12 active layers in Westfall alone, so you just need to know where to look to find the players leveling out in the Old World. 

***

Despite everybody's first impressions, I'm not anti-social when playing MMOs. I do tend to immediately reject random people if they simply throw me a grouping-up invitation without asking first, because I strongly believe in following social conventions rather than blithely assuming everybody is trying to rush through leveling. However, if I'm out leveling alone, I tend to prefer playing alone unless I need to group up. 

Solo play has allowed me to survive my expected PTSD leveling Briganaa to a surprising degree. When I ran RFC on my Orc Shaman when the Anniversary servers first dropped, it was not a pleasant experience at all. It felt like I was back in Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling to maximize my damage output despite juggling many hats and raid drama and everything else. When I got out of that last RFC run, I had the shakes and I decided to shelve that Shaman. 

This time around? It was a bit chaotic as I needed to get back into the groove of dealing with totems, but I was happy just being a regular player. With all the sweaty players already in Outland, those of us left behind in the Old World tend to not be min/maxers, so nobody cares if you're not doing things exactly perfect. 

And to those who might read this and say that "your friends don't care about how you play and you can go into Outland and not have those issues", I have a one word answer: bullshit.

You see, what may be said and what is done are two entirely different things. If I held a mirror up to my friends and their style of play, most of them are min-maxers and all of them play in a sweaty manner. They know what gear they need, they go after said gear, and they're pretty straightforward in what they want to do and where to go. And yes, they may say they they want to play with me, but if I'm not going to min-max that will be a source of friction when we play together.

They also play and quest faster than me, because they all use the Questie addon (something I refuse to utilize along with most other addons), and I tend to take my time and read the quest text as well as take my time to restock and do other things in between questing hubs.**** So, when I'm grouped up, my lack of Questie works to my advantage and I simply stop working on my own quests so I can keep up with them, then I'll go back later when I'm solo questing and finish them at my leisure. 

***

Another thing that has saved me (so far) is that I'm not exclusively leveling Briganaa, either. I've been working on trying to get some of the professions on my already L60 toons to the max for the Old World (300). Of course, that does mean fighting gold farmers for things such as herbs and mining nodes, but outside of the first couple of days when the Dark Portal opened it hasn't been that bad.

I've also been re-engaging with my first max level toon, Quintalan, in his Anniversary Server edition:

Yes, he's a bit of a cad. And he knows he's got
the looks (and the locks) to match.

Amazingly enough, he hasn't died yet. I figured he'd be dead already, but he's at L15 and still hanging in there. 

IIRC, the first time I did this quest back in 2009
I died on it. So... that he survived is a testament to
how much I've learned in the 17 years I've been
playing MMOs.

I'm definitely taking my time with Quintalan, because I want to see how far I can go before I kick the bucket. That might mean delaying the last quest in The Ghostlands for a while, as Dhar'khan is a bit of a tough guy to kill at-level, even in a 5 person group.

But I've got time. I've got 8.5 months before whatever happens next will happen. I know that PTSD is still out there, lurking about, but as long as I stay true to my goal of taking my time and not rushing, I think I'll be okay this time around.

*At the rate of 3 levels/day just to get to L60 and then head out to Outland. When you couple that with almost no support ("New phone, who dis?") from the guild once the Dark Portal opened, it was a stressful and grating experience. It was then that those of us who leveled Shamans (or BE Paladins) back then realized what their guilds really thought of them.

**Despite our official 1 day/week raiding schedule being completely present from the beginning, from the start we had members of the raid team agitating for us to switch to 2 days/week. It was as if they felt that once we got started we'd switch to 2 days/week just to keep up with everybody else. The Raid Leadership held fast to that 1 day/week schedule, and we lost a lot of our best raiders who jumped to more sweaty raid teams. I'd say "good riddance", but we had an increasingly hard time finding good players as the expansion went on as people began fleeing the server for more populated servers, and a lot of those that were left congregated in the sweatiest of the hardcore raid teams.

***The astute among you will recognize that the chestpiece she's wearing in the first screencap is the quest reward from killing the end boss in that dungeon.

****Such as take screenshots. LOTS of screenshots. I really ought to figure out a way to copy them regularly to a location that's backed up with the rest of my data onto a separate hard drive. No, I don't trust OneDrive at all, since it's not a true backup solution, but rather a "cloud solution" where all your data is stored in a central location for all your devices. As long as you know that's what it is and that's what you want, fine, but I don't want that. I want backups of my local data, not a replacement of my local data with cloud storage that can go *POOF* if I decide to stop my subscription. 

EtA: Fixed a few pronouns.

Sir, He's Dead Already!

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.

The Blood Elf Paladin Quintalan still survives, but he's Level 7 right now. His long term future is in doubt, because he has a tendency to overpull even when I specifically don't want to.

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. 

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 Bit of Humble-ish Pie

Did I say something about no paid boosts yet?

Well, this dropped later in the day yesterday....

This was captured 11/19/2025.

And yes, there's a paid boost involved because of course there is:

This was captured on 11/19/2025.

The Outland Epic Pack --including the Boost and 30 days game time-- is $80 US, while the Outland Heroic Pack* is $40 US. Back in 2021, the paid boost to L58 was $40 US, and most of the commentary in the Blizz Forums centered on the "value for the money" for the two packs. More than one person thought you had to buy a pack to even play TBC Classic on the Anniversary servers, so they didn't read the post thoroughly. One person did request the "/spit" emote be restored to the game, indicating that they were not happy with these boosts existing at all.

Captured on 11/19/2025.

However, almost nobody mentioned the real issue here: the bots.

I sincerely doubt that the bot brigades will care about throwing $80 at Microsoft to have a legion of L58 boosts for farming Outland. They're just a higher class of locust, I suppose.

Another other notable item that I've seen out and about is that the Hardcore servers will not progress into TBC Classic, as per this YouTube video by WillE:

However, the biggest change aside from the $80 paid boost is that the TBC raids will all be in their post-nerf settings. I presume that's because they want everybody to blitz through TBC Classic in one year, and the difficulty of some of the raids were simply too much to be able to pull that off. Still, Karazhan especially turned into a cakewalk by the end of TBC Classic back in 2022, because we frequently had very few toons (yes, they were alts) more well geared than my Shaman back then, and she was (at best) partially Tier 5 geared.

This doesn't entirely shock me, but I figured they'd wait until the next Phase's raids became available before they nerfed the lower Tiers of raids. Silly me, I suppose.

WillE highlighted some other things, such as Guild Banks being available at launch instead of when they were first released into WoW back in the day, and that the UI changes found in Retail will make their way to the Anniversary servers. There's also that Dual Spec and the Dungeon Finder will appear in Classic Era as well, so butter my butt and call me a biscuit. 

At this rate, we'll be seeing the WoW Token on Classic Era sooner than I'd have thought.

*Minus both boost and game time.

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.

Just How Fresh is it?

I wasn't that enthusiastic about the prospect of new so-called "Classic Fresh" servers, since I was already fine with hanging around on Classic Era. The nicest thing about Classic Era is that it's (theoretically) not supposed to change. There is absolutely no rush or FOMO or anything in Classic Era, because it's simply not going anywhere. There's nothing new coming to the servers, so if you want to take years to finally get around to raiding Naxxramas, that's fine. If you want to gradually get to Rank 14 in PvP, sure, take your time.*

That's the thing about Azeroth in Classic Era: sure, it's static, but it also means the entire place is relevant. (Yes, even Azshara.) You don't have to worry about broad areas of the game being cast aside and not played by 99% of the player base because it's not part of the latest expansion, because there simply aren't any expansions.

My Questing Buddy and I have discussed at length the only weakness in Classic Era: the lack of TBC Era or Wrath Era servers. If you've read this blog during the period of TBC Classic, you know I have issues with The Burning Crusade expansion, but to be perfectly honest the issues were less with the expansion itself but more with my interactions with my guild and its transition into a hardcore Meta-driven raiding guild.** If we'd have been given the opportunity to keep our old toons in TBC Era, I would have done it if for nothing else than to give me a chance to enjoy TBC on my own terms without the external pressure to be something I'm not.

As far as my Questing Buddy goes, she loved how the Warlock played in TBC Classic, but probably even more than that she missed her Draenei Priest, who became her main in Wrath Classic.

So when I logged into Classic Era the evening after the 30th Anniversary video release, I should have known she had opinions on the matter.

"CARDY!!"

"hey there"

"There's gonna be new Fresh Servers that go to TBC!!!"

Yeah, you could say she was excited.

***

I'm somewhat less enthusiastic, because I don't intend to give up Classic Era. If these servers become --or transition to-- TBC Classic Era servers, I'd be fine with that. I suspect, however, that they'll move on to Wrath Classic just like the current progression Classic servers do. And since they're Fresh servers, I won't be able to transfer my original Cardwyn over either. I would have to do all the things she'd done, and I'm not sure I really want to. 

But in the end I did agree with my Questing Buddy that I'd spend about half of my WoW time in these new servers. I suspect that among our friend group I'll be the last person to L60, because I do dawdle a bit when I don't have a goal in mind. 

*You can't de-rank in Classic Era due to inactivity; that was part of a change to the PvP ranking system put in place in Era presumably to combat the issues with a lack of people playing Era servers when they first appeared. The changes made also make it harder to get to Rank 10 and beyond, but I've learned to cope with that. After all, I never got past Rank 9 in original 2019 Classic.

**I think the biggest loss for me in that TBC Classic period was how that naked pursuit of hardcore playstyles wrecked relationships in the guild. I should have never accepted a raid leadership position, because I was exposed to the conflicts within guild leadership which manifested in a fracturing of the guildies. That I was one of the Leftovers, the leveling Shamans abandoned when the Dark Portal opened, didn't help. I would have been much better off staying separate, within the confines of my old guild Retail Orphans, and tried to hold onto Cardwyn as my main instead of volunteering to level a Shaman instead.

Wake Me Up When September Ends*

We are now into September, but as far as weather goes that doesn't mean much.

What it does mean is that Blaugust is over, and I participated without ever signing up or mentioning it directly in a post.

Yeah, it's kind of hipster-ish to participate by not participating, but I've found that when I do explicitly participate in something by signing up for it --I'm looking at you, NaNoWriMo-- I never actually get close to actually doing much. Therefore, I decided if I was going to try to post once per day for an entire month, I was going to do it my way and without drawing any sort of attention to myself.

When you throw in the several trips that I've had this month, including the Big One up to Milwaukee, I'm surprised that I pulled it off. Another funny thing is that since I don't play Retail WoW, I didn't rely upon the new expansion's release to fill my content. Based on the tags I put out, I only had four posts that referenced Retail WoW, the second one being the only one that addressed my dislike of the direction the Modern game has taken.**

I kind of wrote about things that were of interest to me, such as re-discovering some of the radio material in storage and some of the adventures I had as people returned to Classic Era and began playing Alterac Valley once more. 

What you don't see very much of are adventures pertaining to more "traditional" MMO activity, such as leveling, questing, raiding, dungeon running, etc. I don't level alts much at all, which I already covered, and I don't really want to bother with a regular raiding schedule either. I'm fine with simply hanging around and not doing much; this is a form of social media that I'm fine with. If I did play Retail WoW right now, I'd probably be one of those people who would just level a toon by fishing, because I really don't need to rush out and do all the things (or see the content).

I mean, I am that guy who leveled a toon to max level in TBC Classic by not setting foot in Outland.

I still have the proof of that.

Actually, that does bring up the question as to how slow can you intentionally level in Retail WoW and still be considered to be "leveling"? I know of DoubleAgent and their factionless Pandaren who has leveled to max level by just gathering herbs and ore in the Pandaren starting zone, but is that really the slowest way to level? Can you go even slower? If you go even slower, you could probably level so slowly that by the time you get to the starting point for the current expansion the price of The War Within would be 75% off or more. When I last was in Retail, I leveled the original Azshandra from scratch at the beginning of Mists, and by the time I was ready to head out to Pandaria it was nine months or more after release. Actually, if you level slow enough, you could level so slowly that you don't even have to pay for The War Within, because the pre-patch for the next expac would be released.

Hmm... I wonder...

Of course, I could just fish in Classic Era and do effectively the same thing.

***

Still, looking ahead, September is going to be busy all by its lonesome. I'll be working on the deck some more, probably going to at least one of my youngest's concerts down at UofL, and my wife is already getting itchy to visit our oldest up in Milwaukee.

And somewhere in the middle of all that I'd like to actually relax a bit.

*Holy crap. That Green Day song is 20 years old.

**As for the 'Green Eggs and Ham' crowd of 'try it and you might like it', I've seen enough cutscenes to know that I don't like it without playing the game at all. (In fact, I didn't 'play' the game much from early Cataclysm until I officially stopped playing in 2014, but I instead only played Battlegrounds.) My dislike of the PvE game has nothing to do with how a class feels or the quest design or systems or anything like that; I'm sure if you play that you'll like it. I simply don't like playing a godlike character. Well, that and after 20 years I begin to ask the "doesn't this seem like an awful lot of world-ending events to happen to one world over the course of 20 years?" type of questions. I'm sure there's some in-game handwaving there too, like "well, all the other titans are dead so Azeroth is this one special place where they can be birthed once more." (I'm going off of The Last Titan as the name of the last of the trilogy of expansions; I have no understanding of anything regarding the story since... probably late Cataclysm?)

EtA: Grabbed the wrong screencap. The original screencap was for me hitting L68, as proof that I could go to Outland. I replaced it with the one for L70 itself.

#Blaugust2024

Yadda Yadda Yadda, Something About History

Let's harken back to those halcyon days of yester er, 2021, when the Dark Portal opened and TBC Classic formally launched.

The optimal method of leveling in Outland --according to all the game guides-- was to spam dungeons in succession until you get to the level cap. My guild back then followed that strategy religiously, endlessly spamming dungeons to get to the cap*, and then... They stopped. They --and a lot of other players who followed the same strat-- simply burned out on running dungeons and refused to run them again.** 

This strategy, one of endlessly spamming dungeons over and over, was repeated in Wrath Classic and in Season of Discovery's Phase 2 (Scarlet Monastery, anyone?) and was even picked up on by Nixxiom in his latest video as part of the reason why he stopped playing SoD:

One of my Classic Era friends hates hates HATES
Gnomeregan, so she's right there with you, Nixxiom.

So, why bring this up? I mean, that community-wide scourge of min-maxing things to death is what led me to quit Season of Discovery too, but that's not why I'm posting.

I'm looking at Delves from Retail's soon to be released The War Within and am thinking that people will simply run Delves on repeat until they get to max level, and then switch to running dungeons and raids. That's assuming that they don't actually need to finish a main storyline to jump straight into endgame content. Maybe they do need to quest to get to endgame, but my belief is that people will skip everything to get to the end if you give them the opportunity to do so. The WoW community has shown in the past that enough players will do whatever it takes to "win" that they need to be protected from their worst impulses. 

I don't need to rehash that TBC Classic experience that the leveling Shamans --myself included-- had upon reaching Outland: when we finally needed to enter some of these dungeons, we couldn't find anyone to run with us due to the burnout. At least with Delves you can run them solo, so you don't have to worry about your friends burning out on them and preventing you from getting your own runs completed.

It's just that I look at these new systems and think of all the ways that they could go wrong. Like death and taxes, the concept of developers underestimating a player base's lust for something --no matter what it is-- is almost a certainty. 

*And then Heroics once those unlocked, because getting attuned to some of the raids required a lot of Heroic dungeon runs.

**Until the Isle of Quel'Danas unlocked at the end of the expansion, revealing the Magister's Terrace dungeon, and they all spammed that endlessly for reputation and gear.

If We Had The Chance

Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?

--The Way We Were, Barbara Streisand (Written by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Marvin Hamlisch)

The other day I was helping out my Questing Buddy with a run through Uldaman --that mid-L40s dungeon out in the Badlands that is actually the archaeological excavation of a titan city-- when I mentioned something amusing I saw when I got to the Ironforge Flight Point to head out.

"One of the people from [the guild I occasionally help out with Onyxia] was here at the Ironforge FP and they did a keyboard turn as I ran by on OG Card," I reported. "It was as if they saw my full Tier 3 set and said, 'Wait, isn't that the Mage who never reserves anything in Ony?"

"LOL"

I'm sure I got recognized, since that Mage Tier 3 set is pretty distinctive, and having it also means that I was raiding Naxxramas in Vanilla Classic long enough to actually get the full set. In a 40 person raid where you have --on average-- 5-6 Mages, 3 Warlocks, and 3-4 Priests vying for the same drops-- you're competing with over 1/4 of the raid to get 9 pieces of gear.

Too bad I didn't say out loud "I'm the EVIL twin!!" before I took the FP, but because my brain only thought of that now, oh well.

"Maybe they're waiting on the T6 set," my Questing Buddy added.

"They'll be waiting a long time for that," I replied. We both knew that the T6 set was released in Burning Crusade, and Classic Era is permanently set at Vanilla Classic.

After a short pause, I said, "I never got a T6 set. Or a T5 set, for that matter."

"Neither did I." 

Our TBC raid team disbanded after only one try in Sunwell Plateau*, and since I was Loot Manager for our raid, I was also aware of her struggles to get gear in the two Tier 5 raids, Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Cavern.

"IIRC, Tier 5 wasn't that good for Enhancement Shamans," I mused. "Maybe two of the pieces were good, but overall Tier 4 gear was more desirable."

"I didn't even get Tier 4 gear at all," she replied, "since Fire Spec Warlocks used the Spellfire set."

"Ah, the Tailored set?"

"Yep."

That was the set that required a Tailor to make Spellcloth every couple of days. While it's one of those 'it sounds great in theory' concepts to spread out the gear acquisition process, what ended up happening in TBC Classic was that people would fanatically level alts just for the purpose of cranking out tons of Spellcloth for their gear. I knew one Mage who actually had FIVE toons making Spellcloth so they could get the gear needed for raiding.** (Yes, they also had a 'normal' full time job.) Somewhere in the back of my head I would have liked to get that set for Cardwyn or Neve, but I looked at how sweaty people were at working for that set, threw up in my mouth a little, and walked away.

The next day, we were killing pirates in Stranglethorn Vale when talk about TBC Classic came up again. 

"I find it surprising, but I'm now kind of missing TBC Classic," I said. "It would be nice to go back and do things differently."

"What would you do differently?" my Questing Buddy asked.

"First thing is that I wouldn't switch to being an Enhancement Shaman," I replied with some heat.

She laughed.

"I'm a Mage, and while I love melee, I absolutely hated the totem-twisting rotation. If you were off by just a smidge everybody's DPS would tank. I know I'd lose my raid spot, but that'd be the case only on the hardcore guilds."

"Yeah, I'd do a lot of things differently," she added. "I loved Warlock Fire, and I hated giving that up to tank [Leotheras the Blind]."

"I don't miss raid leading." Being peripherally involved in guild leadership drama wasn't worth it, particularly the perception that we were the "casual" raid despite our once per week raid trying hard to keep up with the multi-day per week hardcore teams.

"I miss Jesup." Jes ran a lot of alt raids, and she was the one who originally created the Friday night Karazhan run before handing it off to me. She'd burned out on all those alt raids in TBC Classic, but she came back to run some in Wrath Classic.*** 

"How is she doing?" another of our friends asked.

"I haven't heard from her in months," I replied.

Now that we're a few years away from the end of TBC Classic, I find that I've come around to agreeing with Shintar's desire to have a few TBC Era servers around. For all those worried about the player base being fractured, to Blizzard a sub is a sub is a sub, so if they keep you "in the family" in some fashion rather than having you unsubscribe to go play FFXIV or Elder Scrolls Online during content droughts, then Blizz has succeeded.

Preach talks about the "keeping it in the family"

concept here, so it's not just me who thinks that...

I know I'm not the only one who misses the concept of TBC Era servers, given the community driven "fresh" server push on PvP-RP Classic Era servers, as highlighted by WillE here:

Apparently Microsoft/Zenimax is pushing hard

to promote ESO's Gold Road expansion with
all of these sponsorships...

He is right in that Vanilla Classic seems to be an evergreen thing, where there's continual interest in starting over every few years, but another part of it's appeal is that in an Era server you have all the freaking time in the world. You don't have to rush to the end and then start on the progression raiding treadmill because you know an expansion will be coming out in a few years. That's kind of why in LFG and Trade Chat there's an ongoing argument about why pay for a level boost when most of the Vanilla Classic experience is in the leveling itself. 

With Cataclysm Classic in full swing, there is now no ability to see the Old World + Outland + Northrend as it was, so Blizzard is effectively creating a demand by simply going through the progression of World of Warcraft's expansions. While it's not their primary motivation for creating Cataclysm Classic, I'm sure that the WoW Classic team is aware of it. I'm also completely sure that Blizz has at least kept an eye on the private server community to see if there's an uptick in interest in TBC and Wrath Classic servers. 

But we'll see. After my experience in TBC Classic, I never thought I'd be circling back to want to try it again, but here we are. Maybe it's a shot at redemption, or maybe it's a chance for me to finally get some closure from all of the shit that myself and the other leveling Shamans went through, but if I did go back it would be on my terms, not anybody else's.**** 

And that's a start.

 

*That's where you get the Tier 6 gear, along with Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.

**And to sell on the Auction House.

***I'd have loved to have run with her in those, but since she was doing them under the franken guild's name and some people I no longer respect participated, I refused to join. I'm not so desperate to raid that I was willing to overlook bad behavior, which judging by commentary in social media makes me feel like I'm some sort of unicorn.

****Even just writing that last paragraph gave me flashbacks to that insane month I spent and how miserable it was. Slaying that soul-sucking psychic vampire would be very much worth it. Now, where's my fucking wooden stake?

Video Game Art: World of Warcraft

I was perusing Batttle.net's launcher the other day because the launcher is heavily promoting the somewhat controversial Plunderstorm event in Retail* when I was struck by the artwork:

The presence of a Draenei in pirate regalia makes
this event seem flirty and fun. Screencap from Battle.net.

While I have no real opinion on Plunderstorm itself, as it's a Retail only thing and I don't play Retail, I had to admit that Blizzard's art team does a fantastic job of selling the event. 

That was when I got the idea for this series of posts, which is intended to be an occasional event meant to highlight the artwork in and about video games. 

My sister-in-law's husband received a coffee table book as a present some years back of the artwork for the games for the original Atari 2600, such as this box cover for Atari's Haunted House:

We have this in a box somewhere, but
this graphic from Giant Bomb is much better
than I'd ever be able to scan.

Whether or not the game matched the artwork is kind of irrelevant, since the artwork is meant to evoke a specific emotion and intice you to purchase the game. Beyond that, it's really damn good all by itself.

So, I thought, why not highlight a slice of some video game art that I've found that I really do enjoy? I'm not an art museum or gallery, but it's something I want to present here to demonstrate that, well, video game art is just as much art as that found in any physical gallery.

This first installment of artwork comes from screencaps I made from of Battle.net's launcher --which is why there's the 'X' and the 'Back' buttons visible on them-- and show that the Blizzard art team is still at the top of their game. Alas that these aren't the full artwork, because the news entries only show part of the full piece, and if there's an attribution other than 'Blizzard' I can't find it on Battle.net's launcher. I realize that Blizzard likely did that on purpose so that their art team wouldn't be poached by other game developers or graphic art teams, but the artists who worked on these pieces deserve the recognition.

When the sky is shattered and looks like it's on fire,
that's not a good thing. Yes, this is from Shadowlands,
which is to show that no matter what you thought
of the expansion itself, the art does a great job
of showing a shattered world.

Yes, I used a cropped version of these two clowns
as a header for this blog for a while. I still have
mixed emotions about this graphic, because the art
is great but the memory of my progression raiding
ending without ever finishing Tempest Keep
still hurts over two years later.

Yeah, don't remind me that I only set foot in
Ulduar once. The artwork is still great,
because I can appreciate the Lovecraftian nature
of the Old Gods.

I'm still of the opinion that dragons --even in
WoW-- are not to be trifled with. They have
their own agendas, and woe to that person
who crosses them. That said, if you've got
one in your corner, you can sleep well at night.

Yeah, the fight at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraq was
kind of like this. Cardwyn took a bit of a beating
there in the fight --I seem to recall her getting
stomped and kicked into the next county--
but I'm glad I was there for the battle.

I believe this is inside the Icecrown Citadel
raid itself, because it doesn't look like
the entrance to the 5-person instances plus
the raid. Unlike Ulduar and the TBC raids,
I'm actually okay that I never made it here.

Sunrise over Thousand Needles.

Remember what I said about not quite
trusting dragons? How about dragons disguised
as gnomes? That's about as close as you can get
to someone holding up a sign that says
"Danger, Will Robinson!"

As much as I ended up disliking the Cataclysm
expansion, I can't deny the power of the artwork.

It's that "We are not amused" look that gets me.

Oh, look; the demon found himself a new
pet. While seeing the artwork for Serpentshrine
Cavern and Tempest keep hurts for me,
this likely would hurt my questing buddy, as
our raid team in TBC Classic fell apart
when they pushed to Sunwell Plateau right
before the guild transferred servers.

And finally, this stirs a lot of emotions in me.
Not bad ones, to be certain, but old memories
of my first Paladin in AD&D in the early 80s
taking on evil in all its forms. There's also more
than a bit of Arthur vs. Mordred at the Battle
of Camlann here as well.

*I know that Blizz wants to call it Modern WoW, but I prefer Retail since it also implies that you have to have bought the current expansion to be current with the present version of WoW. Modern WoW sounds like it covers everything from Legion onward, and at the rate Classic WoW is being released it'll reach Legion in a few years.

Behind the Curve

My son informed me the other week that he'd finished Baldur's Gate 3.

Considering that after that first week's worth of excessive playing my time in BG3 had shrunk to practically nothing for a month, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm not into rushing into new content when an MMO expansion hits, but that initial week's worth playing BG3 gave me enough dopamine hits that I could understand the urge to keep playing.* When I realized I was eschewing work to play BG3, I had to dial it back for my own sanity. (And to keep my job, but that kind of goes without saying.)

My son didn't have those issues, since he was able to fit in most of BG3 before his current semester of grad school started, and more power to him for that. 

I'm not going to lie and say I was totally fine with all this; I felt a pang of jealousy at how he cruised through the game while I'm plodding along. It's not as if I'm savoring the game, either; at times it feels like when I was speed leveling that Draenei Shaman when TBC Classic came out: I'm constantly plotting my next move and trying to figure out how to progress further through the story.**

Yes, my MMO playing is at exactly the opposite inflection point from where I am playing a single player RPG. You could say that I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 like other people play World of Warcraft, and you'd not be wrong. 

***

It's the equivalent of reading a really exciting novel: the pages fly by and you want to get on to the next part just to see what happens. 

I get that, I really do, but I think that I need to be reminded of that from time to time that people who blitz through content aren't doing it "just to get it over with", but genuinely like the content so much that they're constantly turning that next page to find out what happens. 

I guess I get cynical about things when, like in TBC Classic, everybody was supposed to follow a playbook to get themselves raid ready as soon as possible. I thought it was only my guild that did that, because a few people I met out in Outland while leveling had completely different (and better) experiences with their guilds in terms of pacing and prepping for raids. However, on further reflection those better experiences had more to do with helping their own leveling Shamans to get leveled and not abandoning them to their fate when the Dark Portal opened. Those guilds, while more helpful to their Shamanistic (and Blood Knight) brethren, still had goals to achieve and raids to prep for; they were just a tad nicer about it, that's all. There were quite a few guilds raiding Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon while I was somewhere out in Terokkar Forest***, plodding away. 

A blast from the past, from June 18, 2021. If I were in
the "sweaty" raid, I'd have only a little over
two weeks to get to L70 and through the attunement
gauntlet. Our raid team was the one with the
"casual" reputation that I despised and started
raiding in the last week of July, 2021.

If I were in those guilds, I'd not have been abandoned, true, but I'd have also been pushed into the regimen all of those other guilds were doing. 

So why am I okay with it when I'm playing a video game such as Baldur's Gate 3?

***

As is typically the case, I believe it has to do with agency.

Typically, the way to get me to do something is to let me figure it out on my own and I'll likely end up doing what needs to be done. If I'm forced into doing something by some external force, then I'm going to drag my feet and refuse. Think of it of how people approach taxes: everybody in the US has to file their income tax by April 15th, and a lot of people will procrastinate until the last possible moment to do their taxes. I know people who do that on principle, complaining about their tax rates and whatnot, but I am one of those who simply don't like being told to do their taxes, especially if I'm given some sanctimonious bullshit like what I got as a kid when being told to eat my dinner "because it's good for you."

From Calvin and Hobbes.

Likewise, at work if I'm told I have to do something, I'm probably going to be one of the last people to actually get it finished. I would not do well in a highly regimented environment, such as the military. 

Hawkeye is my spirit animal.
From Imgflip (and M*A*S*H).

From that perspective, you can see why I clashed with progression raiding in an MMO format. When I joined the progression raid team, I did so willingly and pushed myself to get up to speed both gear wise and add-on wise. There weren't requirements for how exactly I went about getting my toon(s) ready for progression raiding; just that I get myself ready. And yes, I willingly went to SixtyUpgrades, Wowhead, and Icy Veins to see where my gaps were. It wasn't a directly communicated expectation, but rather something I did on my own to become a member of the raid team. 

It was only when TBC Classic came along and raid/guild leadership began making exact demands on the gear and process of getting raid ready did I rebel. The concept of raiding went from only being concerned with the end result ("raid ready") to trying to dictate how it should be done, and those demands weren't limited to my guild. Almost all of the actively raiding guilds on Myzrael-US were guilty of making the same demands on their members starting in TBC Classic, and whether their demands were cloaked in a velvet glove or not, the demands were pretty much the same iron fist: do it or you're not on the raid team. The lone exception that I was aware of was one guild who basically told its members to go do whatever for a month when TBC Classic dropped, and they circled back after that month to see where the guild stood before getting ready to raid. 

***

Okay, that's just raiding. Still, there's nothing that says you can't do whatever you want in an MMO in general. 

At it's core, that's correct. The design of an MMO is to allow a player to do a variety of activities without saying "you must conform". You could make the argument that modern MMOs have a ton of alternate activities designed with this player choice in mind.

This old chestnut highlights the player choice
the modern MMO has versus good ol' Classic.
Can't even recall who first made this meme.

The thing is, MMOs are not merely the sum of systems: there's a social element to them as well, and that is how the problems creep in. 

In any social endeavor, certain niceties are expected if you want to fit in. Just like proper social etiquette in real life, there's an MMO version of social etiquette when interacting with people. The Wil Wheaton saying "Don't be a dick" is just the bare minimum for social interactions; beyond that MMO interactions are a bit more complex. If you want to do group content in an MMO --especially in today's age-- you're expected to have done the "correct" things to maximize your output. What that entails varies between guilds and groups, but there's a measure of commonality driven by the knowledge that in the "group finder" MMO environment players are interchangeable: if you don't have the right specs/gear/systems settings, you can be painlessly replaced by someone else. And in a pre-group finder MMO, be prepared to submit for inspection if you want in on some group content.

Developers have attempted to circumvent such social restrictions with new ideas --LFR raids being the most notable-- but that's a technical solution for what is inherently a people problem. And when I play any group content in an MMO, I feel the social pressure. I never used to, but once you've crossed the Rubicon and been on the progression side of things, the veil of obscurity has been ripped away and you now see things from the lens of those who are judging whether you're good enough to join their raid team.

The best way to find good candidates for your organization is to create what I call positive encounters. Actions speak louder than words, so you need to ensure that these potential new members have some actions by which they can judge you. When you need a specific class, get your best group runners together and advertise that you need said class in order to do an instance. Once you get them in your group, don't mention recruitment. Just run that instance and do your job well. If they do well, tell them you hope to group again and then part ways. If they aren't in an organization, you may subtly mention that you are looking for their class. Do this enought times with enough people, and word will get around that you're a solid outfit. You can't buy better publicity than that and it creates more opportunities for you to use the soft sell. 

--The Guild Leader's Companion by Adam "Ferrel" Trzonkowski, Page 41.

The irony is that I thought this way before I bought The Guild Leader's Companion, because I'd be on guild runs in an instance and guild chat during the run would have a lot of commentary on any pugger's technique, both good and bad, and what their prospects were as a potential member of the raid team. I never saw it myself until I formally joined the progression guild immediately before TBC Classic, and there were plenty of times I wished I had remained ignorant and just enjoyed a dungeon run or a raid.

***

I guess that's where the irony creeps in. A single player game, such as an RPG, doesn't have that sort of social pressure. There's nobody looking over your shoulder, judging your gameplay, dropping comments and/or hints about how you could have done better. Nobody is pulling you into a Discord chat about how you could up your DPS a bit more so you could overcome that last fight more quickly. Nobody is telling you what extra gear pieces you should farm for. Nobody is suggesting a link in Wowhead to go check out to improve your gameplay. In a single player game, the only person you have to please is yourself. 

And Garrus. You ought to please
Garrus too. From Tumblr.

Because of that, I can focus as much or little of my time on the metagame without any recriminations.****

I haven't gone and pulled up walkthroughs or YouTube videos or gone to other websites that would cause spoilers in BG3, but the plotting does remain. I know that there's an optimal way of doing things --that's a drawback to any game, really-- but I don't seek it out. Most importantly, I don't have people telling me (or others in a chat I'm not part of) that I'm not playing it right in one form or another.

To a certain extent ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

Now, about that Arcane Tower in BG 3...

*Sort of. I still don't quite get people who took off for a week's worth of vacation when TBC Classic (and other WoW expacs) released, given that at least here in the US paid vacation isn't very copious to begin with, and if I told my wife I was going to burn a week's worth of my vacation time playing video games for upwards of 18 hours a day she'd have a conniption fit. If I were retired that'd be a different story, but I think I'd be expected to travel a lot, and I'm not as big on that these days either.

**For the record, yes, my character has been immersed in the other party members' backstories. Let's just say I was surprised at how easily certain relationships "progressed", which made me wonder if there was something I was missing out on in real life if fictional relationships moved at this sort of speed.

***The Terokkar Forest zone was exactly in the middle of the Outland leveling experience. So, while I was halfway through, I still had a ways to go.

****Unless you're streaming, I suppose, but I don't stream because I don't like having a peanut gallery watching my every move.