Time For a Short Catch-Up

I might as well get this out of the way.

As of August 19, 2026.

Yes, if you can count, I got Joan to L70. I was in the middle of the Ring of Blood group quest when she dinged, so I was kind of busy and didn't take a screencap at the time.

If you'll also note from that screencap Neve is at L51 now --and boy have I been dragging my feet with her-- so she ought to reach Outland sometime in late September.

As for what to do next on the Alliance side, I've brought Hoots over and have started leveling her. I realize that the optimal way to level a Hunter is to go and get a Ravager as a pet, but as you're quite aware I march to the beat of my own drummer. In Hoot's case, I probably will not get into very many instances regardless, as I just prefer solo work with her. Good thing, as Hunters are a dime a dozen on the Anniversary servers. Between Hunters and Druids, they make up what seems to be 90% of the gatherers out in the field. 

In other news, for the first time in 2-3 months I logged into Retail.

You don't say...

Of course I just logged in and fished for a bit, but the cry of seagulls and the rolling thunder of the surf was quite pleasant to listen to.

You can tell I'm not serious about doing anything other than fishing because I actually have the "Fishing" command on my main bar (#9). I know that I can move it around wherever I want, but given that I'm not really doing anything else on this toon, why bother? At least she's low enough level that I don't get the "catch up" option when I come back to her after having been away for a while.

Alas, poor Quintalan.

Given that Quintalan hasn't been played since early Cataclysm, so 2010-ish, there'd be a LOT of catching up to do.

From Reddit. Well, and
World of Warcraft on Facebook.

#Blaugust2026

A Tale of Two Extremes

One of my unwritten rules about pugging is that I don't go all in until I get a feel for how a tank and healer operate together. It obviously goes without saying that such a conservative approach would not be good if I were to ever get the urge to run Mythic+ instances in Retail, but it's served me well over the years. My credo boils down to "Don't do anything stupid, pull threat, and wipe the group while people are feeling each other out."

Well, I figured I hadn't been on my two Horde toons in a while, so why not pull Neve out of the garage and go visit Scarlet Monastery? Neve is a Frost Mage*, so she consequently has a lot of utilitarian/crowd control abilities. When you combine that with my 'starting off slow' approach, what could go wrong?

Almost from the beginning, the Healer kept pushing us to go bigger. "I can heal through it," she said.

When I used single target for the first couple of mobs, she said "Mage, AoE to save mana instead of single targeting when over 3 in a mob."

I was annoyed at that because we originally had three in the pull but two additional enemies came wandering in midway through that fight, and I mentioned as much. 

"I main a Mage," the Healer replied. "I'm used to it."

"I main a Mage too," I replied, "and I want to make sure how well tanking is working before I go ham."

"You'll pull threat. It's what we do, get used to it."

I grumbled at that. There's enough tanks I know who dislike that belief and the behavior it encourages that I was immediately sympathetic toward the tank, who said nothing.

We got partway through the instance, and then the tank said "brb 5 min" and then stayed put.

Well, the Healer was having none of that, so she started pulling mobs one by one and we slowly worked our way forward. I suspected the tank was just going to basically go AFK and then vanish, and sure enough he did just that. So the Healer got another tank and we continued on and finished the run. 

Once we finished it, the Healer dropped and we got a new Healer. The tank, after the first few pulls asked me to go single target because he was having trouble keeping threat with me constantly AoE-ing so much. "I know you want big numbers and all," he began...

"I'm fine with single target. Whatever you need," I finished. "We don't have that first Healer around, and that's fine."

"Whew," our new Healer said. "I'm still learning healing." 

"No biggie. I want to go at a pace you're comfortable with."

***

It goes without saying that while that first Healer was definitely skilled, I preferred the second Healer because I worked at the pace that the Tank and Healer were comfortable with. I didn't need any extra drama, and I think that's a problem that some people seem to relish causing. 

This reminded me of the time back in 2021 when I attended an AQ20 raid where our Raid Leader had pugged one of the two tanks, who turned out to be from the top raiding guild on our old Myzrael-US server. Yes, the guy was good at what he did, but he wasn't interested in listening to what the Raid Leader wanted, which drove all of us nuts. He began freelancing his way through the raid, ignoring our Raid Lead and essentially directing people to do it his way.

Well, our Raid Lead kicked him, top guild member or no, and our Guild Master also kicked him from our Discord. Sure, the tank we got as a replacement wasn't as good, but at least he could work within the raid team paradigm.

There comes a point where you have to relinquish your desire for big numbers to work with the rest of the group. MMOs have "multiplayer" in the acronym, after all, and the entire point is to work with people to accomplish a singular goal. If you're not interested in that, maybe finding a group of likeminded people is best for you, so that I can grab a bowl of popcorn and watch the fireworks when they start.

*Cardwyn: "I approve."
Me: "That's nice and all, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't need your approval."
Cardwyn: "We mages stick together. End of story."

Me: ::sigh:: "Why can't the voices in my head be more normal?"

EtA: Corrected the year of that AQ20 run. It was a couple of weeks before pre-patch for the original TBC Classic in 2021.

Second Verse Same as the First

After my previous post about how leveling seems to have been subtly speeded up, I decided I was going to make some changes how I was going to approach leveling in Outland.

As of April 15, 2026.

I was originally planning on leveling Briganaa all the way to L70 and then go back and level other toons one at a time. After the process of slowly leveling what eventually became 4 toons at once, I figured changing the methodology was in order. 

Well, then I met the speed of leveling in Outland.

In the two weeks that I've been enjoying the view in Hellfire Peninsula, I now have one toon at L62 and two at L63. I suppose it's slipping back into old habits, but I discovered the quickest way to combat a game that insists on pushing me faster toward max level is to simply spread out the leveling process among several toons. At the moment I intend to stick with three, but I think that I'll eventually bring five into Outland.

Something I have been wondering about is what I intend to do once I start getting toons to max level. Even if the leveling slows down the farther in I go, I expect some of these toons to be getting to L70 by July. What to do then?

Well, the first thing I've thought of is to simply not get flying. 

Blizz opened up the quest chain for the nether drake mount
right when the Dark Portal opened, so you can't go a couple
of minutes without seeing a player on one. It's almost
as bad as seeing the paid boost ground mount "reward"
everywhere as a reminder that people paid money to
skip playing the game.

I don't need it to get to max level, and since I'm not raiding I don't need to do the Tempest Keep instances as part of any attunement quests.* I don't intend to impoverish myself just because, and I'm still expecting  a lot of players to stop running instances as time goes on. Other than getting to Tempest Keep, there's no real reason to get basic flying: a fast ground mount is quicker, a Druid's fast flight form is much quicker at diving in and obtaining gathering nodes**, and it does cost a bit of gold.

Is it a hipster move? I'm sure some people would say yes, but I pushed back on it even in 2021 and then in late 2022 in Wrath Classic. I simply don't want to be a slave to having to make gold just to get a mount that I won't really use, and I don't like standing around somewhere, preening and showing off my new fancy mount and/or gear.*** 

If I'm not doing flying, and I'm not raiding, I'm starting to think about running some Alterac Valley battlegrounds. I'm not interested in Arenas because I know I'm not good enough for them, but I would like to go out and play some AV for a change. I could also run some instances, so long as I'm not required to utilize flying for them.

And, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Horde toons around. I ought to work on them too.

*You need flying to get to the Tempest Keep instances. No way around it, as the time of posting you can't even summon a player in front of the instance entrances themselves. I do think that'll change as time goes on, but I'd not count on it just yet.

**That happened in 2021, where Druids with fast flight form would frequently pick entire zones clean of gathering nodes because they were so fast compared to anybody else. So, why should this be any different once a Druid's fast flight form becomes available in Phase 2?

***Yes, I'm the sort of guy who, when presented with a cost-is-no-object choice, would likely end up buying a decent quality-built sedan to drive around with. I don't want to be seen, and I don't want anything flashy. In my experience, people noticing you isn't really a good thing; as I like to tell people who I am introduced to in meetings, if you don't know my name it's because I'm doing my job well, and if you know my name it's probably because people were shouting it during emergencies.

We've Gone to Irrelevance Speed

I suppose that it's inevitable that I would have more thoughts about being in Outland for the third time.

Okay, it's not the third time ever, to be certain, but going there fresh as part of either a first time through WoW (back in 2009) or through WoW Classic when the TBC portion was current (2021 and now 2026).

It's definitely not my first rodeo in Outland, but it's my first time going there in a fresh context in almost 5 years. This is also the first time I'm heading to Outland --period-- without a further goal in mind. In 2009 it was to get to Northrend and to the current expansion to meet up with Souldat and his wife who got me into WoW in the first place, and in 2021 it was to get to max level and ready for the initial tier of raiding within a specific time limit. Here, in 2026, I don't have any further goal other than exploring Outland and just getting to L70. No raids, no Endgame, no Heroic Instances, nothing more than the Journey itself.

Late Sunday I got Briganaa 2.0 to Zangarmarsh, the second zone in Outland. There's one questline I refuse to do in Hellfire --the one that eventually leads me to killing Maghar Orcs-- so I was largely finished with Hellfire Peninsula. I arrived at the Cenarion outpost in the marsh, collected a bunch of quests, and ran up to the initial Alliance base in the zone and did the same*, then a strange sensation began to take hold of me, so Monday over lunch I dusted off Card and sent her over to Outland to see if that sensation went away.

Yes, getting the Robe of the Archmage sewn
was one of the goals I'd set before she crossed over.

The Burning Crusade questing feels like it's designed to push me into going faster, and I can't shake that.

It's all relative, of course, but it certainly feels less organic than Vanilla questing does. Some of this is explicit to the Anniversary servers, where the sparklies that indicate that something is the object for a quest is now present on the Anniversary servers**, which completely eliminates the need to look around with your eyeballs on the screen and remember what the quest text said. Considering that I'm practically the only person on the Anniversary servers to not use Questie*** I'm probably the only person to notice, but it's pretty obvious to me that Blizz said "here you go: you want it, you got it" and there it is. Quest markers all pop up on the mini-map just like they did in Wrath Classic, so I've suddenly found myself staring at the mini-map far more than actually paying attention to where I'm going, which is never a good situation to find yourself in when there's Fel Reavers wandering around. 

When you combine those quality of life changes with the questing hub changes, it's become far more explicit that Blizz is streamlining the leveling process further than in 2021. Wrath brought in the concept of the zone stories, complete with phasing, so that's not present in TBC, but it's only when you decide the journey is the destination do you begin to realize that the pace of the journey changed. 

***

It did feel that while Brig was leveling in the Old World she was almost effortlessly moving forward, but not so quickly as to outlevel her ability to pay for training, gear, and consumables. When the Joyous Journeys buff made an appearance in late TBC Classic in 2022, it was tuned to level you so quickly that you'd outstrip your ability to make gold to pay for those associated costs. I found that similar to the leveling process on the original WoW Classic Seasonal servers, Season of Mastery. When you can't afford even the basic spells for L10 because you leveled so damn fast, then yeah, you've got a problem. Apparently Blizz tuned the Anniversary servers better without creating an explicit buff, so that while the leveling was faster in the Old World, it wasn't so fast that you couldn't afford to level so quickly. 

But now, in Outland, everything seems tuned just enough to make it easier and quicker to go through the leveling process. Mobs do seem to respawn faster (except named mobs, as one of my friends noted the other day), they go down quicker, and the XP feels... chunkier, maybe? That last one I'm not sure of, but I do know that when you combine these changes with the TBC-specific tweaks to the concept of quest hubs****, boy do I get the urge to just keep going and not pay attention to things such as sleep, food, etc.

At first I wanted to describe the leveling in Outland Anniversary Edition as hollow or boring, but that's not it. It feels like the leveling is being pushed toward irrelevance by speeding it up. Given that TBC Anniversary will only be around for a year, I guess it's not that great of a surprise, but it certainly shows that speeding up the leveling process doesn't make for a better experience by itself. Leveling on these Anniversary servers is merely a means to an end, and you're in the wrong place if you want to enjoy leveling itself.

If there's a Wrath Anniversary Edition coming this Fall, then we can expect some further streamlining going forward. It wouldn't surprise me if the concept of Follower Dungeons gets ported back to the Anniversary edition, in a bizarre reversal of Retail being the testing ground before being added to the Old Game. However, that will only come into play if we have a repeat of the collapse of instance grouping as happened in 2021, and the No Changes crowd has sufficiently been cowed into submission.

***

*Blink blink*

I just thought of something. 

Could it be that the "big thing" that Holly Longdale teased in the Community Update video be a release and support of "official" private servers for Vanilla WoW?

It's most definitely NOT Classic Plus, but it would eliminate the private server problem in one fell stroke.

*Plus getting the flightpoint.

**It was in Wrath where that first began showing up.

***If there's somebody out there who doesn't, I've not seen it yet. Whenever I'm in a group, and I'm talking about every single time, if someone gets all the items for a quest the Party chat immediately is spammed with an announcement saying that they're done. Another reason to not want Questie is that it can snoop on you and share your progress with others in your group, providing they also have Questie installed. 

****Unlike Vanilla WoW, the quests are congregated more completely into centralized quest hubs. If you go into Ashenvale as Alliance in Vanilla, quests are scattered throughout the zone and you're constantly running back and forth across the entire length of the place. However, if you go there in TBC and Wrath, several of the quests for the eastern part of the zone are moved out of the Shrine of Aessina area and to Forest Song, which becomes a fully developed quest hub. Blizzard centralized things further in Outland, where the questing equivalent of "one stop shopping" allows a player to blow into a quest hub, grab everything, and head straight on out into the field.

Setting Expectations

If you want to know the difference between Retail and Classic in two screenshots, here you go:

Classic:

Note: I like the purple robe better. It harkens back to Dalaran
and the Royal Purple of the Mages of that City.

Retail:

The blue and white robe a Retail Mage starts with
is closer to the Blue and white robe a Priest starts with in Classic.

Both are a Blood Elf Mage with the same name (Drak -something, can't remember what it is offhand), and their respective starting zones. If I'd have chosen Sunstrider Isle for the Retail toon, it would have looked exactly like the Classic version, but the Exile's Reach intro area highlights the differences much better.

Yes, that's Thrall. You know, The Once and Semi-Future Warchief of the Horde. And there's two dragons (!) for escort. 

Of course, a new player won't know diddly about who Thrall is*, but this intro is all about setting expectations. You're on a ship with an Orc in charge, and there are dragons escorting the ship. If you're a recruit, that image implies that a) Orcs are in charge, b) creatures such as dragons are your friends, and b) this is normal.

The Classic intro, by comparison, shows the entire stretch of the Blood Elf starting zones and then centers upon you as a "recruit": a survivor trying to make sense of it all. No dragons, no orcs, just some fellow Blood Elf NPCs and a few other players** 

Like the Exiles' Reach intro, there are expectations set. This time, however, they are that a) you're pretty inconsequential, b) there are no gigantic fantastical creatures in your corner, and c) this is normal.

***

If you've played both the Draenei and the Blood Elf starting zones that were introduced in The Burning Crusade and remained largely unchanged over the years, there are two things that stand out between them:

The Draenei antagonists are the ecological disaster of their own making when The Exodar crash landed on Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles, and the Blood Elves themselves. Make no mistake, the Blood Elves are out to get them by any means necessary, and they're under the command of an Eredar named Sironas.

The Blood Elf antagonists are the Amani Trolls on the eastern borders of their lands, and the undead Scourge and the remnants of their homeland destroyed by Arthas Menethil before he became the Lich King.

The expectations are that Draenei will hate the Blood Elves and their Demonic masters, and that the Blood Elves will hate the Scourge and the non-Darkspear Trolls. It is by design that the Blood Elves never encounter a Draenei out in the Old World*** until they arrive in Outland and discover that the propaganda of Outland spread by their leadership to be a lie.

Neve: Paradise, my ass. What idiot do they take me for?
From April 2022.

Likewise, the Draenei don't re-encounter Blood Elves out in the wild**** until they also reach Outland, but they knew what they were getting into because they'd actually fled the damn place not so very long ago.

***

Now, why do I use TBC as a reference? Because this setting of expectations is very important. It gives you a chance to understand what you ought to care about, what is considered to be a normal baseline, and where do you go from here. 

Taking that comparison from TBC and applying it to Classic vs. Retail, the expectation is readily apparent: in one, while there are fantastical elements, the basics are pretty recognizable to anybody who has played a Medieval-based Fantasy RPG, read a Fantasy novel, or even watched a (relatively) low Fantasy television show or movie. You're starting at the bottom where things are more or less non-magical, and you're going to have to work your way up. In the other, the Fantasy elements are much higher, which might indicate you're of higher status than average, but if you're just a raw recruit then you have greater access to what is typically thought of as High Fantasy than your typical Fantasy novel.*****

If you'd not have looked at the title, you'd have thought they were two different games. And, for all intents and purposes, they are two separate games these days: while the art and class design are similar, they are distinct enough that a player won't confuse one with the other. The gameplay may superficially look similar, but the differences quickly become apparent once you begin to level a character.#

Is one better than the other? Despite my own personal preferences, not really. One is a refinement of the original MMO design that Everquest popularized, and the other is a lot closer to an Action RPG. In one you're a nobody, in the other you're the Champion of the World. In one you can have a house, in the other you have to make do with the occasional empty building. 

And in both, at the intersection of seediness and desire, lies Goldshire, the Fever Dream of Azeroth.

Or maybe Sanctuary, the city found in Thieves' World.
From Etsy, of all places, because I'm lazy
and don't want to hunt down my own copy.

*Okay, it's entirely possible they might have heard about it, especially from some friend who'd been trying to convince them to try WoW and peppered them with all sorts of lore as "enticement". Thankfully, when Souldat's wife convinced me to try the game back in 2009, she didn't have to twist my arm very much.

**The Exiles Reach boat I was on had literally no other players on it. So... I was the only person on Moon Guard taking the boat, I guess.

***As an NPC or an enemy, not a player, of course.

****Save for those old Blood Elf quests in Azshara, which actually date to Vanilla WoW and had nothing to do with the TBC expansion. In fact, those Blood Elves are hostile to both Horde and Alliance, and Blizz obviously didn't clean that up very much before TBC released back in the day.

*****Unless this is Pern. Or Navarre. Or the Alternate Europe from Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.

#When I encounter a Retail player who came back to try the Anniversary servers and they ask where a specific ability is, I have to explain that that ability or capability or whatnot was added in [insert expansion here] so instead you have to do [insert original design here].

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