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.

The WoW Classic Token was Just the Beginning

It may surprise you, but I don't actually subscribe to WoW.

Yes, I'm aware that I could save a few dollars by subscribing for 3 or 6 month intervals, but because I buy 60 days' worth of game time every couple of months, it forces me to evaluate as to whether I'm having enough fun in-game to continue paying for it. In my experience, when I subscribe it takes more effort to actually decide to discontinue a subscription than actually keep subscribing, so by reversing the process and making it more effort to continue playing the onus is put on Blizzard to create a better experience. 

It also means that I actually engage with the cash shop on a regular basis, so I can see exactly just what Blizz is up to.

Such as this little surprise when I bought 60 days' worth of game time yesterday:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

Do you see it?

In addition to the Retail character boost and the Cataclysm Classic Blazing Heroic Pack, there another little addition to the cash shop: a Level 80 Character Boost for Wrath Classic.

You can now bypass the entire leveling process in Wrath Classic and go straight to Endgame.

Of course, that also means you're effectively paying for gold as well, given that you can go back and do all of the Northrend quests and just get gold as a reward instead.

Yeah, right. 
Graphic from The Simpsons, and
the Comic Sans courtesy of MS Paint.

My, how the Wrath Classic player base has fallen. 

Because I'm Getting Old and Have Seen It All

The other day, I was querying my Questing Buddy how the Friday raid went. "It went well," she said. "We downed Ony first and then got a group for TotC."

"Did you get an Ony bag?" I teased, as that was one of the reasons why people would continue to run Onyxia even late in Vanilla Classic. The "revived" Wrath Classic version of Onyxia returned in Phase 3, a month or two ago.

"Oh, I got it the other week, but I won the head!" (That's the other big reason why people would run Ony.)

"Wait, what?" I was not expecting that reply. "There's an Ony Bag in the L80 version of Ony?"

"Oh yeah! It's a 22 slot bag."

"Huh." I just got outfoxed by Blizzard, as I wasn't quite expecting that they would put an updated Ony Bag in the loot. "I kind of expected it to be a 24 slot bag."

"No, it's like the bag out with the dragon area," she replied, referencing The Obsidian Sanctum raid from Phase 1, which also dropped a 22 slot bag. 

"Hmm..." I replied, trying to remember. "I can't recall if I got that bag or not." Given the amount of effort people put in back in TBC Classic to min-max everything, including bag space, I kind of tuned out these sort of reward drops. I looked at it as representative of the problems afflicting the Classic community, and my appetite for these little quality of life rewards from TBC Classic onwards turned into revulsion instead.

My Questing Buddy, of course, didn't know about any of this. "You DIDN'T?" she said incredulously.

"I just really didn't care if I won it, so I skipped rolling a lot of times."

I could almost see her rolling her eyes. "Why am I not surprised?"

I went back through some notes I made on those Phase One raids. "Oh wait," I corrected myself. "I did win it on the last time we went through that raid. I waited until everybody else had won it and then I got it."

My Questing Buddy sighed.

***

There's another reason why I mentioned this story, and it's this:

If you need to click on the pic to bring up
the original size, that's fine. But it's
pretty obvious that I'm not talking about
the regular maintenance window here.

Even if I didn't have some revulsion toward Blizzard courtesy of their corporate behavior, the "fund raising" pet sale in support of Ukraine would have generated a ton of ick all by itself.

Not that I'm anti-Ukraine or anything, because I'm most definitely not, but because of the corporatization of doing something for a good cause. 

It's not any sense of purity that I feel this way --okay, maybe a little, if I'm being completely honest about it-- but that I know that very very few corporations look at something as an altruistic endeavor. Over the years I've seen the man behind the curtain, and I know that at their heart most companies put only profit. Not good deeds, not society, and most definitely not people. So when I see something like this, where Acti-Blizz recruited Mila Kunis* to promote pet sales in support of BlueCheck for Ukraine, I simply can't see the altruism.

At this point, I'd much rather that companies simply stop trying to put lipstick on a pig about their corporate altruism if they're going to prioritize profits over everything else. That's their prerogative to do so, but they're definitely not fooling me into thinking that somehow Blizzard has turned a corner and will behave like a responsible corporate citizen. Maybe when the wheel turns and shareholder primacy yields to another form of corporate activity I'll change my mind about this, but until then I'll do my good deeds out of the public view and not in service of a corporate master.

#Blaugust2023

*Holy crap, she's matured. I don't know why, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she's grown up and reached the cusp of 40. Before you accuse me of being ageist or something, I think that she looks absolutely stunning, and not just "for her age". Of course, me being in my 50s, I still think of her as being young, but that goes with the territory.

EtA: Corrected spelling.

The Soft Glow of Electric Sex Gleaming in the Window*

When you were a kid and you wanted to be outside but couldn't, you'd press your face against the glass window pane, smudging the window to the point where you left a soggy mess when you pulled your mug away. Rainy days, frozen days, days where you had to go to some important family event, just pick one and they're all the same. That longing of wanting to be where you couldn't made your entire day miserable. Even later in life, when I wanted to be reading about different worlds found in SF&F novels, if I had to be somewhere else I'd not be in the best of spirits.

I mean, who wants to go take a Chemistry test if they had the option to go play Risk or read Dune instead?

This is my copy, circa 1985.
I mean, look at the price on
this paperback! $3.95!!

Tonight is my questing buddy's regular Wrath raid night, and while for the most part I'm quite happy to be no longer in the grind given all the Heroic Plus Plus** "runs" she's been doing lately***, I will confess to missing out on all of the trappings surrounding those raids.

More than anything else, I miss the camaraderie in the raids, chatting and enjoying the company of each other, than the raid itself.

Ever since the transition from 40/20 person raids in Vanilla Classic to TBC and now Wrath Classic, the raids have felt "less than" compared to those early raids. I know that it could be argued that 10 person raids in Wrath Classic truly are less than, particularly given the differences between 10 person Wrath Naxx and 40 person Vanilla Naxx, but I've felt that way ever since I set foot in every 25 person TBC raid I participated in****. Blizzard may have made it easier to field a raid team in terms of numbers, but they also left some magic behind. 

It's an acceptable trade-off, I guess, but for me raiding hasn't been the same. 

But it's a bug I can't completely leave behind, despite my obvious refusal to "play the game" and catch-up to the current raid tier in the most expedient way possible. The raids themselves don't exactly hold much in the way of charm for me, and Trial of the Crusader holds bittersweet memories for me.

***

Back in 2010, I almost became a Wrath raider.

Oh, you never heard about that? Well, there's a reason why I never blogged about it: why blog about an event that ended up not happening? I didn't expect that I'd ever be back in this situation in a Wrath of the Lich King Classic edition of WoW, either, but here we are.

Remember this guy? Here's Quintalan,
complete in his T9 Liadrin's Battlegear, earned
the hard way by running plenty of dungeons.

Back in Satyana's very brief period of joining Parallel Context, I'd been logged in one evening when she whispered me "Hey, you want to join a raid?"

This was back when I severely restricted my WoW time because the mini-Reds were truly "mini" and they took priority over my game time, but this particular evening I had a few hours to just kick around. Still, my brain kind of froze at the prospect. I still had a hard enough time dealing with the 5-person pugs in the LFD tool --not that I didn't now what to do in those instances, but the very nature of dealing with random strangers on the internet-- and here I was being asked to make a huge leap into raiding. 

"Uh..." was my oh-so-brilliant reply. "I've never been raiding before."

"Oh, you'll love it! It's fun!"

She kind of had me over a barrel there. "Okay, what are we doing and do I have enough time to read up on it?"

"It's Trial of the Crusader, and don't worry, I'll tell you what to do."

That didn't exactly make me feel any better. But since I didn't want to let my co-blogger down, I joined the raid team that Satyana was putting together, and she cast about for 3 or so more people to finish filling out the raid.

Raiding was such an unknown to me that I didn't even realize there was a "raid" channel, so imagine my surprise when I started seeing chat messages with an unfamiliar color popping up in my dialogue box.

I, uh, kept my mouth shut throughout this, but I had a feeling that I was going to need to go on Ventrillo if we were going to run this raid. Oh yay, I thought. Mister Introvert is going to have to be in a voice program with 8 strangers and look like a complete idiot along the way.

I hung around Dalaran for a few minutes and after consulting with a WoW website --maybe Thottbot-- I flew up to the Crusader area in Icecrown.

It was then, while I felt like I was waiting for my own funeral, that it began to dawn on me that Satyana was having trouble filling out those last few spots. 

Over the next 15 or so minutes we got to 9 raiders twice, then someone would drop.

"Anybody know anybody who can join?" Satyana asked in raid chat.

Nobody said anything, and my hopes rose some more.

A couple more people dropped, and we went down to six raiders.

"Okay, I'm going to call it," Satyana finally said. "We'll try another time."

I breathed a big sigh of relief. 

That "another time" raiding with Satyana didn't materialize, as she moved on from both the server and from Parallel Context shortly after that aborted raid attempt.*****

***

Thirteen years later, Wrath Classic has returned to Trial of the Crusader, and I can't help but think of what might have happened then. 

Would I have liked it? (I don't know.) 

Would I have screwed up royally? (All signs point to yes.) 

Would my fellow raiders have tolerated my mistakes? (Come on, this is World of Warcraft we're talking about; what do you think would have happened in a pug like this in the era of GearScore?)

I do believe the trajectory of my MMO career might have been totally changed if that raid had actually happened, but my suspicion is that it would have made me even more reticent about raiding when Vanilla Classic became a thing. Even then, I had to be fast-talked into those first raids I went to in Vanilla Classic: Zul'Gurub and Molten Core. Yes, I ultimately had fun in both raids, but there was a learning curve. And the weight of expectations was not upon me. If anything the only expectation was that if we didn't loot the Corehounds like we were supposed to, we were gonna get called out in that first Molten Core raid. (Luckily for me I stayed on top of that job; I only got called out once and was in the middle of looting when it happened so it went something like "Cardwyn, loot the-- oh, nevermind.")

At times like this, I do wonder whether I deliberately sabotage my gearing and playstyle just so I am never put in the situation where I'm asked to join a raid. You can't have someone reach out to see if I'm interested if I'm not geared enough, and with my avoidance of running 5-person H+ and H++ instances, I'm guaranteeing that I won't have the gear.

Still, I do have to periodically clean the smudge from the window, looking at all the fun, wishing I was there.

*From the movie A Christmas Story. Here's the reveal of the now classic "leg lamp":

**For those who remember their programming languages, I always hear Heroic Plus Plus and think of C++. Kind of weird how this stuff comes back into your life after being away for a couple of decades.

***I put runs in quotes because the current strat for those runs is to basically run through all of the boss encounters to get to the final boss because badges for the current raid tier only drop off of the final boss.

****For the record, that does not include Hyjal, Black Temple, or Sunwell.

*****It's been forever since I've thought about her, but my biggest memory about her time here was the time she made a post criticizing someone and disparagingly wondering if someone had Downs Syndrome. My biggest regret was not standing up to her more forcefully than I did for that behavior.

EtA: It's co-BLOGGER, not coworker. Sheesh.

Friday Night... Repairs

I think I jinxed my questing buddy.

She logged in to raid last night and... Wrath Classic barfed and wouldn't let her in. Multiple times.

So after a lot of debugging by disabling addons and other tips that the raid lead was providing --and weren't working-- she decided to take drastic measures and uninstall/reinstall Wrath Classic.

While she was waiting, I kept her spirits up with some pics inspired by what was going on in LFG Chat in our Classic Era cluster.

I found this on Redbubble:

My oldest wants this.
Because Night Elf Hunters, you know.

And then, because I was curious, I found a companion to that one:

I'm not so sure I'd want to, uh,
advertise about that fact.
Again, from Redbubble.

Right about then, I stumbled onto a pic from Reddit that Sam Hogg had created as a commission, and I about fell over:

!!!!
This is the Artstation version.

"OMG I FOUND CARD!!!" I practically shouted in Discord.

I have no idea who the hell the Draenei is, but that is Cardwyn to a tee. Well, outside of the fact that she would more likely not be in her robes, but still...

Whomever got that as a birthday present got something priceless.

***

Shortly after that, my questing buddy finished with the Wrath Classic installation, but still she couldn't login. So I took the data she could give me --her laptop's basic info (processor, memory, etc.) and the error code-- and did some quick research. Luckily for me, I'd been wrestling with this exact problem on my son's old laptop before it gave up the ghost, so I knew where to look for the legacy AMD FX Series drivers. I found the one for her laptop, gave her the link, and waited.

And hoped.

...and it worked.

She was able to get in finally, and it turned out the raid waited for her while they filled out the rest of the slots. But since she'd uninstalled/reinstalled the game, all of her addons were gone. So... she had to reinstall and reconfigure all of those too.

But the worst part of the fight was over. She was back online.

Now the raid under the Friday Night Lights can go on.

In the meantime I'm going to admire that artwork some more while fishing. And listen to Todd Rundgren:

EtA: Corrected a grammar problem.

It All Blurs Together

There are times when "I hit it with my axe!" is the best way forward.

--Me (probably)

"I hit it with my axe! Wooo!!"

--Youngest mini-Red, in our 2-3x annual 1e AD&D game, as she in turn high fived one of our fellow party members. Yes, both women play Dwarven Fighters. Are you surprised?

If you listen to people talk about Retail WoW after having been away for a while* you can get absolutely lost in all of the systems and designs in the modern game. 

You don't say....

Returning to Classic WoW as a refuge from the complexity is an illusion, as those devoted to the min/max culture brought that back with them to Classic where it has morphed into its own culture in the Wrath Classic servers.**

Every time I think about trying out Retail, I read some blog posts or watch a YouTube video and --story complaints notwithstanding-- I get lost when people start talking about the various systems in game. When I also realize that unless I want to pay Blizzard extra money I'd have to go through Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands to get to Dragonflight, I just kind of shudder at all of the complexity those two expacs introduced. 

If you've been playing the game straight through, that's one thing. After all, the systems and whatnot are gradually added over time. It's when you go away for years and then come back do you realize just how crazy things have gotten. 

***

There was a time when I was the one who preferred the complex over the "easy to learn and hard to master" method of game design. Back in the early 90s, when I was knee deep in games such as Squad Leader, War and Peace, and Battle of the Bulge, an old high school acquaintance invited me to playtest a boardgame he and some mutual acquaintances were working on. 

This was the sort of thing that I played
back then, which is Victory Games' Ambush!, 
a solitaire WW2 wargame.
From Jonathan Arnold of Board Game Geek.

Their game was set in the Star Trek universe, where up to three players were fighting over control of a specific doohickey using several starships each. The three factions --Federation, Klingons, and Romulans***-- were pretty much equal in overall strength and movement.

"Is this like Star Fleet Battles?" I asked.

"No," my friend replied. "That's too complex. We're aiming more for Axis and Allies."

Okay, I thought. Let's give it a try.

The game had potential, but I felt that they lost something with the rules as simple as they were. "The various ships with their number rating is fine," I began, "but have you thought about two numbers, one for attack and one for defense? That'll allow you to have more and different types of starships out there."

"We're not doing any of that Avalon Hill bullshit," one of the team snapped back at me. "That crap is too hard and we want this to get a wide audience."

After that, I realized that they weren't really planning on taking my advice to heart, so I just kept it basic with some generally positive feedback and then found an excuse to leave rather early. 

The irony is that not only am I the one who prefers simple systems to more complex ones these days, the so-called "simple systems" found in WoW's Classic Era are far more complex than what I proposed back then. Computers have a habit of condensing complexity to manageable levels, after all.

***

Kirk: Galloping about the cosmos is a game for the young, Doctor.
Uhura: Now what is THAT supposed to mean?

--From Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

That's not to say that complexity is bad by any means. If you know going in how complex things are, and if said complexity is presented well, the complexity isn't necessarily a problem. The thing is, if complexity is gradually added to over the course of years, you may not realize just how complex things had gotten until said complexity becomes overwhelming.

Or in my case, poking my nose into World of Warcraft after a decade away.

I like to use the Blood Elf starting areas up to and including The Ghostlands as a great way to introduce someone into the various systems of WoW --well, TBC-era WoW-- in a gradual fashion. The build up includes things such as timed events, escort quests, mobs with AoE damage, mobs that chain pull, and mobs that drop the "don't stand in the bad" stuff. In the end, you even have opportunities for grouping up for the two abomination elites as well as Dar'Khan Drathir, but along with everything else that got nerfed in Cataclysm those grouping opportunities were obliterated as well.**** That basic introduction carried my original toons all the way up to max level in original Wrath of the Lich King, because that foundation was utilized and built upon from the beginning. 

From what I've read, the brand new intro zone provided in Shadowlands (Exile's Reach) does a great job of providing a new player a way of learning the basics of WoW, but what ends up happening is that those basics get thrown out the window once you reach high enough level to hit the various expansions.

Not that people can't utilize the basics of "don't stand in the bad", but that you're not exposed to the systems found in the expacs until you reach those expacs.

Like, oh, say, Legion.

Or Shadowlands.

Or even Dragonflight.

Existing players may not notice it at all, or may even think it a new quirk of the current expansion, but players who had been away for years --or are new-- will notice. That wasn't always the case, as the systems found in TBC Classic and Wrath Classic --flying and membership in Scryers/Aldor being the notable exceptions-- are also found in Vanilla Classic.***** 

After a while, all that bait-and-switch complexity just blurs together and makes you feel like an idiot for not understanding it all. If that doesn't happen on its own, the loudmouth toxic aspects of the WoW community certainly will do that for you.

"LOL L2P noob!"
From Memebase via Pinterest.

***

The thing is, sometimes all you want to do is hit an enemy with your axe. Which brings me to Diablo 4.

I'm moderately interested in Diablo 4, but to my mind as someone who never played the Diablo franchise I'd first want to play Diablo 2# and then 3 before finally setting my foot into Diablo 4. 

If that sounds vaguely familiar to long time readers of the blog, that's the process I used to approach Retail WoW with, starting in Cataclysm. I'd select a toon or two and then level those new toon(s) from L1 all the way to max level when the new expansion dropped. This meant that the crowd had already cleared to max level, begun their raiding, and were sitting in Trade Chat complaining that they were bored before I even killed my first mob in the new areas. It also gave me a chance to experience the game as it was presented, whether that presentation was purposely intended or not.

In the case of Diablo, I'm not one to replay RPGs ad nauseum --because replaying and releveling to the end at increased difficulty levels doesn't engage me-- so if I wanted to try those games out I'd wait for a massive sale## and then purchase those games at the price that reflects the worth of a single playthrough rather than a steady stream of replays for.... whatever reason. 

(I suspect that the "replay" concept of Diablo arose because people would replay the game while they waited for Diablo 3 and then Diablo 4 to be announced and released. Now, it's just... part of how the game is played.)

Nevertheless, when I watch Diablo 4 YouTube videos, what I'm struck by are how much Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft have blurred together, terminology wise. People talking about Affixes, grinding for Renown, and the various Seasons could be talking about either game, really. Add in World Bosses and dungeon grinding, and you'd have a hard time distinguishing discussions between the two games if you weren't looking at the screen.

That does highlight something that I never thought I'd ever have to contend with in an Action RPG such as Diablo: just how much complexity from WoW has bled over into Diablo? I mean, "I hit it with my axe" is pretty much the hallmark of the Diablo playstyle, but if you have to pay attention to all of this other crap just to play the game to completion, what's the point? What else is out there, that if you missed a specific item you were doomed to not playing the game right and that you had to start over? 

We've all experienced this feeling before,
which makes you wonder why you spent
all this time in the first place.
From Gamerant.

Kind of like that ol' Diamond Flask for Warriors in WoW Classic. If you didn't know that was a BiS item for Warriors in Classic/Classic Era, and you missed out on selecting it as the reward from the Voodoo Feathers quest, then you were simply shit outta luck.

L2P noob indeed.

***

In the end, complexity is an aftereffect of how long a game has been in existence. All games will, over time, become more and more complex as additions are made to the base game. Hell, just look at all the additions to the various incarnations of Sid Meier's Civilization over the years. The thing is, just how the game implements that complexity and builds up to that complexity is critically important. 

And that is something that Blizzard's properties need to work more extensively on.

*Such as, oh, 9 years from the date of this post but effectively 12 years.

**You can just opt out of this culture, as I kind of have, but that only goes so far. Even I partake in the min/max-ing culture whenever I fire up sixtyupgrades.com to see if a specific piece of gear is an upgrade or not. Still, Classic Era has been a true refuge from the meta driven culture found in Wrath Classic.

***They were most definitely old school in that they hated Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was the only one who regularly watched ST:TNG, and even then I stopped watching by my Junior year of college.

****I'm pretty sure I soloed Dar'Khan during the Cataclysm expansion on a Horde toon at level, and maybe even soloed the abominations as well.

*****I want to point out that membership in Aldor or Scryers was entirely optional in TBC. You'd think it was required, but I managed to simply ignore it on Deuce while leveling her and never had any issues with that. Of course, I wasn't going to raid, so that meant I wasn't gaining access to any Scryer or Aldor specific crafting recipes, but since I could just buy those if I needed them it wasn't a big deal per se. Flying in TBC wasn't mandatory if you weren't planning on raiding or accessing the Tempest Keep 5-person dungeons, as my old TBC Classic main --Briganaa-- didn't gain access to flying until some days after hitting max level and I absolutely was required to enter into those Tempest Keep instances for attunements. But Deuce, like before, skipped flying entirely until she finally had to bite the bullet and get it at L80 in Northrend. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that Neve still doesn't have flying in Wrath Classic, and she's been at L80 for a long time now. It's... just not a priority for me in the same way that I don't have a single toon in the entirety of Wrath Classic that has epic flying. Somewhere I can hear the collective mass of Wrath players screaming at the audacity to simply not give a fuck about flying anywhere fast.

#I mean, good luck trying to get Diablo 1 to work, if you can find a (legal) copy at all.

##Oh, the irony. I wrote this over the weekend, and between then and now the Blizzard Summer Sale appeared, with D2: Resurrected at 67% off and the entire D3 franchise at 26% off. To be honest, I wasn't expecting this sale right now --more like in November/December-- and my budget is kind of shot to hell with car repairs and my oldest getting her wisdom teeth yanked, so I'll likely pass on D2.

So Here's a Toast

 As I've alluded to over the past few months, my questing buddy has continued to raid in Wrath Classic by joining a Friday night semi-pug put on by a mutual friend of ours. I call it a "semi-pug" because it has a regular group of about 10-15 people and they pug the rest of the spots. Initially the pug was for a full size 25 person raid, but after enough failed raids due to puggers simply not having the gear or the basic skills needed to understand things like "don't stand in fire", the raid lead dropped the pug down to a 10 person raid so that the regulars could get the gear they need to once again ramp up to a 25 person raid.

So... For the past month, that 10 person raid has pretty much worked according to plan. The raid has been getting clears of Ulduar, which my questing buddy was thinking she wasn't going to see at all given how the 25 person raids had been going. That doesn't mean they've gotten to Algalon, because they've not met the requirements for that*, but they have been downing Yogg-Saron regularly now.

I've been proud of her given that she's new to healing for this expac, and I know from experience that she's gotten really good at it. Part of this is that she attacks the game like a puzzle to be solved, figuring out how to get the BiS gear she needs, and picking the brains of people she knows and respects who are better at healing than her.**

That she does this with three kids --and their associated demands on her time-- is even more impressive.

(And have I mentioned that she puts up with my quirks and foibles? I'd not blame her if she threw up her hands and declared "You're impossible!!" but she just keeps hanging in there.)

The two of us back in early January,
when we were clowning around
in Shattrath before raid time.

So on the eve of the Trial of the Crusader raid, here's to my questing buddy and her success!

*Whatever those requirements are. No, I'm not going to look it up, because when our 10 person raid team broke up I simply stopped caring at that point. Okay, that's not entirely true, because I didn't care all that much to begin with in Wrath Classic, as I was determined to not do what I did in TBC Classic and go all hardcore about it. For me, that meant only giving just as much of a damn about raiding as would pass the minimum requirements to actually get into the raid. (I think I can hear my questing buddy screaming, because for her part of the love of the game is all the plotting for gear.) I know enough about the cadence of raiding that it typically takes a few tries to get the positioning and whatnot correct, and unless you're hardcore enough to get into the PTR to practice, those first attempts "to work out the kinks" will be on live servers.

**This does spill over into Classic Era, too, as she'll frequently drag me along when I'd be more inclined to simply just screw around and fish or something in game. That's how we discovered we could two person significant portions of Gnomeregan as Hunter and Mage at level, and the same with Scarlet Monastery: Library and Uldaman.

They Actually Did It Part Two: Preach-ing to the Converted

Okay, excuse the bad pun.

Preach of Preach Gaming came out with a video that does a pretty good job of explaining why some of the WoW Classic playerbase has gone ballistic over the introduction of the Wrath Classic WoW Token:

Of course, if you are part of a progression raid team and don't partake in GDKP, the introduction of the WoW Token won't have an impact on your ability to play Wrath Classic. (Myself, for example.) However, there will be inflation in the prices found in the Auction House, and that might just have an impact on me.

After all, I'd like to do the Quel'Delar questline on Linnawyn at some point, but I do realize that given my history of getting that Battered Hilt to drop* I'd expect the AH to be selling said Hilt for well over what I paid for it back in the day. Then the question becomes "Do I want to farm for the gold to buy the Battered Hilt on the Auction House, or do I want to buy gold via the WoW Token?"

Or maybe a better question is, "Is it worth it to try to recapture some magic from the old days when I know it's destined for failure?"

At this point, I'm starting to think that it's not worth it. Era has been a shot of adrenaline to my system, and I'd be foolish to give that up.

*Narrator: It didn't drop for Quintalan in original Wrath, and Q had to pony up 5000 gold on the Auction House for the Battered Hilt.

They Actually Did It

Well, MadSeasonShow was right.

In addition to the return of Joyous Journeys to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, there was this little ditty hidden below the top of the news section:

Woah.

The WoW Token has come to WOTLK Classic, which means you can pay money to buy a WoW Token for Wrath Classic, and in turn sell the token to buy gold in game. You don't need to go spend money on a third party site, just give it to Blizz instead.

The details upon clicking are this:

So the Token is for Wrath Classic only --for now-- but I guess you can go out and buy your way into Ulduar runs legally via in-game gold you purchased by selling said WoW Tokens.

To say there are some unhappy people is an understatement. Reddit's r/classicwow has suspended their rule banning promotion of private servers, and it wouldn't shock me if Blizzard gets ClassicWow suspended shortly for promotion of basically pirated content.

This won't end well.

I kind of presume that Blizz is adding the Wrath WoW token to not only boost their bottom line, but they figure that people will come back when Icecrown Citadel opens and they'll want to gear up as quickly as possible. Or, to be blunt about it, to pay people to get them geared as quickly as possible.

Or to put it a third way, the Kingslayer title is now officially for sale via GDKP runs and carries, with Blizzard approving. For Blizz to keep the Random Dungeon Finder out and bring the WoW Token to Wrath Classic, I have to wonder who Blizz was listening to. Most of the heat generated over Wrath Classic was from the RDF, not from any lack of the WoW Token. But the Token directly generates profit for Activision Blizzard, and the RDF does not.

Oh well. 

What Is My Personal Endgame?

One of the odd things I've noticed about the WoW Classic community is the willful ignorance that a certain subset of the community has. I know, I shouldn't be reading Trade Chat or LFG Chat, but when someone starts blathering about how the current Looking For Group tool is "no different" than the old one in original Wrath, I get annoyed. 

"No, it's not," I replied. "The old one was totally random; you were selected automatically and spat out with a group. This one, you control who you select." I didn't even mention the Battlegroup part (thanks again for the reminder, Shintar), but I was ready in case someone decided to try to counter me.

Nobody did; in a rare case of me actually "winning" an argument online, I actually had the last word.

Of course, this argument didn't come out of nowhere, as people were arguing about "When WoW started going downhill." Some said Cataclysm, others said "That Panda expansion, Mists."

It all depended upon whether they were talking about subscriber numbers or whether the game no longer felt like the game, I guess, but my belief that the seeds of WoW's downfall were already sown by the time Cataclysm came along and blew up the Old World is irrelevant to this crowd. 

This discussion was a constant reminder that the majority of people who play the game aren't very interested in the broader scope of WoW itself, but rather "What is important now?" 

And for most people, it's Raiding with Arenas as a distant second, with an occasional nod to Dungeons, Dailies, and the Auction House. 

***

This brings to mind something that I've been pondering lately: what is my personal endgame for WoW? I don't mean raiding per se, even though I'm not doing it anymore, but what happens to me after Wrath Classic is over?

I suspect that the Classic Team are going to go all in on Cataclysm Classic, but whether that means no Wrath Era servers is somewhat unclear. I've read scuttlebutt that implies the splitting off of Classic Era from TBC Classic servers was such a pain in the ass that the Classic Team doesn't want to do that again, so that likely means there will be no Wrath Era servers in perpetuity. 

So... What then?

I'm thinking that if I still play WoW Classic, maybe a return to Classic Era servers is a good idea. It's a known item, and I took advantage of the $5 (or whatever it was) transfer before it ended to move more toons' Era versions into place. While Classic Era may no longer be "progressing" if an old game can be said to be progressing, As Shintar has point out on numerous occasions the original Vanilla WoW experience just felt to be a perfect leveling cadence. I certainly discovered that myself in the Season of Mastery servers, where my leveling was so fast I was unable to train properly due to the lack of gold.

But, there's another option, floated by YouTuber Nixxiom in this video:

One thing that the WoW Private Servers do that Blizzard has so far been unwilling to do has been to "break" WoW. By that, I mean break the internal game design and go with servers with all sorts of quirks.

Things such as "Classless WoW", where there are no classes and how you develop your toon depends on what you find interesting. In this respect, it's a bit like how Elder Scrolls Online allows you to tweak your player with as much or little magical ability as you see fit. My own Nightblade on ESO has a healthy dose of magical abilities, because I went all in on those talent trees. However, she is still recognizably a Nightblade (aka Rogue) because ESO hasn't exactly crossed that "classless" threshold. 

But a WoW Private Server has.*

There's a constant low level drumbeat for "Classic Plus", which is new content that is NOT TBC or other expansions but built upon the Vanilla WoW environment. New content and zones based purely in the Old World. 

Such as Turtle WoW.

What Nixxiom suggests, and I think he might be closer to the mark than you might believe, is that the reason why some of these Private Servers haven't been shut down by a litigious Blizzard is that the WoW Dev Team likely plays on some of these servers. 

But still, Nixxiom also further suggests something truly radical: provide for a fee --monthly or whatever-- a team to have access to Vanilla WoW and a set of development tools so that a team can rent server space from Blizzard and tweak WoW to their hearts' content. To put it succinctly, use the Minecraft model for WoW Classic. 

I am truly intrigued by this idea. Not that I'd be able to do this myself --I'm not made of money, so I couldn't pull this off-- but going all in on official support for WoW Private Servers would be extremely exciting. It would reinvigorate the WoW community in a way that WoW Classic itself did in 2019. Like the OGL that Wizards of the Coast originally introduced with D&D 3e**, it would unleash the creativity of the greater community on the game they love.

There's just one thing that would likely prevent Blizzard from going this route: they'd lose control of the narrative for Retail. 

Admittedly, as my experiences in WoW Classic have reminded me, a sizable portion of WoW players don't give a crap about the narrative at all, they just want a raid to beat. But still, Blizzard very jealously protects the WoW narrative, and having more people go off and play Private Servers --ones with an Imprimatur or not-- means that their "one true way" of the WoW narrative would get diluted. Especially if more people play those servers than the Blizzard official ones. 

That alone would likely prevent Blizzard from actually creating a "Vanilla WoW Toolkit" for anybody to use, but hey, a body can dream.

*Not sure how long that link will be valid, because it's for a private server, but hey...

**And they recently tried --and failed-- to kill off because of corporate greed. I could have provided about a dozen YouTube video links to this whole brouhaha, but Dungeon Craft's "We won!" video works.

We're Not in Azeroth Anymore, Toto

It may seem silly, writing an impression of Ulduar having only been inside the place for only one week before the raid team dissolved, but I've found that my first impressions frequently don't change that much over time. They may get tempered a bit in terms of "like" vs "dislike" --Karazhan certainly comes to mind*-- but my overall first impression has stuck with me. 

Outside of this video, of course.

Yes, I can be a stubborn bastard. Just ask my family or my questing buddy (and her husband).

If you want to skip the rest of the post, here's my TL;DR: Ulduar is the sort of instance that would be more at home in Wildstar or Star Wars: The Old Republic than in World of Warcraft.

***

My only previous time spent in Ulduar was once back in Mists when I poked my nose in there and had absolutely no idea what to do. All those Dark Iron Dwarves come pouring out of the place, and while my overpowered Rogue had no problem dispatching them I had no idea what to do next. All I did was kill Dark Irons for about 15-20 minutes and realized that --like Blackwing Lair-- there's some trick to getting past the initial area that unless you read a guide or watched a video you would have to die repeatedly just to puzzle it out. 

Given that I wanted to go into the place and simply explore what was considered one of the best raids that Blizzard had put out up to that point, I wasn't inclined to "do my homework" and read up on a Cliffs Notes of the raid, because that would puncture my immersion balloon** of trying to stop Yogg-Saron from escaping and destroying Azeroth.

So, I kind of knew the basics of what I was getting into on the week's run up to entering into Ulduar for the first time: there's a gimmick at first which leads to a fight with Flame Leviathan, and then you proceed onward from there. Luckily, being ranged DPS --and not having any 25-person raid gear on me-- meant I was going to be a passenger on the vehicles for the Flame Leviathan fight. I was supposed to go grab the fuel lying around on the ground after we shot down the flying machines, and...

/record scratch

Wait, what?

WTF is this, Mad Max: Fury Road?

I mean, the Mad Max movies would make a great post-apocalyptic RPG campaign, but inserting vehicle combat into Ulduar like this is Blizzard's way of saying "This isn't your effing Vanilla WoW, motherfucker."

Oh, and did you know that you don't target the flying vehicles to shoot them down --leading them via AA fire like you're supposed to do in aerial combat-- but to grab the fuel lying on the ground you have to select them and then hit the "grab" button? The tutorial video that I watched*** kind of glossed over that latter fact until my driver called me out and said that I had to click them first. 

So... inconsistent mechanics for that fight... Gotcha. 

The Flame Leviathan fight itself was, shall we say, underwhelming. If you ever wondered whether a solved raid presented a challenge to a reasonably geared group, Flame Leviathan didn't exactly show it. I'll freely admit that I was probably one of two people in the raid who'd never seen Ulduar either back in the day or that week, but I wasn't impressed.

My opinion of the place didn't exactly improve once we got past Flame Leviathan. 

The inside of Ulduar appears huge, designed graphically to present you with the overwhelming vastness of the titan complex, the entire raid itself isn't as nearly long a run as AQ40 was. That's because Blizzard embraced one crucial SF element all over the damn place: teleporters. 

Now, portals in a World of Warcraft raid aren't exactly new: you can find them in Karazhan and AQ40, to name two raids I'm familiar with.**** However, those raids only had one portal each, and those portals were only unlocked once you finish the portion of the raid that unlocks the destination. An NPC would port you to where you were supposed to go, basically to cut down on runtime when you wipe. Naxxramas had portals too, but only after a wing was finished. Again, an unlock, but you wouldn't use a portal to get back to a place you've already cleared.

Ulduar, however, integrated teleporters into the design of the raid itself, so you can use those teleporters to blip around the entire damn place and go where you want to go. 

When I realized that, I suddenly also realized that I should have watched the entire freaking video, because we could skip around a bit rather than do bosses in order.

    ::cue Cardwyn cursing rather inventively at my lack of preparation::

Well, I figured, I could wing it. After all, I'm not likely to be the source of a wipe.

    Narrator: He wasn't.

From a practical standpoint, the teleporters made perfect design sense. Runbacks from a wipe are the main reason why raid nights can feel like forever, and minimizing those runbacks is a huge boon to any raid team. That's likely why Naxxramas was designed the way it was, unlike AQ40 with its huge winding path through the instance, but instead 4 rather semi-compact (compared to AQ40) wings: finish a wing, go back to the beginning. 

Okay, the practical bona fides aside, those teleporters pretty much establish that we're firmly in Science Fiction territory here, not Steampunk, and definitely NOT Fantasy.

We're basically in a raid that feels like the deeper parts of the planet Belsavis from SWTOR.

***

With each successive boss, the more I heard from people in the raid who'd been there before about how fantastic Ulduar is.

Not was, but is.

Some of them were reliving the past, to be sure, but by far the raid team really liked/loved the raid. It was fun, with interesting and innovative mechanics that Blizzard reused in later expansions. People liked the volume of gear drops, and that everybody was running the place all at once.

Except me.

I kept my opinion to myself, of course, but I felt that Ulduar was a lot like, well... I have to borrow a comparison from my prog rock days: Ulduar felt a lot like Yes' Relayer album. It felt like Blizzard was trying too hard to be too different, too hip, and too unlike World of Warcraft.

When you hear Brann Bronzebeard on a freaking communicator telling you where to go and what's going on, you've left where WoW was, and are heading toward a place where WoW's Retail is today. Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning offered 5-person instance runners a taste of Ulduar, but Ulduar itself was like watching the end of Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.#

Remember when I posted about immersion breaking parts of Retail, with a pic of Goldshire as an example? Ulduar is like that. I mean, if you're going to break the Steampunk and semi-Fantasy mold and go full on Science Fiction, you might as well go all the way. The thing is, we're running around with swords and spells like the old D&D module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but without the ability to pick up any of the SF gear lying around. Well, except for the vehicles for Flame Leviathan, I guess, but at least in that D&D module you could pick up and use the stuff on the crashed spaceship. 

Back in the day I had no idea what I was
in for when our DM ran me through this.
This is the Goodman Games'
conversion + homage cover.

Now, before somebody stands up and says "Hey, what about Krull? What about that last fight against The Beast??!!" 

Thank goodness for YouTube!

Yes, you have a point. Yes, you can have a fight --or a raid-- and keep your high fantasy gear and tropes around, and yes the ending of Krull shows the power of love in a fight even against an advanced tech fueled enemy. However, we don't see the effects of this culture clash on the society at large years later. Unfortunately for Azeroth, Blizzard has been happy to keep areas that would have changed over time due to such exposure completely static, as if a First Contact had never happened. 

***

But the biggest thing about Ulduar that just doesn't fit with me is the tone that Blizzard took with it as a raid. In Vanilla Classic, you went into AQ40, Onyxia, or Molten Core as a raid, not a raid led by an NPC. Up through Tempest Keep, that remained the same in TBC Classic. But I do know that by the end of Sunwell Plateau, at least, the tone had begun to change. An NPC was the de facto leader of the raid, and they got the in-game scenes at the end. I believe that might have been the case at Black Temple as well, but I have absolutely no clue about Mount Hyjal. 

Wrath Classic brought with it Discount Naxx, which didn't have any NPC changes of that sort, but The Eye of Eternity certainly did with Alexstrasza putting in a guest appearance. And with Brann in constant communication with the raid throughout all of Ulduar, the raid becoming just a tool for and led by an in-game NPC has come front and center. There is simply no going back, and Ulduar was that tipping point.

***

I suppose I should be glad that my raiding time in Wrath Classic is over, because the vision in my mind of what Ulduar would be like made the reality a bit underwhelming. Nothing, it seems, can match the Vanilla Classic feel of 40 people all doing something greater than themselves. And to be fair, my experiences in Wrath Classic only served to remind me that TBC Classic personally ended so piss poorly. The raids I wanted to finish I never did, the gear I would have liked to have gotten I never did##, and the stress of having to prove to myself and others that I belonged in the raid rather than "being carried because you're on the raid lead team" was too much.###

Ulduar could become like Karazhan for me, in that I could grow to love it over time, but I doubt it. There's too much of what became Modern WoW in there for me to truly embrace it.

*Despite my dislike of the instance itself from a practical standpoint --once a scientist/engineer ALWAYS a scientist/engineer-- I've grown fond of it because of all those months of my raid leading the Friday Night Karazhan Run. That has almost nothing to do with the raid itself but the people involved in the raid. Alas that a few of those people are no longer playing WoW, and moved on to other raids.

**If there's one thing that drives me nuts, it's that even in Retail you as a raider are expected to follow guides and what comes out of examination of the Public Test Realms. It's as if you were planning a trip to Gatlinburg instead of entering into a new and unexplored area. Then again, if you wanted to explore and experience the "newness" of something, MMOs are definitely NOT it. They're filled with --and cater to--people who have to have control over every last detail as if we were a bunch of mathematical exercises. Okay, video games are at heart just that, but their developers try hard to use mathematical modelling to enable the illusion of freedom. By breaking down the game back into its mathematical components, we're left with a dexterity fueled Algebra problem set for homework composed of shiny pixels. Assuming you even look at the game rather than your button bar and all of the addons and whatnot that overlay the game. Or, as they put it in the Folding Ideas video about Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft, "Players make World of Warcraft look fucking ugly."

***It was a requirement for the raid, so I didn't have much choice in that. But like at work where every "required" training course I had to take I'd resist as much as possible, I waited until the last moment to go and finish. As in, 1/2 hour before raid. I figured we'd only get to about 4-5 bosses anyway, and I'm not under any true requirements to do much more than bring the Arcane heat, so why sweat it?

****Remember, I haven't done Mount Hyjal, Black Temple, and Sunwell Plateau. If there are portals there, I'm not aware of them.

#I haven't watched the whole movie, but I was unfortunate enough to be walking through a Best Buy or another one of those stores and the ending happened to be playing on televisions. 

##The gear I would have liked to have gotten I always stepped aside and let others have because:

• As Loot Master/Raid Leader, I felt it would have been unfair to get gear ahead of the rest of the raid. I'm a leader, and to lead means to do so by example. You put your people first. I'd been in semi-pug raids before where a tank finally got what he was looking for and decided to stop going to said raid, basically torpedoing everybody else's fun because he got what he wanted.
• I knew I didn't have the physical skills to compete with the best DPS players, so I felt they should get priority on gear over myself. Even when I ran the Friday Night Karazhan, I refused to roll on the ring that dropped from Malchezaar because if someone else could use it in a future raid they should get priority over myself, who was just doing Karazhan for fun. That it was a significant upgrade over my own rings didn't enter my thoughts. To me, desiring something just because I wanted it was simply being greedy. 

###Nobody ever said it to me, but I said it to myself. Constantly. I could hear the voice of self doubt every time I logged into the game, knowing that my DPS wasn't up to par. 

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.