These Aren't the Toons You're Looking For. Move Along...

I haven't been writing much about any adventures in MMOs lately --okay, for the past couple of months at least-- but to be perfectly honest, there's not much to report. 

Okay, last weekend was Alterac Valley
weekend, so there's that...

There's also been my Questing Buddy and I sneaking into the 20 person raid Zul'Gurub to farm Bloodvine...

Like a god is going to listen to me...

Or just hanging around at Darnassus, watching the Trade and LFG Chat and doing some buffing of people as they go by.

I have to admit that guild advertisement for
"Vanilla" (in the chat window) was pretty damn good.

One thing I've not been doing much? This.

This was on my login screen the other day.

That's pretty much the extent of Classic's participation in the anniversary events, and Classic Era has none of that going on at all.

I suppose I could have watched the video today, but I really don't see any reason to do so. The only time Blizzard cares about Classic Era is when they want to "improve" things without consulting the player base, or when they update Season of Discovery and break things in Classic Era as a consequence. The widely rumored official Classic Fresh servers are likely to have been announced, but given that I've already got toons on Classic Era I'm not sure if I'd bother with going to a new series of servers at this time.

In the meantime some of the people in my friend group have migrated to mainly playing Retail since you can solo almost everything in the game now --yeah, they don't like pugs, and they don't push Heroic or Mythic content. Even my Questing Buddy has been playing Retail a bit with her husband, while another member of the friend group has poked their nose into Cataclysm content a bit.

As for me, the deck took priority, and now that I'm done with that I'm just going to chill for the most part. Well, if the Horde calls me "That fucking crazy ass Mage", I'm fine with that too...

We were stomping them pretty good in this battleground.

Maybe I ought to play a bit of Baldur's Gate 3. I haven't touched that game in months, so I'm still in the Shadow Touched Lands. Well, I also have some studying to do, because there's a test I'd like to take sometime before Spring, but whenever I sit down with the books in question --yes, there's more than one-- I end up falling asleep. I really need to read at lunchtime or something...

There's probably somebody who reads the blog
who recognizes this small part of the book.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Channeling My Inner Boss

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

Hmm... Have I been here before?

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

***

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

Because I simply can't keep my mouth shut.

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

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

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

When we're not dead, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Fancy meeting you here.

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

***

And, uh, this person is back too.

/sigh

Sometimes you just can't win.

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

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

The Maiden Voyage of the Loot Master

I should have taken screenshots.

Really.

I'd never performed any raid lead functions before, and I mean the "real" raid lead functions, not merely organizing the Mage Int buffs. But last night during our regular Zul'Gurub pug run* I assumed the role of Loot Master for the first time.

Courtesy of my new gig being part of a raid lead team, I knew I was going to have to learn this job anyway, so I figured no time like the present. I'd already been growing more and more concerned about the burnout that the pug Raid Lead had been facing, and I wanted to take on a greater role in her raids to make her job easier.

So last night's ZG run was a great testcase as to whether a) I could handle this technically, and b) I could handle this without getting too much stress.

While I realized that I wasn't going to be as smooth as she does it --she's been doing it for months-- I have no idea how she juggles all the hats on these smaller raids.

***

We spent about a half an hour before the raid working out the settings for the LootReserve add-on, which is what we use for our raids with the Soft Reserve loot system**, and then based on a quirk of Classic I had to assume the Raid Lead position and then grant her Assist so she could perform all of her 'regular' tasks.

It actually wasn't that bad.

It helped that the raid was composed of a mix of guildies (still feels weird saying that) and regulars, and they were very encouraging throughout the raid. The two other Mages stepped up to help out with managing the Int Buffs and taking care of other small things I'm used to doing, so it freed me to focus on the Loot Master's job.

Which actually contributed to my death at least once. 

I was busy looking at the reserves and whatnot in the approach to the spider boss while we were killing those spider packs. Since my mind was on that, I kept spamming Arcane Explosion and not paying attention to my threat levels. Naturally, I pulled threat and died.

"A Card in her natural habitat: eating dirt" was how I described it in Mage chat.

"What happened?"

"Died due to skitterer packs."

"How?"

"Was busy looking at reserves, spamming AE, not paying attention."

"Yeah, that'll do it."

I died one or two more times, both of them directly related to me focusing on the Loot Master job, so I'm not terribly concerned. But given that I'm not exactly swimming in gold, that money spent on repairs did hurt.

***

Since I'll be taking this job going forward on the two 20 person raids, I'm sure I'll get better at this as time goes on. And I think I can do this when we get to BC and I graduate to the DKP tools we currently use in our progression raids. Of course, stakes about loot are a bit higher there, so hopefully I'll have this down enough to not cause any drama all by my lonesome.

*While technically it is a pug, this raid (as well as our Saturday BWL and Sunday AQ20 runs) has so many regulars from across several guilds that it's more of a semi-pug at this point. 

**If you're considering running Soft Reserve, the LootReserve Addon is AMAZING. For both raiders and the lead team. For raiders, you get a GUI that handles everything you wanted to do (so you don't overwhelm the Loot Master with requests to the point the LM's account is throttled by Blizz). For Loot Masters, you only have a half dozen settings to worry about without having to type out commands on the chat line. If it was all command line driven, it'd take forever.

Let Me Expand on That

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

Ever.

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

In that raid I learned three things:

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

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

***

What?

Oh, that.

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

More on this another time.

***

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I can do this raiding thing after all.





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