I was getting on one of my toons on the Anniversary servers when my Questing Buddy whispered me and asked if I could join her in exploring AQ40 in Retail for a bit. I knew that the lead-in to the opening of AQ40 --formally known as The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj-- had begun on the Anniversary servers, and she wanted to poke around inside to make sure she had the cadence of the raid down.
Having actually completed AQ40 before, she could pick my brains a bit as needed.
"What do you need?" I asked, thinking of the Retail toons that could get into AQ40..
"Doesn't matter."
"Which faction?"
"Doesn't matter, because cross faction grouping."
So I hopped on Neve, who was simply loitering around Silvermoon City, ported to Orgrimmar, and then took a flight down south. I had to make some adjustments to the UI, however.
Yikes. That was embarrassing.
I felt it wasn't going to be that big of a deal, only there was one thing...
"You'll have to timewalk a bit," she informed me.
"Do I need to do that? I haven't played Neve since Mists."
"Yeah, you will. The giant sword is in the middle of Silithus."
What sword?
The irony, which I called out midway through the raid, was that she was on a Draenei Warrior, and I was on a Blood Elf Mage.
"TBC forever!" I said.
Yes, this is the same gear Neve wore when I last ran a BG with her in Cataclysm. Or thereabouts.
My Questing Buddy's warrior was significantly higher level than Neve, because Neve was still at L32 (where she landed after the level squish, going from L85 down to L32), and with the mobs there around L31 or so, my aggro radius was pretty broad. On more than one occasion I'd be typing something in and I'd get shellacked by a mob that wandered vaguely close to me. Even when I behaved myself and hid away from the fight, such as the final fight against C'Thun, one of his tentacles magically appeared in front of me and tossed me into his inside, where I died quickly.
Story of my life, dying to C'Thun.
Obviously, one shotting mobs and bosses don't give you a good feeling of how the fights really progress, and so I was just there to bounce my experiences off of her. However, I believe she's going to have a bit harder of a time of it in spots than we did in the fall of 2020.
"You have to be able to decurse here, so casters can't just sit at the top and then DPS. You need to put them on the stairs so they can reach people for decursing."
"That means me, because our Mages don't decurse."
I was pretty disgusted at that behavior. You do what you can to help the raid. "If they behave like that, they'll die very quickly in Naxx, let alone here."
Still, for a brief diversion, it was fun. I really didn't do terribly much other than comment on how much things had changed, such as the Blizzard spell behaving completely differently in Retail versus Classic, and how you could now use any mount you wanted inside AQ40 whereas back in the day you could only use those Qiraji battle mounts, which worked only within the raid itself.
Also, I have no idea why raid frames didn't appear like they're supposed to. When we were in a regular party, things looked normal, but as soon as my Questing Buddy converted the group to a raid, the frames vanished. And for the record, I don't have any addons in Retail, because this PC didn't exist when I last played Retail.
Speaking of not playing Retail...
NOTE: I don't want to hear anything about the cluttered nature of my bars. I haven't touched them in 13 years, so they're bound to messed up.
Last night I spent some time doing something I've not done since November: actually playing in-game with friends.
Oh, I've been online at the same time they are, and even been in a group together, but either they were doing their own thing, doing boosting/getting boosts, or doing group content of some sort. Since they mostly were rushing on ahead in the Anniversary servers, there really wasn't much in common for us to work on at the same time. Even when they had gotten toons to L60 and were working on alts*, I'd kept a distance because they were frequently doing boosting of some sort.
However, last night was a respite from that because my Questing Buddy was playing with one of her kids**, and I noted that her kid had died.
"Need a healer?" I asked.
"Not a bad idea," my Questing Buddy replied, so I switched to a Priest who was close to Darnassus and went up to Teldrassil to help out.
I spent the next hour or more following them around, healing and shielding them, while they quested inside the Ban'ethil Barrow Den and against the Furbolg encampments nearby. Once in a while I would pull threat due to the heals, so I had to use wands and the occasional attack spell, but I was perfectly fine providing a minimal amount of support to keep them upright. I had no skin in the game, since I wasn't trying to keep up with quests or catch up with leveling. It was simply something that I could do without disrupting their enjoyment of the game --or making it all about me-- so I could enjoy the ride for a while.
*At least one has an alt closing in on L60 as well. Go figure.
**The kids play on a free account, which works well since they only tend to play in the starter and adjacent leveling zones.
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.
My Questing Buddy has been going into Alterac Valley with me the past week, as she has her eye on some gear that you can buy once you become Exalted with the Stormpike Guard. I know she'd had a rough time in Warsong Gulch in TBC Classic when one of her BiS pieces was available from the Silverwing Sentinels, but I think I might have miscalculated how her competitiveness was going to surface in AV.
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?
I think I'm at that stage in my MMO career that what attracts me, more than anything else, is playing with other people.
There's always the automatic dungeon finder, dude. I hear people who use it are absolutely fantastic to play with. Just ask Reddit. From Imgflip (and Reddit.)
I guess I'm just kind of done chasing the next new thing, whether it's a new expansion or a new raid or a new instance or new gear.*
There's only so many times you can be asked to keep running on that hamster wheel before you start to question why you're doing it in the first place. This is particularly the case if you're also questioning the quality and direction of other aspects of an MMO, such as the story or class design.
But.
I can throw all that whining out the window, since I have a group of friends I play with regularly and I value their company.
It is not a coincidence that I continue to both play WoW Classic Era and have a small group of friends to play with. If it weren't for them, I'd have likely not renewed my WoW game time when it ended back in early 2022, after I walked away from progression raiding. Hell, were it not for the Friday Night Karazhan Run that I raid led** until the guild up and moved from Myzrael-US to Atiesh-US, I'd have probably not made it until March, much less June of that year.
Yet here I am, almost two years later, and I'm still logging into Classic Era regularly.
***
It is also not a coincidence that in the age of people predicting WoW's demise --myself included-- that the power of friendship keeps World of Warcraft and other MMOs afloat.
No, I'm not talking about the Retail WoW team's recent storylines, although judging by some of the commentary surrounding them I can understand why some would feel that way.
So... Who are the Bronies in this scenario? From Reddit.
But the reality is that while you can play MMOs solo --and "playing solo" while in a group via the automatic dungeon or raid finder is very much a thing-- MMOs are built upon group content. And you don't have to be in a guild to find friends to play with.
I mean, that's how I found most of my friends in WoW Classic.
Ancient of Tome of the Ancient was the only friend I knew who not only was playing WoW Classic at launch but was also on the server I played on.*** Sure, I knew a few people in the blogosphere who were going to play WoW Classic, but most of those whom were friends were over in Europe. The people from previous guilds that I could have considered friends at one point had either drifted away from the game or vanished from view in one of the couple of guild blow-ups that I've had the dubious privilege of witnessing.
So... outside of Ancient, I was pretty much on my own as far as making my way was concerned.
***
I was fine with that. I'd been effectively playing MMOs solo since about 2011, when the Alliance guild I was in basically faded away to nothing in late Cataclysm and then after a burst of activity early in Mists proceeded to do a repeat performance. The only group content I participated in were the Flashpoints in the "vanilla" portions of SWTOR, and by 2016 or 2017 I moved away from even that.
Given that I wasn't raiding, and --outside of the mini-Reds and my blogger friends-- I knew almost nobody who actually played MMOs, this wasn't a surprise.
But the surprise was that I began to make acquaintances and then friendships with people in Classic WoW.
Look, I'm tellin' ya, that's what happened. And no, people weren't asking my toons to strip or anything.
It was a natural outgrowth of manual group creation and obeying Wheaton's Law: "Don't be a dick." I would get into a group, behave nicely and not try to pull threat from the tank, and at the end I'd thank people for the group and if they ever needed a Rogue (or Mage), to hit me up. Most people wouldn't whisper me again, but a few did. From those initial connections grew some of my longest lasting friendships in the game.
While I had acquaintances in Classic WoW that have fallen by the wayside as interests diverged or people unsubscribed, other friendships persisted. It is those friendships that keep me playing WoW Classic Era more than anything else. So when I see that subscriber numbers kind of float between 4 to 8 million --and I'm assuming that paying for game time as opposed to an actual subscription qualifies-- then yeah, there's far more here than just approval and love for the game and its content.
Yes, that's 4 to 8 million players spread across (effectively) 5 games: Retail, Wrath/Cataclysm Classic, Classic Era, Classic Hardcore, and Classic Season of Discovery. I get that it's not the same as 4 to 8 million players that were playing a single game (Retail WoW), but money is money to Microsoft and it pays the bills.****
I realize that friendship isn't impervious to anything video game related, just as in real life, but MMO creators would do well to realize that fostering and maintaining friendships are likely the smartest thing they can do when designing and building an MMO. After all, it is an armor stronger than any plot armor out there, and can keep players subscribed even when the product stinks and the development team make horrible decisions. Okay, maybe not, but when people still play after a bad expansion, I believe there's more at work than that the WoW community are just a bunch of "sheep" who blindly continue to play the game.
And for pete's sake, don't expect the sanitized group and guild recruitment tools to do the heavy lifting of interacting with people for you. I'm almost 100% certain that if I relied upon an automated dungeon finder to enter into Classic Era dungeons that I'd not have made the connections I have. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems in a purely manual system --there are a truckload-- but by minimizing interpersonal contact the WoW team(s) have inadvertently exacerbated the problem of people forming bonds in the game. And online want-ads aren't the answer.
Uh, that person spamming a level boosting service in Mandarin notwithstanding.
At least I'll admit that the guild name "Frequently Reported" is kind of funny.
*That doesn't mean that I'm not interested in trying new games, because I am. It has far more to do with games I'm already playing that rely upon people constantly ponying up money for more things --whether it's an expansion or some cash shop item-- than getting a chance to try something completely new. I'm looking at you, Paradox, who either give up on a game after a very short period of time or will simply throw "expansions" at you ad-infinitum until you cry 'uncle'. It seems that every time I turn around there's a new addition to Stellaris or Europa Universalis IV, while on other games Paradox simply gives up on those that need bug fixes and tweaks to make them shine (Imperator: Rome).
**I found out much later from a friend who remained in the guild and in a semi-leadership position that the franken-guild's leadership expected me to run the "social" raids in the same manner as I ran the Karazhan raid, and they were surprised when I refused to move to Atiesh-US with the rest of the guild. Given that my orphan raid was pretty much independent of any guild leadership input or oversight for over half a year, they kind of screwed that up pretty badly given they never bothered to ask me my opinion on things.
***To be fair, I chose Myzrael-US in part because Ancient had decided to play on that server, as I figured that I at least knew one person on there.
****If anything, Microsoft is disappointed that I don't pay for more via the Cash Shop, because there they get maximum profit for minimal effort.
Several people in my friend group on WoW Classic Era have been leveling Mages lately, so they've prevailed upon me to help get them through some of the low to mid level instances. I may not run boosts for people for profit, but I can do this for friends. Since my gear is about as good as you can get without going into raids --more on that on another post-- I can solo up through about partway into Uldaman.* If the people I'm helping to run through instances are high enough level to actually be there due to quests, we ought to be able to handle all of Uldaman and most of Maraudon and Zul'Farrak.
Still, it's not a big deal and it does keep me in practice.
Inside Uldaman.
Did I mention that they were all Gnomes?
Oh yes, and the "herding cats" mentality runs strong in my friends, which led me to a revelation:
So what did I do? I took that and ran with it...
Having raised three kids, I know the drill.
My friends were only too happy to oblige:
*This is WoW Classic Era, mind you, and to reach the end in Uldaman you need at least three people in a group to start an event that opens up the last part of the dungeon. Still, I can do trash mobs and whatnot through most of the instance without dying.
One of the things that I remembered fondly from my time in that Horde guild back in 2010-2011 was that on Fridays after work there would frequently be an impromptu 'Happy Hour' in WoW.
The guild was split between people in the Eastern Time Zone and the Pacific Time Zone, so at 5 PM EST and then at 8 PM EST we'd have people getting off work and getting online to relax and chat. Alcohol was optional, of course, but after a long week at work it was nice to grab a beer and chat online while I worked on dinner. There was no pressure to actually run anything at that time, although if you wanted to run a dungeon with guildies it was an option.
Even when that WoW guild imploded, I found another 'Happy Hour' on Lord of the Rings Online with the local band on the Gladden server playing at 5 PM EST in Bree.
I reached into the archives for this one.
The mini-Reds found the band first, but after they informed me of the Friday afternoon concert I became a regular as well.
I didn't often drink during these concerts, but there were weeks where a beer or a glass of wine felt like a good idea.
However, my participation in these Happy Hour concerts ended when the kids reached high school and they joined the marching band. That meant that in the Autumn, Friday after work was spent going to high school football games to watch the marching band.*
Eight years later, the mini-Reds aren't quite so mini, and they've all graduated high school and gone to college. It's been a few years since we last attended a high school football game, but of course it's also been a few years since the pandemic began as well.
And oh yeah, it's been a few years since my health was turned upside down.
***
When I returned to WoW Classic in 2019, I fully expected to remain guildless. It wasn't a desire to play solo per se, but when you've had enough drama within guilds --and being the parent of teenagers**-- you prefer to keep the drama to a minimum. That being said, I did kind of miss the old Happy Hour on Fridays: the ability to just kick back and relax where people are glad to see you.
From Cheers, via yarn.co.
I ended up joining a few guilds in my WoW Classic career, and with the exception of the one guild pivoting toward a truly hardcore raiding scene which directly led to my departure from it, I had an okay time. I say "okay" because being on a West Coast server meant there weren't a lot of people on when I got off work; that usually happened when it hit 5 PM Pacific Time.
But now, with my involvement in Classic Era with my Questing Buddy and a small cadre of friends --originally hers, but I kind of got adopted by them-- it feels... Good. While we're not part of the same guild, we have a chat channel that we share that keeps us all connected. We also use their old TBC Classic guild's Discord server for when we want to get in voice chat.
Today, being Friday, means that we'll likely get on voice chat and enjoy the company of each other for a while. It'll be later than the traditional Happy Hour, as some of them have kids that need to be put to bed, but it definitely qualifies as one to me.
Now, about that beer...
Yes, I can drink beer, but I have to ration my amounts. And yes, I know that means 'light beer' for the most part, and that probably sucks for a lot of people. But local breweries make light beer such as this one that taste much better than the big brands and I support the local economy. From the Braxton Brewing Company, Covington, Kentucky.
*To be clear, it wasn't to watch the football team. We were there to watch our kids, and the football team lost their games a lot. And by 'a lot', I mean that seasons where they only won one game wasn't that uncommon.
**There's also drama in our neighborhood that I definitely try my damnedest to avoid but don't always succeed. In a way, not sending my kids to Catholic schools --which is where most of the kids in our neighborhood attend-- has been a boon in the end. It sure didn't feel like it at first, but once the kids grew up I realized I'd successfully avoided most of the parochial school/church related drama (and there tends to be a crap ton of it, from what I can see).
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.
"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:
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.
My questing buddy suggested that we run a few Heroic Wrath Classic dungeons on her Warlock, and I agreed. I had hardly played a Mage in a couple of months*, so I grouped up with Linnawyn instead.
Then the fun began.
My questing buddy began fielding queries, complete with GearScore, and ALL of them asking "H+?"
"No, just Heroic."
"Oh."
This went on for quite a few minutes, and finally my questing buddy got disgusted and grumbled "At times like this I really hate this game."
I figured the grouping was going to be a lost cause, because H+ was all anybody ever seemed to care about --and don't give me any bullshit about how "there's plenty of people who will want to run normal heroics" because my experience has been exactly what we found that night**-- so I made a radical suggestion.
"How about we roll up some characters on WoW Classic instead?"
"You mean Classic Era?"
"Yes."
There wasn't even a moment's hesitation. "Sure!"
She delisted us and we immediately began discussing what server to try. I was the only one of the two of us to have copied our toons from original Classic, and I knew that the cluster of servers those toons were on were fairly dead, so I was open to trying other locales. That night we initially tried Bloodsail Buccaneers-US, which had a listing of "Full", but we quickly discovered that the RP server is the current home of the Hardcore Challenge for the Alliance side. When you have a line of 6+ people deep to kill the boss in Northshire Abbey starting zone at lunchtime, you've got a population problem.
So the next evening we abandoned Bloodsail Buccaneers and tried the server cluster that Pagle-US is part of.
We quickly discovered that this server cluster was more to our liking. The crowds weren't overwhelming, people weren't stealing each other's mobs, and we relaxed.
"We're off on the road to Darnassus..." (Please tell me someone recognizes that line.)
The Gen Chat was relaxed in both the Night Elf starting area as well as the Human starting area, and it also had a dearth of people selling boosts and other assorted meta behaviors.
The second night on the Pagle cluster, we got into a group to run the Ban'ethil Barrow Den in Teldrassil, which is notorious for being hard to handle due to the respawn rates of the mobs inside the packed area.
This is like the beginning of a joke: "Three Hunters and a Rogue walk into a bar..."
Much hilarity and fun was had.
The next day, my questing buddy had a proposition for me: would I like to run to Mulgore with her? She wanted to get a chance for her Hunter to tame a lion there named The Rake, and she figured I'd like to tag along. I quickly calculated the path we were likely to take, as low level toons (around L10 or so), and replied, "We're going to die a lot."
"It'll be fun!"
"Then count me in!" I never let a little thing like death get in the way of seeing the wide world of Azeroth.
So we took the ship from Teldrassil to Darkshore,
You know, I think we can do that. Blizz got rid of that quirk in Wrath Classic.
ran the length of Darkshore to Ashenvale,
took the Talondeep Path through to the Stonetalon Mountains,
We died almost immediately after this screenshot.
died a bit on the way, but we finally escaped Stonetalon and into the Barrens.
"I hate what they did to the Barrens in Cataclysm," my questing buddy said.
We eventually did make it to Mulgore after dying a lot more, but alas I missed taking screenshots as proof. Still, it was an adventure made more real because we had to put in real effort to make it there. I mean, if this were Wrath Classic we'd likely have waited until we got to L20 and got riding, which would have made this jaunt a lot easier. Indeed, in Wrath Classic everything at the lower levels comes easier, but we'd have not likely gotten the satisfaction of making it through to Mulgore if it would have been so easy.
I will say that Shintar is correct in her assertion that the leveling cadence in Classic Era just feels right; you're not leveling so fast that you're choked by the lack of coin on you (Season of Mastery), or that you're plowing through content so quickly courtesy of heirloom gear and whatnot that you lose sight of all of the world around you (Wrath Classic). You're also not getting major rewards so early --such as riding-- that you forget how important of a step it is.
"OMGosh! Bloodvine is important again!" my questing buddy gushed.
"And I can make my own poisons once more," I added, which earned a laugh. "Hey now, I missed that connection to being a Rogue. It's part of why I chose Alchemy on Az!"
"When was the last time we saw both Onyxia and Nefarian heads hanging in Stormwind?" My questing buddy mused.
And then I went and just had to do this:
"Lady Prestor is back!"
"What did you do??"
"I, uh, hugged Lady Prestor."
(Do you know how long it took for me to wait for the throne room to clear out for this screenshot? Better you not know...)
"Oh, the Windsor questline is back too!!"
"And no more Varian!"
***
The past few days, even the Pagle cluster has been so busy in these lower level zones that we've resorted to heading off and doing other things while we waited for people to split so we could quest a bit longer. Travelling to Darkshire for the flight point there or cutting across a zone that have enemies that will still aggro on you to gather mining nodes ("I'm NOT addicted!" my questing buddy insisted) are just a few of the things we got into trouble with in Classic Era.
It's a very weird feeling, seeing these zones so active when they were so totally dead from, say, mid-2020 onward, but this is a level of activity that is entirely organic. Blizzard did not directly create this demand by doing anything, this has been players coming back to Era on their own. I suppose you could argue that Blizzard did this by providing the greater Classic community what they wanted in Wrath Classic, but I'm not quite sure. After all, people did leave WoW entirely for other MMOs (such as Final Fantasy XIV) during Shadowlands' run in Retail, and the WoW Classic community has been embracing the meta for so long that people have simply just stopped playing. I know of a dozen people who stopped because they didn't like what TBC and Wrath Classic became; they never even bothered with Classic Era. But here we are, and Era is experiencing this renaissance in activity.
Will it last? I don't know. I don't even know if my questing buddy and I will continue to play Era in the long run, but there is hope that we will. We've already begun talking about potentially joining a guild that is going to experience leveling and raiding content as if we were all new to the game, and there is no shortage of guilds that are advertising exactly that. We can afford to be choosy, because we've been there before, and we know what we're getting into.
*I'd prepped Neve for a transfer off of Myzrael-US to Old Blanchy-US, and I wasn't inclined to do anything with her in the interim. Cardwyn... Well, Cardwyn I've hardly touched at all since the raid team broke up except to tailor a few bags here and there. And those few times I did get on I got whispered by some people in the now defunct raid team, asking how I've been and what raids I've been on. I'm polite enough, but I'm really not interested in hearing about all the raiding they've been on and all the loot they've gotten. In that respect I'm like our Bear tank on the raid team, who left WoW entirely when the raid fell apart. He'd committed a lot of effort to making that raid work, and then.... pffft.
**And if you listen to Trade/LFG chat or the Blizzard forums you'll hear people say "Oh, there's plenty of people who will run normal Heroics," but if that's the case, where the hell are they? I simply am not buying what people are selling, because as Folding Ideas put it, "We brought the bug back with us."
When I first started poking around on Atiesh-US, I thought about resurrecting the old guild name I was a member of on Ysera-US, Is Up To No Good. Instead, I created that guild on Myzrael-US as a home for some of my alts, such as Az and Linna.
Something about Linna's Mona Lisa-esque smile fits that guild name perfectly.
But if nothing else, I wanted to put a guild together on Atiesh-US for Deuce. I'd discovered the joy of having an entire guild bank to yourself, and I figured that if I was going to have an alt over on Atiesh it'd be nice to have a mammoth amount of space for oddball junk as well.
I try not to be a packrat, but with WoW you never quite know when some of this stuff might come in handy.
My questing buddy and I got to talking about this blog, and I mentioned about how the MMO blogging landscape had changed over the years.
"There's a lot of blogs that were watering holes for the community, and they're no longer around. Places like Tam and Chas' Righteous Orbs, Rades' Orcish Army Knife, and LarÃsa's The Pink Pigtail Inn were the places to go, not to mention WoW Insider."
"What was that?"
"What? WoW Insider?"
"No, The Pink Pigtail Inn."
"Oh, LarÃsa ran that. She stopped blogging long ago, 2014 maybe?"
My questing buddy began gushing about what a great name PPI was, and then she mentioned something I hadn't considered. "That would be a great guild name!" she added. "Hold on."
"Okay..."
"There!" she said a few moments later. "I reserved it. Want to sign the charter?"
"Sure!"
Alas, that charter then proceeded to languish for some months, as we moved on to other things.
Fast forward to this past week, and I logged in on Deuce to find this:
"Yes, Mistress Elsharin. I like it too."
So LarÃsa's blog now lives on in game.
LarÃsa, I know that you've moved on and don't play any more, and I'm pretty sure you've put your gaming days behind you, but in case you come across PC again I wanted to let you know that you were an inspiration to me and a lot of other bloggers over the years. This small thing, a guild name for a few people, is just one way of saying thanks for your writing and community way back when. It still means a lot to me, and I hope I'm not the only blogger who thinks so.
EtA: I had "gushed" in there twice. That looked weird, so I fixed it. No more gushers here.
