"I Guess You Like Killing Dragons"

This is something that periodically pops up when I play MMOs, and I have to wonder whether it's unique to me or more of a general reaction.

When I'm in a PvE group environment, such as a max level dungeon, instance, or raid, the question of  "What are you here for?" will occasionally pop up. In raids, that is an inevitable part of handling loot, especially in the "old style" of not having personal loot as found in Retail WoW, as no matter what method used people will want to obtain loot.  In other cases, people are merely being social and asking a pretty general question as an ice breaker. 

There's even a good chance that people have some quests they want to finish, such as the numerous quests that take a person back and forth to Blackrock Depths, or they want to help someone with a special questline, such as the WoW Classic Era Paladin or Warlock mount quests. 

But I'll use as an example an Onyxia raid from last year that I got talked into going by a couple of people in my WoW Classic Era friend group. This Ony run came after their guild's weekly Blackwing Lair raid, and for those people not familiar with the Onyxia raid, it consists of a couple of trash mobs and the dragon, Onyxia, herself. It's a fairly quick raid if it's done well. But this particular time, they had barely 20 people there out of a maximum of 40, and that as definitely pushing the envelope as far as how few people you can take into Ony and complete the raid. 

So I figured why not and asked for an invite. 

After joining the raid, I joined their Discord for coordination purposes and the Raid Lead sent me a link to a website for their Soft Reserve system, Softres.it. I didn't really need to look at the list of items to know that Onyxia doesn't drop a lot of loot for Mages. For the most part she drops one piece of Tier 2 gear (the Helm), and the only other items of interest would be the 18 slot bag and (of course) the Head of Onyxia, which you can turn in for an okay reward for Mages but you do get to have your name announced as everyone in your capital city gets the "Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer" buff. 

I just gave a brief glance at the options there and decided to pass on reserving any loot.

This didn't go unnoticed.

Before first pull the raid leader said they were one short on people reserving, and after a short pause, there was a "Cardwyn, you're not reserving anything?"

"No, I'm good," I replied via chat. 

"You're sure?"

"Yep."

"I guess Cardwyn likes killing dragons," someone quipped.

I'd begun typing a response, basically saying that the helm I was wearing (a turban, actually) from Upper Blackrock Spire is better than the Tier 2 Helm, but.. saying that was simply taking too long and they were ready to go, so I let it slide.

There's a reason why I turned off
the Show Helm option in MMOs.

But I'm sure that more than one person looked at my gear, which was a mix of Blue and Green gear, with the only Purple pieces on it being the hand crafted Robe of the Archmage and the ring I got from having an Exalted reputation with the Stormpikes in Alterac Valley, and said "WTF?"

That's the thing, really: the raids with actual upgrades for me --in the lower WoW Classic Era raids, anyway-- are in the other raids: Molten Core (MC), Blackwing Lair (BWL), and Zul'Gurub (ZG). To be honest, I'd be better off running ZG a few times to get some basic raid pieces and then go to BWL, but I'm sure people jump right in to BWL without a thought once they hit max level and get attuned to the place.

***

The concept of someone joining a raid or other group content when they don't need anything, gear-wise, seems to be such a foreign thing that it flummoxes people.

I was once kicked from an instance run of fellow raid members back in Vanilla Classic WoW because I was in there for fun and not a guildie. One moment I was in the group and the next I was kicked, being told in Discord* that since I was in the instance for fun and not a guildie they were going to give my spot to a guildie who needed the instance run. If I were given the option I would have stepped aside, since everybody involved was on the same raid team, but being booted without giving me a chance kind of stuck in my craw.

For a long time I felt that the person leading that instance run was trying in a not-so-subtle way to try to push me into joining the guild that I raided with, and I resented the passive-aggressive manner in which he was trying to accomplish his goals.** As time has gone on, however, I now realize that this was just a symptom of the encroaching hardcore direction that both the guild and raid leads were heading, and one that I became increasingly at odds with.

I realize that saying that you play for fun
can be wielded as some sort of  excuse for poor behavior,
but I've been on both sides of this argument and I can say
that the try-hards are worse. From Reddit.

Doing things for fun is just a statement that you enjoy what you're doing. It's not an excuse for not caring, or trying to validate bad behavior in group content. Unfortunately, however, "fun" has somehow gotten a bad reputation in gaming circles, which boggles my mind. 

This isn't work, after all.

If your gaming has morphed into work for you, or you begin to look down upon people who are there to enjoy themselves, maybe it's time to re-evaluate what you're doing. 

*It was a post raid instance run, so we were all in Discord.

**This person is the same person who pulled me aside after a Classic Naxxramas raid to tell me how to "improve" my DPS, despite he not being my class lead, nor a raid lead, nor playing a Mage for anything other than one of his many alts. This unsolicited advice annoyed the hell out of me, given that I knew what gear I needed to improve and I couldn't make the gear drop if the RNG Gods were not interested. Given that my class lead was really happy with my overall output, as he had his own trouble with getting gear, I valued his input far more than these "suggestions".

#Blaugust2025

When You're Too Meh for a Midlife Crisis

I sometimes wonder what my midlife crisis would look like. 

Yes, before you point out that I'm north of 50 so I technically should have had my midlife crisis a decade or more ago, I'm aware of that. But I also know I didn't really have a midlife crisis either, so...

Would it be a fast car, like this Mercedes I discovered at my son's apartment parking lot when we picked him and his partner up for Gen Con?

It was SO out of place compared to all of the
rest of the cars in the parking lot.
Fun Fact: I looked up the price online and it costs
close to what our current house cost back in 2002.

Nah. If I had my choice of car, it'd likely be something from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, although I'd not say no to a mid-80s Ford Mustang or Pontiac Firebird.

These were made locally until mid-1987.

The thing is, that era of cars are in high demand from people my age (or a little older), so even the thought of buying one to try to fix it up is kind of cost prohibitive. 

The pricing bubble has also afflicted another hobby of mine, audio, because I'd like to have picked up an older 1970s era receiver, but again a ton of people my age have gone into that and driven up the prices.

Such as this Pioneer SX-780, made in 1980
(the manufacturing run was 1978-1980).
From Oleg's Vintage Audio.

Then again, my trusty old NAD T751 receiver could stand a cleaning and repair job, so maybe it's for the best to stick with the NAD and my Pioneer VSX-2000 that is still chugging away in the basement.

Or I could go the route of a friend of mine and start up an AD&D campaign of my own...

Such as module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
From eBay.

But I'm happy playing in his campaign at the moment. No sense in stealing his thunder.

Maybe I could just take that period of my life when I actually did progression raiding in Vanilla Classic and say THAT is my midlife crisis, and then we'll call it a day. That's probably the easiest answer. 

EtA: Corrected the NAD receiver model.

#Blaugust2025

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.

Must Be Something about Changing the Title Pic

I haven't been talking much about raiding in Wrath Classic, mainly because there wasn't much to report.

After all, I was part of a rather casual 10 person raid team, and we'd been clearing Wrath's version of Naxxramas, the Eye of Eternity (aka "The Malygos raid"), and Obsidian Sanctum (aka "The Sarth + Drakes raid"). We'd hit a wall trying to down Sartharion with all three Drakes alive, but given that apparently the 10s version of Sarth + 3 Drakes is much harder than the 25s version, I wasn't too concerned about it. I mean, I felt bad that we weren't downing the 3 Drakes on 10s when 25s teams were doing it with aplomb, but apparently teams with full 25 BiS Phase One gear were failing to down the 10s version, which made me feel much better about the supposed "EZ Mode" that 10 person raids are in Wrath Classic.

With Ulduar opening up, all this was destined to change.

Oh, so THERE it is!

As I'd never raided in the original Wrath, I never knew where the entrance to Ulduar actually was. After all, it's not something you can ride to from the flight point, unlike the Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning 5-person instances. And yes, I got lost trying to figure out where the entrance to Ulduar was on that first night's worth of raiding. I guess that is the same sort of thing that would have happened if I actually was able to raid Black Temple in TBC Classic, because I once spent a half an hour flying around, trying to figure out the entrance to Black Temple, and I still don't know where the entrance is.* I think I used to know, because I have a hazy memory of soloing BT back in 2014 or so, but burn me if I can't find it now.

And I thought the entrance to the original Naxxramas was a puzzle.

Ulduar is the instance where Steampunk and World of Warcraft collide in a big way. While there's a ramp up in TBC Classic --such as Netherstorm or my questing buddy's 'copter, which she absolutely loves-- it was Wrath of the Lich King where Blizzard went all in on a steampunk setting for World of Warcraft. From the design of Warsong Hold --my oldest explicitly mentioned to me the Steampunk elements to the complex the first time she saw it-- to the vehicle oriented World PvP in Wintergrasp** you can't avoid the overt Steampunk to the game. But really, once a player reaches The Storm Peaks with its Marvel-esque Nordic vision of the Titan Keepers, down to names such as Freya, Loken, Mimrir, and Thorim, you realize that the Steampunk in Azeroth wasn't just a "flavor of the month" design but rather Blizzard consciously deciding that Azeroth was created by tech beyond what the current inhabitants could achieve.

Kind of like an MMO version of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, complete with dragons.

The cover art for Dragonwriter, a tribute
to Anne McCaffrey. Art by Michael Whelan,
who painted almost all of the Pern cover art.

The centerpiece of The Storm Peaks is Ulduar, what appears to be a titan city, but is in fact something else... 

Oh come on, I'm not gonna spoil it for you, despite Ulduar having been out in Retail WoW for over a decade now. 

But that time interval also means that Ulduar is --like almost all of WoW once something is released into the wild-- a solved raid. There are already tons of articles and videos on how to optimally raid Ulduar, from the raid composition to the Best in Slot (BiS) lists to even the boss order you should take to blitz through the content.

Due to that, and since I wasn't doing as much DPS as Fire Spec compared to Arcane Mage in the raid, I was asked to switch to Arcane in early January. 

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as to where this might be going. I knew that my Fire Spec for a single target boss isn't as good as Arcane Spec, although AOE damage for a Fire Mage is superior to that of an Arcane Mage, but I liked playing as a Fire Mage. The way a Fire Mage has to run into melee range, drop some casts in the scrum, then blink away so I can then rain fiery damage from distance just suits my playing style. But even the difference between Arcane and Fire aside, my fellow Mage had been running 25 person raids and whose gear was decently superior to my own, so it was only natural that her damage was also greater.*** 

But like a good teammate, I set aside my internal concerns about the raid creeping toward the hardcore, saluted, and switched to an Arcane spec.

We were then dealt a blow when we lost our Warlock, who decided to play fewer characters in Wrath Classic, and our raid got the short end of the stick.  Still, we had 11 players on the team, so despite missing a Lock we could still field a full raid. That was good for us, since the raid leads had personally reached out to people that they liked to raid with and had agreed with our focus for this particular raid team. While most people raided with other toons, 25 person raids, or both, a few of us --myself included-- kept to only this particular raid team. After what I dealt with in TBC Classic, I was happy to have low expectations and a casual attitude toward raiding. This time around, I was not going to get sucked into the Meta and hardcore progression grind.

And I thought our little raid team was insulated from that grind.

We got into Ulduar last week and... It felt weird. I'll have to go into it more on another post, but unlike Karazhan --whom I have issues with the internal logic of the entire place-- Ulduar just feels like an inflection point in WoW's history. 

***

I was online, doing something on Neve, when the post appeared in the raid's Discord on Saturday night. 

The Pally Healer and the Hunter were leaving the raid team.

They were running 25 person raids together, and they wanted to also push into 10 person hard modes**** much faster than we were. For our raid team, hard modes were something we'd like to eventually do, but it wasn't a priority; we had people in raid with young families, and people like me who burned out on the hardcore progression, so getting all sweaty in pursuit of the hardcore wasn't something we were interested in doing.

Since our raid team wasn't going to progress into hard modes fast enough, the two decided to leave our raid and join an "in house" raid team composed of members of their 25 person raid. Several classes have BiS items that are found in Ulduar's hard mode 10 person raids, so if your 25 person raid demands you get your BiS gear you have to get as quickly into 10 person hard modes as possible.*****

The Meta caught up to our little raid team after all.

Monday evening before the raid we had a meeting with the raid leads. The Pally healer was there for one last time, but we were still a person short: our Shaman.

It was then that the raid leads had announced that our Shaman had begun ghosting them over the week, and didn't bother signing up for tonight's raid. My heart sank.

Based on all that and that neither raid lead wanted to spend time recruiting, vetting, and bringing new raiders into a raid that was designed to be pretty laid back and a friends' raid, they decided to shut down the raid instead. Given that we only had 9 people we went into Naxx, Eye of Eternity, and Obsidian Sanctum one last time, but that was the end.

***

And so ends my Wrath Classic raiding.

I have not much desire to go raid any further, as it seems that even casual raids have to work hard to keep from backsliding into a more hardcore stance. I do know that my old friend Jes has been running 25 person pug raids of her own, and I know she'd be happy to have me sign up, but I really have no desire to join a raid that is nominally hosted by the franken guild, pug or not. Even if I was so inclined, I noticed who was signing up for the raid and some of those are people I don't care to ever raid with again.

It's not as if I'm giving up on Wrath Classic. The new Heroic Plus 5-person instances --what I've dubbed the "Mythic Plus of Wrath Classic"-- are sufficiently difficult enough that I'm happy to run some of those and scratch that group content itch. Beyond that, there's plenty of things that I can do that have nothing to do with raiding, so I'll be fine. In spite of what the majority of the Classic playerbase seems to think, endgame raiding isn't why I play Wrath Classic. It never was.

*No, I didn't break down and look up where the Black Temple entrance was on Wowhead, either.

**For Wrath Classic, Wintergrasp became an instanced battleground, but originally it was designed as a World PvP event where the winning faction gained access to the Vault of Archavon mini-raid. If you were on an imbalanced server --and most people were-- if you were on the wrong faction you never got into Vault of Archavon. Of course, now everybody can get access to VoA, because all it takes to gain access to Vault of Archavon is having exactly one person on your faction on the server having won Wintergrasp to gain access to VoA for your faction.

***In Wrath Classic, both sets of raids --10 person and 25 person-- drop their own gear. Due to the supposed increased difficulty of 25 person raids --and more people to gear for-- the 25 person raids drop gear with supposedly superior stats. That doesn't mean that an item from a 10 person raid might not be BiS for your toon and your spec, but a 25 person raider going down to a 10 person raid is going to have better gear than someone (like me) who kept to 10 person raids. The two types of raids don't share the same lockout, so Cardwyn could theoretically join both a 10 person raid and a 25 person raid of Ulduar that same week without issue.

****Wrath of the Lich King saw the beginning of hard modes for raid content. You could flip a switch in the raid and suddenly the raid entered an increased level of difficulty with the promise of better loot overall for each class of raiding. 

*****Okay, one thing needs to be said: if you want to go all in on hardcore, and apparently a ton of people do, that means you're running full Ulduar raids --one 10 person raid and one 25 person raid-- twice a week on your main toon. And if you've got multiple toons, you can easily see where you spend every night of the week raiding in some form or another. I was listening to a YouTube video when it was mentioned that Warcraftlogs had announced that the first week of Ulduar had the most registered parses of any raid, my first thought was "Duh." Alas, I've not been able to confirm that mention independently, so I'd place this as "not surprising but unconfirmed".

EtA: Fixed a formatting issue.

Wrath Classic Phase One Raids Part 3: Something Something Something Black Dragonflight

Monday night my raid team ventured forth to do battle with Malygos (again) and then to the only raid instance I'd yet to see in Phase One of Wrath Classic, The Obsidian Sanctum.

Once again, I hunted around for a quest --any quest-- that pointed people in the direction of the seedy underbelly of Wyrmrest Temple, but I rolled a "1" on my Intelligence check. 

"Is the redone Onyxia [raid] out yet?" I asked in voice.

"No, it still says L60 if you go visit her," our Warlock replied. "I think the redone Ony dropped around the time of Trials of the Crusader."

"Then I'm trying to figure out why we're here. I couldn't decide if Blizz decided to redo Ony after it created Obsidian Sanctum, or before. It feels like this raid [Obsidian Sanctum] came first, then Onyxia's revamp, but unlike Ony there's absolutely no reason for us to know this raid exists in game."

"Oh, this definitely came first," the Raid Leader replied.

"Yeah, but unlike Eye of Eternity and Malygos, there's no quests at all for the reason why we're here. At least the Nexus War had a big long thingie for it."

"Thingie?"

"Whatever it is. Brain fried from the time change."

But that's the point, really: there is no reason why we're at The Obsidian Sanctum. If it weren't for Blizz saying "Hey, this is a new raid," you'd have no reason other than pure curiosity as to whether there's something underneath Wyrmrest Temple. 

***

Blizz has mentioned in the past that they're already looking, storywise, a couple of expacs ahead. I've always thought that was something they did later in WoW's lifetime, but I suspect it was happening even back in the "ancient days of WoW", pre-Cataclysm. 

After all, the evidence is right in front of you when you walk into The Obsidian Sanctum: Three Twilight Drakes.

Years before we got to know them well in Cataclysm, there they were beneath Wyrmrest Temple. No explanation, no nothing. Just... there. Arrogant as hell, even as drakes they feel superior to Sartharion, and their presence there make the raid totally chaotic.

So I'll give kudos to Blizz thinking ahead, but without any in-game reason why the raid is there, it's just, well... disjointed.

***

Oh, the fight itself?

Uh... I died. A lot.

I'd never been in the raid before, so of course they wanted to try killing Sartharion with two drakes up.

I very quickly became acquainted with what "two drakes up" meant: you can kill Sartharion with anywhere from zero to all three drakes alive when you first attack Sartharion, but the more drakes you leave alive before you start the fight the better the loot that will drop.

And the more chaotic the fight gets, too. 

The basics of the fight are simple: kill Sartharion. However, Sarth summons fire elementals to pester you and whelps to hound you. Oh, and there's this thing called a Lava Wave (or something to that effect) where walls of lava come rushing at you like you were out surfing in Hawaii, with a gap that you can stand in if you're fast enough.

I was frequently not fast enough. 

Oh, it's not that I couldn't see the gap, or that I dropped casting (I did), it's that I often chose a gap too far away from me to try to make. And with my Blink ability frequently on cooldown because I constantly had to move to avoid mobs/AOE/whatever, I had to hoof it a lot.

That's a type of mistake that I'll fix the longer I'm exposed to this fight. 

Yeah, starting out on the second highest difficulty setting for 10 person Obsidian Sanctum wasn't the best introduction to the fight. The Raid Leaders finally decided to dial it back a bit and take down Satharion with only one drake alive before the boss fight began, which made things much easier to process for me. Whereas before I saw only chaos, I was able to understand the mechanics of the fight better because I wasn't constantly running for my life. 

As is what I've discovered in the Phase One raids, I do better when I can stand and cast. Fire Mages' abilities don't lend themselves well to fights where you have to be on the move: our instant casts are pretty piss poor, damage wise, and even if a Fire Mage was standing, my damage output is definitely inferior to an Arcane Mage.* However, I can do better --and have more of an impact-- with AOE damage for all of the adds that spawn. Get them down, and the fight is much easier. 

***

Like the Onyxia fight back in Vanilla/Vanilla Classic, The Obsidian Sanctum is organized chaos. It is also the most difficult fight in the Phase One raids for 10 people. Yet despite that, it is the one raid that has the largest disconnect from the entire expansion. Kind of like how Blizz shoehorned in a Troll Raid (Zul'Aman) into a Burning Crusade expansion that had nothing to do with Trolls at all.

*More on that for another post.

Wrath Classic Phase One Raids Part 2: How to Make Something Less than Epic

As I alluded to in my previous post, we cleared Wrath Naxxramas over the course of two nights, with plenty of time to handle Vault of Archavon and the Eye of Eternity. While we didn’t get to Obsidian Sanctum this first week of my raiding participation, the raid team did clear it the week before. That means there’ll be a third post on Phase One Wrath raiding when I visit Obsidian Sanctum, so you have been warned.

After dealing with the Uncanny Valley Effect in Wrath Naxx, the two other raids were completely new to me. I mean, I knew of them back in the day, but as I wasn’t a raider back then I never actually saw them. During Mists I considered trying to go in and solo the Malygos fight, but I was vaguely aware that there were drakes involved, and if I were required to use a drake’s abilities for a decent portion of the fight then it would be impossible to solo. But Vault of Archavon? I really don’t know why I didn’t care about soloing that raid, but it just wasn’t something I was interested in seeing.*

After we turned Kel’Thuzad into a puddle of goo at the end of Wrath Naxxramas, we ported out to Dalaran and flew over to Wintergrasp. 

“Everybody should have the flight point,” someone in the raid said. 

“I don’t,” the raid lead said.

“Nor I,” I added. Given that the only way to get to Wintergrasp is via flying, my purchase of Cold Weather Flying the day before meant I didn’t have that flight point. I wasn’t planning on short circuiting the storyline and grabbing all of the flight points available just because riding wasn’t as fast as flying.**

I tried flying over to Wintergrasp –and yes, I got turned around on my navigation and initially went the wrong way-- but because I was also one of the few people without an epic flying mount the rest of the raid made it ahead of us and summoned us over.

“Don’t ask me to navigate,” I grumbled to myself, dismayed at how low my map reading skills had fallen from the days of being the family’s navigator when we went on vacation.*** “Maybe I should reread that book on orienteering that I bought back in high school.”

We went inside and I followed the crowd to the raid entrance. I’d never been inside the building before, so I was surprised to see another location where you could queue for battlegrounds. As if there weren’t enough of them already.

***

People call Vault of Archavon VoA for short, which gave me flashbacks to my shortwave radio days as VoA is also short for Voice of America, the long running international broadcast of the US Government, in much the same way as the BBC World Service or Radio Nederland or Radio Moscow were for their own countries.

Or it reminded me of a few songs from the 1980s…****

Holy crap is this music video so campy!
And I thought "I Can't Drive 55" was bad...

It wouldn't be an Asia album without

the Roger Dean cover art.

As for the raid itself, there’s not a lot of ‘there’ there.

I knew absolutely nothing about the boss fight, but neither did I die nor did I feel like I was in any sort of danger of dying. It was pretty much a typical spank and tank fight, with an AOE effect that you could move out of, and that was that.

The gear dropped was, well, PvP epic gear. No big deal, but hey, better than I was wearing at the time. I won the pants, so that was worth the fight, I suppose.

Then it was off to Coldarra and the fight I really wanted to see.

***

Malygos the Spellweaver, despite the very poorly written reasons as to why he began the Nexus War in the first place, was the collision course we’d been on from practically the moment we arrived in Northrend. 

From the “Why doesn’t anybody believe me?” initial quest (on both factions), through your first “don’t piss me off or I’ll eat you” interactions with the Red Flight, the Keristrasza tragedy, and becoming the messenger of the Kirin Tor to the Dragon Queen, everything led to this.

I made the entire Nexus War personal for Cardwyn with that short fictional piece, but it also underscores the genocidal nature of Malygos’ “solution” to the problem of overuse of Arcane magic. When you decide to control the overuse of magic by “limiting the supply of Arcane users” one way or another, you’re essentially authorizing the slaughter of children with a talent for the Arcane. And entire families who may have one Mage in the tree, because talent is inherited. (My interpretation.) 

Despite every valid reason to limit the overuse of the Arcane, Malygos’ solution is far worse. And Blizz’ crappy reasoning for creating the conflict in the first place aside, for a being supposedly as wise as a Dragon Aspect, it feels incredibly small minded to have settled on “Kill them all” as the solution. 

The Lich King couldn’t have cooked up a better conflict if he’d have tried.

When we arrived at Coldarra, I was nervous, having only briefly skimmed the fight, but ready to go.

Except for me almost entering The Oculus’ instance by mistake.*****

Yeah yeah yeah, the old
"I'm invincible!" speech. 

We wiped about 3 times on Malygos before we got all of the mechanics down, but this fight definitely does not play to my strengths. The first phase does, but the second phase has those adds all over the place and my tendency to strike the one closest to me ends up poorly, with me as a dead Mage lying around. Once I resisted the temptation to simply wail away at random adds, I was able to survive that phase and enter into the "Drake Phase", where the ground crumbles beneath you and you're rescued by Red Dragonflight drakes, who then turn and fight Malygos (with you riding them, naturally). 

It was an interesting fight, but not that memorable. What really made it less than epic was the voice acting itself. I described listening to Malygos in raid as being voiced by an Accountant lecturing on tax law; maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but the voice actor was absolutely not what I expected the Spellweaver to sound like. Maybe some reverb or other vocal manipulation would make Malygos sound a bit better, but for a gigantic Dragon Aspect the voice simply didn't fill the space like the Spellweaver himself did. Compared to Nefarian's and Vaelastrasz's voices, Malygos' voice is very uninspiring, which by extension makes the raid encounter weaker for it.

It's not just a problem with the Spellweaver. Alexstrasza and Keristrasza both sound "less than" as well;  although to be fair I thought the acting of Keristrasza in The Nexus good enough, but it just doesn't sound "dragonlike". If this were Keristrasza fighting us in her polymorphed human form that's one thing, but she's fighting us as a dragon. Maybe Blizz is having difficulty making the vocals sound like they're coming from something as gigantic and epic as a dragon in their true form, but my belief is that the difficulty lies in adjusting a woman's voice to make her sound like a woman and yet inhabit the full throated cavernous power of a dragon in their natural form.

Now that I think about it, this is not a problem confined to the dragonflights, but those who are simply gigantic compared to us. The Keepers' and Watchers' vocals in The Storm Peaks are pretty hit or miss, although to be fair they tend to be closer to the mark than a lot of the dragons in their true forms sound. But when you hear the petty shrillness of the Hyldnir's vocals, which are pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect of those who remained loyal to Thorim all these years, it is nothing but grating to the ears. 

***

It's a shame that the Eye of Eternity was so underwhelming to me, because I'd hoped for an epic battle to close out that chapter in Wrath Classic. Much like how I found Wrath Naxxramas to be "close but not quite" like the real thing, the Eye of Eternity could have been great but just was... pretty good.

*It probably had something to do with that there was no real backstory behind that raid. From my perspective, it was the “PvP raid”.

**Yes, I’m one of those people who would have used the “pity mount” in Storm Peaks rather than purchase Cold Weather Flying. I remember being able to navigate a lot of The Storm Peaks –the Norse Mythos inspired Thorim questline notwithstanding—via a riding mount back in the day, and I realize now that a lot of that is due to what faction I played. More on that in an upcoming post.

***And yes, growing up in the 70s and 80s meant we drove everywhere for vacation. In a station wagon. No, not one with the “gun turrets” in the back, but a mid-sized 1980 Chevrolet Malibu.

This is very similar to the one we had.
The paint is the same, the interior as
well. Only difference is this had the V6
engine, while ours was a 267cc V8.
From smclassiccars.com

That wagon became my second car when the old 1976 Plymouth Volare finally kicked the bucket.

****Before you ask, yes, I have both albums from back in the day. Sammy Hagar’s VoA I have on cassette (!), and Asia’s Astra on CD. The latter was one of the first CDs I’d ever bought, and I bought it from a secondhand record store near UD called Second Time Around. 

*****No, I hadn’t been to The Oculus at the time of that raid. It appears to not be everybody’s favorite instance, and I tend to go with the flow in that regard.

Wrath Classic Phase One Raids Part 1: Welcome to the Uncanny Valley

The past two nights of raiding were, well, weird.

As in 'fever dream' kind of weird.

Have you ever had a dream where you were performing some action, and everything felt 'off' to you, as if you were talking to someone in the dream and had a sudden Uncanny Valley effect? Or that you were performing an action in a dream which is impossible in real life --such as flapping your arms and flying around-- but everybody in said dream just assumed it was a normal thing?

Yeah, that's what raiding in Wrath's version of Naxxramas felt like to me.

The original Vanilla WoW version of Naxxramas, intended for 40 people, had both that epic feel to it and a lethality that was legendary. Very few raid teams back in Vanilla ever finished Naxxramas*, which likely contributed to Blizzard reusing Naxx as one of the intro raids for Wrath of the Lich King.

But with that recycling of existing content came, well, compromises.

Blizzard had already committed to 25 person raiding in Burning Crusade as the "main" raid**, and they doubled down on it by deciding to create separate 10 and 25 person raids for each raid instance in Wrath. I presume the idea was to allow more people to see the raid content as it was "easier" to get 10 people together than 25 (or 40), but scaling down 25 person content to accommodate a raid 40% of the original size was going to be a challenge.

In the case of Naxxramas, there were already challenges lowering the scope of the raid from 40 down to 25 people, much less a raid with only 1/4 of the original raid size. 

I knew all this in the back of my head, and I'd quickly reviewed some of the fights beforehand, but I really didn't internalize just how much had to be lopped off in Naxxramas until I zoned in.

Or attempted to zone in.

***

Okay, I should back up a minute.

I spent some of the last hour before Sunday's raid trying to make sure I had all that I needed. You know, things like flasks, mana and health potions, stuff like that.

Or enchants to the gear I had.

Deuce, just like OG Cardwyn, had taken Tailoring and Enchanting as professions, and I'd diligently been raising the skill level up to at least reasonable proportions. When I say "reasonable", I don't mean "I went broke in game buying mats in the Auction House so I could level up my skills," but something I could achieve that would get me some enchants I could actually use. 

So, out of a Wrath Classic maximum of 450, I hit 430 on both Enchanting and Tailoring. I had access to the Enchants I needed***, and I spent those last minutes making sure that was done. So I hopped on a Flightpoint over to Wintergarde Keep, where Naxxramas was hovering nearby, and when I arrived I began riding around, looking for the portal spot on the ground just like Classic Naxx had. 

The only thing was that I couldn't find it.

"It's gotta be around here somewhere," I muttered, dodging Scourge in the killing fields underneath Naxx. In Classic, it was a one way trip. You got in, and if you didn't have a Mage, the only way out was to Hearth. There was no exit, which is one of the famous things about Naxx.

And, unlike just about any other raid instance, there wasn't a "Here it is!" identifying stone right outside the entrance to Vanilla/Classic Naxx either.****

I finally broke down and hopped on Google and queried where the entrance to Naxxramas in Wrath Classic was.

Oh.

To quote Gruber when he accidentally pulled two trash packs at once in Classic Naxx: "Oh...... shit."

You see, I still hadn't picked up Cold Weather Flying, which is required for flying of any sort in Northrend. 

I hadn't needed it, because the zones I've been questing in have been accessible via riding, and I'd been summoned to the few 5-person instances that I couldn't get to via riding (Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning). I could deal with just riding around, since I took forever to get a mount on my first toon in WoW Classic*****, and I was perfectly fine with riding in Outland. Or not having an epic (fast) mount out there, either. 

The cost in gold was also a deterrent, because while I originally thought it was going to cost 5000 gold for Cold Weather Flying --or that I had to get Epic Flying first-- neither were the case. Still, the cost was 1000 gold, and I wasn't going to rush to accumulate a lot of gold just to get Cold Weather Flying. Dailies were simply out of the question. I've been there, bought the t-shirt, and after doing dailies in Wrath and Cataclysm (and trying to do dailies in Mists), I simply burned out on it. 

There is no joy in Mudville

For Mighty Casey had struck out burned out on dailies

--Casey at the Bat - MMO Version

Besides, my life has enough work without me creating another part-time job for myself.

So... I hadn't gotten Cold Weather Flying, but I was gonna need it to get to Naxx. And suddenly my gold that I'd felt comfortable with while leveling my skills suddenly.... wasn't that comfortable.

Fun fact: you don't have to go to
Dalaran to pick up Cold Weather Flying.
This was obviously a post Naxx pic, if you
notice the gear Deuce has on, but this
screen cap was merely for demonstration.

I quickly pooled all my gold together and managed to purchase Cold Weather Flying.

Barely.

Just enough for repairs. I think.
And yes, I still have the Spectracles
from TBC Classic in my bags.
Don't judge me.

I flew back to Wintergarde Keep, got in the raid, and... I got summoned to Naxx.

/facepalm

***

Yes, you fly up into the underbelly of Naxxramas, which is where the Summoning Stone actually is. And from there you can walk right into the instance. 

Will wonders never cease?

The interior of Wrath's version of Naxxramas is as it was in Vanilla: green, slimy, glowing, and depressing. What it wasn't was what struck me: Naxx was devoid of tons of trash mobs. 

If there was one truism about Naxxramas, it's that the trash mobs would kill you if you weren't on your game. It typically took only two of the wrong sort of trash mobs to doom the raid, especially if you were just entering Naxx for the first few times and hadn't received any gear upgrades yet.#

But in the new 10 person Wrath Classic version of Naxxramas, the mobs are few and far between. "Paper thin" was how one commenter in Reddit described them, and he's not wrong. I remember dying to Scientist packs leading up to Patchwerk, wiping on Spider packs leading to Anub'Rekhan, and having my innards splattered all over the walls by the Cultist packs leading up to Faerlina, but now... Nothing. 

I almost felt sad about that. Almost.

The size of Wrath Naxx was the same, but with the reduced number of trash packs, it became almost cavernously empty. Some of the packs changed, such as replacing the mobs between Gluth and Thaddius with single oversized giants instead of a group of 4-5 "normal" sized Scourge, and far more mobs were skippable than ever. 

***

The first boss I encountered, Anub'Rekhan, highlighted the changes between Classic Naxx and Wrath Naxx. Original Naxx had that fight beginning with a boss and two adds, and the fight strategy was to kill the adds then have a pair of the raid --tank and a Mage (me, typically)-- babysit the adds as they will spawn scarabs from their dead bodies at some point. (Adds will periodically spawn during the fight, and they too have to be tanked and downed and babysat just like that initial bunch.) If anybody dies in the raid, they will also spawn scarabs too, so the point of the Mage is to freeze the scarabs in place before they escape and start munching on the raid, and then the tank will round them up so the raid can kill the scarabs.

Fast forward to Wrath Naxx, 10 style, and you begin the fight with just Anub'Rekhan. No adds in sight. A pair of adds spawn during the fight, and the off tank can grab those so that the raid can kill them --just like in the Original Naxx fight-- but no scarabs spawn off of them. The only time scarabs will spawn is off of the body of a dead raider, which makes the Anub'Rekhan very much a tank and spank style fight. 

Most of the other Naxxramas fights are like that: there's a shell of the original fight in place, but mechanics have been removed or reduced to accommodate the smaller raid size. Well, and also the expectation that you could potentially finish the entire 14 boss raid in one night.##

***

What do I think of Discount Naxx?

For those of us who ran it in Classic, it feels like "almost" the real thing. I referenced the Uncanny Valley effect, where you get that uneasy feeling when you see a robot or video of someone very close to human, but not quite human###, and that is a pretty apt description. It's not the Naxx I knew; it's a reduced version of Naxx, and there's a shell there, but it's not the same thing.

I mentioned to a few people in raid at the end of Sunday that it felt that the original TBC Classic version of Karazhan was harder than the Wrath version of Naxxramas. "Oh yeah," one person replied. "Remember trying to clear that ballroom right before Moroes?"

"Or Nightbane?" Came another.

"Or Netherspite? Yeah, Wrath Naxx is much easier."

The Sunday portion of the raid concluded with us needing only Gluth, Thaddius, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad to finish up. We'd wiped a few times, since we needed to work out the kinks with a raid composition that included two Mages (the previous week's raid not having any Mages), but in general it didn't feel like anything was out of our league.

But of course, Naxxramas isn't the only raid in Wrath Classic Phase One, and I'll continue these thoughts on those raids later.

*Of our WoW Classic raid team, only one person actually had completed Naxx back in the day. He was a member of the sixth raid team to finish Naxx, and his raid team pioneered the use of bringing world buffs to Naxx. On a PvP server, no less.

**With 10 person raids --Karazhan and Zul'Aman-- replacing the 20 person "catch up" raids in Vanilla. The hardcore early players of Vanilla will also point out that Blackrock Spire --Upper and Lower-- were designed as one whole instance but Upper Blackrock Spire being gated behind a door --you had to quest to get a key to unlock-- was originally a 20 person raid at launch. It was downscaled to a 10 person raid later in Vanilla, which was something I didn't know about. For all I knew, UBRS was a 10 person raid from the start, but that wasn't the case. 

***And Tailoring versions of the same, called Spellthread, for applying to Leg armor and Cloaks. As an Enchanter, I can even Enchant the rings I wear for a bit of an extra boost. The only people who can Enchant rings (or Tailors sewing Spellthread on their own cloaks) are the people who actually own the skill for their own rings; I can't sew Spellthread onto other people's cloaks, unfortunately.

****I know it was a 'feature' of Vanilla/Classic Naxx, but I suspect that it was an oversight due to the original design for Naxx calling for the entrance to be located inside the Stratholme dungeon itself. So, you'd have to run Stratholme --the side commonly known as the 'Undead Side'-- to get to the Naxxramas entrance. You can (or could) still see the entrance to Naxx, sitting unused, inside Stratholme in Classic WoW.

*****That was Azshandra, and I think it took her until L47 or L48 before she had enough gold to afford the Riding skill and the mount.

#Hence Gruber's "Oh...... shit...." moment, when as the raid puller he pulled a trash mob. Instead of coming right for us, one of the mob ran backwards in a small circle, aggroing a second mob nearby and they all rushed in. Gruber was famous for cursing up a blue streak all the time, so you knew things were bad when he very quietly said "Oh shit."

##This is very much a thing, as I've seen it numerous times already.

###Insert Mark Zuckerberg jokes here.

EtA: The comment about Gruber got chopped off. Fixed.

EtA: Fixed "flight" with "riding". Sheesh.

It's Been a While

I feel like I've been here before.

Tonight will be almost nine months to the day that I was last in a progression raid.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about tonight's raid.

I just want to be good enough that I won't embarrass myself.

The Hell Just Happened?

A little over two weeks ago I had a conversation with one of my fellow "Leftovers" (aka the Leveling Shamans left behind in the Old World when the Dark Portal opened back in June 2020), which between the two of us became a grousing session on how TBC Classic went down, raid-wise. Given that the two of us were the only people online in Valhalla at the time*, we had a good long rant session in Guild Chat. 

I was kind of busy helping get
a waylaid pilgrm to Falcon Watch
at the time.

A day or two later, I got pinged in Discord by him. Would I be interested in joining a 10-person raiding team for Wrath led by himself and another of the Leftovers?

Given that my job situation is such that I could now raid at night, I was initially receptive to the idea, but I needed to know more about what they were looking at. And as I was not planning on joining the franken-guild in Atiesh, I definitely wanted to make sure that joining the guild wasn't a requirement.

Narrator: It wasn't a requirement.

The more we chatted, the more interested I became. I think the clincher was when he asked what level Deuce was and whether I'd be interested in using her in the raid team. 

• Getting a chance to raid on one of the two toons I'd consider taking into a raid**? Check.
• Me not having to raid lead? Check.
• Wanting a raid team that is "more chill" than having the same 2-3 people talking all the time? Check.
• A raid that has a built-in rotation and bench where everybody sits at one point or another? Check.
• A raid not built on either DKP or Loot Council, but instead a Loot Reserve system***? Check.
• A raid that they are reaching out to people they personally liked to group with? check.
• A raid that --unlike our experience with TBC Classic-- people aren't going to have deadlines to get toons leveled so raiding can begin ASAP? Check.
• A raid that won't harass you about getting your gear the optimal gems/enchants ASAP? Check.

They pretty much had me at the first item on the list, but still the entire thing read like a dream. The thing was, I wasn't totally sure if I was going to want to do this again. I didn't want to get my hopes up only to have them dashed by having someone I personally didn't like on the raid team. While I get that I have to tolerate such things at work, I don't consider playing games to be at that level. I'm not interested in dealing with people I dislike just because I want to see content.

But.

The people they were bringing on board read like a who's who of people I've missed playing with in WoW Classic. And it included my questing buddy!

***

Okay, what's the catch?

Well, that's what I was wondering, and I waited for that shoe to drop in a meeting on Discord last night. 

As far as that meeting went, I can safely say that everybody there was on board with the concept of 10 person raids with 2 more --maybe 3-- for a rotational basis. We have 8 already, and it's a matter of recruiting 4 more to round out our list. My questing buddy is currently bringing her Priest, and I my Mage, but we are both flexible as to whom we bring. I'm fine with switching to Ret, and she's fine swapping to Warlock, but we both want to make sure we have those holes plugged before we do so. Others are fine with moving a bit as-needed, but we all want to see this group succeed. 

My questing buddy already informed me that she will torpedo any attempt on my part to try to level another toon --a Shaman, perhaps-- from scratch. "You are NOT doing that again," she informed me.

One obstacle that I can mention is that the franken-guild isn't quite as enthusiastic about this raid's existence, because "blah-blah-blah it will take away from 25 person teams blah-blah-blah", but I'm pretty sure the act of trying to compress 3 25-person raids down to 2 will do that on its own. As my questing buddy pointed out to me later, when people discover that they're going to be on the bench --and clearing up to the first boss so that the real raiders can take over from that point onward-- they'll do a "peace out" quicker than you can say "The hell going on..."

Okay, so this is referencing
the NFL's bizarre offseason player
moves this past summer, but it still
is appropriate. From twitter.com.

Regardless, it was pulling teeth to apparently get a chat channel created in the franken-guild's Discord to even discuss the thing, so one of the orders of business last night was to have us move our discussions to a separate Discord without being concerned about any snooping going on by said franken-guild's leadership.

To be perfectly honest, I felt immeasurably better with that having happened, because I did not want to have to be in that Discord any more than absolutely necessary. I'd had one of the people in that guild reach out to me in-game to ask if I was going to join them on Atiesh, and I rather bluntly said "Not planning on it."

And I'm still not.

I don't want to be there when the drama goes down, and I don't want to be there when I know that the questions about "Why move and merge at the same time?" start showing up when people begin complaining about the excessive people signing up to raid. I don't want to be there when the clash of guild cultures ends and the other guild's culture wins.****

Not exactly the clash I was
thinking of. (From Twitch.)

And now my Horde guild is thinking of dipping it's collective toes into raiding in Wrath. Nobody there has asked me yet if I want to raid with them, but given that there aren't a lot of L70 Mages in the guild, I'm kind of expecting to be asked at some point. I'm not sure what to do there, exactly. I'd not mind raiding on Neve, but I also know I don't have the time for multi-day raids beyond what I've already committed to. So, I guess you could say that all that's old is new again.

"Did someone say something about Northrend?"
"Don't worry, Neve. We'll get to you soon."

*There are a few of us that are still in Valhalla on Myzrael-US. There's a ton of alts that never migrated --and I doubt they will-- as well as the people who burned out and left. I keep a close eye on who logs in on a regular basis, just to see if getting any groups together for things are a viable option on Myz.

**The other would be a Ret Paladin. Could be Linnawyn 2.0, or another Ret Pally. Not sure yet.

***I've run Loot Reserve systems in the past, particularly in AQ20 and Zul'Gurub, where people are allowed one soft reserve. It's worked out very well. This particular iteration allows people to take turns on who gets loot, so it's not a Soft Reserve with rolls to see who gets loot if there's more than one reserve, but instead each person who reserved an item --if it drops-- gets a turn at getting their loot. That way the entire raid gets gear together, rather than one person with lucky dice gets the lion's share of gear and the rest are left with scraps.

****What I've been told, that has pretty much happened already. I've been involved in too many corporate mergers over the years to not know how the culture clash will end: there's always a winner and a loser, and the corporate culture I've been on has typically been on the losing side. The lines from Pink Floyd's Time come to mind...

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And Just Like That...

 ...the Monday raid came to an end.

After last night's raid, where they failed to down Kalecgos, there was an announcement in Team Loki's chat that the raid leadership had made the difficult decision to shutter the Monday raid. It was becoming too difficult to recruit given that Alliance players were abandoning Myzrael-US in droves, and while there was an option floated about moving the Monday raid entirely to Atiesh-US for next week, apparently enough people didn't want to move that it would be difficult to replace them on the fly. 

I know that things were difficult in keeping a single day/week raid going --I mean, I was in the Monday raid up through Phase 2, so I know this personally-- but I also know that the grind as well as the perception that the Monday raid team was somehow "less than" hardcore enough that it became mentally taxing to a lot of people. 

***

Yes, I was aware of how mentally taxing the perception that the Monday raid was a bunch of "casuals" was. I kept my mouth shut about it in general, both here and in guild, because it wasn't my place to say anything as I was no longer progression raiding*, but I knew it really became a thing when we were unable to get people to come to our Saturday afternoon/evening Zul'Aman runs.

That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. If you avoid running with people because they're "not hardcore enough" then they have to backfill with undergeared alts who can't clear content quickly enough, so the perception is reinforced that "they're too casual" or "they're not good enough". Rinse and repeat.

Sure, there were other issues with the Saturday ZA raids, such as other raids happening that would suck away personnel and we were caught in the crossfire, but perceptions are hard to shake.

***

Now that the Monday raid is well and truly dead, I guess I'll have to come to grips with the small(ish) fantasy I had that somehow I could get back into progression raiding before Wrath Classic dropped. 

I mean, I now have the time on Monday nights to be able to raid again, but I am so far behind --both in gear and more importantly in understanding the fights-- that there's little chance of me catching up in time. As my questing buddy put it the other day, by the time the Shamans were really needed in progression raiding (in Mount Hyjal), there were so few left of the original group of leveling shamans that it was essentially worthless to make them run through the gauntlet at the beginning of TBC Classic. All it did was burn them out and cause them to quit.

Gear drops --or a lack thereof-- also hurt the Monday raid. For most of Phase 2, we got so few decent drops out of SSC and TK that it really hurt our DPS and Tank output. When your Pally tanks and Warlocks are both competing for the same tier gear, and both need the same drops off of Vashj and Kael'Thas, then that's going to hurt your raiding quite a bit. Chasing the BiS gear --and not getting it-- was mentally taxing on my questing buddy too. I did my best to try to support her and the others with the Friday Karazhan raids (badges, you know), but I was pretty limited in what I could do without burning her out further.

***

At times like this, I just wish I could have done more to help out and keep the raid running. Even though I know intellectually that you can only do so much, that doesn't stop those feelings from coming. You never really stop caring, and when you say you've stopped caring that's probably when you actually care the most.

Yes, there's a selfish element to all this, because I'd love to be able to stick it to the doubters, and even more than that I'd love to finish my personal goals in TBC Classic. But part of being an adult is that while I can keep my dreams, I can also acknowledge reality. 

*It was brought up with raid leadership as well.

Someone Picked at a Scab

I saw this video today about "what's going away when Wrath Classic drops"

And I was sufficiently annoyed at his flippant "if you're one of the 4 or 5 people on your server who doesn't have an Amani Warbear" that I felt it merited a response.

If you've got Hyjal / BT gear, then yes, Zul'Aman is "a pretty chill raid." Even if you're in SSC/TK gear, you should be fine. But if you're in a raid with primarily Phase 1 gear or quest greens + pre-BiS, ignore what WillE is saying. It's a raid that is highly dependent on gear checks and having the right composition --such as having a Priest to do periodic mass dispels on the raid during the Vol'jin fight-- that if you don't have those you're not going to finish the raid. 

And god forbid if your raid is caught in between about 6 other ZA raids --not to mention the other progression raids of other major guilds-- so most of the personnel for the critical slots (Tanks, Healers, the aforementioned Priest, Shamans) are already either locked or are busy. And those roles are ones that I have no desire to pug. I've been in enough pugs that I know that those roles are ones I want people I can trust with, and a random pug --assuming you can even put one together right now on the server-- isn't where you're gonna typically find them.

I suppose that the entire tone, which is a breezy "oh, this is some box you can check off before Wrath drops but everybody will have this anyway", really ticked me off. 

Probably a good deal of it was because I'm not going to get the "Hand of A'dal" title because I never got a Kael'Thas kill in Phase 2. I never show my "Champion of the Na'aru" title anyway, and I'd certainly never bother showing a "Hand of A'dal" title if I got it, but the fact that I did get it would mean something to me. And here was yet another reminder that one of the few personal goals I had in this expac --to raid up until Illidan was downed in Black Temple-- was not going to get completed just kind of set me off.

***

I guess what drives my obsession about this is something I remembered back in original Wrath.

Remember the blog I Sheep Things/Oh My Kurenai? I certainly do. 

And I remember Rhii's steady stream of updates on her guild's attempts to kill Arthas in ICC before Cataclysm dropped.

But more than anything else, I remember her despair at her realization that her guild wasn't going to be able to do it, and her GM --of all people-- took off to run with another guild and down Arthas instead of trying to finish the job in their own guild. 

As I wasn't a raider at the time, I could only offer some sympathy to her plight, but I didn't really experience it firsthand. When I was a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast back in ancient history, there was some disbelief that it was a big deal to down Arthas by the end, with the hosts thinking it wasn't that hard by then because of the buffs and whatnot, and because I knew Rhii's struggles I disagreed. Now I have found myself in her exact same situation, knowing that one thing you wanted to get but you aren't going to get it, that hurts. It's not like a kick in the shins, because that is intense for a brief period of time and then fades, but it's closer to a long, slow burn, like when you've got acid reflux. Even when you think you've put it behind you, it's still lurking to spring out when you least expect it. 

Like now.