One Final Lesson -- Part 1/6

(This is a rarity for PC: an actual work of short fiction. A month or two before I thought about writing this post, I pondered character motivation and backstory for my toons. Az would be a really tough nut to crack, given all sorts of contradicting issues regarding The Rogue Life with Darnassian society, but I thought there was something I could write about for Cardwyn. When the time came to actually start writing, I thought it would be a short piece in the same vein as my sole other work of fiction on the blog, but Card had her own thoughts on the matter. A month and a half and waaaay too many words later, this is the result.

Okay, part of the result. Rather than do a dump of the entire story, I decided to break it up into six parts so that any reader wouldn't be confronted with a wall of text. I also decided I was going to finish the entire story before posting, because I wanted to make sure I was going to see this through to the end. I inserted breaks because, well, it'd likely overwhelm the blog otherwise.

Some final notes: This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to any people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any characters created by Blizzard for WoW Classic remain their property. Kitwynn appears courtesy of Tome of the Ancient. This work of fiction uses WoW Classic as the reference point, no other version of WoW. This was written by Redbeard of Parallel Context, 2020.)

One Final Lesson

Mom looked out the window into the fields, her jaw set. Her hands kept up their steady pace kneading the dough, with only a slight tremor betraying their emotion.

Fold, turn. Fold, turn. Grab a scant handful of flour and dust the dough before folding once more.

I always wondered how she could keep up this work for what seemed like hours on end, as baking day wore me out by noon.

"We could use the gold, Mom," I began.

Her eyes flicked back to me for a moment, silencing me, before returning to the wheat growing beyond the fence.

I turned back to the oven, inserted the long wooden paddle, and nudged a rapidly browning loaf away from the coals. Tired or not, Mom would make me turn over the manure in the yard this afternoon if I burned one. "It's not like I was joining the army."

"Ah yes, the army," she spat. "Go and see the world, meet people, and get turned into a ghoul. Or worse."

My knuckles turned white as I clenched the handle. She didn't need to bring up Uncle Aeron this early in the argument.

"Where is the army, anyway?" she continued. "You'd think that they'd be back home now, especially since the Plague is now some someone else's problem."

I noted that her "someone else's problem" conveniently left out just whose problem the Plague was.

"But Mom," I said, "I'm talking about our home. With the army not here, we need all the help we can get. Did you see those people the other day? Even Dad was shaken last night. And Kira says—"

"I know what your sister says. I'm talking about our home too." She tore her gaze away from the window to set the finished loaf to one side, covering it with a damp cloth, before grabbing another wad of dough from the large bowl.

She dusted the dough with flour and began kneading. "Did Evelyn put you up to this?" she continued.

"No, Mom. I came up with it on my own." Well, that was only partially true, and we both knew it. Mistress Evelyn talked about Lordaeron and the gleaming towers of Dalaran whenever she would visit, and that the beauty of Dalaran put the Mage Tower in Stormwind to shame. Her faded Tirisfal accent made her stories more believable as well has her lessons more bearable: a touch of the exotic in a world of crops, food, family, and neighbors. The occasional trip to Goldshire was a poor substitute.

Mom grunted as she continued to knead.

"You can ask her, Mom. She'll be here this evening."

If anything, Mistress Evelyn would prefer I do something else entirely. "Very few outsiders ever joined the Kirin Tor, you know," Evelyn frequently said when I was younger, "but if you applied yourself to your studies, Cardwyn, I would sponsor you." I was skeptical as to how arithmetic and grammar would help me join the most powerful Mages in all of Azeroth, but I kept those misgivings to myself.

"Hmmpf." Mom attacked the dough with a vigor that said we'll see about that.

Despite her outward resistance, I felt that Mom was at least considering the idea. She and Dad, among many others in Elwynn, were veterans of the Second War, when we nearly lost everything to the Horde. The Third War was, to a large extent, someone else's war, despite us all being part of the Alliance of Lordaeron. Dad would be a tougher nut to crack, as he'd had his fill of fighting after the Second War and had a long and healthy distaste of what "those Light damned nobles" were cooking up in Stormwind. But if I could get Mom on my side...

"Hey!" Mom's shout shook me out of my reverie. "Get that bread out before it burns!"

I shoved in the paddle and pulled loaves out to the edge of the oven. My eyes narrowed as I focused on the bread and the oven's heat, whispering a sing-song that Evelyn had taught me. I then grabbed the loaves, which despite the shimmering heatwaves felt nice and cool, and tossed them into a basket. The scent of freshly baked bread filled my nostrils as I lugged my catch over to another table and set each loaf out. Steam curled off of the loaves as I flipped each over, inspecting them for blackened sections. Not too bad for someone who wasn't paying attention, I thought, nodding with satisfaction.

"We'll talk about this later," Mom said, dismissing me with a glance. "And go check the manure pit."

Conan Exiles -- TL DR: Wow, is this a Brutal Game

I downloaded and began playing Conan Exiles the other week.

When they say it's a brutal game, they're not kidding. I think I died more in two 1.5 hour sessions than Az died from her WoW Classic creation through Scarlet Monastery, and I'm not really exaggerating much.

And, I should mention, this was on the single player game.

Yikes.

If there's one thing I will say about Conan Exiles, Funcom got the Sword and Sorcery world of Conan pretty much dead on.

I'll have to collect my thoughts a bit later, given that I've not had enough time in-game to get everything squared away, and also that I have to go and read more online about whether my hunch of simply just killing animals and avoiding people for a long while is the right strategy. I suspect it is, because all of the NPCs seem to have metal weapons, and I'm stuck with pointy sticks at the moment.

I feel like I'm in a Conanesque version of Lord of the Flies.

Maybe I'm Overthinking This

 Okay, I KNOW I'm overthinking this....

One of the items that I've puzzled over the years were character backstories. I don't mean the multipage life history that some people write for their D&D characters*, but rather the motivation a character has to go adventuring in an MMO.

Now, LOTRO actually does a good job of this, because the entire intro zone --and the entire starting sequence-- for a player centers around why to go adventuring. The late MMO Wildstar also did a good job of this as well, but unless there's a private server out there Wildstar isn't coming back. But other MMOs kind of just plunk you into the starting zone --maybe with a brief narration, in the case of WoW-- and that's that.

Take the case of the Human starting zone: Northshire Abbey. You've answered the call for assistance as the army is elsewhere, yadda yadda yadda. But where's the motivation? The "why" behind the answering of the call?

For Humans, at least, there's the Three Wars, and for a Human adventurer the Second War is the War your parents would have fought in, and the Third War was only a few short years ago. But the Night Elves have a completely different motivation. I've not seen a Night Elf child throughout my wandering in Classic.** But I have seen Human and Orc children out and about. I suppose that means the focus is on Humans and Orcs, but given that Night Elves were (until the end of the Third War) immortal, if they had children at the rate Humans and Orcs had they'd be dealing with incredibly bad overpopulation problems.

So by extension, any Night Elf adventurer likely has been an adult for a pretty long time, and therefore has a different motivation for going out and adventuring than, say, a Human or Orc.

By contrast, some players such as Gnomes and Darkspear Trolls have built in motivations. Gnomes lost Gnomeregan, and Trolls are dealing with a potential usurper in the Echo Isles. A direct threat has a way of motivating people far more than a vague "come help us protect [insert locality here]". And once the direct threat is over, people who have had a taste of the adventuring life will keep going. Motivation solved.

But for me, the real conundrum is also the class itself. Warlocks are going to want power, Mages could go for power or knowledge, Warriors have that military/guard thing going, and Paladins have the Knights of the Round Table vibe. Druids have nature as their motivation, and Hunters... well... you kind of get the idea there. Priests do have the "tending the flock" prosleytizing motivation too. And Shamans I could see as a rough equivalent to Priests in that regard. But Rogues? They're a puzzle, especially once you try to combine a Rogue and a Night Elf. You'd think that any Night Elf with Rogue tendencies would have ended up in a Darnassian jail cell, and the same goes for a lot of the other races. There are those who go for the secret agent angle, but given that SI:7 is primarily a Human outfit, the non-Human Rogues really don't have an equivalent motivation until the Alliance ones (at least) get a quest to go visit SI:7.

I suppose these speculations are all just that, given that anybody can come up with a motivation and backstory for their character, but it does serve to make me wonder why Az does what she does.

And I can almost hear her say "I do what I do because I'm good at it," intentionally deflecting any attempt at understanding her.




*Not to downplay those, but I've gone back and reread some of my old backstories from my pencil and paper RPG campaigns back in the day, and boy do they make me cringe. I may have thought I was being edgy, but with the years of experience later what I thought was edgy was merely bad writing.

**Same with Dwarves, Gnomes, Tauren, etc....

We Pause the Blog for a Special Announcement

A year ago on February 23, my friend and fellow WoW, SWTOR, and Neverwinter blogger Shintar was married. I can't tell you how happy I am to wish her a Happy Anniversary!!

You know, I'm always surprised when
I see a real pic of Shintar that she doesn't
have the Cyber-thingie over her head.
From Shintar's Twitter feed.

Now, go wish her on her blogs (pick one, they're linked above) or her Twitter Feed (I linked that on her name) a Happy Anniversary!!

You Knew This Was Coming...

...when Warcraft 3 Reforged was released to a completely disastrous result. Here's the Honest Game Trailer of Warcraft 3 Reforged.

I Can Handle Low Key

The WoW Classic Valentine's Day event is pretty much low key, which is perfectly fine with me.

You're wondering if the Dwarf had
forgotten about you? And you're
dressed like that? Lemme explain
a few things about guys....

As far as I can tell, there aren't any raids to deal with, just general hijinks regarding giving the equivalent of Valentine's Day cards to people, a few candy-esque goodies, and a rather simple quest chain that ends with a short epiphany on seeing through the purely physical to the soul of what it means to love.

I'm not here to spoil the event, but I will say that it was kind of a fun, low key event that --at worst-- had some temporary items that took up bag space.* Not a big deal all around, but a brief diversion nevertheless. And yes, I did burn the temp items as quickly as I got them, because I wasn't about to lose out bag space for mats and other junk I can sell to vendors when I come back from questing/instances.

I guess you could opine on how love doesn't require people to have, well, stuff to make love work. People give candy and flowers for Valentine's Day all the time, and those are at best temporary. Even jewelry isn't that important if you really love someone, it's just an item that people don't frequently wear in their everyday lives** when you really think about it. But it's the thought that counts, I suppose, and that's what makes Valentine's Day meaningful to people.





*And one piece of non-stat gear formal wear, which is great for roleplaying or just hanging around one of the major cities. (Or Goldshire, I suppose.)

**Unless it was an engagement ring given as a gift!

Don't Wait! If You Act Now, We'll Add This Free Gear!!

If there's one thing that stays the same in Classic, it's change.

Or, more specifically, how I deal with guilds.

I'd gotten used to getting invites to guilds as just part of the game. I configured Classic to auto reject guild invites, but I would still get pings on the average of once a day. And not from people nearby or during 5-man runs (or other groupings), but just random guild invites. I treated those with politeness, and if they responded in kind I made a point to not specifically block them.*

The past few weeks, however, I've seen a complete sea change in guild invites.

The guild invites from grouping have pretty much dried up for now**, but the randoms looking to fill out raid slots have spiked. And since Cardwyn is in the low L40s right now, that means she's been getting no guild invites whatsoever. The guild invites that Az gets, as she's sitting at L54 as of this posting, include things like "we'll help you get to L60 so you can raid with us". Even after I point out that raiding isn't my priority, the guild invitees respond with "we've got raid gear for you, and we'll run PvP Battlegrounds as well!"

Now, I've not bothered to look at the needs for Onyxia, Molten Core, and UBRS runs, but I'm pretty sure that Rogues are kind of far down the list. After all, the best interrupt abilities of a Rogue don't necessarily work with non-humanoids, and one of the other abilities (Expose Armor) interferes with a Warrior's Sunder Armor and can cause a Warrior Tank to lose aggro during a fight.

Flattered? Yeah, sort of, but I'd rather not join a guild when they sound so obviously desperate.

Besides, I've kind of made it known enough times that I'm not that interested in joining a guild, because of my history of dealing with guild drama. I get that crap at work, and I don't need it following me home to my hobbies as well.

On the flip side, I do know at least one fellow player who is trying hard to find a guild that fits. She*** has been in a few guilds, but for some reason or another they simply don't work for her. All she really wants is a guild that she can run instances with at max level and just relax and have fun, but she hasn't found that yet. I've told her I'll keep an eye out, but I've not seen as many guild invites as before.

***

Guild invites are one thing that has changed, while another is that the Auction House has changed yet again.

When Az got her mount in the upper L40s, one sure way to generate gold was make Mageweave Bags and sell them on the AH. It wasn't a lot on Myzrael, but it was about 70-90 silver a bag. Silk bags went for about 40-50 silver, which was pretty good now. So among the fishing that Az performed --to get lockboxes and other assorted rarer fish used in cooking recipes-- I had Cardwyn make a bunch of Silk and then Mageweave bags, ship them over to Az, and have her sell them.

Now that it's time for Cardwyn to get her own mount, however, it looks like the Mageweave and Silk bag market has collapsed.

If anything, it looks like the mats market is doing better than expected, and I'm going to have to study it for a while. But it seems profoundly weird that I can sell bags to a vendor for more than what they're going on the AH right now. Runecloth is the major exception in the bag department, because unless you're willing to go with Mooncloth's pricing Runecloth is the best you can easily get.

I do suspect that part of the reason for the bag market collapsing is that enough people have alts that can easily create bags now, so there's not much of a need for bags from the AH. It also seems the same thing happened with lower level cloth gear, as I used to be able to sell some of that Cardwyn made gear for a decent profit and that has collapsed as well.

So.... Off to work on Cardwyn's fishing skills, I guess. Or start farming mats to sell on the AH.






*I only had to block one guy who simply wouldn't give up and take no for an answer, but in general they've been a decent enough bunch.

**Watch me get one the day this posts. It's just karma, you know.

***I'm going off of the toons she creates, as I've not actually heard her in Discord or something.

On Being a Student of the Game

There's an American sports term that's frequently applied to players who take the time to learn the nuances of their particular sport: "a student of the game". The term basically means that the player understands all aspects of a particular sport, and uses it to their advantage.* The hidden implication, however, is that the particular player in question succeeds because of their applied knowledge rather than their raw physical skills.

I was thinking of this when I was in yet another Scarlet Monastery run on Cardwyn the other day. For myself --and likely a lot of other people-- WoW Classic is familiar and comfortable. You don't have to have top flight physical skills to do a passable job as DPS in a dungeon, and due to how the data structures were configured for Vanilla (and now Classic), the abilities of bosses in both dungeons and raids were somewhat limited compared to, say, Wrath onward. For a person like me, who now qualifies for membership in the AARP**, this is a good thing.

Dungeons such as the Scarlet Monastery instances reward tactical skill and not strictly physical skill. You don't have to rely upon an MMO mouse such as the Razer Naga and then attempting to master it.*** to do well in SM; you need to know which baddie to kill first in a pack, how to perform LOS pulls, and the order in which you kill Whitemane and Mograine. (For the record, it's Him -> Her -> Her -> Him.) None of that stresses your physical skills. And for that, I'm eternally grateful.

Given that I've been wearing bifocals for most of the past decade and that I now require a magnifying glass for soldering electronics, I've been acutely aware of the gradual decline in my physical skills. Games that require tons and tons of button mashing in rapid fire fashion, such as MOBAs**** or an action RPG such as Diablo III, make my fingers and wrist ache after a short time. Inadvertent screw-ups, such as being late to an interrupt, plague me more than before. But a game such as Classic is more forgiving of physical limitations, especially given that I picked up the game at 40.

From that perspective, less is more, and I can focus less on the mechanics and more of the game itself.





*This isn't to be confused with university classes such as "Coaching Basketball". For those who are skeptical, yes, this is a thing, particularly if your university major is in something such as "Physical Education" or "Sports Management". Charlie Coles, the late basketball coach at Miami University in Oxford, OH, loved to teach that class. And because Charlie was a morning person, he had that class scheduled as the first one of the day.

**American Association of Retired Persons. To be a member, you have to be age 50+. You get some discounts at certain places, but the AARP is most well known as a lobby for senior citizens' issues. It doesn't have the clout it did 20 years ago, but it still does have some political power.

***I'd love to have a Naga, but my wife would not be able to cope with all the buttons. We have a Steel Series Sensei Raw, and while I love the mouse my wife forced me to lock most of the mouse buttons because she would constantly bump the buttons while using the PC and screw up her screen. Before you point out there are different profiles for mice, I frequently play games with browers and whatnot running in the background --because there are plenty of times when I'm on the PC and she comes over and decides she wants to use it at a moment's notice-- so I discovered those profiles were pretty useless. So if I wanted to use a gaming mouse to the fullest, I'd need an entirely new PC, which is a LOT more than the cost of a mouse.

****An ex-coworker of mine is the father of a well known elite LoL player, and he told me once that his son figured he had only a few years to be at the top of his game due to the demand on the body, and that he'd likely be gone from playing competitively at the highest level by age 28. Even discounting the fact that his son was playing at the highest level in competitive LoL play, you'd figure that most of the top raiding guilds in MMOs such as WoW constantly tweak their raid lineups and "retire" people whose physical skills start to drop off in their 30s and 40s.

A Few More Portia Thoughts

Even though I'm no longer playing My Time at Portia like a maniac, I still am playing to see where the stories go.

And, really, to see which NPC to romance.

I just kind of cringe at the "play date" portion of the game, because it feels like what a child would think that an adult "hanging out" or "date" would be like. Most adults I know wouldn't want to spend an entire play date swinging on swings or riding a seesaw. While those are obviously not required activities, you have to burn through a certain amount of activity in each play date, and that going back and forth from the game room area of the restaurant to sitting down and talking (either inside the restaurant or in the square) just burns up time you don't have.

I'm kind of a "bang for the buck" kind of person, and burning a lot of those "activity tokens" by traditional kid's playground activities delivers the most, so I end up using them a lot in spite of the "Really?? I mean REALLY??" aspect of them.*

One last thought about the play dates: why on earth would an NPC request to meet at one location and they say "Hey, let's do XXX!" which is about 1/2 hour walk away? Why not choose a better location for the starting of the play date in the first place? I get that it might be my choice when I initiate the request for a play date, but when the NPC initiates a date and selects a specific time/location, and then it's all on them to select an activity nearby.

***

There are some cut scenes that make me really want to push the game further, just to see what happens to the story. There's the main story, of course, and there's also the personal story of several characters. The thing that gets me is that only some of the NPCs you can romance have a fully interactive storyline, which kind of bugs me a bit. The ironic thing is that while the game kind of pushes you in the direction of one female and one male NPC --if you play the game you can figure out which is which fairly easily by the side quests they ask you to do-- one of the NPCs you have to actually go and seek out has a couple of cut scenes that are so fully fleshed out that it seems that at some point the devs believed most people would go and try to romance this character.**

I recognize that this is about as "romantic" as a G rated movie is concerned --no Mass Effect stuff (or even SWTOR stuff) here-- but in some ways the story is a bit more adult than I expected. It's a curious blend of kid friendly yet teen/adult-ish content.

***

My Time at Portia has the same save characteristic that Stardew Valley has: saves only happen when you go to sleep for the night, so you lose any activity if you quit the game during the day. This has led to me "pausing" the game by hitting the escape key or another key (such as i for inventory or m for map) and then doing something else around the house for a while because I don't want to lose my place in game. This has the unfortunate side effect of seeming to Steam like I'm playing it for a lot more hours than I really am. I think it told me I'd been playing it for over 100 hours by now, but over that time I think I've only truly played about 30 hours or so.

***

One final side note on MTAP: the adventurer's guild is known as The Flying Pigs. That might sound goofy to people, but me, I'm totally amused.

But not for the reason you might think.

My hometown of Cincinnati has a marathon that is known as The Flying Pig Marathon. It's called that because of Cincinnati's historical connection to the pork packing industry. In the 19th Century, so many hogs and pork processing was peformed in Cincy that it garnered the nickname "Porkopolis". To honor that part of the city's past, for Cincinnati's bicentennial back in 1988, the (then) newly created Bicentennial Commons had statues of flying pigs atop columns like so:

Courtesy of WVXU***

And so when I saw the posters and statue in Portia for The Flying Pigs, my first thought was "someone from Cincinnati must have worked on this project".


Not very likely, given that Pathea Games is a Chinese company, but still....




*Apparently play dates and dating options get better the farther you progress along the storylines, so we'll see.

**Maybe the baser instinct in me says that the devs figured this because "big boobs!", but it's not like she's the only character with a voluptuous build in the game.

***The article the pic came from is Cincinnati's Flying Pig Icon Wasn't Always So Beloved by WVXU and contains a 25 minute audio portion for those who want to listen to the story.

Finding Myself in Classic

Apparently I do exist in Classic....

Sorry, I'm not bald. And I haven't
worn my beard that long since
I attended college.

I can live with being a Dwarf.

Building for Fun and Profit

I've mentioned before that I play and enjoy the game Stardew Valley, which can be a welcome diversion from other games I play. It's definitely not a deep game by any stretch, but it is a fun and satisfying game. Well, I think I've found a competitor to the "let's play farmer" Stardew Valley.

In the last Steam Winter Sale, I acquired a few titles to play when I wasn't playing any of my "regular" games. Among them was "My Time at Portia", a game that I'd kept my eye on for quite a while. It hadn't been garnering the same overwhelming interest that Stardew Valley had, but the concept of a "builder" type of game in the same Stardew Valley genre, but in 3D* intrigued me. However, I'd been holding back from purchasing the game as it had spent a long time in early access. I do enough IT work for my job to not want to volunteer to be a beta tester, which is what early access effectively means, so I was content to wait for MTaP to officially be released before purchasing the game.

Well, it went live back in mid-late 2019, so when it went on sale in December I finally decided to pull the trigger. My Time at Portia sat around in my Steam Library for a few weeks, and I finally decided to download the game last week to see whether it meets expectations.

My answer is a "sort of yes", but I also haven't stopped playing the game this past week.**

***

My Time at Portia (MTAP for short) is set in what is described as a "post apocalyptic world", but it is far removed from the type of post apocalyptic world that, say, Fallout resides in. There are ruins a-plenty to explore, but most of the countryside and the area around Portia are pretty much an idyllic farming community. You learn over the course of playing the game that there was a 300 year age of darkness across the land after some cataclysmic war --likely a nuclear war with a Nuclear Winter causing the darkness-- and it was only after a plucky adventurer named Peach brought back the sunshine that the world began to recover.

Yeah, I know. 'Peach'? Really?

But regardless, that's just background so you'll find monsters and ruins and whatnot to explore out there in the world, ala D&D or any other setting of that sort.

I'm going to try to avoid some of the finer details here, since you have to discover the game yourself, but I can cover some broad strokes here about the game itself.

You are a builder, taking over your father's old shop that he'd left abandoned years ago. You never really knew your father, so you're just learning a bit about him and Portia, the community he lived in, as you go. The game itself is part construction game, part dating/getting-to-know-the-community game, and part story about Portia itself.

The basics of the game are pretty simple: You go get commissions to build things from either the Guild Hall or from townspeople who reach out to you directly. Typically you have a time limit on how long it will take to get something built, and the early game especially is spent trying to build up your equipment so that you can then actually build things for people. Oh, and acquiring the raw materials to do so from the surrounding countryside (and the ruins). There are abandoned ruins, which are great for ores, stone, and the occasional ancient relic you need to make something with; a countryside with trees, shrubs, and wild animals you can use to get raw materials from; and townspeople/farmers/ranchers who do own shops that might have what you need as well. As you progress, the requests get more and more elaborate, forcing you to upgrade and stockpile raw materials to try to stay one step ahead of the requests. Oh, and you can also upgrade your house and land as you see fit, so there's a metagame surrounding how you want to organize your pad.

Setting that aside, there's the metagame of the townspeople itself. You have a scale of diamonds (for townspeople you can develop friendships with) or hearts (for townspeople you can romance). Interactions with townspeople on a daily basis will raise their approval of you, and as you progress you learn more about them and you unlock the ability to hang out with them. For those who can be romanced, once you get high enough in the heart listings you can then confess your romantic interest in them and the "playdates" turn into "real dates".***

And above this lies the overall story that the devs wanted to present about Portia. When I think I'm at the point where things will slow down, storywise, it picks up again.

***

Okay, that's pretty much how the game goes, mechanically speaking.

Does it scratch my builder's itch? Yes.

Does it scratch my interest in the story? Yes.

Then do I give it a resounding seal of approval? Kind of.

Why the "kind of" response? Well....

1. The graphics, while pretty to look at, aren't designed to appeal to me.
   
   Oh, don't get me wrong, the landscape is really nice, and the buildings/stuff you build are rather nice in a cartoony kind of way. I'd describe that as Wildstar meets Thomas Kincaid, I guess. However, the character design has more than a bit of Rugrats style cartoon in them, and the Rugrats style did not appeal to me. On top of that, you can tell that the character designs were angling to try to appeal to both adults and kids, so some of the marriageable characters look adult (such as Arlo or Petra or Phyllis), and others look like adults with kid-style faces (Sam is the best example here). The character designs also had a certain "street caricature artist" aesthetic to them as well, which kind of bugged me from time to time.
   
2. It needs more polishing.
   
   Even after its official release, I find small bugs here and there, mainly in the writing.
   
   Let me put it out there before anybody else asks: I could tell that the development team's native language was not English almost from the start. There are certain speech patterns that native English speakers have that non-native English speakers have a hard time picking up, and once I noticed the first mistake I started finding them throughout the game. What makes it worse is that about 1/5 of the voice actors' lines are different than the lines on screen. You can tell that changes were made, but QA didn't align the voice actors' lines with the on-screen lines. Given that the voice actors' deviations typically made less sense than the written ones, I suspect that the written lines were the ones that got more polish**** than the spoken lines, and the dev team didn't have the budget to re-record the voice actors.
   
3. The path finding. Oh, the path finding.
   
   Have you seen videos of some of the worst Skyrim path finding bugs? Or maybe the Skyrim spoof? Yeah, it's like that. At one point you're on a quest with an NPC deep in one of the ruins, and I turned around, wondering where on earth the NPC had gotten. Turns out said NPC was underneath the catwalk I was on, walking through the instant death goo below. /sigh
   
   I've also seen bugs where an NPC keeps trying to get on a horse and the NPC keeps flickering between on the ground and on the horse. These are pathfinding issues that have seemingly been solved in most other video games, so the dev team really needs to tweak their code in this space.
   
4. The stereotypes.
   
   If you're looking for deep characterization, video games typically aren't people's first choice. That being said, the NPCs are a laundry list of stereotypes: The Hot Farmgirl, The Idealistic College Student, The Church vs. The Scientists*****, The Greedy Competitor, The Tomboy, The Sassy Waitress With the Brooklyn Accent, The Farmer's Daughter Living with the Elderly Grandma, the Hot Girl with the Mysterious Illness, etc. They even have seven brothers who look and sound like they came right out of an episode of The Sopranos.******
   
   The NPCs would also say the same couple of lines over and over again, depending on where you were with the story, so you quickly got used to the same thing over and over and over.
   
5. The Pacing
   
   At first I thought the game was going to be fairly slow paced, but once you get into the mid-game everything seems to have a timer on it and there seems to be not enough time for me to get into tweaking my house and workspace the way I like it. The game burns through a daily clock much faster than Stardew Valley does, and I have to constantly be on my toes to organize my build schedule properly.
   

Okay, given that list, it's a wonder why I'm still willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt. That's because the issues aside, it's still a fairly well made indie title. I'd be tempted to say that the dev team is likely more familiar with creating mobile games rather than regular PC/XBox/Playstation titles, and there are aspects of MTAP that seem to fit in better with mobile games --particularly the character graphics-- but it's still a decently built game overall. If the dev team continues to fix the bugs --and more importantly get an editor to clean up the language translation issues-- I think that MTAP will do fairly well for itself.

The game is obviously not for everybody, but when it's on sale it's worth a gander. If you like Stardew Valley you might like MTAP.

But I really need to get back to MMOs now....





*And in third person view, no less.

**I finally got around to logging back into WoW and also playing a few other games last night. Nothing fancy, just wanted to work on Cardwyn's Tailoring.

***Really, it's called "Play", and I'm not making this up.

****Although they could REALLY use a lot more polish than this.

*****Okay, this is still a pretty valid trope.

******True Story: Back when I was at college, I went with a group to a conference in New York City. On a Saturday night, we went into Little Italy to get some food. I kid you not, there were tons of little Italian-American restaurants there complete with a guy out in front --typically dressed in a loud suit-- who would try to get us to go inside. No matter which restaurant we passed by, the guy would also have that heavy NYC accent that made the whole thing feel like we'd stepped into a bad gangster movie.

Not Everybody Wants to Herd Cats for a Living

One thing I've noticed over the past couple of months or so in Classic is a general reluctance to actually start up and get groups together for runs. I've mentioned this before, but the reason why it came into sharp focus the other day was the following scenario:

• First person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Second person posts a "LFG Mara".
• First person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Second person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Third person jumps in and says "You both should talk".

I whispered the third person to agree with him, and we both expressed frustration about people not wanting to take the initiative. He felt it was laziness that led people to just posting and not initiating, but I thought that there might be an aspect of shyness to it as well.

In their own way, MMOs are an ideal game for a shy or introverted person to interact with the world. You can go about playing a game online under your own rules, without having to play with other people at all. At the same time, you reap the benefits of a living, breathing online world. Of course, there's that initial leap that you have to make in actually starting to play.

And sticking to PvE servers too.

I can't be mad at people avoiding the responsibility of putting a group together, because when I started WoW that would have been me. I still remember the emotions and almost terrifying hustle and bustle of a busy Orgrimmar the first time Soul escorted me in the gates, but what was even worse --for me, anyway-- was the first time I did it alone. It's like trying to find your way in a new city with a pretty rudimentary map, and the occasional "need a guild?" whisper buffeted me. It was like I was back in my first day of high school, trying to find my way around and realizing that those who I thought were my friends in elementary school were anything but.

If '10 year player' me were to just tell newbie me "just put yourself out there and LFG", newbie me would never have believed him. Even the LFG queue, which was designed to match people quickly with what they wanted to run, was a terrifying step. "What if I fucked up?" I thought. I'd quickly read over the online walkthroughs once more for the instance I'd selected, just to make sure I didn't screw up and get crapped on by the others in the group.

Kind of like this, but with MMOs.

Naturally, my first LFG 5-man would be Azol-Nerub, which is a (relatively) simple instance in theory, but the webs in the background kept confusing me as to where to go as they all seemed to blend together. But I somehow persevered, and I made it through that first time.

In the years since, I'd done enough instances that I know how these work --whether or not you have a walkthrough handy-- but those feelings of "please don't screw up" never really leave me.* And getting a group together means you're partially responsible for the group composition in the first place, so I have a tendency to blame myself since I was the one who "approved" everyone's entry in the first place.

In addition to the fear of reaching out an assembling a group, there's also the "tune out" part of playing an MMO: people who already herd cats in jobs aren't necessarily going to be interested in doing the same thing in an online game. Just like how some people don't want to be part of guild leadership because "they do the same damn thing all day long", people won't want to pull together a PUG just to go run Maraudon, for example. And if you've a hard time finding a tank, which is the current hard to find role on Myzrael, you can spend your entire evening just being frustrated.**

I suppose what I'm saying is to all the people who don't want to be Type A personalities and actively put together PUGs for the instances you want, I grok you.*** You've got your reasons, and while I don't know the specific ones, I understand. I'm fine with organizing our PUGs (now, anyway); just don't be a stranger.





*Particularly for wipes.

**Not that LFG is any better, mind you. I remember days when I wanted to get into a specific instance and waiting a couple of hours for it to pop, only to have the tank or healer drop as soon as we got to the instance. Given that I've seen this in both WoW and SWTOR, I believe this to be an MMO-wide practice where LFG queues are concerned. At least with a PUG via LFG or LookingForGroup, you're going to find people who actually want to be there, even though that may take a while.

***'Grok'. Wow, that's an entry for the Wayback Machine.

I'll Miss You, Neil

I apologize for interrupting the blog like this, but I wanted to at least pass along my condolences to the friends and family of Neil Peart on his passing this week.

Neil, the drummer for Rush, provided a huge part of the soundtrack of my youth*. When other rock and metal lyricists were getting airplay about getting hot and heavy with girls, Neil's lyrics were deep and touched on subjects from teenage angst to astrophysics to mythology to nuclear war to death and meaning.

Of course, Neil was most well known for his drumming prowess, and he was frequently praised as one of the greatest drummers of all time. When my youngest decided to take up percussion in school, I made a point of getting her a copy of Neil's "Anatomy of a Drum Solo" on DVD.

I'm sure I'll be able to put this in perspective later, but all I can think of now is "Fuck Cancer."

Neil's family --and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson-- asked that in lieu of flowers or anything else, just pick a cancer charity of your choice and make a donation in Neil's name.

From the CBC.

And from Rick Beato, whose YouTube channel I watch to help the eternally musically clueless Redbeard understand a fraction of what the mini-Reds and my wife understand.

*And to this day, even though they retired a few years ago.

Before the Burning Crusade...

...is the only time you would have seen this.

As a Wrath baby, I certainly never have. But the absence of any Horde or Alliance in front of the Dark Portal shocked me more than the presence of all those demons and L60 elites all over the place.

This is yet another reminder that the world of Vanilla/Classic is totally different than what WoW evolved into.

The Story Continues (because I don't want to make a major edit to the last post)....

Well, right after I hit "Publish" and sent the previous post out into the world, I remembered something about the post-Cataclysm Felwood: there was a Night Elf encampment just south of Timbermaw Hold. I'd assumed it was an extra flightpoint added in to the game from Cataclysm --having not leveled up through Felwood in pre-Cata Alliance-- but what if it did actually have a flightpoint?

Wonder of wonders, it existed pre-Cata, and it did have a Flightpoint!

Mishellena, I am SO happy to see you!!

I'm sure the Paladin who'd recently landed* thought I was nuts for hugging Mishellena, the Hippogryph Master.

So with that in mind, I decided to tackle Timbermaw Hold without making good on my threat to strip Az down to her skivvies.

There was a group of Alliance who'd obviously farmed enough to have the Timbermaw as at least neutral running ahead of me, although I got the feeling they paused a bit to see if I needed some help. But hey, Az is a Rogue of means, and can get through anything, right?

Because Firbolgs.

Um, yeah, about that....

So I decided to save my gear and crept along once Kernda cleared out.

I did get jumped by one Firbolg but managed to avoid them by Vanishing. And on reaching the end of the tunnels, I found as I ran out that the large group of Winterfall Firbolg that wander around out in front of the Winterspring exit had all been recently cut down, so I managed to put some distance between myself and the exit....

Dead Firbolgs as far as the eye could see.

Sorry, Az draws the line at keeping her brown shirt on, as Winterspring is freaking cold.

And her daggers, but that's a Rogue thing.

So all I had to do was put my gear back on, mount up, and head west.

Destination: Everlook.

*Who was just offscreen.

Why do I do this, Part Whatever...

Az's penchant for getting me in trouble led me to Azshara today, stealthily sneaking along and swimming among the elite Giants out there. It wasn't exactly how I planned to spend part of a Sunday, but I wanted to clean out my quest queue as I was starting to acquire Alterac Valley quests.

And yes, that meant I wandered into Alterac Valley at a severely overwhelmed L51.

I kind of hoped* that the L60 toons would be isolated from the rest of the L50-L59 toons, but as soon as I joined the entrance to AV I discovered I was one of a handful not at L60. And I was the only one lower than L55, which wasn't a good thing.

That meant that enemies had a beat on me no matter whether I was stealthed or not, and I lost track of my deaths after about 7 or so.

Still, I actually got a killing blow in, and I participated in 6 HKs, not too bad for someone who was grossly outleveled in that BG.

And because of that misadventure, I decided I was going to wait on AV for a couple of more levels before I try again.

***

But back to Azshara...

I had that one quest you pick up in the Mage/Priest/Pally area in Ironforge to go get some rubbings of runes in Azshara, and both the rubbing kit and the flare gun were taking up space in my bags. So between those things and my full quest log, I decided to run on over to Azshara and knock that quest out.

However, I didn't count on the adventure of trying to find the island where the Biggs knockoff** was going to land.

The quest said it was an island off the coast of the southern peninsula, but did you notice there were a LOT of islands in the southern peninsula? And what qualifies as "off the coast", anyway?"

So I spent upwards of 40 minutes swimming from island to island, checking each one I could climb up on for a place for the Dwarf pilot to land. After the first attempt of firing the flare gun I discovered that I should be looking for a specifically built platform, so at least I now knew what to look for. But the time spent dodging regular enemies and elites that were 4+ levels higher than me didn't make this any easier.

I finally found the island as the very last freaking island on the map. Figures, I suppose, but I didn't want to assume that and then have to double back if I found I was wrong.

After that long waste of time, I shot off the flare, talked to the pilot, and then discovered that for my reward I'd have to go visit the original quest giver anyway.

"If that was the case, why make me run around for upwards of an hour?" I grumbled as I hearthed back to safety.

***

I had yet another quest to take care of, and one that led me to Felwood: the ooze collection. I'm almost worried about what that gnome wants all this ooze for, but Ironforge isn't my home, so off I went up to Felwood to perform the ooze collection I'm sure everybody wants.

It was then that I discovered that the Emerald Circle outpost doesn't have a flightpoint in Classic (it did by the time Wrath came along). So I collected oozes and then decided I ought to wander north to see if I could sneak through to Winterspring. As of this writing, I'm parked outside the tunnel entrance, debating whether I've enough flash powder to vanish my way through the cave network.

There's foolhardy, and there's crazy. I prefer to think that Az is on the side of the former, but given that I've got some screenshots of Az in the Western Plaguelands at L28, maybe the latter is a more apt description.

But one thing is certain: I'm not exiting this expedition without acquiring a flightpoint.

Somehow.

And if that means having Az run naked though the tunnels so as not to lose equipment durability in the event of multiple corpse runs.... Well, I hope those Firbolgs enjoy the show.




*Given that I don't read the forums, I just play.

**Biggs Starlighter from the original Star Wars movie.

Who eats those Sour Patch Kids candies, anyway?

I finally got into Az's last Uldaman run* the other day, and by far this run was the most like my previous time in WoW than any other.

And I'm not exactly sure how I felt about it.

On the plus side, it was efficient. We had a Mage whose AoE made me pretty much superfluous, and I was reduced to mainly doing crowd control on various casters. We had a DPS Warrior who could handle threat if the tank went down, even though he wasn't geared for being a tank himself. We skipped a boss or two on the way to cleaning out the instance, and the only time we had a couple of people die --the tank and the Mage-- the three of us who were upright were able to handle the mobs without issue.

However, the efficiency came at the cost of silence and pulling entire rooms.

The tank pretty much made the assumption that our group could handle pulls at the level I last saw in Halls of Lightning, where a tank would get about 3-4 mobs at once and let the DPS toons AoE them down. The problem with that is that the tank had issues keeping threat from the Mage**, so the DPS Warrior and I kept having to DPS down the mobs that ran to the Mage.

And during Archaedas' fight, the Mage had been designated to take care of the adds, but either he kept forgetting or he didn't have the instant DPS needed to zap the adds quickly so I had to run around and kill the adds instead.

But what bugged me the most was how blasted silent the entire run was.

I'd grown accustomed to everybody talking in the instance, if for nothing else than to identify what strategy to use throughout the pulls. But this was so damn quiet I think that the only time we did talk was the lead-up to the Archaedas fight, and that was limited to a couple of sentences total.

This was not what I had in mind when I resubbed to play Classic.

Thankfully, that seems to be the exception, as this past morning Cardwyn ran Razorfen Kraul with a good group, and we had a great time killing mobs, chatting away, and in general having a blast. About the only downer was that I got a call from work that caused me to have to drop after the run, so I couldn't get a second run in with that group. But we did exchange friend requests for later***, so maybe the Uldaman run was an aberration.

***

I have turned that Uldaman run over in my head for a couple of days, and emphasis on efficiency --and the overall silence-- bugs me more now than it did then. I'm in Classic for the experiences, not the rush to max level, and that Uldaman run felt so much like another step in the rush to get to raiding that it made me want to hang around Stormwind, crafting for a while.

If Classic devolves into the rush to end game like Retail, I'm not so sure how much longer I'll want to hang around. But at the same time, this was only one run. We'll see what happens later, but I'd say this was the first time I'd had a truly bad taste in my mouth since coming back to Classic. The irony is that it had nothing to do with being ganked in a battleground, which is where I expected that first sour taste to come.

On the flip side, I've met some really great people in Classic, and I enjoy talking with them. And seeing old friends who still play both Classic and Retail. So I guess we'll see how things go.





*I should clarify: she only needed one more run to finish the Uldaman quests she had in her queue.

**Rogues have an ability to reduce their threat --can't remember the name offhand right now-- that as of L32 Cardwyn does not have. Therefore, I use AoE with Cardwyn sparingly, and after the tank says it's okay to use it.

***And I politely declined yet another guild invite after the run.

OOO!! OOO!! Greatfather Winter!! I Know Him!!!

Catching a snowball fight using screenshots
is harder than it looks. So I guess I'll
settle for some Lock AOE.

Clothes Make the Mage

One thing about class quests in WoW Classic is that each class has a different focus. For Warlocks, it's all about the demons and the power they bring. For Rogues, it's about how to use your abilities to not get killed in the field. And for Mages, it's about acquiring the trappings of power: your gear.

That's not to say that Mages are stuck using gear they're given in these class quests, but they represent the maturation process of the Mage. As you grow in level --and stature-- the class quests become the equivalent of exams.

For example, your first class quest is the equivalent of getting your entrance papers in order: you show up with the letter, and you're in.

Then there's the basic "gofer" test to prove you can follow directions and not ask too many questions*, which gives you your first "real" staff.

The next quest (~L15) is the "go investigate" quest, showing you have basic mastery of your abilities, and you are rewarded with a "real" Mage robe. Right about here, this quest presents you with an item that easily identifies you to all around that you're a Mage; so you've "joined the club" and are no loner a Mage-in-training. It doesn't carry any real weight to others who are Mages, but to the general populace it provides an "ooooo" moment. Such as when you finally graduate from basic training in the military and you get your first dress uniform.

After that, you don't get any new class quests until about 10 levels or so later, which is when you're sent on another fetch and carry quest, but this time it's considerably more dangerous. You could potentially solo it, but this is more of a "social" test for the Mage: you have to put a group together to go achieve the fetch and carry, and since a Mage has high social standing, you have to demonstrate that you can navigate the complex social life in Azeroth.** Your reward for this is a better set of robes, but you have to assist in getting them tailored. You've moved up the food chain to no longer being a 1st or 2nd Year Mage, but rather a 3rd Year Mage.

At least she's no longer a Freshman.

And now Cardwyn has just reached the next round of respectability, as she just received the Class Quest for a wand.

Of course, that quest means that she has to travel to Dustwallow Marsh and hunt for a Human Witch out in the swamp.

At L30.

There's a reason why this quest shows up as beet red in the quest log, because you'd have to have a full group to run through Dustwallow Marsh at L30, and even then you're all likely to wipe once you go south past the fork in the road that heads to the Barrens.

It's not that a Mage hasn't stumbled across a wand or three out in the wild, but this is a Class wand, which may not be the most powerful wand available to you, but is another social cue to others in the profession.

***

You know, it's kind of strange to approach the class quests like this, because until I started writing about Cardwyn's journey, I never really noticed these details. I certainly remember Quintalan's two biggest class quests, which involved him learning how to Rez people (~L20) and obtain his Blood Knight Tabard (~L60). The quests involving the Blood Knight Tabard left a bitter taste in my mouth, as so much of that questline was driven by revenge against the Alliance for abandoning Quel'Thalas in the Third War.

That being said, I don't recall much of Neve's leveling process --and corresponding class quests-- because she was still at a fairly low level when Cataclysm dropped and removed all of the class quests. (The same with Tomakan, my Draenei Paladin.)

With the benefit of hindsight, however, these Mage class quests --while optional-- provide flavor that was lost when WoW streamlined leveling/questing with Cataclysm and subsequent expacs. I've a similar experience now that I've been playing in a D&D 1e campaign the past year or two***. While newer versions of D&D have a better grasp of various actions, there's something about the quirkiness surrounding 1e that was lost in 3e and 4e, which helps to explain the popularity of the "return to basics" that D&D 5e espouses.**** When everything becomes a mechanic, you tend to look at actions in strictly a "gaming the system" fashion. But D&D 1e, like WoW Classic, there are quests and options and other things that aren't there strictly to propel the plot forward, but reflect your toon's interaction and status within Azeroth itself.

I guess an argument could be made that Classic was far more open world than subsequent iterations of WoW, and as the mini-Reds would put it, "You're not wrong".

Now if you're excuse me, I'm going to let Cardwyn contemplate her place in the universe while I go work on some fishing and crafting with Az. I've finally decided that she does need a mount sooner rather than later.





*For Alliance toons in Stormwind, it's the "get the vial filled" quest.

**Okay, it's not that hard to get a group together for the quest --at least in the Redridge Mountains version-- but you still have to be social enough to pull the group together. The more I play Classic, the more I realize that because I post in LookingForGroup and Trade Chat, I'm the one who frequently gets the job of putting a group together. There are a lot of people out there who simply passively watch and not get actively involved in the social aspect of putting a group together.

***We just finished the Slave Lords modules (A1-A4), and are starting in on the Against the Giants modules (G1-G3).

****That's not the only reason, by far, but it is one that has captured the interest in long time players such as myself.

A Blast from the (Infamous) Past

I periodically make a trip back to Ravenholdt, on the border between Alterac and Hillsbrad, because that's the one place I wanted to see as a Rogue in Classic. When you're an Alliance Rogue in the low L20s and you get that quest to "come visit" Ravenholdt, you have to traverse not only the Wetlands but Arathi Highlands, where the wandering enemies can be over 10 levels higher than you.* As a Rogue that means that you pretty much go through all of Arathi stealthed as much as is prudent, but even then I was chased by one of those damn buzzards for what felt like an eternity.

But once you're high enough level --and you've already gotten the Southshore flightpoint-- Az made her base at Hillsbrad as it was the closest a low-mid L30s Alliance toon would get to the Scarlet Monastery without having to run through the Western Plaguelands.** I spent the Halloween season hanging around in Southshore, watching the occasional Horde incursion to throw rotten eggs around the town.

Once I moved on from Scarlet Monastery, Az left Southshore to entrench herself at Theramore instead. But me being me, I'd still occasionally send Az back just to wander around. Seeing Hillsbrad as it once was warms the heart.

Anyway, the other day I was visiting Ravenholdt and Alterac when I got into group for Uldum. I figured that a quick jaunt down to Southshore and catching a flight to Thelsamar was faster than hearthing to Theramore and catching a ship to Menethil Harbor, so I stopped bashing ogres in Alterac and ran towards Southshore. I quickly passed the Tarren Mill spur on the road from Alterac, where a Horde toon gave me a wide berth even though I wasn't marked for PvP.

There I ran --almost literally-- into a group of L60 Alliance that were coming back to Southshore after a successful foray into raising hell in Tarren Mill. They were bouncing around, taking their time, and one of them waved at me as I caught up to them.*** Even though I started playing WoW on a PvP server, it still felt very weird being surrounded by allies with green colored names. Perhaps because this was Hillsbrad and I was once a Horde lowbie getting ganked by those evil Alliance, I suddenly got the creeps.

I turned off the main road toward Southshore, and everything exploded around me.

Figures with skulled yellow nametags were everywhere, swarming all over the Alliance group. At that point I was eternally grateful that none of the Alliance PvP group had decided to buff me or something, as it would have made me a sitting duck.

I had one Swiftness Potion left in my packs, and I used it to quickly get the hell out of there and reach the Flight Master before the Horde could gank her. Good thing, too, as when I flew away I turned around to see the much larger Horde retaliation group right on my heels, having dispatched the Alliance group.

Okay, I should have had absolutely nothing to fear, as I wasn't marked PvP. However, I know from experience that accidents happen and I could quite easily have been buffed by a PvP late comer or someone not part of the Tarren Mill raid. I also have a lot of dark memories of being ganked in Tarren Mill, to the point where I stopped calling it "ganking" and started calling it "being Tarren Milled". Since this was open world PvP, I wasn't prepared for it in the same way that I'm prepared for a battleground.

So when I read online in places (Reddit is the loudest party here) about how the heavy Horde skew on PvP servers is making Alliance players leave in droves, yeah, I can appreciate where they're coming from. Yes, these players should have known this was coming when the Honor system dropped, but still it can be quite a shock to the system. And it makes me glad I rolled on a PvE server.

But this has also hardened my resolve. Bring on Alterac Valley; I'm ready.




*And that's not counting the elites that wander the zone --and the road-- on a regular basis.

**Not recommended, although some plate wearers in my various SM groups died only once, and that was at the armed border crossing from the Western Plaguelands into Tirisfal Glades.

***The people who I first grouped with those first few weeks of Classic had long since passed me to max level, and it was entirely possible one of them recognized me. However, I think that it was more that they'd had their fun and were enjoying the chaos they'd wrought.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Queldorei Were Larger Back in the Day...

Posted without further comment.

Where's the Shower, Part Two

I was supposed to get up early yesterday to start work on cooking the Thanksgiving turkey, but I for some strange reason I ended up waking up a couple of hours before that. Therefore, I figured I might as well goof around on WoW Classic for a while.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have.

Oh, the first part of the early morning was fine: I logged in as Cardwyn and got into a Blackfathom Deeps run fairly quickly, and I also finished a Mage quest for Cardwyn's second robe*, so not too bad overall. The BFD run was nice, efficient, and we all got along well. I even added a few people as friends in case we wanted to run or quest together.**

After the instance, I got back to Lakeshire and the Inn there, and got up to take care of dishes in the dishwasher.

By the time I came back, Cardwyn was AFK. Not a big surprise, perhaps, but what another toon was doing was.

This other toon, a female toon, was messing around with Cardwyn.

As in maneuvering around, and then kneeling, so it looked like the two were kissing.

Then standing up and again carefully maneuvering around so that it looked like Cardwyn was going down on the female toon.

And then back to the kissing pose, and back to the other pose.

Rather than let the other toon know I was there, I just waited and watched, wondering WTF was wrong with this person. After 3 minutes of this, the other toon eventually got tired "playing around" and logged out.***

It was almost a surreal experience, like the time that I was propositioned in the middle of an Isle of Conquest Battleground. At least this time the other toon didn't try to emote or say anything, because if they did I was going to do something. Not sure what, but I was.

Well, I had wondered where the Moon Guard Lion's Pride Inn crowd was, and now I know.





*I'll talk about those stories in another post.

**I asked the Paladin tank if it was okay if I could use AoE when DPSing mobs down --I always ask as some tanks prefer to not handle the chaos that Blizzard can cause-- and he was fine with it. After all, he said, he understands where I'm coming from as his main is a Fire Mage.

***I'm not sure how long it had been going on before I returned to the PC, and I've no idea if this person was doing it to the NPCs before she zeroed in on Cardwyn.

Living The Frosty Life

When I started playing Classic, I had two real goals: to get into old style Alterac Valley matches, and to get a chance to play once more a lot of the classes I'd leveled before. While I'm still waiting for that AV run, I'd made a point to create several toons so that when I was ready I could start leveling a different one.

My first toon to be used was pretty much a no-brainer, as I've been playing Rogues/Thieves/Shadowblades since I rolled up Azshandra back in late Cataclysm.* While I fumble around with my Warlock Dominius when I enter an instance, I know exactly how to play Az.

But while Az is my main, I've got a few other classes that could vie for second place.

There was the Paladin, whom I've played on both the Horde (Quintalan) and Alliance (Tomakan and Balthan) sides, but squeezed in between the Paladin years and the Rogue years there was my multiyear dalliance with Nevelanthana the Mage.

"Barkeep, hit me up! And add another
for the lady to my left!"

Neve, a Sindorei Frost Mage, leveled primarily in late Wrath and Cataclysm, and hasn't seen much time since her semi-retirement**. But having played her out in the Wild, in BGs, and in 5-man instances, I know how to handle a Mage in a more well-rounded fashion than I do a Warlock.

So I eschewed the temptation to roll a Paladin and instead created a Mage.

***

I resisted the "obvious" Min/Max choice for an Alliance Mage --the Gnome-- and instead created a Human Mage. Like the Kaldorei Rogue Azshandra, a Human Mage isn't the optimal choice for the selected class, but I'm not interested in the strictly optimal build. I'm not interested in raiding, and I'm not going to let the "git good scrub" crowd tell me how to make a Mage tick. And since there are only two Alliance races that can play a Mage, that meant a Human Mage.

Which fit in with the WoW Classic equivalent of Neve I'd envisioned.***

Therefore, let's put the rest of this behind a spoiler window, because I'm going to be talking about those low level Mage things that people don't want to have spoiled.

Backup Gear, I Needz You

This post's title might be a bit confusing unless you know two things:

• I finally got into an Uldaman run last night.
• I was on Az, which means exclusively melee combat.

I'd been trying to get into Uldaman the past several days, but I'd made the executive decision each time to switch toons and try for Deadmines after 15 minutes of trying in Trade Chat and LookingForGroup*, so I suppose you could say I wasn't trying wholeheartedly. But when I saw the "looking for DPS for Uld" pop up in LookingForGroup, I pounced. I almost immediately got an invite, and I quickly abandoned my goofing around in the middle of nowhere (Stranglethorn Vale) and Hearthed back to Theramore** and caught the boat to the Wetlands.

 A short flight to Loch Modan and run to The Badlands later, I was at the entrance to Uldaman.

My memories of this place are a bit hazy, as I didn't venture inside when I leveled Quintalan and then Neve on the Horde side, and I think Tomakan got in one LFG run when he was leveling. It was only when I was exploring on Q at L80, trying to get all of the achievements for the Loremaster achievement in Late Wrath before the Cataclysm changes dropped that most of my memories from the place came from. Of course, Q steamrolled through everything, so I never got to know the details of Uldaman the way I got to know, say, Halls of Stone. Still, I knew that it was a precursor of the Titan oriented instances/raids in Wrath and onward, so I knew there were going to be Troggs, Earthen, and those Myzrael-like people/statues/whatever around.

Oh, and there were going to be walking statues, too. It's kind of the Titans' thing, I suppose.

I didn't really think much of those statues, until we started fighting them.

You see, with creatures made of rock there are no bleed effects, so several of a Rogue's best abilities are useless against them. Because of that, my DPS went down quite a bit when we would have to take them out.

However, there was a second impact to those walking statues that I only noticed when we were approaching Archaedas: the yellow warning symbol appeared on my screen for my weapons.

"What the..." I began as I pulled up my character screen. I knew I had fully repaired gear before I joined the group.

But there it was: my main dagger had only 5 left, and my off-hand dagger had 16 left.

"How did.... OH." I looked at the recently dispatched walking statue and realized these stone creatures were grinding my weapons to dust.

I quickly switched my off-hand and primary daggers, and told the rest of the group that my off-hand might break before the end of the instance. "I'm definitely going to have to repair when we get out of here."

As we ran down the passageway toward Archaedas' room, I was kicking myself. I could have rolled Need on a dagger that had dropped in a random mob, but as it wasn't as good as the two daggers I had I decided to just roll Greed on it. But now, I saw that random drop for what it was: an insurance policy. I should have known that with Classic things such as this were a lot more realistic, and you can't get much more realistic than what happens when you use an edged weapon to attack a thing made of stone.

We managed to down Archaedas, and wonder of wonders, my (now) off-hand dagger survived with ONE point left.

But I did learn an important lesson last night: always carry a backup weapon, just in case.




*On Myzrael, at least, the LFG channel has fallen by the wayside while most everybody has moved to LookingForGroup. I still keep it up and running, however, just in case.

**Hey, don't judge me. It works for being able to quickly get to instances on both continents, courtesy of the boat ride and its proximity to Ratchet, which is a short flight away to a ship to Booty Bay.

Beating Those L40s Blahs

Azshandra has been in that weird low-mid 40s zone for a while, where she's not really high enough level (or geared enough) to take on Uldaman or Zul Farrak, but too high to get anything meaningful out of Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Downs.*

So, what's a Rogue to do?

Make some forays into The Hinterlands, and realize that you're really in over your head for most of the zone.

Felwood? Nah, I know better.

Feralas? Sure, but keep an eye on the levels, because they can spike pretty quickly. And hanging out with the Gordunni Ogres can be satisfying, although in Zone Chat the name "Gordunni Ogres" quickly morphed into the "Gonorrhea Ogres", and all manner of shenanigans broke out. (Sorry, no screenshots of that. I do have some scruples.)

Head into Dustwallow Marsh, where you're overpowered until suddenly you're underpowered? Okay, but keep an eye on your surroundings. And try not to get depressed about the creepy nature of the place, that simply screams "A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAST RULES HERE!"

Set your sights on Booty Bay where you discover that you're not really overpowered for the zone, but you really have to group up to tackle some of those Troll and Pirate mobs. They aren't elites, mind you, but that you'll end up with about 5-10 of them swarming you before you could even say "What the hell happened?"

Yeah, let's do Stranglethorn Vale, because at least the greenery is mood lifting.

And we could do some fishing, I suppose. There's that Nat Pagle guy, who wants these fish from all over. So yeah, I could hang out in Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace, and Feralas, enjoy the coast, kill some Nagas and Trolls, and fish for those rares Nat wants.

***

But come on. That's not what I've really been doing.

I got a bunch of All Hallow's Eve candy, and I've been having fun shape shifting when the people out and about in the world aren't expecting it.

Like the Pirate's Costume:

Hey, I know that outfit!

Back in prehistory when I attended the University of Dayton, I used to go with friends to the big outdoors Halloween party in the Oregon District**. Being the stereotypical poor college student, my costume frequently consisted of using a white bedsheet as a makeshift toga. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it weren't for the temperature at those parties: 40F/4.5C. A wee bit chilly to be wearing just a bedsheet, some gym shorts, and shoes. My solution to that was to take a few swigs of double strength rum and try to just ignore the cold.

But what I couldn't ignore were the stares.

Yes, I got a lot of stares of the "are you nuts?" variety. Even though I was reasonably fit at the time, I got a lot of "aren't you cold?" questions from people who wore costumes more appropriate for the weather. However, I was a distant second in my group, because one of the women we went with wore a costume exactly like the WoW Pirate's Costume:

It's kind of hard to have a nice pose
when there's a slain Naga behind you.

The only difference was that she didn't have much of a bare midriff, but like the WoW version her outfit was completely skin tight. And believe me, in the cold weather you noticed.

With a wicked grin on her face, she exclaimed, "We're getting all the looks because you're almost naked, and I've left nothing to the imagination!"

***

But the WoW Pirate Costume wasn't the only thing I got. There was the ghost --which didn't last long enough for me to get a screenshot-- and there was this:

GIANT... ORANGE... AZSHANDRA!!

It's not everyday you get to look down on a Tauren. And for a reference on just how gigantic Az had gotten, here's the pre- and post- growth Azshandra:

Night Elves are tall already....

But now Humans don't even reach
Az's navel.

Maybe I should have gone and danced on the Stormwind mailbox....

***

I still have a bunch of those candies left, so maybe I'll pull them out when people aren't expecting it. Like, say, January.

In the meantime, I'll be back to my normal self, doing some questing and fishing, and lending a hand when I happen to be in the area:

Dropping in to help out the
Night Watch in Duskwood.

*And, truth be told, I'm kind of sick of SM. Not Gnomeregan-level sick, but still tired of the tactical nature of SM. "Everybody over here, I'll pull them over, we'll DPS them down, and do the next pack." It's a marvel of tactical design, but when you're about halfway through you start to wonder just how much longer you've got until the end. And when you realize most of the gear isn't Leather....

**Yes, THAT Oregon District. And yes, I know exactly where the shooting happened.