Well, This Is Different

The last seven days were pretty eventful, game-wise.

Not for any earth shattering content update, or even for some in-guild or on server drama*, but for personal reasons.

A week ago, I began laying the groundwork to have Card begin showing up at the Tuesday Molten Core raid that Az currently attends. I figured I could switch off between the two for a while until I could determine a better long term plan. I knew where I needed to go --finish as much T1 as I could and obtain Zul'Gurub level gear with hit bonuses necessary to hit BWL (and higher) bosses-- but getting from Point A to Point B was the question.

My problem has always been that Rogues are far more in demand than Mages in Z'G for their ability to interrupt some of the bosses, so that even on those pugs when I do bring Card, the raid leader is frequently left trying to find a Rogue.** And so I volunteer to switch to help out.

Nevertheless, it looked like I could get Card moving in the right direction again, so it gave me the chance to relax a bit. I could go incognito, play around with an alt or two, and just keep an eye open for an instance that interested me and I could hop on Az or Card to see about getting in.

But some of my WoW friends had other plans.

***

By midweek, I began getting whispers from several of them, asking me to come along on Friday night. They were running MC after all, they said, so I had no excuse. Then on Thursday, I was tag teamed and leaned on until I cried "Uncle" and signed up.***

"I feel like I've been the subject of an intervention," I muttered as I clicked the sign up page.

The Friday Molten Core run went well --I don't think I've ever been in an MC run that was terrible, whether or not we actually kill Raggy-- and so I succumbed and said "okay" to signing up for Blackwing Lair on this coming Friday. What actually sealed the deal was that the guild sponsoring the BWL run decided to keep the MC run after all, but move it to Thursday.**** I still felt undergeared for BWL, but after last week I figured they were gonna pester me until I signed up anyway, so I decided to save them the effort.

We're here to kill you and all you can
do is whine about your beauty sleep?

Card found a new (old) home for Molten Core, and my friends successfully pulled me into Blackwing Lair. And that was that.

Or so I thought.

***

Monday was a holiday here in the US, and I had an eye to work on some projects around the house and begin work on a set of speakers for my wife's old mid-1980's all-in-one stereo.***** I got up early, and after I helped my wife get ready and out the door for work I pulled together a list, visited the hardware store, and began work on replacing a few rotted boards on the gate for our fence. I managed to free the boards but the bolts were stuck, so I hammered at them to free them up. Almost instantly ants boiled out of the so-called "good" wooden beams, and I realized that the entire gate would have to be junked.

Frustrated with that turn of events, I went back inside to cool off a bit and took my annoyance out on a metric ton of unsuspecting demons in Azshara.

While I was singlehandedly depopulating Azeroth of demons, I received a ping from one of my WoW friends.

"Hey, the guild is looking for a Fire Mage for their AQ40 raid team."

Then a separate ping from another friend announcing the same thing.

I sighed.

"I haven't even been in BWL yet and you want me to jump to AQ40? At least give me a chance to see how I handle BWL first."

Unlike Blackwing Lair, I did have at least some experience with AQ40. Back in 2010, my (now disintegrated) Horde guild decided that it would be fun to enter into AQ40 just to check the place out. We tried 5-manning it, and since we couldn't even get past the Prophet Skeram we returned a few days later with a full 10 man raid# and eventually made it through and downed C'Thun. I remembered Skeram for obvious reasons, but I also remembered the Twin Emperors because we a) didn't have a warlock along to tank the arcane Emperor, and b) because a Pally had magic damage, guess who got the job of trying (and largely failing) to tank that emperor. I also remembered C'Thun, because once you think it's dead, oh no.... You get C'Thun Part 2.

But I was told that I'd be fine, and respeccing as a Fire Mage was easy. I had my doubts, as I originally started Neve (remember her?) way back in pre-history as a Fire Mage and I knew the limitations of the spec, especially when not in a raid environment. After all, there was a reason why I spent a lot of years in WoW playing a Frost Mage. While I'd miss Frost, I could respec as necessary due to the synergy Fire Mages get when working together. (Greater synergy than Frost, to be fair.) 

But still, with very little T2 and almost no Z'G gear (like the Bloodvine set), Card was going to stink on the DPS meters. The guild's own documentation had a set DPS number goal for certain bosses --the ones you can just go balls to the wall and blast away-- and I knew I was likely not going to make that minimum number. So I told my friends that there was really no way around the fact that I needed to get my gear up in order to effectively raid with a main raid group. "I don't want to hold the raid back," I replied more than once.

"Go ahead and talk to the raid leader about it," I was told. 

"I did, a month ago, and I know where I need to go to get where I want to be."

And that, I thought, was that. 

Some hours later, I'd recovered from my disappointment at fixing the gate and was busy cutting wood for the speakers when my wife got off of work and came home.## After shaking off the dust, I followed her inside and we talked about her day while I grabbed a drink. I happened to walk by my work area and I saw Discord flashing, which I wasn't expecting.

It was the raid leader/co-GM.

"Somebody blabbed," I muttered, and I clicked to see what he had to say.

Sure enough, he'd heard that I was interested in the Fire Mage position and wanted to chat. 

"Well, here we go," I said, replying to his direct message.

I'm not going to discuss all that was said, but from his perspective the biggest barrier was whether I could raid late on Monday nights EDT. I paused a second, because I never even considered that part. Friday nights, and even Thursday nights are one thing, but Monday? But you know what, I'm up late enough that for me it isn't an issue, so I replied that yeah, I can raid on Monday nights.

But for every concern I had he had an answer, and he assured me that they'll work with me to get my gear to where it needs to be.

The next thing I knew, I agreed to go to AQ40 that night.

 

I almost went in the wrong instance.
For the record, this is AQ20's entrance.
The least the Qiraji could do is put a nice sign out front.

I'm actually surprised I didn't slice off a finger while I finished up my cutting, because I certainly wasn't that attentive at that point. I was thinking that "I've got to respec, then practice the respec, then figure out what pots to take to the run, etc. etc."

Then I got pinged in Discord by the Mage lead for the raid, and he dumped a metric ton of info on me about 2-3 hours before the raid invites were to start. There was a spec to mimic, Weak Auras settings to be installed/used/understood###, a basic rotation to work on, some pots to get, and some YouTube videos to watch to understand the mathematical and in-game underpinnings of how Fire Mages tick. (I still haven't gotten to that video yet. Sorry, Haldol.) Somewhere in there reading up on the strategies for AQ40 got lost, but oh well. I was going to do what I was told to do in raid, so I wasn't planning on worrying about that. Not with all this other stuff to absorb.

So here I was, at 9:30 PM EDT, drinking from a firehose and using the Scourge in Eastern Plaguelands as unsuspecting guinea pigs. 12 hours ago I was thinking about project lists, with saying hello to my old buddy C'Thun not exactly high on my priorities for the day.

***

And so that was how I went from looking for a new MC home to raiding AQ40 in one week.

What, you want to know how it went?

Oh.

It went well enough, I suppose. I made a decision to not look at the meters, because I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I only died six times on 4-5 total raid wipes. So not bad. The AQ40 mounts were dropping like flies, but since I was a guest I waited until everybody else from the guild got one first. That kind of got some of my friends upset, because they felt I should have been more assertive about that, but I wasn't about to barge in and do that sort of thing. That's not me, and I'm not going to change.

But what actually did keep me going throughout the raid were the whispers I got from my friends, who were really happy to see me up with them on the raid. And from the chat that the guild's Mages invited me into. Of course, knowing a couple of them already --Mages tend to stick together-- helped, but the espirit de corps of the group was infectious. 

The Prophet Skeram and the Twin Emperors were as I remembered them, so my memory isn't too far gone, but the "trash" in AQ40 definitely hit a LOT harder at level. So that wasn't entirely unexpected, but it meant that it took us a lot longer to get to the end than what I remembered.

Oh, we didn't down C'Thun, but I wasn't expecting us to beat that thing either. Burning down C'Thun at L80 is an entirely different experience at L60 in Classic, and things that don't hurt at L80 certainly do at L60. But I felt that the strategy that they were working out was fairly sound, it was just a matter of execution.

So that's it. I think it likely I'll be on the bench for next Monday's raid, because more than 40 signed up and I'm the new guy, but I'm fine with that. 

I presume the awkwardness will fade with time, and I've got a long ways to go before I feel like I'm actually contributing to the raid.

But yeah, this was a very different week than I expected.

Thanks gang. (And yes, I know that at least two people involved do read the blog. Commenting is always another matter, but I've been there, so I get that.)

*The guild I'm in has --on average-- about 3-4 active members as people have faded from playing or moved on to other guilds. It's purely social, as only two of us raid, and when I joined I didn't even raid at the time. It is one of numerous small guilds on the server that are frequently overshadowed by the medium and larger sized guilds on Myzrael.

**Yes, really. I'm not sure if it's just my luck or what, but in the Z'G pugs I've been in we always seem to be running short on rogues. At the time Az was still pretty much my main, so it wasn't a big deal.

***There were some issues getting the loot system for BWL properly configured so they ran MC once more. I was completely unaware of the switch until that moment, as I try not to poke around other guilds' Discord servers.

****I signed up for MC before BWL. Shh; don't tell anyone.

*****I've mentioned her stereo here before. I've gotten the turntable and radio working, but the cassette player will be a tough nut to crack as the rubber belt has disintegrated. The worst part of the stereo, however, are the speakers. They're crap, just a speaker in a box without any sort of engineering behind it.

#Until my first Zul'Gurub run earlier this year, that was my sole foray into raiding.

##Apparently I look hilarious wearing an N95 mask, but when you're cutting medium density fiberboard (MDF) you NEED one of those masks to keep the crap out of your nasal cavity. Saves you surgery and medical issues in the long run.

###I just want to know who came up with all of those settings/configurations. The amount of work it would have taken to initially come up with all of that would have been considerable, and that's not even counting the Weak Auras application/add-on itself. 

EtA: I have now gotten to watch that video, and after a week's worth of playing around with the Fire Spec, I understand what the video was talking about. I certainly wouldn't have understood it on Monday night, because after more than half a decade of being a Frost Mage, Fire was essentially a foreign language.

One Little Add-on That Changed WoW Forever

I was speaking with Shintar* recently when she pointed out that I worry too much about gear.

/raises hand 

Yes, that's me. I'm guilty.

But in that moment I realized something. I began playing WoW during Wrath, and if there was one hallmark of Wrath --outside of the destruction that raiding in Wrath caused to many guilds-- it was the omnipresent Gear Score.

Does anybody else remember the Trade Chat entries for ICC pugs to be something like "LFR ICC 10-man. GS 5000+ pst"? That magical 5000 Gear Score became a barrier to people getting into ICC and other raids, because it boiled down your gear, your skill, and your class to a mere number that people could point to and determine your raid worthiness.  I seem to recall that 5000+ meant at least a full T9 set, and probably at least one or two T10 pieces, which really meant you were capable of grinding 5-man dailies over a period of a couple of months. 

Skill? No.

Talent Spec? No.

Knowledge of the fights? No.

But you've got that gear, man.....

Blizzard indirectly encouraged the GS domination by having their own internal method of determining your "fitness" for entering the ICC 5-man instances via the LFG tool. Once you got past a certain point, and I think it was around the 3000+ GS, you could get into the Frozen Halls instances. I remember quite clearly when The Forge of Souls popped up for me, and I promptly freaked out. I was kind of expecting something more tame, such as Ajol-Nerub, but nope. 

"WTF is this?" I remembered whispering Soul back then.

"It means that you've high enough gear score to get into the endgame instances," he replied. "Congrats!"

I wasn't that thrilled, as it was a whole new set of strats to learn, and I knew I was starting at the bottom once more.

And the flaws of LFG had already begun to rear their ugly head, as one of the players I'd ported in with promptly dropped group, and this was on an instance with endgame implications and gear designed to get you ICC ready.

That sort of behavior sticks with you, and you wonder what you did wrong.

***

I guess I'd completely buried those experiences in Wrath somewhere deep inside my psyche, but I can still see a direct correlation between those experiences pugging via LFG and my behavior today, both the good and the bad. Every time you'd get The Old Kingdom as an instance, there would be at least one person who would drop as they couldn't be bothered to deal with a "long" instance when all they wanted was their daily badges. And every time I saw that behavior, I'd resolve that I'd never be "that guy" who put themselves over the group. 

But it also does explain my obsession with making sure my gear is "good enough", because I was once on the receiving end of being judged purely based on what I carried with me into a fight, not how well I performed in the fight. 

It's kind of bizarre when you think about it, because this is simply the same "judging" behavior from middle school and high school, picked up and transferred wholesale into an MMO. But with numbers to back it up.

***

Maybe I ought to re-evaluate Wrath some day, without the rose colored glasses that I have for my first exposure to MMOs. I'm not so sure I'll like what I see, but I believe being honest with yourself is one way to take a critical eye toward the assumptions you make whenever you play.

But trying to make me stop worrying about gear? Well, that's a topic for another time.

*Owner of several blogs, most notably Going Commando (SWTOR Blog), Priest With a Cause (WoW Classic Blog), and Neverwinter Thoughts (Neverwinter Blog). And yes, I can trust her to get at the root of a problem. She knows me way too well.

Off Topic: Take This Seriously, People

I'm setting aside the theme of the blog for this post.

It's a post I'd rather not make, because I'm neither a health professional nor involved with government, but sometimes amplifying the message is what's needed.

Covid-19 is no joke, and take appropriate steps to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

***

I've had one member of my extended family die from C-19, and another is clinging to life while on oxygen.* My nephew had what we believe to be a severe case of it, but it happened back in March when the hospitals were refusing to consider the possibility of kids with severe cases, but he managed to recover. My immediate family had just recently emerged from quarantine as my wife and the oldest mini-Red both contracted the virus.** While the cases we had in our family were "mild", I'm here to tell you that it is not even close to "just a cold".

In the case of my wife, it would have been considered a normal summer cold, except for two unnerving things: the lethargy and the lack of taste/smell. This isn't your normal "I'm feeling sick, I'd rather not do much other than sleep" sort of lethargy. I mean, this is the sort of lethargy that says "I don't want to get out of bed to go to the bathroom" or "I don't want to do anything other than lie right here" or "I don't want to drink or eat at all". I'd never seen anything like it, and as soon as the lethargy crept into her bones I started hassling her to go get tested. You've heard numerous times about the lack of taste and/or smell, but it's been over two weeks since she was cleared by the county board of health to return to work and she still hasn't regained anything from those senses. It may take months, or who knows, it might even be permanent.

The oldest mini-Red had more of what you'd call a chest cold if it weren't for the fact that her cough was a lot like pneumonia. She's had walking pneumonia before, and this was much more severe than that. She slept on the couch so as not to infect her sister --who stayed up in the room they share together-- and I kept close tabs on her at all times until the congestion and cough finally broke.

But the one thing that nobody ever tells you is that when Covid-19 enters your home, your paranoia ramps up considerably. 

You're always wondering if you sneeze or you cough "Is this it? Am I finally catching it?" Or every time you check on one of them you think "Is their temperature going to spike? Are they going to have trouble breathing? Will I have to call 9-1-1?" And, somewhere in the back of your mind, is always the gnawing fear that something even worse will happen and they'll be gone within a day.

As much as you like to think you can, you can't quite compartmentalize your fears and just carry on with work as usual. Maybe health professionals can, but I certainly can't. And I know this situation has affected my mental health in other ways; I'm a bit more abrupt with friends and co-workers, and I don't want to lean on "Covid-19 quarantine" as an excuse. 

It has also crept into my game playing, as I'm sure it contributed to my feelings playing WoW the past few weeks. But it's not something you can just come out and tell people, you know? "Nah, I'm not feeling like joining an Ony pug, gang, because I've got the blues from dealing with a household with Covid." 

At times like this, mindless farming in game has helped me to just simply stop thinking about things for a while. Like tonight, where I realized that Card hadn't reached max fishing, so I stood there on the docks in Tanaris, constantly casting, forgetting everything for a while, and even forgetting there was a chance I might even join a pug raid tonight.** Or later, I got on to farm Felcloth, and forgetting that I'd been fishing earlier, I was fighting Satyrs equipped with a fishing rod.

Basically stuff that I'd never have screwed up in-game before, I was messing up constantly.

***

I wish I could thwack every idiot out there --and yes, that does include extended family members-- who thinks this isn't a big deal. 

IT IS A BIG DEAL. AND WE ARE STILL LEARNING THINGS ABOUT THIS VIRUS IN REAL TIME WHILE WE'RE TRYING TO GET A VACCINE TOGETHER. AND WE STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW THE LONG TERM EFFECTS OF ALL THIS, SO CUT THIS IDIOTIC SHIT OUT!!!!

There.

And if there's anybody whom I play with who stumbles on this, I apologize for my moping around in game. Now you know a bit of the reason why.

*Due to his prior history he's only able to take oxygen via a mask, rather than a ventilator. The last I heard, which was the other day, he was doing slightly better. He's always been tough --a retired firefighter who had several bouts of cancer-- and he's giving the virus a run for it's money.

**The other two mini-Reds tested negative: one when he was tested as he arrived at university, and the other received a test because she works at a restaurant and could have potentially infected a lot of people otherwise. I showed no symptoms, and because of that it's pretty hard in my state to get tested. So I assumed I was asymptomatic and behaved accordingly.

***The raid happened, but no spots were available. Just as good, because to be honest because my mind simply wasn't in it. 

 

A Friday Scene

 

Upon Taking the Oaths

The compassion to pursue good, the will to uphold law, and the power to defeat evil—these are the three weapons of the paladin. Few have the purity and devotion that it takes to walk the paladin’s path, but those few are rewarded with the power to protect, to heal, and to smite. In a land of scheming wizards, unholy priests, bloodthirsty dragons, and infernal fiends, the paladin is the final hope that cannot be extinguished.
--From the Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook v3.5, pp 42.

 

While I've been pondering Cardwyn's future, I've taken the time to, in her sister Linna's words, "Go bash a Defias."

I suppose it's not a big reveal that like Card*, Linna is short for Linnawyn. I was going to go strictly with "Linna" when I created her, but since it wasn't available her formal name will do.

And to be honest, Card likely thinks it incredibly funny to hear Linna's full name, as she only heard it on the farm when she and her older sister were in trouble.

"First Card and now you, Linna? Are you
sure that Mom and Dad are okay with this?"

Being a Paladin means that her path is going to be quite different than Card's. Paladins and Warriors have to slog through leveling, and Retribution Paladins --like I'm envisioning for Linna-- don't have the advantage of being good tanks that Warriors do. 

But hey, it's all about the journey, right?

Right now, Linna is whacking away at Defias, Murlocs, and Gnolls in Elwynn Forest, and I'm still working through a rotation.

Not Hogger, but still good for getting in
some good practice. Still have to get a two handed
weapon that does decent damage, tho.

But what really made me stop and wonder was the quest for learning how to rez people:

I was amused that the Dwarf called
his companion being daft for being brave.
After all, isn't that what Paladins are supposed to be?

With the impending release of Shadowlands, how is this going to work for retail going forward? Are people  suddenly going to pop into the Shadowlands when they die in game, and have to be pulled back into the "regular world" when they're rezzed? Or if you die in Shadowlands, where do you go? Oh well, I wasn't planning on checking that out anyway, but the mechanics of this alone would make my head hurt.

Regardless, I've been having more fun leveling Linna than I expected. I think that I'm so familiar with Elwynn Forest by now that I've just come to accept that she's gonna die at the hands of the murlocs, and that she has to pick and choose her battles when fighting packs. But I'm also not desperate to level her, either, so I've got plenty of time to work through rotations, learn how the Classic Paladin really plays, and go from there.

*Or Cardy, as some people call her on Myzrael-US. I would have never expected that nickname, but you know, it's pretty good. Far more people say "Card" than "Cardy", so when someone says "Cardy" I pretty much know who they are. The only times I really hear "Cardwyn" are when raid leaders do it, such as when they're calling out marks for sheeping in the Majordomo Executus fight in Molten Core.

Watch: Jasper Hour Classic on YouTube

Okay, after Monday's rant, I'm going to pivot* and promote a friend/acquaintance of mine** in WoW Classic.

Jasperin is a Pally Tank on Myzrael-US, and is probably one of the best Classic Pally Tanks I've ever seen. He frequently blows my mind with his skill in out tanking well geared Warriors, even though in raids he's frequently a Healer. And even when going balls to the wall on Cardwyn, I've never had issues pulling aggro from him. Yes, part of it is me being a good party member and waiting for Jasper to get a good grip on aggro before attacking, but even then on a lot of Pally tanks they'll still lose aggro. But not Jsaperin.

The guy is good.

And to match it, he's probably one of the nicest guys I've met on the server. Yes, I've been in Discord chat with him, and he's just as nice in Discord as he is in game. In fact, he reminds me of a guy I knew when I was much younger and at college; my friend back then was just as unflappable and upbeat as Jasperin. And like my friend, just about everybody on the server seems to know Jasperin.

Why am I talking Jasper up? Because he just started a YouTube channel to provide info about Pally Tanks, Boss Guides, and other assorted topics. Before you ask, no, his skills are in Pally Tanking, not video creation/editing, but he still provides a lot of data in his videos. One of his goals is to do a two Pally tank run of Zul'Gurub in Classic, just to prove it could be done. I've already volunteered to be part of his run if he wants me, but I think it likely that he'll want to do it as a run with his guild, Mystic Bond.***

Jasper Hour Classic

Now, after all of this, why am I promoting a YouTube channel when I implied yesterday I'm not too fond of them? Because Jasper puts in the work and figures things out. He has a grasp of the finer points of Pally tanking in Classic that a lot of people don't get and simply dismiss Pally tanks as --at best-- only good for instance running. And I'm not against YouTube channels as much as I am against the feedback loop that Blizz gets from using the PTR servers to overemphasize raids over everything else. 

Jasperin only has a few videos up so far, but he's intending to make more, and they're very much worth a view.

In addition to the channel link above, here's a link to his video about using two Pally tanks in Upper Blackrock Spire:

*Sorry about the obligatory Friends reference.

 

**Where is the border between when an acquaintance becomes a friend in a MMO? That's a question for another post, I suppose.

***Mystic Bond (or MB as known on the server) straddles the line between casual and progression raiding, but they lean hard on the progression end of things. Yes, they're that good. And to reference my post from several days ago, the guild's personality is of a light hearted yet serious bunch. If an MB guildie is in an instance pug or raid pug, you know you're getting both a quality person as well as a quality player.

Monday Rant: Why Do PTRs Exist?

Seriously.

I understand the desire of video game developers/publishers to let the players beta test your new content and save money, but PTRs have become so much a part of the development process that nobody has stopped to say "why are we doing this at all?"

After all, if the entire point of playing a game is to experience new material, why allow everybody the ability to cheat like this? Is it just so that the elite raid teams can get "practice time" in on the next raid, and then they can provide a strat for everybody else?

If that's the case, then the entire point of MMOs is simply "how quickly can you finish a raid". 

***

As you can tell, I dislike the concept of "open betas" and "PTRs" in the first place. They keep all players from experiencing content at once, and instead of everybody muddling through and trying to figure out how to handle new content, the sandbox is already there for people to try to figure it out beforehand. 

I was in a run --I think it was Upper Blackrock Spire-- when one of the players commented that it is so much better now in Classic than in Vanilla because we all now know what to do; back then we were all muddling through trying to figure it out, but now we've the advantage of 15+ years of insight to know how to handle things. While I agree that it is nice to have detailed data to fall back on, I'm not convinced it is "better" now. We just know what we have to do, and all we're left with is just execution. There's no "hey, this isn't working, let's try this instead" or "WTF was THAT attack about?"

The thrill of discovery, and the knowledge sharing that happens following a "eureka!" moment is all lost. Now it's all about "Go look it up on the forums" or "Check out the YouTube video for how to run it".

Perhaps if dev staffs got back to not using PTR servers, MMOs might see a resurgence in that Vanilla excitement that nobody seems to be able to generate anymore, yet everybody complains about.

My Name is Nemo

To be a blogger in 2020 is to be anonymous.

To be an MMO blogger in 2020 is to simply not exist.

I'm talking about blogging in the traditional sense, of course, although the Influencer crowd would have you believe that Tumblr and YouTube channels --not to mention Instagram and TikTok-- are also blogging. While I don't doubt that the effort it takes to put together a good Influencer photoshoot can be pretty extensive and take up a ton of time, putting words on virtual paper in a blog is a pastime that has seen its heyday come and go. Those of us who continue to blog these days do it for the love (or compulsion) of writing, not to become internet famous.*

But just starting up a traditional blog in a TikTok world, and a gaming blog at that, is to be akin to shouting at the Void.

And if there was one way for me to participate in the online community and remain (relatively) unknown, this is it.

***

In case you're wondering, I'm actually happy about that. 

Back when blogs such as Righteous Orbs and The Pink Pigtail Inn were gathering places for one of the most popular video games on the market, getting into the blogroll was a bit of a big deal. It meant that Tam or Larisa actually read your blog and commented on it, which would give you a semi-official stamp of approval.** 

Even so, the biggest bump we ever got was from a couple of hundred hits per day to 3000, and that was when the old WOW Insider promoted a series I did concerning the Draenei and Sindorei, titled Two Sides of a Coin.

Nowadays, the blog watering holes are gone*** as people blogfaded, moved to other hobbies, or had real life intervene, and the MMO industry has shrunk considerably. Even the blogs that would bring in a lot of readers from outside the immediate WoW community, such as From Draenor With Love, have brought their stories to a satisfying ending.****

***

All of this isn't new, of course, but on the anniversary of WoW Classic just a few days ago I read all of these anniversary blog posts and I realized that throughout the entire year --with the lone exception of Ancient from Tome of the Ancient-- I didn't run into a single person in game who I used to play WoW with, blogger or no.

Obviously some of that is because quite a few of the current bloggers still playing Classic are overseas, and Blizz still won't let European players hang with North American ones, so there's that. But for others, real life dictates schedules and once you get settled on a server you tend to want to stay put. It's nothing like the blogger guilds of yesteryear.

As an experiment, I googled my co-mains and "Myzrael" just to see what would pop up, and my suspicions were confirmed when the first entries for each were this blog as well as Ancient's. In a WoW Armory era, there would have been tons of links for that before you'd see anything about blogs.

But given the lack of interest in MMO blogs in this day and age,***** the likelihood of someone trying to find info about a toon outside of the game are practically non-existent. Okay, not non-existent, but someone would have to have a real burning desire to try to find someone that way, despite knowing that there is no WoW Armory (and that Google doesn't search Discord servers/channels).

***

So I can blog to my heart's content and not worry about being recognized in game. Not that I ever really worried about that, but after the past year's worth of WoW Classic blogs I started to wonder if I was saying too much in some of my posts. (Like, you know, the last couple of posts.) But there's only so much sanitizing one person can do, so I'll just live with it.

After all, anonymity has its advantages.

 

 

 *Okay, some traditional bloggers can become internet famous, but the topics of those blogs are frequently topics that are about reading --such as the Romance genre-- or are sponsored by larger websites, such as the people who would in previous decades be known as columnists for newspapers or major magazines.

**I related the "OMG!!!! TAM COMMENTED ON OUR BLOG!!!!" story back when I was a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast back in 2012. And even then, I downplayed my real reaction by quite a bit.

***For a slice of nostalgia, The Pink Pigtail Inn still does exist at http://pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com/. Alas, Righteous Orbs is long gone.

****I wonder what Vidyala would have thought about the storyline in BfA after having worked on FDWL all those years. I should ask her and see if she's interested in a guest column.

*****If you want to know about something in WoW Classic, you go to WoWHead or WoWpedia or.... you get the idea. Places, like the old Hots and Dots blog, that had full maps and descriptions of Vanilla instance content, are a thing of the past.

A Bit Like The Ending to "The Searchers"

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
--Neil Postman

 

Cardwyn's last Molten Core run with her first "regular" raid group was last night.

It felt bittersweet, given that it was nice to see a lot of people I've gotten to know as acquaintances and friends one last time for an MC run, but the knowledge that I'll have to find a new MC home for Card put a damper on the occasion for me.

The rest of the raid group was in good spirits, however, and the raid went very well. There were no wipes, although we did lose half the raid on a trash pull right before Baron Geddon. That seems to be the norm for the packs in the Baron Geddon/Shazzrah area, where the packs seem to be more deadly than the bosses themselves. I was also exposed to yet another strategy on taking out Shazzrah, which I commented on to a friend of mine. 

***

That did get me to thinking about how similar some strategies are for bosses and others are totally different. They're all personal variations between guilds --and even raiding teams within guilds-- and if they work, then that's fine. But as time has gone on, there often seems to be that "one person" who thinks the way their raid team does it is the right way, and says so on the Discord or in Chat. Frequently that means they can become a disruptive influence on the raid, especially if there's a wipe. I've been in more than one Zul'Gurub or instance pug that dissolved into chaos because of people insisting that "you're doing it wrong" after a wipe, and effectively throwing a temper tantrum because they weren't getting their way. I've even seen it happen after a wipe in an MC run, which the person throwing the fit was a guest of the guild putting the raid on. And really, that takes some brass balls to try to tell the people putting on the raid that "they're doing it wrong" when they invited you to come along in the first place.

But I guess that's the finest example of an MMO being as good as the people who operate inside it. 

***

Meanwhile, back in the Hallowed Core (as Ragnaros calls it) I was pondering all of that, as well as how different guilds have different internal dynamics.

Each guild has their own personality. I don't mean the differences between leveling guilds and progression raiders and social guilds, I mean how guild members interact with each other and the greater WoW world. Within Myzrael, if you run enough instances or group up enough with people from various guilds, you begin to get a feel of a guild's personality. I always try to not to extrapolate from a couple of people to an entire guild, because that smacks of prejudice, but I'm also a firm believer in that when you're a member of an organization you represent that organization no matter whether you're "on the clock" or not.*

One of the primary methods of guild recruitment --outside of spamming LFG or posting ads in the Myzrael Discord-- is the pug. Prospective guildies get a chance to hang with members in a (theoretical) non-stressful atmosphere and see the guild dynamics at work and in general have a good time. Take the proverbial high school or college mixer, place it online, and that's what pugs are. It's not perfect, but it does work. And when I attend a guild group, whether it's in a Scarlet Monastery run or Zul'Gurub or Scholomance or even Molten Core, there's an unspoken evaluation going on in both directions, whether or not the pug was advertised as a recruitment event or not. 

What I've found in running enough raid pugs --with Discord-- is that the guilds that put on these pugs do put their best foot forward. Nobody wants to look like an asshat, and you can tell that the guilds that have been around long enough have settled into a comfortable level of banter and enjoyment in Discord. Of these regular pugs, I don't think I've come across one that made me feel uncomfortable with weird dynamics or people who were overly aggressive in trying to push the raid to a speed record or something. However, I've been in enough of these sort of pugs where I can detect a distinct separation between the guildies and the puggers. It's not intentional, as it is the product of familiarity and friendliness, but it's there. And in an MMO where there are no visual cues to derive from, you're left with Discord and in-game chat to navigate that separation. 

Me? Because of my natural shyness I resort to humor to break the ice** and, naturally, if my attempts at humor are well received I begin to feel a bit more comfortable with the situation. 

I was considering all of this in the raid --yes, deep thoughts for a raid that starts at 1 AM EDT on a Saturday morning-- while I was thinking of the struggles of some of my Classic friends to find a home in the game.

I've watched as several of my friends bounced from guild to guild. Or in the case of some of them, watched a couple of guilds blow up or have significant departures; in those cases, I look back on my guild history in Wrath and think "there but for the love of God go I". It didn't make anything easier for my friends, however, but all I could do was just listen/read while they aired out their grievances. And I wondered just how much of the raid pugs presented a complete slice of the guild dynamics. It's far better than an advertisement, for certain, but it's not foolproof.

Some of my friends, however, eventually found a guild that suited them. Finding yourself in a group of people that accept you and let you grow is a good thing, and I'm happy that they found their landing spot. Others are still looking, and the best thing for me to do is to be there for support. 

***

I suppose it was a good thing that I didn't use Discord to talk in the raid***, as my mood was more than a bit melancholy, and the last thing I wanted to do was to be a Debbie Downer on what for a lot of people was a good time.

And what didn't help my mood much was when I happened to look at the damage meters to get a feel for how I was doing.

Over the past couple of months Card has slowly moved up the charts as she's begun to get some T1 gear and fix the gaps in her T0 gear, like replacing things like Priest/Warlock T0 with true Mage T0 gear. Right about now, Card is about half T1, half T0 Mage, and some of the minor gear pieces (trinkets and whatnot) are finally being replaced from leveling greens and blues with something more raid ready. I've not bothered with enchantments because that money hole is something I'm going to pursue once I get enough pieces good enough to enchant that I'm going to keep for a little while.**** And she's been hitting the 10-15 ranking mark on a regular basis on fights that require her to just go balls to the wall and attack without doing massive interrupts. She was frequently 3/4 or 4/4 in the mage group, but given the other mages were getting T2 gear from regular Blackwing Lair runs, I thought I was moving in the right direction.

And then I saw the meters this time. 

I knew that more people in the pug were raiding AQ20/40 now, and more than a few of them weren't alts at all but people's mains, but when I vanished from the Top 20 for almost the entire run I knew I had a long way to go. 

***

In the end, I did get a good send off: the T2 Mage legs dropped, and I won the roll for them.

And while I got a lot of whispers from friends trying to convince me to join them next week when they start up the Blackwing Lair pug, I had to keep telling them that I simply wasn't geared for it yet. I wasn't ready, and I was determined to not be a detriment to the raid. 

What did it feel like? About the closest way I can describe it is that feeling when you first drop your grown child off at a university. You raised them, were there for them in all their successes and stumbles as they grew and matured, and you let them go to make their own way in the world. They go on without you, and you can only watch with a mixture of pride and sadness.

*I've always impressed on the mini-Reds that it may not be fair, but when they are out in public wearing a shirt with their school name (for example), people will judge their school based on their behavior. "It isn't fair, but that is why it is so important to behave well," I'd frequently tell them. "You carry the weight of expectations, and live up to them."

**Trust me, it's there. I know that more than a few people have a hard time believing that I'm pretty shy, but you have to realize that these are just words, and I'm not talking to you face to face. HUGE difference. And even then, I struggled to put together this particular post because it was difficult to corral my thoughts into something that resembled coherency. It was only toward the end of writing this that the light bulb went on in my head and I remembered an article from Cracked about Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves, and I said "Oh!" I may not be as depressed or anxious or anything as represented in the article, but it does explain to an extent why I use humor so much as a defense mechanism to overcome my own shyness and nervousness.

***This particular channel required the use of push-to-talk, and I'll be frank in that I suck in using PTT while trying to not stand in the bad during MMOs. My headset allows me to mute myself when I push my mic up, and the mic is re-engaged when I pull it down into a talking position.

****I am NOT getting on the gold farming treadmill just to enchant an item that will be only equipped for a couple of weeks.

 

EtA: Cleaned up some grammar issues.

EtA: I should clarify the title of the post a bit. If you're as old as I am --and being even older is better-- The Searchers was one of director John Ford's best films. Ford was a master of cinematography and letting the symbolism tell the story, which is quite a feat in the Western films era. While most people today know of The Searchers as part of the inspiration for the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes the dialogue, the treatment of Native Americans in the story, and the acting is very dated, Ford doesn't shy away from the flaws that make Ethan, John Wayne's character, so single minded in pursuit of his niece who'd been captured by the Comanches: his ruthlessness and his racism chief among them. Ford's direction and cinematography forces us to reevaluate the racism implicit in the settlement of the Old West, and to realize that Ethan is not truly the hero of the story at all; he is just as dangerous as the Comanches who killed his relatives and captured his niece. One of John Ford's themes in his Westerns was the approach of civilization and the replacement of lawlessness --embodied by gunfighters and outlaws of all stripes-- with the normalcy of civilization. As in Ford's other big film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne's character is a product of the Old West, and while he helps to usher in the New (Civilized) West, he has no place in it.

I obviously wasn't going for all of the rest of that subtext about The Searchers in this post, because I could write at least 3-5 posts on how WoW approaches complex subjects such as racism, but rather the basic theme of the outsider watching as the world has passed him by.

Change Changing Places

 

For some reason you're questioning why
I always believe it gets better
One difference between you and I
Your heart is inside your head

 

One word from you
One word from me
A clear design on your liberty
Who could believe when love has gone
How we move on like everyone

--Changes by Yes, from 90125

 

If there's one thing that's a constant in life, it's change.

And for me, change came to WoW Classic the instant the 10 hour war ended and AQ opened up.

The Molten Core run that Cardwyn had been attending for 2+ months is being shut down in favor of two separate Blackwing Lair runs --one from each guild that hosted the MC run-- which leaves those without sufficient gear to attempt BWL in need of a new home.*

Like Cardwyn, who has about half T1 and half T0 gear.

I realize that for some it's a minor inconvenience, and they can just go find another pug to run MC with**, but it was nice to have a regular run that I could count on to be there and develop friendships with. And with me being a bit of a night owl when it comes to playing, there aren't that many Molten Core pugs around Midnight EDT on the server. 

There's also one additional problem that has to be considered: everybody and their grandmother is running AQ20 or AQ40, and if you're running those you're not likely going to be in many other raids. 

And if you're doing AQ20/AQ40, when you're not actually in the raids, you're farming the mats for the raids.

I've seen references in the Myzrael Discord channel and in other spots online to the sheer volume of flasks and whatnot that some of the more progression oriented raiders are utilizing in the AQ instances, and it ain't pretty. Unless you've got a huge amount of gold coming in you're going to have to spend a ton of time farming mats to make the pots to just raid AQ40 once a week. And that's not even counting all of the scrounging you'll need to do to find Nature Resist gear to use in AQ20/40, which if you want to be in AQ40 right now that means even more time spent doing things in support of the raid when you're not in the raid.

And here's Az and Card with only half of a T1 set***, watching all this and wondering when did WoW Classic turn into a second (or third) job.

***

Such is the WoW Classic life now: the people who I like to run with have all moved on and aren't really available to run the instances/raids I'm running, and with Shadowlands on the horizon and coming fast, I suspect that the WoW Classic environment will take a massive population hit for at least the six months after the October launch.

Sure, one obvious solution is to focus more on what I can control, which means running Battlegrounds and finding instance pugs where I can, or maybe even level an alt. 

Like this young Paladin. I think Card knows her.

 

And I have been receiving whispers from people I know who have guilds who are recruiting --not really poaching, as the guild I'm in is only a few people and of the group only 2 of us raid with any regularity-- but the requirements are to be either AQ ready as-is or at least be Blackwing Lair ready, neither of which I am at present.**** It's not like I don't know the guilds or the people, because I've run with plenty of their guildies over the past 6 months or more and I'm fine with them, but the reality is that they're going progression and their entire focus is the immediate needs for the progression raids.*****

And to be honest, if AQ is so demanding on a player's time, I'm not so sure I really want to raid there any time soon.

I talked with a guildie about it, and he's planning on going to AQ only when enough people get geared enough to make pugs more practical, probably when Naxxramas starts getting close to dropping.

Until then, I guess I'll muddle through.

*One of the BWL pugs is purely recreational, if you can call a BWL run that, and the other is oriented at people who want to move into progression raiding. The guild running the latter intends to use that run as --more or less-- a farm team for their main progression teams.

**Myzrael is a medium population server, so higher pop servers may not have this issue quite so much. And it should be mentioned that Zul'Gurub runs continue on a regular basis, because of the "+hit" gear you can get out of Z'G which are necessary for BWL and later raids.

***If I had a dollar every time someone asked me "if you've been running Molten Core for over 2 months, shouldn't you be fully T1 geared yet?" I'd be able to quit my real job. Most of the T1 gear that Cardwyn and Azshandra are wearing dropped in the first 3-4 Molten Core runs, and just about every run since then has seen either a) repeat drops, or b) no drops at all. But boy, if I were a Druid/Warlock/Pally, I'd have been living large.

****And with Fire being the current "spec du jour", Card being Frost (for MC and BGs) sticks out like a sore thumb.

*****The recruitment blurbs for the guilds in the Myzrael Discord have changed over the months from being a mix of progression, casual, and somewhere in between to weighing heavily in the direction of progression. And it's not just that the progression guilds are recruiting more, the guild advertisements for the same guild have tilted heavily in the direction of progression as the War Effort ended.

Attack of the Ancient Egyptian Lookalikes

 The Ten Hour War on Myzrael-US has come and gone, and I missed a lot of it.

Well, the reason for that is simple: the ringing of the gong happened at 10:00 AM EST (7:00 AM server time), and I couldn't really take a day off to play WoW Classic.*

So I went and rode up on Card before work, soaking in the view....

Soon......

 

Even then, an hour or two early, there was a crowd. You'd think that Led Zeppelin had gotten back together and were going to play a concert...

 

"Play Dazed and Confused!!!!"

 

So I figured I'd sneak in right around the banging of the gong just to see what happened, but work kept me busy until lunchtime.

When I did login, I had to dodge as a giant foot nearly flattened me. I ran up onto the platform and took a view of the surrounding area:

Correct that. Maybe I should have asked for
Iron Maiden to play Two Minutes to Midnight.

In times like this, I'm reminded of the advice given to me before I entered my first battleground when I asked what I should do: "Just go out there and hit somebody!!"

So I did:

And again....

And again.

And I thought Onyxia was organized chaos...

I was aware that I wasn't getting any reputation or any drops because I wasn't in a raid group, but that didn't matter to me. I was fine with just bashing things for a while. I chatted with a couple of friends who'd gotten there early and were knee deep in raids, and they were having a blast.

Me? I got to take a picture or three, and enjoy the memories.

One giant foot. With a Cardwyn for scale.

*Sure, I could, but I already had two days off on my calendar --each for taking a kid back to university-- in the week and a half surrounding the banging of the gong, and I didn't have my backup available the day of the war.

 

On the Eve of War

Dear Mom and Dad--

By the time you read this, we'll know whether Azeroth has a chance to survive.

I'm writing this on the eve of the banging of the gong, where the combined might of the Alliance and Horde will stand against the armies of Ahn'Qiraq and the dark force that controls them. Backed by the Cenarion Circle and the Bronze Dragonflight, we hope to weather their first attack so we can set up a command post inside their city, and from there strike deeper into their territory.

I saw Linna earlier today, and we talked briefly about how strange fate is. Who knew that when the Defias demanded our iron that Summer day it would have set us on a road to this desolate place? The Marshals have separated us into different units --for support, they said-- but I believe it's so that we have a better shot of having one of us survive the battle.

While I was wandering about, greeting friends I've not seen in some time, I came across one of the Mages from Theramore who was deep in conversation with an Orc and Tauren. He waved me over and introduced me to them as Evelyn Aldcock's last apprentice. We exchanged greetings, and it turns out that all three of them fought with Mistress Evelyn at the Battle of Mount Hyjal. The Tauren Druid was especially pleased to know that Mistress Evelyn was still alive and keeping an eye on her adopted grandchildren, and said that he will try to talk Kit into escorting him for a visit. Please tell her that Drak and Nighthoof wish her well, and will strike the Silithids in her name.

Please don't worry about me or Linna. I feel it in my bones that this is one of the great trials of our time, and everything I've learned throughout my life prepared me for this moment.

Be well and stay safe, and Light willing we will prevail.

--Cardwyn

P.S. Tell my nieces and nephews I'll be back soon to go fishing again.

A Window into the Past

 As time has gone on this past year, I've seen people come and go on Classic.  I've gotten to know some of them fairly well, and others I met via an instance, friended them after a great time, and never saw them online again.

Perhaps the greatest example of this phenomenon is the friends' lists of Az and Card. 

I was thinking about this the other day when I realized that almost nobody from Az's friends list was on, but Card had a ton online. Given that Az leveled first, I suppose it was inevitable that some of the people I encountered in September and October 2019 would have moved on. I've even seen a couple of people I battle tag friended in that era online, but either on other Classic servers or even on Retail. 

But I also think it's a measure of the type of group that Az would get involved with versus Card. 

Melee DPS isn't nearly in as much demand for instances as ranged DPS is. If you're interested in a speed run of, say, Blackrock Depths, getting 2 or 3 Mages together can wreak havoc on an instance. On the flip side, if you're in an instance that favors lots of single target attacks and/or you have tanks with issues holding threat, a Rogue's threat reduction and single target specialty has an advantage over ranged DPS without threat reduction.

I also think that a Rogue or a cat Druid, when stealthed, has advantages that a Mage doesn't have if you're new to an instance. Both can scout ahead and inform the group of what is around a corner (highly useful in RFK and RFD), and the Rogue (with Improved Sap) can provide CC in those scenarios where not pulling aggro is critical. If, however, you want a ranged pull + CC at the same time, a Mage's sheep pull is highly useful.

All of this analysis boils down to one simple fact: different groups require different classes, and the groups that Az would run with aren't going to be the same --especially at lower levels-- than those that Cardwyn would run with.

Perhaps the purest form of this is when I see somebody I know looking for DPS for an instance, and I whisper them "which do you want, Card or Az?" Sometimes they're fine with Az, sometimes they're fine with Card. Depends on the situation and the current group makeup. And because of those differences, whom I put on my friends' list on Az is likely to be different than on Card.

As a result, Az's friends list reads like a view of what Classic looked like in the Fall of 2019, while Card's friends list is a window into Classic's current status. 

And because of the impending release of Shadowlands, I have to wonder just how much of Card's friends list will turn into Az's in a few months.

Some Brief Musings

The more I see of the artwork from the new WoW expac Shadowlands, the more I think that it's a cross of WoW with Aion. Not saying it's a bad thing, but it does feel a bit weird.

From aion.mmosite.com via Pinterest.

From worldofwarcraft.com.

Unless, of course, it's a weird merging of WoW and Elder Scrolls Online....

Nothing says "Gothic Horror" like vampires.
From mmosky.com.

From a larger graphic from worldofwarcraft.com.

***

My push to gearing up properly appears to be bearing some fruit, just not in the way I expected:

This was a surprise, to say the least.

I joined an Ony pug headed up by a person relatively famous on the server for a) his devil-may-care attitude to pugs, and b) his steadfast refusal to use any form of audio communication. He considers using an application like Discord to be "for wussies".

Everybody knows what they're getting into when they join one of his pugs --myself included-- so I go in expecting to wipe at least once.

We didn't wipe on Ony, but I did die in Phase 3 when Onyxia moved out of range and I tried to get back in range. As I told a guildie --who'd also joined the pug-- later, the pug was pretty much organized chaos.

They decided to roll on the head first, and someone rolled a 95. I really wanted the bag, but I figured "Oh what the hell, why not" and decided to roll on the head anyway.

I got a 99.

"Dammit Card!" the person who'd rolled 95 said.

So I now get to coordinate with my server's Discord channel on when to drop an Onyxia head, something I didn't expect I'd ever get to do.

***

My oldest visited Minas Tirith in LOTRO for the Summer Festival, and she raved about it to me later. She also mentioned how busy it was, and that her laptop was struggling so much her FPS was down to 5 FPS. Given that her laptop was a fairly generic AMD processor that's now 6 years old, that didn't exactly shock me. Still, she went on for a while about how well done Minas Tirith was, which pleased me to no end.

MMOs still bring me and the mini-Reds together.

One Direction Versus Many

A blinding hatred caused by fear is showing in their eyes

They want their truth all black and white

But a rainbow never tells no lies to a

Stranger in a strange land

What's a man supposed to do?

I'm just a stranger in a strange land

When will the light come shining through?

--"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Triumph, from Thunder Seven*

I was thinking the other day about how WoW Classic/Vanilla is different than MMOs that came after it. And that includes the expacs for WoW that have accumulated over time.

There are some MMOs that are completely different and have very little actual story, such as Black Desert Online, and there are those that are little more than an excuse to PvP, such as ArcheAge. But as far as story driven MMOs are concerned, Classic/Vanilla stands out from its future self and its competitors in that not everything devolves to a single conspiracy.

Sure, in SWTOR the original version has each class story's own Big Bad, but the game's storyline points to the same ending in Corellia. LOTRO's big bad is, well, Sauron. Age of Conan has it's own storyline with Atzel at the forefront, ESO's original storyline had Molag Bal, and Rift's original storyline pointed at Regulos, the Dragon of Extinction. And starting in Burning Crusade, each WoW expac had an eventual Big Bad that had to be confronted at the end of the storyline.

But Classic/Vanilla? Not so much.

There is no defined "Big Bad" at the end of Classic/Vanilla, but instead there are a variety of different Big Bads that covered various WoW stories: Onyxia, Ragnaros, Hakkar, Nefarian, C'Thun, and Kel'Thuzad. What is most interesting about the various Big Bads is that their stories don't intersect. Sure, Ony and Nef are brother and sister black dragons, but their stories don't intersect at all. The same goes with Ragnaros and Nefarian, despite them sharing Blackrock Mountain.**

There are a plethora of other questlines that likely were designed to lead to other raids and raid bosses --Varian's questline, the Syndicate/Alterac, Burning Blade, Scythe of Elune/Deadwind Pass, etc.-- that were either shut down entirely as Blizzard changed the focus to Burning Crusade or were retconned for later expacs (the Worgen in Cataclysm and Deadwind Pass/Karazhan at the end of BC, for example).

Here's the kicker, however: if you take WoW Classic/Vanilla at face value there was no defined story, no overarching Big Bad, that who was the ultimate mastermind and you had to eventually deal with. With the benefit of hindsight and a metric ton of official stories/comics/expacs out there, we now know that everything devolves into either the Burning Legion or the Old Gods. And a great argument could be made that it's really the Old Gods being responsible for everything, from the lowest Defias cutthroat or Hexxed Troll up through Sargeras itself.***

But Classic/Vanilla doesn't have such an escape valve, and we have to take each storyline at face value. This means that, as far as a world is concerned, Classic/Vanilla Azeroth is more complex than many of its successors. The enemies aren't all in this together, and in fact they frequently feud with each other just as much as they do with the Horde and Alliance.

If there was one true disappointment in how WoW developed over time, it was the loss of all of this complexity at the expense of pushing a singular narrative. While a singular narrative was easier to sell as part of an expansion, it made the WoW-verse smaller. If there was a problem in one location, it could be traced back in one form or another to the Old Gods' or the Burning Legion's corruption. Even if it wasn't obvious initially, don't worry. It'll eventually get there. It's kind of like the Elder Scrolls Online, where almost all quests eventually devolve to a Daedric issue. Which is a shame, because it takes away the agency of everybody involved and they all simply become pawns moved around on a chessboard.

Move over, Mongo, you've got company.
(Made from a WoWHead screencap.)

*Here's a link to a YouTube video of the song, since it's one of Triumph's lesser known songs. For those not from the 70s/80s, Triumph was the "other" power trio from the Toronto area.

**And are also supposedly on the same side as C'Thun. Of course, there's nothing directly in the quest texts that indicate that all three are working for the same overall team; that came later.

***Talk about the conversations surrounding a misbehaving child in Azeroth: It's not my fault, Dad! The Old Gods made me do it!!

Keep that Hamster Wheel Going

It was inevitable that I'd get on the gear treadmill that MMOs hitch their endgame to these days.

And part of it is, admittedly, the desire to not bring up the rear when it comes to DPS.

Yes, I do have a story about that.

About 3 weeks ago, somebody I knew from running pugs whispered me and asked if I was interested in joining their guild's weekly Zul'Gurub run. "Sure," I replied, "which toon to you want me to bring? Mage or Rogue?"

"Bring your Rogue, as we already have several Mages."

Which was fine with me, as at the time I'd several runs of Zul'Gurub under Az, so I knew what was expected of me. My enjoyment in doing the little things tended to pay off with certain bosses in Z'G. So I grabbed a few potions, rebuilt my poison supply, and accepted the summons to Z'G.

I joined the guild's discord channel, but I decided to stay quiet and listen. This wasn't a pug per se, and I counted about 3-4 people who weren't guild members, so I wasn't going to butt in unless there was something relevant.

The first thing I noticed was how smooth the run progressed. "Like a hot knife through butter," is how I described it in my guild's chat. While I did notice I was running around 11-12 in DPS, I knew that I wasn't as well geared as the guild team I was in, but somewhere in the bottom third was okay for me.

Then I noticed just how many people were in the raid.

There weren't 20 people, but 15.

So, I was barely above the healers, and sometimes not even then.

That made me wonder just what on Azeroth was going on, so I started inspecting people in between pulls.

They were all BWL geared, and poor old Az had a mix of T0 and Z'G gear.

Oh.

Now, the guild was very nice and didn't mention my lack of DPS, although naturally during Jin'do I got mind controlled and critted on a healer, taking her out. As I said in my guild chat later, it would figure that my best crit of the night came when I was mind controlled.

***

So after that experience, I decided I was going to have to work harder at getting raid worthy gear. If I was going to be invited to a raid like this, I wanted to pull my own weight.

That meant two things: I was going to have to complete the T0 sets for both Cardwyn and Azshandra, and I was going to have to be more diligent in raiding on both toons.

Saying I was going to do it was one thing, but doing both? Well, that's a different matter. And, I'll confess, it also involves more than a little bit of luck, both good and bad.

One piece of luck dropped my way soon after the previously mentioned Z'G run: an acquaintance in Classic whom I'd run instances with invited me to their guild's weekly MC pug run. The timing wasn't purely ideal for me --I tend to prefer WoW activity later in the evening after dinner-- but I conferred with my wife and we agreed that we could work in dinner prior to the raid, so I wouldn't have to miss sitting down with the family.

The people in the raid were nice --and several of them were older than me, which made me feel good-- but I'd not done Molten Core as a melee DPS before, and it showed.

As in "I was a splat on the ground multiple times" showed.

My acquaintance felt bad for me about that, but I assured her that I was expecting to die a lot. Melee DPS is a completely different mindset from ranged, and Az was (arguably) geared more poorly than Cardwyn. So when you combine poor gear with "up close and personal with the fights", yeah, you can die pretty damn fast.*

Still, it was an enjoyable experience, so I was happy that my acquaintance and I worked out a regular night for Az to raid MC.

That left Cardwyn, and she has her "regular" MC run, as it were, but her issue wasn't so much as that as that her T0 set (theoretically the Magister's set) had a lot of other T0 pieces filling in gaps. Such as the Devout Crown, because nobody wanted it when it dropped and Card's headgear at the time was a green she'd picked up from trash in Maraudon. The same thing goes with other pieces, such as the Warlock T0 legs, that despite the number of times she's run Stratholme Undead she's never been able to replace.

So Card became more aggressive in running instances that would allow her to fill out her T0 set properly.**

***

For a guy who prefers to play casually --and play by his own rules-- this has been a bit of a shock to the system.

Focusing on raiding has a bit of a team sports mentality to it, no matter how laid back or casual the raiding group seems to be. Having played team sports for over a decade in my youth***, I'm not exactly sure how I'll react in the long run to being part of regular raiding groups. I've had good and terrible experiences playing sports, and I've got a very low tolerance for asshats. So far, so good, but I think I'll have to table any real raiding opinions until I've got a couple of months under my belt. By then, I'll likely have graduated to BWL at the very least, and maybe even ventured into AQ20 once or twice.

But we'll see.

Oh, and this past Tuesday's run had a glitch. Az was jumping across the lava during the Ragnaros fight when I "fell through" into this:

You don't need to pay for Shadowlands,
everyone. I just found the WoW afterlife!!

I couldn't even be rezzed, as the raid team couldn't reach me, so I had to release and run back. But my reward for being glitched into oblivion were the Rogue T2 legs that dropped.

*My first death was also my oddest, as I critted so hard on my first swipe that I pulled aggro and died almost instantly on one of those Ancient Core Hounds. I still have no idea how I did that, because I took some time to let the tank get aggro by positioning myself perfectly behind the puppy, but I still managed that massive crit in just the wrong time. Oh well.

**As of this moment, that Devout Crown was finally replaced, but she still needs about 3-4 more pieces to have a complete T0 Magister's set.

***Started with baseball, then spent the Spring playing baseball and the Winter playing basketball, and finally three years of Track and Field in high school. You'd never guess that I played sports now if you saw me, but yes, I was an athlete.

Something Something Something Motorcycle Maintenance

What now seems a long time ago, I fell in love with playing Tetris.

The game had recently been released in the states. and I remember playing the game on a (then new) 286 PC clone that my parents had bought.* I was in college, and when I was visiting home --and I wasn't up to my ears in homework that came along for the ride-- I'd play Tetris as stress relief.

This is the Tetris that I knew.
From abandonwaredos.com.

After a while, I got pretty good at the game, to the point where the game "slowed down" for me. That's typically a sports slang where a player gets good enough at the level of the sport that they're playing in that they can process everything happening around them and make decisions at a faster rate than before. It's an "a-ha!" moment when someone moving up to, say, one of the top flight European leagues in futbol or the NFL in (American) football suddenly is no longer a step behind because they're still trying to figure things out. They simply just do it, with no direct thought process at all.

For me, once I reached that point in playing Tetris, I was able to detach myself from actually playing the game and simply react to whatever shape was being thrown at me. It was a weird feeling, akin to me watching another person playing the game, and I was merely along for the ride. I described it once as entering a Zen state, where people who perform different actions (Tea Ceremonies, for example) slip into a meditative state during those performances.**

I've slipped into that state in other games over the years, most notably Sid Meier's Civ series, but it's been a long time since I could say that I slipped into that sort of state when playing an MMO. Given that MMOs have two competing interests --story and activity-- that frequently demand your direct attention, slipping into a quasi-meditative state doesn't really happen much. However, I found myself looking on as a spectator when I was in a couple of 5-man instances this past weekend.

Both of these instances were in Stratholme, one on the Live side and one on the Undead side, and I've run them enough times that I knew what to do on both co-mains.*** And in both occasions, once we got the first couple of pulls out of the way, all of us in the group had gotten the feel of each other and slipped into our roles without any issues.

Nothing says "Riverdare's Place"
quite like seeing this on the floor.

In each instance, you get into a roll: trash pull, clear, kill any adds, move on. After some pulls, you hit a boss or an event, and you finish and continue on. Same old, same old, the instance pattern from time immemorial. But shortly after the first boss/event in each instance, my consciousness found myself just along for the ride while I moved each toon around, attacked, performed CC actions, and did other things without even thinking about them. It wasn't until later in each instance, when something unexpected happened (an accidental --and temporary-- disconnect, for instance) that I snapped back into awareness and took care of things as usual.

I haven't had that happen since my Wrath days, running instances such as The Nexus or Utgarde Keep, or even the pre-expansion days of SWTOR, where I'd get into that sort of state in Athiss or Cademimu.

Afterward, I wondered about exactly why this happened. Was I simply so used to my roles that I could handle this, or had my toons had gotten powerful enough to allow me the opportunity to distractedly daydream? After all, I'd noticed how easier things got when I went from a fresh L60 to acquiring mostly T0 gear, and I now notice even more the differences between T0 and T0+MC / T0+ZG gear. My DPS might not have gone up as much as I'd have liked, but in the case of Card my mana certainly had gone up, which allowed me to a) drink less, and b) be able to react when things go bad.

While the ability to understand a role and raw power likely are contributing factors, I suspect that my recent encounters with Zen also have to do with simply just letting go of control and reacting by instinct. I am by nature a bit of a control freak; I prepare for meetings**** by trying to think of all potential questions and having answers ready beforehand, and I was not about to embarrass myself (or my friends) in my first Zul'Gurub and Molten Core runs by not knowing what to do, so I spent the 1/2 - 1 hour prior to each by scrambling to read up on each raid. I've been known to do that on instances as well, especially when I'm specifically invited to join them by a friend. I quest in a conservative fashion, because I realize my physical abilities (particularly my fingers and reaction time) are on a slow and steady downward slide as I progress through middle age.

Giving up control like that is hard for me, not because I can't control the narrative, but because I want to prove myself worthy and not create major embarrassing moments that I'll regret later.

But when I do give up control, consciously or not, something magical can happen.

I just need to accept it.

*Don't ask how much it cost --I can't remember-- but I do remember it running MS-DOS 3.3 in a pre-Windows world. And that it had a then roomy 40 MB hard drive, of which several MB were on another partition because 3.3 couldn't handle sizes greater than 33 MB.

**Yes, I actually remained awake during my Eastern Philosophy class, who was taught by a Zen Buddhist. We did cover other Eastern religions, but it was readily apparent that Zen Buddhism section was his favorite.

***There, I said it. They're both equal right now in terms of time played.

****Particularly those which involve presentations. With management in attendance.

The Not-So-Glamorous Farmer's Life

Back in Wrath and I was a part of the (in)famous Horde guild, I used to spend my spare time at max level cruising around the Icecrown Glacier portion of Northrend, farming for mats to be used by the guild. It was a way for me to support the guild without having the time (at the correct time of day) to raid. It also gave me something to do between instance runs while chatting in guild chat.

Ah, the good old days.

Since I began raiding, I've discovered the need to actually focus on little things I'd previously not given much credence to. Such as storing Greater Shadow Protection and Greater Fire Protection potions for Molten Core, or collecting Swiftthistle to brew Thistle Tea. Sure, those little things would also have an impact on running instances (or in the case of Thistle Team, running battlegrounds), but given the risk/reward on an individual BG or 5-man instance is (compared to raids) pretty low, I was fine not worrying about whether I had enough Thistle Tea versus Flash Powder for Vanish.

But raids are an entirely different animal.

My first real raid --the Zul'Gurub run that I got talked into going*-- I ran while being completely oblivious of the preparation people put into raiding. But by the time I was invited to run Molten Core, I had a better idea of what to expect. Still, I spent the hour before the first raid invites went out frantically reading up about all the fights, which highlighted the need for various potions to mitigate damage enough to get the pressure off of the healers.

Thus began my love/hate relationship with using the auction house for my raid prep.

It takes my gold and gives me potions, at alarmingly high markup rates. But the people who put items up for sale know they've got a racket going, because we need their potions if we want to optimize our utility to the group. (Peer pressure can suck at times.)

Now, with a regular raid schedule and increasingly frequent whispers to join raids down a player, I can't simply throw my gold at the auction house on a regular basis and expect my bottom line to survive. Therefore, I've taken up farming again, but this time for items to sell on the AH and for Az to create potions for.

Sorry about that, Az. Not exactly the glamorous Rogue life.

But such is the life of a raider, I suppose.

As is the need to constantly make sure your buffs are all ready to go.

***

I'd always wondered about the constant stream of Dire Maul-North Tribute Run requests in the LookingForGroup channel; after all, my own first experience in DM North wing left a pretty bitter taste in my mouth (and a lot of broken equipment afterward).

But after having been part of a DM North Tribute Run, I now understand the appeal to the raider.

For the uninitiated, a DM North Tribute Run involves a group entering into Dire Maul's North Wing --the Ogre wing-- and avoiding all of the bosses until you get to the last boss. Once there, you kill only the Ogre King, and then better loot than normal runs drop. However, to the raider there's something more important: buffs. You run around to the bosses you didn't kill, and since you became the Ogre King (or Queen, in Card's case) they grant you buffs if you talk to them. Yes, even the drunk Ogre gives you some buffs in the form of booze to drink.

So that's a pretty clever way to get a player to run DM-North long after the gear dropped is obsolete, just like people who run the Stratholme Live area for the Righteous Orbs.

***

I wish I had some funny stories about my foibles raiding, but far too many of them are spur of the moment quips that lose their amusement value when you step away from the raid. But I can guarantee you that there are plenty of funny moments out there. After all, if I weren't having fun, I'd likely not be raiding.

And I guess that's enough.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some farming to do.

*The (now) guildies who talked me into running Z'G should have gone into sales. They were that good at being persuasive.