"Time for Sharing, Class"

I'm not one to bug people online, particularly when I really ought to ask someone for a favor.

I suppose that some of that is my natural introversion, but a lot of it has to do that I was raised in the US Midwest. Pestering people, or calling them up and asking for a favor, is not in your typical Midwesterner's DNA. Saying hello, talking about pleasantries, and maybe agreeing to get together to game or just hang out is just fine. But favors? I'd rather have a root canal instead.

I've been a fan of Dar Williams's work for a couple

of decades now, and when in the song Iowa she

talks about how "we never mean to bother", she's got

the Midwestern ethos nailed.

So when Cardwyn joined a group for Scholomance and we needed a tank, I kind of hoped someone else would come up with one. Typically the tanks I do know and are acquainted with are already busy in a raid or running a 5-man, so I've never had to worry about reaching out like that. But this time, I did actually know someone who was available, and was mentioning to me the other day that they'd not mind tanking for me. Their main is a raid Healer, and he doesn't get a chance to tank that much.

The group leader asked if anybody knew a tank, and after a few moments of wrestling of whether I should bug my friend, I spoke up and said I know one who looks available. The group leader gave me the go ahead to reach out and ask if he was interested, and sure enough he was happy to join. He just needed a few minutes.

Now, to also add to this, I knew the Healer and the Warlock in this group from other pugs I've done, so this felt like one of those awkward social moments that you dread about in middle school: when a member of one friends' group meets another friends' group. When you consider that I was inviting a tank to join, if things went south it would also reflect poorly on me.

I shouldn't have worried.

We had a couple of wipes in that first area in Scholomance because of the group being feared into other mobs, but once we settled on clearing most of the middle mobs by doing pulls up the stairs, things went well. In fact, the only other wipe was when we tried the event for the Paladin fast mount: the first couple of waves went okay, but then --as the group leader put it-- it got "stupid hard real fast".

I actually got to see something I never had before, where the lich Ras Frostwhsiper was turned back into a human. And he was a lot harder to kill than when he was a lich. (Just sayin'.)

The most important part, however, was that the group meshed well, except for the Warrior DPS' tendency to take over aggro by not waiting for the tank to build up enough aggro. Card even got two pieces of L60 gear out of the deal. But I think the biggest part of that evening was that my friend the tank volunteered to heal Dire Maul - East so that I could get that Crystal Water quest done. (Any gear there would be a bonus, really.)

***

"So kids, what have we learned today?"

That it's fine to ask people to help out. They might just appreciate the ask.

This knowledge doesn't necessarily make it a cakewalk to ask people, but it does make it easier to do so.

Darn Midwesterners.

*The composition of the Midwest varies, but the term broadly encompasses the old Northwest Territory ceded to the new United States by Britain in 1783. From that territory, north of the Ohio River, west of the Allegheny Mountains, and east of the Mississippi River, came the states Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas are frequently added to the list, but from my perspective they are more properly considered Plains States that came from the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon in 1803. Still, the Midwestern ethos thrives in those states too.

Just One of Those Days

The other night I had one of those runs that you'd prefer to forget.

A day or two before, this had happened:

Okay, so I'm a bit of a minimalist,
add-on wise.

so I was kind of itching to finally get access to the Crystal Water that L60 Mages can create. Sure, you can use that skill to make a bit of money in-game*, but I'm not one to monetize something that ought to be freely given to people who need it.

Now, I'd not been in Dire Maul North at level before --and not inside it at all since Cata dropped and reworked Dire Maul to a much lower level instance-- but I knew that after it was over the Crystal Water walkthroughs all pointed to getting to the Shen'dralar area for the quest. I did read up on DM-North, just to make certain what I was getting into after a near disastrous run of DM-West on Az, and I kept thinking that a bunch of Ogres should not be that hard to deal with. Unlike the various mobs that gang up on you in DM-West, the variety of mobs in DM-North are pretty vanilla. So when an opportunity opened up for a DM-North run I jumped at the chance.

To make matters even better --from my perspective-- Cardwyn had run with the healer before in an absurdly long Maraudon run and a very well done Blackrock Depths run, so I was confident in how things were going to go. This was primarily a guild group --except for Card-- but in general the guild group runs I've been in have worked out fairly well. When guild group runs talk among themselves in Discord that can be an issue as I don't use Discord***, but I figured that wouldn't be a problem here.

We wiped on the first trash pull.

Well, there were additional issues there. Just as the tank told me to sheep the moon, another mob came at us from behind so right after casting all hell broke loose.

Oh well, just like my first run in DM-W, I thought. No worries.

We proceeded to get ourselves clear of the first area, crept over to the second, and eventually made it through the door. The main concern I had was that we were performing sheep pulls, and before I could get close enough to sheep the ogre in question I'd aggro the rest of the mob. Therefore, I'd cast and haul my butt back to the rest of the group with ogres right on my heels. Since this wasn't working so well, we switched to the tank pulling and I'd sheep before the mob would arrive. We cleared a mob or two, then on another pull we were in the middle of a fight when another mob from over in the corner aggroed on us too.

We wiped there.

We cleared another mob, but I died when the ogre I'd sheeped suddenly popped back up and blasted me before I could sheep it again. I grumbled at myself a bit, but I got a battle rez from the healer and we kept going.

Hugging the wall, we went around the bend toward the next trash mob in the far corner, but before we could get even close the mob across the hall aggroed on me and two hits later I was gone.

With the Druid healer's battle rez on cooldown, I had to run back. By this time I was starting to wonder when I was going to see the "gear in danger of breaking" figure on screen.

The group said they were going to wait for me, which was a good thing as I had to wait while a wandering ogre first blocked my way at the entrance and then he blocked my way at the raised platform. After I finally made it through that, I joined the group while they were in the middle of another pull. I got up there and tried to sheep the caster, but he resisted. I sheeped him again and this time it stuck, but right after I turned to help the rest another group aggroed and that was that.

On the runback I noticed in the group chat "sheep the caster" from the healer. "I did sheep him, but he resisted, so I did it again," I replied.

"I know, I just panicked," the healer replied.

We eventually got all the way up to the top floor and another door, but we didn't have the key. We had to go get the key from a boss outside, so down we went. Somewhere in the middle of that running around the DPS Warrior aggroed a mob on the floor below us --which we were able to dispatch-- but it made me feel a little better that the ogres didn't explicitly have it out for old Cardwyn.

We ran through the second area, but I thought when they said they needed the key from the boss outside I thought they meant here, so I hung back with the Hunter as the boss was moving back right to where we were.

You can kind of guess what happened.

On my runback I was kicking myself for not just following the tank like I usually do.

Well, we took care of the first boss who had the key, but I was following the group back when a mob aggroed on the Hunter and me. He feigned death, and I died. It was only after I died when I noticed "stop" in chat.

"That was my fault," the healer said. "I was saying 'stop' in Discord, forgetting you weren't in there."

"No worries," I replied.

After this, well, the rest of the instance was pretty anti-climactic. Killed mobs, killed the boss, got into the Shen'dralar area, and got the quest for the Crystal Water.

But after it was over, I apologized to the group for my poor showing, as it was easily the worst job I've done in ages.

"Don't worry about it," the healer replied. "There was plenty of blame to go around."

Still, I felt badly about doing such a terrible job. I know those things happen, but I don't want to be known as "that guy" who can't be trusted to do well in group setting.

But I did learn one important thing: those ogres have an obscenely wide aggro radius. When I read about the DM-North tribute run, I thought that it wasn't going to be a big deal, but now I see with the aggro radius those ogres have it'll be quite the challenge.

Oh, and my repair bill? Well, I kind of earned that bill given my poor performance, so I'm okay with it.

***

And oh yeah, the kicker on this was that I explicitly turned off "auto loot" to check the reward gear and yet it still auto looted.

"WTF, I turned that off!" I said.

I have actual independent proof that I did it, because my oldest was watching the last part of the DM-North run and she saw me turn "auto loot" off.

"Hey," she said, "I saw you turn that off. What the fuck?!"

Luckily I killed the auto loot before the greens were looted and I gave the water and healing to the people who requested it. Along with a bit extra.

*When you're L55 and up, the struggle is real when you're constantly trying to drink with L45 water and you're sucking wind with mana because a single fight with a couple of uses of Blizzard can wipe out about 2/3 of your mana. Unless you get lucky at constantly getting best in slot items out of instances, you're going to not be totally optimized until much later, once you have run multiple instances to get "raid ready." I for one am not fond of slowing down the group by constantly having to drink, so I just try to get "reasonably close to 2/3 mana" and then catch up with the group once the tank has a good lock on aggro.

**Creating a portal, however, is a bit different as you need a Rune of Portals to create a single port, and I don't have any issues recouping your losses there.

***My voice carries even at normal volume, so accidentally waking the entire house up because I got excited isn't necessarily a good idea.

Being a Slave to the Mantra

Remember Blizzard's mantra, "bring the player not the class"?

The seeds of that mantra lay in their design for Vanilla, and you can see that in operation whenever the raiding guilds put out ads in game. Guilds looking for Warlocks, Holy Paladins, etc. are currently seen all over Myzrael-US, and are typically accompanied by "will take any class with exceptional players" as a catch-all just to make sure they're getting the best potential raiders possible. Raid composition is important for the success of the raid, and that unique composition requirement can be found even in 5-man instances.

Take Sunken Temple, for one well known instance.

Sure, you can have a primarily ranged DPS group and do quite well in almost all of Sunken Temple, but when you get to the Shade of Eranikus at the end, his sleep action pretty much requires an off tank to pick up tanking while the main tank is out cold.* I was part of a group without a tank spec (yes, a Healer + 4 DPS run because the tank had to bug out midway through) who managed to take out Erkanikus, but we got extremely lucky in the process that we had another DPS who could effectively off-heal (Shadow Priest), so we were able to heal through the designated tank's sleeping.

The same thing goes for Blackrock Depths, where you put two or three Mages in a group and you can clean up on the Lycaeum (aka the "group check") room filled with rapidly respawning Anvilrage Reserve enemies. Even if you don't have such a composition, having a Stealth class being able to roam through the room and mark the few Flame Keepers out there can be priceless to the success of a BRD run.

What got me thinking of the "Bring the player not the class" mantra, however, was a Lower Blackrock Spire run I was in the other day.

***

I hadn't been in LBRS since, oh, 2012 or so, and my first run through it (using Az) was pretty rough. It's not that the players weren't skilled, but since none of us save for the Healer had been in there since forever, it took us a long while to get into a groove. Still, we were highly dependent on the Ret Pally for any rezzes, because a Resto Druid only has a Battle Rez.

The second time I got into LBRS however --with Cardwyn-- turned out to be the equivalent of a speed run. It's not that we were trying to do a speed run, because we were chatting and having a good old time, but it just ended up that way. Only one player death, and even when we had an extra mob crash into us during a fight or two we turned out okay.

I mentioned how smooth the run was to the Healer afterward, and he said that the group composition was really good. Several players could remove various debuffs** which took the pressure (and mana usage) off of the Healer, and the ranged DPS (Card and a Warlock) could trade off of each other and mostly keep any ads or runners at bay.

That brings me back to the Blizzard mantra, because these experiences highlighting the utility of certain classes over others is likely what drove Blizzard into eliminating the unique capabilities of each class over the years' worth of expacs out there. If it was perceived as a limitation to bringing a class to a raid, it was eventually removed. Such as the Battle Rez only capability of Resto Druids I mentioned above. Or eliminating the ability of the Rogue to select various poisons for various situations. Or extending classes (such as Druid, Shaman, or Paladin) to other races, so that Horde and Alliance essentially have the same makeup, class-wise.

Some tweaks to the class structures from Vanilla to Burning Crusade were inevitable, and many people I've run with in instances keep saying how BC was their favorite expac for various reasons. But at the same time, they've also said that Blizz has gone too far relying upon their mantra, and that class uniqueness should matter.

And the more and more I've delved into Classic, the more I've come around to that idea. "Bring the player not the class" works to a point, but when it becomes the be-all-end-all of class design you lose sight of what makes a class unique. And for my money, uniqueness matters.




*Unless you have a Shaman who can counter that sleep action, something the Alliance doesn't have in Classic.

**At one point during the run, the Healer asked whether I could counter a Magic debuff. "No," I said. "I only have Remove Curse." "That doesn't make any sense," he replied. "If there's one class that you'd think would be able to remove a Magic debuff, it'd be the Mage class."

I Need a Vacation from my Vacation

Well, Blapril is over.

And if you want a quick "lessons learned" response to Blapril, then it's this: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I posted 18 times in April, by far my largest individual output in any month for PC. At the same time, the sheer volume of posts wore me out because I spent more time writing than enjoying myself. And when writing ceases to be enjoyable, that means the quality of output inevitably declines.

What also declined were the number of pageviews to PC for individual posts.

Sure, the total pageviews to PC went up, but the number of eyeballs on a specific post went down as the month wore on. Given that most of PC's regular readers are also bloggers, it only goes to show that the grind was getting to them too.

***

And, I have to admit, that Blapril pretty much didn't make a blip outside of the merry band of MMO/Gamer bloggers out there. It's not like I logged into WoW or LOTRO and found people talking about Blapril at all. It was pretty much an exercise in posting among a small group of people, no more no less.

A good portion of why it didn't make much of a blip outside the blogger community is that, well, blogs are pretty much on the outs these days as far as social media is concerned. It used to be that you'd go to blogs to get info that you can now find better at other locations. But blogs are also about telling stories --fictional or not-- and in a Tik-Tok world we're writing manuscripts on vellum.

At times like this, grabbing an ale at a local

tavern with friends sounds like a good idea.

This pretty much leaves that doing Blapril for reasons other than your own is that you're setting yourself up for a letdown.

***

Was I let down by this?

Not really. I mean, I knew going in that I was trying to see if I could do it. And, for the most part, I was able to get reasonably close to a goal of posting once a day. Well, I came twice as close as my closest month of output, and I'm not including last month's fiction boosted output. After a certain point I decided it was best if I just posted every other day, as otherwise I'd have no time for any actual gaming. And no gaming means Red isn't a happy person.

Additionally, I don't have people randomly coming up to me in-game and saying "Hey, are you that Redbeard guy, the blogger?" Which would be mildly embarrassing, to say the least. After all, I think Ancient is the only other blogger I know who is on Myzrael-US, and while I still do have toons on the SWTOR server that Shintar plays on I'm rarely on that particular server.

But I do believe that --for personal reasons-- pushing myself harder at blogging was a good thing. It makes me respect published authors that much more, because they frequently hold down another job (at least) in addition to writing. That doesn't mean that I think I'm as good or any better than they are, because there's a reason why they're published and I'm not*, but I can see how dedicated they were toward realizing their dream of being published while managing job, family, and other time commitments.

So, thank you, Blapril, for the motivation. And thank you, other bloggers (and other authors), for showing what the end result can be.

And thank you, readers, for hanging in there. (You know who you are!!)

#Blapril2020



*Hint: the quality of writing plays a large part in that.

A Musical Finish

In honor of the end of Blapril, I thought I'd post a music video from the past with heavy fantasy overtones.

You know, Ronnie James Dio.

The man himself.
Pic is from The Guardian,
attributed to Yui Mok/PA

But when I was searching for the right video to post, found this cover of Dio's Holy Diver by the band Burning Witches:

80's Metal lives on.

I was very impressed by their sound. How on earth haven't I heard of them before?

Anyway, here's the original Ronnie James Dio version:

Now I really feel old, because I remember

watching this on MTV.

So here's to the end of Blapril!!


#Blapril2020

What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?

Woody: What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?
Norm: All four cheeks and a couple of chins.
--from Cheers episode "Snow Job", 1984


One of the big reasons why I haven't joined a guild since my original time in WoW Retail has been the spectacular implosion of a guild I was in.... Twice.

Yes, the same guild blew up not once, but twice.

I wasn't one of the people directly involved or instigated the destruction, but after the second implosion I took Quintalan and Neve and split. Were it not for the Alliance guild that my other toons were in*, I'd have been guildless since roughly mid-Cataclysm onward.

I had absolutely no desire to get in the middle of --or, for that matter, be the adult in the room-- what seemed to me to be middle school drama. After all, I get enough drama at home, in the my neighborhood, or at work, so why have it in my gaming?

For the most part that has worked out well for me, especially since the MMO experience in ESO, LOTRO, and SWTOR isn't very dependent upon guilds at all. However, there are times when I do miss logging in and being greeted with "Red!!!" from about a half dozen or so people.** That connection of being with people who like you just for who you are is priceless.

Yes, I'm old enough to have watched

Cheers when it was first on television.
This supercut of Norm's quips when
entering the bar has always stuck with me.

Last night, I'd made plans to connect with another player to run an instance at 8 PM server time. He, like myself, is guildless, but we tend to get into groups together and we accumulated a friends list that is pretty similar. So when I logged in he whispered me and we grouped up to hopefully get a run in.

Well, that didn't work out so well. We quickly got a group of four together, needing only a tank (as usual), but then the DPS Warrior dropped group without a word and then a few minutes later the Hunter begged out.

So we decided to simply work on his quest for the Abyssal Dukes in Silithus.

I'll be perfectly honest: as a Wrath baby, I'd never seen more than maybe a dozen people at one time in that zone until last night. The place was a nuthouse, as both Horde and Alliance groups were rep grinding in advance of the AQ Opening event. That made acquiring the gear to summon the elementals a bit harder than usual, as everybody was competing for the same Twilight's Hammer cultists that dropped the gear. But eventually we got through enough of the grind that my friend decided he was going to go to the auction house and get the last piece or two so we could summon the Abyssal Duke.

Yes, we were intending to try to two man it, as we didn't have any issues taking down the lesser elementals as a Resto Druid and a Rogue. However, before we could bug out to the AH, we paused to watch another pair (Warrior tank and Mage) in the process of taking on one of the Dukes.

When I saw the Warrior tank get launched by the Duke about a good couple hundred feet (in game), I said in chat "There's no way we could pull this off with just the two of us."

Apparently my friend thought the same thing, so he reached out to the two of them to see about joining up. He dropped group, got invited, and then he in turn invited me to the group.

It was then when I realized who the Warrior and Mage were.

I'd run with them back when we were all in the L20s and L30s through several instances.

"Hey guys! I've not seen you two in months!"

 "Az!!"

"Hey Az!! How've you been?"

We spent a minute or two catching up and then we proceeded to summon and then take down the Duke, completing a quest that we started on 3+ hours ago.

We chatted a bit more then waved goodbye, going our separate ways.

It was then that I realized that I'd missed those guild type interactions.

***

To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not planning on joining a guild anytime soon. Not for a lack of invites, but because I'm trying to play on my terms. I'm not really interested in raiding, although I would like to follow the Onyxia line all the way through, and there are enough players out there that seem mystified by that premise*** that I'm not really interested in having to deal with that in a guild.

And there is still the matter of that middle school drama that even erupts on the LookingForGroup chat. I know enough good people throughout all of the major guilds on the server that when somebody trashes the guild on chat I have to resist the urge to step into the drama and tell people to not trash an entire guild based on the behavior of one or two people. "I'm not an assistant principal," I have to keep telling myself, "The guild can take care of themselves." Then I imagine what it'd be like having that guild name above Az or Card, having to defend myself from that crap, and I take a deep breath and say "no thanks" to joining a guild.





*This was pre-Azshandra (Retail Version) for reference.

**None of the guilds I was in was ever very large, so the concept of gigantic guilds of 200+ people just seems to be almost obscene. By comparison, the mini-Reds' elementary school consisted of roughly 450 students from Kindergarten through 5th Grade, so when you get to guild sizes of beyond 40-50 people you start to lose a connection to everybody in the guild.

***"You don't want to raid? But this is WoW!" was the answer I got when somebody asked me about joining a guild. Yeah, that guy didn't end up on my friends list.

Blurring the Lines

Sunshine has streamed through our house the past few days, lightening the mood here in Chez Redbeard.

You never quite realize how much the lack of clear skies can depress a mood until you find yourself mired in the middle of it.

Back in 1997, I spent an entire Summer working through my own version of crunch, arriving at work at 4 AM and leaving at 8 or 9 PM. Wash, rinse, repeat. At one point I joked that I could walk out the door in mid-October and not return until after New Years, and still have enough excess hours left over to take another week off.

I'd leave in the morning before dawn and go home as the sun was setting in the west. The hours in between were spent in a desperate rush to try to stay one step ahead of the developers as I was building testcases, testing code against them, and then debugging the results. On top of that, I was converting the homebrewed test harnesses and reporting scripts --typically written in Korn Shell-- into Perl and then into C just so I could get enough throughput to keep up with the demands of the job.

At one point in mid-July I sat in a co-worker's empty window cubicle, sipping coffee and watching the sun creep over the wooded hills in the distance, and I wondered just what the hell I was doing here anyway. Sure, management had promised bonuses and an extra week of vacation for the project I was working on*, but a few weeks prior --on a week that I'd worked 89 hours ahead of a holiday weekend-- the exhausted technical lead had left after pulling an all-nighter, fallen asleep at the wheel of his car, and crashed into a parked car on the side of the road. Luckily for everybody concerned he emerged without a scratch; he told me later that one moment he was driving into the community square and the next thing he remembered was the airbag deflating. But still, it was a sobering moment for me.

I've been wrestling with the question of what the price of work is ever since.

***

Two years later there were similar demands made of my time, but with an infant in the house I finally found some measure of spine to push back on what management's expectations were of me versus being there for my wife and daughter. Maybe reducing my hours to a "manageable" 55-60 hours/week doesn't seem like much, but compared to the 80 hour work weeks I had been pulling that Summer of 97 it was heaven. But the realization that the crunch would never truly go away is what motivated me to find a new job, which I eventually landed a couple of years later.

Fast forward from then to now, and those days truly are a fading memory.

There are some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, believing that I have reports to get out and the app build had crashed in the night, and I had to figure out which code change broke the app before the devs got to work. Then I'd remember where I was, breathe a sigh of relief, and roll over.

But still, the balance between work and play has blurred over the years. Certainly this has been accelerated for many people by the ongoing pandemic, but I've had this issue ever since I began to work from home. My work and home life have sufficiently blurred that my boss is constantly pestering me to shut off the laptop when I reach 5 PM, but there's always just one more thing to take care of before I finish.

***

And now we come to my other "job", the blog.

I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for Blapril2020 --or at least I thought I did-- but I've found the dedication to this a lot more than I ever did for NaNoWriMo. Right now I'm on target for writing a post on 17/30 days in April, which is the busiest this blog has been since May 2010**, and back then we had three writers at PC. (Please don't read them. They're really badly written.) I wasn't sure I'd be able to maintain that output, but once I got started my notion of duty kicked in, and you can guess the rest.

I've wondered just how much this Blapril will change things about my approach to blogging; for a while I was concerned that I'd not have enough things to write about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.*** I was also concerned that the blog would simply turn into a "Travels with Red" event where PC becomes a personal self-absorbed blog in the same manner that some influencers have, but I hope that hasn't been the case. But about 15 days or so ago I was thinking to myself  "I don't think I can keep doing this" and now the end is in sight.

Is the slog worth it? I'm not sure.

It's not like I've experienced demands placed on my time before. After all, I have plenty of experience dealing with insane work experiences (see above), and by comparison this isn't that big a deal.  But still, this does turn gaming into a version of work, and that's something I've become acutely aware of this past month.

As my blogging output has gone up, my enjoyment with gaming has gone down a bit. Not that I don't have a good time goofing around in WoW or Stardew Valley or any other game, but I'm always looking for an interesting story to write about. In as much the same way that someone who gets really good at music never really approaches listening to music the same way again, I've found a similar experience with gaming.

I think that when this is over I'd like to go back to a more normal level of blogging, which for me is 1-2 posts per week. I can handle that amount of demand on my writing, and it also means that I can spend more time simply enjoying games for their own sake rather than always looking for that angle to write about. Plus, it also gives me time to tinker with some other writing I'm doing, because Cardwyn can be a pretty harsh taskmaster when I'm not writing about her.

Maybe with some more distance from Blapril I'll be able to answer the "is it worth it?" question better, but we'll see.

#Blapril2020




*And yes, they did deliver. This post would have an entirely different feel to it if they didn't. Trust me.

**There were 22 posts that month, which is the current record for posts on PC. The only times we've come close to that were March 2020 --driven primarily by One Final Lesson-- and this month.

***And I did it without resorting to politics or name calling, either.


EtA: Cleaned up some grammar and restored half of a sentence that I'd accidentally deleted.