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.