In tabletop RPGs I tend to play Clerics. I started on that path when I was in college and we needed a Cleric to heal the party, and it kind of stuck.
In MMOs, I have off-spec healed before, but healer classes and I don't often mesh. I leveled my original Paladin as Holy up until... Outland maybe? But before then, my very first toon was a Priest who I assumed would be like a D&D Cleric.
Oh, was I wrong.
Low level WoW Priests do not handle hand to hand combat well. From... Reddit, maybe? All over the net, really.
Still, I have a certain fondness for people who can play the healing classes well, and this Meme Monday is dedicated to them.
Pretty sure this does NOT apply to FF XIV. From Pinterest.
It's not that I don't trust healers, it's that I don't always trust other people. There's a history to unpack there. From imgflip.
I'm pretty sure I've made healers look like Elrond before. My questing buddy denies it though. From Pinterest.
But sometimes the Healer actually gets an "atta-boy" for their work in a group. And their brains freeze up. From Pinterest.
And one bonus Healer meme...
On those times when Briganaa healed a 5-person group...
Longtime YouTube RPG personality, Matthew Colville, put out a video 3+ months ago about how modern D&D is not really designed with a specific style of role playing in mind, in the same way that Call of Cthulhu is designed for Cosmic Horror or Paranoia for... Well, I'd call it "The Insanity of Bureaucracy", but "Something like the movie Brazil" works too. But what made me sit up and take notice was when Matt described Old School D&D as Survival Horror.
Matt's premise, that dungeon delving and keeping track of things such as torches and other minutae that make a foray into a dungeon an exercise in ongoing tension, puts the initial incarnations of D&D in the Survival Horror style of gaming. Your party isn't all powerful, you have limited amounts of critical items such as food, water, and light, and you have to balance your ability to delve deeper versus your ability to get out before your supplies run out.
In that vein, I could call the Survival option of Minecraft "Survival Horror" as well.
And believe me, that thought has crossed my mind more than once these past few weeks.
If you've been watching Carbot Animation's Elden Ring videos, this will look awfully familiar. Just insert screaming. From gfycat.
***
The deeper I got into Minecraft, the more I realized just how similar Minecraft is to being on a PvP MMO server. Your head has to constantly be on a swivel, even in the daylight, because you're never quite sure when a Creeper or another monster will just appear --or be hanging out under a tree-- and can cut you down before you can say "What happened?"
I guess that leads me to the fifth revelation about Minecraft: Don't be concerned about leveling up, because you're going to die anyway and lose your levels.
Fatalism very quickly set in during those first several hours of game time, where I realized that if I was going to survive I was going to have to clear out some space and build above ground. I didn't really need to go above ground in general, but I felt that it made the most sense to be able to have a tall building where I could at least see if it's dark or not outside. But to clear that space, I had to live with dying a lot.
Plus I had to cover up the "mine" I made, which was my first shelter.
And every time a Creeper exploded in my general vicinity, a hole opened up again, which meant that the long term solution was to basically fill that damn thing back in.
Which meant strip mining a nearby hill and using that dirt to fill in the mine itself.
/sigh
Eventually, I built a tower made out of birch blocks and each evening I'd seal myself inside. I had little openings where I left gaps in the blocks for a cheap window, and I learned my sixth revelation about Minecraft: If you make your windows two blocks big, a monster can get inside.
Like a @#$%-ing spider.
So that became my reality: hiding out in my birch tower in the darkness and the rain, and clearing the area some more during the day.
My long nights were spent trying to figure out what I could do next. Surely I could craft more items than what few pieces I already had, so I read some more of the How to Play section and noted that I could create a workbench --apparently without tools, no less-- and from there I ought to make more items. So I created a workbench and stuck it in a corner.
Now, the instructions said to click on it, but... how close did you have to be to actually do that? I kept accidentally putting down blocks (which required me do break them down again) before I realized I had to basically stand right next to it. Then the builder's window came up with far more options than before, and I could create wooden items such as an axe, a shovel, and a sword.
Uh, a wooden shovel? And a wooden axe to chop down trees?
Me: "Sheesh. Can't you all give it a rest? I'm not even playing WoW right now!"
Me: "@#$%-ing Paladins."
Whatever. I still built them, because even a wooden sword is better than a pointed stick.
Just ask Monty Python.
Okay, I thought. I've got this. I have some basic tools, I've cleared out enough space to survive walking out of my tower, and I even built a door for the damn thing. Now, what else to build?
It was then that the seventh revelation reared its ugly head: monsters will spawn inside your dwelling.
I discovered this when I went inside my tower for the night, saw darkness creep over the land, and I got up to get a drink. I came back to discover I was dead.
"What the hell!" I exclaimed as I rezzed and ran (!) back to my tower.
I reentered to find a Zombie inside, who promptly killed me before I could grab my weapons and fight back.
So.
Third time's the charm, right? I reentered and finally took the zombie down, then I had a chance to stew over what happened.
Just what did happen? Did it come inside while I wasn't paying attention and left a door open? No, I'd been very diligent about that. So... What?
I guessed that it had to have spawned inside, maybe if I wasn't there when darkness closed in or something.
Reading the How to Play section again, I read up on Nightfall. The last sentence caught my eye: "Also be sure to light up the area with torches, it may save your life." I'd presumed that it was talking about outside, but what if it meant that monsters would spawn inside?
And how the fuck do I create torches?
Coal? Oh, for fuck's sake.
That meant I was going to have to dig until I found some coal and then I could make torches.
***
"I apparently suck at Minecraft," I told my questing buddy that night.
She chuckled and mentioned that she happened to know some kids of hers who'd love to chat with me about Minecraft.
"Oh, I can imagine," I replied.
"Maybe you should try the sandbox mode."
"Sigh. My oldest said the same thing."
My mining adventure looked pretty grim, since all the digging that I'd done had only landed me some cobblestone and dirt. But in a rare stroke of luck, the next day I dug in just the right spot and found some some coal. I grabbed a couple of chunks, made some torches, then just kind of plunked them on each floor of my tower and hoped for the best.
If you'll note, I also made some stone swords and axes as well.
So far, so good.
***
Outside of behaving as if I'm some strip mining corporation with a penchant for mass deforestation, I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Now that I've got the basic tools down, I can now try to mine to find ore and gradually expand my capabilities.
The unknowns:
How long items last. I know from sad experience --and truly bad timing-- that items will gradually weaken and break through use, but I don't know whether that includes wooden blocks. Or stone blocks, in much the same way as fencing in Stardew Valley eventually crumbles. That would kind of suck to login and suddenly discover half of my birch tower crumbling to dust beneath me.
Just what other monsters are out there. I've already encountered Zombies, Creepers, The Drowned, Spiders, Slender Man (?), Skeletons, and Witches (?), I'm not sure what else is out there. I don't have any ranged weapons, so I run like hell from Skeletons and Witches who can hit me from distance with arrows and spells. I just have this bad feeling that some truly big monsters are out there, lurking, and I'll discover them the same way I usually do: by dying to them.
What effect things such as fire might do. I've played enough Rimworld to not be completely clueless, and I know that one of the worst feelings in the world in Rimworld is when a wildfire starts outside of your safe area. I would not be shocked at this point to see wildfires spreading like crazy because OF COURSE THEY WILL.
Whether I can ever actually see my toon from the front. I've tried the traditional MMO view of swinging around using the left mouse button to see what my toon looks like with armor on, but no dice. Surely there has to be a way to view my toon, but I haven't figured it out yet. Then again, The Outer Worlds never had an option for a 3rd person view, which is the main reason why I didn't play the game.
How to eat. Maybe I'll start working on that part, given that I can actually survive for longer than a day. But campfires require coal for some weird reason, so unless a furnace doesn't need coal to cook I might have to do a lot more digging.
One big question remains: now that I've got a functional shelter, a fence around it (not sure just how much it helps, but it's there), some tools, and some armor, now what? My immediate needs have been met, but I know I'm just tempting fate if I stay out in the rain or after dark, so I can't really explore very far. I may have to create alternate shelters if I want to go exploring, in the same way as any guerilla group has multiple hideouts. (See: the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War, or to use a Fantasy equivalent, the Noldor's hideouts in The Silmarillion.)
I guess in one respect, I'm a poor candidate for playing an open world sandbox game such as Minecraft. While I can appreciate what goes on in trying to figure the game out, and believe me, there's plenty of gaps for things such as "just how DO you eat food?" which isn't covered in the How to Play section, once I get past a certain point my motivation for playing kind of drops to the floor. I mean, I've got the house, the weapons, the armor, and even a freaking door, so why create anything more ostentatious? Maybe that's why my motivation for raiding and achievements in MMOs isn't really all that great: it's not that I can't put the work in, it's me questioning whether the work is worth it in the long run.
I remember a suggestion I once read about graduate students, in which the science writer in question* suggested that a way of training grad students to be better at teaching others was an addendum to their requirements for graduation: in order to receive their degree, the grad student had to accost a layperson on the street and explain to them exactly what their dissertation was about.
Having gotten my degree in the sciences, and having had more than my share of obviously brilliant professors who couldn't explain their way out of a paper bag**, I became enamored of this idea. And decades later, having tried --and failed-- to explain to coworkers in IT that they need to write better documentation, I sometimes feel like a lone swimmer going against the tide of shitty wordsmithing.
My experiences with IT documentation is just like that in gaming. I've had the experience of reading wonderful game instruction manuals which I detailed a year or so ago, but I've also read my share of "manuals" that were abjectly terrible at explaining the basics.
And of course if you wanted to learn how to play MMOs, well... Don't bother the official website; go visit a third party side such as Wowhead or Icy Veins (for WoW, naturally). Those sites will be... kinda sorta better... at explaining the game from a certain point of view (mostly raiding, some PvP), but even then they make a ton of suppositions that a newbie won't get.
***
To understand my opinion on the matter better, when I was at my old position at work last year, I had a big argument with several of my coworkers about documentation. I'd put together a document with extensive screenshots, detailing all the steps people must take to get an account created on our LINUX servers, and my overseas coworkers basically laughed at the document. "You don't understand," I told them, "but I see this every goddam day. People who have never touched a LINUX server and only know the words Red Hat or SuSE from some sales pitch expect to get access to these servers, and they don't know shit about the process that their own company put into place to do that. If you don't want them contacting you at all hours of the day and night because they got your name from somebody who knew somebody and 'They want access NOW because they WANT it', you need to give them the explanations and tools that will help out. NOT just a three or four line instruction set, because they don't understand the underlying assumptions. YOU all know LINUX, so this isn't an issue for you, but THEY DON'T."
My boss understood what I was trying to accomplish, and before he left --a few months before me-- he was pushing to get this doc published. But bureaucracies being bureaucracies, it never did.***
Still, that experience, which was repeated by watching people be clueless in MMOs with only the "Get gud scrub" or "Go read Wowhead" guidance over the years, had me stewing for a long time.
Then I saw the beginning of this series by Razbuten on YouTube:
And I thought, "Hey, that's a good idea!"
I mean, I know it would suck for a complete noob to figure stuff out on their own without guidance, but it also would provide --front and center-- what I was complaining about with the lack of good instruction in video games. Processes such as figuring out how to jump in Shovel Knight that we --as gamers-- could easily figure out, aren't as intuitive as we might think. And likewise, understanding MMOs may come naturally to an MMO player, but a new player doesn't have that to lean on. They have to figure it out themselves, based on what the game provides. Or be told where to get a game manual outside of the game itself in order to figure this out.
After all, people perusing the Mystery or Horror section of a bookstore might remember that "Hey, there's probably a magazine or book about this video game I'm interested in" and go check to see if there's a "Complete Manual" there to buy.
I got this for my oldest's SO about a year ago, who'd been perusing it, only to discover afterward that it was already out of date. So it sat on our coffee table since that point. And no, I've never looked inside.
But when was the last time someone checked out a print manual of, say, World of Warcraft, let alone going to an actual bookstore?**** Or maybe they'd try to find something online, but can you imagine going to Wowhead for the first time and trying to figure out the basics of World of Warcraft from it?
This design practically screams "busy" and "early 2000s".
You could say "Hey, there's a 'Guides' tab, let me select 'Classic' on there and see what happens."
Uh... Right.
I looked at the "Lore" section and, well, you kind of have to know what's going on already to get much out of that area too.
Look, I could go into more detail on Wowhead and other sites and how a completely new player can end up more confused than before, but that's not the point. The point is that there is data online, but the underlying assumptions are such that you have to know what to look for, or at least understand the context of what is being presented. If my wife were to suddenly announce that she wanted to play WoW in the same way that she did when trying out Breath of the Wild*****, I suspect that unless I held her hand all the way through she'd never make it much farther than the starting zones (Classic or Retail), much less max level. Besides, the easier game of the two, WoW Classic, requires a game time commitment at minimum; there simply is no way of trying out Classic for free.
But this video series did give me an idea. Why don't I try this out myself?
After all, I'm not a fan of online guides (or add-ons such as Questie) when playing video games, but I do have a long history of referencing official documentation, so why not try a video game I've never played before, using only what the game company provided me, and see if I can figure it out.
Enter Minecraft.
***
The game had come with my PC, and it was merely sitting there, unused. I'll admit there was a bit of snobbery involved with my reluctance to pick it up, because the game wasn't what I typically play. Sure, I do play builder type games, but none so wide open as this. Usually there's a more defined structure to the game, such as with My Time At Portia or Sim City or Cities: Skylines.
Plus Minecraft is also incredibly popular, even among people who don't play video games, which means that there's a ton of resources out and about on "how to do things right".
Which I'm disinclined to use anyway, as guides aren't what I'm interested in.
But that doesn't mean I'm some macho type who doesn't read the instructions before assembling something, I just believe in following the instructions as presented, as opposed to having to go find "the REAL manual" from people who wrote guides and posted YouTube videos on how to "properly" play a game.
You get the idea. Except for the Folding Ideas video, which pointed out the underlying assumptions to the game that look suspiciously like Colonialism. Which is fine, because at the time I watched it I had no interest in actually playing Minecraft.
Of course, if there's confusion out of the instruction manual for a video game, the stakes are a wee bit less than if you're putting together office furniture (don't ask how I know that), so if I screw up in a single player game the only person I hurt is myself.
But hey, Minecraft is beloved by kids and adults, so it ought to be fairly easy to pick up and play, right?
Right?
Yeah, about that...
***
"I think you ought to play in Creative mode."
My oldest informed me of that when I mentioned about trying Minecraft to her. My wife had no opinion at all, since she doesn't play video games much, but I value my kids' opinions.
And I did briefly consider it, but... Come on. I've raided in Classic WoW. I finished Baldur's Gate back in the day, and I regularly play (and win) at Civ IV and other 4X games.
Yeah, why not?
So I went with a "Normal" Survival World.
What, you expected another name?
Ignoring that yes, I've been sitting on this post for a while as I've delved into the game, I figured that there'd be some sort of tutorial or something. Failing that, there was likely a Help section that I could use to figure things out.
Well...
As you can tell, I figured out the Dressing Room portion of the game. I didn't like the semi-gray beard option, so I just ran with the ol' Redbeard look.
In the Settings section I found what I was looking for:
Between that and the Keyboard and Mouse settings, I should be good.
It was at about this point in the game where I discovered the first big revelation about Minecraft: the game does not pause when you bring up a window such as this one.
How did I learn that?
Yep. That's where this came from.
Apparently time continued --at a rapid rate-- and the next thing I knew it was dark in my world and the Zombies came out. Oops.
So... I remembered that first stanza of the How to Play section, saying "At night monsters come out, so make sure to build a shelter before that happens."
I figured that I died, so go restart and build a shelter.
But I respawned into darkness and was immediately chased by Zombies and things that I can only describe as "Explodies". And in the time it takes you to try to get something --anything-- mined or chopped down or whatnot, I died.
Over and over and over.
WTF.
So I spent my entire first half an hour in Minecraft running for my life.
The second big revelation about Minecraft came when dawn broke: while most monsters may die in sunlight, they can hide under a tree --or a forest-- and still live.
Because naturally I spawned in a forest, so the Zombies laughed in the face of the sun and ran after me again.
Which led to my third big revelation about Minecraft: not all monsters die in the Sunlight, and monsters can jump in the water and survive.
The Explodies --officially called Creepers based on my numerous deaths to them-- survive in the daylight. And they love to come up to you from behind while you're busy getting resources and suddenly BOOM! You're dead.
Double WTF.
I decided I was going to at least live long enough to make a shelter --any shelter-- and survive the night just to prove I'm not an idiot. So I chopped down some wood, if "chopping" is the right word for using the left mouse button to thwack a tree until a block pops off, dug up some dirt, and started learning how to place blocks. But because I was in a forest, I still had fatal issues with monsters coming after me even in the daylight, so I ran until I found a (relatively) clear space near a river's edge. I then began to emulate the Dwarves, digging into a hill, and then I decided to enclose myself in said mine/hill/whatever as sunset was upon me.
And there I sat for about 5 minutes, feeling very foolish. I could hear grunts outside, and I realized that they might try to break down the "walls" of my dirt hideout, so I began digging further into the hill.
Sorry, I don't have any screenshots of this because I was too antsy to get away from the monsters who were more deadly than what I've encountered in quite a while. But trust me, I was digging frantically enough that eventually I realized I had to take a peep outside if I was going to leave my cocoon. So I came over to where I sealed myself in and hacked out a block.
Daylight.
It was raining, but it was daylight.
So I mined another block and went outside.
Which is how I had my fourth big revelation about Minecraft: monsters don't despawn in the rain.
This again.
Sigh. This was harder than I thought. But it was what I wanted, wasn't it? Learn the hard way, with the tools that Mojang (aka Microsoft at this point) provided, trying to emulate what it's like if you don't rely upon external Wikis and YouTube videos and whatnot to play an open world game.
*Boy, did I try hard to find this, but no dice.
**One famous time in an after school seminar, one of the professors brought in a bunch of overhead slides and was alternately bumbling over and droning on about his research, the chair of the department who was sitting next to me leaned over with a sly smile on his face. "Perry Potpourri..." he whispered, making a play on the professor's name.
***What I've heard is that they never distributed the doc after I left, and they've come to regret that. I still have my original copy, but even if they came crawling back and asked me for it I'd be inclined to tell them I deleted it. Let them figure it out for themselves.
****Before people get pissy at me, I go to bookstores all the time. It's just that I know I'm very much in the minority these days.
*****My kids gave it the ol' college try and worked with her during her attempts at playing, but after a couple of weeks she simply gave up and went back to Mario Kart.
I suppose I could do anything I want to on this blog, but I do try to have themes for these Meme Mondays. But sometimes, you know, that gigantic catch-all of "Miscellaneous" sounds like a good idea.
Again.
And again.
I'd have figured the "meow" would have done it, but the players likely thought that the DM was being really immersive. From 9gag.com.
Alas, I know which side I'm on. From me-me.
Sure, it's been around since Classic launched, but it's still a great one. From funny-memess.
My youngest is a percussionist and also plays D&D, so... Brilliant! From slaughterkeys.tumblr.com.
No, not Storm, the character from X-Men, but a real storm.
As in, "conditions are right today for severe thunderstorms."
Yes, that's what Spring is like in the Midwest; we're kind of used to it. Still, there are memes... But apparently storms are a common meme in politics, so...
I selected these so you don't have to deal with those.
Yeah yeah yeah... From makeameme.org.
The older I get the more I agree with this. From imgflip.com.
Oh hush, Oprah. From imgflip.com again.
I could get behind this, except that knowing my luck it would be the day that all we see is the "threat" of rain. From pinterest.
One of the odd things I've noticed about the WoW Classic community is the willful ignorance that a certain subset of the community has. I know, I shouldn't be reading Trade Chat or LFG Chat, but when someone starts blathering about how the current Looking For Group tool is "no different" than the old one in original Wrath, I get annoyed.
"No, it's not," I replied. "The old one was totally random; you were selected automatically and spat out with a group. This one, you control who you select." I didn't even mention the Battlegroup part (thanks again for the reminder, Shintar), but I was ready in case someone decided to try to counter me.
Nobody did; in a rare case of me actually "winning" an argument online, I actually had the last word.
Of course, this argument didn't come out of nowhere, as people were arguing about "When WoW started going downhill." Some said Cataclysm, others said "That Panda expansion, Mists."
It all depended upon whether they were talking about subscriber numbers or whether the game no longer felt like the game, I guess, but my belief that the seeds of WoW's downfall were already sown by the time Cataclysm came along and blew up the Old World is irrelevant to this crowd.
This discussion was a constant reminder that the majority of people who play the game aren't very interested in the broader scope of WoW itself, but rather "What is important now?"
And for most people, it's Raiding with Arenas as a distant second, with an occasional nod to Dungeons, Dailies, and the Auction House.
***
This brings to mind something that I've been pondering lately: what is my personal endgame for WoW? I don't mean raiding per se, even though I'm not doing it anymore, but what happens to me after Wrath Classic is over?
I suspect that the Classic Team are going to go all in on Cataclysm Classic, but whether that means no Wrath Era servers is somewhat unclear. I've read scuttlebutt that implies the splitting off of Classic Era from TBC Classic servers was such a pain in the ass that the Classic Team doesn't want to do that again, so that likely means there will be no Wrath Era servers in perpetuity.
So... What then?
I'm thinking that if I still play WoW Classic, maybe a return to Classic Era servers is a good idea. It's a known item, and I took advantage of the $5 (or whatever it was) transfer before it ended to move more toons' Era versions into place. While Classic Era may no longer be "progressing" if an old game can be said to be progressing, As Shintar has point out on numerous occasions the original Vanilla WoW experience just felt to be a perfect leveling cadence. I certainly discovered that myself in the Season of Mastery servers, where my leveling was so fast I was unable to train properly due to the lack of gold.
But, there's another option, floated by YouTuber Nixxiom in this video:
One thing that the WoW Private Servers do that Blizzard has so far been unwilling to do has been to "break" WoW. By that, I mean break the internal game design and go with servers with all sorts of quirks.
Things such as "Classless WoW", where there are no classes and how you develop your toon depends on what you find interesting. In this respect, it's a bit like how Elder Scrolls Online allows you to tweak your player with as much or little magical ability as you see fit. My own Nightblade on ESO has a healthy dose of magical abilities, because I went all in on those talent trees. However, she is still recognizably a Nightblade (aka Rogue) because ESO hasn't exactly crossed that "classless" threshold.
There's a constant low level drumbeat for "Classic Plus", which is new content that is NOT TBC or other expansions but built upon the Vanilla WoW environment. New content and zones based purely in the Old World.
What Nixxiom suggests, and I think he might be closer to the mark than you might believe, is that the reason why some of these Private Servers haven't been shut down by a litigious Blizzard is that the WoW Dev Team likely plays on some of these servers.
But still, Nixxiom also further suggests something truly radical: provide for a fee --monthly or whatever-- a team to have access to Vanilla WoW and a set of development tools so that a team can rent server space from Blizzard and tweak WoW to their hearts' content. To put it succinctly, use the Minecraft model for WoW Classic.
I am truly intrigued by this idea. Not that I'd be able to do this myself --I'm not made of money, so I couldn't pull this off-- but going all in on official support for WoW Private Servers would be extremely exciting. It would reinvigorate the WoW community in a way that WoW Classic itself did in 2019. Like the OGL that Wizards of the Coast originally introduced with D&D 3e**, it would unleash the creativity of the greater community on the game they love.
There's just one thing that would likely prevent Blizzard from going this route: they'd lose control of the narrative for Retail.
Admittedly, as my experiences in WoW Classic have reminded me, a sizable portion of WoW players don't give a crap about the narrative at all, they just want a raid to beat. But still, Blizzard very jealously protects the WoW narrative, and having more people go off and play Private Servers --ones with an Imprimatur or not-- means that their "one true way" of the WoW narrative would get diluted. Especially if more people play those servers than the Blizzard official ones.
That alone would likely prevent Blizzard from actually creating a "Vanilla WoW Toolkit" for anybody to use, but hey, a body can dream.
*Not sure how long that link will be valid, because it's for a private server, but hey...
**And they recently tried --and failed-- to kill off because of corporate greed. I could have provided about a dozen YouTube video links to this whole brouhaha, but Dungeon Craft's "We won!" video works.
It may seem silly, writing an impression of Ulduar having only been inside the place for only one week before the raid team dissolved, but I've found that my first impressions frequently don't change that much over time. They may get tempered a bit in terms of "like" vs "dislike" --Karazhan certainly comes to mind*-- but my overall first impression has stuck with me.
Outside of this video, of course.
Yes, I can be a stubborn bastard. Just ask my family or my questing buddy (and her husband).
If you want to skip the rest of the post, here's my TL;DR: Ulduar is the sort of instance that would be more at home in Wildstar or Star Wars: The Old Republic than in World of Warcraft.
***
My only previous time spent in Ulduar was once back in Mists when I poked my nose in there and had absolutely no idea what to do. All those Dark Iron Dwarves come pouring out of the place, and while my overpowered Rogue had no problem dispatching them I had no idea what to do next. All I did was kill Dark Irons for about 15-20 minutes and realized that --like Blackwing Lair-- there's some trick to getting past the initial area that unless you read a guide or watched a video you would have to die repeatedly just to puzzle it out.
Given that I wanted to go into the place and simply explore what was considered one of the best raids that Blizzard had put out up to that point, I wasn't inclined to "do my homework" and read up on a Cliffs Notes of the raid, because that would puncture my immersion balloon** of trying to stop Yogg-Saron from escaping and destroying Azeroth.
So, I kind of knew the basics of what I was getting into on the week's run up to entering into Ulduar for the first time: there's a gimmick at first which leads to a fight with Flame Leviathan, and then you proceed onward from there. Luckily, being ranged DPS --and not having any 25-person raid gear on me-- meant I was going to be a passenger on the vehicles for the Flame Leviathan fight. I was supposed to go grab the fuel lying around on the ground after we shot down the flying machines, and...
/record scratch
Wait, what?
WTF is this, Mad Max: Fury Road?
I mean, the Mad Max movies would make a great post-apocalyptic RPG campaign, but inserting vehicle combat into Ulduar like this is Blizzard's way of saying "This isn't your effing Vanilla WoW, motherfucker."
Oh, and did you know that you don't target the flying vehicles to shoot them down --leading them via AA fire like you're supposed to do in aerial combat-- but to grab the fuel lying on the ground you have to select them and then hit the "grab" button? The tutorial video that I watched*** kind of glossed over that latter fact until my driver called me out and said that I had to click them first.
So... inconsistent mechanics for that fight... Gotcha.
The Flame Leviathan fight itself was, shall we say, underwhelming. If you ever wondered whether a solved raid presented a challenge to a reasonably geared group, Flame Leviathan didn't exactly show it. I'll freely admit that I was probably one of two people in the raid who'd never seen Ulduar either back in the day or that week, but I wasn't impressed.
My opinion of the place didn't exactly improve once we got past Flame Leviathan.
The inside of Ulduar appears huge, designed graphically to present you with the overwhelming vastness of the titan complex, the entire raid itself isn't as nearly long a run as AQ40 was. That's because Blizzard embraced one crucial SF element all over the damn place: teleporters.
Now, portals in a World of Warcraft raid aren't exactly new: you can find them in Karazhan and AQ40, to name two raids I'm familiar with.**** However, those raids only had one portal each, and those portals were only unlocked once you finish the portion of the raid that unlocks the destination. An NPC would port you to where you were supposed to go, basically to cut down on runtime when you wipe. Naxxramas had portals too, but only after a wing was finished. Again, an unlock, but you wouldn't use a portal to get back to a place you've already cleared.
Ulduar, however, integrated teleporters into the design of the raid itself, so you can use those teleporters to blip around the entire damn place and go where you want to go.
When I realized that, I suddenly also realized that I should have watched the entire freaking video, because we could skip around a bit rather than do bosses in order.
::cue Cardwyn cursing rather inventively at my lack of preparation::
Well, I figured, I could wing it. After all, I'm not likely to be the source of a wipe.
Narrator: He wasn't.
From a practical standpoint, the teleporters made perfect design sense. Runbacks from a wipe are the main reason why raid nights can feel like forever, and minimizing those runbacks is a huge boon to any raid team. That's likely why Naxxramas was designed the way it was, unlike AQ40 with its huge winding path through the instance, but instead 4 rather semi-compact (compared to AQ40) wings: finish a wing, go back to the beginning.
Okay, the practical bona fides aside, those teleporters pretty much establish that we're firmly in Science Fiction territory here, not Steampunk, and definitely NOT Fantasy.
We're basically in a raid that feels like the deeper parts of the planet Belsavis from SWTOR.
***
With each successive boss, the more I heard from people in the raid who'd been there before about how fantastic Ulduar is.
Not was, but is.
Some of them were reliving the past, to be sure, but by far the raid team really liked/loved the raid. It was fun, with interesting and innovative mechanics that Blizzard reused in later expansions. People liked the volume of gear drops, and that everybody was running the place all at once.
Except me.
I kept my opinion to myself, of course, but I felt that Ulduar was a lot like, well... I have to borrow a comparison from my prog rock days: Ulduar felt a lot like Yes' Relayer album. It felt like Blizzard was trying too hard to be too different, too hip, and too unlike World of Warcraft.
When you hear Brann Bronzebeard on a freaking communicator telling you where to go and what's going on, you've left where WoW was, and are heading toward a place where WoW's Retail is today. Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning offered 5-person instance runners a taste of Ulduar, but Ulduar itself was like watching the end of Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.#
Remember when I posted about immersion breaking parts of Retail, with a pic of Goldshire as an example? Ulduar is like that. I mean, if you're going to break the Steampunk and semi-Fantasy mold and go full on Science Fiction, you might as well go all the way. The thing is, we're running around with swords and spells like the old D&D module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but without the ability to pick up any of the SF gear lying around. Well, except for the vehicles for Flame Leviathan, I guess, but at least in that D&D module you could pick up and use the stuff on the crashed spaceship.
Back in the day I had no idea what I was in for when our DM ran me through this. This is the Goodman Games' conversion + homage cover.
Now, before somebody stands up and says "Hey, what about Krull? What about that last fight against The Beast??!!"
Thank goodness for YouTube!
Yes, you have a point. Yes, you can have a fight --or a raid-- and keep your high fantasy gear and tropes around, and yes the ending of Krull shows the power of love in a fight even against an advanced tech fueled enemy. However, we don't see the effects of this culture clash on the society at large years later. Unfortunately for Azeroth, Blizzard has been happy to keep areas that would have changed over time due to such exposure completely static, as if a First Contact had never happened.
***
But the biggest thing about Ulduar that just doesn't fit with me is the tone that Blizzard took with it as a raid. In Vanilla Classic, you went into AQ40, Onyxia, or Molten Core as a raid, not a raid led by an NPC. Up through Tempest Keep, that remained the same in TBC Classic. But I do know that by the end of Sunwell Plateau, at least, the tone had begun to change. An NPC was the de facto leader of the raid, and they got the in-game scenes at the end. I believe that might have been the case at Black Temple as well, but I have absolutely no clue about Mount Hyjal.
Wrath Classic brought with it Discount Naxx, which didn't have any NPC changes of that sort, but The Eye of Eternity certainly did with Alexstrasza putting in a guest appearance. And with Brann in constant communication with the raid throughout all of Ulduar, the raid becoming just a tool for and led by an in-game NPC has come front and center. There is simply no going back, and Ulduar was that tipping point.
***
I suppose I should be glad that my raiding time in Wrath Classic is over, because the vision in my mind of what Ulduar would be like made the reality a bit underwhelming. Nothing, it seems, can match the Vanilla Classic feel of 40 people all doing something greater than themselves. And to be fair, my experiences in Wrath Classic only served to remind me that TBC Classic personally ended so piss poorly. The raids I wanted to finish I never did, the gear I would have liked to have gotten I never did##, and the stress of having to prove to myself and others that I belonged in the raid rather than "being carried because you're on the raid lead team" was too much.###
Ulduar could become like Karazhan for me, in that I could grow to love it over time, but I doubt it. There's too much of what became Modern WoW in there for me to truly embrace it.
*Despite my dislike of the instance itself from a practical standpoint --once a scientist/engineer ALWAYS a scientist/engineer-- I've grown fond of it because of all those months of my raid leading the Friday Night Karazhan Run. That has almost nothing to do with the raid itself but the people involved in the raid. Alas that a few of those people are no longer playing WoW, and moved on to other raids.
**If there's one thing that drives me nuts, it's that even in Retail you as a raider are expected to follow guides and what comes out of examination of the Public Test Realms. It's as if you were planning a trip to Gatlinburg instead of entering into a new and unexplored area. Then again, if you wanted to explore and experience the "newness" of something, MMOs are definitely NOT it. They're filled with --and cater to--people who have to have control over every last detail as if we were a bunch of mathematical exercises. Okay, video games are at heart just that, but their developers try hard to use mathematical modelling to enable the illusion of freedom. By breaking down the game back into its mathematical components, we're left with a dexterity fueled Algebra problem set for homework composed of shiny pixels. Assuming you even look at the game rather than your button bar and all of the addons and whatnot that overlay the game. Or, as they put it in the Folding Ideas video about Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft, "Players make World of Warcraft look fucking ugly."
***It was a requirement for the raid, so I didn't have much choice in that. But like at work where every "required" training course I had to take I'd resist as much as possible, I waited until the last moment to go and finish. As in, 1/2 hour before raid. I figured we'd only get to about 4-5 bosses anyway, and I'm not under any true requirements to do much more than bring the Arcane heat, so why sweat it?
****Remember, I haven't done Mount Hyjal, Black Temple, and Sunwell Plateau. If there are portals there, I'm not aware of them.
#I haven't watched the whole movie, but I was unfortunate enough to be walking through a Best Buy or another one of those stores and the ending happened to be playing on televisions.
##The gear I would have liked to have gotten I always stepped aside and let others have because:
As Loot Master/Raid Leader, I felt it would have been unfair to get gear ahead of the rest of the raid. I'm a leader, and to lead means to do so by example. You put your people first. I'd been in semi-pug raids before where a tank finally got what he was looking for and decided to stop going to said raid, basically torpedoing everybody else's fun because he got what he wanted.
I knew I didn't have the physical skills to compete with the best DPS players, so I felt they should get priority on gear over myself. Even when I ran the Friday Night Karazhan, I refused to roll on the ring that dropped from Malchezaar because if someone else could use it in a future raid they should get priority over myself, who was just doing Karazhan for fun. That it was a significant upgrade over my own rings didn't enter my thoughts. To me, desiring something just because I wanted it was simply being greedy.
###Nobody ever said it to me, but I said it to myself. Constantly. I could hear the voice of self doubt every time I logged into the game, knowing that my DPS wasn't up to par.
