The First Lesson in Avoiding Temptation

Well, one goal has been accomplished with Operation Spread the Love: my in-game friends are reaching L60 before I have gotten a single toon to L20.

Here's how it looks as of January 2nd, 2025.
I really have to get some better looking pants;
between the green and the yellow, it looks like Cardwyn
plays for the Green Bay Packers.

My Questing Buddy is sitting at L59, and others are at L60 and L55. Still others are in the L40s, while another friend who is taking their time like I am is in the L20s.

At the moment, I'm not feeling any surge of FOMO since they're reaching max level. I think a lot of that is seeing their relief that the leveling is done (or coming to an end), which only adds to my resolve. While I'd like to finally get out of Westfall or Darkshore, I know that once I start pushing I'm going to have a hard time stopping. 

How do I know that? 

Well, if there's one thing that dealing with my health issues has taught me, it's that the easiest way to control my diet is to simply not have temptation in the house. It's not always the most fun thing to do, and given that my wife doesn't have any dietary restrictions that means temptation is always in the house to some extent. However, by minimizing my contact with any temptation I can control my diet. 

What I'm doing on the Anniversary servers is taking the lessons I've learned from my "health journey" and applying them to leveling. That means avoiding dungeon runs from a high level toon, whether a bought boost or just given one by a friend. But that also means avoiding grouping up with friends to do some questing together. From my experience I just don't level as fast as everyone else*, and since I frequently do take my time to read the quest text I find myself holding people back. So, when I have grouped up with people in the past to "level together", I rather conveniently skip doing quests myself and simply am there to make their questing easier.** Since all that's happening is inadvertent pressure put on me to level faster, I've decided to avoid grouping to do quests together entirely.***

I do have one last trick up my sleeve for slowing down my leveling, and that is leveling crafting at the same time.

Anybody who has leveled a non-gathering profession in WoW Classic can tell you that it can take a serious amount of gold to level something such as Blacksmithing or Tailoring, let alone Enchanting. Since my gold is spread thin already, I have to slow down my leveling just to grind out drops from mobs so I can sell for more gold.

I also sell any fish I catch for gold --either to a vendor or on the Auction House-- which also takes time.

So, I have my methods of avoiding temptation. Now I have to stick to it.

*Yes, my powerleveling a Shaman in 2021 is the exception.

**Afterward, I'll go back and do the quests myself at my own pace. In case you're wondering, I starte doing this back in 2009/2010 when I leveled Quintalan, my first L80 toon. I'd be out questing with Soul and his wife and I'd frequently find myself behind on completing quests because they'd done all of this before, so I eventually just gave up and just became a so-called sell-sword.

***This isn't the same as joining up for a group quest, where I'll group up with people nearby who are on the same group quest so we can complete the thing together. Once done, the group is disbanded and that's that.

Learning to Crawl

Okay, maybe that title references my attempts to learn how to play as a Warrior on the Anniversary WoW Classic servers, but it could also be a return to playing a Shaman.

"There's a place out there on the savannah where you
can see forever, and it stirred something primal in us," I whispered.

A lot of my problems with playing TBC Classic didn't have to do with playing a Shaman per se; I found the class very much the Horde analogue of a Paladin, and the Vanilla version of a Shaman's solo attack rotation is very similar to that of a Paladin's. To be blunt, it was the circumstances behind my playing a Shaman --and everything that developed out of that-- that I disliked. Unfortunately, that means that the poor Shaman became associated in my mind with everything that went askew in TBC Classic.

Playing a Shaman in the Anniversary servers meant I was going to pick at a scab that should have healed by now, and I knew it wasn't going to be a pleasant experience. Still, I felt that I couldn't really avoid this forever, and confronting this problem now rather than waiting until I experienced the triple whammy of leveling a Draenei Shaman in the TBC portion of the Anniversary servers was likely the best option. I could control a lot of things this way: the speed of leveling, reacquainting myself with the Old World Horde quests*, and even disappearing into the ether, truly playing solo on the "other" faction from most of my current stable of toons.

I'm not going to lie: the first few levels were hard. 

I wasn't expecting the welter of emotion when I went forward into the Valley of Trials. After all, there's only a single auto-attack and a single magical attack available at the beginning, so it's not like I was doing anything complicated such as totem twisting. But I still had to get up and walk away for a bit after those first couple of quests, because apparently association is a real bitch. 

A few days later and I was back again, pushing forward a little at a time. Some quests here, some quests there. The freshness of the Orc/Troll starting area and both Durotar and The Barrens helped a lot. Sure, there's a lot of running back and forth in The Barrens --that's pretty much the Old World in a nutshell-- but I don't mind that much. And doing just a little bit at a time does help to separate the Shaman from the 2021 Leveling Shaman experience.

The real question is what's going to happen when in November 2025 the TBC pre-patch drops. I don't intend to get swept up in a mad dash to level a Shaman, but given the sheer lunacy of some people to sprint to L60 on the Anniversary servers**, I can foresee some problems for myself.

But that's all about sprinting: I'm back in the crawling stage, and I have plenty of time to learn to walk first.

*My other Horde toons in Classic and Retail were Blood Elves, and their starting area will get a player to L20-L22 in Classic by the end (or whatever the level is in Retail nowadays), so you could skip the Barrens or Silverpine Forest entirely. Being a Blood Elf has it's advantages.

**Not my Questing Buddy, who admittedly is almost at L60, but those who were already getting their pre-raid BiS gear in early December. 

Meme Monday: New Year's Memes for 2025

Eh, I'm going to pretend that parts of 2024 never happened.

Therefore, on to the new year!

See? Classic Godzilla is ready!
from EN World.

This sounds like a great idea in theory,
but I don't know if I can pull this off.
From Andreas Kjeldsen. 

At first I thought it was a meme from
one of The Hobbit movies, but I realized
that it was Robin Williams. Which means
this is Jumanji. From Pinterest.

Not so sure drinking and eating as
a concept for a good party is best for
my health. From Dungeons and Dads
Facebook group and gdfalken.com.

Yeah, I guess they covered their bases here.
From Dungeoncast's X posts.

And finally, one extra New Year's meme:

Uh, yeah. I died to the infamous Rot Grub
once. From the Toolmaster.

On a Winter's Veil Eve

In honor of another year's Advent calendar of music from Bhagpuss over at Inventory Full, I thought I'd provide my own quirky piece of Christmas music. My wife and I saw Dar perform this live at the sadly now defunct York Street Cafe in Newport, Kentucky in 1996; the upstairs where the concert was held was full to bursting with people, and I'm sure that a fire marshal somewhere would have had a fit if they'd have seen the crowd. Just Dar and her guitar, but it was a magical night where everybody had an absolute blast.

Meme Monday: Winter Steam Sale Memes 2024

Instead of generic video game Winter Holiday memes, I figured I'd go for what PC gamers really wait for: the annual Steam Winter Games sale.

Given that the majority of the items I've Wishlisted are Early Access games, I don't expect to spend a lot of money on video games this year. I have this rule I put into place years ago that I was not going to either preorder video games or purchase a game listed as in Early Access, and that has kept my purchases down quite a bit. It has also saved me from purchasing a game that based on Early Access reviews I might like, but the farther along the development cycle the game got the worse the game seemed to me. Or maybe not "worse" per se, but not the sort of game I'd actually like playing. 

(Holding out the vain hope that a game would be switchable between First and Third person perspective is one of them. I'm looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds.) 

So, for this Winter Holiday season, let's have some fun at the expense of ourselves and the Steam Winter Sale!

I finally got the reference a month ago, where
David Beckham called out his wife for her
claiming to have a "Middle Class" upbringing.
Apparently this unscripted moment really grounded
the documentary about David's life.
From Reddit.

Uh, I'm pretty sure half of 59.99 is NOT free.
From 9GAG and Reddit.

Yeah, I get this.
From Reddit and Imgflip.

There are those who love to "just look" at what's
on the Steam Sale, and.... OH, LOOK AT THE TIME!!
From Ragebuilder.com.

My big rule is to buy any games after
Christmas itself, so I don't end up like this guy.
From MemeCenter.

A Snapshot of Classic Fresh Guild Names Part 2

I thought I'd have enough for two of these posts, but let's just say that people are creative. So be prepared for more posts along these lines...

This is in here not because it's amusing or anything, but
it's also the name of Vidyala's guild back in Retail.
I wonder if some of her old guildies are now playing
the Classic Fresh servers...

"I---mannuael Kant was a real pissant..."

"Feral Kittens"

I think I found the guild that my Hunter ought to belong to.

"House of Bread"

With a toon name that recalls Ronnie James
Dio's first album, the guild "Disco For Life"
does kind of stand out.

Not These Idiots Again

Have you ever had that situation where you exit/logout from a video game in a certain location and when you login again you forget what you were doing?

Yeah, that's been happening to me quite a bit with this project of mine.

I'd swear I've seen this thing before...

Oh, right.

With only a certain number of starting zones, I've found myself doing repeat work in most locations. That's not a bad thing per se, but I do lose track of which toon has done what thing when I login to one. The easiest solution to this issue is to simply concentrate on few toons to level, but I know that will tempt me more toward accelerating my leveling, and I don't want that at all. 

I suppose I could simply write down "to do" lists for each toon, but that seems kind of silly. This isn't that important, after all, just an annoyance.

Anyhoo, here's the current status of Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 17, 2024.

Again, the Shaman doesn't fit into the loading screen without me scrolling down, so I left him off, but he's at L14 as well.

As an aside, I play that Shaman when I'm not logged into Battle.Net, because he's my "I'm going to go hide and play for a while" toon. However, one disturbing thing happened last night. While I was logged into my Shaman for a bit before bed, I was heading back toward The Crossroads when I got a sudden group invite by a player name I'd never seen before. I figured it was a random thing so I rejected it. Then I got a whisper from the toon: 

"I see you."

I quickly did a /who and discovered they were an L26 Hunter. I then checked Battle.Net, and none of my friends from BNet were logged in as this toon. After verifying that I was not visible via BNet, I swtiched over to my Alliance bank toon and verified that they were all logged in on Alliance toons.

Who was it? Hell if I know, but I did go back and check to see if I'd accidentally made the Shaman's name visible at some point on the blog, but nope. Not there. And whomever it was had already gotten ahead of me to L26, which is well beyond the level cap for a "Free Account", so if it was one of them that meant they were spending a very unhealthy amount of time playing on these Classic Fresh servers. I mean, they're all in the mid-upper L30s to the mid-upper L40s, so yeah.... That's a lot of time spent in-game.*

The L24 toon is an alt. Their main is in the
upper 30s/low 40s. That player also raids Naxx
twice a week, BWL and MC once a week, and
the occasional AQ40, so that's why they're not higher.

As I alluded to above, my friends are all far ahead of me in the leveling process, even the slowest of them is in the low-mid L30s on their main toon, and plenty of them already have alts that are higher than my brood of toons. That suits me fine, because I'm actually leveling at a lower speed than I thought I would. Either that or they're going faster than I expected.

I originally thought that they would get to L40 --and a mount-- before I got to L20. Well, most of my friends got to L40 (not all of them have mounts yet), and I'm not even at L15 yet. My prediction may eventually hold, but they might all be at L50 before I hit L20 with my stable of toons. 

***

It's kind of funny, but if I had tried to do this in Retail WoW, I would have actually had to put in a lot more effort at slowing down my leveling than I put in actually leveling in Classic Fresh. That may go against what you'd expect, because process of leveling does require me to exert effort, but Blizzard has spent so much time and development at making it so easy to get to max level in Retail that you have to be creative if you want to NOT level that fast. As it is, I've had to be creative enough to slow myself down in the Anniversary servers, and that's in an environment in which the Journey is the main selling point of the game. Imagine trying to do this in an environment where "The Game Begins At Endgame" is the driving focus.

You need a beard, Steve. And red hair.
From all over the internet.

*I should point out that my Questing Buddy has informed me that her new guild that she is going to raid with already has groups spamming Stratholme and Upper Blackrock Spire dungeons, so they've got enough max-level toons in the guild already to accomplish that. That's... kind of nuts, as that's at the speed of my leveling experience as a Leveling Shaman in TBC Classic.