Month: January 2025

My eldest son is a dinosaur nut and watches the Jurassic Park/World movies frequently. Since I am not settled on a pet yet, I tamed a raptor in his honor. Gonna name it Blue Turquoise. It might not be the most optimal pet, but c’mon, there’s a cool factor running around with a raptor at your side. And I do like that it can use both bite and claw, which pumps its DPS up quite a bit.

I’ve been having some fun fooling around with a Gnome Warlock again. It’s the flip side of the pet class, more magic than hardware. And angry skull flinging! It’s all very slow at low levels, but that’s a good opportunity to chat with my guild and get to know people. I did twink her out a little with a few gold so that I could buy bags, a wand, mining training, and staff training.

I’ve been thinking about the Hunter vs. Warlock a bit as I leveled her through the lowbie areas. Some advantages are pets that level with you and don’t lose loyalty, a variety of pets, more bag space, more health-gaining options, and what I feel is more utility. Free mount. No ammo. Oh, and no dead zone!

Deep guild discussion — and mild shaming — over names.

I cruised up to level 11 pretty quickly thanks to an optimized questing path and my super-duper amazing wand of one-shotting. Well, it took more than one shot, but it’s still fast. I never really did use wands on Warlocks before this past year — heck, I didn’t even know they could use them! At low levels, at least, it’s far faster than slowly shadowbolting everything. I just sic my imp on a bad guy, throw on a Curse of Agony, and begin wanding with three quick taps of the keyboard.

One nice perk of going back — getting to do Loch Modan all over again. This really has become one of the top prettiest zones in the base game for me. Great alpine environment. Cataclysm did this whole place dirty by draining the lake.

Now that we’re in the new year, it’s always a good time for a bit of welcome change to gaming routines. So in addition to my regular adventures of my Death Knight in WoW, I’m going to start giving my techno lock some love as well. I’ll admit, it was January’s clockwork outfit offerings that nudged me back in this direction — how can I not put together the ultimate Gnome outfit?

I guess the question is, what do I do with this Warlock? Her gear isn’t terrible (around 595), so running a few T8 delves should get her above 600 relatively soon. But I don’t see much of a need to redo all of the quests — I should look into reputations but it isn’t a priority right now — and I can’t think of much else I want to do to improve her or take her in a different direction. Maybe, just maybe in an expansion that’s the most alt-friendly this game’s ever been… one character is really all you need. Still, I like the playstyle and would be loathe to completely abandon her.

But a week or so after writing that, Blizzard activated a series of Timewalking dungeon events with some really nice 610+ chest rewards for the weekly, so just like that, I found a purpose once more!

Kid, I don’t come to MMOs to have imaginary grief dumped on me from an imaginary child over an imaginary event. Less with the “dad dying” and more with the “go kill 10 rats please!”

Nothing like coming to new content several weeks late after everyone’s already been grinding and progressing. But hey, that’s just my style! So yeah, I finally got over to Siren Isle with my DK, and I’m certainly interested to see what it has on display. I hear this used to be an island expedition before it was scrapped, so this is essentially some repurposed content. Recycling! It’s not just for cardboard products!

At least for the time being, I’m going to camp my DK here and invest my time into this island. See what’s what. It’s not the biggest place but also not tiny either. What’s really taken some adjustment is not being able to use mounts.

After a couple of nights doing Siren Isle, I wasn’t really feeling it. There’s stuff to do, and you can’t fly, and I’m not seeing a lot of return of investment into it. Still, I’ll keep chugging away for now — or until Undermine comes out.

Why play WoW Classic? There are many answers to that, but one that comes to mind today is “simplicity.” This is, for the most part, a straight-forward MMO experience — a long journey that’s guided by quests, grinding, and levels. When I come to it, I don’t have to sit there trying to figure out complex questing patterns and strategies. I don’t have to create a priority list of what needs to get done before the next weekly reset. I can simply pick up the last questing thread and follow it to the next one. It’s super relaxing and comforting.

It also gives me a lot of time to do one of my favorite secondary activities during MMOs, which is to listen to podcasts and sort through music. There’s a zen calmness to putting on headphones, grinding through some slow quests, chatting with guildies, and listening to electronic music or soundtracks or what have you. Nobody’s making demands on me during this time of day, and I’m not rushing to get anything done. This is my down time.

My Hunter is level 35 with 46 gold to her name. The beastmastery tree is filling out nicely, and I look forward to getting the capstone at level 40 (and a mount? hopefully?). Right now I’m doing some questing around Southshore and soaking up the generally pretty atmosphere.

I never do feel much in a rush to go anywhere and get things done right away. There are quests and objectives, yes, but I’m content to meander and even wander far off the path to pursue whatever direction I choose. Sometimes the best session is one where I find a nicely spread out camp of mobs and lazily mow through them again and again.

One of my favorite little things about WoW Classic is how much spontaneous grouping happens out in the world. There’s a lot of people descending on certain areas for quest mobs, and it almost always makes sense to group up instead of competing for them. I got pulled into a group outside Southshore that was farming Syndicate members for a good 20 or so minutes, with bards and warlocks and hunters absolutely chewing through packs of mobs. It was glorious.

While I’m having a generally good time, I also can’t help but constantly wish that these fresh start servers had begun with The Burning Crusade or, barring that, the pre-patch. Heck, I’d even take a vastly shortened lead-up time, anything less than a year. But no, we’re stuck in the most broken class era for a bulk of 2025, and without much for casuals like myself to do at the endgame. I’m going to start pushing myself to get into dungeon groups more, I haven’t really done that much, but it seems like such a hassle. Maybe I’m just whining because I truly want my Draenei Shaman, but oh well. Patience is a virtue, as is contentment.

Hey kids, remember back when the entrance to the dungeon wasn’t the entrance at all but a gauntlet you had to run each and every time you wanted to get to the actual action? Pepperidge Fa– I mean, Deadmines remembers!

I love this book on a platform that occasionally flips open to spawn a hand that slaps you down. That’d be really neat to have as a housing item.

For your consideration: The only time that someone’s been excited about the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.

Ashenvale: Great for scenery, horrible for pretty much everything else. The whole place is like a lumpy maze, and I blame the elves for it. Learn some straight lines once in a while, elves!

You know what’s kind of weird to consider about WoW Classic? It’s how very few pets and mounts were in the core game. Seriously, there aren’t that many of them. Just a few handfuls, really. I almost never see people with vanity pets out, so I bought this black cat to give everyone bad luck who runs in front of him in Stormwind.