Three Short Classic Tales

Monday

I've been trying to look into some guilds on Alliance side, not because I'm in any way unhappy with my Horde guild, but because I figure I've got all these high-level characters on Alliance, it would be nice to be able to also take them out for a spin at least occasionally. I've been finding it more difficult than expected to find a good fit, but that's really a story for another day. The point is that I finally did my first era raid on Alliance side on Monday!

It was a bit of a weird evening as there was nothing in particular going on in SWTOR, my Horde guild had no event on, this Alliance guild I'd been watching had no event on, and the Alliance guild I had just joined on my hunter and pally was running Naxx, for which you (understandably) have to be vetted in another raid first. But hey, the local French guild was hosting an MC pug! I decided to sign up on my holy paladin Sarelle, since they seemed to be short on healers and there's some good healing loot in MC that was potentially going to be useful for her, and then parked myself in Blackrock Mountain well ahead of time.

Unfortunately, when I logged in just before raid time, there were only a small number of people there, and there was some talk about going to Zul'gurub instead since there weren't enough sign-ups. I whispered one of the organisers for confirmation and sadly that was indeed what was happening. I spent about a minute quietly pouting to myself. I had got myself all hyped up for MC! Did I even want to go to ZG? Plus there may not have been "enough" sign-ups for MC, but there were more than twenty, so not everyone would get to raid now anyway.

Then I wondered what else I was going to do that evening and whispered the guy again to ask for an invite to ZG after all. Fortunately Sarelle's hearthstone was still set to Booty Bay for world buff reasons from back in the olden days, so it was easy enough to get down there.

And honestly... it was a nice enough run! We didn't do Edge of Madness and the fish boss, but the pace was good and we only had one wipe on the trash leading up to Mandokir when we somehow got overwhelmed by those life-draining trolls and they slowly wore us down.

It was a bit odd to raid with a group of primarily French people though - they asked everyone to join Discord, but apart from the occasional instruction in English such as "sheep diamond" all the chatter was in French so that I didn't really understand most of it. I did find myself thinking that for someone like me who really values the banter during raids, this was not an optimal solution. At the same time I'll say that even though I didn't understand most of it, the French chatter generally sounded pretty upbeat, and the overall mood did feel good as a result.

I didn't win any boss loot, but a BoE world epic dropped on trash, I won it and was able to sell it on the AH for a couple hundred gold, so I certainly can't complain.

Tuesday

Tuesday was an office day for me, which meant that I came home late and very tired. Even so I still did a BWL clean-up and my first Onyxia with my Horde guild. Sadly the latter didn't drop the sinew I needed for my bow, however I did win both her head and the hunter tier helm. As I said to my guildies: one dragon head to hold and one to put on my head. As they were continuing to Naxx afterwards, I bowed out at that point and popped over to my little rogue on Alliance side.

I quickly decided that I was too tired to do anything "proper" but she had a bunch of breadcrumb quests to talk to people in different zones, so I figured I could just do a bit of running around before bed time. I was just emerging into Stormwind from the Deeprun Tram, when the GM of the little social guild I joined asked whether anyone wanted to join for a Stockades run.

I've mentioned in the past how I'm not too fond of dungeon boosting, but context matters and it seemed serendipitous that he had one spot left and had popped the question just as I'd arrived in Stormwind after not spending any time there in weeks. So I joined and got two quick runs through the Stockades which effectively earned me a "free" level before going to bed. Really can't complain.

Wednesday

After another office day I was once again not feeling up to much, so I just logged through a few characters to check on their mail, auctions etc. However, as I did so on Horde side, a guildie piped up that Azuregos was up and they were forming a group for it. I learned last time that Horde claiming an Azuregos kill as the minority faction is a rare occasion, so I wanted to help out even though I didn't need anything from him anymore.

I hopped on a Windrider from Orgrimmar (getting to Azuregos is one occasion where Horde has it sooo much easier than Alliance) and soon a bunch of us were assembled around the big blue dragon. It took us a while to kill him, but we did manage and a number of people were able to claim some nice loot.

I really like how Classic has these kind of slow and not too rewarding activities that involve a lot of running around, meaning you have reasons to be online and do stuff, but at the same time it's easy to abandon what you're doing in favour of some more exciting group activity without feeling like you're losing out.

Tirri's Dungeon Journal

Just like during my previous nostalgia trips back to Vanilla WoW, I only really find the time to do dungeons on the weekends, which strongly limits how many of them I can do, but even so I've managed to squeeze in four runs on my druid so far. I thought I'd make a short post about them, since in Vanilla WoW, no two dungeon runs feel the same and it's always interesting to talk about your pugs.

Part of the idea of rolling a druid this time around was that I would have an easier time getting into groups, since tanks seemed to be in much higher demand than healers while I was levelling my priest. It hasn't quite worked out as expected.

I tried to put my first Deadmines group together myself, but despite of my (what I thought were) inviting shouts that a tank OR healer would be fine for the last spot, nobody took the bait. Suddenly a level 60 night elf hunter whispered me and offered to simply run us through. I've never been a fan of dungeon boosts, as they kind of defeat the point of having fun with the group gameplay, but at that point I was getting sufficiently tired of spamming LF1M that I accepted his offer (once I had checked with the rest of the group that they were OK with it too). The result wasn't very exciting and gave little XP, but I did get all my quests done in record time and the last boss dropped his Blackened Defias Armor for me, so I called it a win.

Later I joined another run as tank, and things went well enough until our healer suddenly disconnected while we were on the pirate ship and then never came back. We managed to clear a couple more trash pulls with the use of crowd control and by having me back off to heal myself when needed, but Captain Greenskin proved too much for us without a healer, which eventually forced us to call it a day. I would have been more disappointed if I hadn't already completed all my quests and also scored Smite's Mighty Hammer on this run.

Up next was Blackfathom Deeps, this time as a healer. Fortunately I do enjoy healing as well and had made a point of starting a set of healing gear early. This was a very smooth and fun run with a pleasant group, with the only disappointment being the realisation that the quest Twilight Falls is simply impossible to complete as a healer. I had the same issue on my dwarf priest earlier in the year. The problem is that quest items for some reason seem to ignore the normal loot rules on this server and are always treated as free for all, which means that they inevitably get picked up by the tank and melee dps before anyone else can get to the dead mob, and there aren't enough cultists in the instance to produce drops for a full party all on the same quest. If I happen to get into another run I'll give it another go (maybe if I can tank that one so I can hog all the drops for myself), but if not I'll just have to dump it - again.

Finally I picked up all the quests for the Stockade except the one from the Wetlands that has a prerequisite chain. The nice thing about the Stockade is that due to how short and easily accessible it is, people run it all the time and at all times of day. I actually logged on with only about an hour to go until bedtime and simply watched general chat for a few minutes - and what do you know, "Anyone for the Stockade?" popped up within five minutes. I was initially asked to heal again, but then the party leader (a paladin) suddenly decided that he'd rather heal himself, and we already had a tank, so I actually ended up doing kitty dps! Not my favourite thing ever, but if it gets the job done...

It amuses me that with a character specifically designed to make use of the apparent tank shortage I experienced previously, I only actually tanked one out of four runs so far. But then that's part of the beauty of rolling a druid - being able to play whatever role is needed.

Dungeons and Drama

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I'm continuing to level my dwarf priest on Nostalrius Elysium PvE, but progress is slow. One of the downsides of Vanilla WoW gameplay that I absolutely admit is there is that it doesn't lend itself very well to short play sessions, so I only really play on the weekends when I have the time to play for several hours at once. Unfortunately one or two such play sessions don't necessarily provide me with enough content for a proper blog post, so the blog stays silent even if I'm happy with having made a level or two of progress, especially since there isn't as much novelty to the process as there was when I rolled my first character on Kronos.

I'm currently sitting at level 25 and have only really quested in Redridge since leaving Westfall and Loch Modan behind, with all my other experience having come from dungeons.

First I tried to give the Deadmines another go, but that run was pretty awkward and ended up getting aborted halfway through. I should have known that it wasn't a good group considering that the leader was advertising via /yell instead of general chat. Still, the real problem wasn't anything anyone did... as far as I could tell anyway. We'd had a wipe in the forge and had just run back in, then had to run back out again when someone pulled a nearby patrol before we'd all reassembled, and the next time I ran in, it suddenly said that everyone had left the group simultaneously, which was way too much of a coincidence to have occurred naturally. Some sort of group disband bug? I don't know. Either way, since things hadn't been going so great anyway, I made no effort to whisper anyone about putting the group back together, and they didn't contact me either.

Then there was Blackfathom Deeps. What was funny about that one was that we spent ages looking for a warrior tank since the group leader (a ret paladin) insisted that this would make for the smoothest run. Then we finally found one, but the moment we actually stepped into the instance it turned out that he had neither a shield nor any interest in tanking. I don't know if he was intentionally deceiving us, didn't know what he was doing, or if the invitation issued by the paladin had been unclear, but nobody made a fuss and we just moved on with the hunter pet tanking. (Could have had that experience without waiting for half an hour, that's all I'm saying...)

Ironfur the bear was actually doing a pretty decent job at it for most of the instance too, but when we reached the part with the Twilight cultists, our pally DCed, never to return, forcing us to continue with one man down. This did not go well on the part with the braziers, where we wiped on every single one as far as I recall, and on some of them more than once. When we didn't wipe, I at least still died on every single pull (since I instantly got healing aggro from everything and the hunter was the only one trying to get things off me) and had to make the long corpse run from Darkshore every time because nobody had a res. By the end my armour was nearly broken and I was seriously losing the will to live, but at least I got a Rod of the Sleepwalker out of the whole ordeal.

In contrast to these, running the Stockades was a breeze, with a tank who seriously knew what he was doing and made it a great experience. I happily joined him for another round when it turned out that his friend had forgotten to pick up some quest items and needed to go again. I was disappointed only when I got my Seal of Wrynn at the end of the lengthy quest chain, as it was only a pesky green! I can only guess that this is another one of those "back in patch 1.x it hadn't been upgraded to a blue yet" things that the Nost team seems to love...

Speaking of the Nost team though...

The Vanilla WoW community continues to provide endless entertainment in the form of pointless drama. Remember how this whole Nostalrius relaunch came about? Because the Nost devs were ticked off that Blizzard wasn't responding to them and released their code and database to former rival server Elysium to recreate Nostalrius. While many were happy to get the server back, people were also shaking their heads at the Nost team's behaviour, as acting like that was an obvious slap in the face of Blizzard after they had considered themselves the champions of getting official WoW legacy servers previously.

Well, it seems that a couple of months later, they've finally realised this too, and are akwardly backpedaling by asking the Elysium team to stop using the code and data that they've been given only a few months prior. Unsurprisingly, the Elysium team replied with what can be summed up as: "Sure, we'll change the name from Nost to something else and go back to using our own core. Thanks for gifting us this massive community!" So nothing really changes except that the former Nostalrius team has officially disavowed private servers I suppose? One can only guess that this has something to do with Blizzard, whether they privately expressed an unwillingness for any further talks because of what had happened, or whether the Nost team is actually dealing with legal action that forces them to officially cut all ties with the project.

Little to nothing should change for those of us who are simply playing on the servers. Maybe my Seal of Wrynn will actually turn blue. And I guess I'll have to go back and re-tag the previous posts about this project "Elysium" instead of just Nostalrius.

Adventures in Dungeoneering

If you asked me which aspect of WoW I missed the least in the past two years, I definitely would've chosen the dungeon finder. As such, I wasn't at all keen on reacquainting myself with its "gogogo" culture and had originally planned to avoid it altogether. My pet warrior had different ideas however, as he really wanted to tank some dungeons, so who was I to say no?

Initially I thought that I was going to play off-spec healer for him while staying feral for our questing, however I soon found that the talent changes in Mists of Pandaria seem to have made that kind of thing pretty impossible. By the time we became eligible to queue for our first couple of dungeons, I still only had a single healing spell as feral - a heal over time at that - and my mana pool was limited to a piddly 200 or so, no matter how much int gear I put on. So I settled for queuing as dps.

Interestingly, our queues were still near instant almost all the time - with one notable exception when we just couldn't find any other damage dealers and spent about ten minutes waiting to fill the other two dps slots, which was probably more time than we then spent in the actual dungeon (Stormwind Stockade in this case). If anything, there seem to be too many healers in the low-level queue: in more than one run we ended up with a healer filling one of the dps slots. The holy pally in Wailing Caverns at least seemed to give ranged dps a pretty good go, but the disc priest/resto druid combo in Shadowfang Keep were both convinced that since they had both queued as healer, they didn't need to do anything but stand in the back and look pretty. (The druid literally had my pet tank on /follow for most of the run.) Since our third dps wasn't particularly on the ball either, this led to a rather odd experience where it felt like my tank and me were pretty much duoing the instance, while everyone else just tagged along to collect loot.

I suppose I mustn't complain too much though - at least we haven't run into any rude people... yet. For the most part, the players in our runs have been what you could call enigmatically silent, leaving their thoughts and motivations up to individual interpretation. Being a cynic, you could certainly interpret the fact that two dps dropped out of our Wailing Caverns run within the first five minutes as a sign that they were extremely impatient and even a minute of walking the wrong way (which we were doing at the time) was already too much of a waste of time for them to tolerate. For all I know though, they might have been some perfectly relaxed people who only just happened to remember at that time that they forgot to feed their cats.

Overall it seems to me that the "rush rush" culture is as alive as ever though. It's not that much of an issue in our case, as my tank is the sort of person who actually likes charging madly from one objective to the next, and I know that I can always tell him to stop if I need to. Gameplay-wise it's pretty dull from my point of view though, just running along, mashing my AoE buttons and collecting shinies along the way. I couldn't help feeling wistful in Blackfathom Deeps in particular, remembering how deadly so many of the trash pulls and boss encounters used to be, while it's now just a race to see who can round up the next room first.

One thing that mystifies me a little has been the loot. I suppose it's positive that we didn't encounter any ninjas, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that this was due to some sort of change to the loot system rather than people suddenly being more considerate. Most of the time I couldn't even see anyone but myself rolling (which among other things resulted in me winning four pieces of the "of the Fang" set in a single Wailing Caverns run), and I just can't believe that everyone was always passing on everything.

Not quite as I remember it...

Taken on its own merits, the most interesting instance so far has probably been Ragefire Chasm, because I had completely forgotten that Blizzard was going to redo that one for MoP. Imagine my surprise when upon entering I found mobs that looked like they escaped from the Firelands instead of a bunch of troggs! Now I'm curious to see what they've done to the Scarlet Monastery (which I know was redone).

From the Stockade to Gnomeregan

Apparently some people have already levelled two or more characters from one to sixty since the Shattering. Where do people find the time?!

My druid is still coming along nicely; I even managed to do some questing in Stonetalon without anything turning grey. I might write a post about that as well at some point. But first, more observations about what has or hasn't changed in low-level dungeons:

The Stormwind Stockade has been completely revamped like the Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, but remains a fricking boring place anyway. It's a bloody cellar with some generic enemies in every room! Pah. I don't know whether the Alliance still gets the same quests as before for it, but as Horde we didn't even have a reason to kill any trash and with just going straight towards all the bosses, things went incredibly fast. Oh, and none of the trash mobs are called Defias anymore.

The new bosses are some random rogue type with a hat, a fire elemental (about a third of the instance has been invaded and wrecked by elementals, you'd think the prisoners would be a bit more concerned about that), and Hogger! I knew that the latter would be there because I happened to do the new Hogger quest in Elwynn Forest before, which ends with him getting taken to the Stockade. All the fights were fairly boring compared to DM and SFK, but Hogger at least seemed to be a nice exercise in learning to interrupt, as he keeps spamming an ability with a cast time that damages the whole group a little bit and debuffs everyone's damage output. Basically it's not vital to interrupt it (and unlikely that you'll manage every time anyway, even if you try), but considering how often it happens during the fight and that the spell affects damage output, even slow dpsers might eventually connect the dots and give it some thought...

This was also the first instance where I started to feel that our characters are clearly advancing in power faster than the dungeon mobs, despite of the buffs. Back in RFC the trash seemed tough, but in here our paladin tank started by pulling a group of both elite and non-elite mobs two levels below him, and all the non-elites got one-shot by his Avenger's Shield. Ouch...

Blackfathom Deeps has changed very little, apart from the mob buffs and new quest givers that all the instances seem to have received. The biggest change I noticed was that there is now a trapped fire elemental in front of the Twilight's Hammer cultist area who gives you the quest to kill Kelris. The old dying Argent Dawn guy in his cavern that used to give this quest before is still around but seems to have been turned into a member of the Alliance and wouldn't talk to me.

Ghamoo-ra has roughly doubled in size and been given a scarier model, presumably to justify a turtle being a boss. (Kresh in WC was still the same though...) Lorgus Jett is still around too, but contrary to what I had hoped he still isn't a proper boss, and the quest to kill him seems to have gone as well from what I could tell, so I'm not sure why they kept him in. Maybe for the Alliance? Oh, and Kelris lost his annoying tank-sleep ability I think. The devs did mention wanting to get rid of that kind of thing.

Gnomeregan again has hardly changed at all, which I found particularly disappointing considering that the story of the gnomes has been advanced so much otherwise. In fact the only changes that I noticed at all were that the Viscious Fallout has been doubled in size as well to stand out from the crowd of smaller elementals in the same area, and some of the sludges have been changed to a new, "blobbier" ooze model. Oh, and the goblin escort quest seems to have been removed, presumably because it kind of broke the "flow" of the instance, forcing you to go back to the entrance.

Scarlet Monastery next!