I Got To See Atiesh Get Made

Vanilla WoW is full of content that was only ever experienced by a small minority of players when it first came out. One of the great things about Classic was that it allowed more people to see and experience things that they missed back in 2005. I didn't go into Classic with any intentions to raid for example, but it was cool to get to do it in the end and to experience the epicness of 40-man raiding for myself. Similarly, I felt privileged to take part in the forging of the legendary Thunderfury more than once.

One thing that I hadn't seen yet after almost five years of Classic was the creation of the Naxxramas legendary Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian. Atiesh never became as widely popular as Thunderfury, partially I think because it's quite drab-looking compared to the flashy Thunderfury, partially because the fact that it comes from the last raid of the original game meant that fewer people really knew about it. Working on getting it also requires even more of a time-commitment than Thunderfury, as you need to collect forty randomly dropped splinters of the staff from bosses across Naxx, then kill C'thun in AQ40 and Kel'thuzad in Naxx once more, just to then finish off with an extremely demanding five-man boss fight. The latter also goes to why I hadn't seen that part before myself - it's one thing to be in big raid group gathering in the sands of Silithus, helping to take down a giant wind lord, but when the presumptive staff-bearer can only take four of their trusted friends (of the right classes) into an instance for the final step, that does kind of limit who can go.

I was therefore extremely flattered and excited when a friendly druid from my era guild messaged me the other week to let me know that she had nearly collected all the splinters for her own Atiesh and to ask whether I wanted to come along to the final fight when the time came. It's really hard for me to capture how meaningful this simple offer was to me, as I haven't really been online much in Classic era for several months now, even if I do keep logging in to do my auction house stuff and try to stay in touch via Discord. It's still not the same as actually being there for the raids every week.

I was initially nervous that I might miss the whole thing since a holiday took me out of the game for a week, but in the end it worked out so that I came back just in time for Bracken (my druid friend) to collect the last pieces she needed before the five-man fight. Thursday night I logged on excitedly after the guild had finished an AQ40 run, even spurning my husband (there are some occasions that are too special to miss!), and it was only while I made my way to Stratholme that I finally learned what was going to be involved in the fight, partially from people talking about it, partially from looking things up.

Atiesh is a demon that looks like a dreadlord (though I'm not sure whether he's actually supposed to be one, lore-wise) whom you summon on Festival Lane in Stratholme and who hits like an absolute truck. Key to the seemingly intended strategy for the fight is to have a warrior in the group to disarm him, which will cause him to drop his sword as a temporary item that you can pick up and use during the fight to do insane dps, kind of like the weapons of Kael'thas' advisors in Burning Crusade. On top of that he has a constant shadow damage aura akin to that of Baron Rivendare, which combined with the damage on the tank makes it recommendable to bring two healers. Oh, and he pulses an AoE curse on everyone that reduces physical attack power by 1000 (!), which also makes it advisable to bring someone who can decurse.

Our group did contain two of the best-geared priest healers in the guild, but we had neither a warrior nor a decurser, as my friend was tanking in bear form and the other dps was one of the officers on his rogue. This was, frankly, an utterly terrible setup in terms of guaranteeing success, as it meant the boss's damage output on the tank was entirely unmitigated and our dps was perma-nerfed by the curse. (Unbuffed, losing 1000 attack power reduces my hunter's overall AP by about two thirds!)

We gave it one go without world buffs, which ended with our poor bear going squish with the boss at only about 75% health. After that, we decided to pop our chronoboons, which helped a lot. Things still got tense however when a stray wandering ghost got pulled into the fight (not even by me) and started whacking one of the priests. We eventually killed this unexpected add and got things under control, but the fight is so tight that this distraction had caused the tank healing to fall somewhat behind and healers to run out of mana a bit earlier than expected. With the boss at about two percent health, our tank died again, immediately followed by one of the priests, and for a nerve-wracking few seconds we didn't know whether we were going to make it. Fortunately, the rogue managed to pull off the classic manoeuvre of evasion-tanking the boss for his last sliver of health so we could get him down.

The actual hand-in for the quest after that is with Anachronos at the Caverns of Time in Tanaris, so we had a little guild assembly there to cheer for the guild's newest "Guardian". The fact that they were letting a druid build Atiesh should give you an idea of how many versions of this staff there are in the guild by now... one of the fun perks of the never-ending Classic era.

She then made her first portal to Karazhan (it's an on-use effect the staff has) and we all took it and did a bit more silly bouncing between portals in front of Kara before calling it a night. I made a 14-minute video to commemorate the event as well:

Pug Tales

I just wanted to share some notes about three pugs I had recently.

Blackfathom Deeps

This was on my mage. A warrior tank was the last one to join and in the same guild as the priest healer. This guy must have been a genuine newbie because he had virtually no idea what tanking means other than that he should be the first to hit things and wear a shield. I didn't see him use sunder or taunt even once, just rend and more rend. Unsurprisingly, this meant that aggro was all over the place as he couldn't hold threat at all, but nobody ever said anything. After all, his healer buddy didn't seem to mind!

Fortunately, everybody else was also really on the ball and we survived both pulling most of the murloc room at once and another really bad pull at the entrance to the water area. This prompted the warrior to say how awesome we were, at which point the ret pally whispered me that this was the worst tank she'd ever seen... though with a smiley, so she was clearly also more bemused by the whole thing than anything else.

In Kelris' room the warrior suddenly piped up to say that people in WoW Classic were all so kind and that he'd added us all to his friends list. Big "d'aww" moment. Then, as soon as Kelris was dead, someone - not the newbie, mind you - lit three of the braziers at once. I could feel the panic in the priest's voice as she quickly asked for the warlock to soulstone her, but we actually managed to pull through as everyone was very much on the ball again.

Just goes to show how much carrying you can do if you know what you're doing. Still, I would totally group with that warrior tank again. Though next time I might politely suggest using taunt at least.

Stratholme

On New Year's Eve I spent a good chunk of the evening being the pug in someone else's guild group. There was a call for a healer for a full Strat run (both sides) in LFG so I responded on my pally and it turned out to be a group of four guildies who were just looking for a fifth. They ended up inviting me to their Discord and we had lots of laughs - it was a fantastic run all around, and not just because we got lots of good drops too. My pally got the teal dress from Baron (which is BiS in terms of +heal for all healing classes until some pretty high-end raid drops), everybody got a Righteous Orb, and the mage book and flask recipe dropped for the happy guildies.

It was a bit of a bittersweet experience as it made me realise that it's been a little while since I had such a run with my own guildies. Since I've cut back on my playtime just a little bit in order to preserve my sanity I always seem to miss the five-mans - either because my role just isn't needed by the time they ask for more or due to timing. I've had multiple chats with people about wanting to run this or that dungeon, but then they are busy while I have time and vice versa and then they end up going without me. I miss that.

Deadmines

I ended up joining a Deadmines run on my dwarf priest that was... colourful. At least two of the other players were extremely weird stereotypes. The warrior tank, whom I got quite fond of, seemed to be an over-excited kid - he was friendly and competent enough, but loved talking in all caps for some reason and was always speaking his mind. The other priest was kind of the opposite and rubbed me the wrong way almost immediately - and not just because he joined as dps and then kind of usurped my healer spot. I didn't really mind dpsing that much, but he was just... weird. The best way to describe it is that he sounded like someone who had read an extremely detailed guide about Classic and therefore considered himself highly knowledgeable about the game but never actually played it before.

First he made everyone wait for ages because he wanted to finish levelling one more time because he thought it was of the utmost importance that he upgraded his spells before going to the dungeon. Then he handed out potions of mixed usefulness to everyone. He also tried to lecture us about kill order at one point. On the other hand though, he didn't even know that priest shields don't stack, and when we killed Mister Smite he thought that the environmental chest deco next to him was lootable. Just... weird.

Sadly, with all the delays to actually getting started (coughtheotherpriestcough), the whole thing took way too long. One guy then DCed by the first boss so that we ended up four-manning the rest of the instance, which made things even slower. With the lack of dps we wiped on Van Cleef and then another guy had to go so I didn't even end up getting the boss's head. Not a big deal I suppose as I meant to run the place more than once anyway, but one of my stranger pug experiences for sure.

Dungeon Bullet Points

Leaving all this newfangled raid stuff aside, one of my Classic endgame goals was to do all the max-level dungeons at least a couple of times and get a better feel for them than I had back in the day. (I've written about my uncomfortable relationship with vanilla endgame previously.) I wasn't sure how well that particular ambition was going to pan out in a raiding guild, but luckily for me it turned out that quite a few of the core raiders are actually quite fond of running five-man dungeons as well, so I've made some nice progress on my personal dungeon checklist.

Blackrock Depths

A Jail Break run in BRD was actually the first piece of group content I recall doing with guildies (not counting the bug/dragon farm). They were looking to get a couple of alts attuned for Onyxia and were LFM, and I figured that I might as well join in since I wasn't attuned either at the time. It was pretty fun!

Since then I've been back a number of times: to get attuned for MC, do some other quests and also help out other guildies. I still think it's too easy to get lost in there and just consider the dungeon too long, but I've found that it does help to let go of the notion of treating it like a regular dungeon that you "complete" every time and to simply accept that you have to pick and choose your targets based on what people want to do on any given night. Plus my guildies actually know their way around so there are fewer annoyances with getting lost.

Blackrock Spire

Now, this has been my biggest success story as it's the one place I don't think I ever went to back in Vanilla and which I only ever visited a couple of times afterwards as well. The only post on the blog that had the tag "Blackrock Spire" until now is this one from late Wrath in which I talk about a pug kicking me for specifically wanting to do LBRS instead of a random dungeon (lol).

Parts of it are still confusing to me, especially where people habitually skip some pulls by jumping off ledges and stuff, but through sheer repetition I've become much more comfortable with the place. I even ran LRBS often enough to collect all the gems for the UBRS key. (Yes, I'm a hunter with the UBRS key now. Every pug's dream!)

There've been fewer runs of UBRS itself, but still a few (and yes, I'm counting UBRS as a dungeon even though it's a ten-man). I've learned how to kite General Drakkisath, and I got Finkle's Skinner from the Beast. I also learned that there's a gnome hiding inside the belly of the Beast, which amused me to end.

Dire Maul

Dire Maul is not as popular a destination but I have visited all wings at least once. East was ticked off during an extremely late-night run with a group of guild regulars. West was done one afternoon when a guildie suddenly got it into his head that he really wanted the book needed to acquire Quel'Serrar - not that we got it in that run, considering the extremely low drop rate. On the final round of the instance to hand in our quests at the end, the druid healer and I must have found every single one of the invisible ghosts in the instance; it was quite ridiculous. Finally, I got to see Dire Maul North during my first ever tribute run, which someone started to get the buffs in time for a guild raid.

Scholomance

Scholomance is the one dungeon I still haven't done for some reason! Need to rectify that at some point...

Stratholme

I've done the living side once or twice and the undead side several more times. It's a place that seems to be quite popular with people for farming money (live side) or specific rare drops (undead side). I took it as a sign of how much times have changed that we easily completed the "Baron Run" (reaching and killing the last boss of the undead side within 45 minutes) several times without even trying. I also learned that there's an amulet you can gather in the living side that makes an NPC from the chapel at the back door help you in the fight against the Baron... even where I thought I knew the content, I keep learning new things.

Hitting The Endgame Wall

My last post ended on a very optimistic note, but as it turned out that optimism may have been slightly misplaced or at least premature. For example I'd forgotten just how much I loathe most of the game's original endgame zones. To quote myself from three and a half years ago when I was levelling my paladin on Kronos:

I just don't really like most of the Vanilla level 50+ zones. The Plaguelands are depressing, the Burning Steppes are dull, Silithus with its grating soundtrack and ongoing bug noises is just freaking annoying. I actually find myself wondering if WoW would have been as "sticky" for me if Burning Crusade hadn't come out relatively soon after I hit max level, sparing me from having to spend a significant amount of time with the level sixty endgame.

After finishing up Felwood and Un'goro, my hunter set foot into the Plaguelands and I barely managed to complete two quests before I was feeling turned off. Ugh...

Attempts to pad my XP gains with a few more pug dungeons weren't successful either. Having hit level 58, which is technically high enough for all of Classic's endgame dungeons, I figured that I should be able to tap into the never-ending stream of LFM requests for max-level content that I'd observed during most of my levelling journey. Unfortunately though, it turns out that level 58 hunters aren't the most popular characters in /LookingForGroup.

The first three people I whispered didn't respond to me at all, just kept spamming their LFG request as if nobody was replying. Another told me that they were already full (quite some time after my initial whisper though) and two other times I was told that they already had a hunter and didn't want another. I mean of course, bringing more than one of the same class to a dungeon would surely be unthinkable!

I'm being a bit facetious here because when damage dealers are a dime a dozen there is some logic to trying to build a diverse group, not least because it increases the chances of everyone getting some loot and little going to waste. But after how inclusive and easygoing most of my pugs had been while levelling up, it was still a bit of a blow. (I ran quite a few levelling dungeons with groups with other hunters and there were never any bad vibes. In Sunken Temple a troll hunter and I even set up trap chains on some pulls since a single ice trap's duration is so short.)

Finally I managed to get invited to a group for Strat live that had already both a tank and a healer but was taking suspiciously long to fill its dps slots - my best guess is that the fact that the group leader and healer was a level 59 shaman was deterring the same kinds of people who didn't want a level 58 hunter in their group.

I was feeling optimistic though as we engaged in some friendly chatter on the way to the dungeon entrance. Unfortunately we were only on the second pull when an Eye of Naxx appeared and since I couldn't kill it fast enough we got adds and wiped. Fortunately nobody took it too badly and we just resed up and continued. Unfortunately we soon suffered more deaths, such as when the tank made a big pull while the mage was busy conjuring water. I'll shamefully admit that I was responsible for some deaths too when a clumsy tab-target sent an arrow flying into an extra group of mobs (though that pull didn't wipe us).

We made it past the gate with the rats, and then wiped again on the very next pull. This time I couldn't even tell what had gone wrong exactly; it felt like the healer just hadn't been able to keep up with the damage on the tank. One of the dps said that he didn't have time for this, left, and before I knew it the group had disbanded.

Just like Vanilla indeed. My first memory of Strat is my nelf priest being roped into serving as a healer for a pug run, us wiping a few times on the first road and everything falling apart soon after.

I'm not sure if this screenshot is from that run, as it looks like we must have got a bit further that time, but you get the idea.

I was starting to entertain the idea of cancelling my sub and giving the whole thing a break for a couple of months when I finally got lucky and managed to snag a spot in a guild run on Sunday morning, also for Strat live as it happened. That experience couldn't have been more different: The run was chill and very successful (we never wiped, though there were a couple of humorous deaths, such as when the undead warlock gained an insane amount of aggro from some Scarlets by cannibalising the corpse of one of their mates), and even better for me personally: I hit level 59 and scored no less than three very good pre-raid pieces of gear that nobody else needed.

So hope lives on.

Stratholme and Zul'Farrak revisited

My little troll druid's adventures in the old yet revamped instances continue.

Stratholme

You probably already knew that Stratholme has been split into two parts now, called Main Gate and Service Entrance. Considering that the instance always had those two entrances and already consisted of two distinctly different halves as it was (undead and living side), this split feels reasonably natural, though it's not without issues. There's the problem with the postbox keys for example (no, I don't think I'll ever get tired of linking to that post of Klep's), but the street that used to connect the two parts (I think it's called Market Row) also feels a bit pointless now. It's considered part of the Main Gate half of the instance now, but it's basically just a dead end with a quest mob in it. I considered myself lucky for being able to convince my party to go there and kill it.

The instance has also received some updates in terms of lore besides the quest givers at the entrance, though I have to admit that they felt a bit half-arsed to me. I mean, the living side used to be a Bastion of the Scarlet Crusaders, led by the demon Balnazzar disguised as Grand Crusader Dathroan. Now Balnazzar has dropped the disguise, and all the Scarlets have died and risen as undead. To be honest I didn't even notice that change until we made it to Balnazzar's room and I was startled by the fact that he was already in his demon form. The undead side is similar - everything is more or less the same, except that Baron Rivendare is gone because he's in Naxx now, and in his place we fight his long lost twin brother Lord Aurius Rivendare.

I don't want to be too cynical, but this really felt to me as if Blizzard wanted to drive Stratholme's story forward but couldn't be bothered to give it a full revamp à la Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep. The end result is just a particularly bad example of the inconsistent way in which Blizzard approached the Cataclysm, where even within the same instance some characters have moved forward in time while others are still in exactly the same position they were in back in vanilla. It just makes my head hurt.

The quality of my pug groups in Stratholme was below average as well, which rather soured the experience for me. In my Main Gate run nobody was particularly rude or terrible, but for some reason people kept dropping every other pull and for no apparent reason; we must have rotated through about five different tanks alone, which was simply annoying.

The first time I zoned in at the Service Entrance I got a paladin tank who immediately pulled everything in sight and then kept going, not giving anyone time to pick up the instance quests in the chapel or loot. Since I did those things anyway, we eventually wiped and he started telling me off for being too slow and that me wanting to get quests or loot wasn't his problem. I dropped group and didn't feel like pugging for about a week.

When I tried again, I got another paladin tank like that, though fortunately I already had all the quests in my log this time. We also didn't die, though the pally complained about "having to use LoH" when my grand total of three different healing spells were unable to keep him up while tanking about ten mobs at once. Seriously, what is it with cocky paladin tanks? I noticed that they seem to make up the vast majority of my low-level tanks and it's getting quite annoying. Fortunately this particular specimen wasn't totally unreasonable and after a bit of grumbling from my side we moved on and completed the instance.

Zul'Farrak

Fortunately the gods of pugging eventually seemed to have mercy with me and my group for Zul'Farrak was nothing short of lovely: a sweet druid tank, a fun warrior, and two playful newbie hunters, all of whom I would have happily run with again if it hadn't been so late already. I'm glad that one of my favourite instances didn't get tainted by a bad pug experience at least.

With the dungeon always having been one of the better ones, I wasn't surprised to find that Blizzard didn't feel the need to make any noticeable changes to it, other than the fact that it was moved up a couple of levels and also has all its quests on the inside now. It felt kind of weird to only be given four quests for it though, as I remember this instance having loads back in vanilla - seven or eight maybe - even if some of them were a bit obscure to get (like the one to learn the name of the spider god). No more Carrot on a Stick, no more Troll Tempers, no more Uncracked Scarab Shells and no more Divino-Matic Rod. Woe. Interestingly you can still fight and kill Sergeant Bly and his party, despite of the Divino-Matic Rod quest being gone. I only got a brief glimpse of the dialogue to trigger this, but it seems that you just attack him out of random annoyance now? For all the killing we do in WoW, I find this display of unprovoked violence towards an ally oddly disturbing...

Other than that I have to admit that the instance felt somewhat undertuned to me, but I don't know if my party was just that good or what. I really don't know what to think of the tuning in low-level instances post-Cataclysm in general. The very first ones, like Ragefire Chasm or Deadmines, felt like they were reasonably challenging for their level now, with both bosses and trash pulls actually posing a real threat at times, but as you go up in levels the runs quickly turn into mindless AoE fests again - except when you suddenly get a random run where everything seems to hit crushingly hard again (like it felt in my Dire Maul North run). I don't know if the tuning is really that out of whack or if gear and spec simply make that huge a difference these days. It's just puzzling to me.