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.

An Epic Paladin Adventure

Amusingly, after complaining in my last post that my paladin alt just didn't seem to click with me, I naturally ended up playing her for hours and hours this weekend and had an absolute blast.

It started with me rejoining the LFG channel at level 19 to look for a group for Deadmines. This was a bit of an epiphany for me as I realised just how much I had missed being social and engaging with the server community in the past few weeks and months. There's something comforting even about simply sitting in the LFG channel and watching the mix of acronyms and inane chatter scroll by - it just makes the world feel so much more alive, and I'd missed that in my recent time spent doing almost nothing but solo.

The actual grouping experience itself was as entertaining as ever as well. I ended up finding a DM group pretty quickly, and while it was a relatively uneventful run in the grand scheme of things, it easily could have provided material for a whole blog post of its own. The group makeup was just so on point, it was almost like something out of a comedy skit: the tank was the competent straight man, the healer the self-professed noob, and the other two damage dealers were a night elf warrior driven by what I can only guess must have been an overexcited thirteen-year-old (based on the amount of bouncing around and typing in caps he did) and a quiet rogue who later turned out to be Spanish.

At one point the healer noticed a chest and pointed it out to the rest of us, just to then go ahead and loot it himself while the rest of us were doing our /rolls. I was incredibly amused by this, remembering that I had done that exact same thing during my first DM run back in the day, so I typed in complete earnestness: "It's customary to do a /roll for who gets to loot a chest :)", which I thought was perfectly polite, but the nelf warrior felt the need to follow it up with a "SAVAGE!!!" of his own, which I think changed people's perception of my intent somewhat and made the poor noob all defensive.

Later on, we did an accidental overpull on the boat and jumped on the wheel to evade it - all except the healer, who just stood there with a baffled look and let himself slowly get beaten to death while typing: "I don't get it." Also, the first time we pulled the boss, the tank went down without getting a single heal because the healer had been busy talking to the rogue about trading the parrot cage the latter had picked up from trash earlier. Good times all around.

Anyway, I dinged level 20 during this run and it suddenly hit me that it was time to start the quest for Verigan's Fist. I remembered it being quite epic when I did it on my paladin on Kronos, but since I struggled to get a group for Shadowfang Keep back then and wasn't particularly fussed about completing the quest, I didn't actually finish it until I was level 32. I also remembered Rohan writing about getting the Fist for his own pally the other day and talking about how satisfying it had felt. I decided to make it my new goal to get my own Verigan's Fist as soon as possible this time around.

I started with the ore shipment in Loch Modan, though I promptly got distracted by some other quests in the zone. (I finished the timed one to kill six buzzards with only seconds left on the clock because the area was annoyingly busy.) When I saw someone looking for more to do the two elite quests in the ogre area I happily volunteered. I knew that the ore was there as well, and while you didn't necessarily need a group to pick it up, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately it turned out that the ore requires you to first get a "sub-quest" in Thelsamar, which I'd forgotten to pick up, an embarrassment that I had to confess when we reached the broken cart with the ore and the other pally in the group tried to helpfully nudge me into picking it up. Fortunately he then had the brilliant idea to try sharing the sub-quest and it worked! So I got that done alongside the two ogre-killing quests.

We were chatting a bit during the whole thing - as you do - and on the subject of the paladin class quest I mentioned that I thought getting the hammer from SFK was the most annoying part as few Alliance players ever want to go there. My fellow pally noted that it was technically soloable, which I conceded while insisting that it was quite a pain to do so. "Well, we could do it together after this if you like!" he offered cheerfully. I couldn't believe my luck and happily agreed.

I just went to clear out my bags a bit while the paladin's player was meant to get some food, but he soon returned saying that he was feeling too ill to eat. He had been going on about having the mother of all hangovers earlier already. So we got going.

We did the orc quest in the mountain pass and actually managed to wipe on it, though we had a good laugh about the absolutely insane number of orcs we'd managed to aggro in the process. We detoured to Menethil Harbour to pick up the flight path there and then proceeded through Arathi and Hillsbrad.

We chatted a bit on the way, again as you do - he kept going on about his hangover and I had to laugh when he said that he usually hated the simplicity of Classic paladin gameplay but in his current state he was glad that it wasn't more demanding. We talked about retail and how neither of us had played it in years, and how you didn't get the sort of adventure there anymore that we were having right in that moment, trekking across half the continent on foot together. There were quiet times as well, when we put on auto-run and looked at something else for a bit, but it never felt uncomfortable.

Eventually, after a journey that seemingly took forever (though I hadn't been bored enough to ever look at the clock) we reached Silverpine Forest and the keep. We didn't have any trouble dispatching the early trash one careful pull at a time, though we got a bit too many on our first attempt at the boss. I died, but my comrade managed to make it out alive and was able to give me a res when he came back in. After that we were able to proceed to the stables without further incident, where we grabbed Jordan's Smithing Hammer and then hearthed out. We thanked each other for the company and logged off.

Later in the day I decided to log back on for the Purified Kor Gem. I was happy to just solo that one as I was a bit low to join a full BFD run anyway, plus I'd picked up the quest for brain stems from the naga outside the instance to go with it. I actually got the gem after only a few kills but then felt compelled to hang around to finish the other quest too.

I'd started my farming pretty buffed up as there'd been a head drop in Stormwind before I left, but annoyingly I then died from a cocky mistake, which meant that finishing off the remainder of the quest suddenly became that much harder without the buff. I'd just come back after my second corpse run when I spotted the same paladin that had run to SFK with me at the entrance of the cavern. We briefly reunited and killed some more naga and satyrs together (much easier as a duo!) until I had all my brain stems and he had his own Kor Gem. Then we said our farewells and hearthed again.

I figured that I probably wasn't going to get my DM run done on that same day as it was getting pretty late by that point, but when it was closing in on midnight I saw a group LFM dps in chat, and since it was a Saturday I thought eh, what the heck.

This run ended up being fun as well, though in a different way. We started with a warrior tank, a druid healer, two paladins and a hunter. The warrior offered that I could tank since I was higher level but I happily declined. I was doubly glad I did so because the hunter was constantly pulling for the tank and if that had been me it would have driven me utterly bonkers. Fortunately our warrior seemed to be much more patient, and even gave the hunter some of his own bullets when the latter realised that he was running low on ammo (how very authentic).

I think it was shortly after the first boss when the druid healer suddenly disconnected and never came back, so I whipped out my healing dress (no good paladin should leave the house without one) and took over the healer role for the remainder of the run. We did just fine four-manning, though it was a bit slow and the hunter started meleeing towards the end to "conserve ammo" which once again gave me flashbacks to me having an eerily similar experience on my own nelf hunter.

I know the way I'm describing this it sounds as if the hunter was quite annoying, but in reality we just had a good time. People got loot and there was silliness and banter. I made a gif out of the hunter trapping a mob and then accidentally hurling himself off the boat, which was the sort of thing I just found hilarious at half one in the morning:

Anyway, I got my lumber and returned to Ironforge so that Jordan Stillwell could craft my new hammer for me. I was pleased as punch that I had achieved my goal by level 23 and it had been one hell of a day.

Don't Click Anything!

The more often I run Blackfathom Deeps in Classic, the more I love it. It's an instance that I've been fond of for a very long time, partially due to its atmosphere and partially due to nostalgia, but in Classic I've also come to realise that it really brings out both the best and the worst in people... and the game.

My nelf hunter had already done it once, in a run that had been very smooth and perfectly enjoyable, but despite of the group being very thorough and killing almost every mob in the instance, I still finished with 7 out of 8 naga brains and 8 out of 10 Twilight Pendants in terms of quest progress.

Now, the former I would have been able to get from the mobs outside the instance as well, but the latter were a lot trickier, so I really just wanted to join another run to ensure that I'd be able to complete both quests. So I did get another group on Saturday... eventually. I'm learning that group assembly can take a lot longer on Hydraxian Waterlords than on Pyrewood Village.

The party was led by a male rogue and a female paladin who gave me couple vibes. At least the rogue also gave the impression of someone who'd returned to the game after a long absence, as he clearly had some knowledge of the dungeon but was fuzzy on a lot of details.

Our tank was a male paladin who was actually a very good tank but by his own admission didn't really know the instance. The group was rounded out by a second hunter, this one a male dwarf.

Things started out smoothly enough, though the other hunter forgot to breathe at one point while we were fighting in the water and drowned himself.

When we got to the murloc room, I warned that the murlocs had a habit of running and aggroing the entire room. The tank went in, murlocs ran, we aggroed the entire room. And wiped of course. The tank apologised as we made the corpse run, but I told him it was fine and at least now he knew just what could happen. The second time around he made sure to pull back a bit more and things went fine.

The next interesting moment occurred as we entered the cavern leading up to the temple. We ended up with a pull that was way too big and only barely scraped by. Then just as we breathed a sigh of relief at having come through after all, I saw the rogue back into yet another group. Nooo...! People died and I did that shameful thing where instead of fighting I grabbed my loot first, because at that moment I wasn't sure things were going to work out and I really wanted to get my last pendant, okay?

But after I had it, both the tank and the other hunter were still alive, so I joined them in fighting. It was super manic, with mobs and pets going everywhere and the tank bubbling himself with only a sliver of health left, but somehow we made it through so that the other two could be resed and didn't have to make another corpse run.

In front of the temple the dwarf randomly fell off the walkway, couldn't find his way up again and died. By that point I had started to file him away under "a bit of a dork".

As soon as Kelris was dead I made sure to put into chat that people shouldn't click on the braziers because they would summon mobs and we could only fight one group at a time. As soon as I had typed this though, the tank went up to one brazier to click, while the dorky dwarf went up to another. Both me and the rogue went "nooo" in chat but it was too late.

I declared it a wipe and dived around a corner like the coward that I am because I wasn't actually in combat, didn't have Feign Death yet and really didn't fancy another corpse run. The others tried to fight but died very quickly, with the rogue only just managing to vanish in time.

Once the dead had made it back, we finished the rest of the dungeon just fine, but the whole situation with people running up to click things right as I was telling them not to do that very thing reminded me eerily of this UberDanger video, which still makes me break into giggles upon rewatching (it should start at the relevant point in time, but the whole thing is worth watching really - just be aware there's swearing):



Just DO NOT. CLICK. ANYTHING!

(By the way, you can now also follow this blog on Bloglovin.)

Blackfathom Adventures

My last few posts have all been very theoretical, so let me tell you a story involving actual gamplay for a change, to mix things up a bit.

This past weekend I decided that I wanted to go to Blackfathom Deeps on my hunter. After keeping my eyes peeled on both general chat and the LFG channel while questing in Ashenvale for a while, I eventually managed to join a group.

It was a pretty pleasant and uneventful run up until we got to the area with the Twilight cultists. First our tauren warrior tank asked if we minded taking a smoke break for him. It's one of those rather awkward questions to ask in a pug, because realistically most of us were probably thinking something along the lines of: "Ugh no, this is taking long enough as it is, and you want to make us sit around for another ten minutes just so you can smoke a cigarette?"

On the other hand though, you also want to keep everyone in the group sweet and the last thing you need is the tank getting grumpy due to nicotine withdrawal. So we all agreed that he could go while the rest of us tried to use the break in other constructive ways (getting drinks, going to the toilet, that sort of thing).

He came back and we cleared the way to the temple, but we hadn't been underwater yet, to pick up the quest item from there and kill the thrasher boss. The troll shaman and I kept urging people to come over and get into the water, but the tank and feral druid seemed oddly reluctant.

Suddenly the druid sat down, said that he had to go and logged off. We were a little taken aback by the suddenness of this, but it's not like BFD is cutting edge content - I figured we'd be able to continue just fine with a dps down.

However, then the tank suddenly said that he also had to go. "Really?" asked one of my remaining group mates, somewhat incredulously, to which the tank replied that his mum was in the hospital and logged off.

It was one of those awkward moments where you don't quite know what to think, because the timing sure made it seem like a lie concocted on the spot to ward off any criticism or damage to one's reputation for leaving people hanging like that, but on the other hand it's the sort of thing that makes you hesitant to call someone out because if it's true they are of course completely right and deserve nothing but sympathy.

Either way, the troll shaman, undead priest and I were left at a loss. Getting a replacement of any kind this close to the end of a dungeon is rarely feasible.

Still, not wanting to give up I suggested that we should press on with the three of us to see how it'd go with my pet tanking. Unfortunately poor Snowclaw didn't stand a chance at keeping aggro off my level 29 group mates, being only 25 himself, but the shaman didn't seem to do much worse at tanking anyway, so he equipped the dagger that dropped off Old Serra'kis, strapped on a shield and we continued like that.

The temple is probably one of the toughest part of the instance, with all the trash requiring careful pulling and some of the mob waves spawned by the brazier doing quite brutal damage. However, our shaman bravely did as much kite-tanking as he could, running enemies in circles around his earthbind totem, and the priest gave it his all, contributing damage with his wand after he ran out of mana to heal.

Slowly but surely we managed to whittle down the remanining enemies that way until only Aku'mai herself remained. She was tough, especially since I could contribute only relatively little damage, what with being three levels lower than her. Again, we all ran ourselves out of mana by the end, but the boss eventually collapsed at the same time as my pet and with our shaman only having a smidgeon of health left as well. Victory!

I felt very warm and fuzzy at the end, pleased with how the three of us had worked together all the harder after our other two group mates had left. These are the moments to remember and that plant the seeds for new friendships. I'm not really looking for new friends right now, but I added both of them to my friends list anyway, just in case.

Also interesting: The next day I ran BFD with my husband on my druid, and there we also had a dps quit in the run-up to the temple. To be fair he'd pretty much said that he was only there for the one quest item, so I guess it wasn't entirely surprising that he closed the game shortly afterwards.

Still, when you're already this close to the end and everything's going smoothly, why not just finish the run and have a shot at loot from the last two bosses? I get that real life can always interfere, but three out of seven pugs quitting at around the same point in the dungeon sure felt odd. Am I missing something here?

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.

Level 30, Loving Duskwood

Isadora hit level 30 today, with a /played time of 2 days and a little less than 11 hours. I was really hoping that I would be able to start this post with a screenshot of her proudly wielding Verigan's Fist, but alas, the quest for it is still in her log and has gone grey by now. I just can't seem to get a group for Shadowfang Keep. At one point I tried to form one with a druid, but we gave up after nobody responded to our LFM requests for too long. He joked that people probably didn't even know what "SFK" was. Alliance just doesn't like to go there - it's too far away, and I believe that other than the paladin class quest there are no other incentives to go. I wonder at what level I might be able to solo the first boss? I only need to get to the stables to complete my quest...

In regards to Blackfathom Deeps, reader Shandren had commented that the quest item also dropped from the elite mobs outside the instance and that I should be able to get it solo if I was careful. As it happens, I did end up finding a group for BFD though and completed a full run of the place. (We even killed the thrasher boss!) The way the party was formed was a bit bizarre. We only needed a tank, but as soon as we invited one, she immediately left again, citing the presence of two other plate wearers in the group as the reason. I had forgotten how peculiar people could be about that back in the day. It seems all the stranger considering how hard it can be to get groups at all, never mind your preferred group composition.

Anyway, at this point our level 23 dps warrior offered to tank instead (even though her level was slightly on the low end for BFD) and we started to look for a dps. We got... another dps warrior, several levels higher. "Well, you'll end up tanking then," she was told unceremoniously... and was perfectly fine with it. She just strapped on a shield and tanked the whole instance like a boss, even though she could have complained that we had originally invited her as a dps. It was just such a stark contrast to the previous tank leaving simply because she didn't like the group composition.

Other than that BFD run I haven't found much time for group content, so I've been questing instead. It's starting to become a bit of a drag at the moment because I'm having trouble finding gear upgrades (I don't want to waste money on the auction house) and my weapon is now more than ten levels below me. As if being a prot/holy hybrid wasn't enough to make me hit like a wet noodle... At least I get to squeeze some extra dps out of Exorcism whenever I'm fighting undead. (Yay, class flavour!)

A lot of my recent questing has taken place in Duskwood, and somewhat to my surprise I've been loving it (even if the constant running back and forth between Darkshire and Raven Hill is annoying as anything). The thing is, I don't recall being very fond of Duskwood back in Vanilla... in fact I seem to remember not liking it very much at all, because I wasn't a fan of the gloomy atmosphere. But looking at it now, it seems like the perfect example of why many things about Vanilla WoW just worked so well, even if people would probably call them bad game design these days.

For example, who thought that it would be a good idea to have a level 35 elite mob patrol among regular skeletons that are ten levels lower? Or to spawn another level 35 elite who'd then make his way to Darkshire on the road, squashing innocent players and quest NPCs alike if they happened to cross his path? Things like that really made the world feel dangerous and served to underline the background of Duskwood being a cursed and dangerous place.

 Just like the good old days...

Quests aren't always connected in a perfectly linear manner either. For example you get a quest to bring some food to Jitters in Raven Hill, but that quest simply ends there with no follow-up. Later however you receive a quest from a guy called Sven, who wants you to hunt down the last person he saw at the house where his family was killed, and after a fair bit of running around and collecting clues, it turns out that this person was the very same Jitters to whom you delivered that food parcel. The Legend of Stalvan also has you running all around the houses to find out more about this Stalvan guy, after the local medium has a vision of him bringing doom upon Darkshire. People may have argued that this made the stories too hard to follow or whatever, but it's hard to deny that actually having to read the quest text and connecting the dots also made the whole experience so much more rewarding for those who actually cared to pay attention.

Duskwood as a whole is bursting with what I would call "old WoW flavour", portraying a world that is cartoony and sometimes a little silly but still takes itself seriously. (I read all 20 pages of Jitters' completed journal - the bit about him witnessing the death of Sven's family was rough!) I feel that this is something that has been lost in current WoW - while it still has some serious quests, the overall tone is much less so, with people riding around on increasingly ridiculous mounts and areas like the goblin starter zone setting a very different tone for new players.

Remember when worgen were fierce monsters instead of dogs with top hats and bad English accents?

Now I just have to find out more about this "Scythe of Elune" - Jitters' journal mentioned something about it having been found inside a mine... (Read: I can't really remember where that particular quest line starts, but I'll be happy to find out.)

Kalimdor Calling... and Other Travels

There's one thing no recreation of Vanilla WoW can bring back, no matter how faithful it is, and that's the ignorance of being a truly new player. I recall that when I started playing the game back in 2006, Elwynn Forest alone seemed huge to me. Then I realised that it was just one zone of many. Then I realised that there was a whole other continent waiting for me... well, you get the idea.

This time around, I know almost exactly where I need to go. I say "almost" because while I achieved Loremaster pre-Cataclysm, I "only" did so on Horde side, and even that was several years ago by now. I haven't been truly surprised by any of the content I've encountered on Kronos (yet), but there were definitely a few "Huh, I'd completely forgotten about that" moments.

For example, it had been quite a while since I last had to buy a book from a special vendor to train my secondary professions past 150. It was quite a trek over to Ashenvale to get the Expert Cookbook. With what little money I had, I bought a spare to sell on the auction house and I managed to sell it with a markup of 100%. Yay, arbitrage! A similar scenario played out when I had to wander up to the Arathi Highlands to learn expert first aid, and again I was able to make a tidy profit off the journey.

I also encountered my first Horde player while travelling. As I was making my way along the mountain road from Loch Modan to the Wetlands, I was suddenly faced with a "skull level" tauren druid in travel form coming my way. I froze like a deer in the headlights, but he just looked at me for a moment and then moved on. I don't know if he didn't want the dishonourable kill or just didn't care to gank either way. One mustn't forget that not everyone on a PvP server is necessarily out to kill the opposite faction non-stop.

Quests feel like they are all over the place by this point. There are half a dozen zones that contain mobs of the right level somewhere, but there only ever seems to be a small handful of quests that are in the right level range, so I'm constantly travelling round and round.

Finally of course, I'm dealing with the absolute insanity that is the paladin class quest for a levelling weapon. (This being Vanilla, I can't currently see my reward, but I've been reminded that it's Verigan's Fist.) Its instructions are so long that I received a "note" item in my inventory that's six pages long. Do you remember when quests used to give those? For this class quest, a blacksmith that works in Ironforge asks you to bring him supplies from the elite ogre area in Loch Modan, wood from the Deadmines, tools from Shadowfang Keep and some other thingamajig from Blackfathom Deeps. Considering that an instance run takes about two hours, and that's without even taking the travel time to places like SFK into account, wanting to complete this quest means that you're looking at about 6+ hours of play time just to finish what is essentially a single task.

It feels insane... but of course there is a certain pride to be had in completing your class quests. What kind of paladin would I be if I couldn't gather some simple blacksmithing materials? So far I've managed to get the stuff from the ogres and the wood from the Deadmines. (For my second run I healed and it went much more smoothly... just don't tell anyone that I stood at the back wearing a dress; it's very un-paladin-like.) Shadowfang and Blackfathom worry me a little because they are both in fairly remote areas where people don't often go - but on the plus side, levelling being fairly slow means that there is plenty of time for an opportunity to present itself before I completely outlevel the content.

(On a side note, I have now outlevelled the "real" Isadora - my first ever WoW character, whom I tried to recreate here - because back then I switched to playing a night elf priest on an English server fairly early on. Now there is definitely something very new about this journey.)

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!

Blackfathom nostalgia

The other day I decided to log onto my level twenty-two troll warrior and queue up for a low-level random instance, as the scattered posts I read about other people's experiences with the dungeon finder at low level and even a whole blog dedicated to the experience had piqued my curiousity.

The meagre amount of talent points that my troll has at the moment are all located in the arms tree, but since tanking at low levels doesn't even necessarily require you to wear a shield or the highest armour type for your class, I ticked the "I can tank" box as well and got a group popup instantly.

The instance I got ported into was Blackfathom Depths Deeps, and immediately a wave of nostalgia washed over me. Blackfathom remains one of my favourite low-level instances and I'm not even sure why. It wasn't my first; the Deadmines hold that spot and I quite liked them as well... but Blackfathom appealed to my sense of adventure in a different way.

First off, it was pretty damn annoying to get to as Alliance. To this day I'm not sure whether it's faster to run down the beach from Auberdine or to fly to Astranaar and then walk from there. I always preferred going via Darkshore, but I can see the addition of low-level mounts make the Ashenvale path more appealing. Either way it was always quite a pain to assemble a whole party for the instance and then actually get everyone there.

Then there's of course the whole unadultered dungeon feel of the place: It's a dark, humid hole in the ground with winding tunnels to get lost in. I remember my levelling partner asking me for help with Researching the Corruption (back when the mobs outside the instance were elite as well), and I thought that it was scary as anything.

In all fairness though, while it was certainly a group building experience back in the day, I can't claim that I really missed the long walk towards the instance entrance and people inevitably getting lost in the tunnels before even reaching the swirly portal.

My little warrior's group consisted of a rogue in full heirlooms, a hunter, a warlock and a paladin healer. Apart from the rogue and me none of the others had any heirlooms, but I don't think any of them were genuine newbies either, judging by the way they played, never got lost and managed the bridge jump flawlessly.

Oh the bridge! As far as I know there's a spot where you can just climb up onto the other side straight from the water, but back in the day I didn't know that and we always spent ages getting everyone across the gaps in that bridge. I was particularly fail at it, only surpassed by a druid with whom I grouped repeatedly and who always complained about his old computer making well-timed jumps impossible. Let it be known that my little warrior leapt across flawlessly and with particular glee.

Despite of what I said about low-level tanking having very lax gear requirements, I did actually strap on a one-handed mace and a shield, simply because I have too many bad memories of having to heal completely clueless tanks with two-handers and it would have made me feel very noobish.

So far, so good - though I was quickly reminded of something that I had experienced before on previous warrior alts: tanking in a dps spec sucks because you never have any rage. I hit Bloodrage whenever it was off cooldown, but that wasn't nearly often enough. I tried to preserve rage by using Rend instead of Sunder (lol, I know) on single targets, but I swear in the end I still mostly just held aggro by auto-attacking. My heirlooms helped a lot with that though, as the equally geared rogue was the only one who kept ripping aggro off me, and considering that the mobs didn't hit very hard anyway it wasn't a big deal.

I thought it was interesting that nobody commented on my tanking either way but happily followed me wherever I went, even when I dove down into the underwater caverns to kill Lady Sarevess and to find that injured Argent Dawn dude. I guess they were all relatively experienced, decided that I was acting sufficiently like a tank was supposed to and left it at that.

Our healer also did well, even though his mana bar appeared to be empty all the time and he had no drinks. Most of the time he just managed to squeeze out enough healing anyway. Only once or twice did he ask for a mana break, which due to his lack of drinks simply meant that everyone was sitting around and waiting for his mana to regenerate. Talk about old school! During one such break he also announced that he "had to go to WC", which momentarily made me worry that he was about to drop the group to join a Wailing Caverns run, until my brain made a reality check and realised that he just wanted to go to the loo.

Overall it ended up being a very smooth run. About the closest we came to wiping was when we entered the cavern containing Gelihast (aka the murloc boss), I ran in to shield bash the first caster mob and forgot that the murlocs are arranged in a complex pattern which means that if you attack even a single mob where it stands, all the other mobs in the room will aggro in a domino effect, and the next thing I saw was the boss running past me with a fear icon over his head as he had aggroed on the warlock. Everyone played well though and we managed to survive even that.

On a related note, what is it with pulls in many low-level instances? You don't really appreciate how clearly visible it is in higher level dungeons which mobs belong together unless you go back to tank a place like Blackfathom. The mobs are literally scattered all over the place, and chances are that if you pull one, at least one other will come but you can never know for sure. And then you have places like said murloc room, where you can't seem to take one step without aggroing yet another mob and it's all too easy for everything to spiral out of control.

Anyway, after the madness surrounding Gelihast we made it through the rest of the instance without another hitch. I remember the platforms just before you get to Kelris' room being quite wipetastic back in the day, but this time I made sure to pull all the casters back using line of sight (which wasn't too hard with all the pillars) and no further chaos ensued. I'm also proud to say that nobody had the bright idea to light all the candles at the altar at once, because I remember all too well when some people did do that...

I'm looking forward to my next run like this, though I don't know when it will happen, considering that my obsession with getting lots of emblems for all my level eighty alts takes up most of my WoW time these days.