Dusting off My Original Priest

In reply to a comment on my post about WoW's returning player experience back in August, I noted that almost all the characters I've been playing in retail since picking it up again at the end of BfA were created from scratch, because the notion of going back to an existing character that I last played more than ten years ago was all kinds of terrifying.

Having dabbled in retail for nearly four years now however, the idea didn't seem quite so bad anymore. A big part of my original fear was simply that it would make me feel bad to go back to these characters that I used to love and see them in the context of this new game that I didn't like all that much anymore. Thanks to the existence of Classic, I don't feel the same hostility towards retail anymore though, and there are some aspects of it that I actually quite like (as a separate game to Classic instead of as an replacement for Vanilla).

Why is this relevant? Because I noticed in the info about patch 10.1.7 that it was meant to include a new heritage quest chain for night elves. I wrote about how I really enjoyed the one for humans, and night elves are no less dear to me. The very first character I ever created may have been a human, but the first one I ever really inhabitated was the night elf priest I made a few days later to level with a friend. She was the first character on whom I ever hit the level cap, and while my focus shifted over to Horde side during Burning Crusade, I still came back to at least level her up every expansion and check out the new content from Alliance side. So it was clear to me that I really needed to dust this character off for this occasion.

I had last played her during Cataclysm, where I'd left her at the then-cap of level 85, which in the new, post-level squish world, made her a measly level 32. So my first challenge was going to be to just get her levelled up. (The heritage quest chain requires at least level 50.)

I took the returning player gear boost, but declined to clear out her quest log. I manually sorted out her old possessions, and gave her a transmog featuring the old Primal Mooncloth set, which I fondly remember crafting for her during Burning Crusade (for some reason I have very vivid memories of farming wraiths in Netherstorm for motes of mana in particular).

I found that I was still in my tiny old social guild, along with all my alts and... a couple of characters of my ex-boyfriend's who'd last logged in four years ago and one of whom now held the GM title. I couldn't even remember inviting him to this particular guild! I looked into how to depose and boot him, but apparently my priest had been made the lowest rank in the entire guild and you need to be a higher rank to do that, even if the GM hasn't logged in forever... in the end I just figured "whatever" and ignored that whole situation for the time being.

My priest's quest log indicated that I'd done a fair bit of questing during Cata but had stopped with things partially unfinished in Uldum and Twilight Highlands. I decided to visit the latter first, and I gotta say: after playing Dragonflight in particular, doing Cata quests in a zone like Twlight Highlands is quite a mindfuck. Dragons going from scary monsters to more human-like NPCs that we just kinda hang out with is a process that has been going on since at least Wrath of the Lich King, but even so the contrast between how we interact with the dragons in Dragonflight and some of the quests in Cata is pretty extreme. Being given quests to eradicate the last of the black dragons because they were all corrupted anyway, or slaying a "broodmother" after using her whelps to track her down felt very uncomfortable now. Not to mention that picking up Dragon Flanks reminded me that we also used to cook and eat dragons for buffs. Just awkward.

There was also this five-man group quest chain, "Crucible of Carnage" which made me realise to my annoyance that the custom grouping tool is not available to levelling characters for some reason. As I didn't see a single other player around during my journey, I eventually just tried to solo it and learned that with all the class changes and my overpowered boost gear, I could indeed solo the first three encounters, however the Worgen rogue type still made short work of me and I had to give up for the time being.

I also noticed that I still had the dungeon quest from Grim Batol in my log to kill mobs while riding the red dragons at the start of the instance. I thought I'd queue for a run of that dungeon in specific to get that cleared out. I didn't check the clock, but I must have sat in that queue for something like two hours. When I finally got a pop - quite late at night - I greeted the group happily but nobody responded. They also ran right past the dragons I needed for the quest. I just went along with it and figured I'd try to run back and finish the quest after we had killed the last boss. A mechagnome hunter seemed to have the same idea, as they were the last to drop group and ran back with me... however, it turned out that the red dragons were helpfully set up to not do the mob killing circuit anymore once you passed a certain checkpoint and would just immediately drop you off at the spawn of the first boss. Me and the gnome doing a /cry at each other after that happened was the only interaction I had in that dungeon, and I was no closer to finishing my quest, though at least I'd gotten a bit of XP.

As I was otherwise done with Twilight Highlands by that point, I decided to turn my eyes towards Uldum next. I remember avoiding replaying that zone because the Harrison Jones quests were just so. Stupid. Being confronted with a terrible Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull joke in the first spot where I picked things up again did indeed confirm that age didn't make those quests any better.

Funnily enough though, after writing the first draft of this, I went back to check my original first impressions post about Uldum, and it turns out that back in 2010 I actually thought that the zone was quite funny, and I called out the very same joke I just mentioned as terrible as "my favourite bit". This is why I blog, because past me from ten years ago might as well be a completely different person it seems. It's just fascinating to see.

Anyway, levelling in Uldum continued at quite a brisk pace and I didn't even have to complete the whole zone before hitting level 50. It's mad to remember that when Cata first came out, you pretty much needed to do all five of the new zones in full just to gain five levels.

My thoughts on the night elf heritage quest itself will be a separate post.

Ran some normals again

I don't think I've ever hit my weekly heroic cap since it was first introduced, but I used up all of my weekly random bonuses for normals on my newly dinged night elf priest within two days. I think that says something about me as well as about normals, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I've talked about the advantages of running normals before, and all in all, they still apply. I think I'm also finally managing to pin down what has been bothering me about dungeon runs in the game as of late, and it's not so much about point systems, immersion or difficulty by itself, but the whole "rush rush" culture. Players want to get through dungeons as fast as possible, and the developers keep talking about releasing content at a faster pace. I don't like that! It turns fun into stress for me. My favourite run these past two days was actually a normal Grim Batol with four people from the same guild who advanced at what most people would consider an agonisingly slow pace (one trash pull every other minute or so). At one point their dps warrior fell off a bridge, died, and took ten minutes to find his way back. The tank apologised profusely for his friend's drunken stupor, but I honestly didn't mind. I just watched a bit of tv on the side and was happy. I'd rather deal with someone who's ten times slower than my "ideal" pace than someone who pulls even a bit too fast. It's pretty obvious that I'm exceptional in this attitude though - I'm pretty sure that ninety-nine percent of pug healers would have abandoned that group quite quickly.

I also met several nice players again with whom I continued to do more than one run, and even the not-so-nice ones were never outright mean or rude.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses however. In fact, my very first run was pretty disastrous. I got into Lost City of the Tol'vir with nobody using crowd control, two melee dps, and the very belated realisation that my keybinds were completely messed up. I struggled on for a bit, casting the wrong heals all the time and finding myself forced to drink after every single pull, but when we wiped on some trash after the first boss, someone finally complained about "bad tanking and healing". Since I was most definitely performing sub-par, I apologised and left, to try again later.

Subsequent runs with properly set up binds went a lot better, though getting fewer melee dps that loved to bathe in any ground AoEs helped as well. Still, I have to admit that I felt a lot more performance pressure than I had in a while. I think I only met one person who wasn't geared for heroics yet, and most tanks had around 150k health. I remember when we tanked heroics with 125k! I really didn't think I'd feel so undergeared in normals of all places - and other people having better gear only did so much to make my job easier, as AoE damage remains the same if people don't dodge or prevent it, and I was still left with a lot more green bar space to fill than my poor mana pool could handle at first.

There wasn't a whole lot of gear to be had either, since mages are still needing on all the spirit cloth (and winning it) even a full year after 4.0 made the stat obsolete for their class.

At some point I did the Horseman and won a ring, at which point the system suddenly tried to put me into heroics. What is this, I don't even! I'm in greens and can't heal my way out of normal Lost City and you want to put me into heroics? Clearly a single high-level epic can seriously screw with item level restrictions.

In a Vortex Pinnacle run, my group spent eight minutes on the first pull with two Temple Adepts because they just could not control or interrupt the heals. I still don't know how I managed to keep everyone alive that long, even with blowing all my cooldowns. When we ran into the same problem on the next pull, I did run out of mana eventually and we wiped. The tank told everyone that they sucked and left, at which point everyone else dropped group as well, presumably in shame. I requeued for an entirely new group, and we almost wiped to the same problem again, though we eventually managed to scrape by, barely. I think I might have to reconsider my opinions on Cataclysm dungeon difficulty...

Lost City of the Tol'vir was the instance that came up for me most often, and I think there wasn't a single group that didn't wipe on those trash packs at the entrance to the last third of the instance - you know which ones I mean, the ones that people always try to skip, but then someone inevitably butt-pulls them, you get two or more groups at once and you die. I thought it was amazing how consistent that was. You'd think people would learn eventually.

Still, I had fun, because even if it wasn't perfect, nobody was stressing about speed and that made all the difference. Also, chain-running instances is an awesome source of cloth for levelling tailoring!

Pug Tidbits

After taking a bit of a break from instancing for several weeks, I've finally started to hit the dungeon finder again, partly because I was starting to feel somewhat guilty about basically collecting no valour points on my main at all outside of raids, partly because I felt like seeing some low-level instances on my alts again after having levelled several of them purely through questing as of late. I've noticed that I generally seem to go through certain cycles in my play patterns, alternating between max-level and low-level play, instancing and questing, feeling very enthused about the game and feeling very burnt out.

Anyway, as usual many of my pugs didn't leave much of an impression either way, but here are some things that stood out:

Best Player

When I zoned into heroic Lost City of the Tol'vir, the bear tank called Bob immediately asked everyone to be patient with him because it was his first time tanking the instance. I told him not to worry, and as it turned out he didn't really have to ask us to be particularly patient because he did a great job anyway. It might have been his first time tanking the place, but he was clearly already familiar with tanking in general and knew the pulls and boss strategies of the instance inside out.

Since it was such a smooth and pleasant run, the entire group immediately requeued for another dungeon. This time we got Blackrock Caverns, which went slightly less smoothly due to no fault of Bob's, but he managed to save several bad situations through good cooldown usage. If only all tanks in LFG were like him...

Worst Player

Me! Okay, I probably wasn't the worst player among all the people I grouped with, but I've definitely had some serious herp derp moments in my last couple of runs. In the aforementioned BRC run I managed to aggro and die to one of the patrolling dragonkin just as the rest of the group had jumped down the slope to Corla and pulled two additional packs. Fortunately Bob managed to salvage the situation by shifting out of bear form and throwing me a combat res.

Then there was the Zul'Gurub run where, while trying to dodge Venoxis' poison maze, I managed to fall off his terrace and into the water, where I immediately died to the various mobs there. Fortunately the dps was very good and they managed to down the boss anyway, but I still felt like a huge dolt.

And then there was the Grim Batol run with the paladin tank who kept pulling as if he had ants in his pants, so that I could barely keep up with healing even while outgearing the instance by two tiers. I think this threw off my mojo right from the start, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when I managed to die to General Umbriss' Blitz. I just remember thinking: "Oh good, he's not targeting me with it, I can stay where I am... wait, he's still facing in my general direction, so I do have to - oh poo, I'm dead". Again the group managed to down him even with me dead (who needs healers anyway) and I was even rewarded with an achievement. Way to go!

Then the group skipped the last two trash packs in the inner circle of the city and I somehow managed to aggro one of them even though I usually never have problems running past them. Since everyone else had already charged way ahead while I was still looting a mob, I was the only one who died. They just continued to kill the next pack without me and said nothing while I corpse-ran back. In a way I almost found myself wishing that they would laugh at me or make some sort of snarky comment... somehow just being ignored and left behind felt even more humiliating, especially as a healer. I have to admit I felt a certain mix of glee and relief when the tank's rogue friend got himself blown up by one of the adds on Drahga, as it at least meant that I wasn't the only one who had made a stupid mistake during the run.

Player With The Best Attitude

On my low level draenei shaman I had a slightly messy but strangely enjoyable Dire Maul West run the other day, in which I ended up with a paladin tank who was retribution spec. No biggie in a lowbie instance as far as I'm concerned, as long as he knows what he's doing and isn't too squishy. He did do reasonably well at holding aggro, and healing him wasn't a problem either with the exception of a couple of bosses where he went splat, but the rest of the group still managed to beat them without wiping.

Still, he was clearly new to the instance, as he felt the urge to run back to the quest giver immediately every time he completed a quest objective and kept going the wrong way. He also might not have been able to speak English, as he never said anything in chat and more importantly never reacted to anything that was said in there either. All the party's well-meaning attempts to tell him "no, this way, over here" were in vain. Eventually we just gave up on trying to steer him and followed him during his meandering through random trash packs, because sooner or later there'd be nothing left but the boss anyway.

Now, all this might sound pretty bad, but somehow I still couldn't help liking the guy. Yes, I generally prefer to have some communication going on, but on the plus side he never complained about all the times he died either. In fact, he never even waited for a res and always released instantly and started running back, even if he had been the only one who had died. This was in fact another thing that convinced me that he must have been a newbie, because he clearly wasn't jaded or entitled - instead he was curious and driven. Death was merely a minor setback, and he was always happy to pick himself up again and try again. In a time where the game has made it so easy to drop any group activity at the drop of a hat without any negative consequences, that kind of perseverance impressed me. Here's to you, little newbie tank. Just keep working at it and you might go far in this game.

Player With The Worst Attitude

In heroic Shadowfang Keep I got a raid-geared bear tank who had some serious issues. After Baron Ashbury's first Asphyxiate I healed the party up to about thirty percent health, as that's more than sufficient to survive the occasional tick from his (dispellable) dot. But Mr Bear Tank didn't think so. He started to yell at me to heal more, then in all caps, then calling me a whore. I politely told him to calm down and that there was no need to top everyone off until near the final phase since the boss just kept putting people back down to one hit point anyway, but he wouldn't believe me.

He and his dps shaman friend then stopped attacking and interrupting the boss and just stood there, letting him heal back up to full repeatedly while the bear claimed to have problems with his mouse. I don't know, maybe it was true, but considering how worked up he had just got about me not topping people off it seemed more like a passive aggressive attempt to wipe us, especially since the shaman stopped too. Eventually they seemed to get bored of it though and we managed to burn the boss down. Then there was an awkward pause during which I can only guess he tried to kick me, but if he did it didn't work, so both he and his shaman friend then dropped group. Their replacements were more sensible fortunately.

Anyway, raging at people in the dungeon finder is generally never a good idea, but raging about people doing it wrong when in fact you are the one who doesn't seem to understand the mechanics just makes you look like an even bigger idiot.

Gogogo indeed

It's been a while since I had a pug that simply made me happy, so when it unexpectedly happened last night, I was left with an urge to share.

Basically, it was gone one a.m. in the UK here, and for some reason I was wide awake, so I decided to log back onto WoW and heal a normal random on my shaman. I was rather surprised that the dungeon finder couldn't even give me an estimated waiting time, and as I saw icons light up and go dark again while the system tried to put a group together, I noticed that we were short on dps of all things. Fancy that. Still, in the end it didn't take longer than a few minutes until a full party had been formed and I found myself zoning into Grim Batol.

I have to admit that I had a good feeling about the run right away when one of the other party members made me crack a smile by responding to my greeting of "evening" with "morning". That's one way to look at it, isn't it?

I made a fool out of myself early on by accidentally aggroing a group of mobs that we didn't have to fight at all, but the death knight tank picked them up with no issues, I apologised and it was all good. As we were making our way towards Throngus, I suddenly noticed one of the damage dealers typing "hurry" in chat. "What are you in a hurry for at this time of night?", I was tempted to ask... but then I scrolled up and saw what had triggered his sudden sense of urgency:

[SERVER] Shutdown in 15:00

Aw, crap! I've been living in the UK for over a year now but I still forget about the one hour time difference to CET sometimes, and it's also been a while since I was actually online just before server maintenance time anyway. Okay, so this was only normal mode, but we had only killed one out of four bosses so far; what were the chances that we could finish in less than fifteen minutes?

It seemed that everyone was willing to take their chances. We skipped what trash we could, though we once got an extra group anyway and our hunter died. I saw him release and was hesitating whether it would be more time efficient to res him or to let him run back, but the warlock saved me from having to make a decision by using his soulstone to combat res the hunter. (They can be used after the person has died now? Awesome!)

Our pulls seemed to get faster, and I dropped mana tide on cooldown to save myself from having to drink. Fortunately people had bombed very efficiently during the dragon flight, so we didn't have a whole lot of trash left to kill anyway. When we got to Drahga, it looked for a moment as if one or two group members were just going to run past him, but the tank pulled the boss anyway.

"Do you think we can make it?" he said as he hit Drahga in the face with his big two-hander. I looked at the timer. Seven minutes to go. "Hell yes!" I replied.

People took care of the adds swiftly and didn't stand in the bad. That's one of the nice things about pugging in the middle of the night, nobody queues up for a run at that time unless they are both confident in what they are doing and actually enjoy running dungeons.

We continued straight on to mow through the trash before the last boss. Four minutes to go. "Gogogogo," said the hunter... and for what I think might have been the first time ever, I actually thought that this was perfectly appropriate. After all, we were in a race, and so it didn't so much sound like a patronising command to the tank as an encouraging battle cry directed at the entire party.

A Faceless Corruptor was still trailing after the tank when he pulled Erudax. I hit bloodlust and I reckon that everyone else mashed their cooldowns like mad as well. When the add came in, I didn't see anyone go for it, with people focusing on a quick burn instead, seeing how the boss was already low. (In any other group I would have assumed that they were simply playing badly, but this party had already convinced me that they knew damn well what they were doing.) I made sure to frost shock the add to keep it slowed and buy us a few more seconds. And then, just before it could finish hatching any eggs... dungeon complete! With about one minute to go until server shutdown as well.

People briefly congratulated each other on a job well done, rolled on the loot and then left. No time left for any idle chatter after all. Still, I logged off happily. Sometimes challenges can arise in the strangest of places and at the strangest of times - but it's great when you've got a group that's willing to tackle them with enthusiasm.

State of the dungeon finder

I still haven't dared to brave the dungeon finder for a random heroic on my own, but I'm slowly trying to wean myself from only running with guild groups. To be honest I kind of have to - unsurprisingly, the tanks have finished their heroic gearing before anyone else, and I'm pretty sure that even some of the tanking alts have overtaken me on gear progression by now... either way the number of guildies that are interested in joining a heroic group is going down each day, and being able to get a full guild run together is rapidly becoming a luxury. I don't see that as an entirely bad thing though, as I've said in the past that - unlike many other players - I do like pugs. I think at the moment the main thing that still scares me a little is that I haven't done all the heroic dungeons yet, and I'm terrified of having my "first time" with a bad group. Once I know what to expect I'm usually a lot more confident.

Nonetheless, I'm working on it. Initially I only ran with full guild groups; then we had some runs where we pugged one person. The players we got were all very good and we didn't have any problems with them. From there I dared to take it to runs where it was three guildies vs. two puggers. We only got one completely hopeless dps at one point, but after we kicked him it was smooth sailing again. And last night I finally braved the dungeon finder with only a single guildie of mine by my side, an elemental shaman.

We got Vortex Pinnacle, which I hadn't done on heroic before, so I was slightly nervous even though I had heard that it was definitely one of the easier heroics. Fortunately my shaman friend was an absolute star, assigning crowd control on trash and patiently explaining fight mechanics to me and the tank, who hadn't done the instance before either. The dps did their job admirably, using crowd control, interrupts and doing good damage.

The tank was kind of an interesting case. As I mentioned, he admitted that it was his first time in there, but he didn't say so up front. In fact, he charged into the first pull with no crowd control and I immediately broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what that kind of tanking was going to mean for the rest of the run. However, my shammy friend nagged him about marks, so he set some... and then didn't really follow them himself. Again he was asked about this, at which point he finally admitted that he didn't really know what he was doing, and could someone else please mark for him? No problem! I'm just glad that he fessed up.

On those pulls with the tol'vir in the anti-magic field he was advised to make a line-of-sight pull... and had apparently no idea what that meant, as he charged right in anyway. We lived through it, but I couldn't help but wonder whether the tank hadn't just outed himself as a Wrath baby, as anyone that learned the ropes before WOTLK would have known what doing a LOS pull meant. Still, aside from that our tank did very well, used his tools appropriately and generally came across as a genuinely nice fellow. We had a pretty smooth run in the end, with only two wipes on the second boss as some of us had to get used to dodging the tornadoes first. It makes me hopeful for my future pugs; I'll just have to remember to also keep an open mind and to encourage communication like my shaman friend did.

Now, normal pugs are something that I've been doing aplenty, mostly on my druid. Unfortunately they've largely been less fun than my heroics. There is less wiping, mind you, though people have become a bit more tolerant of it even in normals, but the attitudes are rarely pleasant.

Especially in the low-level instances, that is Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides, you'll often run into people that behave as if they've freshly stepped out of a WOTLK heroic and haven't got a clue about what's changed this expansion. "Gogogo"-ing, pulling for the tank, you name it. This isn't helped by the fact that BRC in particular seems somewhat undertuned on normal mode so that you can completely ignore many boss mechanics, such as Corla's zealots and the crepuscular veil of Obsidius's adds.

As you go up in levels this gets a bit better and people will at least wait for the tank to pull, but crowd control is still something that nobody really bothers with. On some pulls it really doesn't matter; on others it means that the healer has to do overtime and then hope that the tank is willing to wait for mana before charging into the next group.

Boss mechanics, interestingly enough, are something I've had few problems with on normal. Occasionally someone will mess up because they didn't know what to do and didn't ask for an explanation either, but even if that leads to a wipe it's usually not a problem to do it right next time. Sometimes the one who messed up will rage-quit because clearly the rest of the group sucks and wiped him, but then you'll only have an even easier time with his replacment, so you still win. Today in Grim Batol I had a warrior who seemed to consider it hilarious to intentionally do the wrong thing on bosses (such as charging Drahga's elemental add to make it explode or running all over the place during Erudax' shadow gale) and we still made it through.

The thing that has really been bugging me in my normal runs however is the incredible loot greed. For example I was healing a normal Stonecore run where the party repeatedly commented favourably on how I had managed to heal through some very sticky situations when we got multiple trash groups at once - and then when Azil dropped her healing trinket, the mage took it and left. /sigh. Why are classes with no healing spells even allowed to roll on trinkets with a healing proc?

Today in Grim Batol, a similar scene. Drahga drops his spirit cloak and the warlock wins the roll over me. I call him out on it and he says that it was better than "the crap cloak" he had - he was wearing the same cloak as me actually, another drop with spirit on it. Maybe he should try rolling on dps gear for a change? In a funny twist of fate, I then won the caster trinket off the last boss which works for both damage dealers and healers, and suddenly the lock offered to trade me the cloak for the trinket. So let me get this straight, you roll on a healer cloak - which you shouldn't have done in the first place - and then graciously offer to trade it to me in exchange for an item that you want as well? How about NO? Is this some sick new kind of loot whoring strategy, needing on everything you can in hopes of being able to use it as a bargaining chip against your competition later on? "Oh hey, I'll trade you that item I ninjaed from you earlier if you give me this drop now..." What will they come up with next?

Likewise I was tanking a normal BRC run today, when I saw a mage roll against the healer on a spirit ring, the healer won, and then the mage got all pouty because the healer had already won some other healing loot earlier as well. Yes, because if someone gets lucky with drops for their class/role, you obviously should try to take some of their loot away just to spite them. What.

I miss the times when people were able to be genuinely happy for someone else getting a great item for their class and spec instead of greedily trying to grab everything that the system will let them roll on just because it has a single useful stat for them on it.

What have other people's pugging experiences been like?