Category: ramblings

11.0 Patch Issues & Stuff

Kurn / / alchemy, healing, professions, ramblings, the war within

My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂

That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”

The bank is being used by another member of your Warband.

As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.

To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.

Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.

I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.

Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.

And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.

That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.

I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.

So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.

In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…

There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.

In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.

So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?

The War Within – I caved

Kurn / / dragonflight, leatherworking, ramblings

Like, okay, I was 100% going to buy the expansion. I have bought all the expansions. I did not foresee myself springing for the top-tier pre-order deal, though…

AND YET.

The interesting thing is that I have some PTO planned for the week of launch (unintentionally coinciding, I swear), and so I saw the three days early access and I was like “well, shit” and coughed up the cash. This also included a 70 boost and access to the beta.

So, current state of All The Things for me:

  • Kurn, Madrana, shammy, dragon are all 70, plus now my warrior (who was 41) is 70 as well
  • Priest and mage are 60 and 61, while warlock is 64
  • Dark Iron Dwarf paladin is 70 in MOP Remix
    • I have achieved my original goal, but I don’t think I’m done with remix yet
  • I have created an 80 hunter skinner/lw on beta

As such, I’ve also played around with professions in beta, although just about an hour’s worth so far. The NPC crafting orders are a weeeeee bit fucked. I did report all these things, btw, but:

  • Lua errors when selecting NPC crafting orders (with 0 addons/etc)
  • A request for a rank 4 item … when the item only goes up to rank 3, so it’s literally unable to be completed
  • Issues with taking orders when I didn’t have the ability to add the reagent in that I could take the order and then had to cancel it

Hilariously, I already hate one of the NPCs. He gives me the shittiest mats (if he gives any mats at all!) and then expects a rank 3 (max rank) item! Like get fucked, my bud. hahaha.

Anyway, things I want to play around with on beta include other professions plus delves. I haven’t even left the old world yet, so some exploring would be nice. I’m not planning to do too much testing because when you then do it over and over again on live, it’s SO BORING. Like I am ALREADY not looking forward to dealing with the quest to open the warband thing. (I gave some feedback on the very low drop rates for the items, but it’s ultimately a short-ish quest chain and it’ll be fine even if they don’t buff the drops.)

So it bodes well for the expansion for me so far. I’m hoping to do up a proper spreadsheet this weekend and I’ll share it with you folks, so you can see just how stupidly organized I try to be when I take things seriously!

What are you all up to?

Mists of Pandaria Remix Thoughts

Kurn / / dragonflight, professions, ramblings

I wasn’t going to take part in the MOP Remix. I really wasn’t. I did not like the pandaland expansion. I think the thing I liked most about it was farming Zandalari Warbringers.

And yet, when I realized levelling characters would be trivially easy and those characters would end up on live after Remix ended… I was intrigued. You see, I have like seven toons. Kurn, Madrana, a shaman, a dracthyr evoker, a mage, a priest and a warlock. Do I know how to play the evoker, the warlock or even the priest properly? Absolutely not. In none of the specs. So why do I have them?

Kurn is a skinner/leatherworker.

Madrana is an alchemist (since her day 1) and a jewelcrafter (since Burning Crusade). (Here’s my second-ever blog post and it’s about jewelcrafting!) I had dropped herbalism to pick up jewelcrafting.

The shaman is a miner/herbalist and started out as a draenei and has always been my farm toon for Madrana. (She is now a male dwarf.)

I had to roll a dragon this expansion because, uh, dragons. My dragon is an herbalist/scribe.

My mage is a miner/tailor. I’ve had this mage since my brother convinced me to create one with him on a PVP server. Once I hit 30 and got WTFPWNED every single time I logged in at the Southshore inn, I transferred. Fog’s warrior transferred later. This mage started life as a human female and is now a dwarf male. I LOVE the dwarf male emotes, okay?

My priest is an alchemist/enchanter. She came to be because my brother “needed” a healer as he levelled his paladin. He tanked. I “healed”. (I literally put him on follow and threw out some heals and read or watched TV while we did this, much of the time.) The most exciting thing the priest has ever done was a full BRD run with my brother tanking after just the BRD prison popped. My brother was like “that’s IT?!” when the instance officially ended and asked if everyone wanted to keep going. We did, so we cleared the instance. And then I read someone’s blog that sounded SUSPICIOUSLY like our instance run! The blog is now offline, but it was sisters, I believe? Who were a shadow priest and resto druid? Hots’n’dots or Dots’n’hots or something like that.

My warlock is the result of having had a free upgrade to level 90. And I also decided to pick up Blacksmithing and Engineering. That was a heck of a weekend, let me tell you. hahaha.

But I hate the warlock. I really do. He’s presently level 64 and has only levelled via profession quests.

So I was like, okay, if I can level easily to 70 and that toon moves to live in a couple months, just before the War Within launches… then I can pick up mining/blacksmithing on the new toon and drop blacksmithing on the warlock and pick up mining and keep engineering.

For those of you keeping track, that means:

Kurn: Skinning/LW
Madrana: Alchemy/Jewelcrafter
Shammy: Mining/Herbalism
Dracthyr: Herbalism/Inscription
Priest: Alchemy/Enchanting (still needs levelling to 70)
Mage: Mining/Tailoring (still needs levelling to 70)
Warlock: Mining/Engineering (still needs levelling to 70)
New toon: Mining/Blacksmithing

So I rolled a male Dark Iron Dwarf paladin. (They have +5 to Blacksmithing.) I’m levelling him ret in the world and holy in instances. Here, have a look at me healing 3 MOP Remix dungeons!

MOP Remix is interesting. I don’t know that I like it for the experience, but another toon to 70 without too much trouble? Doesn’t sound bad, frankly.

So are you in Remix? What have you done? What should I not miss out on?

Oh, and, please note that I am no longer active on Twitter. I have moved to Blue Sky:

https://bsky.app/profile/kurnmogh.bsky.social

Come say hi.

Cataclysm Classic Holy Paladin Meta Gems

Kurn / / cataclysm, classic, ramblings

It is 4:28am. I have work in… not too many hours. But I came across a video on YouTube while I couldn’t sleep and they were talking about how holy paladins should use the burning meta gem in Cata Classic.

And I was like… that’s not right, is it?

So what did I do?

First, I scoured THIS VERY BLOG to see what I have to say about Cataclysm meta gems. Know what I found? One post. One. That’s it. And it doesn’t even mention the Burning Shadowspirit meta?

So I got out of bed and went to check what gems were in Madrana’s old helms — both original Madrana and baby paladin Madrana. Ember Shadowspirit Diamonds were in basically all of my old holy helms (different ones for tanking and the odd ret helm).

And I’m like how did I not mention a whole other meta gem? I was very, very confused.

Until I saw a comment at Wowhead. The Burning meta used to say 3% Increased Critical Damage until 4.3, whereupon it changed to 3% Increased Critical Effect.

Judging from Wowhead, Cata is going with 3% Increased Critical Effect for Classic. (And, it seems, the second iteration of Holy Radiance, but that’s for another post.)

So, questions:

1) Was I really unaware of this change at 4.3???

2) If I wasn’t unaware, why did I keep using the Ember?

3) Why have I been researching this and writing this for 20m in the middle of the night when I have work the next day?

I think I’ll do a bit more research this week and come up with a good video/post about Cata and holy pallies. In the meantime, yes, use the Burning Shadowspirit Diamond as your meta. And here’s what I still believe is a pretty decent max-level spec for a PVE holy paladin.

Okay, back to bed. The birds are chirping and the sun is coming up. I am not going to be a happy camper at work…

Follower Dungeon Thoughts

Kurn / / dragonflight, dungeons, ramblings

Folks, I am still gobsmacked at this whole “follower dungeon” thing. Gobsmacked.

Naturally, as I haven’t been playing regularly in a while (I was last tinkering in Season of Discovery with my brother and his eldest son), I had no idea that there even were follower dungeons.

I ended up running Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr as Kurn, just to check it out and I was impressed with the NPCs. I pulled, MDing to the tank… and everything was fine. I tried pulling without MDing to the tank. And still, everything was fine. I tried pulling aggro off the tank and I couldn’t. I tried pulling multiple groups to see if either the tank or the healer would get taxed. Nope.

Mind reeling, I then decided I had to do this as a healer on Madrana.

You should watch it. It’s pretty funny. I also confuse this big shiny yellow spinny effect on the ground for something a mage does. No, no, it’s something a trinket of mine does…

Anyway, the NPC tank was fucking amazing. Like, no shit, my hand to God, amazing. Tanks of the world (or, perhaps more accurately, wannabe tanks of the world) should take a page out of Captain Garrick’s book. She is GREAT. The one nitpick I had (I healed Neltharus) was that at one point, the tank was at the top of some steps, the hunter (Austin — I hate him, but the other characters are fine) was at the bottom, and I was in the middle, having a bit of trouble with line of sight for a minute. But aside from that, this tank was great. This tank cast Lay on Hands on the shammy. I would have 100% let that shammy die while I cast LOH on the mage (which I did) because a shammy can rez.

So now, I’m like… how did the tank know to LOH the shammy? Is there a piece of code in there that says that a real human behind a paladin healer would have saved the character who couldn’t self-rez and that’s why the LOH went to the shaman?

(PS: I have a battle-rez, now? What?! I mean, it’s on my bars, so I must have known about it at some point, BUT WHAT?!?!)

So yeah, I’m really interested in understanding how the NPCs are programmed. These are not the dumbasses who were in the proving grounds. These are much more sophisticated. Slow to pull (but considerate of the healer!!!) and the DPS is somewhat weak (but they’re normals), but still. They sort of play their classes well? (Austin has pulled extra mobs on me at least once, so he’s on my shit-list.)

What comes next, I wonder? Heroics? Mythics? LFR bots to come in when there aren’t enough tanks or healers?

Part of me kept thinking about these “fun” dungeon runs some of us had together in Burning Crusade. It was like a bunch of night owls. Me on Madrana, with Tia (warlock), Fodder (DPS warrior) and Cennathas (rogue). And sometimes Fodder would actually tank if we, you know, couldn’t find a tank at 2am. And Cenn would always be the one tasked with finding a rando DPS. So we’d all be on Vent or something except for the rando and I’d be stressing about mana and Tia would get lost in the instance and the rando must have always been like “who the fuck are these people and what are they even DOING???” It was vaguely stressful for me as a healer, but it was usually a good time.

And like… that wouldn’t necessarily have happened if we had had the ability to do follower dungeons.

Hell, if the gang of us had been able to find a tank back in the day, like the Vanilla days, we may never have done a 39m Baron run without a tank. It was me on Kurn, with my cat, Whisper, tanking, Crypt healing the crap out of Whisper, and Tia, Tan and Maj doing insane caster DPS while I pulled. (This was prior to MD, btw.)

Now, obviously, doing a dungeon without a tank is, in a word, stupid. But that’s sort of what we liked about it. We liked challenging ourselves to use all the abilities at our disposal. We liked learning things. We especially liked forcing Majik to drop enchanting and pick up engineering and power-levelling it all night so he could drop repair bots and try to rez Crypt with jumper cables, when Crypt’s darkmoon card wouldn’t proc (which was, you know, often).

I wonder if we would have still had the fun adventures we did if this technology had been available to us. My gut says no, because necessity is the mother of invention. And if we hadn’t needed to find ways around not having a tank, would we have? Probably not.

So while I do love this follower dungeon thing as it is, where you can do normal-level dungeons with 3 of your friends and a bot or by yourself with 4 bots or anything in between, I hope it doesn’t go further than this.

I do think it’s sort of a band-aid to the whole lack of tanks situation.

The way to get more tanks is to open them up to more specs and to make it more rewarding to be a tank (and I’m not talking a goodie bag out of LFG) and to require more hybrid role encounters in raids. In a 25-man raid, we needed like, 2.5 tanks in Cataclysm. Usually 2. Occasionally 1. Sometimes 4. (Heroic Halfus, anyone? God, kitties who could be bears were amazing.)

So yeah, still gobsmacked. Still very curious as to the how. And now curious about the why and the how far this will go.

What are your thoughts?

Dragonflight: Plans & Thoughts

Kurn / / dragonflight, gold, healing, paladins, ramblings

Howdy, folks! November is always a busy month for me. I’ve spent some time attempting to write 50,000 words of a novel for National Novel Writing Month, as per usual. (Let us not discuss how close or far I am from that goal.) I’ve also spent time running Wrath Classic dungeons with my brother, Fog, and have recorded a bunch of them. (The first is my breakdown of holy paladin talents in Wrath, but the rest are all videos of me running dungeons, mostly with Fog.)

So, I made the decision to buy Dragonflight, because… dragons, hello! Not even to just be a dracthyr evoker (we all know I love my hunter and paladin too much to seriously look at another class), but to see if WoW can keep me in “present times”. I had purchased Shadowlands and promptly hated everything about it. I hadn’t even finished the starter quest on Kurn, that’s how much I hated it. Apart from anything else, the level squish — which I understand on a logical level — really pissed me off. Why? Because, excuse you, Blizzard, Kurnmogh of Eldre’Thalas had been level 60 since sometime in 2005, thank you very kindly. The thought of levelling to 60 again was just absolute crap. It’s such a psychological blow. Even though I completely understand that levelling to 130 (from level 1!) is stupid. I really do get that. Logically, I know a level squish had to happen. But for someone who spent THIRTY DAYS IN-GAME trying to get Kurn to 60 (and yes, that’s how long it took me the first time around), it really sucked to think about grinding out those 10 levels from 50-60 again. Like a LOT.

It still sucks. And so, perhaps out of nothing beyond spite (and perhaps a little greed), I have Kurn at 60, Madrana at 60 and five other alts at 60 (including a dracthyr evoker). My army of alts and I are ready to jump into Dragonflight tonight (in about three hours, as I write this), and I am ready to make ALL THE GOLD. I have skinning/LW on Kurn, JC/alch on Madrana, Herb/Inscription on the dracthyr, Herb/Mining on my shaman, Mining/Tailoring on my mage, Alch/Enchanting on the priest and, hilariously, Blacksmithing/Engineering on my warlock. In my defense, the warlock was a boosted character from like… Mists (?) whom I decided to add BS/Eng to because those were the professions I lacked. I still find it hilarious that I have a warlock with those professions, so I decided to keep them on that toon.

Levelling during this elemental invasion event has been fascinating. I didn’t tend to join groups. Rather, as healers (priest and shaman, specifically), I greatly enjoyed just dropping heals like Healing Rain, Chain Heal, Circle of Healing, etc, on the people doing damage. It was so much more fun, IMHO, than running around dropping Blizzard or Rain of Fire. Also, what the hell, soul shards are the worst. hahaha. I eventually figured out how they work, but it made me wish for the old days of soul shard bags instead of them as a secondary resource. And does life tap no longer exist for destro warlocks??? I actually ran out of mana sometimes. Too much Rain of Fire, I guess. Anyway. That was a painful, like, 18 (?) levels. Though I do have to say, even with the nerfs (and yes, they are nerfs!) to the heirlooms, I gained like 5 levels chewing through 1.5 levels worth of rested. That was disgusting and I loved it.

Madrana got boosted to 60 so I didn’t do a lot of invasion stuff with her, although I did enough to get most of the 252 gear. I also got to try out this fancy new talent tree. First, yay talent trees!!!! Second, oh god, talent trees!!! hahahaha! I had some fun reading through things. I think I have a workable talent tree at the moment. The biggest problem for me was not being able to generate enough holy power to cast Light of Dawn, because I wasn’t grouping with folks. I did enjoy that Consecrate finally heals people if talented for it, though. I’ve been wanting that since… Wrath? Cata? Maybe even BC, because I remember not being able to heal through Heroic Magister’s Terrace in TIER FIVE GEAR because I couldn’t heal more than one person at a time. That was a brutal effing dungeon for a paladin. Priest? No issues. But a paladin? At least 1 dead person, guaranteed.

Having said that, healing someone with beacon (in this case, it was me) should be enough to gain a fair amount of holy power. I also specced into Veneration, which means that my Flash of Light, Holy Light and Judgement crits reset the cooldown on Hammer of Wrath and allow it to be used regardless of the health of the mob, and Hammer of Wrath generates 1 Holy Power. I see what they’re trying to do (bearing in mind I’ve missed all of Shadowlands), in that they want paladins in melee. And, quite frankly, fuck that noise. I like standing way the hell in the back. If people like standing in melee, go ahead. I’ll just stand over here.

Also, the holy paladin mastery changed?!? It’s now “Increases healing done by up to X%, based on the proximity of your target.” Obviously, this means if you’re tank healing, you want to be in melee. Again, no thank you. I haven’t done any testing on this, but it’ll be interesting to investigate going forward. In the meantime, I’ve done some running around with the paladin during the invasions and I’m feeling okay with most of my toolkit.

Right, so my plans for Dragonflight include making a ridiculous amount of gold, particularly with Inscription, but also with the profession equipment. Between Leatherworking and Blacksmithing, I have 16 different profession thingies I can make. Then I have Engineering for another 7, JC for another 4 and Inscription for another 3. So I think I’ve got them all covered.

I’m super looking forward to more complexity regarding professions (note to self: remember this when you’re pissed off that you don’t have enough profession knowledge at some point), and am so glad that it’s going to be more interesting than going broke trying to eke out the last five points of your profession. (Having just done that in Wrath, I can’t say I was looking forward to it.)

So, what are you looking forward to in Dragonflight? Anyone healing with a dracthyr? Anyone also looking to corner markets? Tell me what you’re up to!

The First 30 Levels

Kurn / / classic, ramblings

It’s been a little while since I’ve had a chance to write. I’ve been spending most of my free time split between Classic WoW and a programming project.

I’ve gotten Kurn to 31. Madrana remains at 10 and I’m writing this as my mage is level 3, running around Northshire. Wow, what a difference between 8am now and launch time a couple of weeks ago! The goal is to get her to 5 so she can pick up Tailoring (and make use of all the linen I no longer need for First Aid) and Enchanting.

I’ll get back to Madrana soonish — gotta level her soon — but in the meantime, I’m loving running around on Kurn. I got Aspect of the Cheetah at 20 and it was life-changing. As someone who hasn’t been without a mount of some sort in like, a decade, it was amazing. (I have the chauffeur for my toons under 20 on retail.)

And at 30, I got Feign Death. HOLY CRAP THE BEST EVER. Even if I get resisted every so often, I can now, once again, do Stupid Hunter Things. Frankly, that’s one of my favourite things to do in this game.

Example: There’s the Preserving Knowledge quest up in Alterac. I was level 30. My brother was 31 on his warrior. There is no WAY we should have been able to get that done, at least not retrieving the Worn Leather Book. But I found the place where the book was and we used my pet to distract a level 38 elite ogre and my brother ran over to join me. Then I feigned after my pet died. And then, just at that moment, a group of people came up and destroyed all the things for us so we just ran in and got the book. But my pet could have tanked the boss for a second (turtle with shell shield!) if needed. Ahhhhh, Stupid Hunter Things. I love them.

I’ve also made a serious effort to level my professions. Skinning isn’t a problem, I’m already at like, 230. Training Artisan skinning for 5g was not my favourite thing in the world to do, but I did it.

Leatherworking is hard at this point. I’m at about 200 and can’t wait to hit up the Hinterlands at 35 to train Artisan.

But I’m also at about the 150 mark at Fishing and First Aid and my Cooking is approaching 200! (I may have spent money to get there by buying stuff off the AH. Oops.)

I’ve done Deadmines once and Stockades once, both with my guildies. (Though we pugged a healer for Stocks.) I am planning to skip Razorfen Kraul and Gnomer entirely, thank you kindly. Next up for me will be Scarlet Monastery.

The world feels big again. And it’s not just the lack of mounts, it’s the lack of flying mounts. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my flying mounts on retail, but flying from Ratchet to Auberdine means flying down to Theramore first. It’s altogether ridiculous, but there’s a certain something to it.

And the danger! I don’t tend to die on retail, not unless I’m in a raid or something. As a hunter, I can feign, as a pally, I can bubble, etc, etc. So there is no real danger involved on retail. But it’s all around you in Classic. I’m not saying I like dying to murlocs or elite orcs or Bellygrub, but it does happen and I do enjoy knowing I have to be alert when kiting or pulling.

I also really enjoy working towards various goals that are achievable, but difficult. Like, 90g or whatever it is for a 60% speed mount? That is going to suck. But it’s also so rewarding when you get there. It’s been hard to get Leatherworking to 200! It’s been challenging to get Kurn to 31. There’s like a dead zone for quests around 25-27 where things seem to be really hard. I ended up questing in Wetlandsand Redridge with a touch of Duskwood and Southshore and did a lot of just killing of whelps in the Wetlands.

Killing whelps and dragons in this game — and then skinning them — is truly one of my favourite things to do in this entire game. Love it all day long. I must have ground out at least a level or so doing just that over the course of a few days.

So I’m having a great time. Do I miss some of the creature comforts of retail? Of course. Mounts, flight, even some high-level abilities like Blink on my mage or Cleanse on my paladin, not having to stable one pet to call out another… All of these would be nice to have but I know I’ll appreciate Cleanse more on my paladin when I get it in my 40s. I’ll appreciate my slow mount SO MUCH when I get it.

What are you up to in Classic, if you’re playing? Let me know!

Classic Thoughts

Kurn / / classic, ramblings

I’ve been very quiet over the last couple of days. This is because I’ve been busy playing Classic, primarily. Well, you know, and working, celebrating my nephew’s fifth birthday, etc.

But I’ve been playing a lot of Classic. Naturally, I have Thoughts and Feelings!

Honestly, props to Blizzard for keeping the servers up. My group and I landed on Westfall, after originally planning to go to Pagle. By and large, most of us got the names we wanted, which was nice. Anyway, on Monday evening, a bunch of us logged in and were amazed by all the people in the starting zones.

I have never seen so many people in Northshire in my life.

Of course, with this concentration of people came the lag. As, I presume, more layers were created, I saw things fade in and out of existence. Eventually, my brother and I, plus one of our friends, Kam, all managed to group together and did all of Northshire together. Eventually, Kam got her imp, we finished our Northshire quests (after I got Judgment — so useful for tagging mobs instantly!) and we went off into the wilds of Elwynn Forest.

While primary professions only cost 10 copper apiece to train at the Apprentice level, FUN FACT, secondaries are a whole silver each! (Part of me is still amazed that I have five million gold on retail and I’m struggling to scrape up silver to train, etc.)

The hardest part of the evening wasn’t the lag, but rather tagging mobs. Props to Kam’s imp for being on aggressive and tagging some kobolds in Fargodeep Mine and some Murlocs at Crystal Lake!

It took us dozens of tries to get Garrick Proudfoot back in Northshire. At least half a dozen to get Princess in the pumpkin patch (once we found it). Let’s not even talk about Hogger.

But props to my group for mostly living through everything!

I eventually had 10 silver and made my way up to Stormwind to get a guild charter. Coming into Stormwind… well, it was an experience. I turned on the music to get the full effect and got chills down my spine as I entered the original Stormwind for the first time in years.

I managed to get a bunch of random folks, as well as a few of my friends, to sign the guild charter and our guild, Faded Heroes, was born. I thanked the randoms and booted them and we went about inviting all our friends as they logged in.

The goal had been, for me, to spend a couple of hours running around and earning silver to make the guild charter in Stormwind, which is quicker to get to from Northshire than Darnassus is from Aldrassil. Then, I was going to swap to Kurn. But it took me FOUR AND A HALF HOURS of playtime to get ten silver to use on a charter, so I was already nearly ten and I stuck it out to get to level 10 on the paladin.

After day 2, my hunter was also level 10. I died a LOT. The Barrow Den is The Worst, and Ursal Mauler, well, get yourself a group. At level 9, I joined up with a random level 9 rogue and we wiped four (?) times before we got him down. But we got it done! And what lies next for Kurn is getting a pet! Very excited.

Hilariously, I had to turn in a couple of quests to Fandral Staghelm. Now, I remembered him from Vanilla when I was fighting him in Firelands, but it was really very weird to meet him again for the first time, with that context! I remembered him being a jerk, but he is REALLY a jerk. And so, as I read the quest text and such, I remarked, aloud, how happy I was to have killed him a number of times in Firelands.

So what do I think about Classic? Loving it. There are a lot of things I’m having to untrain myself about — sparkling quest objectives, quest stuff on the map, the hunter dead zone, aspects and tracking vanishing once you die and needing to be re-enabled. The retail game has made me soft!

I’m also having to re-learn how to hunter. Paladin, less so, but wow, the dead zone is bigger than I remembered, Concussive Shot isn’t as effective as I remembered… Without a pet, against higher-level mobs, I had to kite them! I was never the BEST kiter, but I could certainly kite Drakkisath. I used to kite some blue dragon up to Everlook, over in Winterspring. (Can’t, for the life of me, remember its name.) Still, there I am, in Teldrassil, kiting furbolgs all over the damn place. And mostly living! It was the harpies in the Oracle Glade that wrecked me.

Looking forward to having a pet so I can stay at range!

Overall, I’m loving what I’m doing in Classic.

Tell me about your Classic experiences!

It’s Go Time

Kurn / / classic, ramblings

Well, more like “It’s Go Day”, but close enough. Today is launch day. In just under four hours, as I write this, WoW Classic will launch.

I am, and this is an understatement, thrilled.

For over a decade, now, I have eagerly awaited the launch of each new expansion, only to pair with it the fact that everything I once knew no longer meant anything. It’s draining. Exhausting. To know all the nuances about your class and spec and just things in the game in general to knowing basically nothing? It’s annoying. But new content brings with it new challenges and new information, so it’s generally a decent trade-off.

Today, however, I sit here, eager to jump into a world that I know oh-so-well.

My encyclopedic knowledge of Blackrock Depths matters. (See my YouTube channel for detailed video guides of BRD and, eventually, more!)

My knowing various old farming spots in Swamp of Sorrows and Dustwallow Marsh and Felwood actually means something.

Understanding what’s required to get the key to Upper Blackrock Spire is important again!

Knowing the best place to raise your weapon skills is finally useful once more!

The content may not be new, but my knowledge is right up there, my friends. I’m thrilled these nuggets of information are going to be put to use once again. And the adventures? The adventures will be brand-new, and I can’t wait to embark upon them and see what the original World of Warcraft has in store for me.

That said, I have some tips!

Tips for WoW Classic Launch

  • You may want to log in as your alts first and get them to a city to get them rested XP while you play on your main! My paladin and mage will be parking their butts in Stormwind while I play on Kurn. (That said, if your nearest capital city is far, look for an inn at the first real zone. No point in running to Goldshire if you can run to Stormwind, but Dolanaar is a better bet than Darnassus)
  • You may be on a different “layer” than someone else. To be on the same layer, someone can invite the other person. The party leader’s “layer” becomes the layer for both people at that point. (I think guild members will also all be on the same layer as each other, could be wrong.)
  • Remember that flight points are few and far between. When you need to head to the Eastvale Logging Company in Elwynn, you may as well run a couple more minutes to grab the flight point out at Lakeshire as well. You may even want to grab the Darkshire FP in Duskwood while you’re over there, though you may end up dying if you’re too low-level.
  • Night elves who want to level in Westfall, search for videos on how to skip from the Wetlands to Dun Morogh (where you can then take the tram). If you don’t do this, you may just want to wait until you’re in your early-to-mid 20s to make your way by boat over to Menethil Harbour because there are a lot of crocolisks who are eager to kill you otherwise.
  • Vendor all your greys, don’t destroy them.
  • Anything that is coloured white (apart from crappy armor/weapons) can be useful to someone. Bear that in mind when killing animals and getting various meats and such.
  • Don’t forget to train fishing, cooking and first aid, as well as your primary professions.
  • Don’t forget to train your abilities and place your talent points! Talent calculator here: https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc
  • Most of all, HAVE FUN! :)

 

Happy WoW Classic launch, everyone. I’ll see you in Azeroth.