It’s All Coming Back…

So in December, my video card died. My beautiful, gorgeous, GTX 1080Ti died.

Naturally, this put a crimp in my WoW playing in that I basically couldn’t play anything that required hardware acceleration.

Thankfully, my 16-month old video card was still under warranty, so I got a free replacement. Unfortunately, this was all happening over the holidays so it took over a month to get my card. I had other stuff to do with some personal projects, but I’ve finally gotten back to playing WoW.

And I’m level 58! And almost a half!

I’ve run a bunch of the high-end instances for the first time in over a decade since properly doing them at level.

Dire Maul West – a couple of wipes, but ultimately I got the Backwood Helm.

UBRS – No loot but I didn’t have to kite Drak! I did get my Pyroguard Emberseer quest done (Eye of the Emberseer) for Duke Hydraxis and got attuned to BWL and got my Blood of the Black Dragon Champion for Onyxia. So with one run, I was attuned to everything except Molten Core.

LBRS – This was a weird-ass run. Four wipes (I feigned through two of them) and these people didn’t drop down to the right at Hordemar City. Why… why would you not do that? We ended up not clearing the hallway where the recipe for the Greater Fire Protection Potion drops, nor the other one on your way to Troll side. It was weird. But I got my Beaststalker’s Gloves and Beaststalker’s Mantle (thank you, Voone and Wyrmthalak!) as well as Trueaim Gauntlets.

Strat UD – No loot to speak of, but I got the holy water quest done and got the key.

Haven’t done Live or Scholo or DM North yet. Oh, and I soloed my way to attune myself to Molten Core. Plus got my Royal Seal of Eldre’Thalas all by myself. Plus assembled a video of five ways to mess up Jailbreak.

It’s a very interesting experience, to be really knowledgeable about stuff and yet unable to convince anyone to take you anywhere when pugging because you’re a hunter and no one thinks you can CC worth shit. My brother has promised to tank me through anything I need, so that’s good.

And I have more than enough needed for my epic mount. I’m pretty pleased about that.

The most interesting thing about this experience, though, is how old memories come back.

We were in that LBRS run and we’d killed the quartermaster up the hallway from Halycon and were clearing trash towards the dogs and I’m like … there’s something here. There’s a pat. I hit Track Humanoids and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a pat coming from the upper hallway just as our pally tank is going to run at the group at the far end of the corridor. I pinged the map multiple times, averting certain disaster as the tank stopped to get that pat before the group.

And while in Strat, the goddamn Eye of Naxxramas kept showing up during boss fights, but guess who killed the damn thing each time? That’s right. Me. Too many memories of being wiped by the Eye and its summoned thingies.

But the thing is, that pat in LBRS, the Eye in Strat UD, these aren’t memories I would have consciously thought about. They’re not things I would remember if I were talking about the instances to someone. But as soon as I was in those particular positions, it was like an old neural pathway just lit all the way up.

It’s been fun, relearning this stuff or, perhaps more accurately, rediscovering that I still have this knowledge.