Thoughts on WotLK Classic & Dragonflight

Well, hi there! Long time no see. And there’s a good reason for that, I haven’t posted in more than two years.

Sorry!

In fairness, I haven’t played any Blizzard games in a good long while. Part of it has to do with the various scandals the company has faced in the last while. Part of it has to do with my lack of desire to play retail WoW — the auction house changes, the level nerf, etc, have left me not wanting to play retail at all. And while I did get Kurn to 70 in TBC Classic (and got epic flying!), I basically stopped playing shortly thereafter. Poor Classic Madrana is still 58.

And part of it has been a lack of time on my part. I was super burnt out at a previous job, leaving me not wanting to do anything when I’d be done for the day. So I found a new job, quit the old one and have been training, basically, for the last six months. It’s challenging and I’m loving it. I just haven’t had much time for other stuff.

Yet, here I am, wondering if I should dip my toes into WotLK Classic or Dragonflight or both.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic

A whole lot of this blog is dedicated to my adventures throughout Wrath of the Lich King. I know it is, because not only did I write it, but I also just reread a bunch of entries.

Wrath is the expansion with dungeons like Oculus. >.> Wrath is the expansion where Onyxia came back out. Wrath is the expansion with Naxx and Sarth and Eye and Ulduar and TOC and ICC. Wrath is the expansion when the LFG tool launched when ICC did.

Rereading about being the only healer in the Thorim tunnel with a Blood DK instead of a Frost DK brought back loads of aggravation and frustration.

Rereading about the idiocy of my raid leader on Bronzebeard brought back a ton of bad memories.

Rereading about the idiocy of my MT on Proudmoore brought back even more bad memories.

And rereading about my missing Apotheosis so badly during Wrath, which was the reason I started Apotheosis back up in Cataclysm, makes me wistful for those days (ie: the BC-era Apotheosis) again.

The thing I realized during Cataclysm, when I reformed Apotheosis, is that you can’t go home again. You just can’t. Those times, even those people, no longer exist. Apart from anything else, we’re all older (and hopefully wiser). Demands on time are different now. I wouldn’t have the time to be a GM these days, at least not the way I would want to be. And I’m pretty sure I still would end up getting promoted to officer in any guild I joined because, as Majik has pointed out to me, I fail at being bad.

So, my question is… do I do Wrath? At all? I wouldn’t need to learn a lot. My hard-mode Ulduar experience is lacking, but apart from that, heroic Anub 25 and heroic LK 25 are the only 25-man bosses I haven’t downed, though I have had the pleasure of wiping on them. A lot. And I liked a lot of the dungeons, even. I levelled my shammy and a druid and a priest through Wrath. (And maybe a mage?) The content was pretty cool. I know I can make a crapton of gold in Wrath.

But to what end? What would the point be? If I’ve done X and Y and Z, why do them again? I do not have a burning desire to do Mimiron’s Firefighter achievement (haha, I made a pun). I really don’t know that I ever want to do heroic Sindragosa 25 again. (Your pathetic magic betraaaaaays you!) Would it just be to pass the time? I mean, I have other things I could do.

Still, it’s tempting… And my brother wants to roll on a fresh start server and I’m like NOPE HAVE FUN ENJOY BYE.

Dragonflight

So, I mean, dragons. One of the things I love to do in WoW is kill dragons. And I like learning more about the big dragon aspects and everything.

But:

  • I am still pissed off that Kurn is level 50. Excuse you, I have hit 60 on that toon before. And 70. 80. 85. 90. 100. 110. 120. I know that the number of levels just gets ridiculous. I know. But while I am okay with the concept of redoing whole expansions I’ve done before, the sheer gall of having to re-do my levels 50-60 and 60-70 is so unappealing to me. I think I might have finished the intro to Shadowlands but that’s it???
  • The Auction House. The changes they made… whenever they did, I guess in BfA (?) where they completely changed everything about auctions just absolutely ruined the game for me. I did not adapt and I don’t agree with the change. I had been able to make money in WoW for over a decade with the old system and I feel like the new system sucks. Maybe I just need to relearn how to do things yet again but UGH, I don’t wanna. And if I can’t make gold in the game, why should I even play???

Still, if I do end up playing at all, I’ll probably want to pay for my sub with WoW Tokens. Which costs in-game money. And if my sub includes retail (well, there’s the cost of the game too, I know), then I might as well play retail and learn to make money there so that I can support my sub.

What’s hilarious is that, nowadays, the sub cost is like nothing to me, but back in the day of me being a poor college student, sometimes it was hard to get that sub money! And yet if I can pay with in-game gold, then, by golly, I want to pay with gold!

Nerd Stuff

One of the things I have to do in my new job is, I’m not joking, log dive. Obviously, it’s not diving through logs from WoW (boy, do I wish!), but rather logs from customers’ servers and stuff. It dawned on me, though, that all of my WoW log dives are responsible for my comfort in scrolling through customer server logs. And I miss doing that in WoW. I miss teaching that in WoW. Maybe I don’t even have to play in order to do that. I can ask you to submit logs to me and I can review them and/or use them as teaching moments? Maybe? Hm.

So…

Lots of thoughts, no decisions made. But that’s one thing I’ve always liked about the blog. I could always write out my thoughts to better understand things, whether it’s the mechanisms of holy paladin healing or why I hate various raid leaders.

What are your plans for Wrath Classic and Dragonflight? Let me know in the comments. :)

9 Replies to “Thoughts on WotLK Classic & Dragonflight”

  1. You’re back!! I’ve missed you while you were away.

    FWIW, part of my job for years was log diving, especially combing logs for security issues. If there’s one thing I looked at when I moved into becoming a progression raider and my brain said “Ugh!” it was that I’d have to go log diving there too. Admittedly Warcraftlogs does make analysis a lot easier, but having to constantly research my results rather than just letting myself relax and have fun kind of wore on me after a while, especially when you’re not getting drops and people are asking why your DPS sucks. Well, that and that I’m on the north side of 50 now, and I’ve noticed my reaction time isn’t what it was even in my 40s (for the record, I started playing WoW the year I turned 40.) So… Log diving is a thing, just that it’s very much something that you can spend way too much time doing to try to get better.

    As far as expacs go….

    I’m still torn about Dragonflight. It looks like it’d be an expac right up my alley, given that my impressions are such that it’s more of an exploration and discovery expac rather than a “save the world from the big bad!” or “No wait, not THAT big bad from the last expac, THIS big bad!” But I look at what endgame likely is, and think that if I’m having trouble keeping up with raiding in Classic, how on earth can I hope to meaningfully contribute in Retail, where my physical skills would be put even more to the test. Plus, what I don’t want is dealing with the complexity of a game I’ve not played since, oh, Mists. (And not done group PvE content since early-mid Cataclysm.) Having me come in, 8-9 years away from what Retail has been, and trying to pick everything up and understand all the systems…. That’s a bit much to handle.

    As far as Wrath Classic goes, I had already separated from my raiding guild prior to the pre-patch dropping, because they kept moving more and more toward the hard end of hardcore raiding, to the point where those of us on the once/week progression team were considered “casuals” and wouldn’t even be considered for a spot in one of the 25 person runs. Plus, there was also the merge with another guild combined with the migration off of our server and onto a Megaserver, and I basically wrote that episode in my life off.

    That was before someone reached out to me and asked if I was interested in doing 10s with them. They’d already recruited several of my friends, and I was on their list. So…. I guess I’m raiding after all.

    (Yes, this is the same Redbeard at Parallel Context. I’d grabbed the blog name Azeroth After Dark from WordPress on a whim, but now when I post on WordPress blogs it points to THAT thing that I’ve never done anything with. Oh well.)

    1. I think that “back” is perhaps an overstatement. We’ll see what happens. :) That said, always a pleasure to read your thoughts!

      I feel you on getting burnt out on logs, especially doing them for work as well as for “play”. I’ve always adored having logs as a single source of truth, as it bypasses memories and claims and such. It’s like “no, honest to God, me and the other paladin both cast Blessing of Protection on the SAME PERSON at the SAME TIME, here’s the log!” It did require a ton of research, though. “What’s that spell called? Does it show up? What is going on??!” Still, I adore it.

      Very interesting, re: reflexes and reaction times! I’m in my 40s now (I was in my late 20s when I started playing WoW) and I can’t say I’ve noticed much of a difference. Having said that, I haven’t played in a while. Practice makes perfect, they say. I was definitely at the top of my game around the middle of Cata, raiding 5 nights a week as a holy paladin (well, two holy paladins), with identical keybinds. 15 hours a week, plus any time I spent healing in dungeons (which was not a lot) meant a lot of doing the same thing. Oh, to have 15+ free hours a week! hahaha.

      re: Retail: See, the thing about Retail is it’s always going to be “easy” to pick up if you come in at the start of an expansion and keep up on updates. There will be guides written for you and your class and your role and stuff like that and if you’re just doing LFR (… I presume that’s still a thing?!) or normals or heroic vs mythic, you should be good. I think that the reflexes thing specifically really only matters in things like competitive Starcraft or when you’re trying to get server first mythic kills. In other words, the 1% of the 1% of players. WoW has been dumbed way down since Vanilla. I don’t think anyone would have trouble picking it up, especially someone who’s played previously! I’d recommend reading things about Dragonflight, particularly now as it’s in beta, and seeing if there’s anything that appeals to you about it. You don’t have to do anything super end-gamey either, remember. You can just be on your merry way through the world and pick flowers if you like. :)

      re: friends: WELL, yeah, that’s how the cookie crumbles. hahaha. The 10s I remember in Wrath were pretty decent, although not at all my favourite. I know I’ve done 10 person Naxx, Sarth (3d zerg in T9! ahhahaha!), Ony, TOC/TOGC, ICC… Oh, and a bit of 10 person Ulduar. As a TANK. hahahaha, ridiculous. ANYWAY, 10s with like-minded people and friends sounds like a nice way to spend Wrath. :)

      1. Oh yes, LFR is still a thing, and it’s still really looked down upon by the raiding community as not being a “real” raid.

        I suspect the biggest problem I have with doing things in Dragonflight was what happened in Shadowlands where –story notwithstanding– the grind became so bad that guilds up and quit rather than deal with it day in and day out. While Classic and TBC were grindy in their own way, they were also simpler to pick up and play without having to understand all the systems. And Classic had those 40 person raids. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the epic feel of those 40 person raids, but 25 person raids just didn’t feel the same. At least I know what I’m getting myself into with 10 person raids, courtesy of UBRS, but it is certainly going to be quite an adjustment doing 10s in Naxx after having been part of a successful 40 person Naxx team in Classic.

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