MMORPG

The year 2019 has been both the hottest year on record for Oklahoma and the wettest year on record. Generally speaking by this point in the season it is starting to calm down on the temperature front and I have a mostly brown lawn. However this year everything is lush and verdant and trying to kill me. Over the last few weeks my allergies and asthma have hit a critical mass and combined with the still 95 degree days and I feel like I am dying most of the time. I have my good days and my bad days, and the last two days have been bad days.

I wasn’t entirely certain I would make it through the day yesterday but I somehow managed my way through it. Today however is a day for staying home in the AC and taking periodic breathing treatments and lots and lots of meds to try and kick this whole situation in the bum. Sure it is a fine day for dinking around in World of Warcraft, but I also feel supremely guilty for sticking my three supervisors with having to attend meetings that I would otherwise attend. Responsibility sucks but what is absolutely worse is the feeling of guilt when you know you are pushing your responsibilities off onto someone else.

Last night however was a mostly good night. We ultimately pulled together a Razorfen Kraul group when the FFXIV raid night didn’t make due to lack of healers. Grace is mostly busy this week so instead we grabbed Eliyon on his Shaman and worked our way through the instance. Living most of my Warcraft life Alliance side this is an instance I do not know terribly well. I mean I have run it a handful of times, but due to the extreme distance you have to travel to get there it just wasn’t something that happened regularly.

I largely wanted the instance to finish out my Warrior specific Brutal Armor quest chain, as one of the drops came off a boss early in the instance. Past that Eliyon really wanted the Corpsemaker axe to drop, especially given that I am not interested in it as a warrior since I mostly level sword and board. What I wanted instead was to get the Pronged Reaver one handed axe seeing as it more closely fits my personal play style. Fortunately for me it did in fact drop… and unfortunately for Eli his axe did not. I am sure I will be back in there at some point and will try and snag him again so he has another shot and another person who might roll on it that wouldn’t.

Now I am in the awkward position of skilling up Axe from scratch, as I had never really used a one handed axe prior to winning this weapon. I am taking the opportunity however to farm cooking components and catch that skill up in the process. As a warrior I seem to go through an excessive amount of food and while Vernie keeps dropping his creations off on me, I feel like I should probably be more self sufficient. Right now I also largely treat his creations as a limited quantity and use them fairly sparingly.

The negative of last night however is that I dinged 32 and with it… went literally all of my money. I am down to 10 silver at this point, so I am not exactly sure where that 100 gold for the mount is going to come from. Maybe I should have been playing the market this entire time, but I feel like I lack the financial fortitude to really do that in Warcraft. Instead I will probably find something to grind and vendor copious amounts of it to make my 100 gold. I wish “tank for hire” schemes were more viable because I would absolutely tank for cash.

This was the weekend of the “great” Denial of Service attack against classic. Starting at some point Saturday afternoon there was a rapid sequence of attacks targeting a specific set of PVP WoW Classic servers. This then expanded to ultimately target all of the Classic servers, and seemingly the live servers as well. At the time of taking this screenshot I was not able to see any Classic or Live realms as being “online”.

A Twitter account spawned in the midst of this claiming credit and going by UKDrillas, seemingly starting as an attack on two WoW Streamers Asmongold and Sodapoppin. Asmongold was hosting an event on his Twitch stream for the final grind to 60, and seemingly whoever initiated the attack was attempting to stop that from happening. Things sorta get weird from there in that I also saw reports that folks from 4Chan doxxed the attacker, once the attack spread to a server that they were playing on. It was a pretty short time before the twitter account that was claiming credit had been banned and cut off that source of information.

Whatever actually happened, the servers were back up and playable by that evening and I spent the entirety of the Podcast on Saturday roaming around Thousand Needles knocking out quests and collecting much needed Iron ore. That is probably the biggest highlight of the weekend the fact that I am now sitting at 170 Blacksmithing, which is honestly way more tedious of a grind than I remembered the first time. I am slowly getting into the realm of being able to create things that are useful to me while leveling.

Bronze was a hell level, and I am finally happy to mostly be on the other side of that mess. Also Thousand Needles is deeply confused as to what level it is because of the weird range of ore nodes that spawn there. In my travels I have seen: Copper, Tin, Silver, Iron, Gold, Mithril and Truesilver. I am hoping to be able to harvest at least Gold nodes the next time I happen across one. Unfortunately that means I need to find a lot more Iron nodes because I am currently sitting at 150 skill and reportedly Gold is 155.

There were three dungeons that were needed to be run this weekend and due to the DDoS we only managed to squeeze in two of them. The first was another jaunt into Shadowfang Keep because Thalen had reached the point where he needed to clean up all of the quests associated with it. Unfortunately on Friday night neither myself or Grace had the oomph in us to run two dungeons back to back after you consider the standing around time as everyone makes their way to the instance portal in Silverpine.

The second was Blackfathom Deeps which we managed to knock out yesterday morning and offered up several upgrades for me personally, but additionally for the group as a whole. Unfortunately later in the evening we just lacked the critical mass of “almost 30” players required to do the third instance that was needed, aka Razorfen Kraul. In theory I should be hunting down the rest of the quests associated with that instance because it is my ultimate hope to be able to maybe run that night. If I can’t make a group materialize I might join on a PUG group because really at this point I just want to collect the component for the Warrior level 30 armor quest chain while it is still useful.

I close out weekend two of World of Warcraft Classic sitting a little ways into level 31. This is a reasonable speed I think and is way faster than I was leveling in Vanilla. I still feel like a reasonable and viable tank in instance… even though I have moments where I am just out of rage and things are going insane. Grace and her constant fearing doesn’t exactly help this because if I am going to try and lock things down they have to be sitting beside me. It however seems to bring her joy to grief me, and we haven’t died as a result yet… but we did come really close in BFD when her fear went off and grabbed another whole pack.

I am also having to relearn how to play with a proper trapping hunter, because I kept griefing Thalen while he was desperately trying to make the traps work. Additionally we had a Warlock dotting everything up which served to further grief him when the traps didn’t last. We will get this shit sorted out by the time we hit 60. The more pressing concern however is that I have a mount to buy in 9 levels and I have zero clue how I am going to get anywhere near the money needed to purchase it. The riding skill is 20 gold and the mount itself is 80 gold.. which doesn’t include the honored discount but regardless… it is a lot of money. I am just worried that I am going to be that guy without a mount that everyone waits on to get to instances. I have no clue at all how I am going to see the 1000 gold needed for the epic mount.

Some years back I wrote a series of posts that I called GroupCraft and dug into my greater unified theory of group creation. The problem with the Classic era is that I see a lot of people doing a lot of things that just are not effective, and then being frustrated when groups don’t happen. Coming back to Classic I am seeing the same behavior so I thought it might be time to break these posts out again or at least create a streamlined version of them. The original posts however are still largely valid so if you are so inclined the three part series is as follows:

• GroupCraft: Preamble
• GroupCraft: Part One – Communication
• GroupCraft: Part Two – Assembly

If You Don’t have a Healer and a Tank You Don’t Have a Group

I realize this is a blunt statement, but it is one you need to get used to. During the course of this post I will give you some advise to mitigate this, but if you don’t have a stock of pocket tanks and or pocket healers then you are going to struggle to make groups happen. That is the cold hard fact and there is no reason to sugar coat it. DPS you are a commodity in the Vanilla/Classic era because you are WAY easier to level than a Tank or a Healer. Hybrids to some extent have an easier lot in life but they are also in many ways less effective at the chosen role, at least until properly specced and geared.

I commented about the above snipped of general chat on twitter last night. That is not a group looking for more that is two very hopeful dps thinking that shouting into the void is going to fix their dilemma. Shortly after I took that screenshot and snipped it down, it was a group of three dps looking for a tank and healer, and continued to do so until I logged for the night and hour and a half later.

Public Channels Rarely Provide Results

When you look for a group in either General or Trade you are effectively shouting into the void hoping that someone else happens to be sitting there doing nothing looking for a group as well. Most players are engaged in the world and not actively watching chat channels. We are still knee deep in the leveling phase of the game and few people are just hanging out in Org or Stormwind trying to make a group happen. While I have General and Trade still turned on, I have also made a tab that complete filters them out so that I don’t miss Guild Chat. Basically when you are shouting into the void of a public channel you are talking to a very small group of players that are actively watching that channel.

Lock Down a Tank and a Healer

If you want to be successful in forming groups you have to take a very systematic approach to it or be very lucky. As a Warrior Tank I can shout into any channel and probably get a bunch of nibbles because I am a class that is in demand. Most players are not going to have this benefit so when it comes to building a group, you have to lock down the core. If you are DPS this means you need to find both a Tank and a Healer. If you are one of those roles you just have to find the other. In theory you should have been friending every Healer or Tank you come across in grouping up randomly to complete quests. If you didn’t do this however you have to utilize the dark art of the /who command.

When you type /who in game you get the first panel. Yours may not look exactly like mine because I have an ElvUI skin applied but the contents should generally be the same. The who command accepts a large number of arguments and by default it it queries the specific zone you are in with the z=”ZoneName” argument and +/- 3 levels from your current level. This might be useful if you are looking for a specific group within your zone. However I find filtering by class a way more powerful option because it will search all players actively logged into the game when you use the c-“ClassName” argument.

Getting to Know the Classes

So now that you have access to the full potential of the who command, you are going to need to know what you are looking for. The truth is for Classic the class options are pretty limited so I am going to go down each of the Tank and Healer options and talk a little bit about my own personal perspective.

The Tanks

• Warrior – The OG Tank, the only one that is universally raid viable at end games. I’ve know a lot of people that worked really freaking hard on their hybrid of choice to be almost as effective as a warrior completely half-assing it. The bigger challenge is the fact that most people have no clue at all how to tank in the classic era, and it took me a couple of instances to reach a point where I was comfortable with it.
• Druid – Bear has some excellent threat and a lot of health to mitigate damage. The biggest challenge to bear tanks is the fact that the gearing options for “tanking leather” suck badly for the entirety of Vanilla. If a Druid wants to do this role well, they are going to have to go to some extreme lengths of grinding to reach peak efficiency. That said since dungeons are mostly about holding threat then Druids make a perfectly cromulent choice.
• Paladins – Just don’t. My original intended main was a Paladin Tank, and eventually after running up the Hunter I returned to it and attempted in vain to make it work. Paladins have the benefit being able to wear all of the same gear that Warriors can, which is a pretty good start on the mitigation front. The real problem with Paladins is they have really poor threat generation tools. You are going to have to work very hard to make a Paladin Tank viable.
• Shaman – No. Yes technically at this point in life Shaman have a tanking tree. Enhancement has all sorts of threat generation abilities, and rockbiter weapon is damned mighty for holding threat. However you are going to kill your healer in the process. We had a guild run recently where the Shaman was running rockbiter and I forgot it was the threat stance… and the healer had a hell of a time each time something was ripped off my Warrior. Maybe viable if you are really desperate and you have a really great Shaman.

The Healers

• Priest – The OG Main Healer, and the one that has the most tools in their toolkit without really having to do much spec wise to augment them. In vanilla this is going to be your bread and butter most reliable healing experience.
• Druid – Healer really is the role that this class is born to play in Vanilla and as a result Classic. They have a lot of healer gearing options, with the ability to just wear “priest” gear and get by with it. It is a weird healing style to get used to but those who are good at it are godly.
• Paladin – A phenomenal healer if specced properly. If you are running with someone who is hybrid specced then they are going to constantly run into mana issues. If the paladin throws on some “priest” gear however they can do a great job of healing in a pinch regardless of talents. For them it is all about making sure they have enough mana.
• Shaman – Probably the weakest healing offering in Vanilla mostly because it requires a lot of talents to back it up. All of the Shaman I have run into that are trying to shift over and heal a bit are having serious mana issues. The Shaman that are geared and talented specifically for healing though are perfectly fine.

Be Direct and Be Specific

When you shout into a public channel you are talking to everyone and no one at all. It is very easy for me to completely ignore something that happens in public chat. Either I may not happen to be watching that channel at the moment, or I may read something and not think it really is addressed to me. As a result I find it way more viable to hunt for players directly. I am going to always at least respond to a tell, even if it is with a polite “no thank you”. If you ever get a response like that, move on and don’t pester the player.

So taking what you already know about the /Who command and the classes available to you… start reaching out directly to players and trying to fill your slots. Once you have locked down a Tank and a Healer you can then probably safely take things to public channels to fill the last couple of DPS slots. Right or wrong… right now in Classic as it was in Vanilla… DPS are a commodity. GOOD DPS however will eventually become something that is going to get you invited back to groups over and over, but we are too early into the life cycle of this game for it to have much of an effect.

It is also very important that you tell players exactly what you are wanting to do. If you need to run Blackfathom Deep, then say something like this “Excuse me, would you be interested in tanking a BFD run I am pulling together?”. It is polite, direct and friendly in tone. Sure you could get by with fewer words but just sending someone a message like “BFD?” comes off as totally random, somewhat rude and doesn’t exactly convey the full message of what you are expecting. Come up with a template in your head and mostly just swap out the pieces of what you are looking for and where you are planning on going.

Join Social Channels

One of the functionalities that players have more or less forgotten about is the inclusion of social channels. So /1 is always going to be General for players and /2 is always going to be Trade, however you have a bunch of channels that you can create yourself. I am sure if you do some searching you will find a full listing of the commands but here are some of the most basic options.

• /Number – a slash and the number of the channel will allow you to address a message towards that channel. Doing the command with no message will lock your chat pane to talk to that channel by default, which is handy if you are in a lengthy communication.
• /Join ChannelName – the /Join command followed by the name of a channel will join that channel. There really aren’t a lot of options here and all channels are effectively joinable by all players. There isn’t really an option for locking them down.
• /Leave Number – Similar to the join command you can type /Leave and then the number of the channel and it will remove that channel from your list effectively removing you from it.
• /ChatWho Number – ChatWho is a super useful command because it lists who is active in the channel at a given moment. Mostly useful if you are going to say something to the channel that is really meant for a couple of people that are in the channel, and want to make sure that they are actually in there.

Social channels used to be a great resource for grouping. Pretty much every raid group had one or more… or in the cases of Late Night Raiders we had one for each class team in addition to the main channel. Once you got invited to one they became a great way to pull together groups giving you several “slightly better than general” options to look for groups. I still stand by direct messages as the best way of finding groups however.

Friend Good Players

I cannot harp on this one enough. If you are out in the world friend players that you happen to group with that are both good-natured and competent. Direct messages work, but what works better is a direct message to someone on your friend list that you have already built up a rapport with. Also get to the point where you notice names of players you have been around before. I’ve friended up a few players that I have noticed consistently throw me a buff for example. That kind of open positive attitude towards the community means that the player is probably going to be team minded.

This Takes Work

It takes an awful lot of work to make any of this happen, but then again once you start building ties it leads to other things. Back in Vanilla I got invited to so many raids as a result of random encounters that I happened to have out in the wilds. There are a lot of people that I am still friends with today that came from a random occurrence. Hell we would not have 80 some characters in the guild right now were it not for the fact that I have been applying this sort of logic and “collecting awesome people” over the last two decades of gaming.

It isn’t that I am doing anything terribly special. I am just being mindful of my surroundings and taking opportunities to make connections with the good people I happen to find along the way. You too can do all of these things.