Month: August 2019

I should in theory write about staying motivated this morning, given it was my list of suggested topics for each week and I have not touched that one. However the biggest suggestion I can give you in order to keep motivated is to follow your heart. There are going to come a lot of times when you feel like you should be making one post for various reasons, but you actually want to write a completely different post. My suggestion to you is to always write about the thing that interests you the most regardless if it fits neatly into your blog.

Nothing saps your spirit more than feeling like you need to write about a thing just because it is popular or you think for some reason you will gain a bunch of views. You are not going to get rich off of your blog, and it is highly unlikely you will ever get enough money through shilling products to make a sustainable living. Instead you need to find what draws you to writing and what interests you and then cling to it with both hands. For me… it is these long form rambling conversations that I have with you each morning which are pretty much the exact opposite of marketable material. You either are interested in my life and my take on the world or you are not, and nothing I do is probably going to change that.

Following my own advice however… I want to talk some more about World of Warcraft Classic. It really is the little things that make it worth playing. It is the rolling parties that sort of seamlessly come up from nothing and then dissipate in the same way like a passing storm. It is the random stranger last night that handed me a pair of shoulder pads because he had just upgraded his own and noticed I didn’t have any. It is the fact that I keep cramming bags in to peoples inventory when I get one to drop out in the wild. It is everyone in the guild constantly offering things up to help out like crafting patterns or something cool that they just learned how to make. There is a spirit of us all being in this together that is infectious.

Side note… Kodra is my hero because I logged in this morning to a mailbox full of copper ore.

I think more than anything I am enthralled by World of Warcraft Classic because it represents something that I never really dared dream would happen. Sure I had high hopes about getting the band back together and tromping around in Azeroth. However what I really missed was the return to the sense of broader community that existed during that time. Apparently lots of people also missed this because it has done my jaded heart good to see players helping players constantly. The number of random drive by buffs that I receive is excessive and I try my best to thank everyone that does it to keep bolstering that community spirit.

What does break my heart a bit is what I am calling the hopefuls… the folks who hang out in front of a dungeon instance looking for a group. Lately I have been focused on leveling and generally speaking the only time I end up near the instance portal is when I am running a dungeon with a guild group. So far I’ve run Ragefire Chasm the last two nights, and it does in fact go so much more smoothly when I actually have tanking abilities. Grace, Ash and I needed to dip back inside to do one last quest that we picked up and did not have primed for our first run. We managed to snag Vernie and Moughsie who had not run it at all and while we had a bizarre group comp it was a lot of fun. I look forward to running Wailing Caverns over the weekend and am trying to collect the quests required for it in The Barrens right now.

I could however be spending my evenings pugging and helping folks out that way, but I just have not been able to cross that line as of yet. It definitely seems like there is a shortage of tanks, given the fact that almost every request I saw in trade chat yesterday was hunting for a tank. I’ve even started getting random tells from people looking for a tank, which was to be expected. Were I in their situation I would have done exactly the same thing, utilizing the level/class query options. Maybe over the weekend I will tank some stuff for random people, but for now it feels like I have enough folks in the guild that probably need dungeons to keep me busy.

Maybe this is silly… but I feel reinvigorated. I feel like I regained a chunk of my soul that has been missing for a really long time. I feel like I am once again in love with World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre. Time will tell if this is a crush or if it will be a lasting thing, but lord knows I am hoping for the later at this point even though it will mean me not playing a lot of games that are coming down the pipe.

In the continued tradition of Bel learning things don’t quite work like he remembers them… I introduce to you the Warrior Training panel. In theory this is where I learn new abilities every few levels. The challenge with this however is that I did not remember needing to scroll down to find each of the various talent trees worth of abilities. As a result up until this point… I had only ever been training the Arms abilities and not realizing it.

As a result this lead me to run Ragefire Chasm last night with a group of guild friends with only Rend, Heroic Strike, Sunder Armor and Taunt. I somehow made that work for the most part, especially on single target fights… but it all seemed way the hell harder than it should have been. That is because I had apparently never trained Shield Block, Shield Slam, Mocking Blow and Enrage… all of which that would have been super helpful in trying to keep multiple targets under control.

So far for the most part World of Warcraft Classic has been a continued series of these things not quite working like I remembered them. This is a sequence of things… firstly that I am 43 and I am having a hard time remembering exactly what things were like when I was 15 years younger. Next I played through a series of changes in the game and don’t quite remember when they put which things in. So I for some reason thought that meeting stones would actually work to summon players… but no they do not. I also thought that the Barber Shop was something that I could do to change my hair cut… also not a thing that exists yet.

The challenge is that so many little things don’t quite work the way that I remember them working, and as a result the game feels very new and fresh… rather than ground that I have tread upon a thousand times before. It has been nine years since we have played through the old world zones in the condition they are in now… and quite frankly there are many cases where I get mixed up the way the world used to be and the way it was post Cataclysm. It is the little things, as simple as expecting to find the quest where the kid is looking for his dog that has the recorded voice of Ezra Chatterton. That however didn’t go in until way later.

The weirdest part about all of this… is that I am finding that I really do love World of Warcraft. At least I love THIS version of World of Warcraft. Maybe we are just in the honeymoon phase, but it seems like so many people on Bloodsail Buccaneers are going through this same sequence of events, and it is leading all of the public channels to be relatively delightful places. Granted this is all Horde side… for all I know the Alliance side may be a dumpster fire. The Horde seems to be exception at keeping their head down and moving on with things as a whole. Even retail WoW Horde side is way more chill than it ever was on the Alliance side.

Also we are apparently up to 57 characters in the guild? This still floors me.

I am still very much lagging behind my peers in World of Warcraft, but I am hoping that the long holiday weekend will fix that. Last night I hit 12 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway into that level towards 13. I have officially completed all of the quests in the Brill area and wrapped up the last quest chain between Undercity and the Tirisfal this morning. I have no clue what level Grace or Mor or Tam are at this point, but based on my figurations once I hit 13 I might be viable to start tanking Ragefire Cavern, which I am hoping for maybe tonight.

In other news… House Kraken has exploded, and I mean that in a good way. As of last night we had 43 members of the guild with only a couple of those account for alts. I believe there are still several people who won’t be creating characters until the weekend. That said I also started up a chat channel this morning and am going to try and get everyone joining it, and conversely snagging people as they group up with good folks. The idea being that if and when we actually decided to entertain raiding, we will have a social channel that we can operate out of.

I am a huge proponent of non-guild-based raiding. Most of us in AggroChat cut our teeth doing that in either the Late Night Raiders or Last Horse raids on Argent Dawn. I really like that clear delineation between what is “Guild” stuff and what is “Raid” stuff and as a result I have always had a bit of a distaste in my mouth towards “Raiding Guilds”. I feel like the social interaction of the guild suffers for the sake of the raid. This is different than a casual guild who happens to raid together like Facepull. Maybe the distinction doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me… but it does me. Also it makes it way easier to pull in random people from other guilds that they don’t want to leave for the purpose of clearing content.

Last night would have been more productive were it not for a few points where I needed to log out either to swap machines, or to come back upstairs to help watch the print jobs. This is the absolute worst I saw the server queues last night for Bloodsail Buccaneers. This is not a sign that I want everyone to swap over to it and roll on our server, because I rather like having small queues and being on a chill Roleplaying server. I am extremely happy that unlike Cactuar in FFXIV we can at least reliably get our friends onto the server to play with us.

WoW Classic: A thread.

What is this phenomenon? Why do people want to go back to the place that everyone agrees was terrible in so many ways?

— Tam (Chris) (@Tamrielo) August 27, 2019

Tam posted a massive thread on twitter yesterday which is worth a read, and highlights a lot of my own experiences about coming back to classic. The one point that I really feel hits home though is that Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes and early World of Warcraft were story engines in a way that modern games just are not. The frustration and friction often times turned into these elegant stories about how you overcame adversity to push through the process of completing a specific task.

When I look back upon my Everquest days for example, it is moments like clearing The Hole with nothing but rusty weapons to get back or corpses, or getting called in the middle of the night to come rez someone who got killed in Kael Drakkal. When I look back upon Dark Age of Camelot it is stories of us accomplishing things through perseverance and many corpse runs that we should not have been able to accomplish with way less than a full party. When I talk about City of Heroes I am going to talk about the stupid things I managed to accomplish with my Katana Regen Scrapper and some of the horrible deaths that I took when things went wrong… that and the horrendous rubberbanding.

I also wonder if this lack of generating stories is why that MMORPG blogging has been a dying art over the last decade. These games used to give us a constant font of tales to tell, that were actually often times humorous or interesting to read. Tam and I have talked about this many times, but gamers love to tell tales of things that happened in games. The problem is most games just don’t really give us an interesting story to weave anymore. “I spent my night pushing through ten levels without encountering any obstacles” is not exactly a compelling tale.

However if you have to tell a story about how you weaved your way through a camp carefully body pulling enemies, and then getting completely overwhelmed right before you got to the final boss. That is a tale of defeat but it is an interesting tale nonetheless, and I have already had several versions of this tale in my memory. I’ve grouped up with so many random people to work together on shared objectives and in some cases this has worked out swimmingly… and in other cases we have died horribly. I’ve also gone out of my way to be that random stranger who saves people from death when I happen to notice that their health is a wee bit low.

I’ve missed the era of MMORPGs as Story Engines, and I think this along with many other reasons are why I am having a blast right now. If you are one of the Anti-Classic folks that I am seeing pop up in my timelines… I am sorry. You are going to be getting a lot more WoW Classic discussion from me over the coming weeks… and hopefully coming months. The Kraken has risen and now we are slowly conquering this forsaken land.

Last night is without a doubt the most stupidly fun night I have had in years. The servers came online sometime around 5 pm my time. I somehow managed to get home and finished with the basics that I do every night around that time. Shockingly I didn’t hit a queue or anything of the sort and managed to sail straight through to my Warrior Belghast. Mor and Grace were already online, because of course they were. After grabbing some food to nom on I joined them in voice chat and we proceeded to do stupid things along with Vernie who we have to get on voice at some point in the near future.

Everything becomes significantly more complicated when there are a couple hundred characters running around and trying to do the same quest objectives. The kill quests were fine and we pulled together a group to get those done. The real challenge came when we started needing to loot things, because of course each time something died it may or may not drop an item. If it did drop an item, it only dropped it for one of us. Thankfully the “boss” kills were set so that everyone had the quest objective on the body, otherwise that would have been true madness to try and complete because it was a trick to get even one successful tag in, let alone multiple.

The other thing that came flashing back in my memory is that many of the warrior abilities don’t actually start you attacking. Namely Rend and Charge, so I had to break out my macro muscle memory. Essentially for your information what you ultimately want is something that looks a little like this.

/#showtooltip Rend

/startattack

/cast Rend

simple Rend Start Attack Macro

The reason why this matters is I watched many a warrior charge at a target only to get it tagged by another player who just swung a weapon at it. Rend was the ability that I used for tagging purposes most of the time because it seemed to do just enough damage to flag the mob as mine.

So we continued on questing as a group until we hit Brill, when for the most part the group devolved into a bunch of people doing different quests and me deciding to venture forth into Undercity to try and find the mining trainer. Without a doubt you see a half dozen ore nodes when you don’t have the skill, but none when you finally do have it. While in Undercity I decided to check the cost of a guild charter, and I am thankful that I did. I had it stuck in my head that a guild charter was 1 gold… aka 100 silver since for the first bit you are dealing with scourging to get a few silver. However it turns out I was completely wrong and the charter was only 10 silver. At this point I had 9 already on me and I met Tam in the newbie zone who handed me the last silver.

So from that point on the rest of my evening focused entirely upon wandering around and trying to collect the signatures needed to make the guild happen. You need 10 total signatures including yourself, and I am super thankful to Elly for signing even though they had other plans guild wise. I similarly helped another friend from Argent Dawn get their guild up and running by signing the charter on my babby orc huntress. So the servers came online at 5 pm and I got the guild up and running by 8:30 pm… which seems pretty solid. I think technically Vernie and I had it done in faster time at the launch of Vanilla, but we were also more dedicated about collecting the money.

I took a screenshot at this location because it was my corpse. This was my first death in classic wow, and it happened from a bad pull where two level 10 Vile Fin Oracles attacked me at the same time and I was too slow to run away. I was level 7 at the time, and was dumb enough to try and fight them for a few swings before realizing that I should be running. During the middle of the night Grace managed to get a green two-hander and handed it over to me… at which point I started trying to skill that up. Also something I had forgotten… the need to go train weapon skills because it is 10 silver to learn swords as an undead rogue apparently. I started with Daggers, and both One and Two Handed Swords… which honestly is the majority of what I would be using anyways.

I managed to get to level 8 before logging for the night around 9:30 pm. Yes I am in fact an old man and either can no longer deal with all night grinds… or I have reached a point where I have the wisdom to avoid them. You can decide which of those is true. Grace and Mor made it to around level 10 in the same time, but I spent a lot of time faffing about trying to connect with people to get a charter signed. One last thing I am going to talk about this morning are what addons I am running, since I have several… but I might dial that back a little bit namely not sure if I actually need TSM. Here is the list of everything I currently have installed and an explaination.

• ElvUI – includes all of the bar mods and such that Elv normally does
• AtlasLootClassic – When I start running dungeons I would like to know what drops from each boss.
• DBM – Eventually it will be a thing so I might as well just install it now.
• BetterVendorPrice – Adds a bunch of sell price information to the tooltip. Useful for deciding if it is worth throwing an item away for something that will sell for more money when bags get full.
• Inventorian – Gives you a single all purpose bag instead of multiple bags. I would have greatly preferred if I could have gotten a port of ArkInventory but I will deal with this.
• Leatrix – Swiss army knife of addons, allows you to sell vendor trash and a bunch of other things.
• Leatrix Maps – reveals the full map instead of giving you the fog of war.
• Questie – Shows all quests available and where the quest objectives are. I broke down and installed this after a few hours of fumbling around.
• TomCats/TomTom – Not really working as I would have expected yet, so I am wondering if they are blocking them. It did provide a navigation arrow to find my corpse when I died so I will probably let it ride.
• WeaponSwingTimer – Since hitting an ability right before a swing is about to go off is a damage loss… I figured I would get used to watching this now. Basically shows how long until you do another auto attack for each hand. Shows a similar bar for how long before you auto fire a ranged weapon as well.