The Kraken Rises

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.