Month: September 2019

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.

The first hurdle of a guild is getting the 10 silver required for the charter. We managed to get that within the first few hours of Classic. The bigger hurdle however is the 10 gold required to be able to choose your tabard design. I remember back in Vanilla we did some runs of Deadmines where we vendored everything that someone didn’t actually need and funneled that money into funding the 10 gold. This time around we took a more communal approach. As you reach 20 you start getting a little more wiggle room in your money situation, and as such I set up one of my alts as a banker and folks mailed donations to it.

Over the course of four days and lots of generosity we gathered the 10 gold needed to buy the tabard design, and last night when I first got on I labored over making sure to pick the right items. I really wish there was a number system or something so that I could make sure that what I was choosing was exactly what I wanted to choose. I had used some of the tabard designers to come up with the basics of what I wanted and last night was largely just trying to match that design in the tiny window that is the tabard designer and the generally poor lighting conditions of Undercity.

In the time it took to earn the money I also cobbled together a logo. The idea for the tabard was to make it sorta look like a pirate flag given that we are playing on the pirate themed Bloodsail Buccaneers server. The purple border is for the Forsaken given that a huge chunk of us were Forsaken to facilitate the signing of the charter. I also happen to really like purple as a color and thanks to Ultros I will always associate the color with octopoids. In my travels I found a really cool woodcut illustration of an octopus on a public domain site and I incorporated that into the logo.

Other than setting the tabard, last night was largely one of chill leveling. I originally went over the HIllsbrad to help Tam out with a quest, but then realized it was at the very end of a quest chain… where I opted to try and catch up so we could do it together. I did not realize this was one of those quest chains that went on forever and I made it to step three before I stalled out a bit and reached a phase where I am going to need to call in some help myself to push through it. I tried duoing it with a Shaman but we just didn’t have enough oomph to push through it.

In other bits of excitement, thanks to a pretty regular flow of materials from Dynar I am now officially an Expert Blacksmith. This is another point where I did not remember things working like they do. I kept trying to train in Undercity and my memory told me that I should be able to train the next rank at level 20 and 125 skill… both of which I had passed. After a quick jaunt over to the WoWhead Classic blacksmithing page I realized that I would need to take the Zeppelin. I vague remember this now but in order to train a skill you have to find a higher skilled smith than you are currently. So in order to get to Expert I had to find an Artisan, and the only ones of those that exist are in Orgrimmar and Ironforge.

Then when I want to move to Artisan I will have to go to Booty Bay and track down the only Master Blacksmith in the game. Now it makes sense as to why the quest for the purple smithing hammer was in Stranglethorn Vale. So at some point… I am going to need to make my way to Booty Bay, which thankfully is WAY easier for the Horde than it is for the Alliance. It also means that I am going to have to do the faction repair method in Dire Maul if I decide I want to become friendly with the Bloodsail Buccaneers. I mean I could trash my goblin rep once I have trained all of the available patterns… but that is a decision for a really long time from now.

Since I took yesterday off and I have a post in me, I figure I will make two posts today.  World of Warcraft Classic has shook my world like few other games have. It is making me re-evaluate a lot of my own memories.  Largely for some time I have been in this headspace of thinking that maybe I had just grown apart from the type of experience that World of Warcraft had provided.  Cataclysm is the point where I first made a break from the game, and there were a bunch of extenuating circumstances surrounding that.  

Cataclysm represented the end of non-guild raiding as a whole and it saw House Stalwart ballooning in size overnight as we tried to incorporate all of the different cultures that made up the satellite guilds that raided with us as part of the Duranub Raiding Company.  It also saw us reaching a point where we were trying to make 4 different 10 player raid teams function at the same time, and I had allowed myself to get snagged by the most hardcore of these teams. I’ve never really been a hardcore raider in mindset, and it lead to me playing the game not for fun, but for success.

I burned out and bounced extremely hard, and am realizing that I just used Rift as a handy lifeboat to ferry me away from the gameplay and experiences that I had not been enjoying.  I also found the breaking of the world to be a frustrating experience and didn’t enjoy seeing all of these areas that I had come to know like the back of my hand to be completely changed in the process.  Cataclysm was a turning point in the way I viewed World of Warcraft, and while I came back and played each expansion the time until I bounced kept getting shorter.

As I said before, I reasoned this shift as me reaching a point where I was a different sort of player than the World of Warcraft experience really supported.  However this made me start to question my feelings towards Classic WoW as well. Was I simply viewing that time through rose colored glasses? Was it not as magical as I remembered it being and was simply the circumstances that it was the best game we had available to us at that time?  I felt certain that there was no way I could go back in time and feel the way that I felt when I first stepped foot into Mulgore.

Playing Classic has been this deeply cathartic experience, because no…  it very much is as good of a game as I remembered it being. Sure there are frustrations with the missing quality of life elements that we gained over the years, but on some level that makes everything we do have feel all the more special.  I feel like I am earning my way through the game for the first time since probably Wrath of the Lich King. Each mob kill, each level ding, each time I go bankrupt at the trainer… feels like I did something significant. The fact that one week into the game I am only level 25 feels important.

I remember in Wrath I decided to level a Deathknight and had it up to raid reader in seven days of actual time.  The leveling game was probably the thing that I enjoyed the most out of World of Warcraft and it was truncated to a fashion where it no longer mattered.  Starting a brand new toon and getting it to level 120 is reportedly a 5 to 10 day process. The bulk of the game has been sped up to the point where it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  Pouring on ten levels in an evening makes every single ding feel less important than the last.

The Community is another aspect of the game that I had missed, because effectively human interaction had been optimized out of the game.  Over the last week I’ve seen a lot of bitter tweets talking about how we could be communicating right now in live, and that we just choose not to.  The truth is I have made attempts to bridge this gap because there are certain protocols that I have gotten used to thanks to the much better communication in Final Fantasy XIV.  In that game it is effectively expected for you to join a group and say some sort of greeting. If people are feeling communicative then often times there will be a rolling banter as you do content.

With both Legion and Battle for Azeroth I attempted to move this protocol over to World of Warcraft.  I would join each new group with a hearty “Hey Folks!” and occasionally I would get a response back. However most recently this greeting is met with silence or grumblings to “pull faster” as we all barrel forward silently along the most efficient path towards the final boss.  I’ve seen a lot of this same “silent running” mentality start infecting the groups in Final Fantasy XIV, and I sorta miss the random conversations I would get into there as well.

In Classic however the model has changed drastically because for the first time since the launch of Wrath we actually need other players.  I don’t mean need as in to run dungeons or group content, but need as in to complete quests period. I accept every group invite because I know that I will be getting valuable assets at my disposal in the form of more bodies to kill things faster.  I stick around after I finish my kills to make sure the rest of the party gets theirs because I know it is highly likely that I will run into this player again at another date in the future.

I’ve created a social channel on Bloodsail Buccaneers and I am using these interacts as an opportunity to snag people for it.  Yesterday alone in two random groups I met two different pairs of people who seemed to be both competent and good-natured, and snagged them away to the channel.  When it comes time to build harder content groups at maximum level this channel will serve as a resource for our entire guild and maybe even serve as the basis of a non-guild raid.  I am systematically working towards that goal as I move through the world, because each person I meet has a permanence that just doesn’t exist in the current WoW Climate.

What I mean by that is we are no longer only exposed to players from our own server.  Often times when you push a button and get a group you are thrown in with a batch of players scattered across a large block of servers.  That means you are likely never see that Priest of Earthen Ring or Hunter from Scarlet Monastery ever again. Because of this a lot of the investment goes out the window when you know it won’t lead to future grouping experiences?  In Classic on BB, I am constantly running into the same players over and over so it is worth that extra effort to send a player a tell thanking them when I got a drive by buff.

Classic is effectively unspoiled and still pristine, and part of me wants to preserve it at all costs.  Argent Dawn my server since launch on the other hand has been tainted by fifteen years worth of bad blood, toxicity and apathy.  I can carve out a peaceful existence in my own guild, but I find it hard to be willing to put much effort into making a change to the ecosystem as a whole.  Social Channels were killed when the Dungeon Finder went in at the end of wrath, and I killed my own best home for making a change when I let ArgentDawn.us forums atrophy and die.

I’m fifteen years wiser going into Classic, as are a good number of the people that I am playing with in House Kraken.  I am loving the experience of getting to revisit a time and place that I held so high in my memory, and at the same time building brand new memories.  Classic really is a story engine because I’ve run Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines and in every single instance I have a few stories to tell about them.  Classic excels and producing quirky moments and those are the sort of thing that embed memories in your brain. I’ve probably run Freehold a dozen times, and I can’t point out a single instance in any of those times that was memorable enough to freeze it in my brain.

Classic represents this magical opportunity to see MMORPGs before they changed.  I am determined to enjoy every moment of this while it lasts. Who knows we might really make it work and get raids going.  Even if we don’t however I am going to have a bunch of great new memories to take with me into whatever game comes next.