World of Warcraft Classic

I spent my might roaming around in Mulgore some more and knocking out the various newbie quests from Bloodhoof Village at my own prodding pace that very much fits the animation cycle of the Tauren Male.  So the weird thing about World of Warcraft Classic is that I know there is no capturing the feeling of roaming around in Azeroth for the first time back in 2004.  I was 28 at the time and the launch of the game was a magical moment that happened to enrapture all of my friends that were MMO inclined at the same time.  It was a weird amalgam of people I knew in real life, folks I met through Everquest, the few of us that played Dark Age of Camleot together, a bunch of people that we picked up from City of Heroes and some that came from the larger community of Horizon: Empire of Istaria (now just called Istaria).  Everyone was going to be playing the same game at the same time and it was freaking awesome…  the only hitch was that the game was divided into two halves and some of us were dedicated to playing Horde and others playing Alliance.  I wound up joining the Alliance group and let the horde side of me largely atrophy, but from the beginning I found this to be a very artificial choice as I have never really bought into the faction war storyline.

I cannot fully explain why I am enjoying myself in World of Warcraft right now.  I most definitely do not enjoy the current state of Battle for Azeroth, but for some reason playing Classic Beta feels more simple and pure.  I am roaming around, surviving on nothing…  getting legitimately excited any time I see a copper node or get some linen drops because it means I can advance my crafting.  I got a bag drop during the first part of the newbie zone and was absolutely excited to see it…  and still several levels later I am hoping to see another one drop.  Everything feels to be boiled down to is purest form, of do some quests… kill some monsters…  actually read some quest text because otherwise I cannot remember for the life of me where anything is located.  I am present in the world because I keep my head on a swivel because one bad pull…  one add at the wrong time…  and I end up doing a corpse run.

The truth is that I have probably died more in the last two nights than I have died in the entire time questing since the release of Wrath of the Lich King.  I am of course not counting raid and dungeon deaths because those are rather “accident prone” settings, but just in over world questing…  most of the time I manage to level my way through almost the entirety of the expansion content before I actually take a death.  In Classic I sorta wish that I had been keeping a death count…  because seriously I have been dying a lot as I have had to adjust to the realities that we dealt with in Vanilla.  I am having to re-learn the dark art of slow body pulling camps…  and dragging them back at a safe distance while watching for any roamers.  I am having to keep track of the spawn times and as I clear keep moving to what is now guaranteed to be a safe spot for awhile.  All of these were skills that I went into World of Warcraft with having developed them in the precursor MMOs…  but that have completely atrophied over time.

During Battle for Azeroth I played a Tank Demon Hunter…  and on that character if I was not pulling entire camps at a time I was legitimately playing the game wrong.  If I move forward to Classic however…  if I get more than one mob at a time… I am straight up going to die.  There is no safety net for me to fall back on…  no Ignore Pain that I can lean on heavily to bring my health back up to full.  The in combat regeneration rate is prodigiously slow meaning that I basically cannot do anything to better my situation apart from a healing potion during the fight… and even then that is just a temporary salve to a likely inevitable end.  There is a part of me that thought I wouldn’t be as into this as I apparently am.  That said I am having a blast and while I know there is no recapturing the things that made World of Warcraft Vanilla special…  I am finding that it also still strangely works for me.

All of that said… I am contemplating some nonsense.  I want to build a casual Dungeon and eventual Raid guild in World of Warcraft Classic when it releases in August.  I realize the futility of naming something when I cannot actually register the guild…  but I want to go with Decades Behind because there is a story there.  Back during Wrath of the Lich King a bunch of us on the Argent Dawn Forums started a guild called Years Behind when patch 3.2.0 introduced the ability to lock your level at a specific level.  I rolled a Gnome Warrior and for a short period of time we ran a bunch of the Vanilla raid content while artificially level locked down to 60.  This was fun… but also not exactly true given that most of us were equipping Burning Crusade greens rather than relying on what was actually available back during Vanilla.  With the advent of Classic I want to try and do something similar… and given that it has been over a decade since the launch of World of Warcraft I opted to update this name.  In the months between now and the release I figure we will sort out information.  Right now however I am targeting the Horde for two reasons.  First…  Grace is a die-hard Horde player and is super sad anytime she is playing something else…  and in order to make this work I am absolutely going to need her.  Secondly…  I remember several bosses that Horde had a way easier time fighting than Alliance  (and of course some that horde struggled with as well).  The big one…  was that there just wasn’t a viable way to take down the Ooze in AQ40 as Alliance.  Additionally Horde has bloodlust…  and I am stacking the deck as best I can.

I will of course be providing updates as I know more information about all of this.

Last night I started the evening as I have done several recently…  spending a chunk of time playing Rage 2.  However at some point I needed to get up and around and when I finally got sat back down at the laptop on the sofa…  I decided to check to see if I happened to make it into World of Warcraft Classic Beta.  I can’t even pinpoint where I heard the news, but at some point yesterday I heard that Beta invites would be going out.  I did not notice that I had gotten an email but I opted to just check the launcher, and sure enough…  nestled beside PTR in the list was “Beta:  WoW Classic”.  I installed the game and popped in to see what all had changed since the BlizzCon demo.

Side note… at some point during the evening I did in fact receive an email titled “Belghast – You’re Invited to the World of Warcraft Classic Beta Test” and I clipped part of the email above…  which is obviously formatted for mobile devices.  Like I said however my account had received the entitlement long before I got an email, so I feel like your best option if you are curious is to see if it shows up in the drop down of selectable World of Warcraft accounts.  There are rumors that you have to have an active subscription to get access to it…  which checks as even though I am not playing the game I never went through the process of cancelling my subscription.  I also purchased BlizzCon access last year…  so it might also be tied to that for all I know.  Whatever the case I have access and I spent some time playing last night.

Ultimately I created what was literally my very first World of Warcraft character.  I made a Tauren Warrior back in one of the beta phases in 2004, and since my good friend Grace is excited about Classic and has way stronger Horde loyalty than I do Alliance loyalty I opted to give it a shot last night.  First take away…  Mulgore is way more peaceful than I remember and it was super chill running around as a big damned cow warrior bopping things with a big hammer.  Eventually I managed to get a axe and shield set up going, and since I leveled the original Belghast as prot I am expecting to level in Classic as prot for old times sake.

There was a weird sense of coming home to roaming around in the world.  One of the things I love about limited access alphas and betas in World of Warcraft… is that the community is generally speaking non-toxic.  I spent a good chunk of the night chatting away with random people in general about what we remembered about the early days of Warcraft.  It is weird but I have sorta missed feeling like I had a community that is worth communicating with.  Sure there are excellent people in a good number of the games…  but in the post Dungeon Finder reality no one talks to anyone else.  This means that general channels are left to the devices of the people who just want to make trouble for others, and a secret to my sanity for years has been disabling them entirely.  I’ve missed an era when it was okay to hang out and chat in a public space, and if nothing else that was refreshing about the Classic Beta.

The other big takeaway from the night is that they seem to have toned down the game a bit from the Classic Demo from BlizzCon.  The only death I took during the night is when I charged in to attack a mob that I did not properly “con” first…  and wound up fighting a level 9 swoop and level 6.  This probably would have been fine had another level 9 wolf not jumped in to help out the birb.  My goal for the night was to get to the point where I had tradeskills trained, and I now do in fact have both Mining and Smithing after a quick jaunt to Thunderbluff.  My best drop so far is the 4 slot black bag… and I remember back in the day I used to farm the newbie zone until I had gathered four of these before moving onwards.  Hell when Classic launches I might actually do this so that I don’t feel like I am behind the curve the entire time.  As far as tradeskills… I figured Blacksmithing was going to give me the best bang for the buck as a Warrior in that it will let me craft all of my gear for the most part.

The joys of looking like you dressed yourself for the very first time.  I guess however that is part of the charm of starting over and returning to vanilla.  Getting excited over a grey item dropping for a slot I currently had nothing equipped in is an experience that I have not had for a very long time.  I remember banking shoulder items back in the day just so when my friends got to that point I could hand them one and fill a slot that greys start dropping well before anything reasonable does.  I look forward to running Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines legitimately.  I do not however look forward to trying to make the run to Deadmines as a Horde player.  I keep reminding myself that this is patch 1.12 and not patch 1.0… and in theory Meeting stones exist?  I am not sure at what point they put in the teleports that allow Horde to get to Deadmines easily however.  Ultimately it feels sufficiently vanilla to trigger my nostalgia and doesn’t feel quite as purposefully punishing as the BlizzCon demo did.  I am happy for the moment if for no reason other than I was not expecting to do this last night at all… nor was I expecting to spend the night chatting with strangers.  Good start so far!