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.