The Classic Dungeon Experience

 So far Classic WoW has been pretty much exactly the way I remember it, i.e amazing. There has been one notable difference though, at least to me, and that is the dungeon experience.

While I do recall having fun with dungeoning back in the day, I struggle to remember why or how that was possible, because most of my memories are of it taking way too long and people both playing and behaving very badly. The playing badly part I don't mind so much as long as there is a level of effort put in, and I know for a fact I was far from great myself. And to be fair, it was to be expected. Back then the game was completely new to all of us and even those with previous MMO experience (unlike me) still didn't know anything about tactics, best gear or best talents.

Unrelated picture of a scared priest.

This time around though I rarely find a player who seems to be completely new to the game. Either they have played a lot of retail, Vanilla or both. And in either case they mostly know what needs to be done and I've had a blast going through dungeons so far. I don't need people to play perfectly and I don't need people to be social geniuses, as long as everything is done in good effort and politeness.

So I managed to play a year of Classic and umpteen low and mid-level instances before I ended up having one of those experiences. One of those that took me right back to all the memories I have of everything taking just too long and nothing ever really clicking. Like, I can't even point at any one person and say "this failed because of you" but the group effort failed all together.

Ok, in this particular case there were definitely some warning signs early on. The fact that it takes almost an hour to assemble a group is not one of them though. A lot of instances are literally half an hour of running away and without Dungeon Finder Tool you're left to having to wait for the right person to show up at the right time, that's just the way Classic works and I'm fine with that.

I found a group for SM Graveyard and Library on my alliance priest (whom I have a lot to say about by the way, but that is matters for another post) and had to run myself from Wetlands, through Arathi, Hillsbrad and Tirisfal to get to the instance. I was the last one there and everyone had patiently waited for me without complaining. Off to a good start. 

Unrelated picture of a priest in Darnassus.

Except that when we were going to start our hunter wasn't present. Well, that's fine. He had probably gone afk without telling us while waiting, that's understandable. We cleared the first boss in SM GY before the hunter finally shows back up, at this point we had waited at least 15 minutes for him so that's a pretty long afk, but ok, we had done fine without him.

It was going to turn out there was a reason for that as he was ending up to be more of a hassle than gain for the group. He would stand around just not doing anything for minutes at a time, often not going in to action until prompted by someone asking for his attention in party chat. "Bad lag" he says. With lag that bad it's a wonder you can play this game at all, I think. But then again, he was playing a hunter.

Fortunately SM GY is not a difficult instance and we get through it without trouble. Off to SM Library, and the first half is fine, except for the hunter still being mostly afk. He runs around with Aspect of the Cheetah until I tell him and has full mana after every fight he actually does engage in... but I choose to keep my mouth mostly shut, and so does everyone else. We're still doing fine, after all.

After the first boss problem starts to arise though. The hunter starts "lagging" in to extra mobs, pulling more than the tank can comfortably handle. We have our first wipe. No one is complaining, but we're telling each other to be careful not to pull extras. The warrior turns out to be one of those who doesn't bother corpse running but just waits for someone to res him instead. The mobs in SM Lib are fairly tricky actually, with a mana burn I try to hide from as much as possible and a nasty kick that will silence you if you're not careful.

Unrelated picture of a priest running.

That kick will be the cause of our next wipe, just before the final boss. No one is to blame really, it is one of those breakdowns of team effort I described earlier. Or maybe rather an accumulation of mistakes that breaks the camels back. Even though I use Fade I get aggro from mobs throughout the instance, and getting my spells silenced means the tank dies. The first problem might be that the tank doesn't pull the mobs in to a safe spot, but forces us to fight them where they can more easily aggro more mobs. This also means the hunter often stands in places where he more easily aggros more mobs. The paladin or warrior don't use their cooldowns to save us when shit hits the fan and I forget not to cast a heal when I have aggro from one of the kickers. So we wipe.

We all made mistakes, any one of them miniscule but all together too many to keep the group alive.

The second time we wipe we come back to the instance fully respawned. We had literally been about three mobs away from finishing it, and now we have to clear it all over again. But we decide to do it. And through everything we manage to somehow keep our calm and not start yelling things. I just get mildly annoyed when the tank druid starts needing on cloth caster gear. I mean come on dude, that's just not cool. But I also remind myself that this mid-level gear is a drop in the ocean and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't.

But in the end everything took way longer than it needed to and some have been very much carried by the efforts of others. While it didn't leave me angry, sad or even particularly frustrated it definitely left me extremely mentally drained. And I don't know, was it even fun? In the end I probably feel like I could've been without that experience and that is probably a first in Wow Classic for me.

Classic WoW - I Just Want It To Be There For Me

I'm sure most people are just like me in that there are certain pieces of entertainment, be it movies, games or books (most likely all of them), that you just want lying around. Either you have them on display or not, you want them close by. Even if you know you won't get around to reading/playing/watching it even once this year, there is something that makes you want it nice and handy, just in case you feel the urge. To me it can be a book like The Count of Monte Cristo, a game like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or a movie like Seven Samuari. These are items I get back to every know and then and there is something... calming... about knowing that I can do that whenever I feel like it. Even if I never feel like it again, I want to have that option.

This is what I want to do and can't do with Classic WoW.

After having played it since (re)launch last year I have been having a swell time. Most things about it are so nostalgic I love them exactly because they're tedious or not entirely well-designed. Many things I find are actually a lot better than I remember them, dungeoning being one of those things. I have been going at it very slowly too, my highest character at the moment still being only level 40.

In many ways I am so conflicted when it comes to Classic WoW and in some ways I am not at all. I love it, to bits. It has such a huge part of my life (along with the first couple of expansions) I can not state enough what an important game this has been to me, and still is because of that. Every time I log on, every time I do something I've done a thousand times before I get that nostalgic twang in my heart of pure happiness.

But I have done these things a thousand times before. There is pretty much nothing in Classic WoW that I do not know inside and out already (I didn't do a whole lot of raiding in current Classic so that would be the one exception). Whenever I log on it is solely for the nostalgic feeling and pretty much nothing else. I don't feel like there is any wonder of learning or discovery left for me in this game.

And in many ways that is absolutely ok. When I re-read the Count of Monte Cristo for the umpteenth time I obviously know exactly what is going to happen. Rewatching Seven Samuari I am not entertained by the elements of surprise anymore. Now instead I am entertained by the fine craftmanship and the memory of the first time I experienced it and how blown away I was at that point.

But even though I find the Count of Monte Cristo and Seven Samurai to be absolute masterpieces I don't want to re-visit them too often. I want them close and handy in case I do want to experience them again, but often there are a few years in-between each time nowadays. Often it is just enough to look at them to get a good feeling, and it isn't until a few years have passed before you need to refill that nostalgia-well.

Read it, the movies are not worth your time. There is an interesting anime though - "Gankutsuo".

The same thing goes with WoW Classic, but unlike pretty much everything else I can't really own my own copy of Classic WoW to put in my shelf knowing that if I ever, like 40 years from now, want to play that game it is just to pop it into my computer and go (ok, this is an issue facing a lot of computer games, but mmo's have an even shorter expiration date).

MMO's are experiences you only get to borrow for a short time. Once you start playing it you never know how long you're going to be allowed to stick around and World of Warcraft has proven to be one of the longest runners in the genre. In fact we should probably consider us damn lucky we even got a remake the way we have.

And I am. I am so grateful. I don't take it for granted at all. That is why I am afraid that if I don't keep it around it will go away again. It will only stick around for as long as people pay obviously, but can I really justify paying the monthly fee just to have it sticking around because I don't want it to ever go away? It is going to go away eventually anyway.

There are so many things they got right with Classic WoW. While I haven't played retail since a short foray in Warlords of Draenor or whatever expansion it might have been, I personally feel like Classic really entices you into playing with other people in a way that has been removed in many ways from later expansions. You could say Classic even forces you to, because there are so many situations, even early on in the game, where you will find yourself struggling even with a regular quest if you don't find someone to back you up, this is definitely a lot more true for some classes than others.

It's so good you don't even notice how long it is.

And overall people have been so damn nice. Maybe it's because I'm not on a pvp server like I used to be back in the day, so of course there is a lot less opportunity for people to be asshats, but in instances and during questing I find that generally people are generous and friendly to each other.
But I mentioned the quality of different classes and I find this is where WoW probably has done a lot of improvements, though my personal point of view is that they've taken it a bit far in the more recent expansions (this based solely on what I've read since I haven't actually played it myself).

When I play Classic WoW now, and I have rolled pretty much every class so far except druid, I find that each class is very differently equipped for how well it handles itself in different situations but a lot of the fun comes down to something as simple as agency. When shit hits the fan, it is so much more fun to play a class where you feel like you have three more tricks up your sleeve to solve the situation than one where you feel all you can do is throw your hands up in the air and hope for some lucky crits.

This is true for solo-questing and grouping alike as the more useful you feel like you are, the more fun you are going to have. Some classes are more useful to themselves, some more useful to a group. Either way, in the end you want to feel like you have choices even when things go bad. A class like warlock has the usefulness of Healthstones, Summons, Soulstones, pet buffs, cc and self-healing abilities. A class like warrior has the usefulness of barely being able to tank and yeah that is pretty much it... Druids can jump between tanking, healing and dpsing when necessary, which becomes fairly obsolete at end game unfortunately but is actually really cool in mid-game. A resto shaman is pretty much just a glorified totem-mover… I could probably write a whole post on this and might even do that.

Blizzard get so much better later on at giving all the classes different tools for feeling like they have agency and something to bring to the board. I feel like if I had one complaint about woW Classic right now it wouldn't be about the difficulties in getting money or how much running around there is but that some classes get extremely repetative very quickly.

And right now it's like I get to around 35 ish with a class and I sort of don't feel like going further. Which isn't true, because I definitely want to see instances like Sunken Temple and Zul Farrak, and areas like Western Plaguelands and Hinterlands before I feel like I am done with this game this time around.

So now I am stuck in this limbo of wanting the game to be around for me to play, but without actually wanting to put very much game time into it. I just need it for a quick refill of nostalgia every now and then, and I am not sure the game can be played that way...

Images from Barnesandnoble.com, bbc.com.

WoW Classic Is Exactly What I Hoped For

This is my 800th post on this blog, pretty crazy when I think about it. The vast majority of those posts are about WoW so it feels fitting that the 800th one would be on me returning to that game.

Now that I've got the opportunity to play some WoW Classic I can actually say it's pretty much what I hoped for. Heck I can't think of any way it's not what I hoped for so I'm going to say it's exactly what I thought it would be and wanted. Anyone remember the comparison I made to going to back to playing Pokémon Red a couple of posts back? I had just tried to play Pokémon Moon and not enjoyed it (the first in the main series I didn't absolutely love) and decided to go back to the roots. Doing so I was still wary that years of QoL changes within the Pokémon series would make the original experience more tedious than fun. That was definitely not the case, it was exactly as much fun as I remembered it and I loved every second of it.

So far, WoW Classic has been exactly like that. It might help that I stopped playing WoW in MoP and haven't played it for years (a month maybe in Legion but had no fun there). The original WoW was a masterpiece of a game for so many reasons. And while WoW eventually evolved for me to be more about the community than the actual game, that is not how I played it back in Vanilla. It wasn't until BC that I got into raiding, having done only very little of Vanilla end-game. My Vanilla experience, I realize now, was about enjoying the actual game and the randomness of random people. There was a social aspect for sure, in the sense that I needed other people to get things done, but other people weren't the reason I logged in to play.

I realize now, playing the game again, that atmosphere is why I play this game. The reason I love games like Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 is atmosphere (and great game play design). No one does world building like Blizzard - when you run from one end to the other (and you'll be doing a lot of running) doing quests about anything and everything you'll feel connected and immersed. Even killing Shambling Horrors on a field or Quilboars in the outback feels like it has a purpose and fills in another piece of the puzzle that is the lore and world around you.

WoW Classic nails the sense of wonder and exploration. Going into a cave full of spiders or camp full of Kolkars I never feel indifferent or like I just want to get it over with. I am always curious about what is hiding behind the next hill, always interested in finding out more. And that is even though I have done these quests and run these areas tens of times in the past!

Is it flawless? Well in the sense that nothing has dulled my fun even the slightest, yes. Funnily enough, some things that I knew were a bit of a challenge in Classic and that could potentially drain the fun turned out to not be a problem at all.

Getting money is not easy, but I feel like I am always at the point of where I have just enough. Not enough to indulge myself in blues or even greens, but enough to get my skills when I need them and even buy some food for myself. And what else do I really need?

Enemies are tough, but again I feel like they are just tough enough. Not so difficult that every mob feels like a chore and progression is a slog, but not so easy that I can just pull a camp without some careful planning (or at all).

Like mentioned there is a lot of running, and some quests are quite far away from the quest giver but yet again - this gives me an opportunity to explore the world. The objective isn't right next to me, meaning I might find things I wouldn't otherwise have just by having to go around looking for things. It sets a pace that I find contemplative and almost meditative.

Quest mobs drop rate is horrendous compared to later expansions, but it just means I need to kill more which gives me an excuse to spend more time in each area and also gain more experience doing the quest. To me it's a lot like when I get lost in any of the Metroidvania games, I don't mind it since the experience gained always means there is progression.

Playing with other players means you're taking a chance. You might find someone who is nice or someone who isn't. So far I haven't come across any douchebags. People can run up and snag mobs or herbs/veins but it doesn't even bother me because with that many people questing in the same area it's just going to happen. I've been in several groups for small quests and for dungeons and everyone I've spoken to has been at the very least polite. The dungeon I tanked on my warrior was pretty much the epitome of a great run. Even the few mishaps we had, no one lost their temper or started blaming anyone. I can only hope that it's a sign of how things are, and not just me being lucky for my first few levels.

But there are a few things that have given me pause. You can't use Thunder Clap in Defensive Stance?! WHAT?! Ok, that one actually annoys me a bit. But tanking still went fine for my first (and so far only) try since everyone respected the target markers.

Also I know I am going to want a more efficient way to deal with my bags before long. Something that sorts my stuff and also maybe something that displays what is in my bags without me having to drag it to my bars.

A better way to display dots is probably something I am going to get as well. Right now all I can see is that my target has a debuff, no duration or anything.

So far I've gotten a warlock to 11 and a warrior to 15, both on the horde side. But thinking about all the awesome alliance questing areas like Elwynn Forest, Westfall and Duskwood that I haven't even checked out yet makes me all giddy. I want to take it endlessly slow, I almost wish I could level slower than I already am. Each area I am leaving behind I almost immediately want to return to to run around in some more. I can't describe how happy I am that WoW Classic is a thing but yeah, it's really great.

WoW Classic - I Can Barely Believe It's Really Here

Here we are. WoW Classic is almost upon us, although I don't think I will actually believe it until I log in for the first time and run around with my fresh little character.

I remember when I was little and thought about turning 18 and how cool that would be. It's kind of odd having a memory of yourself looking forward to something that is now already way in the past. Now, at 34, I also remember when I was younger and thinking about how weird it would be to ever quit playing WoW. Here I am years later and I am way passed both those milestones. I've even come some sort of full circle and am going to start WoW all over (too bad I can't be 18 again though, amirite)!

I've probably told this story a billion times, so just scroll past it if you've heard it before:
My original WoW journey started in 2005, when I had just turned 20. My brother, who had played from release, allowed me to create a character on his account (my very first character was an undead priest named Lahmia, but I quickly swapped to a night elf druid to play on the same faction as him). This would become a big source of argument between us until I got my own account somewhere at the turn to 2006. My first character on my own account was a human warlock, but I was quickly required to move servers because of overpopulation and somewhere in the spring of 2006 Zinn the undead priest was born. She was my first character to level 60 and she remained my main character all the way until I quit playing in Mists of Pandaria, April 2013 - 8 years after I had first started playing WoW.

And here I am now, a bit more than 14 years since I first stepped into the world of Azeroth and perched to do it again. It's difficult to explain what I am feeling. My attempt at creating my new characters probably illustrates it quite well;

At first I decided for an undead warrior and an undead priest. Then I thought I didn't want two undeads, and I also really wanted an orc warrior rather than an undead one. But the undead racials are pretty nice, Cannibalize can be useful when questing (thought probably less useful than I remember). Also I had remembered the orc racial wrong, thinking it would give me rage with no debuff, but apparently it increases damage and reduces healing taking and so makes it less useful for tanking.

While I was pondering these things, which I thought would take no more than five minutes, my 5 yo comes up behind me and wonders what I am doing. I explain it to him and let him tinker with making a character himself. He settles on a "bull-man transformer" i.e Tauren Druid. He wants the name Gojira but it's taken so we go with Gojera.

It hits me then that here I am, introducing my son to this game. At 5 yo I think he is still too young, mostly because without being able to read anything all he can do is run around and kill stuff, maybe (even probably) that will be enough for him for a while. But somehow I am so happy that I get a chance to show him this Classic experience first, rather than the modern version (the same reason we decided to introduce him to NES/SNES/MEGA DRIVE before PS4). I even hope he ditches Roblox for this. I hope that when we sit down to play something together, this will be one of those things. Being able to play this game with my own kid would be so cool.

Right now I've settled on an orc warrior and an undead warlock, and though that might still change before I start playing I feel pretty good about my choice at the moment. Professions will be mining and blacksmithing, herbalism and enchanting respectively.

My initial plan was to stay up past midnight to be able to log in as soon as possible, but I scrapped that plan almost immediately for many reasons.

First of all I doubt if I'll even be able to get onto the server straight away, these things just do not launch without major hiccups. I don't think Blizzard has launched any expansion without major log in problems even though they really should've learned by now. I noticed Blizzard has already added several new servers in the last few hours alone, so it seems they underestimated interest as per usual.
Secondly it's not like I can stay up several hours past midnight anyway, my kid has school tomorrow and my daughter does not care about my WoW playing and will get up at 6 am anyway. With what little time I can possibly squeeze in I'll only be able to get the starter quest anyway, so I'd rather just give myself proper time to do it.
Thirdly, related to secondly, I've got a lot of other things and plans tomorrow - life moves on even though it now contains Classic WoW. I need and want my sleep more than I want to play WoW. I want to be awake and fresh enough to be in a good mood for my kids way more than I want to play WoW.

Addons is another thing I've given some thought. To begin with I'm going to go au naturale, mostly because I am too lazy to tinker around with addons right now and also because I've been away from the game so long I feel like I need to see what it is I want to "fix". I remember a bag addon and maybe a UI addon being quite necessary, but we'll see if I think so this time around. It's not like I am going to sink anywhere near the same kind of time into this so I'll probably get away with not having to change too much.

You can rest assured that there are going to be a lot more posts coming on how this experience turns out to be for me. I am also going to be curious on what you think about it, if you happen to play it!

WoW Classic Is Nearly Here And I Am Not Prepared

In a couple of days my son starts real school for the first time (as opposed to Kindergarten). But more importantly, WoW Classic is released (kidding. My son starting school is of course more momentous. Ahem.).

Considering the first 500 something posts on this blog were pretty much all about WoW and I played it religiously for 8 years between 2005-2013, I'm a bit surprised at myself that I haven't even mentioned anything about WoW Classic yet. I am in this weird in-between state of "extremely hyped" and "not really thinking about it". It's possible to combine the two, especially when you're a mom to two little kids. As long as they're awake I don't really have time or brain power to think about anything other than making sure they're not unhappy. As soon as they're sleeping though… I am usually still to brain fatigued to think about anything except how much rest and sleep I might hope to squeeze out of my way too short "free" time. On occasion however, the reminder that WoW Classic is a thing pops into my head and I am immediately extremely hyped.

Me in 2006.

There is no way to overstate the (overall positive) impact WoW has had on my life. In that sense WoW is by far the best game I have ever played. In that sense also I would say that WoW transcends being "just a game" to me. I won't shy away from calling it just short of a way of life. While it never interfered with my life must-do's (study and work, eat and sleep as it happened), for a non-inconsequential amount of time in my life I played WoW a lot. Both my children exist because of it since I met my SO through it. And as mentioned, the vast majority of that time was very enjoyable.

Of course I had my fair share of drama. There is just no way to spend that much time with such a vast variety of people and not have drama. I also may or may not be considered argumentative and maybe even aggressive at times. I definitely have trouble letting doodoo just slide, even when not letting it slide means conjuring more doodoo.

The reason I stopped playing however was wholly undramatic, maybe that was even partly the main issue. At the time I was expecting my first child and had also started working a lot more. None of those were main contributors, but that coupled with the fact that I had to move server because most people I used to play with had already quit or moved on to other things meant I was feeling quite lonely. WoW, at least to me, is all about the community. It's probably a decent game on its own, but I don't think it's comparable to what you get when you have the whole package. The guildies and whatever crazy stuff that went on in guild chat. The chats you had with the random people you encountered doing quests and dungeons. The scheduled hang-outs with friends to do raids/pvp/quests/dungeons/whacky achievements/farming/you name it. To me the game was a (albeit great) framework for the social aspect. When that aspect was gone, the game part just couldn't fill that hole.

I used to love to experiment with my healing output.

This became even more clear to me when I tried to play for a while in what might have been Warlords of Draenor and I still just felt lonely. Even more so since I played without a guild and no one seemed to talk to anyone anymore anywhere, not in any chats nor any dungeons I did. I didn't have time to invest in raiding so a huge chunk of what motivated me game-wise was gone. I never minded grinding or levelling alts, but that was because I could either talk to people I knew and enjoyed spending time with or knew that it was going to go into end game efforts. Having neither of those motivations left me having not much fun.

But up until I didn't have fun I had so much fun. I don't recall WoW ever feeling like a chore or a slog (there were parts within WoW that weren't 100% fun obviously, but in general). I don't recall logging on to raid and thinking "you know what, I'd rather do something else right now". While I don't long for those days to be back, I live a different life now, I am definitely sentimental about them. There are few days even now when some WoW memory doesn't pop into my head at the most random times. I could be building with Lego with my son and suddenly think about running around in Stranglethorn Vale. I can be playing in the sandbox with my daughter and suddenly think about fighting The Lich King. I'll cook food and think about when that BoE epic dropped in Hinterlands.

Me in 2010.

I've understood every change that Blizzard has decided to make to WoW and I don't recall raging too much about any of them. But the honest truth is that I miss the old world, the way it was before the Cataclysm. I believe the Cataclysm was a necessary change, if not exactly like that then probably something like that. In fact I even think it's a bit of a stroke of genius to think of remaking the old world into something new and fresh. It's just an inevitable fact that as soon as something is gone, people (namely me) will be pining for what has been and remembering it with rose-tinted goggles. People don't want what they want and they don't know what they want. If that statement makes no sense, neither do the wishes of WoW-players since the roll-out of the game.

Personally I found that a lot of things were made a bit too easy and too streamlined. I often opted out of using Heirloom gear, because I didn't want to level my alts too fast. I never used the "instantly max level character"-option because I always found that levelling a class and spec was by far the best way to learn it. But as mentioned, they were just that - optional, so they didn't bother me. Then they started changing things like how the skill tree looked and worked, they removed what I considered key features of certain classes like catching your own pet as a hunter and crafting poisons as a rogue. I understood these changes and maybe, probably, they were necessary. But I wanted to be able to experience things the way they used to be.

Me in 2011.

Just imagine if you could return to some of your happiest memories and relive them? Blizzard has essentially offered me exactly that. That doesn't mean I expect my re-visit to Azeroth to be exactly the same. But just like smelling a certain smell or hearing a certain song can bring you to the brink of being "there again", I expect myself to reinvigorate some of all those amazing memories I've made through that game.

I'm not entirely sure how I want to play WoW Classic. Do I want to recreate myself from 2005? I'm leaning towards not going for that approach, for several reasons. Firstly, it's impossible to entirely go back to what I did in 2005. I simply am not that person anymore and more than 8 years of playing WoW means I can't go back to being someone who is seeing things for the first time. Secondly, I don't want to tread on my old memories. I want them to be intact and untouched. This time, I want it to be what it has to be - an older me revisiting an old playground, both to remember but also to create new memories.

One of my most popular posts was about a floating cat head. The internet just loves cats.

Not too long ago I replayed Pokémon Red, some 20 years after I had first played it. I had the expectation that while I would still enjoy it, some of the QoL changes made to later games would sour the experience to me somewhat. But I was wrong. The game was still fun as hell and nothing about it annoyed me. It is difficult to go backwards in gaming I find, unless you are specifically after those differences. And I think I am when it comes to WoW. I am specifically after gold being damn hard to come by. I am specifically after being forced to talk to people, talk a lot, to get through dungeons and some times even quests. I am specifically after my caster having to drink after every single mob. Farming Souls Shards on my warlock. Farming lockboxes on my rogue. Levelling and feeding my pet on my hunter. Having to pay through my nose every time I need new ranks on my skills. Having to get rage at the beginning of a fight as a warrior tank, and hope people hold off long enough for you to keep aggro. Almost all of the little "annoyances" that I can think of, that they've slowly changed throughout the years of WoW, are things that I am looking forward to doing again.

My first real character in WoW was a holy priest named Zinn, and I stuck to her, keeping her as my main throughout all the years. This time however, I think I am going to go with a warrior tank, as I found that I really enjoy tanking somewhere in the middle of Burning Crusade (though initially it scared the hell out of me). We'll see, I've still got a few days to think it through. But I am definitely extremely hyped. Hope to see you there.

Vanilla WoW Is Coming Back!

If you ask me, the only interesting news we got from Blizzcon, which I only know anything about since pretty much every one on my Twitter won't stop talking about it, were the news that Blizzard are launching Vanilla servers. For the uninitiated (and if you are I doubt you're much interested in this post), "vanilla" refers to WoW before expansions. They've existed all along as unofficial "pirate" servers without any kind of support from Blizzard, now they are coming legitimately with all that entails. This blew my mind. As you may or may not know, I started playing WoW around April 2005 and played it until somewhere around April 2013. That is 8 years of my life invested and some of my fondest memories, not just gaming memories, are from that game. I met my bf and we have our child thanks to WoW. I can not overstate what an impact it has had on me and I still think about it  anecdotally pretty much every day. Although I didn't start playing it seriously (as in more than 1-2 hour a day and with raiding) until Burning Crusade, Vanilla WoW is where I started out. Breaking the news to my bf we just stared at each other, memories coming rushing back.

After I had gone past the initial amaze-balls feeling of just hearing about it, my first thoughts were - which kind of Vanilla? Vanilla was around for about two years before we got Burning Crusade and a lot happened during that time alone. Will we get early-Vanilla or late-Vanilla? Which patch are they going from? And are they going to do it hardcore, no Quality-Of-Life-Changes from later patches/expansions added whatsoever? It made me and the bf reminisce about what all that could mean. What was Vanilla all about? Here are some completely random memories from back then;

• Horde didn't have paladins and alliance didn't have shamans.
• Shamans had totem quests! I wrote about them several times on this blog, and I particularly hated the Water Totem Quest.
• Shamans had several talents and skills as if they were meant to be able to tank, which I wrote about here. I even wrote a guide on how to do it!
• Most classes required consumables to be able to do their best buffs and/or certain skills. Symbol of Kings of 30 min Blessings for Paladins, Candles for 30 min Prayer of Fortitude for Priests. Rogues still needed ingredients to do different poisons and had to carry around those poisons. Warlocks needed a ton of Soul Shards for Healthstones which had to be summoned one by one. Imagine that when you want to give your raid of 40 people a Healthstone each. Mages also had to summon their food one by one, although they required no ingredient to do it. Instead they needed materials to open portals and to teleport.
• Spellpower was based off Intellect and mana regen off Spirit. This means most classes had a spellpower gear for when being in combat and a spirit gear to swap into when out of combat, to regen mana in.
• Every skill had ranks and they all scaled about equally with spellpower, but had a very different cost in mana. This means Paladin rank 1 Flash of Light cost basically no mana but could heal for a lot anyway if you had enough intellect.
• You couldn't have dual-specs. You had to pay to swap and you had to buy all your ranks back. I forgot to do this several times and ended up tanking end-game instances with rank 1 skills.
• Tanking as a warrior was pretty damn difficult and required a lot of cooperation from your team or quick reflexes. As a warrior you started each fight without any resource which meant you either needed initial rage or needed to keep the pace up so that your rage never went down to zero. I wrote a lot of guides on warrior tanking, they are from later points in the game but warrior tanking regarding this point hadn't changed much then. Things that annoy me when tanking. Tanking heroics nice and smooth.
• Classes had class quests, some of the best ways to see if someone knew their class or not because they were genuinely some of the most difficult ways to obtain a certain item. I did the Anathema/Benediction quest on my Priest, but I think that didn't hold a candle in difficulty compared for instance to the Rok'Delar/Lok'Delar Hunter quest.
• Obviously Blood Elves, Draenei, Worgen and Goblins didn't exist yet. Introducing Blood Elves and Draenei in Burning Crusade was how Blizzard explained Alliance getting shamans and Horde getting Paladins.
• No flying mounts!
• You didn't get your first mount until level 40 and getting enough money to afford it was not easy. I think it cost some 90g.
• There were no Looking For Groups or Looking For Raids. Originally there weren't even Summon Stones or game-wide channels that allowed you to find people, but you had to stand around in a major city to collect enough people for an instance. Then get everyone there. And if anyone left mid-instance, someone had to travel/hearthstone back to a major city to find a new player and get that new player to the instance. This meant just making any old instance could take hours. HOURS!
• Some instances were hell just to get to let alone get through. Maraudon was infamous for having people lost and confused long before they even entered the instance. If you died you had to corpse-run from outside the instance back in if no one could resurrect you. My brother was known as "Luzi the lost" in his guild because he could never find his way back into Maraudon.
• There was no roll for "Need", "Greed" or "Disenchant" system. You could only roll to either take an item or not. Initially this was one system I wish they didn't bring back, but my bf pointed out that this was the best way to find out who was worth grouping with again or not. You could find some really nice people based on how they treated the rolls, although it also meant a lot of frustration from people treating everything as a potential weapon for them, even when it clearly wasn't *cough*Hunters*cough*.
• Some instances that are now instances were initially raids. Scholomance and Stratholme come to mind. They were first 10-man raids and then 5-man raids if I remember correctly. I recall priests being the go to healer for those instances because we could remove both magic and disease debuffs, had Shackle Undead and that buff that protected from fear.
• Paladins had Judgements and Seals, they only lasted a few seconds. I remember having a macro where I would rebuff my Seal every time I used Judgement.
• Rogues could still open Lockboxes, that was a big thing actually. I loved leveling up my lockpicking skill and offering up my services to people in big cities.
• There were still chests around the world. I really miss those, although they were pretty heavily exploited.

These are just off the top of my head and as soon as I post this I am going to think of a ton of more ones. But I could do this all day and both me and the bf realized that we would love to go back to an unaltered experience of Vanilla WoW. It was harsh, but absolutely amazing. My personal favorite expansion was Wrath of the Lich King, but maybe Blizzard intend to make it slowly through the old expansions again? That would be so, so cool.

Some Hate on MMO Cities

After the hundreds of days worth of playtime I poured into WoW, I told myself to stay away from other MMO's for a while. I've been doing so-so on that front, since there are a ton of them nowadays and some seem truly interesting and like there is a fun game there to play even for someone who has no actual multiplayer interest in it, like me. Eventhough I've hardly tried many - I've managed to stay clear of both Rift, Wildstar and Final Fantasy XIV so far - the ones I have tried have horribly failed to keep my interest. And it's turned out it's not for lack of social sphere like I thought it would be.

Funnily enough, the only MMO I've played other than WoW and actually really enjoyed I played while I was playing WoW - Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The only reason I didn't stick with this one was the one I thought would be a problem for any MMO other than WoW, that I simply didn't have enough friends playing it at the same time. In the end, eventhough I had fun with it and managed to even get my then bf to play a bit with me, the pull of the social life on WoW turned out to be too great. Once WoW was over and done with for my part, I thought that I might be able to enjoy other MMO's uncrippled by this fact. In fact I was intent on it (the lack of social sphere in the game) not being allowed to cloud my judgement of an otherwise good game, because I always felt it was unfair towards other MMO that WoW would always have the bigger playerbase. Once WoW didn't have the social bit to keep me tied to it, I hoped I'd be able to enjoy other MMO's freely eventhough I feared the opposite.

Nothing fun to do here... - fragsandbeer.com

So I tried Guild Wars, admittedly this was also while I was still playing WoW, but this time the problem wasn't the lack of friends to play with. I got to some sort of quest hub, and I'm not even joking, I couldn't find my way out of it. I thought that maybe I was just being stupid for that particular game, but it turned out this would be a recurring issue for me with other MMO's I tried. Ok, so I wouldn't necessarily fail so horribly as to not even manage to make my way out of a city. But the city, usually a massive main hub with not only quests but anything the player might need in terms of interaction, crafting and general restocking is where I end up logging out for the last time.

I tried Guild Wars 2 because everyone said it was such a masterpiece of a game, some said it was really even better than WoW but most players just didn't realize because they had their noses too far up WoW's posterior. And it was quite fun, I actually played it for a couple of hours before I ended up in yet another darned city and just... lost interest in the game completely. Because I had professions, or tradeskills, or whatever Guild Wars 2 calls it, and I had things to sell and probably a lot of other stuff that the city could provide me with. But I just got utterly lost and the entire thing was so boring because running around for an hour just trying to find things is not my kind of fun. And I realized I would have to do this many times before I finally had it all in my head and didn't have to think about it or google names to find the blacksmith and even then I would still have to spend a lot of time just travelling around in the city doing all those chore stuff that is often required in any game that has all that gear and item tinkering going on.

Yet another vendor

I tried Neverwinter and ended up having the exact same issue. The game itself was actually quite fun, the battles were fun, but then I had to run around in the city talking to quest givers and finding vendors and all the fun I had just blew right out the window. I realized yet again that any fun I might have inbetween the city-visits would just not be enough to make me want to go through it over and over. (I also tried Star Trek Online but that was just weird).

It's the size of it. See, I have this issue with cities in any old RPG, not just MMO's, but most of the time they're fortunately not big enough for it to become big enough of a problem. It does happen though, Final Fantasy XII was right on the threshhold for what I can endure. I've realized I pretty much detest having to run around in a city or village and look for things. Maybe I enjoyed Warhammer so much because I don't even remember it having cities!

Just loads of characters I don't care about - squarehaven.com

I don't know if this is something that has come with age, or if it's the times - the instant satisfaction times. Maybe me not knowing exactly what to do and where to go frustrates me too much or maybe... it's because I remember the first time I stepped into Orgrimmar and I was completely blown away. Running in through those gates I pretty much gasped at the massive city that lay before me. It was something I had never seen before and I was amazed at everything there was to see and to do. Eventually I learned where everything was by heart in pretty much any city in WoW and barely had to even look to get where and what I wanted. The more I played the more the amazement wore off and everything just needed to be as effective and fast as possible. I lost interest in the exploration for explorations sake, something I loved to do in WoW, and just wanted to get to wherever would get me the next piece of gear or level as fast as possible.

But that was because I had done pretty much everything there was to do in WoW many, many times over. Somehow I've transferred those feelings over to other games I play and other MMO's are hit especially hard because you spend so much time in cities doing the tinkering and trying to find people to talk to.

There are still MMO's I am interested in trying however, like beforementioned FFXIV or The Secret World. We'll see if I get around to it and if I end up logging out in another city.