Only 15 minutes until the Dark Portal opens, but it’s also 15 minutes to midnight here and it’s Tuesday. The dungeon group is more like “let’s start on or after the weekend” so it seems our leveling marathon from 45 to 58 was a bit for naught.
Ready for Outland?
So here he is, in all his weird low-level leveling gear glory. Level 58.5, a 42.6 DPS Axe, a Level 27 Mail Helm from Razorfen Kraul, a Level 40 Plate Chest, and a few 4x and 5x quest items, but only one high-level blue item except a stat stick bow. Mining 300, Cooking 300, First Aid 290, Blacksmithing 260 and no chance to grind all the Thorium needed right now.
As I wrote last week, we started pushing the Frost Mage/Arms Warrior duo towards 58 and I think I read that the XP required was lowered by 30% until you hit Outland and it would explain why we managed to hit 57.5 last night, now it should be a breeze to get a few quests in Silithus done tonight.
One of our Hunters hit 58 and logged out on the spot, not continuing until the portal opens, the other Hunter hasn’t boosted yet as far as I know, and unfortunately we completely misunderstood our Shaman player. He hadn’t planned to boost the 46 Shaman that he had so many problems to level, and was a bit surprised and dismayed that we ran off with the duo. So now he’ll probably boost a Druid and if he hates it we will help his Shaman level somehow. So I’m having fun with the Warrior again so maybe I’m not boosting something at all, we’ll see – still a bit of time to decide and I guess the boost and the Deluxe version won’t go away. We’ll see if I can manage to tank the leveling dungeons with my weird 31/8/13 Mortal Strike build or if I have to respec Prot after all. We kinda plan to also level together, not just do dungeons, so my personal DPS shouldn’t be too important.
On a personal level, I’m at 291 Mining, which should be easy to finish, and 285 Cooking, which also should be no problem with Sandworm Meat from Silithus. Blacksmithing is at 231, which sucks a bit. I need more Iron to craft some Steel pieces, then will probably need a ton of Mithril and then Thorium, whereas all I found in the world while leveling was Gold and Truesilver. Those BS weapons in TBC are really, really nice – but as long as I can gather all the Fel Iron I see with a high enough skill, it shouldn’t be too bad to postpone the crafting, I guess they’re Level 70 weapons anyway. Oh, and I still need to do the First Aid quest to progress past 225, but again going to 300 and beyond is not a priority as I’ll funnel all my TBC cloth drops to the Mage’s Tailoring anyway.
Overall it’s funny how Classic is such a weird experience to me. Inside a 1h play session I can be happily grinding mobs for a “kill 3x 20 mobs” quest and have fun, and on the other hand get furious to the point of wanting to quit if there are 5 other people farming on the exact only spawn point of the mobs I need. Yes, maybe it was just as bad as release on our server, with so many people pushing for 58/60 in these last days of the pre-patch (which was simply too short, dammit Blizzard. I know we were late, but we were straight up in the “not interested” camp until the dungeon group came back together, so yeah, they should’ve decided a week or two earlier, but still – they probably would have if the pre-patch hads been longer).
Coming back to alts… I’m unenthusiastic. Yesterday I had the urge to actually activate my 35 Rogue on the TBC server but I let it pass. She was supposed to be my remaining Vanilla Classic alt, but we’re all full on TBC now, and cloning is only 15 €, but it’s so easy to lose track of your goals and with Retail and EVE, maybe I actually shouldn’t start playing any low-level Classic alt right now, be it Vanilla or TBC…
When the dungeon group met again on Saturday we first chatted for a bit and it actually looks like we can meet again in real life for the first time soon, with 3 out of 4 being vaccinated and 3 of 4 being stuck at home anyway (which should limit the infection risk quite a lot). Then we pushed on through Kun-Lai and actually managed to get to Level 48 and had enough time left to go through the Maw. Surprisingly quick, I might add, if you have the mount and just destroy everything with 4 people. We decided to do the campaign story and not Threads of Fate and then parted ways to catch up on a few percent of XP, pick some flowers, and meet up again in Bastion next week. But we also kinda agreed to try out TBC Classic, where 3 of us had given up already in 2019 and the spring 2020 revival also didn’t really last long, but our fifth member had spoken up and I guess we’re in now. We have one planned boost on a new character, one “sick of leveling Resto Shaman, will boost 46 to 58”, one “I will level this Mage from 46 to 58” and me originally planning to boost a new Druid, but now maybe keeping the Warrior. The Mage/Warrior duo with the new talents and the supposed? XP changes blasted through the levels on the long weekend to just over 50 and last night we managed a whole level despite not being well-rested anymore and also not playing the whole evening. Hopefully we can make it. If we don’t, I can still boost a Druid as my main, if we do then I have a week to decide which class to play.
Just hit 60 on my Dark Iron Dwarf Monk, that’s all classes at 60 (plus one extra Rogue, of course). 9 are at Renown 40 + campaign done, 3 are at 35/34/24 + campaign done, the last one is at Renown 5 and has just started the campaign.
So far, so good – not sure it’s worth grinding out those missing Renown levels, but at least that last campaign for the Monk must be done. And she needs 170 gear, then I’m happy with that, I guess. No real plans for Horde, but I ran the Orc Shammy through the Maw, collected the dungeon quests, chose a Covenant, and healed a HoA. We’ll see, but in my current bad mood I don’t think I’ll go for “every class at 60, per faction” this time.
But I’ve been trying to do 1 random dungeon on the 2 3x toons, Warrior and Priest, when I have time and am in the mood, still 2x ~27 levels until Heritage Armor. I’ve left Northrend on both now, though. Priest will do BfA as Shadow and Warrior will start MoP, so I can tank the MoP dungeons with the dungeon quest XP, tanking BfA with only half your skills feels horrible, and everything dies sooo slowly. Scaling isn’t always the true answer to everything it seems
And there are the 8 levels for the Vulpera DK (the dungeon group had to pause this week due to scheduling conflicts), but hopefully we’ll continue next Saturday and manage to power through to 48. Then it’s only the Lightforged Draenei that’s missing.
Oh, and I really wonder when Blizzard will finally fix the transmog bug that shows your old look in the character select window, grr.
Reading more posts and talking to more people we seem to be the only guild unable to kill Sire Heroic, and I’m getting increasingly cranky.
Naithin talks about 76 wipes, Rohan mentions a rekill, my friends from the dungeon group had somewhere between 50 and 70 I think (and they only raid ~5-6h per week and we had a lead on them for a month I guess).
I need to doublecheck with one of my guildies who has an addon that keeps track, but I’m pretty sure we’re over 200 wipes. I haven’t missed a single raid (3 nights per week) since about December 12th, so that’s around our 65th evening (give or take 2 cancelled for christmas and 2-3 cancelled the last weeks due to low numbers) this coming Friday and I’m actually fed up. I just want to finish this tier and have a break. But most of all I wonder what’s going on in people’s heads if they stay until 9/10 Hc and then leave. Not single players (it can happen), but we went from 25-30 during normal to 8-12 now. Also I would understand people stopping after the normal Sire kill, that’s fair – but we had about 10 people stopping during Sire Hc progression or just after Generals Hc. I don’t get it…
Raiding has taken a big hit, since we’d been sitting at 9/10 Heroic for so long that a lot of people stopped logging in, either playing other games, giving up, or.. I don’t know. But we had problems getting even 10 people together for a few weeks now, and apparently we suck at 10 player raiding in this composition although I wouldn’t have said that we lost our better 5-10 players, I’d say we lost a few good ones and a few less good ones and the ones still logging in are decidedly solid in the middle to upper end, but it doesn’t help.
On the upside we finally did some alt runs, so I now have a normal Denathrius kill on both my Paladin (as Retri) and on my Shaman (as Resto). Healing is no joke on some bosses but we did it without major problems in one night.
Not much to do at the high end without the raid, and I stopped doing M+ as well, so there’s leveling alts. Both my Balance Druid and Unholy DK have finished their campaign and sit at ~170 iLvl (haven’t done LFR yet), the Mage is currently Renown-gated at 19 and 7 of 9 Chapters of the campaign done, so next week probably. So I started leveling my last Alliance class, the Monk. She’s 53 now and has just finished Bastion, doing Threads of Fate again with mostly normal quests and only some quick World Quests. No progress on Horde side but maybe I’m in the mood to pick up the ~30 Warrior and Priest again.
Another milestone, 80 million skill points on my main. Last milestone in February.
Skill category Points No. of skills
===================================================
Spaceship Command 20,713,077 60 *
Drones 8,859,375 18
Gunnery 8,765,560 34 *
Navigation 7,327,839 13 *
Engineering 6,842,040 15 *
Missiles 6,518,514 21 *
Fleet Support 3,656,894 12 *
Shields 3,198,119 12 *
Targeting 2,575,530 8 *
Armor 2,547,805 11
Electronic Systems 2,224,395 12 *
Subsystems 1,312,530 16 *
Scanning 1,191,530 7
Resource Processing 1,039,545 15 *
Neural Enhancement 745,347 5
Rigging 679,060 10
Science 502,275 13 *
Social 434,510 6
Planet Management 394,040 4
Trade 359,530 8
Production 276,743 4
Structure Management 24,040 1 *
Corporation Management 250
* = changes since last time
Skills at Level 5: 93 (+13)
Skills at Level 4: 123 (+9)
Skills at Level 3: 57 (-4)
Skills at Level 2: 2 (0)
Skills at Level 1: 31 (-3)
Skills at Level 0: 4 (-4)
I guess the big changes are that I completed our FAX and Dread skill plans (Caldari for now and damn you, JDC V) and could apply for our cap group. In reality I should probably train those T2 guns the Phoenix I bought is fitted with… but on the other hand my Dread alt is still in training and I’m not keen on losing this one, with the recent spike in prices, I was happy enough to get one for the old price after the update had landed… Other than that I guess the majority of the 10m came from JDC, and Fleet Support skills (yay, I can boost now), some T3C subsystem skills, finishing up some of our Doctrines and slowly working my way to being able to fly all combat subcaps.
80m is an important point for silly reasons (skill injectors only give the original 500k back if you are under 5m skill points, 400k under 50m, 300k under 80m, and only 150k after 80m), so I took the opportunity and a bit of disposable income and bumped myself over the hump, I think from 77.x to 80.x and didn’t spend it, so that’s why I’m only posting this now, with 80m actually spent. I’m not a huge fan of skill injectors, but they’re a reality and now I used some for the second time and don’t plan to in the future (unless I become filthy rich, which I seriously doubt :P). It sucks a little because now my main alt isn’t exactly 40m behind anymore, so maybe I’ll ninja edit those stats in here in a month to keep track.
It’s been quite a while since I last posted about WoW Classic, April 2020, over a year ago and after that quick adventure we stopped again.
But the news is out that in just 3-4 weeks there will be WoW TBC Classic with their “you can choose either version per character” plan. The problem is… do I know what I want to choose? Will I even play either version?
As with Classic, my memories are surprisingly fresh and again I’m claiming to not have the problem of rose-tinted glasses. I know what was good and what was bad, I know what was fun and what I didn’t like. The attunement chain was annoyingly long, my Karazhan experience was horrible because our guild didn’t really click there (or maybe we simply sucked). I dread all the rep grinds that I didn’t mind doing back then (even on multiple chars), but the point is.. I’ve been there, I’ve done that.
But even more important is the choice of character, so what is available right now?
45 Tauren Warrior, of the failed instance group, Arms and Tanking as Arms
35 Undead Assassination Rogue, played solo
24 Affliction? Warlock
13 BM Hunter
If I was 60 and had acquired some gear, it would be easy. That character would probably stay in Classic. If I was close to 60 and it wasn’t a Rogue, I’d be going into TBC. But my Vanilla Main was a Rogue (+ Druid Alt), that’s why I chose a Warrior main and didn’t roll a Druid. In TBC still Rogue Main but I also played Druid, Warlock, and Warrior a lot. So if I’d be looking to redo some sort of TBC experience, Rogue and Warrior would be out I think, same as every pure DPS class, so what do we have left?
Shaman – one of my staple classes, maybe not a bad choice with 2 diff. DPS specs
Priest – not sure if SP was good in TBC, but not sure I like Priest healing either
Paladin – Blood Elves again… but Heal+DPS+Tank
Druid – one of my alts in TBC (2nd to ding 70, iirc) but versatile enough to give it a shot
So yeah, recently my thinking has always been going like “If I really want to focus on one char and not a bunch of alts, it must be able to do at least 2 roles”, which was a lot harder in the older expansions. No DK, Monk, DH (hey, notice a pattern?) and Horde Paladins/Alliance Shamans only from TBC on.
So yeah. Warrior in TBC is uninteresting, Rogue only as a solo alt. Warlock is too low and I also had that already (Frozen Shadoweave was reall nice though) and a 13 Hunter also isn’t really worth mentioning. So maybe no copying over to TBC. I think we won’t be able to use the Level 58 character boost for Blood Elves, so I guess my choices would be Shaman or Druid, with a preference for Druid.
Or maybe skip TBC outright. Maybe I’ll ask the dungeon group again but we’re still lacking a fifth, even if we four agree to do something there.
While I wrote about the inception of the group, I already missed last week, but we did play. First week was 10-16 with initial setup and starting Jade Forest, the second week was 16-28 and mopping up most of Jade Forest, and doing 2 or 3 instances.
Today we finished the north half of Jade Forest and only once we got down to the horrible set of 4 “solo scenario” quests (after having done the first 2-3 quicker ones) we skipped the zone and went on to the Valley of the Four Winds and knocking out the east and south half of the map. Then we queued for a random dungeon and got the Sotmstout Brewery first, then Siege of Niuzao Temple, which means we’re only missing Gate of the Setting Sun of the 6 Pandaria dungeons now I think.
We encountered the first of the “you need to not fly but ride on the ground to finish the quest” bugs we all love and while I was completely surprised how few problems we actually had with keeping 4 people’s quest completion in sync, today was worse than the last 2 times.
At level 31 we made a quick trip to Orgrimmar to learn flying, just as we did at Level 20 for fast mounts, but other than that it’s been pretty much speedy leveling while only stopping to pick a flower once in a while. In the end we got to Level 36 and ~50%, usually ending with the people missing some XP to go pick a few flowers to get to the same percentage. Probably not needed but at least we can be reasonably sure to avoid any “I can’t get that quest” and it’s only 5 minutes at the end of the evening anyway.
I know the first evening sounded pretty slow with only 6 levels gained, but the intro isn’t really quick and we had to prepare and actually didn’t play the full 4h. The second night I was surprised we got 12 levels, and today’s 8 was a little less than I had hoped but we’ll see how it will scale. Not that we’re hell-bent to powerlevel, just trying to not waste time.
Anyway, it’s a fun diversion to have a static group again and doing a weekly thing.
It’s been a little over 2 years since I moved the blog off of wordpress.com and on to host it myself. Everything has been running smoothly, but I had to upgrade a few things and so if you can read this post it’s being served from the new server. Please shout at me in the comments or on Twitter or Discord if you notice anything off or not working.
A few boring technical details:
Hoster: still scaleway.com, but from a START1-XS instance to a STARDUST1-S, as the former was discontinued
Domain: still namecheap.com
OS: From Debian Stretch to Ubuntu Focal (I know I’m late)
PHP: From 7.0.33 to 8.0.3
WordPress: still the latest version, this had been upgraded regularly
