WoW

When I said I was “done” with Zereth Mortis two weeks ago, I still had some slots with item level lower than 252, so there were still upgrades to be had – this opportunity for backup gear has now been made irrelevant because the +12 M+ I mentioned gave me nice 272 bracers. I’m still wearing 5 pieces of 252 ZM gear though, 2 Legendaries, 1 M+ drop, 6 drops from Sepulcher (one of them a Tier piece) out of 26 bosses killed and 3x Great Vault (is that a good or bad ratio?), and 2 Sanctum drops, one of them even Non-Heroic 233. Never got a better trinket, which is a little sad.

Last night I spent my last cypher drop currency items (whatever name they have) and got the achievement to have researched everything in the Cypher of the First Ones. Well done Blizzard, I subscribed on March 2nd and I finished it on March 30th without excessive grinding, I was basically doing my round of dailies and World Quests dutifully every day, sometimes staying a few more minutes, but nothing I would call actually grinding. And I have 2 days spare that I could’ve taken off – so if you sub for a month then you can do it, which I think is a fair grind. I am not sure though if those items ever dropped in the raid and I’d have to retroactively calculate how much rep I got in the raid, so maybe you’d need to spend more than 29 days to get to Revered + Cypher done, but I guess I’m too lazy for that. It worked for me and I’m not even unsubbing.

So what’s left now is the grind to Exalted and killing those last 5-6 Rare Mobs I’ve never seen so far, then checking the achievements tab if there’s anything else to do, otherwise I might be slowly shifting to doing the dailies on my Ele Shammy now as long as they’re not annoying me and let the Rep on my main pile up while raiding and killing bosses.

On my old server I’ve been very slowly leveling 5 Horde toons from 50 to 60 at the same time. Log in, queue for random dungeon, do some Threads of Fate stuff like quests or WQs while waiting for the pop (usually 5-10 minutes), then run the dungeon (which often also only takes 10-15 minutes because there are so many 60s running their friends through or doing it for gold maybe?) and then sometimes finish the quest I started, sometimes just directly log out again. Takes about 60-90 minutes per day and gives me more than half a level five times (some days I skip one or more toons when they are not well-rested). Once this batch is done I can rotate in another four of them, we’ll see how long I am in the mood. I also shouldn’t forget buying the 40 Renown catchup item before starting like I did with the first two. After that there’d still be my four Allied Race toons but the main priority is to get one per class to 60 on the Horde side.

So yeah, kinda busy in WoW and riding the wave as long as I am having fun.

And again I forgot to post a summary of the raid last week, great.

Last week we did the first six on Sunday and then killed Halondrus on Tuesday, at least that’s how I remember it, and we even had a few tries on Anduin, but we only managed to get to the wall phase once or twice and never saw the last phase.

This week we managed to kill the first seven on Sunday and that left us a whole night for Anduin on Tuesday. But one of our healers had toddler aggro so we started a little late and on the last try we killed him, a few minutes after the normal end of the raid, so that was on point. It’s kind of a nasty fight in my opinion. So from next week on we’re gonna skip, but they have devised some scheme of bringing an alt and still doing the tier bosses, I just have not fully grasped how.

Even after getting both Legendaries to 291 and seeing a 252 MH weapon upgrade I am still very much on the low end of item level in our raid, at 254 equipped and it shows in the damage numbers. One of the other Fury Warriors (who is admittedly a much better player) has a full 11 item levels more, but he’s constantly running M+ and is only after Tier pieces in the raid.

In other news, I got roped in to do a +10 Halls last night and of course I was completely nervous and not playing well, as it was the first M+ since the 9.1 launch week for me. But we made it in time easily and I didn’t mess up. When they wanted to continue they were lacking a fifth so I stayed and we timed a +12 Spires. I was much more relaxed in that one, but it was close. With a few deaths and a wipe on the last boss I think we didn’t have more then 30s left. And of course the only drop I got was a 265 cloak (which could be useful for tanking), but maybe I am lucky with the chest tonight.

So, I just reached Revered with the Enlightened faction in Zereth Mortis, which is an important milestone for Legendary stuff, and I have finished upgrading my Cypher to Level 6/6 which means I can now get 252 items from World Quests and bosses there.

I got quite some gear upgrades the last 3 weeks, but most of my items are still below 252, so with some lucky stats there could be some interesting things. I can now also buy the item to upgrade my conduits to 239, but the grind to get the faction to Exalted isn’t really important. My “mandatory daily” phase is done because I’m not counting on drop luck for these maybe-an-upgrade items, but the daily round in ZM didn’t feel as much as a chore as Korthia did, so I might continue, just not every day.

Now I just need to find out how Dual Legendaries actually work because I’m still wearing my useless 262 Covenant cloak with 239 Epic pants, whereas I could switch to 252 Cloak + 235 Legendary Pants, which should be an upgrade, but maybe not…

OK, that was easier than expected, I could refund my Soul Ash and Soul Cinders of the 262 Cape by handing it in, buying a new 292 Cape for 70k gold and crafting a 292 Deathmaker Legendary. Now I have a spare 235 Leg Deathmaker that I could destroy as well, but it would only give me Soul Ash, as it’s Level 4. Not that hard once you grasped it, but still a little convoluted. At least there are refunds! Equipped Item Level is now 250, nice.

Despite invites starting at 1945 lately we hardly manage to start before 1958, but at least that. Sunday saw us doing Guardian, Dausegne, Pantheon, and Lihuvim, then Skolex on Tuesday and a first kill of Xy’mox, then a few tries on Halondrus but no kill. Still feels a little harder than last tier with at least one wipe per boss on the reclear. Doesn’t help that we’ve been having different tanks on all the nights, maybe it will improve this week. As usual I don’t really care about loot, but I guess with my 239 main hand it’s simply impossible to put out decent damage, so getting a 252+ MH is my top (or only) prio right now.

Sunday, March 7, the first “progression” raid since our Sylvanas Heroic kill in early December, quite a few in the guild had stopped playing, according to all the hello and welcome back on Discord. Starting out was a bit slow, discipline and routine lacking a bit. First boss (Vigilant Guardian) on the second try, fourth boss? (Dausegne) on the third try, fifth boss (Prototype Pantheon) on the second try, and then three wipes on the sixth boss (Lihuvim), no kill. So it seems we skilled the second (Skolex) and third one (Xy’mox again), which is a bit weird, but I remember doing something like this last tier, so people only coming on Tuesday also getting some loot. Lihuvim seems a little harder but doable I think, so I’m kinda curious about Tuesday. My damage was bad, but that’s not surprising – everyone except two people have 4-11 iLvl more and they didn’t take a 3 month break. Still means I need to step up a bit, I don’t want to be in the lowest spots – but I guess for normal it’s not the end of the world.

Some random things I noticed: the login screen shows if your char has mail, that is really nice and I have no ide when they added that. Addons were still good to go after a quick update after 3 months.

Also, the longer I am there, the more I like Zereth Mortis. There’s a lot to discover and some neat things. There could be more portals though.

So, Tuesday we went back and killed Lihuvim on the first try of that night. It was actually kinda easy with the proper tactic and not just chaos. Interestingly we had huge problems with Skolex, the nominal second boss. Five wipes with tanks dying or everyone dying. The secret was stacking every second Retch and paying attention to the taunt rotation.

Then in the end we tried Xy’mox and wiped for six times, only once getting to the second add phase – so that one seems to be a bit harder for us, it wasn’t some “come on, this should be easy” as with Skolex.

Anyway, it was pretty fun to raid again with my WoW guild, and at the moment I’m inclined to add another month, but I’m also not completely sure if I want to do Heroic again. We’ll see.

Oh, and of course I forgot all the kill shots, so here’s my Pirate Pocopoc:

Last night I saw that my WoW guild has a raid planned for Sunday so I claimed my WoW token and am now a subscriber for the rest of March. I just spent around 2h progressing the 9.2 content and while it’s not great, it’s not bad either. The only “argh, really?” moment was at the end where I had two quests left: “Go to Hub A” and “Go to Hub B”. I accepted 2 dailies and went to Hub B, then did my 2 dailies. Then I went to Hub A and the followup quest was “fill this bar by doing World Quests and Dailies.” Well thank you, I just did 2 dailies, and of course the progress didn’t count. /slowclap

So this tweet came out like 2h ago and as someone who has been playing for over 15 years (with breaks) my only reaction is: WHY? WHY NOW?

I played nearly exclusively on Horde from 2005 to 2014. I had a few lowbie alliance alts on random servers, and then one Rogue in a guild on the same server. I joined that guild full-time when I came back for BfA. Then I transferred my main off last summer, to another Alliance guild.

Had this been in the game in 2018 I wouldn’t have had to level all chars again on the other faction. Well of course no one pressured me to do this but I would have absolutely stuck with my old “Horde” chars if I could’ve played with my guild. Not all toons of course, but I would’ve led my old three main chars through all the content.

So yeah, there are no cross-faction guilds, but I maybe would’ve raided on my Troll Warrior in Castle Nathria and Sanctum.

So I guess, personal history with wishing for this feature aside, it’s a good change, but I’m not sure it’s as tremendous as it sounds, if there are no cross-realm guilds. There are some players who are mostly on their main, would they even notice when someone is asking for a group in guild chat where they are not? The people who always seem to be on alts.. those could probably be in the guild. It gets complicated quickly, if you don’t have a dedicated chat channel – or if your guild is not advertising guild dungeon runs on Discord, and honestly why would they? Only if a sizable percentage of people might be on their other-faction chars. I dunno, it seems half-baked.

I’m not mad, just disappointed. (And I am 100% not mad for “grr Horde, grr Alliance” reasons – that ship has sailed. We have worked together cross-faction since WotLK with the Argent Crusade.

Personal PS: If they would manage to get this live for the 9.2 raid, I might actually do this on my Blood Elf Warlock and raid with my Alliance guild. But she’s still cross-server, so maybe it doesn’t work out again anyway, so probably nothing changes at all… And I simply don’t believe that this will be live for the 9.2 raid.

Shintar had an interesting post about a hypothetical (but eagerly? awaited) further installment of the WoW Classic cycle. I’ve not thought a lot about it, whether and for how long “Classic” would continue to evolve. But from most people I talked to and what I read, the consensus seems to be that Cataclysm can’t be part of anything “Classic”, because that’s where everything changed and this third expansion was sort of the beginning of a new era. I can’t really say “the” new era, because between expansions some things have gradually shifted and some have changed the game a lot. Also as I stopped playing in MoP, the fourth expansion, that’s my personal big breaking point, as I basically skipped the next one and only then came back. I simply know I am not objective enough to see the end of MoP as anything but the greatest change for me personally, as it coincided with my first years-long break.

Anyway, about Wrath. I’d rate my involvement in the game only at medium in Vanilla, despite spending a lot of time in PvP battlegrounds at the tail end, but I had missed out on most of the start and was just casually levelling up. Having fun, but not really invested. TBC was very different. I was eagerly awaiting the launch, I instantly started leveling, then raiding Karazhan, then hating it, then there was guild drama, then a new guild, then a little drama, and finally getting together with the people I’d spend half of TBC and then Wrath and Cata and even MoP together. But TBC was a very long time ago, Wrath was a little less long ago. At the start of TBC I pretty much still felt like a noob, having played for ~1.5 years. When Wrath launched I’d been playing for for over 3 years, and I had raided Black Temple, the pinnacle of difficulty. Also I think in Wrath I played even more than I did in TBC. Leveling alts, doing Heroics, raiding. Raiding on alts, everything. As I continued into Cata like this there was no burnout or anything, but still after all these years…

When my interest in Vanilla Classic was kinda big, my interest in TBC Classic was already a lot lower. I had seen SSC and TK, I had raided Black Temple, I tanked and healed some raids in addition to playing on my Rogue Main. And then Wrath. I leveled so many alts, we went to ICC so much, we killed the Lich King on Heroic. I have the feeling I’ve been there and while it’s been over 11 years by the time I’m writing this, even more than in TBC I have so many memories where I can honestly say: I had fun at the time, but I don’t need or even want to repeat that. It was fun because of the time, because of the people, and because it was new. I think to a degree I stopped leveling first in Classic and then in TBC Classic because I did not have those rose-colored glasses. My estimates of how slow everything would feel were 90% correct. I knew it was slow, I just had overestimated my own perseverance, as these two times it felt like a chore so often.

So yeah, and then the fact that my dungeon group mostly stopped playing in the middle of something, twice. Or even three times. Guess next time I’ll just not fall for it.

And interestingly none of this is really Blizzard’s fault (unlike in Retail). People wanted to have the original experience, and that is fine. I don’t need to relive everything. I had fun in Classic and TBC, but looking back even now it feels like a bit of wasted time – because one of my goals is usually reaching max level, and I failed to do that both times.