It's been a while, so where's my nostalgia?

Raise your hand if you're nostalgic for vanilla leveling.  Keep it up and if you're nostalgic for BC leveling, raise it (you don't have to raise both).  Same for LK level.  Okay, who doesn't have their hands up?  Duck down and hide if you started in Cataclysm.  In my imagination, in which I get to make this stuff up (I love punditry), everyone has their hands up.  Okay Cataclysm people, you can stand up now.  Everyone hands down.  Now, hands up for Cataclysm leveling nostalgia?

Anyone?

No?

Okay.

I started in vanilla, played pretty much non-stop through the start of Cataclysm.  Looking back, and playing through again, I had fun going through the content again.  I'd even look forward to it.  This wasn't a "I want to get out of the current content", but looking ahead to what was coming.  As Azeroth wrapped up and I ran BRD, I still looked forward to Hellfire Peninsula and Nagrand.  In Nagrand I looked forward to Grizzly Hills and Storm Peaks (I'm cherry-picking my favorites).  But now that my paladin is on the verge of Grizzly Hills, I am thinking ahead to Cataclysm and neither Mount Hyjal nor Vash'jir hold much appeal to me.  Twilight Highlands sounds nice, but that's not for a while, particularly given the 90% experience nerf for previous expansions, so no sticking around Icecrown a bit longer.

I don't know why Cataclysm has not created this sense of nostalgia or fondness for what is to come.  I could try to blame it on my lack of love for the Cataclysm end-game with its heavy emphasis on randoms and dailies.  But that was the case in LK too and I look forward to the LK zones.  Perhaps it is the limited selection, with Cataclysm adding only 5 zones while Northrend contains 8 (I'm not counting Crystalsong or Wintergrasp).  This means less repetition.  Outland has 7 zones, so perhaps it fits.  But LK and Cata both have a pair of starting zones while Outland has only 1, so there doesn't seem to be much of a link between choice of starting area and nostalgia.

Maybe it's the linear nature of the Cataclysm zones.  That makes it feel more like watching a movie a second time than playing a game a second time.  Different classes will play much differently, making the play different as well.  I'll go with that.

Those were horrible times

As we all know, people used to be better.  They had values.  For example, there was the Greatest Generation and small towns.  Though slightly before that there was the generation that helped Hitler rise to power and slightly after that there was the generation that invaded Vietnam based on complete lies.  Some things never change.

In that spirit of retro-pessimism or Retrimism, I have some screenshots from vanilla WoW.  You know, the greatest time ever.

Here we have my shaman getting called a loot hogger for rolling need on a dagger he then proceeded to use for quite a while.  I don't think I reported him for calling me a bitch, but I recall being a bit pissed off about being called a ninja for a perfectly legitimate roll.  Uncontested, if I remember correctly.

Later on this is him getting called a fag for getting a shield.  In defense of the homophobic asshole, he was a tank, a shield with fire resistance on it was pretty damn important, and the boss we just killed took a while to get to.  On the other hand, I never in any way indicated that I wanted the shield and master looter was on.  Someone just gave me the shield for no apparent reason.  Perhaps they knew that the other guy was an asshole who blames the wrong people when there's nothing to be done about it.  I did end up using the shield quite a bit, since fire resistance was hard to find.

 

Coming up next is the amazing interactive experience which is a vanilla paladin.  See that bottom hotkey, fourth one over, with the ten over it?  That's judgement, with a ten second cooldown, and that's all I have.  At a higher level I could get repentance, which is like sap that can be used in combat, but back then only lasted ten seconds with a minute cooldown.  Or maybe it was five.  Pretty sweet, am I right?  I planned to branch out into Holy, so that I could pick up Consecration, you know, that spell that was pretty handy for paladin tanking and AoE DPS in general since, it was an 11 point Holy spell.  Holy Shock was the other controllable damage spell at it was up at 31 points.

 

 This here is a pretty great moment.  That's right, an epic staff.  A really, really low drop rate epic staff.  This story has a good ending, actually.  Earlier in the run I'd passed on a staff to the priest in the group and he was really excited about it.  He was very insistent that I take this staff, and I did, and I loved it.  So that was pretty awesome.  Oh, and that Scourgestone, that was how you got rep past revered, because mobs actually stopped giving rep after certain points, so I hoped you saved up.  Even better, you couldn't even roll on it if you didn't have a particular trinket equipped, which actually wasn't such a bad trinket, but there was a tendency for there to be a sudden spike in roll competition after the first boss died and everyone remembered to equip them.

This is the boss fight in Stratholme.  The gate can shut, locking out players if they aren't paying attention.  This isn't a new problem; many bosses still do this, so maybe this is more of a "why hasn't this been fixed yet?" type of problem.

You might hear now and then that a particular BG is biased toward one side or another.  Whatever.  Horde had their graveyard camped by boss-level NPCs.  BIAS THAT!

Actually it's just a bug while the mob was resetting, but it made me laugh.

Summoning was super-convenient.

This is me trying to get to Swamp of Sorrows as Horde.  The one path was through a hostile Alliance town.  Which was awesome.

5 too many and 15 too few, it's the amazing 10-man!

The week before today, also known as (aka) "last week" to you kids these days (yktd) I made some claims regarding raiding, such as suggesting that easymode raids would be nothing more than oversized dungeons and that oversized dungeons are stupid.

Well long story short, Upper Blackrock Spire, Karazhan, and Alterac Valley (before they ruined it).

UBRS
This was a good start to a flame war back in the day. Someone would say something about raiding and not being able to raid and then someone would say that UBRS was a raid and someone else would say that is stupid. It was a raid and it was not. It was true that to create a full UBRS group of 15 people, or 10 after they did some changes to a few of the high-level instances, you would need to use the "convert to raid" button and would then have raid bars and all that stuff. It was raid-sized-ish, in the sense that anything more than 5 players required a raid. It was still smaller than the smallest raid of 20 people for ZG (or AQ20 later on).

It was essentially an oversized dungeon with the occasional raid-like element, such as one person being able to ruin everything. The loot was mostly blues, with some extremely rare epics (if you saw one drop ever you were lucky). This was the standard for the high-level instances at the time. Fights weren't quite faceroll, but most of them weren't especially tough. Mistakes could get you killed, but patient clearing minimized the risks. Randomly placed quest chains would lead through the instances. They'd take an hour or two to complete, though depending on the level of PvP activity at the time, just as long to get inside.

I loved that place, despite it not properly fitting with my "no oversized dungeons" philosophy of the previous post.

In fact, maybe that's what made it so great. It was a 5-man that you could bring a crowd to. Bring your friends! Bring your enemies! Bring someone with the key otherwise we're going to have to hire someone and that's a bit of a pain! This was quite handy because it was like meeting three groups at once, a useful thing back when meeting people in groups was how you formed guilds.

UBRS was a strange sort of place. You'd go in and do some raid-like stuff such as struggle to find a competent hunter and a druid (not competent, just a druid) and people would find new and creative ways to wipe the group. Bosses could have some interesting mechanics, but nothing too major. It was somewhere between raiding and 5-mans, but clearly on the side of 5-mans.

Karazhan
This was the best raid ever. Hands down (unless we're doing OWS finger waving things in which case it is hands up, but seriously, stop doing that). Nothing comes close. Why? Why indeed.

You know what? I could go on all day, night, tomorrow, and probably keep going about everything that was great. But I'm not going to. That's right, I'm just going to say that Karazhan was awesome and was a 10-man raid, and then walk away.

Alterac Valley
This is one case where I think having more people was critical. It was the sheer number of people that made AV what it was. Well that and an unusually important PvE element in a BG which was gradually nerfed into oblivion, somehow taking the PvP with it, until it was reduced to a boss race and I went home to cry.

Alterac Valley was the oversized place. There were a lot of people and there were a lot of flags and graveyards. It was like Texas if Texas were colder and the immigrants shot back more often. I think in this analogy the Orcs are Texans and the Dwarves are immigrants, which reverses just about everything we'd usually expect, given the dwarvish love of guns and the orcs being illegal aliens.

In a sense, AV was an oversized AB. You'd run around and try to capture flags and then the other side would try to take them back. Then people would yell at you to fight at the flag and someone else would run around behind everyone else and capture it. So then we'd all fight on some other road. Then at the end the winner would fight a boss while a bunch of idiots tried to wipe them, much like raiding. Mechanically, AV was like a giant AB, but by making it so big, it made it different.

It's not the size that matters, it's what you're trying to do with it.
UBRS isn't an easymode raid, it is an oversized dungeon and does not pretend to be anything else. Similarly, back when several of the dungeons were 10-mans, they were oversized dungeons, not easymode raids. Part of this is that they were not easymode, at least not at the gear level of people who ran them.

In contrast, an easymode raid will not be an oversized dungeon. It will pretend to offer challenges, and then not. It will pretend to require coordination, and then not. It will put on all the appearances of a real raid, and then not be that.

Karazhan, while a small raid, was not easymode. It would kill you and kill you again and then make you play chess. Then kill you for losing at chess. It was small so you could round up people without too much difficulty, though certainly nothing compared to an automated tool that can bring in anyone and then just as easily get rid of them so you don't accidentally form any human connections. With the attunement changed, Karazhan was accessible without being trivial. If someone still won't run it, then the raid is not the problem.

Buying classic content

Yesterday Tesh said this, responding to my "what would get you excited?" post.

I'm with Leah; drop the stupid subscription already and run with a GW business model. I'll pay for content, but paying for time pisses me off.

That would even allow for classic servers; players only play the "chapters" of the game that they have paid for, including the mechanics for those chapters.

I wonder how the pricing would work with that. If it was just content, then a base + expansions model would work well. But if each expansion has the corresponding mechanics, then I think a lot of players would be inclined to play an earlier tier, which I suppose works out. But for people playing BC or later, what do they buy and play? Do they start at level 60 outside the Dark Portal with BC mechanics? Or do they play up through vanilla with those mechanics and then suddenly have a dramatic shift at 60?

I'm not saying a system where we buy/sign up for an older mechanic-content bundle couldn't work, but it sure sounds hard to implement. I wonder if Blizzard even has the old mechanics locked in a safe somewhere, or if they are doing a Lucas and actively destroying all earlier iterations of their work. Then there is the problem of which mechanic set to pick. Are we going with the mechanics of the day before the next-expansion patch? By that I mean, vanilla would be patch 1.9.whatevertheydidbefore 2.0 and BC would be 2.9.before3.0, and so on?

It's not an easy thing to decide. WoW changed within vanilla. You can find people who are, or at least were, furious at how BGs destroyed world PvP. Ditto for guards, and the various ways they've been buffed over the years. Maybe we should have beta WoW. Or post-release but before all the class-fix patches. I wonder if any paladins are still mad about 1.9... Once upon a time there were no raids and dark iron ore was only found in one zone (rather than the generous two!) and before that maybe only instances. Should the vanilla server remove that dumbing-down casualizing killing of the hardcore running BRD for a handful of dark iron ore nodes? Should shamans get the good version of sentry totem or the one with marginal usefulness in WSG? Can fear still run players off cliffs?

Moving forward, should BC have the second tier of badge rewards? Should LK have the Dungeon Finder or not? In the mists of time I think we forget how late it was added, which, by the way, was at the same time as ICC, the last raid, not counting that place no one did. Should Cataclysm have uh... some major upcoming change or not? Will the Mists of Pandaren pack have the original Pandaren or will it use the 5.6 re-write where they are revealed to be the first wave of the Burning Legion's next assault? Write that one down, or you know, copy-paste, I called it here first.

I'm not trying to say that a pay-for-content and pay-for-mechanics system couldn't work. I think it could. But it wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't be cheap either (though "not cheap" is vague and relative). Could it generate the revenues to be profitable? I think I'd buy a vanilla pack for $40 or so, maybe add on a BC pack for $20. But is $60 from a few weirdos here and there worth the cost to separate out the content and mechanics and maintain them? Or even if we don't try to do the mechanics, if we just have a "pay for a higher level cap" system, will a few people paying $40 to play in old Azeroth (Cataclysm just made that part a lot harder) bring in the money to justify the coding and maintenance needed?

I suspect it could be profitable, but that isn't enough. It must be profitable enough to keep investors happy. It must also be profitable enough to offset the risk of subscribers switching to the potentially cheaper system. I don't think that last one is true just yet. Maybe when WoW losses a few million more they will try something radical, but I don't see that for a couple years or so (and that is assuming the downward trend continues).

Did you have fun during Vanilla WoW?

There's a new poll over there in that there corner up there.

If you played in vanilla, did you enjoy it? You don't need to have played for the entire time, I didn't, but maybe a few months before the 2.0 patch, since the pre-expansion patches and changes can have a major impact on the fun of a game, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

I'm not sure whether to exclude people who only played a short time, as in a few days or less. In that case maybe it just wasn't the type of game for them at the time, regardless of what the game was, but maybe that's important too. If you played for a good bit of time and quit, that still counts as playing, but if you quit because you stopped having fun, put it as a no vote.

Maybe I'm trying to hard to make this an accurate poll when I know it won't be anyway. So vote whatever you think is closest to the truth. Then we can argue about it. :)

1% may or may not be accessible

Why did only 1% of people see old Naxx in vanilla? Is it that 99% of players were directly barred from entering? No.

There was an attunement, and that attunement could be either a time sink or a gold sink. I'd done it both ways. Neither was enough to explain 99% rejection.

Was it too hard? Hm... Well let's see, we could look at the new Naxx, which is in many ways the same, and see how that went. The 99% appears to be flipped, without the fights being totally gutted. But... gear requirements.

Aha, here we go now. What time does it take to get the needed frost resistance and general gear levels for that raid? That's a tricky question, due to being a long time ago and no longer accessible. I may or may not be still mad about this. Flip a coin.

It's the linear progression that did it. It is theoretically possible that Naxx could have been a walk in the park: zone in with the right gear level and Kel'Thuzad falls over dead and Atiesh is placed in the bags of one random caster, and under these conditions it would still only be completed by 1% of players.

It is Ahn'Qiraj that mattered. And just how many people saw that? I have no clue, because it was more than 1%, and so not as fun of a number to throw around when complaining about inaccessible raids. But how many were in AQ? I already asked that. Why less than 100%?

I blame BWL. And why do I blame BWL? Because it is MC's fault! Now why did no one do MC? I blame warriors. Not for any particular reason, but just because I hated warriors back in vanilla, because at least 99% of them were total douchebags.

As the hippies would say: "It's the system, man. And then I'd tell them to get a damn haircut and they'd call me a hypocrite and they would be right.

Vanilla did have heroics

In the beginning... there was vanilla WoW, which had no badge system, or heroics for that matter. After you hit the level cap, you could do some gearing up from drops in normal five-man dungeons, but that was pretty much it.

-Shintar
Did you catch it? Right there, at the end: "pretty much it." That pretty much it covers quite a lot!

Technically speaking, vanilla did not have heroics. But let's go pick apart some details, see what we can find between the hairs I'm splitting.

What were the vanilla heroics? Well let's see what a BC+ heroic is. Same instance, with trash and bosses that hit harder (irrelevant given relative loot levels), some slightly higher loot, and maybe another boss.

We called it tier .5

Officially it was Dungeon 2, but that was too easy to say compared to tier .5, and back then we believed in challenging ourselves. I once saw someone get hacked and deleted because he said "deeps". We had standards. "This type of item set is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Tier 0.5" by players." See, I'm right.

In a nutshell, this was a long and expensive quest chain which required players to gather the full dungeon 1 set (sometimes we called it tier 0, for no good reason), and then through the quests, resulting in a half-epic set of overall higher quality, though still inferior to the tier 1 that came from Molten Core. What made this heroic?

"Same instance, with trash and bosses that hit harder (sometimes irrelevant given relative loot levels), some slightly higher loot, and maybe another boss."

The quests were all either outside (not phased) or in the usual instances. Trash was unchanged, except in one case which I'll get to. The quests upgraded the sets and required summoning new, otherwise inaccessible bosses, which dropped some special loot of their own, including pieces of a strange early attempt at a PvP set.

The new fights were not especially hard, but could at times challenge a group, somewhat like heroics not during LK. There is a notable exception, a quest which required the undead side of Stratholme (minus some trash) to be run in 45 minutes. This was not a trivial task. The place was filled with patrols that needed to be handled carefully, due to their tendency to pull adds and fear players. There was not enough time to kill all the trash, so players had to carefully pick pulls, skipping what they could, but knowing that screwing up would be more than a minor inconvenience. If you remember the special bonus at the end of Shattered Halls in BC, it was a bit like that, but harder due to not having an efficient AoE tanking class.

That's pretty much it

Vanilla had more horizontal progression. Or at least angled. Crafters could gain some impressive profits from particular reputations. Mounts weren't in a cash shop, but also in grinds, or luck. World drops mattered forever in a time when we didn't outgear them a month after release. There were ways to progress that did not involve a raid or a random heroic. I liked that. Somehow, some people didn't. I do not understand those people.

Goodbye: Zul. Goodbye, Gurub.

Yesterday I did ZG, perhaps for my last time ever. I got there many hours later than I expected.

Somehow I'd ended up selling some bijous for the guild. Then I offered other rep materials for other grinds. Somehow we ended up going to Molten Core. It seemed like a good way to gradually draw people into the madness of our guild. They needed AQ20 too, so we went there. Then we did AQ40. Why? Why not? They left and a few guildies and I went to Blackwing Lair. There I was disappointed to learn that Styleen's Impeding Scarab had been reduced from its glory to a mere boring +parry trinket. Once upon a time it was glorious:

Equip: Increases your block rating by 24.
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 24.
Equip: Increases defense rating by 20.

I don't remember the original values, before ratings. But I'm pretty sure that was 2% block chance, no idea on the defense. These were the BWl trinkets; items so well designed that they were often used even at 70. Or maybe it just showed that people didn't like the level 70 trinkets much. Too many procs or on-use to keep track of.

But I wanted to talk about ZG.

It dropped blues and epics and used a strange loot system, one which I don't think we could imagine these days. There were of course the usual random drops off bosses, with some loot shared across them. And then there were these strange things: bijous, coins, and paragons. The first two were sources of reputation while the last was a gear token, much like we saw in Burning Crusade. They could be used to create a set. Strange sets with strange bonuses, which make little sense now and possibly not much more back then. Oh but no mere armor. No no, trinkets! Ah the trinkets.

Can you imagine a place called the Edge of Madness? Surrounded by imps and demons and with a strange darkness in the air. Madness indeed. And on a rotating basis the troll ancestors could be called. Gurubashi Mojo Madness brought the boss, but was hard to make. This week it might be Hazza'rah. They weren't especially hard and they weren't especially generous with loot. But this one drops dream thread. And the other drops his tooth. Collect all four! And find a voodoo doll. Find the one for your class. But beware the hoodoo pile, for it is jinxed! Even says so: "Jinxed Hoodoo Pile". Touch it, take the reward, and ask yourself "Will Hakkar rule the world?" Many would say yes, and we would kill them. Put it all together and what do you have? Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets! Power, great power! Power in trinkets!

Ah, but now you have your paragon of power. But do you have the reputation you need for it? No? Then no armor for you! BEGONE! Come back with more.

It's all our faults anyway. We're the ones who brought back Hakkar. We were fools. Easily tricked. You and I did it. We brought him back. Why did we not listen to the green flight? They knew. But we found the screechers and we stole the egg and we went to the Sunken Temple and we drew him BACK. Blood. Nothing good is summoned by blood. We used the egg and put him in the egg and then we gave away the egg. For what? Not worth it. No no.

And he enslaved the Gurubashi. Or did he? Perhaps many desired the power of his presence. But the priests, they were caught. Ensnared. Oh they would bless us to free them. And so we went with the support of the Zandalar. They sent us in, brave heroes and adventurers, to invade the city and stop Hakkar before he drained the world. Five priests and priestesses under his thrall and forced to empower him. Oh you'd not want to fight him without them. Oh no. He would do terrible things to you. Worse than usual! We kill them and they thank us. What a welcome change!

Hakkar the Soulflayer. Not a nice name. He controls minds and corrupts blood. And steals your life. So we did the unthinkable and we dipped ourselves in poison and we never removed it, so that when he tried to steal our life, he stole poison instead.

We fished up another boss with the help of Nat Pagle. Or was it Pat Nagle? We were rather drunk at our last meeting.

And Broodlord Mandokir did kill many of us and the ghosts brought us back and he did level up (indeed he did!) and he did yell, "Ding!" and Jin'do the Hexxer did respond with a friendly "Grats!" And we all laughed for it was silly and we had nothing else to do while running back from the wipe. And all the while he was watching us. He was angry when we killed his raptor.

Jindo has the most frightening assembly of concubines since the brothel in Karazhan, and the flesh beasts in Medivh's bedroom. Gnomes and mummies. GNOMES AND MUMMIES.

*sigh*

Goodbye, Zul'Gurub. I shall miss thee.

But thanks for the three Razzashi Hatchlings.

Being a hypocrite in my own special way: Octonde of Azeroth

In the past I've complained about people skipping content with the obsolescence of every raid that isn't ICC and heirlooms to speed through leveling. I decided to go a step further and do that to an entire expansion of content.

My mage is now level 68. He has never been to Outland. I first wrote this with the expectation that he'd get to 70 and eventually 80. But he's only 68 and now I'm bored with him. I can't think of any new or interesting way to play him and I'm not going to level him just to have him higher level. So he's 68 and I don't see him moving from there any time soon.

It began innocently enough: I don't like Hellfire much anymore and hadn't done the late vanilla content in a long time. This is my own fault, for having too often sent alts out there at 58. This time I decided to change that and not be in any rush at all. I decided to stick around in Azeroth for a bit longer, just so I could skip Hellfire and comfortably go into Zangarmarsh; meaning 60 or 61 (not that I needed to be that high, but I figured that's what I'd end up at after the zones were done). Eventually that idea stopped appealing to me, so I though I'd try for Terrokar. Then it hit me: why not skip BC entirely?

Outdoor non-elites stop at around 58 unless you go into the Silithus hives. But instances get a bit higher and if I didn't mind elites, I could keep getting XP up to the 8 level maximum range, meaning 68, so I could get all the way to level 69. If sanity abandoned me entirely, instances and raids could be found with mobs of 61, 62, and even bosses at 63. That would be level 72! I wussed out.

He went to Northrend at 66, since he could no longer queue for old world instances and there were very few mobs which gave XP anymore. Conveniently, the rhinos were nicely packed for AoE grinding and were only 1-2 levels higher as long as I avoided the bulls. From my extended stay in Azeroth I'd gotten my skinning up high enough to skin them, so that was fully taken care of. And no, I didn't go to Outland to learn skinning. Instead a level 62 mage was dodging mobs on his way to Taunka'le Village. Fishing was obviously a non-issue.

He did have two major problems which would require waiting a year and farming a year, respectively: cooking and tailoring. There's a 15 point gap between the very last vanilla cooking and Northrend. The only way to fill this outside of Outland is the harvest festival, which he missed, since at the time he wasn't yet going to entirely skip Outland. Tailoring can be done, but it requires a very rare pattern drop from MC.

Based on this tailoring search we can see a few bits of useful information. Runecloth headbands last all the way until 340. That means only 10 levels to go with potentially difficulty materials or patterns. Alas, everything else seems to end at 345. Except there's an exception: Flarecore Wraps end at 350. Given a whole lot of patient farming, AH scanning, and gold, I could reach 350 without ever needing Outland or netherweave cloth. I planned to work on this, finding bits of felcloth on the AH, farming it now and then, and trying to form MC raids. Alas, I then found that cooking was impossible unless I wanted to wait nearly a year. I decided that wasn't worth it. I'd compromise and just buy netherweave and the needed meats and recipes. I wasn't personally killing anything, so it's okay (not really).

Gear was surprisingly not much of an issue. Sure, we all know leveling is easy, but he was going to Northrend with vanilla blues. At the time his gearscore was 759, with the lowest and highest ilevel being 58 and 65, the higher being thanks to the dungeon 2 chain giving bracers. Then he got a couple crazy awesome green drops and doubled his spell power; once he hit 67 and could use them. Upon hitting 68 he was able to start the quests and replaced everything pretty quickly.

So when can I expect my title: Octonde of Azeroth?

Someone else also read my mind and conveniently provided an example of saying stupid shit

It's sad the way they have 'dumbed down' raids to the point where all you have to do to be COMPLETELY AWESOME is show up and stay out of fires and run away from baddies.

I wish they would make it more complicated than it is currently, but sure as (*&& there's going to be an army of spoiled raiders coming in here to rate me down just because I want to make it harder for them.

Getting epics used to mean you were good. Now all it means is that you played enough hours to get there.

That being said, this actually wasn't a bad item to have. I wish I could get the pattern on my Blood elf.

If anyone on any server gets this, Please contact Nomiconn on Turalyon-US Horde. I will see about buying it from you, and then transferring that toon to Turalyon.

This was a comment about the pattern for Flarecore Wraps.
Farming FR gear or mats for crafted FR gear required no skill. Getting epics frequently did not mean you were good, but just that the raid needed some more bodies and the RNG had blessed the raid with more class X gear than it actually needed, meaning you were good enough to be worth more than a shard.

I actually like the concept of resist gear. But let's not trick ourselves into thinking that removing resist fights dumbed down WoW, single quotes or not.

The Death of Vanilla has been very extremely overexaggerated to a high degree

You know what bugs me? Pundits. They are so full of shit. They get on their horses of above-average height and tell us not just what to think, but also try to redefine reality to fit their preconceived absurd notions of what the world is.

They're not even limited to real life media. They've infected the gaming media, including the blogosphere, with absurd distortions of what the world is. And for once I'm not referring to Gevlon. No, I instead mean the elitist vanilla-lovers who think that Outland starting at 58 destroyed the 'great late vanilla instances' and that the game is ruined forever now. They sit up there preaching about how no one ever runs stratholme or scholomance except a very rare random instance person or level 80s looking for achievements.

Idiots. Total fucking idiots. Have they ever actually tried queuing for those places? I bet they haven't. Idiots. Ignorant god damn idiots. Fuck. I mean get a fucking clue before you run your damn mouths. Especially you, person with the fake Russian name who whines constantly that vanilla was killed by the Outland gear reset. Yea, you. Try playing around level 60 before you form an opinion.

My mage is now level 63* and has never been to Outland. Since the mid 50s he's been playing in the Plaguelands and queuing for Stratholme and Scholomance. These are no longer available as randoms at 58, meaning that if players simply follow the path of quick rewards, they will either never pop or only be populated by players under level 58. Quite the opposite.

He's found a handful of groups, most of which were populated by players above level 58. That means that players who could be running Outland for bags of useful items, higher xp, and short queues, are instead specifically queuing for older instances. There are players specifically choosing older content with fewer tangible rewards (in a virtual sense). Why? Perhaps for achievements, but not all have been lacking the achievement. Maybe they are stupid. But stupid doesn't really answer much.

Players are specifically choosing to run these instances and are exhibiting unusually high levels of patience for pulling speed and tolerance for wiping. Also unimaginably low risk aversion. The other day my mage cleared live side Stratholme with a resto shaman and hunter. It took a very long time, certainly over an hour and a half. We had deaths and wipes and a whole lot of drinking and slow pulling. The hunter wasn't great, but damn was he persistent. Same for the shaman. This wasn't an isolated incident. There seem to be a lot of people dropping either at group formation or shortly after, leaving behind a small group that would not be expected to complete the instance. Yesterday I did Scholomance with a warlock, hunter, and my mage. It was slow and we all made mistakes that killed us, but we stuck in to the end. This sort of play has been a lot more fun than what I encounter outside of this 'dead zone'. The couple times I have run with a full group have been a bit boring, since higher levels and improved talents mean that the instances aren't hard at all without some extra challenges.

Players really want to do this content. They want it so much that they will endure queues which can go past an hour, runs that go even longer, and risky pulls often without a full group.

Why?

I'm sure many are like me: they liked the old vanilla content and they don't like hellfire peninsula. Leveling speed for leveling fun is a trade they are willing to make. Maybe with more enjoyable leveling they aren't so inclined to get it over with. And maybe they enjoy the inevitable challenge of content that they might otherwise not see.

Based on the very long queues, those who choose to do this content are unusually unusual. This doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that they exist at all. But why should it? I chose to and hoped to be able to do the content. Why wouldn't others?

I have to give some credit to the cross-server group-making tool. Without it I'm not sure there would be the population needed to form groups at all. And while an hour queue is long by current standards, it's not radically longer than it might take to form a group and travel to the instance in the vanilla days. I even enjoy the longer queue somewhat as it allows me time to quest, to relax, to play at my own pace and experience parts of the world which so often seem forgotten. As for the longer instances, it's remarkable how much more fun it can be to stop and smell the bosses.

Though I still want to point out that UBRS is considered a raid, since it technically is, meaning that people in the normal lfg tool cannot queue for it, instead needing to use the raid tool. I don't imagine that helps much with forming groups, but as of writing this I've not yet had a chance to try it, still working on Stratholme and Scholomance.

I'm almost dreading the time when my mage is too high to queue anymore or when he stops getting any experience. While I'm willing to trade leveling speed for more fun, if I stopped leveling entirely, I'm not sure I'd enjoy it much then. It is worth noting that I still have my UI which for whatever reason has no XP bar, meaning that I have little awareness of leveling speed beyond knowing that green mobs and green quests and no bonus random instance xp are slower than yellow mobs, yellow quests, and a bonus at the end of every random.

I know there are a lot of other players who are nostalgic for vanilla, who miss some of the aspects of it that we preferred, or who are just sick of hellfire peninsula. I encourage you to slow down and go where you want. You don't have to chase the xp. You can chase the experience instead. Run the instance you want. The more who do it, the shorter the queues will become. Vanilla will never come back, not with this, not with a old world raiding guild. If anything, come Cataclysm it's going to be gone completely. Naxxramas is happening again.

If you weren't there for vanilla, this is your last chance. Slow down and see what's around you. What you missed before. It isn't going to be what it was. But whether you run the 5-mans at 63 or go back for an achievement raid at 80, it's at least something. You will have some idea of how things were. And that's a good thing. It gives you ideas to pick from. You can see what was better and you can see what was worse. At the very least seeing what was worse can give greater appreciation for what WoW is today. Can you imagine a time when it was most efficient to not to any quests until honored, or even revered? That's just one of many absurd mechanics which pitted logical gameplay against the reward structure.

Vanilla is dead, short-live vanilla.

A game designed for lazy morons

There's a TL;DR in the middle, just in case this turns out to be too long to scroll to the end of. It is in the middle, not necessarily relevant to the context. It's the bolded part.

Isn't everything in LK mindless and easy? I mean really? When you look around how can you think anything other than "wow this is mindless and easy"? It was so much harder back in the day. Back then things were hard and complex and we had to do hard and complex things to get gear.

Lol. No.

Let us see what was so complex, so devastatingly complex in vanilla, that it kept out the idiots.

Shall we go first to the Blackrock Mountain? Yes. Let's go.

And here is Blackrock Depths. A marvelous instance to be sure. But let's find the hard part. Aha, here is undoubtedly the hard part: the Lycaem. I lied. It's not an especially hard room, it just requires having an AoE, which wasn't as common back then. Not harder in any skill sense, just more restrictive. But maybe morons don't like games that exclude them for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

Fine, let's go to MC. Let's see the many common forms of stupid:
Failure to loot core hounds
Living bomb in the wrong place
Using DoTs on the wrong boss
Not stopping DPS at the right times
Warlocks somehow failing at the simple task of keeping one enemy as their target.
These are trivial tasks. People often failed at them. I failed at all of them at least once. Am I stupid? I don't think so. But I know I sometimes do stupid things. Was everyone else stupid? Again, I don't think so. Or if so, no more or less than now. Instead the situation has changed and we should be wary of the fundamental attribution error.

If I sometimes seem nostalgic for a simpler time in WoW, know this: there actually was a simpler time in WoW. Stats were simpler. There used to not be spell power. Certainly no haste. Crit was an easy thing to calculate, with no ratings, just a straightforward percentage. 2% crit. 1% hit. Very simple.

These days we have haste caps, crit caps, armor pen caps. Talents fundamentally alter rotations. Set bonuses too. We have gems and glyphs. We have a hundred new complications. WoW is more complex and when you make something more complex, people will appear less intelligent. They didn't change, the situation did. Give an eight year old kid an addition problem and it's easy enough. Give him a really simple integral to compute and he's going to be lost, even if it is really simple*. He didn't get stupider; the situation changed.

You want lazy and stupid? Try making gold in vanilla. One moment, I need a tangent break.

Gold Elitists are Idiots

Dear people who think the gold cap is elite,
Good for you, now shut up, no one gives a shit. No really. There's been such incredible inflation that these days anyone can get the cap if they care. Just most people don't because it's pointless. You might as well collect strange hats or pets. Hell, the pets might be better, at least some of them are funny to see. As for how easy it is to get gold from 'morons', you're the true morons. You see, this is a game, and when gold is trivially easy to get, people justifiably don't care if an item is 50% above a 'fair' value.

If you think you're such damn economic geniuses, go play EVE. I'm sure you'll love it. Or you'd crash and burn horribly. Literally.

If you had gotten the gold cap in vanilla when having an epic mount was a big deal, then I'd be somewhat impressed. When 1000g was tricky, then the cap, something around 250 times higher, was impressive. Maybe even in BC it would be noteworthy. But now? Getting the gold cap now is about as impressive as downing Rag. Maybe less, since downing Rag would either require some moderate class skill to solo or social skills to get other people to go with.

I know you're not all self-aggrandizing egomaniacs with no sense of proportion. Some of you pass on useful information. But then there are the ones who cannot seem to avoid labeling people based on how they play a side aspect of a video game. I'm not saying I've never called someone stupid or never wondered about the intelligence or attention of someone standing in a fire, but I take the time to think, thereby gaining the ability to recognize that isolated cases of lack of attention or ignorance are a terrible foundation on which to build a model of the community as a whole.

Let's get back to vanilla.

Gold Farming in Vanilla was Boring-er

Farming gold in vanilla meant either mindlessly killing mobs for drops or mindlessly killing mobs for gold. There was no gold from dailies, not even from max level quests. As mindless as you might consider dailies, this was even lower.

I might sound as if I'm bashing vanilla. I'm not. Simpler or more complex are not better or worse, merely different. In many ways I preferred simpler fights. Needing FR, NR, FrR, they weren't 'fun', and they definitely caused bag problems, but they also acted as content slowers, so we weren't burning down a raid the week it came out, and kept older instances relevant in a form other than randoms for badges. It was imperfect, but that's inevitable. Looking back, I liked that when I got new gear, I could just use it. I got an enchant after the raid of course, but I didn't have to sideline an upgrade because I needed gems.

TL;DR: Vanilla was not some enlightened age of intelligent gamers taking on hugely complex challenges. For the most part it was a bunch of people bumbling around killing stuff and trying to feel awesome for it, just like now.

How about that, every single person in vanilla went to every raid with their gear ungemmed and most slots not even enchanted. We did have the enchants, but they were rarer, and less powerful anyway, at least until ZG.

Exclusive doesn't mean "no bads"

Raid content was more exclusive back then. Not because it filtered out the idiots. Trust me, they still snuck in. Instead because finding 40 people to raid the same place at the same time and with the right classes was a rather difficult task. It was even more difficult before easy server transfers and with a much smaller community. Throw in high consumable requirements and it's no wonder 95% of players never saw old Naxx. It's not that it was hard, which it was, it's that it was inaccessible to someone who didn't have all the time in the world. Having limited play time isn't lazy and it isn't stupid, it's the situation.

So wake up. If you have a higher opinion of vanilla than I do, you need to rethink your inks. And no, that's not an inscription reference. I did MC just the other night. Why? Because I enjoy the place. Yes, I enjoy MC. Molten Bore. It is quite possibly the least interesting raid ever. That is including ToC. I am an outlier. Frankly if you're further over in vanilla nostalgia than me, then I suspect you've been brainwashed. Like they literally they took your brain and scrubbed it with soap, destroying most of it.

NAKED CHICKS

Furthermore, if you think new MMOs pushing for a mass market is at all new, if you think that aiming for the lowest is new, should I remind you of the old EQ ads with the suggestion that hot women in bars want to hear about you killing internet dragons? Also, plate bikinis. They have become less common. Less common, as in, less blatant pandering to drooling misogynists. Or maybe that's just due to the radical feminist conspiracy.

Scholomance can be hard with three people, which acts as an incentive to play at a higher level than normal

For another bit of evidence that the community hasn't fallen entirely into some horrible wasteland of impatience and stupidity, I played my mage this weekend. I don't like Hellfire Peninsula much, so he's by now 61 and still has not set foot in Outland. Instead he's questing in the Plaguelands and queuing specifically for Stratholme and Scholomance. You know, the instances that take more than 15 minutes, can actually kill you, and weren't horrible butchered by LFD splitting.

First off, I want to acknowledge that this probably isn't a representative sample of the community. Nothing is, since every activity has some sort of filtering based on rewards. Someone queueing for old world instances after 58 (when BC randoms start) is clearly going for a different reason than the person queuing before 58. They are going to see the content. They are obviously gimping their loot and experience. However their mere existence proves something: the community is not homogeneous. Different players have different interests. This has profound effects on any attempted observation-based experiments.

Goals change behavior, not the player

A player who is after a bag of loot and XP has much different goals than a player who is after an experience. The loot bag and XP can be gained anywhere, so there is little incentive to stay for a slow or risky group. This isn't lazy or impatient. It's normal the normal interaction between incentive systems and goals. If a queue is short, then the threshold for leaving a poor group is lower. I know I am quicker to leave from wipes if I know that I can quickly get a new group. Again, not lazy, just normal, rational behavior. In contrast if someone is after an experience or achievement and the queue is long, then they need the specific place and cannot quickly get a different group. They will appear more patient as people when in reality they are simply in a different situation with different goals. This same person could be the one dropping after a single death in a random.

Observation bias is biased against you being right

But getting back to the filtering: When attempting to observe the community, don't observe one aspect that confirms what you believe and call it a success. That's bad science. That is the true laziness. So attempting to measure trends based on LFD is going to be measuring a specific subset of the community: the people who at that moment are trying to get badges, in other words people in a situation and goal combination where speed matters. I admit I've made this error in the past, claiming that LFD ruined the community. I still think it had negative effects, but what I was failing to fully acknowledge, despite the fact that I was saying it myself, was that LFD wasn't just changing players, it was changing their environment. Put those same players in a different environment and they will act different.

The observations we make in game are not only unrepresentative of the person as a whole, but do not even represent their entire in-game personality or capabilities.

So yes, LK did add a tool that promotes idiocy and impatience. That doesn't mean that LK brought in a million new impatient idiots. Similarly, vanilla didn't bring in smart, hardworking, disciplined players. It just had a system that rewarded patience. This is why I could do a multiple-hour full run of BRD a few years ago and a few days ago think a 20 minute instance was slow.

*
integrate f(x)=x from 0 to 2
2-0=2 zomg

P.S.
Here are a few videos of really skilled vanilla PvPers
Ioneye
Unbreakable
Xrave

Did I say skilled? I meant overgeared and not quite balanced by class or mentally. God, I miss playing a shaman in vanilla. Holy crap was the honor system a mess.
If you're wondering what else there was to vanilla PvP, look up any rogue video of ambush-SS-CB evis-vanish, seduce-nuking warlocks, or PoM-pyro mages.

Truly a grand time of skill and patience!

We miss the good parts of WoW

Remember the epic Onyxia attunement chain and how fun that was? Oh you didn't like looking for Rexxar? Let me show you something.

*opens door*

This is my Nostalgia Room. In here I only put Good Things.

*opens other door*

This is my Stupid Design Room. In here I only put Bad Things.

As you can see the idea of an epic chain to attune to Onyxia is in the room with Good Things, but wandering for an hour to find a patrolling NPC is in the room with Bad Things.

You see, not everything has to exist as the total package exactly as it is. For another example, I liked the idea of needing special water to douse runes in MC. But that doesn't mean that needing 8 or so people with water, or 8 trips to an inconvenient place, was a Good Thing. The ideal often does not exist, so we have to pick those pieces we like.

Another example is Drak'theron Keep. I like the Drakuru finale. I like how it has a different scene in each area. I like that it looks out into the world, making it seem as if it were not isolated. That doesn't mean I like that it is so short and has only a single path.

Or let's look at Lower Blackrock Spire. I think the layout is almost genius. The visual appearance is one of a place which has been constructed with many paths and nooks and possibilities. And in fact there are many ways to run through LBRS. But the true genius of it is that a single path does emerge to clear the entire instance in one sweep, with only a short backtrack in a couple spots. This doesn't mean I liked the terrible drop rate for the UBRS key gems or the frequent long strings of trash.

So when I say I miss something from vanilla, I don't mean to imply (though I often do anyway) that I miss every single aspect of vanilla.

I know I don't miss the way hybrids were mishandled. I don't miss single-class drops which were frequently wasted. I don't miss people not looting core hounds.

I liked the multi-class tokens we saw in AQ which were part of quests. The BC tier token system was less 'fun' and clearly had problems with trending in drops, but it felt more interesting than the badge+token system we now use for tier gear in ToC and ICC. If I had to create a system, it would use a generic "rare item of awesome" combined with quests and some sort of tradeable token (like the AQ scarabs), so that classes could have that bit of differentness without the problem of useless drops.

Yes, I am cherry-picking and picking and choosing and only taking the pieces I want. That's the point. That's a much better idea than picking every single aspect of each expansion as an indivisible whole.

*opens yet another door*

And over here are the things that I like and you don't and aren't objectively good or bad but instead are fun for one person or another.

P.S. Bring back sentry totem.

The LFD RFD from pre-BC

Razorfen Downs was a terrible place back in the day. The run there was too long. The corpse run was too long. It was hard to keep aggro on all the little piggies.

It did have one really great feature: A sword which was awesome for, let's say a leveling rogue or fury warrior. Pair it with the quest for clearing all of SM and you're going to have a nicely-geared lowbie. It's too slow for tanking, but would still be an upgrade for my little paladin.

So I queue for a random, hoping for RFD. I get it.

As we approach the gong, two DPS leave. They said nothing and I didn't see anything obviously stupid going on in the group. We get a hunter and a rogue. Near the escort/second boss, the new rogue leaves. We carry on. Someone starts the escort early. The boss from the escort drops a mage-specific wand. Yes, a class-specific random drop from an escort event. I think all that could make that a worse way of distributing loot would be to make it BiS so mages must farm it endlessly.

I die when I pull the second boss. Turns out the healer is DCed. I run back, we kill him. As we work our way around the spire the healer is lagging, then DCing again. So we got old-school.

These days we just AoE everything down and the healer is a healer and the hunter is just some near-useless idiot who ninjas the drops at the end.

But back in my day...

The hunters were idiots.

Actually this one dropped freezing traps to reduce the damage I was taking. The elemental shaman was healing. And so we three-manned a few packs, fully expecting to do that until the end. Some groups would have quit. Some groups would have requeued. But this group just kept on fighting.

That felt strange. And good.

I won't lie and say it was hard. It wasn't. It was still pretty easy (for me, not sure how the shaman felt about it). But it was different. It was something other than the normal chain-pull face-roll oh-em-gee-r-we-done-yet of the usual randoms.

The random loot bag gave me plate tanking shoulders. I'm level 36 (37 after a gnome gave me a very expensive ring; expensive for me, damn scam artist).

New Raids, Old raids

I decided to pull some of the tangent out of my previous post. It might not make sense with it missing, if it even would have with it still in.

From what I've heard, new servers have their gates open automatically. This suggests that Blizzard intends to make it easier to get into the old raids. They are making them more accessible, since let's be honest, can anyone imagine the supplies being gathered now? It took a long time even back when people were motivated and the proper level. But what was the point? Blizzard should have recognized by now that people will go through horrible grinds for the slightest upgrade. Easy or hard, tedious or convenient, it doesn't matter much as long as the end reward is good. What is there for AQ? No upgrades, with the exception of one extremely rare shadow damage enchant of which Blizzard did not make a TBC version. Still, some people do go into AQ, I've gone myself, even got some funny-looking gear, so perhaps the automatic gates weren't wasted.

MC wasn't for noobs while Kara is. Sure, MC was easier and you could drag 20 noobs through, perhaps even more if they just went AFK and caused no trouble. But MC was the raid. Kara was never the raid. It was always the introduction. In terms of player's attitudes, MC was put on a pedestal labeled: Badass, while Kara was on a little platform that said: for ages 7 and under. How did that happen? It's about how the raids were given out. MC was alone and the top for it's time. Then BWL, then AQ40, then Naxx. Each had its time to be badass and so they could get and keep those labels.

TBC raids came out almost all at once. With the exception of BT, they were all there at release (I really hope I'm not forgetting something, I hate being wrong, especially when it's written down). Any badassness was only a temporary label due to the highest guilds being there at the time, quickly thrown away a couple weeks later when they were cleared and farmed.

It's stupid to have set out the raids that way, clearly showing them to be nothing more than stepping stones to the next level, insignificant except as a source of gear, and even then only leading to another source of gear, never anything impressive. They weren't even fully debugged. I wonder how much better raiding would have turned out if there had been gaps between raids. Not a year or so like vanilla, but a month or two, time to build anticipation, make current raids seem more impressive, and give a chance for more guilds to get to the top.