I Only Asked For A Trim!

I said I'd consider playing World of Warcraft again once Blizzard had shifted over to Microsoft but that happened a while back and until today I'd never done anything about it. It's not surprising. I've always had the loosest of connections with WoW. It wasn't like I was desperate to get back to Azeroth. I'd go there when I was good and ready.

It seems I'm ready now, although I'd be lying if I said it was much more than a whim. Mostly it was the buzz building for Cataclysm Classic bumping up against a distinct lack of ideas for anything to post about today.

Whatever the reason, this morning I clicked on the desktop icon for WoW and waited to see what would happen. This being Blizzard, it all went very smoothly, at least in comparison with some other publishers I could mention.

Battlenet recognized my login details and updated itself very briefly before showing me a smorgasbord of titles I could be playing. I had no intention of playing any of them, of course. Neither did I wish to "upgrade" my WoW account, buy the last expansion or pre-order the next. I did not, in point of fact, wish to give Blizzard or Microsoft any money at all.

Luckily for me, you can still play WoW for nothing. There's a small notice somewhere on the Battlenet landing page offering you the opportunity to Play WoW for Free, by which they mean the so-called Endless Free Trial that lets you get to Level 20 before your character is listed as "Inactive". Orwell would be proud of the way language has been wrangled. Or maybe Lewis Carroll.

I'd been away long enough that some of my own characters appeaed as strangers to me. I gave the list of names a brief glance and one stood out: Snapperhead. 

Now that is a great name. I hasten to explain I didn't come up with it. I stole it, like I steal most of the names I use in most of the games I play. In the unlikely event that anyone's interested in its origins, "Snapperhead" is a mildish insult frequently tossed around by Flora, (Full name Flora Nemain Fydraaca ov Fydraaca.) the protagonist of Ysabeau S. Wilce's magnificent and barely describable trilogy, from which I draw many of my character names, in the absolute certainty no-one is ever going to recognize any of them. 

It's a perfect name for a Goblin, which is what my Snapperhead is. I had little-to-no memory of creating her but there she was, Level 12 and ready to go, so I woke her up and set her running.

At this point, coming back to an old MMORPG, I'd normally just log in to wherever the heck I was two or three years ago, take a moment to orient myself, look through my bags and find them full, look at my quests and have no idea what any of them were about, then set off in a random direction, looking for something to kill. After about an hour I'd probably find myself more confused than when I started and either swap to another character or log out altogether to go play something else.

WoW is generally an easy game to come back to, as these things go. I'm usually somewhere I've been before and I generally have bank space, at least, so I can clear a bag or two. As for quests, most of them just ask you to follow an arrow on the mini-map and click on someone with punctuation over their head, so it's not a lot to cope with as you ease yourself back in. 

This time, things went a little differently. I remembered Wilhelm saying something about a new option that had been added for returning players. You can now let the game reset a few things so as to make coming back less of a challenge. I thought I could see a button for that so I clicked it and up popped a "Gear Update" window.

I had another think. New gear and bags sounded good. Clearing my quest log I wasn't quite so sure about. As for my home city, I couldn't even remember which one it was. 

In the end I decided for the sake of science to say yes to everything. A second window popped to let me change my Specialization, if I felt so inclined, but I thought that might be pushing my luck. Also, Beast Mastery just sounds so much cooler than the other two.

The next thing I knew, the game had given me an extreme makeover and very much not in a good way. At the top of the post you can see a picture of the sassy, stylish young woman who stepped into the changing booth, followed by the grim, faceless cipher that stepped out the other side. I was, to put it very mildly, Not Impressed.

Still, helmets can be hidden and gear transmogrified. I mean, it's a pity I have to take the time doing it just to get back the look I was happy with in the first place but it's not like the wind changed and left me stuck like this. I hope...

I hate this city. I hate my clothes. I hate my life!

Leaving that for later, I logged in to see where I was. Oggrimar, apparently. Standing right next to Chromie, which I took to be a hint. Things did not go well for a while after that.

The best part was my inventory; filled with new bags, all huge and almost entirely empty. I'm sure I would have had plenty of clutter in the old ones, so what happened to all of my stuff I have no idea. Maybe it's in escrow somewhere or maybe the game just did me a mercy and binned it all. Either way, I don't want it back.

My quest journal was, as promised, entirely empty. Since I was standing next to Chromie and since I vaguely remembered hearing something about a special event involving Pandaria (I don't really read WoW news very closely.) I thought I might as well take that path. 

Here's where I diverge from the oft-touted idea that Blizzard somehow does these things more professionally than other developers. As has happened all too often before, I found myself confuddled and confused by quests auto-scribing themselves into my book the moment I entered certain areas, while cut scenes unrelated to the quest I thought I was on started to play. I found myself somehow engaged in the main storylines from three separate expansions within minutes of arriving in the game, despite having specifically asked to be given just the one.

It certainly didn't help that Ogrimmar is one of the least-nagivable of cities or that the quest markers on the mini map take absolutely no account of the z-axis. Also, sending someone who's just arrived in town on a quest whose very first step requires locating and using an unmarked elevator is not the friendliest piece of design, in my estimation.

I love my bags, though.

In the end I decided to manually reset myself back to where I'd begun. I abandoned every quest in my Journal and re-traced my steps to Chromie, who greeted me as though she'd never seen me before. This time, after I'd asked for a ticket for the Pandaria bus, I scrupulously avoided going in any buildings or speaking to anyone until I found my way to the airship.

Once on board, everything happened on rails. I did just as I was told, spoke to who I was supposed to speak to, fired my cannon in the direction it was already facing, rapelled down the ropes in front of me and basically acted like a good little soldier until about half an hour in I dinged 14 and decided I'd had enough.

I like Pandaria but it is one of the expansions I've done a fair bit of before. Even though it was a while ago, I could remember much of the opening sequence quite clearly. Also, there wasn't any special event going on, which is hardly surprising since, as I found when I looked it up later, it hasn't started yet.

It's due in update 10,2.7, whenever that is. Soon, I imagine, but not now.

The good news is that, according to the press release, WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is open to players on the Endless Free Trial so, when it finally arrives, I can join if I want to. The less good news is that I'll probably be able to play the new event for about five minutes before the game locks me out.

It took me no more than half an hour to do two levels and I wasn't even trying to go fast. You need to be at least Level 10 to start the remix, one of the key selling points of which is that it offers "Accelerated Leveling". Since Free Trial characters have to go into involuntary hibernation at the end of Level 20, I reckon that should give me a maximum of an hour's play and very probably a lot less.

If I choose to do it anyway, it won't be Snapperhead who has the problem of trying to go slow in the fast lane. I found the details in the FAQ a little fuzzy but I think you have to create a dedicated character for the event:  "a new WoW Remix character, beginning at level 10, which will only be able to play with characters taking part in the event."

It sounds like a lark. I'll almost certainly give it a try. If it's fun, I might even sub for a month or two, which would also lead nicely into Cataclysm Classic. I did say I'd like to take a look at that one, too.

I'm not promising anything but it's possible this might not be the last post about WoW for another couple of years.

Twenty The Hard Way

I spent what felt like most of today taking my goblin shaman in World of Warcraft from fifteen to twenty. First I waved the trolls of Zuldezar goodbye, hoping never to see their monumental ziggurat-city again. It's an impressive feat of engineering, sure, but a nightmare to navigate.

Back in Orgrimmar, itself no favorite of mine, I went to see Chromie, looking as out-of-place as you'd imagine a gnome among orcs might. After a quick look at the options I plumped for Cataclysm. I've always wanted to take a tour of the old world to see what changes nature wrought.

Chromie sent me to go read some Warolord's board or other. When I found it, there she was, sitting on her hourglass. Unlike her Stormwind version, who, in my limited experience at least, stands in one place and looks respectable, Orgrimmar-Chromie seems mischievious. She vanished and re-appeared twice in the short time I was with her. She even made a joke about it.

The options on the board she made me read were disappointing. Two zones I don't like (Searing Gorge and another volcanic/desert zone I forget) and one I'd never heard of. That one was at least a forest so I picked it and spoke to Chromie again.

She told me to go to the Pathfinder's Den, which obviously I had never heard of, and take the portal to Shattrath, which sounded vaguely familiar although I couldn't place it. I went to the spot marked on the map and spent five minutes checking all the portals I could find. None of them went to Shattrath.

I picked one that went somewhere else I'd never heard of, Silvermoon City, on the grounds that it also began with an "S".  It seemed to be full of elves. I wandered around for a few minutes before deciding it couldn't be the place. 

Looking it up online I discovered it was the starting city of the Blood Elves, as I'm sure every single person reading this already knows. Being almost as allergic to elves, particularly the Azerothian kind, as Syp, I have never played a Blood Elf, nor visited their city. It's better than the Night Elves' shack, which I know all too well, I'll say that for it but not much more.

 

If you meant the secret portal room you should have said so!

Back in the portal room again I tried to google my way to Shattrath. It turned out to be somewhere in Outland, part of the Burning Crusade expansion. How this makes it part of Cataclysm beats me but by that stage I wasn't interested in starting over. I'd wasted enough time.

I was set to waste a little more, since nothing I read online explained how to find the portal I needed. In the end I had to watch a YouTube video, although sadly not this one, which does actually show you where you need to go. The one I watched showed you where you used to have to go before they changed it in the pre-patch.

In the end I stumbled upon a comment on a thread on the forums that mentioned you have to go downstairs to find the portal I needed. That possibility had already occured to me and I had already looked for a way down but I hadn't been able to find one. 

With the information that the entrance to the cellar was off the opening corridor I eventually managed to find it. It doesn't help that if you stand at the top and look straight ahead all you see is a wall. Only as you get to what appears to be a dead end does it become apparent that there's a ramp going down.

By this point I was already wondering to myself just what exactly it is that Blizzard think they're doing with their game. This time last year we were all talking a lot about how Classic doesn't hold your hand and expects you to work things out for yourself, while at the same time making the point that, by the standards of 2004, it was actually doing the exact opposite.

Having spent most of this last week playing it (or trying to), I have to say that a lot less has changed in the last fifteen years than I thought. Compared to almost any other MMORPG I've played in years, Retail WoW is still fabulously confusing and astoundingly user-unfriendly. If its reputation as a casual-friendly MMO was ever deserved it can only have been because all the others were so impossibly unwelcoming. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Damn you, quest tracker!

 

The sheer volume of pre-existing knowledge expected of a new or returning player, not just systems and mechanics but the basics of knowing the hell where you are, is overwhelming. I've been trying not to look too much up out of game but frankly, if I hadn't I'd still be wandering around Stormwind trying to find Chromie.

In the end I made it to Shattrath, whereupon I immediately got hopelessly lost. Before I could orient myself I'd somehow acquired yet another "take a tour of our fine city" quest. I had the quest tracker up and unbeknownst to me it had already defaulted to the tour, while I had it in my head, from the original instructions back in Orgrimmar, that I needed to head out into the woods.

Consequently I spent the next ten minutes running a full circle around the outside of Shattrath before I realised the yellow dot on my map was in the middle of the city. Finally I got it sorted out, found the NPC I was looking for just along the main road out of town and settled down to what seemed to be a never-ending sequence of kill quests.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I've been sniping at new Blizzard's propensity for gimmicky quests that have you riding animals, piloting aircraft or morphing into monsters. I really shouldn't be complaining that what I ended up doing this time felt so... old school. There's a happy medium, surely?

Only a hundred and ninety-nine more like him and that's the level!

Maybe if the kill quotas had been the regular ten at a time it wouldn't have been so bad but these were fourteen, twenty, twenty-five. And there were dozens of them, or it felt like it. I killed wolves for their skins (Bad drop rate. Turned a kill twelve into more than double that.), trees for their termites (Better. Kill a tree, out pop five termites), moths for their... I don't remember what the moths dropped. Mostly I just killed things so I could go back and tell someone they were dead. 

For a long while it was utterly routine. I can't say I fnd the shaman an exciting class to play. It's far behind hunter or warlock or mage for thrills. It certainly is steady, though, and robust. Very hard to kill. 

Best drop of the day!

Most fights seemed to take about twice as long as they would for either a hunter or a druid at the same level, although that has to be perception rather than reality. When the shaman dinged twenty I checked her played time against what it had taken the hunter and the shaman took exactly an hour longer, half of which is accounted for by the problems I recounted earier.

So it's not much slower but boy does it feel it. I wish I'd picked a Warlock for my Horde character now. I'm not relishing another fifteen levels of this just to get to the point where I can get going on my Vulpera quests.

The best part by far was when I ended up in a series of underground ruins packed with mobs. At times I had three or four of them on me at once and often I got adds on top of that. I had to heal myself a lot and at one point I ran out of mana! Really happened!

That part went faster than any of the rest. There was even an escort quest down there, which I failed on first attempt, when the extremely traditional rescuee, who would not move faster than a slow walk but had to attack every mob he saw, managed to get us about six mobs at once and got himself killed. 

And best quest reward.

I was going to leave him down there after that but it turned out I had to go back and pick up some stuff I'd missed. I gave him another chance only this time I made sure to pull things before he could spot them and that way we made it back to his camp alive.

Altogether it wasn't a bad afternoon's entertainment. It wasn't great, though. At times I did find myself musing over whether you can buy xp boosts in the store in WoW. I can see now why the double xp event Blizzard ran for a few months was so well-recieved. There's fast levelling and there's fast-feeling levelling. I know which this is.

That said, I wonder how much it has to do with the content itself? The five levels I did in Tirargarde Sound positively zipped by and I don't think that was just because I was playing a class I enjoy more. I think I might take the shaman back to talk to Chromie and try one of the other expansions for the next stage. Pandaria, perhaps.

Or maybe I should just learn to love the trolls and go back to Zandalar. I do get the sense that if what you're really after is the swiftest trip up the levels it's probably best to do what Blizzard want you to do and stick to the most recent content. Otherwise, I imagine, they're probably thinking you might as well go play Classic.

Geez! And just imagine doing the stuff I did today with Classic's xp rates... I think I'll probably give Burning Crusade Classic a miss.

Hard Time Walking

WARNING! Due to an unforseen error this entire post is a series of screenshots, including all the text. Don't click on the links because nothing will happen. For working links, see the footnote.

 

 

Footnote: Blogger managed to lose the entire post before I could publish it but luckily I had the Preview up on screen. I was able to recreate it with a series of screenshots using Windows 10's handy screenshot clipboard. Certainly better than having to retype the whole thing.

Here are the links:

a comment thread

Shintar

Wilhelm 

Ula 

Belghast

Syp

very compelling cut scene

mentioned