A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game

In the same post that inspired yesterday's ramblings on magic and realism (Damn! That's what I should called the bloody thing!) Tipa makes a potent argument against hunting in Palia. Using EverQuest as an example to describe what is surely the gameloop of most MMORPGs, she neatly sums up the entire genre in a sentence: "all anyone really wants to do is kill stuff."

We could easily consider ourselves entitled to expect more from a self-described "cosy" game than the usual indiscriminate slaughter and yet the repeated, rote killing of wildlife is very much a core activity in Palia, just as it is in the huge majority of fantasy or science-fantasy titles. (Palia is very definitely science-fantasy, by the way.)

Hunting is one of the eight available Skills in the beta, the ones you can "Focus" to level up. The full roster comprises foraging, mining, insect catching, gardening, hunting, furniture making, cooking, and fishing. 

It's notable that, while hunting is there in the list on the official website's Skills page, it doesn't get a mention anywhere in the introduction on the landing page. I guess it's covered, generically, by "Live off the land any way you like" but the words "hunt" or "kill" are nowhere to be found.

Once you step inside the game itself, however, there's no such coyness. Hunting is introduced in the tutorial along with all the other skills. You're sent to speak with the stereotypically gruff and suspicious huntsman, Hassian, a moody fellow with a distinctly dark-elven look about him, although his grimdark demeanor is heavily undercut by his cute, blue wolf companion, Tau. 

Despite his disdainful manner, Hassian wastes no time in giving you a bow and arrows and sending you off to kill some animals. He's not particularly bothered which ones although when you return with the evidence he's quick to take you to task for killing deer or, rather, Sernuk which, for no obviously good reason, is what deer are called in Palia.

Deer are indigenous to the area and to be treated with respect, apparently, unlike the Chapaa, for which Hassian has no time at all. He clearly considers the small, cute-looking creatures to be an invasive species and he's more than happy for you to kill as many as you like. All of them, if at all possible.

But of course, it's not possible. Palia follows the rules of almost every MMORPG since Ultima Online's famously disastrous experiment in quasi-realistic ecology which, back before the turn of the century, led players gleefully to instigate the genre's first extinction event. You can kill as many chapaa as you like; there will always be more.

Chapaa are very easy to kill. They sit up like rabbits and sniff the air, just waiting to be popped. I started by killing them but before long I was killing Sernuk instead. Sernuk are considerably harder to hit (Pro tip: always shoot them as they come towards you, not from the side.) but they drop hides when killed that can be turned into leather and leather is what I needed to make my hang-glider.

Already, as you can see, the seeds of destruction are being sown. Palia may advertise itself as a cosy game with no combat but death there is as much a part of life as in any other survival game or MMORPG. I won't go so far as to say if you don't kill, you don't eat, because you can eat mushrooms if you like, but if you don't kill you won't fly, that's for sure.

The thing about killing, though, as many a serial-killer will attest, is once you start, you find it hard to stop. You get a taste for it, you know?

Hunting in Palia is one of the more enjoyable versions of the sport I've encountered. You have to aim your bow. There's no auto-targeting. If you miss, your prey flees. If you get too close, it spooks. Sernuk gallop off into the distance; chapaa burrow into the ground.

I found chapaa easy prey from the start but Sernuk were hard. At first I was lucky to kill two or three with a stack of twenty arrows. I persisted, not because I needed the pelts but because I was enjoying myself. Now, several sessions later, my hunting skill is closing on level five and on my last hunt I killed eighteen Sernuk with twenty arrows.

Here's the thing. I've seen quite a few people already complaining that there's not a whole heck of a lot to do in Palia. I'm curious about that. There are those eight skills to raise to level ten. There are all of the villagers to ingratiate yourself with. There's a story to follow. There's your house to build and a largeish number of recipes to gain and craft.

It seems like a lot to me. At the rate I'm progressing, I imagine it would take me a few months to run through all of that and I'm fairly confident Singularity 6 will have added something more for me to do by then. It seems to me that there's plenty to do in Palia - if you don't mind doing much the same thing over and over and over again and if you only play for an hour or two each day.

The question for me doesn't seem to be so much "is there enough to do?" as "is it amusing or entertaining?" and I'm guessing that's where the problem lies. For me, so far, Palia's scoring higher than expected on that index. It's not that it's offering me anything new - it categorically is not. It's that the familiar activities have been implemented in a way that makes them intrinsically enjoyable.

Hunting is a great example. As we've agreed, almost all games of this kind send you out to slaughter the local wildlife, often ad infinitum. It's the ones that make doing so engaging in and of itself, not just for the numbers-go-upness of it all, that make you feel like taking a half hour extra just to go kill some more critters.

For me, at this stage at least, hunting hits something of a sweet spot. I'm getting better at it but not just because my in-game skill has gone up - my player skill has improved as well. And it feels satisfying. It feels very much like when I was in my teens, spending hours throwing darts at a dart board. You practice, you get better. Hitting what you aim at is fun.

Cooking in Palia is marginally similar. Making vegetable soup involves a mini-game where you chop vegetables as the pot simmers and you have to get them done in time to throw them in before the stock is spoiled. Probably other recipes will require similar hands-on application. 

That's all very well and I did enjoy it but somehow you just know dicing up a mushroom is never going to be as much fun as hitting a moving target with an arrow. I don't believe the target needs to be a living creature but it has to be something you can creep up on and surprise and for a developer, wild animals just fit the bill too neatly to ignore, I guess.

In a game as supposedly "cosy" as Palia all that slaughter does pose a problem. It doesn't help that the animals you're offered as targets are either cute or shy or terrified of you or all three at once. I can see where some people coming to this game specifically for its niceness might have a problem with that.

There is a workaround for the bow-shy and it's an odd one. I'm not even sure if it's a feature or a bug. When I was out hunting yesterday there were at least three other players doing the same thing in the same spot and I began to wonder why they didn't seem to be picking up the drops from the Sernuks they killed. 

I also began to wonder if you could pick up other peoples' loot in this game. I've never been averse to a bit of scavenging in an MMORPG but I didn't want to make it look like I was poaching, so I waited until I saw someone kill a deer and run off, obviously not intending to come back, then I sidled over and picked up the bag they'd left behind.

That was how I got most of my pelts yesterday. I must have looted a dozen, at least. It seemed crazy so many people weren't interested in their loot, especially because in Palia your hunting skill only ticks up when you press F to collect the drop, not when the creature expires. If they didn't want the loot or the xp, why were they killing them at all?

Eventually I came to the conclusion that it had to be part of the "shared loot" system I'd read about somewhere. I knew that players could engage in activities and all get the same rewards but I'd assumed they'd need to be grouped together in some formal fashion. It seems not. It very much looks like as long as you hang around there or thereabouts in the same place as someone who's hunting, you'll be entitled to the same share of the kill as they are.

Way to go to spread responsibility for your actions! It adds a whole new moral dilemma to the process. Is it just as bad to share in the spoils as it is to fire the killing arrow or is it perfectly fine because the deer was going to die whether you picked up the loot or not?

Honestly, I don't care. There very much was a time when I would have cared.  I might even have kept myself awake at night worrying about it. I took this sort of thing very seriously when I first played EverQuest. 

Too bloody seriously, I realise now. I'm less intense now. And less crazy.

It's still an interesting wrinkle in a complicated fabric of intent, all the same. Hunting does seem like an odd choice for a game like Palia but a glance at Hassian's stock (His high moral tone is somewhat undermined by his willingness to make a profit selling hunting gear to anyone with the coin to spend.) reveals it's no after-thought.

I was very surprised to see you can buy arrows that "disrupt the magical abilities of powerful creatures" and a Hunter's Horn that "allows you to track rare creatures". That suggests we won't just be hunting a few deer for pelts to make leather; we'll be making something of a career out of it. Just like Hassian has.

In a game that otherwise offers very little in the way of action, perhaps it was predictable, if not inevitable, that we'd end up hunting something. The non-lethal smoke bombs that stun the insects you can collect and keep in terrariums in your home seem more in keeping with the cosy concept than copper-tipped arrows. On balance, though, I'm quite pleased the developers let a little of their bloodlust seep through.

It's not that I have anything against the cuddly little critters, you understand. It's just that it's so much fun when they run...

New Best Friend: WoW Classic

Just a quick update on how things are going for my Hunter and his pets. Following my post on the inadequacies of the Idiot Bear and the helpful advice given in the comments, I billetted bear in the Stables and spent a session or two wandering around taming beasts almost at random.

Okay, not entirely at random, but without any out-of-game information the process has randomness imposed upon it to some degree. All you can do is go to different zones and use Beast Lore on whatever you find to see if the animals there have any tricks you haven't learned.

I had two goals. I wanted to test a few different animals to see if they were intrinsically better at holding aggro than the bear and I also wanted to learn any new skills they might have so I could teach them to any pets I might use in future.

Very quickly something became apparent to me that I hadn't noticed before. In any given WoW Classic zone there are only a handful of species of Beast.  

It's easy to get the impression the place is over-run with wildlife. Badlands, for example, is teeming with animals to the point that it can be difficult to go ten paces without having a coyote or a jaguar try to tear the seat out of your leather trews. When you're killing them for quests or just to get from one place to another you tend not to notice just how very limited the variety of local fauna can be.

In Badlands I tamed a cat, a wolf and a bird. There are multiple examples of all of these, with different names and slightly different models (usually just a little larger) but they are all part of one of those three "families".

My first pick was a Level 36 Crag Coyote. From him I learned the "Bite" skill. It didn't take long. I think I got it on the third fight.

I didn't think to take any shots of the temporary pets. Here's one of the bear instead.

I tried him for size for a while and he seemed about the same as the bear. Couldn't hold aggro unless I was very circumspect with the gun.

I'd done with him but it took a bit of fiddling around to figure out how to get rid of him. "Dismissing" a pet just sends him to sulk in his kennel. You have to select "Abandon" from the right-click drop-down menu on his portrait. I had to look that up. I don't count checking UI functions as cheating on in-game information only. House rules apply.

Next I tried a cat, a Ridge Stalker. She had a skill called "Cower", which Wilhelm had warned me about in the comments. It lets the pet drop aggro, something my bear seems to do without the need of any special abilities other than his own innate incompetence.

I had to force the cat to cower by clicking the ability myself. I'm not sure under what circumstances the pet would use it voluntarily or pro-actively. With that in my book I put the Ridge Stalker to the test as a tank and she did noticeably better than the Bear or the Coyote.

For some reason I forget, I didn't keep the Stalker. Instead I abandoned her and went to Hillsbrad Foothills, where I tamed a couple of grey-con creatures, a bear and a spider. It occured to me after a while that taming grey creatures twenty levels below was less than optimal. They keep the level they were when you tamed them and the skills they have are ranked by level. You'd have to level them up to be useful in combat so you might as well just tame the highest you can manage.

I moved to the higher part of the zone and tamed aLevel 31 turtle, who gave me a skill called "Shell Shield". He was still too low so I wandered into Alterac Mountains and swapped him for a level 34 Hulking Mountain Lion.


The lion seemed pretty decent so, to get a fair comparison and since I was very close by, I moved to the huge ogre camp next to the Ruins of Alterac, where the Idiot Bear had let himself down so badly the day before. What  happened next was both instructive and surprising.

Whereas the lion had been holding aggro fairly successfully on the various beasts I set her on, all around her level, she did no better than the bear had on the level 34-36 Ogres. I could barely get off one or two shots on auto-attack before the Ogre would come charging towards me.

Once aggro was lost, the cat could no more get it back than the bear could. I began to formulate a theory that aggro depends on more than just relative levels, amount of taunting successfully applied and damage done.

Everything in Classic has resists. There are several schools of magic plus physical things like bleeding and poison. I can see my resists and my pets' but the resists of mobs are unknown. I began to wonder if the Ogres might be particularly resistant to whatever form of damage the bear and cat were doing, where the Beasts the cat was able to hold up quite nicely might not be.

I had it in mind to follow it up but something else happened to make me put that line of investigation to one side.

Classic doesn't permit you to tame anything higher than your Hunter's own level so I decided to go back to Badlands and grab a Level 39 or 40 beast from the orange sands. Once there, I scanned an Elder Crag Coyote, level 39, and saw he had a skill his junior cousin hadn't known: "Furious Howl". I tamed him to get that and then I set him to tanking for me.

Carry on, don't mind me. I'm just having a snack.

He was a revelation. From the start he could hold aggro better than any pet I'd tried but once I taught him "Growl", the taunt skill, he was able to lock down a mob like a vice. Not only could he grab aggro on the pull and hold it while I unloaded everything I had onto the hapless target, he could also regain aggro almost immediately on the rare occasions I did succeeed in getting the mob's attention.

My bear had never been able to do that, even before he lost his mojo. The bear had extremely poor dps and also suffered from a bizarre inability to taunt and move at the same time. If I had to back off the bear would pirouette and lurch like a drunken ballerina as he tried to complete his animations. Doing that, he was neither taunting nor doing damage, so I had to stand still and let the mob hit me to give him a chance to regain aggro, something he almost never succeeded in doing.

The Elder Coyote had no such aesthetic issues. He just ran at the mob, bit it and taunted and got aggro right back before the mob got anywhere near me. I tested him on any number of different types of creature, Beast and Humanoid and Elemental, and although there were some differences he was able to perform an outstanding job on all of them.

It was like playing a different class. I'd become so used to my pet providing no more than a brief window of opportunity that I'd developed a whole style of play, innvolving stuns, snares, fear and a lot of melee. Suddenly I didn't need any of it. I was able to stand at a comfortable distance and plink or blast away while my pet took all the hits - and he could take them easily, too.

I took him to the ogres just to get a comparison and he slaughtered them. I couldn't pull aggro even when I flat-out tried. I was able to sit and regain mana while he chewed away and when I stood up he'd almost finished the ogre off.  I found out later, hunting trolls and goblins in Stranglethorn, that he could also chase down runners and kill them, another thing the bear could never manage.

In the valley behind the ogres there are plenty of bandits. They're a couple of levels higher and they have more silk. The wolf handles them perfectly. We cleared half a dozen rounds of respawns across the whole valley and I came away with three stacks of silk and Level 41.

All of this leads me to two conclusions: firstly, there is a lot more to aggro management in WoW Classic than first meets the eye and secondly, unlike other MMORPGs, a bear is not automatically going to be first choice when it comes to pet tanking.

Loathe as I am to give up my new best friend, the Wolf, my next move is going to be to teach the bear all the new skills and see how he does. I suspect he'll still struggle. He has never been able to make much of a dent in any mob's health, whereas the Wolf takes great chunks off the target's green bar with every attack. Even if the bear can hold aggro the wolf will still be a lot more useful.

If I was willing to use out of game resources I guess now would be the time to start looking for Rare Beasts, some of whom, as I understand, have unique or best-in-class skills that Hunters covet. Without a guide to follow, I'll just have to chance running into them.

Of course, if I do, I'll have the pet up and won't be able to tame. I'll have to scan the creature, take a screenshot, then kill it if I can. I can then check the screenshot to see if the Rare can do something I'd like to learn, after which I'll have to go stable the pet then camp the spot to see if it respawns.

Without checking outside resources I won't know if that's likely to be an hour, a day or a week. I do know WoW took its rare spawn lead from EverQuest so it could be a long wait.

I probably won't bother. I'll stick with my Wolf for now. Unless the bear can show me he's learned how to do his job. He only had the one, after all...

We All Love Our Pets: WoW Classic, EverQuest, GW2

SynCaine was singing the praises of WoW Classic's Hunter class the other day. He suggested it might represent "pet-class perfection" in the genre and I wouldn't disagree.

There are other contenders. Magicians in classic-era EverQuest had an equivalent range of options and requirements. They had to travel far and wide for some of their their pet spells, as well as having to craft most of the others (or else commission a crafter to do it for them).

Obtaining the essential focus items that empowered their pets was a far from easy task. Not to mention the perpetual buffing and keeping the pet supplied with appropriate weaponry and armor so they could function effectively.

Mages also had four very different "pets" to work with and you didn't always have access to the one you wanted at the level you'd reached. The line-up was the classic elemental quartet, Earth, Wind, Fire and Air. Don't ask me who played which instrument...

The Earth pet was a tarbaby tank that did next to no damage. The Air pet was often preferred as a tank at higher levels because of its ability to chain stun while evading attacks. It  also put out some decent damage.

Water I was never quite sure about. I  remember it as something of a jack-of-all-trades, possibly with the best dps output after Fire but able to take a lot more punishment. Despite playing several Mages over the years, occasionally to relatively advanced levels, I never really used my Water pets. 

The Fire pet, as you would expect, was all about the damage, which it dealt well and took badly. No Magician could reasonably expect to solo with a pet that had a caster's armor class and hit points, but Fire was often used, indeed generally preferred, in groups where the Mage's primary role was DPS.

Yes, that torch is right for your level. Stop questioning my decisions and don't wave those things at me. I am your master!

Elementals aren't very cuddly and neither do they easily develop a personality. I always thought of mine as tools more than entities in their own right. Hunters' pets, being animals or, as the game has it, "beasts", enjoy a considerable head start in the affection stakes.

That poses a problem for me. I tend to develop a peculiarly strong affection for my characters' starting pets in any MMORPG. In Guild Wars 2 each of my several rangers hung on to the pet they chose at character creation for far longer than made practical sense.

The question and answer session every character has to go through before being allowed to set foot in Tyria doesn't help. You're encouraged to build up an RP background for your character that includes picking best friends and favorite pets. The game then proceeds to forget about all that forever, leaving you wondering in the thirties just whatever did happen to that Charr who always had your back in the Warband or that childhood friend from whom you were once inseparable.

If you play a Ranger, your First Pet is always with you. Until you send them away. I always find it a notionally traumatic experience. I put it off for as long as possible but eventually you have to admit that pink Moa just isn't right for the job any more. It's time to send him to the farm.

The trauma is ameliorated by GW2's vast, user-friendly stable facility. You can have two pets active at any time, hot-swappable, and all the pets you've ever tamed remain permanently accessible as load-outs.

Best Friends Forever

Compare that to WoW Classic, where you get just three stable slots and can only have a single active pet available at any time. You want to tame new pets because part of being a Hunter is finding beasts with useful special abilities. But sacrifices have to be made. On a pre-Columbian scale.

You tame a beast and then, by hunting alongside them, transfer their abilities to you. That allows you to train your keeper pets to use those abilities in future. The beast that gave of its skills and knowledge is then duly discarded to make room so you can suck the next victim dry.

Or so the theory goes. I wouldn't know from experience because at level 39 my Hunter is still adventuring alongside his first and only pet, the Ice Claw Bear he tamed for his Level 10 Class quest.

Which was fine until the last couple of days. The bear (or Idiot Bear as I tend think of him, when he does the exact opposite of what I wanted him to do) has never been a stand-out tank. Compared to those EQ Magician superglue pets or the kind of bears favored by the infamous Bearbow Rangers in GW2, he's pretty hopeless at holding aggro.

Still, I've learned to work with him and most of the time he manages to keep the mob's attention well enough. Only not any more. I can't work out what changed but over the last couple of days, where I would previously have been able to send him in, give him four or five seconds to establish aggro, then DoT, stun, DD, DD, auto-attack until dead, throwing in a snare as necessary at the end if the mob turned and ran, suddenly I could barely DoT and Stun before the mob turned and ran - at me.

FFS, you idiot bear! What are you doing? You think you can taunt him by waving your backside at his kneecaps?

Towards the end of yesterday's silk-farming session at the vast and barely-visited Ogre camp outside the Ruins of Alterac, there were frequent occasions where I couldn't even send the pet and just auto-attack. A couple of arrows were all it took to infuriate an Ogre and send him bumbling my way, waving the barrel on a stick that passes for a Mace where he comes from.

Given that I was also training up Bow, using a weapon with barely two-thirds the DPS of my regular gun, I found this behavior perplexing. It wasn't a problem in that I was also training four different Melee weapons so I was happy enough to go toe to toe with the ogres, all of whom were two or three levels below me, but it seemed obvious something was wrong.

It became much more of a problem when I finished my farming and weapons training and moved on to Swamp of Sorrows, where my targets were at-level and above. I began to wonder if I'd missed some training for the bear (I hadn't) or whether there was some link between his original level when tamed (he was Level 8) and his usefulness thirty levels later.

I still don't know and since I'm avoiding out-of-game information sources I'm not sure how I can find out. Other, that is, than by the tried and trusted method of trial and error. I'm going to have to park the underperforming ursine in the stables and go and tamed an at-level bear. Then I'll need to bring him to Level Six loyalty and run some comparison experiments.

Maybe it's time I went solo. I mean really solo.

If that bear does as badly then I guess I'll have to go find some non-bear alternative tanks and try those. Boars might be good. Maybe Raptors, although they look more like DPS to me.

Playing a Hunter does indeed involve "many different mechanics" as SynCaine says. Some of them, like what each pet eats, what skills it possesses and what are its stats can be seen clearly enough in-game. As always with WoW Classic, though, I get the very strong feeling that a lot is going on under the hood.

And that's the charm of it. I find it much more entertaining to suspect something is going on yet not be sure exactly what it is, let alone how it's happening, than I do to have everything laid out before me in neatly tabulated columns. I understand not everyone feels that way but it works exceptionally well for me.

If I do prove to my own satisfaction that my first pet has outlived his usefulness it's going to be hard to consign him to history but I'll do it. With only three stable slots available I can't let sentiment stand in the way of productivity. I'm not running a rest home for cast-off companion animals here.

I guess I'd better get out there and tame something. Here, kitty, kitty!

I Got Skills: WoW Classic

I wanted to say something about weapon skills in Classic, following Kaylriene's post on the subject. I was going to write a long, theoretical post about the concept and mechanics but when it comes down to it there's not much wrong with the way Classic does it already. A quick run-through of what my Hunter was doing yesterday should cover most of the salient points.

I replied to Kaylriene, saying it was the norm (back in the day) to buy all the weapon skills as you could afford them, then swap between weapons as you levelled so as to hit the cap with everything at or near max. This is true but I'd forgotten it was something I was never very good at doing. Or, more accurately, remembering to do.

Having reminded myself, I spent yesterday afternoon taking my Hunter around Ironforge, Stormwind and that Night Elf hovel, finding weapon trainers and paying them ten silver to teach me all they knew. You'd think it would cost more and take longer, right?

Acquiring the skill is trivial but how about training it up? Fortunately for the forgetful (and slackers), weapon skills in Classic improve incredibly quickly, at least until they get to about ten or fifteen points short of your level cap. Then they slow to a crawl, but by then you're already good to go with that weapon in any normal leveling situation.

Like shelling peas. And yes, since you ask, I have shelled peas.

As far as training weapons go, it seems to make remarkably little difference what quality or level you use. Anything remotely close to my level on the Auction House was way out of my price range (I had about sixty silver to my name at that point) so I bought a Level 11 white quality bow from a vendor and filled half eight slot bag with the second-cheapest throwing axes, 50 copper for a stack of 200, meaning I was carrying 800 throwing axes. Best not think about it. Then I went to Wetlands, where I spent a couple of hours killing gnolls, crocs, raptors and slimes.

As a skinner and a leatherworker, with a tailor relying on a steady supply of cloth, this sort of thing is always time well spent. I killed a couple of grey cons to see if they gave skill-ups (they did) and then I moved to where everything was green and gave xp.

I tore through them as fast as if I was using my regular gun and two-handed axe. It was confusing. In order to get the most skill increases I sent the pet in and stood back, chucking axes. Everything stayed on the bear and died fast.

My throwing skill increased by nearly a point per throw at first, slowing down a little after I hit three figures. It took me half an hour and exactly 200 axes to go from zero to 145. Getting the last ten points to my level cap took almost as long. Still very quick.

I was also training one-hand axe. I had let it slide so I had about 50 points to do. I had nothing in my off hand because alhough I'd trained Dagger and Fist I hadn't got weapons for either. I did think I might get some increases for "Unarmed", which isn't a weapon skill as such, but nothing doing. I have eleven points in it so I've obviously punched something, somewhere, sometime but I have no idea what I did then that I wasn't doing this go round.

That's the Skinning Knife. Sure looks like a dagger to me.

Going through my bags in the vain hope of finding an off-hand weapon I'd forgotten about (not at all impossible, given the state of my inventory) I noticed that my Skinning Knife had damage stats and was flagged "One Hand". I equipped it, which at least freed up an inventory slot.

It didn't do anything else. I got no skill-ups and the combat log recorded no damage. The Skinning Knife, although it has a damage rating and can be equipped, doesn't show a weapon type. It looks like a dagger but clearly isn't one. Not sure why it didn't do any damage, Might need further research.

Once Thrown was maxed I went to swap to Bow, only to find I didn't have one. Which was odd because I was one hundred per cent certain I'd bought one an hour ago. After a bit of head-scratching I decided I must have sold it so I ran back to Menethil and bought another. I later found the original safely tucked away in the bank, so that was twenty silver wasted.

Bow went much the same as Thrown except that by the time my skill was over a hundred I seemed to be doing as much damage as I'm used to doing with my gun, which has double the DPS. I kept pulling aggro from the bear, which was fine because it let me carry on raising Axe and Defence.

Things seemed so easy and safe I started to press into higher level areas and pick off mobs nearer my own level. By the time I decided Bow was high enough at 150/155, I was on Level 29 Elder raptors, just a couple of levels below me.

WoW might be the only MMORPG I've played that uses more than one death animation for the same mob. Here are two identical Giant Wetlands Crocolisks. One just collapsed on his belly, the other did a dramatic back flip and ended up with all six legs in the air.

I'm sure if I parsed my DPS I'd see the difference but experientially I really couldn't tell. I did spend a lot of time just using auto-attack, which I never really do, and I wonder if that's actually more efficient than cycling through skills and abilities. Or maybe having the bear tank for longer helps.

Also, I didn't die at all (well, that one time I pulled five gnolls and then got two adds running away...). I may have to rethink my usual "Horatio on the bridge" approach. It doesn't seem to be quite as efficient asI thought it was...

After all that was over I went back to regular questing. Still using the Level 11 Bow and the Axe. And I bought a White Level 11 dagger from a vendor and stuck it in my off hand. I spent the rest of the evening killing mobs my level and up to three levels above me in Shimmering Flats. It went as fast as I'd expect it to go.

Leaving me puzzled. I know it makes a huge difference when I get a much better weapon. I have seen the major increase in DPS. So, if I can see that leap when I upgrade, why can't I see the drop when I change down?

I do think it has a lot to do with how it made me change my approach. Because I was being more careful and cautious at first, letting my pet do more of the work, meleeing less and using fewer skills, my downtime was significntly reduced. Not only did I not die as much (or, really, at all) I spent far less time sitting and drinking to recover mana and far less time running and re-setting after bad pulls.

They don't call it "Wetlands" for nothing. Heaviest rain I have seen in any game, ever. Then again, I've never played "Heavy Rain".

All of that may have made things feel faster even though each kill might have taken longer. Although I can't say they ever felt longer. Also I think I have majorly underestimated the value of just auto-attacking with my hands off the keyboard. What that says about Classic gameplay I hesitate to consider too closely. 

Also, I think it's worth noting that just killing green con mobs in Wetlands for two hours got me a third of the way through Level 32. If I can replicate that with mobs above my level, which I believe I can, that would be more like half the level, which is a lot faster than I'm leveling by doing quests.

Today I plan on getting Dagger to 150 or so. The I have to work through One-Hand Sword (already in three figures), Two-Hand Sword, Staff, and Fist. Not to mention Crossbow and Polearm, neither of which I have ever seen in game.

I find this sort of thing immensely enjoyable. I look forward to doing it on all my characters from now on. And it's going to be a lot more efficient if I start early. The only hard part is going to be working out what weapons each of them can use without looking it up outside the game.

Those weapon masters could at least tell me who uses what. I mean to say, I'm paying ten silver!

Seventeen Days : WoW Classic

So... WoW Classic. Soon to be upon us like a speeding locomotive in just a couple of weeks plus change. Will it drive all before it or crash spectacularly into the buffers?

As reported by Massively:OP, subs are up: "Subscribers in World of Warcraft® increased since mid-May, following the release date announcement and beta for World of WarcraftClassic and the Rise of Azshara™ content update.". And as Bree observes "...wouldn’t it be worrisome if they weren’t?".

Well, yes it would, although maybe not quite yet. True, you have to have a subscription to join in the revivalist fun. On the other hand, if all you want to do is party like it's 2004, it's bit early to pull the switch. What are you going to do for the next two weeks? Money wasted, isn't it?

Makes a lot more sense to re-sub just before the launch date. That way you get a full month of Classic play, which I'm guessing is going to be a week or two more than a lot of people are going to need before they discover that subbing hasn't made them fifteen years younger after all.

That's what I'm going to do. I had already decided to do it purely based on the blogging opportunities it's sure to afford but last night I asked Mrs Bhagpuss (in guild chat in Guild Wars 2 because why get up and walk into the next room?) whether she was interested in re-subbing for Classic and she replied with an unequivocal "Yes".

I wasn't sure she even knew WoW Classic was a thing. I don't think we've talked about it before. She's also not much for going back to MMORPGs she's stopped playing. She did return to EverQuest, EQII and Vanguard but all of those were more than a decade ago.

But then, Mrs Bhagpuss did like WoW when we played, possibly more than I did. She made it to a slightly higher level and carried on playing for a few weeks longer. Conversely, I've been back many times to futz about at low levels, whereas she's never played a session since she stopped about a decade ago.

This is where it all begins. Well, after a bit of a jog. Get your snowshoes ready.

The thing is, we both missed out on World of Warcraft when it was a cultural phenomenon and an unstoppable force in the genre. By the time we got around to trying it, sometime around 2009, WoW was mid-WotLK, considered by some to be the zenith of the game. 

I found that version very enjoyable. There was still plenty of granularity. Mobs didn't fall over from a hard stare. Leveling took a while. The world felt open, connected and real.

On the other hand, a lot of the more interesting mechanics I'd read up about had already left the game. I was particularly disappointed to find that pet management for hunters was no longer a thing.

Because of the way I came to WoW, a great deal of my interest in Classic relies not on nostalgia but on a desire to experience something I missed out on first time around. I'm aware it's going to be a recreation but I'm expecting it to be a convincing one.

As we get closer to launch a few questions arise. With Mrs Bhagpuss signed up I know I won't be playing entirely alone but I'd quite like to have a few other contacts, not least so we can do some dungeons. WoW dungeons are quite good fun.

There will, of course, be a huge number of guilds recruiting and Mrs Bhagpuss, who is a lot more social in games than I am, will quite likely end up in one. That said, she's nowhere near as game-social as she used to be. I don't think any of us are, The games themselves have largely removed the need to make that effort. Whether the old social skills will return remains to be seen.

No pandas, space goats or jolly green goblins in 2004 2019!

I'd be interested in joining a guild made up of bloggers from the local blogosphere but so far I haven't heard of anyone planning to start such a thing. Even if someone does, it will either be a European guild on an EU server, where I won't be playing, or an American guild on a US server, where I will play, but mostly when everyone is asleep.

I prefer U.S. servers for a number of reasons. I've played on many EU servers over the years and they tend to be really bad-tempered compared to US or Global servers. U.S. players just seem generally more cheerful. 

More importantly, though, I really don't like playing MMORPGs in their prime time. I like a busy environment but prime time in a successful game isn't just busy, it's heaving. Playing prime time  is like choosing to go and do your weekly shop at lunchtime on Saturday, when you can't get around the aisles for families shooting the breeze with their friends and neighbors and every checkout has a line ten deep.

Much better to play shoulder hours. As a UK resident, I'm five hours behind the East Coast, nine behind the West. That means things are beginning to liven up around the time I get home from work and just starting to get really busy when I log off to go to bed. Weekends are generally comfortably populated from lunchtime onwards and weekdays I have the place to myself, unless the game has a lot of Australian players, which many do.

Blizzard just released their initial list of server names. Most of them are... odd. TAGN has the full list. I'm inclined towards Bloodsail Buccaneers, which has the virtue of a memorable name, almost the only US server that can make that claim, and a PvE-RP ruleset. It's also physically located on the East Coast, which, by dint of the transatlantic cable, generally gives me at least as good a ping as most EU servers.

I don't do a lot of RP (sorry, Psychochild) but I am very much "RP compatible" as Wilhelm describes it. I'm happy to be around people who roleplay, I pick character names that don't offend the lore and I like to talk "in character" if the opportunity arises. Mostly, though, I find that my playstyle just slides by unnoticed on an RP server.

After choosing a server comes faction, race and class. I really don't think there's much of a decision to be made here. I tend to prefer Alliance to Horde. Goblins are a huge draw but there are no goblins in Classic so Alliance it's going to be.

Wrong. Just wrong.

For race I strongly prefer the short of stature. That means Dwarves or Gnomes. My general preference is for Gnomes but WoW Gnomes are a bit creepy, at least the male ones. I think it's the mustaches. That means it's most likely going to be a Dwarf.

Actually, it has to be a Dwarf because my class of first preference is Hunter. As I mentioned, I was somewhat disappointed to miss out on the pet management aspect of the class and I'm very keen to explore that. Also I really like having to manage arrows as  a resource rather than having a magic bow that never runs out of ammunition.

If I end up hanging around for a while I'll almost certainly make a Gnome Warlock. I like the class and it suits a Gnome. I'd entertain the idea of playing a Druid but the only Alliance race that can be one is Night Elf and I'd uninstall rather than play one of those. I might try a Tauren Druid for the Horde if Classic sticks.

That about covers everything, I think. It's tempting to re-sub now but if I did I'd just end up boring myself with the dull Legion content my Hunter is lumbered with or, more likely, not log in at all. I'll have to exercise restraint and wait until sometime around the 25th or 26th.

Nice to have something to look forward to in MMORPGs for once, even if it is a decade and a half out of date!

Musings On Returning To WoW

The Blizzcon buzz had its intended effect on me. All the talk of Classic servers, a new expansion, fresh adventures in worlds old, new, both and neither, led me to patch up and log in to World of Warcraft for the first time in maybe a year.

In fact, I can't remember when I last played. I know I asked for and was given Legion for my birthday a year ago but all I did with it was register the purchase against my account.

I clearly remember playing for a couple of months during the exciting Legion pre-release Invasion event, at which point I presumably must have re-subscribed because I had access to my higher level characters when I was doing it. After that I seem to remember doing something in Warlords of Draenor and rapidly losing the will to live log in. After that, nothing.

Looking at character select it seems my Dwarf Hunter, who topped out in the low 70s back when I played WoW the first time, is now Level 95. I can only assume that happened during the invasions unless I used some kind of boost on him but I don't believe I've ever acquired a level boost for WoW.

I could fact-check all this by flipping through my back pages of course. No doubt I posted about most of it. It's telling, though, that I can't remember. I like WoW but it doesn't make that much of a lasting impression on me.

There are two reasons for that. Two that I can think of, anyway. One is the Lore and the other the graphics.

In the Oxford Visual Dictionary this is the entry for "Depressing"

WoW lore is opaque to me at best. Mostly it doesn't even manage obscurity. It's simply invisible. I didn't grow up with franchise. I didn't play Warcraft. Until WoW appeared in 2004 I had never even heard of Blizzard and even after the WoW juggernaut began to roll it was years before I'd have been able to name another Blizzard title.

When I did start playing none of the overarching story meant anything to me whatsoever. Plot twists and revelations must have soared over my head, not that I noticed. I did the Death Knight introduction for example, which people seem to rate very highly in terms of both lore and story, and all I remember about it was how long, tedious and claustrophobic it was.

Consequently, the only level on which the narrative connects with me is the local. I can empathize with the problems of farmers being menaced by scarecrows. I can immerse myself in the investigation of a murder or the search for a missing child but the machinations of racial leaders, tyrants, demon-kings and dragons might as well be so much static.

That's the problem with the writing but there's an even greater issue with the illustration. I'm not someone who has to have state-of-the-art graphics and I like WoW's semi-cartoon stylization - in theory.

In practice, though, as I've mentioned before, the textures are problematic. Worse, the palette has a tendency towards the morose that can be - and often is - depressing. I think my memory chooses to protect me against remembering much about all that. I guess it must do or else I'd probably never come back.

I think I saw this scene on black velvet at a craft fair once...

I think it's not insignificant that, in my first and only lengthy, successfully enjoyable run in WoW, I began in Ironforge and spent my formative first days in the snowfields. Partly it's that snowy zones are by some margin my favorite terrain, climate and geography in MMOs but more than that it's that pure blue-white snow doesn't suffer so badly from either the textural or tonal difficulties I find in almost all of Azeroth's other landscapes.

When I do take another pass at playing, Blizzard's famous polish never seems to extend to the patching process. Every time I come back after a break it's a struggle to get the game to run, even though I'm using the same installation on the same machine.

This time I had to uninstall and reinstall the Batlenet app and do a few more tweaks before the game would update. Once the patcher started to co-operate there turned out to be over 5GB of new files to install.

With that out of the way I logged into one of my under-20s, the Worgen Druid. It transpired I'd left off playing her exactly one quest short of the very end of her racial introduction, so as soon I'd sunk a battleship (or, more accurately, vaguely wandered about behind some NPCs who sunk a battleship for me) I was free to leave the dismal, dark, foreboding rainfields of wherever the heck it is that Worgen come from for the dismal, dark, brooding rainfields of that hideous Night Elf place I loathe.

I was not best pleased to find myself back in Teldrassil but I felt momentarily happy when the first quest I took suggested I leave: less so when I fell off a cliff and died on a tree a hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on another tree branch another hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on a third tree branch another hundred meters below the last one.

Just the footsteps in the snow feel somehow joyous.

Fourth fall I survived. Just. I made my way to the marker on the map. Aiming straight for it was what got me killed in the first place but I'm nothing if not stubborn. All of this in the dark and the rain of Azeroth's real-time night cycle, a peculiar design feature that means that historically most of my WoW playtime has taken place in poor lighting except at the weekends. Another reason I like the area around Don Morogh the best - the snow reflects what limited light there is.

The next quest marker pointed to the other side of the bay. I could see the town there from the dock where I was standing. Naturally I jumped in and began to swim only to be hit with Exhaustion half way across.

I understand the purpose of this notional barrier when it's employed to prevent players leaving the playable area or bypassing obstacles intended to be impassable but in this instance it seemed perverse. I was compelled to swim back to shore and go speak to some NPC who put me on a griffin, whereupon the griff flew me back along exactly the line I'd just swum to exactly the place I would have climbed out of the water had I been allowed to continue under my own steam.

By the time I finally spoke to the next questgiver I was so irritated that just the sight of the execrable font Blizzard insists on using, almost unreadable as it is against the equally awful mudded texture and color of the background, that I logged out to search for and reinstall the excellent Add On that replaces WoW's clunky, ugly front end with GW2's smooth and familiar UI.

It's behind you!

Come to think of it, I already had that Add On active last time I was playing so where did it go? Wherever it went I wish it hadn't because getting it back was another fiddly exercise that resulted in the Battlenet patcher demanding to re-download the exact same 5GB it had already installed not an hour earlier.

As I said, my regular experience playing WoW suggests the famous Blizzard "polish" is something that happens to other people. I've never known the game operate any more smoothly than any other MMO and less so than some.

Anyway, it's done now and I have the thing looking a lot like GW2, which is a big improvement. I'm considering whether I want to resub for a while and get some Legion done before it's quite literally last year's thing.

Legion aside, I would like to play my Gnome Hunter some more. She's still playable for free at level 20 but I daren't do anything with her lest she level up and become "Inactive". I'd be playing a Hunter in Legion, too, with my aforementioned level 95 Dwarf, although I suppose I could take the free Level 100 Demon Hunter and roll with that instead.

At the very least the colors are upbeat...

Chances are that I won't do either. I'll probably just footle around with the Worgen Druid - if I can move her to somewhere less utterly depressing - and maybe roll someone new as well. I'm not sure I can justify subbing if I can't find the time to play - but then I've been saying that for a year now.

I suspect the real drag anchor stopping me is strongly connected to the aforementioned issues with Lore and Look. Other than in the big, social events like Invasions, I mostly enjoy WoW in the low-to-mid levels. The higher up you get the more portentous the narrative becomes and, as Syp has often pointed out, in all MMOs, end-game zones tend to be ugly, so the game doubles down on the things I already most dislike about it.

Maybe I'll play my Panda. Wilhelm says the Pandaria zones are "excellent" and I trust his judgment on these things.

Gnome Is The Hunter : WoW

When Blizzard announced the forthcoming sixth expansion for World of Warcraft almost a year ago it occurred to me that I might, for the first time ever, buy in at the beginning. The whole package sounded attractive, much more so than either dull Draenor or potty Pandaria.

There was going to be what sounded like a very welcome shift in gameplay to a more modern, less directive approach, borrowing from the trend begun by Guild Wars 2. The whole enterprise had a looser, more relaxed, less intense vibe than the war-torn drama and earnest work ethic of WoD, yet without crossing the credibility barrier into cartoonism that so tried the patience of the hardcore prior to the release of MoP.

Admittedly, a lot of the tent-pole features didn't do much for me. Order Halls sounded eerily like yet another way for Blizzard to wriggle out of offering real housing (something that, were they ever to take a proper run at it, would probably bring back literally millions of their missing subscribers and hold them, not for months but years). Demon Hunters didn't catch my fancy any more than Death Knights had. Artefact weapons are a thing I actively avoid in any MMO that has them.

There were ten new levels though, and although I tapped out at 69 on my original run, the expansion was set to arrive with the now-traditional boost to the previous cap, meaning I could start at 100 and go on from there. The half-dozen new zones of The Broken Isles sounded interesting. The new scaling mechanic meant they could be approached in any order and I've always been a sucker for an archipelago.

Move your ears, can't you? The reception's terrible..

There were, however, two standout features of Legion that made a re-up more likely than ever before: a real appearance system and Gnome Hunters. Add the super-sweetener that gnomes get clockwork pets and really, what more is there to say?

My highest character in WoW is a Dwarf Hunter. I found the class eminently playable and very enjoyable. As a rule I like dwarves in MMOs but playing a dwarf does have a certain effect on my demeanor and in-game personality. I tend to joke less and act more soberly. It's still more fun than playing most tall races but noticeably less amusing than playing a goblin, a ratonga or, yes, a gnome.

For this last year the prospect of being able to roll a gnome hunter at launch and take him or her clothes shopping as a career has kept the possibility of an early purchase of Legion alive. It was never a done deal because I have a lot of MMO pots on the boil right now and the end of August might not turn out to be the best time to commit to a subscription, but on balance I would have said it was more likely than not.

And then came came patch 7.0, forever to be known, around here at least, as The One Where They Gave Away The Farm. Not the Pandaria farm (anyone remember those?). No, just the very parts of the expansion that I would have been most willing to pay for.

The patch largely removed my need to buy the expansion but it gets better still (or worse, from Blizzard's point of view). As someone who has always tended to enjoy the ultra-low level game in MMORPGs most of all, I don't even need to subscribe to indulge my whimsy. Both gnome hunters and the new transmog system are fully available in the free starter edition that lets you play WoW with few restrictions up to level 20.

With that, I dusted off my old log-in details and gave birth to a new gnome. Thus far (level nine) it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

The character creation screen seems to have changed a little since I made my Goblin nearly three years ago. It seems slicker and shinier than I remember, with a nice sliding-panel that shows off the limited selection of looks. It was easy to get a face I was happy to look at in screenshots and a hairstyle I could stand to look at from behind for hour after hour.

The Gnome Hunter arrives fully petted up - with a mechanical rabbit. It's an odd choice. I realize "rabbit" says "small woodland animal suitable for a newbie" but it's a machine not a mammal. I didn't have to go out at level one and tame it. If you're going to make a mechanical animal to fight for you, wouldn't you choose something more intimidating than a bunny?

None of which logic affects the simple fact that the rabbit looks great and fights like a tiger. Oh come on, you know what I mean...

As a major addition to the game, Goblins get what amounts to an entire ten level RPG of their own. Gnomes, being ever the Unlucky Alfs of Azeroth, probably need to count themselves fortunate to get even a very short introduction. I did initially take it to be something new for Gnome Hunters but on research it turns out to be merely the general post-Cataclysm reboot for the race, which I hadn't seen before.

Gnomes don't really do elegant, do they?

It's a short, tight tutorial with a couple of nice set-pieces. WoW does tutorials as well as MMOs tutorials can be done - in the world and not in your face - and Dun Morogh is one of the most aesthetically pleasing of the starting areas, so the first few levels passed very pleasantly.

I'm currently playing a ratonga bruiser on EQ2's new Race To Trakanon server, which has reduced leveling speed and higher difficulty settings, akin to those on the Time Limited Expansion servers. The difference between that experience and the one I'm having in WoW is instructive.

Neither is clearly "better" than the other - they are just different. There's a lot said about how incredibly fast leveling is in WoW these days but I suspect that's mostly hearsay, based on the accounts of players who burn through the levels using Heirlooms, Recruit-a-Friend and other leg-ups. With none of that, leveling is sprightly but no sprint. On RTT, by contrast, it's definitely a marathon.

It's also my feeling that the actual difficulty of the encounters and quests has changed a lot. I leveled through the pre-cataclysm Don Morogh several times back in 2009 and I remember it very clearly. Some of the quests haven't changed much, if at all. When I was killing Wendigos last night I had flashbacks to the frequent deaths I had in their caves in the past. I'm about certain that with one character I had to postpone that entire sequence and come back a level or two later because I couldn't solo it. Now it's a cakewalk.

Hunter's Moon. So it's told.

Even so, I managed to die twice. The first time was on the quest where I was meant to call on High Tinker Mekkatorque for "orbital" strikes to help kill sub-boss Crushcog. I was so busy enjoying the mayhem I forgot to notice Crushcog's many minions had killed my rabbit and were finishing up the job on me.

The second time I died while AFK looking up how a quest worked. For all its much-vaunted slickness and simplicity, I have always found WoW to be at least as fiddly and unintuitive as any other MMO and more so than many.

The quests use a myriad of systems that are often explained only vaguely if at all. In this particular one my admittedly perfunctory scan of the quest text led me to believe the gears I wanted were ground spawns when in fact they were drops. Close reading of the text could have cleared this up but so could the quest helper - which was no help at all!

Acquisition of gear and abilities at low levels is a  slow and steady process at best. At level nine my gnome is wielding a Poor (grey, vendor trash) bow rather than the Uncommon (green, quest reward) rifle because the grey one has better DPS. Same happened with two pieces of armor.

Gnomes come from Sunderland, apparently. Who knew?

The quest rewards can be odd. At level eight a quest gave me a choice of four items, the only one of which I could equip was a cloth robe. Since the patch also gave Hunters the right to wear Chain from level one (they previously started in leather and had to wait until 40 to equip chain) doing half a level in a dress seemed an idiosyncratic option at best.

Still, at least the frock didn't expose her bare, pale gnomish skin to the wicked Don Morogh wind. At level nine she replaced the robe with what appears to be a chainmail sports bra. Here's hoping something better drops before she gets frostbite.

 It's a racing certainty this gnome will make twenty. I like WoW. Every time I play I have fun. There's a vast amount of content I've never seen. It's highly likely that at some point I'll buy Legion and resubscribe.

For the moment, though, any sense of urgency to grab the digital download or buy an actual box in a real-world store has ebbed away. I still might jump on board at the end of August - the new expansion buzz is always a draw - but it all depends on what else is happening at the time.

For now I'm happy pootling about in Don Morogh. I always liked it there but it's even better with a robot rabbit.