Rather by chance we all ended up online and in WoW Classic yesterday.  There was no plan.  We all hadn’t been online together for a few months at this point, probably not since we attempted Shadowfang Keep in Season of Discovery.  And it was a timely meeting as we were close to the eve of Cataclysm Classic.  It was time to start getting ready.

We spent a bit of time getting everybody together and making sure we all had flight unlocked in Azeroth proper.  There was some fumbling about to get characters together and working with their changed up specs.  Ula, a frost mage so far in WoW Classic, read that frost was dead in Cataclysm, so swapped out to be a fire mage.

There were other change ups.

Beanpole was done being a gnome warlock and paid for the race change, which includes a name change, so became Liftkit, a worgen warlock, largely on the strength of the built-in speed traits.

Then Potshot, who dual-boxed a pally healer and a hunter DPS through Wrath for us decided to swap out the hunter for a Deathknight.  He leveled his new DK up over the last few weeks and even did a bit of Wintergrasp with him to gear up a bit.

So our new lineup for Cataclysm is now

• Wilhelm – Protection Pally
• Fergorin – Holy Paladin
• Kharageenan – Blood Deathknight
• Ula – Fire Mage
• Liftkit – Demonology Warlock

Having gotten all that together in about an hour, and still having daylight to burn, Potshot suggested we ought to do a practice run.  So we started planning to go back to Northrend and travel to an instance, once we figured out which instance would be suitable… when somebody noted that we could just use the Dungeon Finder and teleport our collective asses into an instance.

The Dungeon Finder had limits on where we could go as level 80s, so we decided on heroic Utgarde Keep.  That is a pretty well known instance to us and we have a history there.  So it was off to Utgarde… pop, and we were in there.

Once in there was a bit more setup time to figure out what we had to do and what buffs still applied and all of that.  Small things changed.  Warlock health stones, for example, now heal a set percentage of your health rather than a specific number of hit points, no doubt a reaction to the hit point inflation that the Northrend gear stats brought about… and which the Cataclysm stats will no doubt inflate further.

Eventually we got ourselves set and faced the first mobs.

That went pretty well.  We were sloppy on the first pulls no doubt, but we were overpowered enough to account for that with trash mobs.

We made our way through the trash to the first boss, the legendary (to our guild at least) Prince Keleseth.  We knew how to fight him, it was just a matter of holding it together and doing the right thing… which basically means all standing on Keleseth so AOE will take care of any ice block issues.

As it turned out our group in Cata spec melted Keleseth so fast that ice block wasn’t an issue.  We even got the achievement for not breaking any of his ice blocks.

We rolled on from there pretty confident.

We managed to screw up the fight with Skarvald the Constructor and Dalronn the Controller, slaying Dalronn too quickly, leaving us fighting Skarvald at almost full health while Dalronn’s ghost beat on us.  But we powered through.

We drove on to Ingvar the Plunderer and, knowing the trick to that fight, also got him on the first try.  The only hitch was one fight where we picked up four trash mobs, only to have another three wander in on the side where I didn’t see them.  If I had been more aware I could have laid hands or used a healthstone.  And, even then, it wasn’t a wipe as Ula and Fergorin finished off the fight, then Fergorin ressed us.

So we got through our first instance with the new specs pretty well.  That also got us our first guild dungeon achievement, as guild achievements are a thing with Cata.

Having done that in a rather short time, we decided to do another, this time picking the heroic version of The Nexus, another dungeon well known to us.

Our main issue in The Nexus was simply forgetting all the mechanics of the first fight with the heroic only mini-boss, Commander Kolurg.  The whole thing where his group will fear you and you’ll go run into a bunch of other mobs, pulling them into the fight, which is a pretty sure fire way to get a wipe.

So we wiped.  But by that time we had remembered the warlock soul stone and had one up on Fergorin, who revived himself.  The trick was that I died way on the far side of Commander Kolurg, such that there was no way to get close enough to ress me without aggroing the boss again.

That was when the new pally spell, Absolution, came in handy.  That revives the whole group at once, bringing them to the pally, while having a much greater casting range (100 yards vs. 30 yards).  That was enough to pull us all in safely.

We went back and pulled Commander Kolurg around the corner, far from other mobs, and dealt with him there.  Then it was onward, clockwise around The Nexus, picking off all of the usual suspects.

We got all the way around to Keristrasza, where we managed to remember to jump frequently, bringing her down, finishing the instance and garnering our second guild dungeon achievement.

So we did pretty well with our warm up, and even got Kharageenan a few upgrades… not that they won’t be immediately replaced by superior green gear in the first zone in Cataclysm.  But it is always nice to get an upgrade.

We were also looking at the transmog system in Cata Classic, which as I think I mentioned, is actually the version in retail, which only sucks somewhat, and not the original version from Cata, which sucked a lot more.

As part of that some of us were interested in acquiring gear “looks” from stuff that dropped.  You might be able to see that I am wielding the Mace of Unrequited Love, a drop from that fight, because I wanted that in my transmog options.

I do like that they went with the more modern transmog mechanics… there is no reason to relive the original versions, that doesn’t help anybody… but I am a bit miffed, as always, that it totally ignored anything you had in the past.  That means we might be going back to some old instances to seek out some looks… or old raids.  We’re high enough level now that we could probably smash and grab raids through Outland at least.  We’ll see.

Anyway, we had our warm up.  Now to see if we are prepared.

On Monday at 3pm Pacific time the launch of Cataclysm Classic begins… and I am honestly not even sure where I need to be to best experience it.

I mean three years ago… was it really that long ago… with Burning Crusade Classic everybody went to the newly upgraded black gate and waited for our chance to rush through into Outland.  There was a crowd.

Then, with the Wrath Classic launch back in September 2022, we were all on the dock eager to get on the first boat to Northrend.

But with Cataclysm Classic we are getting into the post-Classic era in more ways than just, say, the before/after era of dungeon finder.  We’re now into the era of expansions I didn’t really play much when compared to Wrath.

My memories are pretty vague, but I know we went into Cata back in the day by re-rolling new characters with an eye to experiencing the new world of Azeroth only to find it had been dumbed down to the point of being quite dull compared to our original experiences.  We ended up leaving and didn’t come back until Mists of Pandaria was wrapping up and Warlords of Draenor was warming up.

So, as I said already, I am not even sure where everybody is going to be on Monday, and the three weeks of the pre-patch were not much help.

Though, part of me thinks the pre-patch started as an involuntary beta given how much was broken the day it launched.  I got in there and had to figure out how to spec and play my paladin on day one, only to come back later and find all of our talent points had been refunded because things still needed to be fixed.

And then we had three weeks to do… what?

Was there a Cataclysm launch event or quest chain that I missed?

I mean sure, if you wanted to roll up a goblin or worgen character, you had some runway to get that done.  And I guess there is the new archaeology trade skill to work on… though I always found archaeology dull and somewhat less rewarding than many of the already dull and unrewarding trade skills in the game.  I mean, I guess I could still catch up on that, but I would need to find the motivation.

On the trade front, I was pleased to see inscription and glyphs were actually expanded with Cata.  I totally forgot about that.

Then again, I know inscription will be nerfed into irrelevance eventually… doesn’t Warlords of Draenor pretty much kill all crafting… but for the moment it is pretty good.

I was also a bit pleased to see that we got transmog that was closer to current retail transmog than what we got back in the day.  I mean, I think transmog in retail is fraught and over complicated, but it suck at least 80% less than the original pass at it.

So, with three weeks to kill, the first thing I did, of course, was head to the flight master in Stormwind and spend the 200 gold to get flying in Azeroth.  Best gold spent ever.

Then I spent some time running the Children’s Week quests on multiple characters.  Might as well beef up my companion pet roster in advanced of pet battles in Pandaria… which should be released before the next Children’s Week rolls around.

That done I… poked around and tried to learn my classes a bit.

I am actually somewhat pleased with how the protection paladin plays now, at least solo.  I have no memories about specs after Wrath, mostly because Blizz just got in the habit of throwing everything in the air and shuffling specs after that.  But this time around it worked pretty well.  I am definitely more OP than I was with the Wrath spec.  I base this on the fact that I could never quite solo Chillmaw on that one Argent Tournament quest.  I came close, but could never quite swing it.  I always needed a bit more DPS.  And this kind of bothered me because I have distinct memories of soloing Chillmaw.

Well, after getting into the Cata spec, Chillmaw was soloable.

I guess those memories are more of early Cata than late Wrath.  Maybe?  Anyway, I could go earn 10 champions seals daily, which I am saving up to buy the tournament pets.  Again, gotta fill up that pest roster.

I did also run around and get the achievement for doing the quests in Icecrown.  I was only a few quests shy.

I now just need Storm Peaks and Zul’Drak.  Storm Peaks I am also close on, but Zul’Drak… le sigh.

I did strongly consider starting a new character just to experience some of updated Azeroth… to the point of rolling up a dwarf shaman and getting into the starter area… but then thought better of that.  I have done the whole loremaster of Kalmidor and the Eastern Kingdoms before.  I don’t need to do it again.  Plus I have six characters at level cap already.  Seven isn’t going to make me feel better.  Now I regret spending some champion’s seals on some heirloom gear for him.

I did get ahead of the game on one Cata ritual.  While running around during Children’s Week I got blasted by Deathwing and got the obligatory “stood in the fire” achievement for dying.

So that is out of the way.

Now we have a weekend left before the big unlock and I am not sure what I should do, if anything, to get ready for it.  I’ll probably run the Argent Tournament dailies… and maybe work on finishing up the Storm Peaks.

As I wrote on Tuesday, the Ashlands biome arrived in Valheim this week, the long awaited updated to the game to expand its content beyond the Mistlands and another step to the final biome and being able to finish Odin’s tasks in order to gain entrance to Valhalla.

It has been a while coming as it seems to take Iron Gate about a year to accomplish any task.  They are a small studio, so I want to cut them some slack, but it took them a year to react to their success at launch and get the game settled and get it launched on XBox, another year to get the Mistlands biome launched, and then more than a year to get the Ashlands to go live.

So yeah, I expect we won’t see the Deep North, the alleged final biome, until mid-2025 at the earliest.

But the real question is, “Will I care?”

By my own admission this week, I am not even ready for the Ashlands yet.  Again, just yesterday I posted about finally getting geared up in the Mistlands… a post I wrote before the Ashlands launched and postponed a couple of days… so I have not set foot in the new biome.  But those that have are not bringing back happy reports.

Bhagpuss has his own tale of the Ashlands, where he died, even while having the game difficulty dialed back.  And I have heard back from a few people that their enthusiasm for the game has died on the burning altar of the new biome.

And, as it turns out, even I am not immune to this turn of events as, on logging in after the Ashlands update, Hugin came to speak to me.

That didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already.  I had read that the waters around the Ashlands would require a new type of boat.  I couldn’t make the new boat, the Drakkar, yet because you need to slay The Queen, the boss of the Mistlands in order to unlock that ability.

So what did that have to do with me?  Well, I was working in our base when I heard the distinct sound of a boat being destroyed… and then another.  I went out to the dock at our base and found the remains of both boats in the slips where they had been left.

I wasn’t sure what had happened, but sometimes neks or greylings swim around there and attack the boats.  It could have been them… and the other boat in the slip, a full longship, was still there.

As it turns out, it simply had more hit points.

I figured this out after going through a portal to set sail to try and make my way to where The Queen spawns.  I noticed, on setting sail, that my boat seemed to be taking one damage every tick.

You cannot really see it in that image, but there is a stream of 1s floating from the mast, indicating the continuous damage being applied to the boat.

I did not go too far before I felt I had better sail near shore and build a workbench for repairs.

This has put a big damper on exploration progress and made sailing, once a leisurely, enjoyable activity, more akin to sailing on a time bomb.

Which brings me back to Iron Gate, the developers, and their insistence that Valheim needs to be “a difficult game,” which seems like a bizarro world claim after it was a huge success back in 2021 in early access mostly because it WAS NOT a particularly difficult game.

Yes, there are difficulty settings in the config that you can ratchet up and down, but apparently that isn’t enough to keep the Ashlands from reaching out and smiting you according to Bhagpuss.

The Mistlands were the first new biome since early access and they were a pretty big step up in difficulty, the mist in the Mistlands being a big part of that.  Fortunately, you can cure that with a mod.

The Ashlands though… that has reached out and hit our world and we aren’t even there yet.

So why are the devs so hot to trot to make Valheim so much more difficult?  It isn’t a live service game, so they don’t get more money for people playing longer.  I paid them my $20 and that will likely be the end of it.  Do they get a small cut from services like GPortal?  I am sure they get some money for it being played on XBox Game Pass, so maybe that incentivizes them to make people play longer?

I think this is the Elden Ring brain worms at it again.  Ji Ham, acting CEO of Enad Global 7 is planning to use the Elden Ring difficulty factor as the basis for the next EverQuest game because he is into it.  But is the difficulty the reason that Elden Ring is popular?  Or is it just a really well made game such that people get past the difficulty because it has other appeal?  If you make a mediocre but very difficult game, is it likely to sell better because of the difficulty, or worse?

I don’t know.  I never bothered to look into Elden Ring because the talk about it is always focused on the difficulty.  That does not appeal to me.  And Valheim going that route does not appeal to me either.

A bit of persistence and a distinct lack of mist has allowed me to reach the next plateau in Valheim, where I have geared myself up as far as I can for the current biome.  I’ve been out and scrounged enough stuff to put together the full set of carapace armor, upgraded twice, which is all you can do at this point.

I’ve also crafted a couple of weapons, favoring the glowing Mistwalker sword, since that is the one weapon skill I have managed to keep up through a series of tragic deaths.  And, to continue on a theme, I also have the carapace shield.

I also crafted the latest bow, Spinesnap, which glows red.

The weapons glow, which according to the wiki can give you away more readily if you’re trying to sneak with them wielded.  I’m just happy that the bow is actually useful now that I have banished the mist from the Mistlands.  Down with mist!

All of these were small upgrades when it came to stats, but Valheim has a pretty tight range of stats and even a couple of points more in armor class, as an example, can make a huge difference.

The last item I made was the feather cape, which you can see on my above.  This is a key item as it slows your falling… which given the steep rocky spines that run through much of the biome, can be a bit of a life saver.

As became the custom, this cape includes the resist versus frost so you can still travel through the mountains biome wearing it… also, it is extremely fun and useful in the mountain biome as well.  It is fun to just jump off of stuff and, if not glide, at least slow fall across the landscape.

It does leave a trail of feathers behind you as you go.  No doubt a comment on the quality of my craftsmanship.

I did find it interesting that the cape makes you weak against fire.  To start with, that is the main weapon of the Gjall, the death zeppelins that float around the biome.

But fires is also the big thing in the recently arrived Ashlands biome.  So that feather cape is going to have to go as soon as those come online… if we start exploring them then.

So now I am geared up and, unless I want to explore more or build up more resources, I haven’t got a lot of motivation to go forward.

I could explore the Eitr casting gear and staves.  There is a whole playing as a mage aspect of the Mistlands.  But I have always been more of a melee person.

So the only thing really on the horizon is The Queen, the final boss of the Mistlands.  I know where she lives, I just haven’t been there yet.

And, according to the wiki, The Queen is the toughest boss fight yet in the game, so I am not exactly eager to get in there with her unless I am fully prepared.

So I continue to stalk about the Mistlands here and there, enjoying the view without the mist.

The mist was just a bad idea.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic is effectively over now.  The Cataclysm Classic pre-patch has been on the servers for two weeks, the initial chaos of that patch has been mostly resolved, and now I’m hanging out, doing a few clean up things in Northrend as I get to learn how the new specs… old specs… new old specs… work for a couple of classes.

Back before Wrath Classic hit, I had put a lot of weight on the idea that THIS was going to be the peak of the classic experience for me.  It wasn’t that we didn’t love vanilla WoW Classic, grindy though it could be, relatively speaking at least, it was just that Northrend lives larger in my memory than any of the expansion.  My head canon is that this is peak WoW for me.

So how did that play out?

On a gut level, I think it made the mark.  I am certainly less inclined to play when I am not engaged, but that was also the case with The Burning Crusade Classic, where we bailed as a group once we were not having fun, which was pretty quickly.  And, in Northrend, once our group had done what it came to do, we ran off and did something else.

The desire to grind out every last thing wasn’t as prevalent.

It may even be that Blizz let the expansion run a bit longer than it should have.  I was on the first boat to Borean Tundra more than 19 months ago.  The thing about the classic experience is that it is also supposed to be a more condensed experience.

Original Wrath ran for 754 days, which was a smidge over two years.

Wrath Classic will close out on May 20th having run for 601 days, which was probably a good 90 days too many for the experience.  Retro servers always run at nearly 2x speed, so running Wrath Classic at 1.25x speed meant people were done before Blizz was ready.

I know, Blizz has to balance a release schedule and doesn’t want one thing to interfere with another and also had its whole Season of Discovery shtick going and there was the possibility, given the way the pre-patch landed initially, that they simply were not ready to go to Cata Classic yet.  Lots of things go into the timing.

But, also, I haven’t played all that much since the new year.  Actually, if you go back, you will see we were playing Season of Discovery for a while even.  Now, we all stayed subscribed, so Blizz won the economic victory, but dead servers and people not playing your game is an issue on its own.

Anyway, we’re now at the end, our group is waking up back in Northrend, taking stock, and getting ready for Cataclysm.

Back to my subjective feelings about Wrath Classic, I think it was both more and less than I expected.

A lot of it is fun and interesting and all the classes I played felt useful and a bit over powered, which I don’t think is a bad thing.  Generally speaking, feeling a bit OP makes me play more aggressively, which means I am often more likely to get in over my head and end up with a fun fight than if I feel I am out of my depth and expect that if i get more than one mob on me that I need to flee.

The zones… I’ve probably done a few of them too many times for there to be more than the joy of competence, the feeling that I know where I am and where I need to go to accomplish my assigned task.  This is not nothing.  One of my favorite zones in LOTRO is the Lone Lands because, after all these years, I know it like the rangers do.  It is a place that makes me feel a part of the story and land I know it so well.

There is also this flat spot in leveling… something accentuated by the fact that when you roll into Borean Tundra at 68, the 68-70 ride is very fast… that makes things feel like they are dragging around 73-75.  Maybe I just don’t like those middle zones.  But once you hit Sholazar Basin things seems to start to pick up and the drive to 80 feels like it goes by more quickly than the previous few levels.

Looking at my achievements… which are now unified across characters since the pre-patch… the only zones I did not get the “did all the quests” update for were Zul’Drak and the Storm Peaks, and I am close on the Storm Peaks.  I might go finish that.  Zul’Drak though… how badly do I want that “Loremaster of Northrend” achievement?

The dungeons were good, and while we got into heroics with our group, none of them were complete push-overs on the first try.  We had to figure things out.  I was also happy enough to see Blizz pushing the envelope with extra hard modes for dungeons, so that there was a challenge for those sharper than us.

I also played a lot of Wintergrasp.  Again, my memories of it are probably a case of rose colored glasses.  I enjoyed it, but it also at times could feel like a solved problem on some rounds, where a core people could show up and drive victory.  But it was fun and chaotic at times and an absolute fountain of honor points.  Our guild message of the day is something like:

How much honor for a shameful defeat? Oh, wow, that’s a lot!

I am interested to be reminded how much Blizz reigned all of that in when it came to Cata.

So, subjectively, here at the far end of Wrath Classic, I am pretty happy with the experience.  There are, and always be, purists stomping their feet about this detail or that, but overall it lived up to my expectations… except for the draw distance thing.  That still irks me and I don’t know why it is such an issue, but it has been there since day one of WoW Classic, so that is hardly just a Wrath issue.

Flipping that around, I was digging for things that might objectively indicate I enjoyed Wrath Classic.  I expect the biggest sign is the fact that I got six characters up to level 80.

I will grant you that I took full advantage of the various points where Blizz turned on the Joyous Journeys xp boost, along with a bit of heirloom gear, and that at least three of those characters were around level 60 at the end of vanilla Classic.  But that is still a pretty good run for me, especially for the rogue, a class I often don’t like, and one that Blizz likes to alternately buff then mess up with spec changes, who was around level 40 when Wrath Classic hit.

There is also the factions in Northrend, at least the ones you encounter on the overland journey.  I did pretty well with them.

On my main, my paladin Wilhelm, I managed to get 10 out of 11 to exalted.

The Wyrmrest Accord… getting faction with them is right in the start of that flat spot for leveling, where I am always trying to get to the next zone, so I fear I do not hang around in Dragonblight very long.  You have to be there long enough to unlock the dailies to get them up to exalted, and I am never quite up to that. [Edit: I went back and got them to revered after writing this post.]

I also did enough of the Argent Tournament to get Wil exalted with all of the alliance home city factions and become the exalted champion of each.

Overall, I feel pretty good about Wrath Classic.  I enjoyed my time going back to Northrend as it was… or as it mostly was… and playing through it fresh with the correct specs and rewards.  My memories of it are not all just filtered through a heavy curtain of nostalgia.  It was some good stuff.

Did it run too long?  Probably.  But it also sounds like they won’t be making that same error with Cataclysm Classic.  So it is on to the new specs and the reborn old world.