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dreamerinsilicoSo two close friends from my time in Japan + my brother and I have a standing Saturday morning (here)/evening (there) meetup-to-play-video-games-together time. It's quite a bit of fun, but finding games all four of us can get into has been a recurring challenge, and the most recent attempt is the game I didn't really think I'd ever touch again: World of Warcraft.
I played WoW from vanilla through Cataclysm (with a break in there - I stopped in Wrath and came back for a handful of months during Cata), which spanned from my first year of undergrad through my first year, year and a half of graduate school. From fairly early in Burning Crusade through about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King, I played it very, very seriously. (We're talking progression raiding 3-5 nights a week, with goof-off raiding another two nights, or stacked with progression raids, for a while. Literally played like it was my job, on top of a full engineering course load + extracurriculars. I think back to how little sleep I got by on in those days with horrified envy.) My housemates and I ended up leading our own medium-core progression raiding group for the back half of the time I was in undergrad, and I was also an admin of the multi-guild umbrella raiding organization we were a part of.
Any time I was at home and not doing necessary bodily/household functions, homework, or occasionally Guitar Hero or Super Smash Bros to let off steam, I was on WoW (or WoW-related forums), in those days. When I came back to it for a while in Cataclysm as a reward to myself for surviving my PhD qualifying exams, I raided in the group one of my friends from the admin crew led, and it was fun? But it wasn't the same. The game didn't have nearly the same hold on me as it had when I was eating, sleeping, and breathing it, go figure, so I stuck around long enough to help with the organizational re-structuring that was happening in my raiding family, and then quit once more.
The one major joy in that game that I did have that didn't revolve around the social and logistical puzzle that was leading a serious raid group was running 5-player dungeons with my friends. Our core group of five leveled a set of alts for forty levels, once, doing nothing but dungeons, and it was so much fun. And that's the experience my current little group is chasing with this return. I'm not even on my old account - can't find the authenticator and can't be arsed to contact Blizzard to try to recover it. It's probably for the best, because I'd probably be very upset to log onto my old shadow priest main and find her mechanics unrecognizable.
We've been playing two weeks, now, with our characters at level 20-21. The nostalgia is... nice but also kind of keenly painful, because the game has changed so much from what I remember - not just the mechanics, but the world as well. It's very "visiting your home town after a few years away and finding your favorite shops and restaurants are all either gone or under new ownership, and the roads have changed a lot, too. And maybe a few traffic laws." :P
The thing that's bugging me the most is the mechanics, though.
My new character is a druid, and I'm the group's tank. My secondary main back in the day was also a druid, whom I primarily played as Resto, but I leveled her Feral (as one did in TBC) and tanked dungeons all the way up. Lowbie bear tanking in TBC? Fucking hard. And super satisfying because of that. Lowbie bear tanking now? I could do it in my sleep. On our first Deadmines run I think I used my taunt once. My brother was healing on a priest and I'm pretty sure he never went below half mana.
On the one hand, I can understand and appreciate the philosophy of making the group content much more approachable than it used to be. Running dungeons back in the day was kind of a nightmare if you had to do it mostly or all with pick-up groups. (I took a political science course in freshman year that actually had us doing pick-up dungeons in WoW to take data for a project about small group cooperation and success - back in vanilla, when I was playing a rogue. It was a neat class, but the data collection was a COLOSSAL pain in the ass!) On the other, I'm honestly quite bummed that it looks like the fun of tackling challenging five-player dungeons with my friends as we level alt characters is a thing that's thoroughly in the past.
I think the one change I've found unequivocally delightful is that my druid's travel form is a kickass stag and I can carry a rider. That's pretty damn cool! (And our party is aesthtically amusing, as we're three gnomes and a worgen.)
However long we end up playing these characters together, I'm finding myself rather intensely interested in the official re-release of WoW Classic that's apparently going to be a thing. I'd rather TBC than Classic, frankly, because in Classic playing a "hybrid" class meant you just got pigeonholed into tanking (for warriors) or healing (for everyone else), but at this point I'll take what I can get.
I played WoW from vanilla through Cataclysm (with a break in there - I stopped in Wrath and came back for a handful of months during Cata), which spanned from my first year of undergrad through my first year, year and a half of graduate school. From fairly early in Burning Crusade through about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King, I played it very, very seriously. (We're talking progression raiding 3-5 nights a week, with goof-off raiding another two nights, or stacked with progression raids, for a while. Literally played like it was my job, on top of a full engineering course load + extracurriculars. I think back to how little sleep I got by on in those days with horrified envy.) My housemates and I ended up leading our own medium-core progression raiding group for the back half of the time I was in undergrad, and I was also an admin of the multi-guild umbrella raiding organization we were a part of.
Any time I was at home and not doing necessary bodily/household functions, homework, or occasionally Guitar Hero or Super Smash Bros to let off steam, I was on WoW (or WoW-related forums), in those days. When I came back to it for a while in Cataclysm as a reward to myself for surviving my PhD qualifying exams, I raided in the group one of my friends from the admin crew led, and it was fun? But it wasn't the same. The game didn't have nearly the same hold on me as it had when I was eating, sleeping, and breathing it, go figure, so I stuck around long enough to help with the organizational re-structuring that was happening in my raiding family, and then quit once more.
The one major joy in that game that I did have that didn't revolve around the social and logistical puzzle that was leading a serious raid group was running 5-player dungeons with my friends. Our core group of five leveled a set of alts for forty levels, once, doing nothing but dungeons, and it was so much fun. And that's the experience my current little group is chasing with this return. I'm not even on my old account - can't find the authenticator and can't be arsed to contact Blizzard to try to recover it. It's probably for the best, because I'd probably be very upset to log onto my old shadow priest main and find her mechanics unrecognizable.
We've been playing two weeks, now, with our characters at level 20-21. The nostalgia is... nice but also kind of keenly painful, because the game has changed so much from what I remember - not just the mechanics, but the world as well. It's very "visiting your home town after a few years away and finding your favorite shops and restaurants are all either gone or under new ownership, and the roads have changed a lot, too. And maybe a few traffic laws." :P
The thing that's bugging me the most is the mechanics, though.
My new character is a druid, and I'm the group's tank. My secondary main back in the day was also a druid, whom I primarily played as Resto, but I leveled her Feral (as one did in TBC) and tanked dungeons all the way up. Lowbie bear tanking in TBC? Fucking hard. And super satisfying because of that. Lowbie bear tanking now? I could do it in my sleep. On our first Deadmines run I think I used my taunt once. My brother was healing on a priest and I'm pretty sure he never went below half mana.
On the one hand, I can understand and appreciate the philosophy of making the group content much more approachable than it used to be. Running dungeons back in the day was kind of a nightmare if you had to do it mostly or all with pick-up groups. (I took a political science course in freshman year that actually had us doing pick-up dungeons in WoW to take data for a project about small group cooperation and success - back in vanilla, when I was playing a rogue. It was a neat class, but the data collection was a COLOSSAL pain in the ass!) On the other, I'm honestly quite bummed that it looks like the fun of tackling challenging five-player dungeons with my friends as we level alt characters is a thing that's thoroughly in the past.
I think the one change I've found unequivocally delightful is that my druid's travel form is a kickass stag and I can carry a rider. That's pretty damn cool! (And our party is aesthtically amusing, as we're three gnomes and a worgen.)
However long we end up playing these characters together, I'm finding myself rather intensely interested in the official re-release of WoW Classic that's apparently going to be a thing. I'd rather TBC than Classic, frankly, because in Classic playing a "hybrid" class meant you just got pigeonholed into tanking (for warriors) or healing (for everyone else), but at this point I'll take what I can get.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-23 03:10 pm (UTC)I also always thought the long breaks in between HP canon helped encourage writing and thinking about more unusual stuff, because we had so long to sit and speculate on everything. (And it wasn't just about kink fics; even the meta and theory postings went wild too.)