Eye of the Beast?

There's lots of good things about being a druid, but the General Drakkisath's Demise quest is one of the (fairly minor!) downsides. You're forced to choose between three of the best trinklets in the game, and while for most classes only one or perhaps two may be relevant, for druids they're not only good but best in slot as either a tank, melee DPS or caster.

I've dithered over which to choose for several days. Pretty much ever since I started my druid I've known this choice was coming, and was sure that Mark of Tyranny would be my choice, since while the other trinklets are replaceable (eventually) that is the best druid tanking trinklet there is. However in the end I went for Eye of the Beast, since raids are were gear really counts and I can only realistically see myself healing or being a moonkin in raids. Much as I like the idea of tanking, the competition and commitment are not where World of Warcraft is in my life right now. It takes up more of my time than it should already, and I think I'd have to turn that up a couple of notches in order to tank in a raid.

Not tanking

I thought I was signing up to tank my first run of Scholomance with a guild group when the last spot was taken by one of our raid tanks. So I found myself doing cat DPS and really enjoying it - not for the role itself but the way that not being restricted to tanking or healing allowed my hybrid nature to shine.

Before that, as I was approaching level 60, I'd whispered our guild master to ask what role he'd like me to prepare for in raids (expecting healing, naturally) and was surprised to find he was looking for a moonkin. I wasn't at all sure about that, as it seemed a rather restricted niche but my Scholomance experience made me reconsider it.

Another thing which swayed my choice was the Guardians of the Altar quest, which gave some good moonkin flavour.

And so, with some reasonable blues but noticeably some greens "of Arcane Wrath" I found myself in Molten Core for the end of the guild's latest run.

Level 60 - finally / again

I've finally got to level 60. I'd become fixated on getting to the milestone in less than 10 days played, and convinced that the slow run through Lower Blackrock Spire yesterday would scupper this. In the end, thanks to some final quests in the Plaguelands and with a rested bonus from the daytime I managed it, just.

9 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes (and 39 seconds).

I've mostly been taking screenshots of my /played as I reached various milestone levels (or random levels where I'd forgot to record the milestone) so I could see what the levelling curve looked like when I got to this point. It's steep!

If I'd focussed purely on levelling this could no doubt have been quicker, but I wanted to get lots of dungeon experience as I levelled and besides, with previous Duillnar I was focussed that way and it made for a pretty unengaging experience.

My elapsed time was 64 days and the graphs look like this:

Graph of time played versus level

Graph of elapsed days versus level

The best and worst of Classic

At the weekend I did a couple of dungeon runs which showcased the best and worst of the game.

First I got together a pickup group for the Jailbreak stage of the Onyxia attunement. The resulting group were at various stages - two had completed Abandoned Hope and so were needing the Crumpled Up Note to drop, two others needed the information from General Angerforge and Golem Lord Argelmach, while I already had the information and was ready for the Jailbreak stage.

We cleared the route for the jailbreak and, as we had hoped, both of those who needed it got their Crumpled Up Note and went back to the Burning Steppes to progress their quests. We then killed Angerforge and Argelmach before completing the jailbreak itself.

The whole thing was done in a cooperative and friendly spirit. We had a silly wipe in the jail area while one member was back in the Burning Steppes and another AFK which would have been the end of many groups but this passed with barely a mention. The practicalities of putting a group together in Classic mean that members are treated as people and this really shone through here. The Looking For Group tool in the modern game has upsides, so it's important to remember as well that Classic negates some of its downsides.

Less enjoyable was my first run (in many years) of Lower Blackrock Spire. It was mostly a guild group otherwise I'm sure it would have been abandoned part way through. I'd switched to a healing spec as an experiment and I must admit that about two thirds of the problems were down to me - mostly not my healing as such but my lack of a "normal" resurrection. If a single character dies on a difficult pull then there's the decision of whether to use your combat ress, if more than one then they have to do a corpse run - which is especially a pain in the larger and less navigable instances like LBRS.

There were other problems as well, both mine and on the part of others, and and all-in-all the run was not enjoyable. I think I will swear off dungeon healing - the great things about Classic's class design include that the druid is master of no trades, but the shortcomings here were too much and impacted on the experience for everyone.

Level 58, and too much to do

After the doldrums of the late 40s, the 50s are busy...

I'm sure I didn't play this way the first time around (I imagine I hit 60 and then thought "right, what do I do now"), but despite levels taking a long time I'm moving faster than my list of targets.

• I have 294 points in leatherworking (target: Devilsaur Leggings)
• I'm attuned to Molten Core, and at the Jailbreak stage with the Onyxia attunement
• I'm 25% of the way through Unfriendly with the Timbermaw Hold (target: Warbear Harness)
• I'm juggling quest log space for pre-quests for dungeon or world elite quests that award decent gear
• and so on...

Classic is this clever (evil?) sequence of to-do lists which I want to make my way through reasonably efficiently - I don't want to get to level 60 and be too squishy to tank the harder dungeons, and this approach does mean that I'm not too stressed about reaching the level cap as it's kind of looking after itself.

I've completed 3 runs of Blackrock Depths and have mostly re-learnt my way around - the first run was a complete mystery and it's a bit odd having the geography come back to me. At level 58 I feel ready in a sense to progress to Lower Blackrock Spire but wouldn't feel confident keeping aggro from max level damage dealers. Players seem to understand the difference from the modern game and despite a few difficult pulls on a couple of the runs the groups have been a lot more pleasant than the typical dungeon finder companions. But I want to keep things that way.