Things have moved on somewhat from my previous post but I wanted to blog a few things while they're relatively fresh in my mind.
As I mentioned previously one of our tanks was aiming for the Scarab Lord / sceptre quest which, shortly after the patch released, seemed like a bit of a fools errand. One of the hardcore guilds on our server had finished the fragment collection within a couple of days and, with a fairly limited number of people helping him initially, our guy was languishing at around 10% of the way through and morale seemed to get quite low. However eventually a real team spirit built around the collection effort and more players got involved, to the point where our guild pretty much claimed one of the Silithus hives as our own. This has become one of my favourite periods of Classic so far - although the bug grind is a slightly odd form of fun, with frantic tagging of newly spawned mobs interspersed with periods of waiting and occasionally surrendering to taggers with clearly better latency, the guild effort and community that built around it is an experience I'll remember. On top of that is the fact that I never saw this aspect in the original game (and wouldn't have this time around either if not for the guildmate who decided to try to complete this ridiculous chain).
A family holiday meant that I missed the later raid- and world-boss stages of the chain, although I followed along via the guild discussions. We were all pleased when our guy, through luck or superior latency, became the sceptre-holder to bang the gong and get emoted across the realm. A few members of some of the "proper" hardcore guilds were a bit put out for our lowly guild to receive this recognition, which seems to show that although the hardcore / casual divide from the original game has softened a bit it's still there in some players' hearts.
Our raid calendar meant that our first experience of Ahn'Qiraj was the 20-player Ruins which, apart from Ossirian the Unscarred, gave us very little trouble. I'm fairly sure that my vanilla guild never completed this raid which reminds me again of how much has changed in nearly 15 years since this was last new. My mindset is now that of a regular raider (with BWL-level gear to show for it) but more broadly there are now PUGs easily competing this content whereas on my original server PUGs would only really take on Molten Core towards the late stages of the game.
The 40-player Temple is giving us somewhat more trouble - in the first reset we downed Princess Huhuran after several attempts (insufficient nature resistance preparation) before thoroughly wiping on Viscidus, giving us a 5/9 completion including the bug trio. This last week our achievement has been to get over the hurdle of the pre-Emperor trash before failing to down those bosses. Our performance improved over each attempt so hopefully we're not far off, but so far the coordination of DPS and bug handling is evading us.
On the dungeon set upgrade chain I'm at the The Left Piece of Valthalak's Amulet stage, so near-ish the end but still a fair way to go. Again this is something I never fully experienced in the original game - I remember parts of it, including gathering the ectoplasm, and I'm sure at least my shaman had the Extra-Dimensional Ghost Revealer but I don't think I got much further than the 45 minute Stratholme run. The stages I'm on now seem to be class-specific so I'm really hoping I get a summon for Mor Grayhoof at the next stage (since I don't yet have the chest piece of the dungeon set so obtaining that from Upper Blackrock Spire will be quite a bump in the road). On the plus side most of the expensive steps are now behind me so I can start rebuilding my character's finances.
And my final current to-do of Alterac Valley reputation is slowly proceeding - I'm now 5,000 into Revered. This has been quite demoralising over the last few days though, with constant losses and (no doubt related) increasing blatant AFKing (or perhaps it's now that I know what to look for?). Unlike the rest of the game this part really has become a grind instead of a pastime.
One last thing to mention is that the game seems to be heading towards its end - our guild has had players dropping away for some time now, and some previously staunch raiders who we expected to return with the launch of AQ haven't. I know a lot of people are looking forward to the rumoured re-release of the Burning Crusade, but my feeling at the moment is that, assuming it happens, it will be a much smaller event than I would have thought it would be a few months ago.
