Alliance experiments

I have a level 85 dwarf warrior (formerly Shank) and a now level 86 dwarf shaman ("newly" created with the help of the Mists of Panderia level boost) which I thought would be interesting to try as a somewhat higher level view of the Alliance side than my druid Duillnar could give me. After the usual actionbar pondering and some quick experimentation out in the world I queued them as tank and healer respectively and coincidentally ended up in the Siege of Niuzao Temple both times.

My main observation is that when dungeoneering it's surprisingly non-obvious which faction you're on. Between the pace of the game and the various spell effects and so on you don't really see the other characters like you did in the original dungeons or do at a higher level for example in pauses during a raid.

Otherwise -

• I love Ghost Wolf. I'll use it when there's even half of an excuse, and often it's actually handy!
• Tanking as a warrior is quite enjoyable. Heroic Leap is fun and useful and combined with Intercept gives good mobility. As with my druid, my warrior has good AoE threat abilities and with groups who are still levelling gear imbalance isn't an issue.
• It's become more obviously a computer game than an RPG. While this was always to some degree the case, abilities such as Heroic Leap to me are suspension of disbelief-breaking - while it may be appropriate with the ever-increasing level cap it also highlights the (relative) consistency of the Classic game.

So if dungeoneering isn't an issue, at least as far as my view of my own character impacts me, and given that I find the Alliance side levelling rather mundane compared to my Horde experience, I can mostly see myself sticking to Oswyn and Grulnak. I might visit my dwarf shaman Grumgar occasionally for Alliance tourism, taking advantage of the button familiarity given to me by Grulnak, rather than trying to get my head around any of my former array of characters.

I'm still fundamentally me

Which I think means I can't make my mind up about characters...

Oswyn was chugging along nicely at level 23 - he's a levelling Fury build with a nice new Wingblade from a couple of Wailing Caverns runs, grinding and questing in Hillsbrad with very little downtime thanks to bandaging and Cannibalize. I then get to the Elixir of Suffering quest and having poisoned the toad I'm suddenly not sure whether I want to be Horde anymore. Thinking that if I'm going to swap characters (again) I'm best off doing it as soon as possible I started a tour of my retail game Alliance characters.

My druid Duillnar constantly draws me back due to his versatility, although I also need to remember why I've only got him to level 42 - in the old days they really seemed to have got the jack of all trades, master of none thing right (for example the lack of interrupts made fighting casters a pain). Blimey are they complicated nowadays - with the way specialisations work they're effectively become four different classes.

To limit the number of new spells and action bars I needed to work out I thought to try queuing as a healer until I saw that the demand was for tanks. After some more head scratching and spell book leafing I added tanking as an option, and immediately popped into Maraudon - with the Lord Vyletongue fight already in progress!

Given one fight didn't teach me very much I queued again and found myself in a different group, this time at Earth Song Falls. The group leader was a Go Go Go warrior who seemed to think he should leap ahead and start the pull and have me pick up the pieces. With the tools in the modern tanking box this didn't go as horribly as it could have and after Landslide and the Princess that was another dungeon done.

I'm not quite sure what this has taught me except for the difference between the original and the modern game. My two tanking runs of Wailing Caverns seemed to me chaotic at times, and at the start of the first there was pressure to pick up the pace, but everyone played their roles well, we had no deaths and the healers were happy. To me this says that a lot of the chaos was probably just my perception, although some will have been that everything is the tank's responsibility while for the others - even DPS who have also got crowd control in mind - the focus is much narrower.

I've a couple more Alliance tests planned but probably I'll go back to Oswyn and just not do the quests I'm not comfortable with!

So it begins (again)

WoW Classic has got me!

The adverts tempted me to have a go and I'm really enjoying it so far. Unfortunately I wasn't sold enough to pre-reserve any character names, so my Forsaken warrior is now called Oswyn.

I'm not really sure what my favourite bits are but -

• I love the ambient music in the Barrens
• Although I've levelled I'm not sure how many characters through Kalimdor I'm enjoying the sense of "going out into the unknown". Though a slight shadow of the first time around, that first cross of the bridge into the Barrens was exciting, and with new-Grulnak I did the run into Ashenvale to pick up the Splintertree flight point at far too low a level, keeping a careful eye out for red-level mobs
• Although some people of course are level 60 already it's still an occasion when you see someone on a mount (i.e. level 40!), and generally people are levelling in a helpful spirit such as grouping for shared credit when Kreenig (briefly) spawns
• Levelling weapon skills are weirdly enjoyable, as you know it's something the modern game has lost

Initially I made a new Grulnak before re-thinking with the help of a re-read of the posts on this blog. Given my alt-itis it seemed daft to have two versions of the same character, especially since shamans weren't especially viable main healers back in the day. Since I used to (mostly) enjoy tanking, and often undead to me feel more "right" dungeoneering than do orcs, I'm planning - at the moment - to replay Shank, with somewhat more foresight of the end game experience this time.

Having levelled through Durotar again I thought I'd do a fly-through of the modern version with level 98 Grulnak. It was interesting to see things like the new developments on the Echo Isles, but I was surprised and bizarrely offended that the harpies and quillboars around Razor Hill are now around level 20!