Turning Back Time

Each week players are given a "bonus activity" which yields a perk for doing a particular activity. Last week, for example, World Quests granted bonus reputation and people who did 20 of them got a little satchel of stuff, previous to that was a bonus for arena skirmishes, yada yada. This week I got the pleasure of "kinda" reliving my leveling experience with "Timewalking: Burning Crusade"


No. Just "no".

Players and their gear may be scaled down to level 70 and then romp through Heroic Burning Crusade dungeons. Do five of them within a week and you'll get a couple of nifties and a piece of gear from the current raid. This last bit caught my eye and I started chain running them with Sun. In a couple of hours I had run my five and I had upgraded my weapon a little with the relic prize I had gotten from the bag, but was it fun?

Almost. I'll give it a solid "that was almost a nice time". It was certainly nice tromping through the old dungeons I haven't seen in years again and running into Millhouse Manastorm in the prison dungeon brought I solid grin. Also, every boss downed dropped token currency used to buy heirloom upgrades, toys, and transmog gear, but I'll give it three problems.

The first was the utter trash that fills your bags. Boss loot scales to "your level" (if you were a fresh-faced wide-eyed level 110), but everything else is vendorbait and clutters something fierce, but I found myself still looting things just in case something with a neat transmog appearance dropped. Sigh.

Secondly, I think it's a damn shame they only run an event like this for a week in over a month. This is the sort of thing that should be a constant option. Get more mileage out of your older content, encourage fun farming of old school rep instead of one-shot killing bosses. It could be amazing. Could.

Ultimately, it gets killed by the third problem: scaling. I know Blizzard tried their best, but it just wasn't there. I get the feeling it was tuned for people with minimum gear and at this point, no one has that. It might have been a little more fun on a max-level Anyth, as hunters are very mobile with a lot of instant multi-target burst damage, but as a druid it utterly sucked. Out of the five, there was only one team that proceeded at a "normal" pace. Throw a single paladin or hunter into the mix and you've got pack upon pack of things eating floor before I can get off a second spell.

Still, I can't complain too vociferously, as it was really cool seeing dozens of players in Shattrath for the first time in nearly a decade, even if they were there just for the token vendor.

The Land of the Hardcore Casual

I've come to accept that OnSunshine is presently my main while Strev gathers dust by the auction house (mostly by disenchanting things). She's matched Strev for questline progress and gear, with a slight advantage in the weapon-department. The first big raid from Burning Crusade, Karazhan, is being retired soon and being converted into a 5-man instance with the next patch (aka The Zul'Gurub Treatment), so for fun I took Strev on a tour through the decrepit castle for one last tour.

Ok. I admit it. It was entirely ungratifying, although every kill was earning reputation with the Violet Eye, a secret sect of the Kirin Tor mages I will never care enough to Exalt. Stomping around a level 70 raid with a 110 mage was ridiculous. Basically, it was wander around until I got annoyed with all of the things clawing at my clothing, pressing "arcane explosion" and aoeing all of the 16k health mobs with 1M+ damage. The average critter was hitting me for less than 100 damage and with over 2M health, I was a god against them. Still, what it lacked in challenge it made up for with ambiance. The music was stellar and the castle's design was well thought out. It has several wings that are mostly linear without seeming overly straight path to the next boss fight. The bosses themselves were two hit wonders and I found myself drawing out the fights with frost nova to get more lines of dialogue out of them.

I think I'll wander through ICC next at some point; it was the first raid I ever did years ago, and I owe a certain plaguemaster a little payback. Curiously, I don't really feel enthused at the thought of going back and collecting the achievements; probably just knowing it's a checklist instead of an actual challenge makes the victory hollow.

I started poking around on Anyth a little, buying her a weapon that is ridiculously overpowered for Pandaland and clearing out a few familiar quest hubs, as both OnSunshine and Strev have stalled out for progress, having gotten as far as they can without Mythic dungeons and "proper" raiding.

I've looked over the LFP tool and each entry seems to be along the lines of 3 DPS sitting around looking for a tank and "a healer that doesn't SUCK lol" or "carry me and you can use my keystone" (a prize that lets people run dungeons on insane levels of difficulty). I may give it a go for "old school" raids-- the current raids are filled with the usual stupid of "will examine your posted DPS logs before invites", "link heroic kill achieve & we will invite U 2 regular" and such.

It's a strange thing, living in the land of the Hardcore Casual.

Like a Month to the Flame

For fun, I stoked my masochistic side and posted my DK story to reddit's /r/wow community. Some people "got it" and told me I made their day and other railed against the "shitposter" with his passive-aggressive whining. When all was said and done, I walked away with probably fewer internet karma points, 2 months of Reddit gold (thanks again, guys!), and a genuine offer to help my lackluster DPS. For all my joking around, I really do want to up my game, so I took the Kind Soul up on his offer.

After a few private messages, I've installed Boomkinator (a nice addon for tracking DOT timers and other rotation reminders) and enabled combat logging. A few gear upgrades and a bit of practicing and I'm now hitting 160k DPS against raider combat dummies. Rawr! I'm actually eager to see how that translates into a live fight. At some point I may even remember I originally intended to use Sun as a healer.

Otherwise, a month since I've re-subbed has come and gone. I know this primarily due to the polite email I got from Blizzard letting me know that my time was nearing completion and would I please consider paying them moneys? Ha ha, Blizzard. Not when I'm sitting on a mountain of gold and you're selling tokens.

At my lowest gold point, I was down to about 170k on Strev, after binging on the initial token and a like amount on gear and things to improve his overall quality of life. Since then, I've probably spent another 60k on "incidentals", bar tabs, hookers, and blow. (Unrelated: a quick trip to Moonguard's Goldshire has shown that nothing there has changed in a few years.), so that puts my "balance" at 110k gold or, if you prefer, about 3 months' worth of WoW tokens before my earnings.

Full disclosure: I have not been goblining it up, not by a longshot. Strev has primarily sold the dust and shards he's earned by disenchanting quest rewards. He's made about 8k profit on glyphs, which is a drop in the bucket compared to Sun. Sun, being Herbalist/Skinner has been making mad bank doing what I've always considered the Least Effort gold farming: picking up anything not nailed down. Herbs fetch 70g a piece and many nodes spawn 4-5 at a time. She's done a handful of "herb circuits" but at no point have I ever said, "Today I'm going to spend hours farming plants for sale". My first week or so was leveling Strev past Draenor the second was exclusively Strev's March to Max Level, so Sun has been part timing for less than a couple of weeks. So what does that translate to?

Current cash on hand: 393k. Good lord, that's around 10k a day just futzing around. Went ahead and bought another token for 35.5k, then dumped 10k into our guild's weekly lottery to help drum up ticket sales. Still it begs me to ask, how do some people stay broke in this game?

From a character development standpoint, Sun is rapidly catching up to Strev and has already surpassed him in base weapon level, due to some nice World Quest relic drops. What's keeping Strev from being relegated to "alt" status is primarily how much work I've done on his quest line completions and reputation gains. A lot of it is significantly "pain in the arse" that I don't particularly want to do it again on an alt in less than a month. Otherwise, things like achievements, pets, toys, and mounts are shared across characters so besides some gated content, there's no real "penalty" for changing it up.