Legendarily Drunk

Ah, holiday weekends. With absolutely nothing pressing, I spent more than a few hours in Azeroth. Friday night I'm wandering around Stormwind, fishing for cat food (Seriously, I'm starting to think ScratchFever has a disorder or something) and a guild advert catches my eye. As an aside, one thing we don't have are add-ons that send mass, unwanted invites to people, so recruitment messages are more prevalent. Anyway, this particular message was a group of drunkards seeking more like-livered individuals to join them on their adventures. I was already pretty drunk, so I ask for an invite. Thus, I became a member of "Legendarily Drunk", which considering how I spent my weekend, an apt tag.

It's a "medium-RP" guild and I was perhaps their tenth member or so-- at the time, everyone around level 12-15, and we established a goal of "Let's do Deadmines on Monday"! By the time Monday rolls around we're sitting at maybe 30 people or so, have a small Discord set up, and the average player level is 15-18 with some significant outliers. Unsurprisingly the group is super-friendly. I seriously doubt we'd ever clear Molten Core, but for casual dungeon running or quest groups, it'll be just fine.

For myself, I suddenly had a goal. "Deadmines-ready". Well, the dungeon is roughly 17-21… let's do this! I'd been bouncing between Westfall and Rockridge Mountains for a while completing quests. To my utter delight, my explorations had yielded a field of level 17-18-ish crabs tucked in the far southwestern coast of Westfall. Like others of its ilk, they weren't needed for any quest and offered an easy non-stop xp factory. My grinding was interrupted only by a wandering 20 elite murloc and the occasional need to empty my sacks.

Eventually I wandered into Duskwood and started the process of cleaning the forest of wolves and spiders. Everything in Duskwood has you running from one end of the zone to the other, so I contented myself with murdering every virtual animal between point a and point b every time. Duskwood at level is a truly terrifying place. Everything has a huge aggro radius, the monsters wander a lot, and your adversaries aren't squeamish about putting 10 minute debuffs on you. (Ah, Classic!) Still, I persevered -- by Monday I was picking off skeletons from a distance and my cat had been envenomed so many times I was genuinely surprised when the green fur reverted to white.

Upshot: by the time the group was ready for Deadmines, most of the team (warrior, paladin, warlock, and priest) were all level 17-19 and I was 23. This was, of course, a blessing and a curse because "aggro management is everyone's responsibility". Scratch got to off-tank a few times when the pulls got dicey and we got overwhelmed a couple of times (only one full-team wipe), but the dungeon itself was a major change of pace from retail. Every pull is slow and calculated. Bosses are generally tank-and-spank affairs with no real mechanics to worry about beyond "Oh, god! He spawned a couple of adds!" It was righteously fun. There isn't so much "don't stand in the fire", but "watch for patrols and don't face pull things".

After the quests were turned in and our party disbanded, I returned to Duskwood to finish up a few miscellaneous tasks that culminated with hitting level 25 and summoning the abomination, Stitches. The whole Abercrombie (aka The Embalmer) questline is my all-time favorite Classic quest series and I absolutely hate what they did to it in Cataclysm.

Funding my adventures continue to be a constant challenge. At 25 I've scraped together in the neighborhood of 9 gold or so. While this seems like a veritable dragon's hoard of wealth, each new skill is costing me around 60 silver and there are a LOT I've skipped at this point. ("Do I REALLY need 'track undead'? "Dude, you're hunting in Duskwood!" "Yeah, but do I NEEEEEEEED it?") If anything, the choices I'm making now really underscores how terribly they stripped fun utility spells and skills from Retail over the years. I'll get everything eventually, but it's just judicious thriftiness for now.

Engineering is paying off in utility, if not in coin. Not running out of bullets because I can carry the things I need to make more on the fly is nice. Very nice.

My next plans for the coming days is taking care of some lingering issues in Duskwood and getting together a group for the Stormwind stockades.