It’s as good as I hoped - and may even be better.

The Oceanic servers filled up pretty quick, or at least the PVP ones did. By the time I was home from work the main server (Arugal) was full with a 10,000 person queue and 260 minute wait. Blizzard had opened up a second PVP server called Yojamba (which sounds more like a FFXIV server than WoW, but apparently it’s an abandoned Troll isle in Northern Stranglethorn) in the middle of the day, but that too was full and queued.

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As I pondered taking it easy on the medium-busy PVE server Remulos, another new PVP server appeared, and with an awesome name too: Felstriker. That’s a much better PVP name. So I hopped on, recreated Stroeb the Undead Rogue, and logged into a world of wonder.

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During the voice over intro there were streams of Undead emerging from the starting crypt, most with single-barrel names (thanks to the server only just popping), and all moving with purpose toward the first quest hub.

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The intro movie is very different to the current one, much more sinister and full of forboding, telling us that the Undead don’t give a damn about “the primitive races of the Horde” (let alone the Alliance), and will slaughter those that would hunt them as monsters:

They will go to any lengths to ensure their dark plans come to fruition. As one of the Forsaken, you must massacre any who pose a threat to the new order: Human, Undead, or otherwise…

One thing I noticed far more was the sound design. Along with the fantastically spooky music and muffled screams of the the intro, the entire zone pulses with a super low heartbeat which you don’t notice until you stop and listen for a few moments. The subtle tension that adds is terrific.

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Instead of taking the first quest, I just wandered through the starter area, poking around the edges of the map and seeing what was out there. I soon found Caretaker Caice, who wandered about restlessly with a lantern in front of a crypt, occasionally philosophising about the Undead state. Purely flavour, and purely great.

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I started attacking the many Duskbats that roam the zone, and was quickly equipped with top quality Grey gear - I even got Grey upgrades to my existing Grey gear. And, somewhat amazingly, a 6 slot Small Brown Pouch. Who said bag space would be a problem?!

The bat hunting was so fun I ended up levelling all the way to 3 without moving beyond the graveyards and surrounding hills. During this I was entertained by all manner of memory jolts, from weapon and defence skill upgrades to the beginnings of the skill tree adventure.

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Before logging off I tried one of the rites of passage of Vanilla by successfully kiting a Dusk Bat down into the spawning crypt.

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It all sounds so simple, but there’s something undefinably magic about it. I’m sure a lot of words will be written trying to capture exactly what that is, but for now I’m just thrilled we’re playing.

#Blaugust27

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It’s almost time. I tried to do some dailies in Nazjatar today but my heart wasn’t in it - Classic is too close.

I’m still unsure of which character to try first. As with many other bloggers, one inclination is to go with the first character I played - my Undead Rogue namesake. She was with me all the way through Kara, only eventually swapping out so I could level a tank for WotLK. Rogues are both easy and hard. For levelling, stealth allows Rogues to make their way to bosses and quest objectives without having to bother with the trash gauntlets, which is a major time saver. But in dungeons - and raids! - they are super squishy. I remember dying a lot, too much, and as the saying goes you can’t do any DPS when you’re dead.

Another option is a Hunter - echoing my current main, and also an early character of mine. Hunters too are an easy levelling class (once you get to level 10 and can tame a pet) and a it’s always fun to have a companion as you roam around. I clearly remember taking a Hunter into some BC dungeons and running out of ammo mid run, much to my horror, but on the whole they survive dungeons a lot better than Rogues, and bring good utility with their traps and snares. It’s was funny to read that Hunter’s were hands down the hardest class to recreate in Classic - pet management and ammo being the unique features I’m guessing.

My other main interest would be a Warrior. A Tauren Protection Warrior was my main throughout WotLK, and I loved the playstyle whether levelling or grouping. Charge is one of the all-time great abilities, and having plate on obviously great for staying alive. They do suffer a bit from not having any self heals though. And I do wonder if I’m up for tanking with strangers - the tankxiety is real.

In the end I think I’ll rotate around and see what feels best - unlike Method I’m not after a world first in a week. But I would like to find a guild and potentially join in with the raiding crowd so levelling can’t be too slow. Thinking about that possibility also means not tanking as I won’t have the time to dedicate to the gearing that raid tanking requires.

Plenty to ponder, and not much time to do it!

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Another thing to decide is how much UI to replace with add-ons. There are plenty of opinions on this, ranging from complete replacement to just the modifying the essentials to not touching anything:

something about the spirit of WoW Classic, a sort of back to nature, seeing the game in a raw or primitive form, makes me feel like Addons might be a bit of a betrayal, a cheat, an option that would deprive myself of the full experience.

BlizzardWatch have been tracking a list their best add-ons, and Curse have hundreds ready to go. If you did want to go with a whole hog, ‘Live’ game favourite ElvUI has been recreated for Classic too.

During BC and WotLK I used to build my own UI from scratch, grabbing bits and pieces from all over the place. I remember using TomTom, threat and damage meters, bags, and floating combat text - though why the latter became so popular is beyond me. My UI back then was a predictable messy nightmare, but I loved it - and loved constantly tinkering with it.

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Then I stumbled on the concept of total UI replacement packages put together by players. My favourite for a long time was the very minimalist but very functional GarUI from Garwulf, who still blogs very occasionally but no longer maintains his UI. It was a beautiful UI, fading into nothingness when you weren’t active so you could appreciate the world around you.

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More recently I’ve taken it easy and just plonked ElvUI into place, my bag manager of choice, and a few other utilities. Building your own is fun but maintaining it through patches and incompatibilities less so - ElvUI is a happy medium, if sometimes a bit over engineered.

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For Classic I think I’ll fall somewhere in the middle, replacing bags and toolbars, maybe nameplates (useful for Threat management on a tank), and some vendor helpers - I noticed during the stress test that the vendor price for items isn’t shown by default, something that’s super helpful when managing bag-rage during the early days when bag space is at a premium. But I’ll try to keep it simple and lightweight - unless the default UI cruft starts to become annoying.

I wish Blizzard had allowed us to logon in the past week or so, even if it was limited to the starter zones, just so we could configure our UIs before launch. There’s no rush of course, but it would have been a fun thing to do while waiting. Not long now!

#Blaugust26

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Instead of fumbling around trying to find my way from Ul’dah to Limsa Lominsa, I rolled up a new Marauder to simultaneously try a new city and a new Class, and be ready to fish the moment it was available.

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Turns out that was probably quite a lot slower than researching how to fly or sail from Ul’dah, but it was also much more informative. The Marauder is another Tank Class, which was a bit unfortunate but it was the only melee choice for Limsa Lominsa. I had wanted to try a Rogue, but strangely you can’t choose that Class until you’ve already levelled to 10 in another - it seems to be the only base Class with that kind of restriction. Maybe it was added slightly later?

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Still, it was interesting comparing the Gladiator and Marauder. The latter wields a big axe, and seems to be more about punishment and fury than the more classical stance of the Gladiator. In many ways they are very similar though, and the action unlock sequence was the same - combo skills, AOE skill, defence buff. One small difference was a guaranteed crit buff which was fun to use despite a appropriately short uptime.

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Limsa Lominsa itself was much more alive than Ul’dah, though it was more confusing to navigate with multiple levels and layers - if Ul’dah was Ironforge, this is more like Undercity.

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There was dozens of incredibly dressed PCs standing around the main Aether teleporter, mostly just posing and looking cool. I get the feeling it’s a bit of a runway for showing off your new outfits, and I spent quite a long time just standing around there and taking screenshots.

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Eventually I drew myself away and went about the business of levelling. The story was better than the Ul’dah mire of politics, with pirates and an identified ‘bad’ guy in someone called Sevrin. There was still an awful lot of courier and delivery quests though, so it still wasn’t particularly compelling. From Kaylriene’s comments it appears that it is well understood that the original ‘Realm Reborn’ questing leaves something to be desired:

For those who haven’t had the…”pleasure”…of playing the base 2.0 and 2.x quests of FFXIV, let me paint a word picture. The game is fun and charming, and has a clear sense of Final Fantasy about it, but questing in FFXIV is not really a gameplay exercise as much as it is a story one. Quests are often simply relaying a message from NPC A to NPC B, or killing no more than 4 enemies, or going to a spot in the world, clicking the interact-able spot, and watching the cutscene that unfolds. That’s not to say they are bad – I like FFXIV’s storytelling overall – but it is definitely not the gameplay-driven questing you might be used to from WoW and the like, where the game simply uses quests as connective tissue to make the gameplay have some degree of reason to it.

As a result apparently the devs are considering a reboot of the early game questing, though hopefully it’s not as world-changing as the Cataclysm event was in Warcraft, which steamlined everything but also permanently changed the environment of a lot of the earlier zones for the worse (Thousand Needles comes to mind).

Until then, I think Bhagpuss’s approach makes the most sense: ignore the MSQ and just enjoy the world, which is pretty spectacular.

So I churned through the MSQ chores in pretty good time, skim reading the text this time (having realised just how trivial most of it is from the Gladiator run) and taking advantage of the Aethernet teleports whenever they were on offer (something I avoided on the Gladiator in order to experience the world better). And finally at level 12 I was finished with the Marauder initiation questline and permitted to choose new Classes.

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I made a beeline for the Fishing Guild, and before long was the proud owner of a primitive rod and a can of smelly bait. The Lalafell seem to run the Fishing Guild by trying to out-pun each other, which doesn’t have the same appeal as the inimitable Nat Pagle, but at least they do take their fishing seriously.

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My first job was to fish up some anchovies to learn the ropes. It’s a much more sophisticated system than Warcraft, like the other crafting and gathering I’d seen in FFXIV. You equip bait, then cast, then wait for the telltale bend of the rod to reel in your catch. You don’t seem to be able to see the bobber in the water, which is a nice touch in Warcraft, but the animation on the whole is much more fishing.

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Once you start catching, you start revealing entries in your Fishing Log (I love the Log system in FFXIV, nothing quite beats an endless checklist). Again it’s far more detailed than Warcraft, and more compelling as a result. There are day/night cycles, weather, different baits for different fish, advice not to just stand in one place and fish as they’ll stop biting, etc.

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There’s also a wealth of skills to be learnt over time - including ‘stealth’ that allows you to sneak past enemy mobs when you just want to Fish. And you can upgrade not only your rod, but a full set of fishing gear too which has bonuses to gathering and looks entirely the part - it’s fishing gear not just gathering gear, and that attention to detail is lovely.

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If FFXIV were my main MMO, crafting would get a lot of attention, with fishing top of the list. For now, with my subscription about to expire, I’m going to enjoy pottering about and filling my bags with fish.

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#Blaugust25

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As Classic approaches I’ve found it interesting how Blizzard don’t seem to be trying very hard to turn the huge enthusiasm into cold hard cash.

The servers are full to the extent Blizzard are spooling up new ones every day, and the general atmosphere (at least from those not swearing off it entirely) is exactly as Wilhelm put it: all I want to do right now is play Warcraft Classic.

With all this energy, and given Classic is somewhat generously included in an existing Warcraft subscription, you would think that a company as efficient at making money as Blizzard would be doing everything they could to sell stuff. And yet all I can see that is definitively tied to Classic is the retro t-shirts on the Blizzard merch store. Soft of nice shirts, but there’s only a few.

There was also the 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition, which isn’t strictly Classic but comes pretty close, but it sold out instantly and has never been restocked. Which is annoying for collectors as it was never tagged as ‘Limited’ as far as I know.

The most obvious thing to sell would be a new Classic box which, given the popularity of the 15th box, would be a hit - especially if they ‘threw in’ a mount for the Live game. Warcraft streamers Taliesin & Evitel posted the press kit they received, and it’s exactly the kind of thing Collectors would love:

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But while something like a box would have sold like hotcakes before the launch, it’s unlikely to sell after. Perhaps there is a merch onslaught still to come, or maybe they are hedging in case Classic falls flat on its face after the first month (which seems unlikely at the moment).

Obviously Blizzard are counting on new subscriber money, and there’s no doubt there will be a sub spike and potentially some conversion to the live game (we need a better word for that - Blizzard call it ‘Retail’ but that’s too mercenary).

But look at that press kit! Let us buy it Blizzard, pretty please? One good thing about Blizzard ignoring their potential cash cow is that we can reward independent creators like Frenone and Naariel with our patronage instead.

#Blaugust24

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FFXIV continues to impress with it’s in-game help and training systems. I’ve reached a level where I can queue for Duties (aka Dungeons/Instances) as a Gladiator tank, and I was tempted to do one, even getting as far as queuing before quickly bailing and saving the poor Duty Finder group from a rookie tank. It seemed a bit soon, and for a new player it would probably be a tough ask having never tanked before.

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I was surprised the game was willing to throw me into it, given its propensity to introduce concepts first. However I think I’m slightly ahead of the level queue due to completing all the Hunting Log quests, side quests, training professions, etc. For that reason I hadn’t returned to Ul’dah recently, and when I did I found there was an excellent solo training function available.

By talking to a trainer, I was queued into some solo Duties which introduce you to the concept of tanking step by step. The first was about avoiding enemy tells (the orange warnings on the ground), the next was using combos to draw enmity/threat, then how to draw multiple mobs attention, etc.

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I’d already worked most of this out just by running around, but then I am well versed in the MMO combat style and tanking as a concept. If you weren’t this kind of systematic training is a terrific way to help people learn a Class and that Class’s in-game role. The training was tailored for Gladiators, naming specific abilities and how to use them. Which is very impressive as it means there is no doubt the same kind of thing for every other Class too.

It’s a lot of work to put in for the developers, but I think worth it as a way to show a new (or old!) player how tanking, healing, and DPS works. This is something other games could really learn from - Warcraft provides precisely zero help for learning how to tank or heal, or even the basic DPS rotation.

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During all this I’ve been following the M(ain) S(tory) Q(uest) - I’ve even learnt some of the acronyms now - which I’m finding rather uninspiring. It seems to be a story of political intrigue, with various named factions and figures all trying to gain power in Ul’dah. The problem with it is that as players we have no investment in any of the people being talked about, and it does seem like a political game rather than something of world shaking importance which a hero like us (ahem) would be needed for.

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I have also failed in my quest to get to Limsa Lominsa to learn fishing. I was pleased when I stumbled on a map reference that seemed to show I could catch a boat there from a nearby town, but when I arrived there the harbour-master told me the way was temporarily closed. I suspect it’s because I haven’t completed some pre-requisite, but it was very disappointing.

Both the political nature of the MSQ and the Fishing failure are making me ponder rolling a second character who starts in Limsa Lominsa, just to see how different it is. I have five days left on my 30 day account, so that might be a good way to spend it.

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#Blaugust23

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