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My first raid ever was in Kara and it was an incredible memory. It was only one time. Never did any of the other raids. I'm really looking forward to raiding in TBC.

WOTLK in the other hand is where I got into raiding when I was like 18 years old. I loved Naxx. I had to quit before we downed Yogg but every other boss in Ulduar was dead.

Having done plenty of Nax in Classic it's hard to get excited about going back for months.

I'm hoping they drag TBC out really slowly for anniversary and let it linger. That might just be me though. Anyone else?

I’m starting to think some players have actually moved in at the tunnel entrance. Same names, same spots, just standing there day after day like it’s their new apartment.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started charging rent.

Seriously though, it’s getting really annoying. They don’t even try to hide it — full AFK from start to finish — and nothing seems to happen to them no matter how often they get reported.
Is Blizzard even looking at AFK reports these days?

The current server-wide layering system creates a frustrating imbalance across Azeroth. While leveling zones like The Barrens or Desolace are practically deserted (where even 3 layers feel excessive), end-game zones are severely overcrowded.

This overcrowding particularly impacts valuable resource farming:

• Winterfall Firewater farmers competing in Winterspring
• Rich Thorium Veins in zones like Un'Goro and Winterspring
• High-level herbs like Plaguebloom and Black Lotus
• Valuable mob grinding spots for Essence of Water/Fire/Air

With everyone packed into the same few profitable zones, what should be enjoyable farming sessions turn into frustrating competition. A zone-specific layering system (allowing 10+ layers in high-traffic areas while reducing layers in quieter zones) would help distribute the population more effectively, making the experience more reminiscent of original Vanilla WoW where you'd regularly encounter others during leveling, without the current extreme overcrowding in farming zones.

I do not like AV. I never have. I think it is the least exciting BG in all of WoW. I have always just ignored it for the most part. This time, I decided that I would get the white puppy dog. I have never done it, and now, I'm going to. I have been banging my shield against Van for the past couple of days, and frankly, I'm going insane. Today, starting at about 9am, I got a ridiculous idea and decided that I would RP walk from the cave to Dun Baldur and only draw my blade to challenge Vanndar Stormpike. That's what I did. I would /wave and /hi to every Horde and Alliance that I came across. I had singular focus and would not soil my blade until I sank it into the heart of my true enemy. I called it my march for peace. There is no reason for all that bloodshed. Vanndar and I could settle it in single combat.

Some were confused and did not understand, sending me back to the graveyard to begin my journey again. Other's respected my quest and carried on, or waved back. A few times some even joined me in my quest. Horde and Alliance alike have walked by my side today. It was dumb and fun. I made it as far as Dun Baldur bridge before the match ended on more than one occasion. One such time, I had a retinue of 5 or 6 players, horde and alliance that were escorting me. The last few matches, I began to report what I was witnessing on my journey. "Alliance were attacking Tower Point GY, but Goff and his fellow raiders were able to fend them off" "Dawgydawg is facing Commander Randolf in single combat" "Shamtastik defeated a gnome mage in single combat" "Ryz is defending SHB with his comrades" etc etc

This brings me to my question. Several times today a player would request that I be reported for afk. In most cases, I would explain in raid chat that I was on a march for peace, and that would be the end of it. However, at around 3 pm today a player (who I won't name) just wouldn't let it go. He was constantly campaigning for me to get banned. It started almost immediately. He obviously thought of himself as Drek'thar's fluffer because he was ordering troops to different parts of the field and insulting the troop as a whole when they didn't satisfy his demands. He decided from the earliest moments that I was not worthy to share a battlefield with him. There were many players in the same chat who were openly supporting me. They were enjoying what I was doing. I was absolutely not afk. I did not walk in a straight line. I avoided obstacles, I heralded the deeds of players in the chat. I was on the same mission as they were: to kill Vanndar Stormpike. I was kicked for afk just before the end of the battle. I was walking across the Dun Baldur bridge.

My question is: Did I violate the terms of service by not mounting up to slam myself against other players and NPCs as fast as possible? OR Did that shiftless loser with no sense of imagination, sense of humor, self worth, or self confidence violate the terms of service by abusing the mass reporting system?

I ask you, who's opinions I value above all others.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who responded. Even the lame ones who think it takes absolutely 40 players and not 39 to kill a bunch of npcs. You'll be happy to know that I hit exalted today, and will hopefully never have to experience that POS excuse for a BG ever again.

Just a bunch of random thoughts.

My History

I started in TBC as a 14yo. I still remember getting defense capped and my heart pounding out of my chest tanking my first Kara. Since then, I’ve played every xpac, never fully completing one. I have multiple CE’s to my name and currently play Cata Classic where I’m in a world top-150 guild.

Key takeaways leveling 1-60 for the first time

• It’s slow but has obvious charm. There’s something endearing about being in the world with a bunch of other players all focused on the same task, playing cooperatively. I used Questie and even though it was on rails I still can say I get what people talk about when they get nostalgic about leveling.
• Some quests are abhorrently tedious due to drop rates or rare spawns. This was really frustrating and made me put the game down since, as a warrior, grinding takes forever since I already need to eat/bandage every other mob.
• Tanking is incredibly unforgiving, especially at later levels. There’s no way to meaningfully AoE tank and threat generation sucks until you get gear, which ultimately means dps has to either hold back (which sucks as a dps), or pull threat and kite. I eventually learned that mages will cast blizzard and deal with their mobs their own way, but this felt very wrong on principle coming from later iterations of the game.
• Mechanics are very simple, but arguably unforgiving compared to content at the lowest difficulty in Retail. A lot of mobs hit way harder than I anticipated, had weird mechanics like threat drops and knockbacks, but ultimately if you know these are coming, they’re easy to deal with.

I leveled 54-60 spamming BRD for HGC/HoJ because, AIUI, these are necessary items for raiding as a fury warrior in classic. They never dropped. I took a break from slamming my head at BRD by trying to tank my first LBRS. Once that concluded, I decided to put the game down until TBC. The grind simply isn’t for me, especially when the payoff is [Warning: opinions ahead] target dummy bosses with a three-button rotation where I’m mostly spamming heroic strike with my unlimited rage and have literally more consumables to manage than class spells/utility that I’ll use when DPSing.

Observations on the state of the game today

Shoutout to u/Svencredible for this comment, much of which I’m going to paraphrase.

Reddit and WoW forums aren’t meaningful sample sizes of the WoW Anniversary Classic population, but regardless, players here fall into two camps:

1. Players who play for power progression. The point of the game is to have the best gear possible. Parsing or maybe getting HWL is a side-effect of that. They aim to clear all content because that’s how you get the best gear.
2. Players who play for the “sandbox” that vanilla was designed as. Classic is a giant world where you can do anything, and these players enjoy the journey and all of the emergent, social gameplay that comes along with it.

These two players are not necessarily, but often are, at odds. IMO the entire GDKP debate is a symptom of this divide: progressionists see it as a safe, reliable way to raid and get loot (especially for their alts) while sandboxers see it as a slap in the face of WoW’s intended design. It’s a gamification, a sterile reduction of their favorite game.

The sandboxers want to take their time with their holistic approach to the game and character development while the progressionists want to go as fast as possible and ignore anything sub-optimal or off the track of that path to power. There’s currently a massive resource shortage which has led to inflation in consumable prices, and while progressionists either have to spend hours farming gold or RMT to play the game they want to, the sandboxers (at worst) point and laugh at those enjoying such a small subset of what the game has to offer.

The progressionists basically treat this game like a mobile game: 1. Log in to get your WBs 1. Farm or more like buy gold for your consumes 1. Log back in for raid night at a chance to become more powerful and optionally show off your acquired power via logs

There are even emergent features that allow players to enter this gameplay loop as fast as possible: mage boosts. Want to skip what sandboxers consider the game to be and instead go right ahead to what progressionists consider the game to be?

[Opinion] The sandboxers that enjoy classic wow are a dying breed desperately trying to hold on to something nostalgic that can’t be recaptured in modern times. There needs to be an RP server, not for people who want to pretend that they’re their character, but for people who want to pretend it’s 2006 again and they’re lost in the big, beautiful, populated world of Azeroth.

Furthermore, you have to be really invested in this game to do anything other than power progression once 1-60 is done. There really needs to be novelty in just logging on and being in the world, and given that it’s all already discovered, is there any novelty left?

Classic+?

It’s not happening. Ask yourself, who is this for? If you want power progression, play SoD or Retail or Cata/MoP, iterations of this game that are much more streamlined for power progression.

It doesn’t make sense to cater to the Sandboxers because of how small of a subset of Classic they are. You could add “more quests and zones” and even some much-needed class balance, but the progressionists are going to consume it in a day, figure out what’s required to max their player power, and ignore the rest.

TL;DR: there is none, this is a bunch of random thoughts.

Seeing how toxic PvP servers are, there would be nothing more than to make a Rogue seethe in PvP. I'm think it's either hunters or warlocks but is there a best of the beat class to do the job well??

A friend of mine recently convinced me to resub and play in one of the anniversary classic wow realms. I played very casually at the end of cataclysm and into mists of pandaria. Never made it to end game content/raiding but enjoyed grinding quests and pve stuff like dungeons.

I decided I want to learn how to tank, so I made an orc warrior. It's been a week and I'm lvl 17, yesterday afternoon I was doing some blacksmithing stuff and turning in completed quests in orgrimmar when I decided to try the look for group feature and try tanking Ragefire Chasm.

Received an invite relatively quickly from a group that was made up of a bunch of guild members. I warned them I had never tanked before and they said not to worry about it, Gave me a few tips and we rolled with it. We cleared the dungeon twice. No one died!!!

I still have a lot to learn, but I was relieved to join a group as a total random and have friendly players help me out. I think their guild was called "S Tier" or "S Class".

I see a lot of stories of toxicity in in this game, and definitely noticed it all those years ago, but it is reassuring to see there are decent gamers out there willing to help out a new player like me. Cheers to those sorts of people, I hope they know it made my afternoon to be greeted with kindness while trying something new.

Zug Zug.

TLDR; nice guild helped with my first tank experience and I'm grateful for them. For the Horde!

Hello all, and thank you for taking the time to read this.

I’m currently level 56, and hoping to hit 60 at some point next week. I’ve seen a lot of different rogues, in a lot of different gear and currently feeling overwhelmed!

I wondered if someone could help me with what I should be aiming for first? I work from home, so play roughly 8-9 hours a day whilst I’m working, so grinding for gear is no issue, it also has given me a lot of time to farm lots of gold so that’s my two avenues of collecting gear. I’ve currently got 3 shadowcraft items that were cheap on the AH and that looked like the first set to aim for.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Thank you! 🙂

He was ganking levelers for well over 30min, corpse camping. I first tried to kill him 1v1 and lost, my friend showed up in stealth and once the rogue opened on me the two of us made easy work of him. The irony of his comment is peak WoW

Hi all,

kinda new to the classic scene, but i've played a whole lotta wow before.
I'm a level 33 priest, healing in a group of friends. I struggle leveling alone because I went full healer, but i don't really mind cause i tend to grind dungeons with buddies. My question is though, how do I heal efficiently in dungeons? Again I have full healing talents and runes, including strength of soul, soul warding, circle of healing and pain suppression.
I generally bubble tank (paladin) and slap a renew on him, then I use lesser heal to top him off when he takes more damage than renew can handle, or heal when he gets chunked. when i see a dps pull aggro, i shield him. if needed i also slap a renew, otherwise lesser heal is fine.

My biggest question is if lesser heal is worth it at level 33 or if i should abbandon it in favor of heal/flash heal. Or if I should use different ranks of healing spells...but that seems like a nightmare and honestly I would avoid it. Is there anything different I should be doing? Any tips for dungeoneering? We're trying to run scarlet monastery now, we cleared graveyard and library, we might do a few more runs tomorrow or try armory.

Alliance - Dreamscythe - Alterac Valley

Yesterday was spent on feral druid. Was going to see if AB was any good, queued for a game, got in, servers got DDoS'd before we reached stables. I took this as a sign to stick with AV. As noted in comments yesterday, these are NA games which last significantly longer than EU games, nonetheless most of these are on the fast side for NA games.

Day 3 - 13W - 9L | 7.5 hours including queue times | 13,011 honor per hour

Day 2 - 16W - 14L | 11.4 hours including queue times | 12,958 honor per hour

Day 1 - 17W - 13L | 9.7 hours including queue times | 14,738 honor per hour

I'm a level 51 dwarf warrior and no training I can find has the starter quest for this chain, A Troubled Spirit. I've checked IF and Stormwind. What the hell do I do?

I have seen some stuff on youtube about SoD recently, but i feel like it is coming to an end. Is it still worth it to start from 0?