Casual Adventures in Anniversary

I recently mentioned in my last blog post about Classic WoW, that I was doing some casual levelling on Anniversary while I wait for BlizzCon, it's been fun, but my time with it is probably coming to an end at this point.

I rolled on the Horde side, as I'm an Alliance player at heart, so as a result, the majority of my time in Classic is on the Alliance. Furthermore, I thought I'd mix it up a bit this time for my class, so I went with a Troll hunter, and it's been fun. I forgot how good hunters were for levelling, and some quests that are usually a real struggle on the classes I like to play (heavy armour melee), are a breeze on a hunter with a pet.

 After a day or two of levelling, a small YouTuber I watch called midventures made a video stating he was starting a casual guild project on the same server and faction that I was playing on. For a bit of my history with WoW, I tend to be fully solo most of the time, and I don't tend to join guilds. I find guilds in WoW to be almost business-like, in that most people treat them as a ladder to move upwards, as opposed to joining a guild purely for social reasons and to hang out with people. Saying that, I came from Star Wars Galaxies, which was a heavily social MMO with a lot of roleplayers, so WoWs guilds ecosystem has always felt quite foreign to me, although I know ultimately, not every guild will be like this.

I figured I might as well join, and see how it goes, and it's been a pleasant experience overall playing with people with a similar mindset to how I play. I still have mostly played solo, but having a chilled & friendly guild chat as I quest and explore has been a nice bonus for me, and I know there's no real expectations, so that usual sort of anxiety & dread that guilds in WoW tend to bring me hasn't really been an issue.

While I haven't managed to do any guild dungeon runs, I have done a Ragefire Chasm run, and a Wailing Caverns run via pugging. Both dungeons did end successfully, Wailing Caverns was a bit of a trial as our tank abruptly said he didn't have time and left 75% of the way through the dungeon. I don't fully blame him, as we had got lost multiple times, and had multiple wipes, but the tank didn't really help himself as he refused to sit and eat, or even pull mobs away, so every pull ended up becoming a stressful life and death scenario. This meant that for the final quarter of the dungeon, my pet, and the Warlock's voidwalker were chaotically bouncing threat between each other, but with the tank gone, we could pull in a much safer way at least.

It got to the point that towards the end, we all just wanted to be finished as we were about an hour and a half in by the time we got to the final escort part of the dungeon, and the group chat had devolved into mild chaos as the length it had taken us to get here started to take its toll. We did prevail in the end though!

I'm unsure how much more of Anniversary I will play at this point, I dove in just to get a bit of a taster so I could scratch the itch I had to play Classic. I'm in my mid-twenties now which is usually where I start to slow down in Classic anyway, and with Blizzcon closing in, I think I'll mostly be waiting until that news drops so we can see what the future holds for Classic.