Finding our Epic Mounts in WoW Classic

We had wrung our hands a some about the state of affairs at Blizzard.  A couple of us cancelled our accounts with pithy remarks in the comments.  But the fact that WoW Classic is the game that brings us together every week overrode our anger at the company, salved a bit by the ramp up in firings of key individuals.  And with the state all over them about this, they’ll be under a microscope for a long while.  Just go ask the Riot management team, which has been under investigation for a few years now and still has the government calling them out for bad behavior.

The upshot, however, is that we are still playing and we have actually spent the last three weekends running around in Azeroth rather than Outland because we wanted our epic mounts.

In the revised Outland lineup, where UIa fired the old team, two of the replacement, Wilhelm and Fergorin are paladins, while Beanpole is a Warlock, which means the three of us have special quests for our mounts.

The quests require a number of special items and 350 gold to pay off one NPC or another.  Much of it can be done solo, but the first thing on this list for the group was to head to Stratholme again because I needed to get four vials of Stratholme holy water.

Back in Strat

You need five for the quest and I had picked up two in our last visit, but they look like mana potions in my bag so I accidentally drank one during the Omor fight in Hellfire Ramparts the last time we were there.  Oops.

So in we went to find some more for me.  They drop from crates that are scattered liberally throughout the instance.  However I would estimate that less than 1 in 5 crates actually contains something, with the other four unleash some minor mobs or a poisonous malady, so we had to go a ways into the instance in order to fill my order.  Far enough to wipe when an old friend showed up.

One of the more memorable vanilla catch phrases

Ula had actually substitted her level 58 booster warrior Scscla into the group for this run, so we were running a different dynamic with warrior DPS rather than a mage.  Still, the soul stone was to hand and we were able to ress and get back to it pretty quickly, finding my final vial shortly thereafter.

Then we ran out to Dire Maul, after hitting Stromwind for some quest updates, to go into the west wing to find the ancient equine spirit, the next quest update.

The spirit of the venture

You can see dual wielding warrior Scscla in that shot.

That didn’t take too long, since you just have to get in and defeat the first boss, after which we decided to head up to Felwood to help Beanpole with the next stage of his quest, down in the underground of Jaedenar.  Getting there was a bit comic as three of the members of the group were boosted, which meant that they got the new flight point at the south end of Felwood automatically, while Wilhelm leveled up the hard way and only had the north flight point.  So we went to the north flight point and rode on down the zone to get where we needed to go.

Beanpole had to get to the end of the underground, talk to Lord Banehollow, kill a few mobs for him, then get his reward and update.

Lord Banehollow

We had some help getting through as somebody else was working on quests and had cleared the way… we then cleared the way for them as we caught up.  They were doing that escort quest, so I was happy to help.

We finished up there and then Beanpole went off to update his quests and we were done with that run.

The next week our target was Scholomance.  Both paladins and warlocks need to visit Scholo and Dire Maul West for their mount quests, just not in the same order.  We were there to move Beanpole’s quest along and finish the quests for Fergorin and Wilhelm.

We flew up to Chillwind Point and ran over to the instance only to discover it was locked.  You need a key, something that had slipped our mind since we last did this instance back in early 2008.  It has been a while.

For the key we had to go back to Chillwind Point to get a quest which required you to be honored with the Argent Dawn to pick up.  Fortunately both Fergorin and Wilhelm were at Honored because you have to be so for a couple steps in the quest before Scholo.  So we ran around, did our quest, got the key, then got into the instance.

Into the instance

We had some problems early on.  We needed some warmup and there were only four of us, though we were all also level 62 at this point and mostly geared up from Outland, so I suppose I should be happy we didn’t try this before Burning Crusade Classic dropped.

Still, we managed to get into the groove after a wipe and a few close calls (and one of the best threading the needling moves I’ve ever managed), fighting our way to the lab first in order to grab the update for Beanpole’s quest.  We killed the boss too, but we didn’t really need to.

We were there already, so why not

Then it was down into the basement where you must slay Rattlegore, then drop an item to start an event.  Fergorin went first, dropped his relic, and the event kicked off.  We managed to wipe on the third round of the event because they mobs all spawn together right where I was standing, but once again the soul stone let us revive and carry on.

Wipe in the basement

We got back up, fought the final guy, and Fergorin was able to claim his mount.

The charger redeemed

We didn’t get a two-fer on that one, the way we did the ancient equine spirit, so I dropped my relic to start the event… and nothing happened.  You cannot do it twice in one run I guess.

Ula opened a portal back to Stormwind and I went back to the quest giver, abandoned the quest, got the quest again with a new relic, then we all went back to Scholo to do it just one more time.

Fortunately we had things kind of figured out for the second run and no wipes occurred and I got my summon charger spell as well.

We didn’t have enough time left for Beanpole’s final run, but we went to Ironforge and collected together enough gold so Ula could head down the hill and buy the riding skill and a Swift Yellow Mechanostrider.

Down at the mechanostrider dealership

That was week two.

Week three had a very clear goal, to finish up Beanpole’s quest.  Having now done the Scholo part of it, we were headed back to Dire Maul West to slay Immol’thar, who we found fairly quickly.

There he is

What took time was bringing down the forcefield surrounding him.  We had to clear all around his pen to turn off two pylons, which were protected by a lot of wandering mobs.  Then, when we did that and nothing changed, we looked up the instance and found that we had to turn off three additional pylons elsewhere in the instance.  So there was some backtracking and and run in with another boss Illyanna Ravenoak to go get that squared away.

The last pylon on our list

Fortunately being level 62 reduced our aggro radius enough that we were able to slip by quite a few groups.

Once that was done we were back down to Immol’thar, who we brought down handily.  Then it was time to setup for the event.  Beanpole had to keep three items active while waves of non-elites, with occasional elites, came at us.  Unfortunately things got out of hand.  We didn’t really have a plan, mobs were being pulled this way and that, and the corpse of Immol’thar was blocking the view of one of the items Beanpole needed to watch.  The wheels came off and we wiped.

That corpse is really in the way, we should have pulled him elsewhere

Late in the first run I had actually settled into a pattern that seemed sustainable.  I had seal of wisdom up, which feeds me mana on each hit, with wisdom judged on my current target, more mana, which gave me enough regen to keep consecrate going pretty much non-stop which, in turn, kept all the mobs who ran in focused on me so we could take them down.

So for round two the plan was to bring everything to me while I kept the consecrate times flowing.

Consecrate for the win!

That was enough to get us through… and get me top damage, hahaha… to the end of the event where we slew the final guy and Beanpole was able to claim his new mount.

The fight done

Beanpole had his new summon mount spell, but you cannot mount up in the instance, so Ula once again opened a portal for us and we hopped through to Ironforge and got out all our shiny new mounts for a screen shot.

The group, only faster now

Now, after a few weeks of distraction we might need to turn our attention to Outland again.  We still have a boss to kill in Hellfire Ramparts.

Oculus and the Facebook Account Requirement

And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “Log in with your Facebook account!”

–Somethin’ Stupid, lyrics slightly altered

I remember back when Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 and the panic it tended to induce in people.  The quotes I gathered at the time indicated that some people did not like Facebook.  I am not sure why, given all they had done for gaming up to that point, like… um…

Oh yeah, social gaming, and that crash when the accurtate description of the average game on the service became “spammy piece of shit,” was still living large in our collective memories back then.  FarmVille!

Happy FarmVille Memories

But we don’t hate Facebook as much now… oh, right… yeah, Zuckerberg’s decision that money from people seeking to subvert democracy and spread false rumors spends just as well as money from any other product has not made him any more popular.

At least, however, he seemed to be content to leave Oculus and its VR headset business alone.  That was likely because the VR market has yet to meet early expectations.  CCP didn’t get out of the VR space because business there was booming.  So Oculus has been able to improve its hardware over time as they continued to sell units at a decent, if more modest, rate.  That latest model from them is better, smaller, cheaper, and no longer requires so many connections to your PC.  All of that is likely to make VR more viable in the market.

Things have been quiet enough that you might have even forgotten that Facebook bought Oculus… until this week.

This week it was announced that Oculus users would eventually have to migrate to using a Facebook account to log in.  The full announcement is here.  The crux of it is:

Starting in October 2020:

• Everyone using an Oculus device for the first time will need to log in with a Facebook account.

• If you are an existing user and already have an Oculus account, you will have the option to log in with Facebook and merge your Oculus and Facebook accounts.

• If you are an existing user and choose not to merge your accounts, you can continue using your Oculus account for two years.

Starting In January 2023:

• We will end support for Oculus accounts.

• If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account.

• We will take steps to allow you to keep using content you have purchased, though some games and apps may no longer work. This could be because they require a Facebook account or because a developer has chosen to no longer support the app or game you purchased.

They are billing this as an ease of use and improved experience, but a statement in that post seems a little more on point as to why they are going this route:

…when you log into Oculus using your Facebook account, Facebook will use information related to your use of VR and other Facebook products to provide and improve your experience. This information is also used to show you personalized content, including ads. For example, we might show you recommendations for Oculus Events you might like, ads about Facebook apps and technologies, or ads from developers for their VR apps.

You will be in the Facebook targeted advertisement ecosystem, which is where Facebook makes its money.  You get to be both customer and product.

Now, does this really change anything?  Theoretically, since Facebook owns Oculus, your account was a Facebook account already.  But I suspect that it wasn’t fully integrated into the Facebook authentication services.  Facebook, like Google and Apple, has made their authentication system available to other services.  And I actually us Google for a few things, as I have 2FA setup on my main Google account.

But would I use Facebook?  With the way that the company has shown itself to be over the last few years?  Maybe not.

I wouldn’t avoid getting an Oculus VR headset because of this, but I also wouldn’t put it on the list of things in favor of getting one either.

Down Stairs in the Sunken Temple

After a week of getting class quests together and another wrapping up the lead-in quests for the instance, we were finally ready to step foot into the Temple of Atal’Hakkar, the Sunken Temple.

The Temple Awaits

We actually ended up heading in on Saturday, on very short notice, when it became clear we were all around and had the time.  It turned out to be a good thing too, as during our usual time frame on Sunday the power went out five times at our house due to the heatwave hitting the west coast.  At least after the third time it blipped out and back on I took the time to plug my computer into the UPS that I had sitting, charged up, under my desk.

We got on and all flew down to Nethergarde Keep, the closest flight point to the instance.

In the Blasted Lands again

Our group for the run was:

• Viniki – level 53 gnome warrior
• Skronk – level 52 dwarf priest
• Moronae – level 52 night elf druid
• Ula – level 52 gnome mage

We had managed to gain some xp as part of the preliminaries at least.  It had been suggested that we ought to be level 54 as a group to finish the whole thing off, but we figured we could get started and level up as we went.

We rode out through the Swamp of Sorrows, then swam out to the temple itself, heading up the stairs on the east side that lead into the depths.

Looking down into the temple

That isn’t where the instance begins however.  Sunken Temple is like some of the other dungeons from vanilla where there is a series of paths between the meeting stone and the instance line, only one of which will get you where you want to be.

Sunken Temple is also multi-level, so the mini-map is often less than helpful.  So we wandered a bit and took a few wrong turns before Skronk recalled that there was some legend about following the masks to get to the instance.

There is a mask, so this way maybe?

I am still not sure this is true, since it only came up after we had about exhausted the false paths, but we did end up at the instance line shortly thereafter.

Into the instance at last

Once in, there was the question of where to go.

I had an old map that I had put in a post about Sunken Temple back in 2012, after Blizzard had shrunk the instance down to a “30 minutes or your pizza is free” level of effort.

The Old Sunken Temple

I included the map as something of a historical artifact showing what the place used to be like, back when the idea of Blizzard doing anything like WoW Classic was just a pipe dream of an old school underground.

But here we are in 2020 and the dream is real… and that map is useful again.

Looking at it, uncertain where to even begin, I suggested we head to down as that looked to be less… complicated for a first run.  Also, the boss down there has the drop for Moronae’s class quest, which would be good to finish.

We headed down, clearing the way as we went.  There was the central pool at the bottom of everything, but no boss there.  Instead, there was an altar with a quest update and some instructions.

When selected, the altar highlights the balconies on the floor above, each of which has a statue.  You have to activate the statues in the order indicated.

On the altar for the order

I jotted down the clock positions as they were lit up in turn; 12, 6, 2, 10, 5, 7.

Then I realized I was facing south, not north, so that my orientation did not match the mini-map.  So I tried to transpose them in my head… failed… then simply faced the other way and ran the sequence again and jotted the correct list.

From there it was back up to where we started, then down to the second floor… the map names the floors bottom, second, entrance, fourth, and fifth… to clear out the balconies in the order given.

There are, of course, a bunch of mobs in the circle that connects the balconies, plus mobs on the balconies themselves, so it took some time to get around.  Also, part way into this I recieved a text from my wife asking me to call in an order for dinner for her to pick up since it was over 100 degrees out so nobody was in the mood to cook anything in the house.

Some statues already lit up

Part way through this I realized that the map had the order printed on it, meaning that it doesn’t change, and that I need not have spent my time trying to make an ordered list of my own… though at least I got it right on my last try, so we didn’t get out of order.

When we activated the last statue Atal’Alarion, the boss we wanted, appeared down in the pool.

There he is below us

In hindsight, we could have just jumped down into the pool and grabbed him right then.  We had, on our initial run down there, cleared all the trash from the room.  Instead, we ran back the way we came and ended up having to clear again.

One of the things in the back of my head about Sunken Temple was a recollection that it had a brutally fast respawn rate.  None of this two or three hours on the timer.  So we ended up having to fight our way back down to the pool, where we found that the trash around the pool had just started to respawn.  In order to be safe, we started clearing that, with it respawning about two spawns from where we were clearing as we went around the circle.

The kicker was that the three mobs that we cleared down in the pool also respawned, so the boss would have some help.

Looking down at the coming fight

We decided to crowd control two of the mobs and kill the boss first, then work on the trash.  Ula could polymorph one, Moronae could hibernate another, and then we would all focus on Atal’Alarion until he was down.  Sounded easy enough, so in I went.

Onto Atal’Alarion

Things mostly went to plan.  It turns out he likes to punt players into the air, which inflicts quite a bit of damage when you land.  At least once I was below half health and flying up in the air expecting that I might die on impact.  But we managed to muddle through and brought him down.

Atal’Alarion defeated

That was about when my wife got home with the dinner she had picked up while she was out, so it seemed like a good time to close out our first venture into Sunken Temple.  We took one last screen shot on the altar.

Everybody recalling home

Sunken Temple was always going to require multiple visits.  I am just glad we managed to find a route that had a conclusion we could manage in the time we had… we started a bit later than usual and there were interruptions at my end… and even wrap up a class quest.

That is one boss down… many more to go.

The bosses of classic Sunken Temple

There will be at least a couple more trips in before we’re done.

Addendum:  Ula has made a trailer for our return to Sunken Temple featuring video from our first visit.

 

Blizz Adds More WoW Classic PvP Realms

After warning people that they should pick new PvP servers in WoW Classic lest they face login queues possibly exceeding 10,000 players, Blizzard turned around today and announced the addition of three more PvP Realms to the list.

Classic is as Classic does

They had already added one realm to each the US and EU lineup last week.  Today they announced three new PvP realms, two for the US and one for the EU.

The new US servers are:

• Blaumeux – PvP – Pacific Time Zone
• Skeram – PvP – Eastern Time Zone

While the EU server is:

• Firemaw – PvP – English

The three new realms will be available tomorrow for name reservations.

Blizzard had said on Friday, when they started warning of gargantuan queues, that they would not add more realms until people shifted off of the most crowded realms, which were Herod (US) and Shazzrah (EU).  That they have now added more realms seems to indicate that people shifting off of those two were not sufficient.

It is interesting to see that PvP realms seem to be the most popular for this nostalgia driven event.  Is it memories of battles at Tarran Mill and the Crossroads driving this?

The last time I checked Bloodsail Buccaneers, the RP server where our group is headed, was one of the more lightly populated servers, which makes a certain sort of sense.  Some people fear to be near RP, lest it be found to be contagious.

The fact that no PvE realms have been required seems a bit odd to me.  But I have no fond memories of PvP in WoW when it comes down to it.  And we still have a week to go before launch, so more may be required.

Maybe somebody will ask about that at tomorrow’s AMA in the WoW Classic subreddit.

I’ll just go update my post about the server list again while we wait.

EVE Aether Wars Round Two Event

Back in March we had the first EVE Aether Wars tech demo when CCP and Hadean got together during GDC to try and get a bunch of players into one big space battle and maybe set a world record.

Things learned from that went into round two, which went off yesterday.

For the second run the event grew somewhat in sophistication.  Previously players just logged in, were given a ship, and spent their time spewing missiles at each other.  This time there was an objective beyond explosions.

The setup

We were also given a selection of ship types this time around as well.  There was the Worm frigate:

The Worm

The Gila cruiser:

Gila Description

And the Rattlesnake battleship:

Rattlesnake description

In EVE Online all three of these hulls are focused on drone combat, but in the tech demo things were more simple.  As the control scheme shows, the combat was much more dogfight oriented than the EVE Online “lock and shoot” method.

The control scheme for the event

One thing missing from the controls was the fire button.  Unlike last time, where much time was spent pounding a button to spew missiles.  I only noticed that once had locked some people up that there was no way to shoot.

Early in the fight

I quickly figured out that the your ship fired automatically, launching missiles at a fixed rate.  They appears on screen marked with red triangles.

It took me longer to figure out where to find the zero point condensate, or ZPC, which was the scoring focus of the event.  I flew around for quite a bit before spotting a black cloud in space.  That a bunch of people were flying around it was the give-away.

Go to the cloud to harvest

I flew into the melee to collect some ZPC.  As it turned out, despite what the ship descriptions said, if you were blown up you lost your whole cargo load, so when I went boom I came back empty.

I tried the different ships.  The Rattlesnake was a popular hull, I saw a lot of them.  However, despite having a lot of hit points it was also slow and something of a missile magnet, being easy to spot and close in on with smaller ships.

Out with the Rattle

The Gila was better, and probably the best compromise.  But I ended up favoring the Worm just to be able to zip in and out of places and to chase down targets.  At one point I spotted a Gila glowing with a golden aura.  Figuring that was a sign, I went after it and, after a long chance blew it up.  The golden highlight was a sign that they were carrying a bunch of ZPC, so I went from zero to 31K pretty quickly.

Suddenly rich in ZPC

I did figure out that you could exit the game and come back in a fresh ship if you were in need of repairs without losing your ZPC.  However, I wasn’t going to play it safe and hide with my little stash and went looking for more golden tinted ships.  Unfortunately I was also likely highlighted with a golden tone, though it did not show at my end, so quickly became a target as well, losing all my ZPC.  Easy come, easy go.

One of the goals, as with the last event, was to try and set a Guinness Books world record, which would have required them to get somewhere around 10K people into the battle.  Mid way through the test they announced that there were over 3,000 of us battling.

Over 3K battling they said

At that point they were going to load up some AI ships in order to push the load levels.

Send in the clones

Once again, they fell far short of a record.

The summary from Hadean at the end put the total just under 3K players involved.  Still, with us and the AI they said they got new data to evaluate from the test, which was the point of it all.

Unlike last time, it wasn’t obvious to me when they added AI pilots to the event.  People were able to spread out in the dark Abyssal Deadspace environment chosen for the battle.

That dead Leviathan was just scenery

The event wrapped rather promptly an hour after the announced start.  At the client end this wasn’t immediately apparent as the server going down didn’t kick people out.  You just ended up flying around in space by yourself.

The final scores showed some people managed to scoop up a lot more ZPC than I ever managed.

Who got the ZPC?

As for how the whole thing ran, it did not seem to tax my system very much.  But the whole thing seemed designed to keep from doing so.  Unlike the missile spam of the last attempt, which dragged down the frame rate on my system, there were never more than a couple dozen ships or missiles on my screen at any time.  Maybe we were all too spread out or maybe the client was set to only draw so many objects before stopping.

Overall, from my side, it was a Sunday morning distraction.  There wasn’t a lot to it, though it was built as a test not a game, so that is to be expected.

CCP promised us prizes, but I haven’t seen any follow up on that.  Everybody who joined in is supposed to get some SKINs for the effort and somebody is supposed to win a paid trip to this year’s EVE Vegas.  I’m sure we’ll hear about that soon, as EVE Vegas is just over two months away.