The WoW Experience ft Jamie Part 2

So here we go, the highly anticipated (I'm sure) continuation of my series on my experiences playing World of Warcraft. When we last left off, the guild I was in, Mass Anarchy, had just collapsed, and a whole lot of players were left without a guild. As they always say, though, when one door closes, another door opens, and indeed another opportunity quickly presented itself.

Another guild on the server called Ravenous was looking to start raiding, but didn't have quite enough players on their roster to get a good raid group going. So, a big group of us from Mass Anarchy, including me, Stormchild, Ashok, and Savoirfaire joined Ravenous in the hopes of getting started in some 40-man raiding. Ravenous will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first guild that I actually started at level 60 in, so I was able to participate in everything right away. We didn't do 40-mans right off the bat, but I was going on smaller dungeon raids, and it was a lot of fun getting to know our awesome new guild mates.

Aside from raiding, though, this is around the time when I really started to get more interested in exploring the world. I was inspired by a guy named Dopefish, who made some really popular WoW movies called Exploration the Movie and Noggaholic. If you're not familiar, these movies showcased Dopefish exploring areas of the game that either weren't released yet, or were in the game but inaccessible by 'conventional' means. For some of these places he did some datamining and opened unfinished levels in some sort of third party program, but for other places he used something called wall walking and wall jumping.

Wall walking and wall jumping are some glitches that are kind of hard to explain, but I'll do my best. For wall walking, having your character at a very certain perpendicular angle to the wall, you could actually walk along vertical surfaces. Then for wall jumping, you would have to be facing a wall or vertical surface at a VERY specific angle (I actually had a mod that calculated your angle to a vertical surface in front of you that wasn't perfect, but helped narrow it down). Then, jumping forward at the wall would allow you to actually land on the wall. If you kept doing this, you could basically climb up sheer surfaces and walls.

So, using a combination of wall jumping and wall walking, you could get to places that Blizzard never intended players to see. One of the most famous (or maybe infamous) places you could go back in vanilla WoW was into Hyjal, an area that was featured heavily in Warcraft 3. At this point it wasn't being used for anything so players were blocked off from entering (we would find out later that it would be used in the Burning Crusade expansion, though as a separate instance instead of part of the persistent world). But by doing some clever wall walking in a part of Winterspring filled with elite demons, you could bypass the blockades and get inside. Below are some screenshots that I took while in there.

See the question marks at the top of my screen? My coordinates mod doesn't know where I am!

Not sure what this giant crater was supposed to be for. I don't remember it being in the Caverns of Time raid.

That red skybox...creepy!

This DEFINITELY wasn't in the CoT raid. Looks like Onyxia's lair, eh?

Dead Archimonde on the World Tree. One of my favourite screenshots ever - I used it as my wallpaper for a while!

And these next two screenshots actually come from a while later, but they fit into the exploration theme, so I guess they will fit well here. By wall climbing up a wall in Badlands, I got up into the mountains around that area and Searing Gorge, and found a couple of interesting things.

I think this was just supposed to be scenery for when you're flying over on a flight path. But in the times before flying mounts were in the game, it was an interesting sight!

And this next screenshot might be my favourite one of all time. Basically, when I was up in the mountains between Badlands and Searing Gorge, I found a few spots where the ground textures of different zones met up. Rather than blending, though, they just stopped suddenly and created bizarre-looking seams, which was fine I guess since we weren't meant to see them. This particular seam was really weird, though...take a look!

This is just a raw screenshot, completely unedited.

So what we're seeing there is the border between two zones: Badlands on the left and Searing Gorge on the right. Amazingly, it looks like the terrain is completely mirrored! I don't know how far this mirroring goes into each zone, and without a flying mount I didn't really have any good way to check. But there's no way you would ever realize that this was the case just by being down on the ground in either of the zones - seeing this just completely blew my mind.

Anywho, back to our regularly scheduled stroll down memory lane. After a short while getting the new members integrated into Ravenous, we started out running Molten Core, the base 40-man raid. It was a lot of fun, but with so many inexperienced raiders, there were many, many walks of shame.

My GOD that raid UI. What was I thinking?

But we all knew it would take some time to learn, so everyone kept up good spirits. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but I definitely remember that getting to the first boss was one of the biggest early humps of the instances. That 40-man trash is really different from anything else you can encounter in the game.

OKAY, everyone crowd up for this guy! No, that's too close.

But, after we got the strategies down, it turned out that the early bosses in Molten Core weren't too hard. In fact, I remember that once we started getting bosses down, they started going down really quickly. I guess all that 15 and 20-man raiding to gear up paid off.

Okay you get the point.

 Of course, all this while I was making even more friends with people in Ravenous, along with the friends from Massacre and Mass Anarchy that I already had. One new friend in particular that sticks out in my mind is Aramlhat, though that was actually her alt character. Her main character was called Tahlmora, a priest in the alliance guild Holy Carnage. I think they were in the top two or three guilds on the server at that time. I just remember she was a really cool person, and it was always fun running into her and her buddies on her main.

Come at me bros, I ain't scared.

So we kept raiding and working our way through Molten Core, but of course I couldn't help myself from trying to find other fun things to do around the world. On the forums, I heard about a cool demon that warlocks could enslave, so I decided to check it out.

Got a problem? Speak to my associate here.

Also happening around this time was an in-game event, some sort of festival of lights (can't remember for the life of me what the name was, or even what real-world counterpart it was celebrating). One of the activities that was part of the event was to go to several elders spread all around the world, and collect an item from them. If you collected all the elder items, you would get some sort of reward. The funny thing was, there were elders in main faction cities. So one day, Stormchild, Zulin and I decided to take off our gear (to avoid repair costs), and charged our way into Ironforge to make for the elder. Results were mixed.

Stormchild: his brave, fabulous sacrifice will be remembered.

Another thing that was happening around this time was the world event for the opening of the gates of Ahn Qiraj, a new area that would have a 20 and 40-man instance. It was a pretty neat event, the way it worked was that everyone on the server would hand in resources to NPCs (farmable things like cloth, food, ore, etc.). Once the server's total resources collected reached a certain threshold, Ahn Qiraj would open, and the new raids would be available. The day that the event ended and the gates opened was pretty cool.

Cool! Laggy as hell, but cool.

The 40-man raid was made for people that were far ahead of where we were, but we decided that we would give the 20-man raid a try. The only problem was, we didn't know which instance was which. I guess we could have done some digging and asking, but instead we decided to just pick one and go for it. 50/50 chance, right?

You gambled, and lost.

Anyway, with Molten Core going well, we decided to give the other entry-level 40-man raid a try - Onyxia's Lair! Despite being entry-level, there was only one boss in this instance, Onyxia herself, so she was a bit harder than anything we'd faced yet. As you can see from the chat, we were pretty confident.

If you can't read the chat, you can click on the image to make it bigger.

After only a few hours, though, we got the strats down, and managed to take her down on the first night of tries!

Woo...with all those people dead, that's about as close as you want it to get.

So, there's not really too much to this next part. Basically at this point the guild spent its time working through MC, ZG, and AQ20, and farming the bosses that we already had down. We eventually worked our way up to MC's final boss, Ragnaros, who was really a big step up in difficulty from anything we'd faced before. If I remember right, this guy actually took us a few nights to get down, but eventually we made it through the fight and triumphed.

For a guild that didn't have a 'hardcore' schedule or mentality, this was a big accomplishment!

MEANWHILE, through all of this, there was another storyline going on behinds the scenes. If you are familiar with vanilla WoW, you may have noticed that all this time, my warlock has been wearing a rather terrible head-piece, the Devout Crown. There is a reason for this. Besides the fact that I never saw anything better drop outside of a raid (Dreadmiiiiiiiiiist!!!), it was because I was waiting for the Nemesis helm to drop off of Onyxia, and we didn't see one drop for a number of MONTHS.

Well fine, you might say, but what about the Felmist helm out of Molten Core? Well, we did see a number of those drop, but here was the problem. The type of loot system Ravenous was such that you gained points for participating in raids, and you could spend those points on an item - the person with the highest amount of points that wanted an item would get it. But when you got an item, you lost ALL your points. So basically, I felt that I needed to save my points in order to be guaranteed the Nemesis helm when it dropped. It turned out that I probably could have gotten a Felmist helm and STILL saved up enough to get the Nemesis helm when it eventually dropped, but hindsight is 20/20 eh?

And in addition to all that, there was even something ELSE working against me. See, Ravenous raided Onyxia (who, if you weren't paying attention, dropped my Nemesis helm) every week on Monday night. Incidentally, that semester in University, I had a class on Monday night. But, instead of giving up my hopes of a new helm and accepting defeat like a normal, well-adjusted person with their priorities straight would, I came up with a plan. I bought some ear buds so that I could listen to Ventrilo, hid them under my hair, and I raided during class. And of course, class would often end before the raid did. So if the prof was finished before we'd killed Onyxia, I would wait for a wipe, then I would close my laptop and run back to my dorm room. I mean I DASHED.

And eventually, by the mercy of some being greater than I, eventually it paid off. The Nemesis helm dropped, and I spent my entire ungodly huge amount of points on it. And it was totally worth it.

Aww yeahh. Also pictured: a weird graphical glitch on my shoulders.

Time for another tangent break! Just as a reminder of the state of the times back in vanilla WoW, one of the biggest updates to the game back then was when they added weather effects to outdoor environments. It looked so cool back then!

Whooaaa...I'm trippin' balls, man.

So, once again, the guild kept farming the bosses we had down, and kept working on finishing the 20-man raids, ZG and AQ. Ironically, we beat MC and Onyxia before those two - I guess there wasn't quite as much interest in or emphasis on running the 20-mans. But one of the members of the guild, Karik, was really interested in finishing AQ20 and pushed hard for it. It was a bit of a struggle to put groups together, but I was always up for it.

In fact, I guess my willingness to participate in the runs meant even more than I realized. See when you killed the final boss of AQ20, he would drop his 'head' (as with the final boss of several other dungeons), which was an item that you could give to one member of the raid, which they could use to complete a quest. Turning in this quest would give the person a nice item, and also give a zone-wide announcement (and buff I think?) in Silithus, the zone that contained AQ. And it turned out that the first time we killed the last boss of AQ20, Karik decided to give the head to me! It was a pretty cool honour, and was even sweeter because a couple of the more douchy members of the guild were visibly upset that it didn't go to them.

I got a purple necklace for this. Yay!

So we managed to finish AQ20, but unfortunately, that's about as far as we got. We tried to start Blackwing Lair, the next 40-man raid after MC, but even after many attempts, we didn't really make any progress on the first boss. I was starting to realize that if I wanted to get any farther in raiding, I might have to look for an alternative. Stormchild agreed with me.

A bunch of my old friends from Mass Anarchy including Nerey, Liberto, and Scorpius had joined a more hardcore raiding guild called Twisting Shadows. They had beaten MC, Blackwing Lair, and were working on AQ40. I thought it was a bit of a long shot, but I asked Scorpius if Twisting Shadows was recruiting. To my surprise, he said that they were, and encouraged me and Storm to apply. My gear wasn't the greatest, but since I knew a bunch of people in the guild already, I thought I might have a chance.

However, I didn't want to be unfair to Ravenous, so I knew that if I wanted to apply to Twisting Shadows, I would have to leave Ravenous first. It was a big risk, since if I didn't make it into TS, I'd be left out in the cold. Storm and I talked about it for a while, though, and in the end we decided that we wanted to give it a shot. It was a tough thing to do, but we said goodbye to our friends in Ravenous and left the guild.

Well this section turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would, so I think this is a good place to stop for today. Would the risk of leaving Ravenous pay off? Find out next time!