A hunter, 2 death knights, a demon hunter and an undead warlock

 I logged on to World of Warcraft retail version for the first time in eons because I wanted a break from Classic and was surprised to see how much had changed. I really enjoyed rolling different classes, especially the demon hunter and seeing what a good job Blizzard had done with those starting areas and with the updated graphics and cutscenes.

I was surprised I had forgotten that I had a 36 level hunter and several death knights on various realms and also my undead warlock. All of the characters had been updated to adjust for the changes made to the game since Warlords and other more recent expansions including the level drop to 50 and the adjustments in gear, equipment etc. 

But the experience was not all positive because even though I enjoyed some of the humor, talented voice acting and in game cinematics, the whole experience, while fun, felt somewhat artificial and compared to classic was more of the ultimate themepark. 

Every zone leads to the next but instead of the feeling of organic exploration you might feel in another game like Dark Age of Camelot, the polished retail wow is one of more controlled fun than an open world experience. I still played for about three hours yesterday and they went fast, trying out the different horde classes and races. I really did like the way levels were redone and scaled back to 50. They had been bloated for so long that this way of leveling feels more in tune with old school mmos where the leveling wasn't out of control.

Sadly I failed in my attempt to level all the Classic classes to 20 with only my undead warrior reaching that milestone after 66 hours played. I think I will take a break until TBC drops and focus on retail toons when I decide to get back to wow.

D&D update

Still zooming in to 3.5 campaign. I have been slowly adding supplements to my core book collection. Recently I became the proud owner of every PHB, Monster Manual and DMG from 1st edition to 5th, with the notable exception of 2e because I heard it was too similar to first. I hope to post a video I made on the races that we like to play on my  Behind the Sreen/noob DM Youtube channel tomorrow. 

This is what the character creation screen looks like in retail, something I was unaware of until recently. I think it is very cool and makes me want to play different classes.

One captivating thing I found about retail wow is the fact that the voice overs, cutscenes and new starting zones make for engaging play. At the same time, the game design is too much of a themepark and it shows, the game practically railroads you from zone to zone and action to action which makes it feel less like an open world as in a sandbox mmo, or even an older mmo like Dark Age of Camelot.

Back to the Wailling Caverns in Classic Warcraft

Inside the WC instance with the PUG

Flying to meet the group from Undercity 

What do you mean I have to wait a half hour to get into b.g.? Put me in now WG Battlemaster!

I am on vacation from the work grind all of this week! So you know what that means? I can give some love to the Nexus and catch up on all of the pending projects.

Last night, knowing I did not have to be up early for work this morning, I logged on to Classic wow and was surprised to discover (thanks to a Facebook post I made a year prior) that I had completely forgotten that I had a level 18 undead warrior on the Smolderweb pvp server. 

I had been playing on Herod for a while because that is the server where my friend was leveling his toons, but I was glad to rediscover Rotting Brain the warrior and promptly proceeded to try and get him to the requisite 19th level. I am not sure if he has the right gear to make him viable for b.g.s but I queued in for Warsong Gulch nonetheless! There was a 22 minute average wait time! 

So while I waited I thought it would be fun to quest around the Undercity areas and kill some mobs, maybe I would pick up a PUG while chatting with the guildies. I belong to the "Devil's Advocate" guild on the server and surprisingly, I was not booted during my almost year long absence, although most of the guild members had long achieved max level.

I got an invite to run WC and since I wasn't having that much luck leveling through the b.gs. (I think I only got into one which we promptly lost to Alliance due to their team being a group of 19 twinks that seemed OP AF.) I decided to take them up on running the long dungeon. It was fun mowing down through multiple mobs and best of all I leveled up like a level and a half, only falling short of my goal due to the lateness of the hour. We wiped twice and the last time was the most frustrating one because we were down to the final boss. One minute the entire group was there and I was hacking and slashing at the feet of the massive monster but when I looked, I had not even noticed that most of the group was dead and without a healer it was only going to be a matter of time, LOL but we came so close!

D&D 3.5 update

I made another video for my youtube channel. This one is focused on the 3.5 classes since we are playing that ruleset in our current campaign. Nothing comprehensive, just a simple breakdown of some of the characteristics and mechanics for some of those races and classes, Barbarian, Wizard and rogue this time because that is what we have currently in our group, though we hope to be adding a cleric. If nothing else, we plan to have our DM take over the role of the healer while she also referees and runs our current game. To that end I plan to get very familiar with those classes, their mechanics and their available skills and feats.

The best laid plans or why I had been neglecting the Nexus

 Happy Easter. I have unfortunately neglected the Nexus of late because I have been focusing on trying to record Youtube videos. That effort hasn't gone that well to be honest because vlogging or the creation of Youtube content with a specific narrow focus is more complicated and labor intensive than blogging.

Who knew?

An example: I successfully uploaded a simple video to Youtube last week created with just the webcam which came with my laptop computer and Windows 10. I had intended to give it a fancy title and add a "super" style caption in the same way I used to for a couple of class projects in college using nothing but the imovie app which comes with the Power books, but after installing and trying two different video editors, I had to scrap the entire edited version and upload the raw video footage because the video editors all come with free trials but will stick a stupid watermark on the outputted video if you don't pay for the program.

So I am cheap and refuse to pay for a fancy video editing program when all I need is something like imovie which comes free with mac, or at least it did back in the day when I was making those video projects for school. 

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time creating a simple but streamlined presentation of some of the D&D 3.5 classes we were using during our zoom campaign which now appears to be on hiatus since we can't get the players all together in one digital room for a few hours once a week...but I digress...the power point presentation was supposed to be the visual component to a Youtube video I was making using OBS Studio to put that little square you see in gamer vids where the youtuber speaks through a livestream or game session and you record both the youtuber and the game going on concurrently. Everything was going great but then for some unexplained reason which I have yet to figure out, the sound on the recording was gone! It was so frustrating, working fine one minute and then completely gone the next for no reason. I never did figure out the fix so I scrapped the whole thing and called it a day.

If any of you stumble on this post and can suggest a simple free video editor, nothing fancy, kind of the equivalent of imovie for Windows, drop me a line or leave a comment, I would rather not have to shell out any money for projects that require very little technical prowess or equipment such as my humble and simple Youtube gaming videos.

MMO projects this week

This week has all been about trying to level up some toons in Classic Wow from both factions and trying out all the nine classes in the games, if not to max level then at least to level 20. I am having fun doing this and even though when Classic dropped in summer of 2019 I vowed I would not use any add ons, I changed my mind and am using Questie and it has made all the difference. I had this strange notion that it would somehow be cheating on the vanilla experience to use an add on, but then I realized that it does not detract from the leveling experience and just hones in to the areas where I need to get stuff done. But why do I feel compelled to do this? I guess because I have always enjoyed the game's lore and would like to try out all the classes and experience the subtleties and game mechanics of each class at least once.

D&D projects I am currently tinkering with

Even though this isn't a blog about Dungeons and Dragons or table-top gaming, I am currently involved in both mmos and D&D and there is crossover from the two hobbies considering I play DDO. Even though I won't get a VIP sub for DDO, the game does offer a Starter Bundle that opens up some great benefits at an affordable price, I think it is $10 U.S. which isn't bad at all for what you get: Special Offers | Dungeons and Dragons Online (standingstonegames.com) 

I am currently considering working on writing my own game module which I think would be a great creative outlet for me so I need to spend sometime in Eberron to gain some inspiration. I plan to do so when I need a break from leveling my Classic wow toons. 

Hordehulk the Orc Hunter standing in a busy Orgrimmar. Me thinks Wow Classic is a big success 

The max toons are dueling outside of Orgrimmar on a Saturday evening! It is a good thing to see a community of involved players on the Classic servers.