So I spent the last almost two weeks in hospital, got into the ward Monday last week with the surgery scheduled for Tuesday and they deemed me fit enough to come home yesterday. It was an interesting experience, especially as someone who has generally not had many problems with her health, to spend such a significant time in hospital, completely bound to the bed for the first several day even, not being allowed to get up or move too much due to that potentially damaging the wound that was healing after the surgery. The healing is naturally still onoing, but I’m afforded a lot more movement now though sitting is still taboo.

It’s also interesting to notice that the things I expected to be problematic were really the minor things, like boredom or pain, and the much more mundane things ended up being the real problem. Case in point, as I wasn’t allowed to leave bed until Monday—almost a week after the surgery—I ended up being put on a liquid diet in order to spare my bowels a bit of work and pain. This unfortunately did not quite go as planned, and I spent the weekend with a very stuck stomach and even now though I’ve been eating solid food for the best part of a week my stomach is still catching up a bit. It all seems rather obvious in hindsight, but this was definitely not something I expected to be dealing with during my stay there.

Another kind of related point, eating when you can’t sit is actually really annoying, even more so in hospital where though you do have an adjustable bed it is made to be ergonomic and doesn’t allow you to contort your back in such a way as to allow your throat to go somewhat straight down while still not putting too much pressure on ones nether regions so as for it to count as sitting—basically putting more pressure on one’s behind than one’s back is bad. This was especially rough with certain types of food like rye bread that have a tendency to be rather rough and as a consequence were somewhat difficult to eat. One learns ways to work around this and as noted it does get much easier at home where one can assume a less ergonomic but more manageable position but still it was one of those things one doesn’t really appreciate before experiencing it.

Overall though, my hospital stay was an overwhelmingly positive experience: the staff was awesome with a great sense of humor, it was interesting hearing the stories and experiences of other people in my room who seemed to come from almost all over the country, it actually felt surprisingly freeing basically being absolved of all responsibility for one’s being with only the single-minded task of resting and getting better. Due to the flurry of activity, time also went by surprisingly quickly and there was rarely a moment where I really felt bored. So while I can’t really recommend that you try to get hospitalized, I do feel I can say that it can actually turn out to be a surprisingly positive experience overall.

So I managed to get myself a fast kitty in Classic, in other words the epic mount. It was actually surprisingly easy, considering how short a time Classic has been out and I haven’t really done any moneymaking activities in the game, mainly just ran dungeons. Sure, those dungeon runs were fairly successful and with a mage so my costs were low—not even water—but still, wasn’t expecting it to be this profitable especially consindering I played back in the day and was always pretty poor, always sitting around 50-100 gold.

Because of that, felt nice being able to achieve this in Classic, something I never managed back then only buying my epic mount while leveling in Burning Crusade though there I did later manage to afford the epic flying mount.

In general though, the epic mount seems much more common than back then, not sure if this is due to the patch we are playing or if players are simply that much more skilled or knowledgeable these days, I know that’s the case for me but it’s still interesting to see. What probably also helped me is that I’m just a lot more motivated to play the game now than I was back then somehow, and actually set goals and achieve things. My playstyle used to be a lot more aimless with several breaks which probably is what caused me not to achieve too much back then.

Still, with how seemingly easy it is to get the epic mount now, I would recommend it since the extra movement speed is nice even for someone like me who spends most of their time in dungeons or raids. It’s also one of the few sensible places to invest one’s gold I find, so that helps as well.

World of Warcraft Classic was released pretty much exactly two weeks ago by now, Tuesday morning at one in the morning. The launch uptill pretty much the last few days actually went surprisingly poorly considering how well Blizzard handled both Legion and Battle for Azeroth, with the game being unplayable for most people due to the queues on the servers. Basically if you didn’t log in sometime before midday you probably weren’t getting in in a reasonable amount of time which at times proved problematic for me with the queue being longer than the time until the next raid. I was rather disappointed to see this, since Blizzard had specifically deviated from the way the original game was launched and introduced layering in order to avoid this very problem, but apparently they didn’t go far enough with this approach.

Beyond that pretty much utter failure on Blizzard’s part, Classic has actually been a ton of fun and it has been interesting to see how differently people approach the game now that everything is a bit more well known than it was at the start as well as how the different pace of modern games seems to influence it as well. I think the most notable example of this are the “bombing runs” of dungeons that seem to really start when Scarlet Monastery becomes available and then continues in Zul’Farrak and later in Blackrock Depths. It seems to basically boil down to the Legion-style of large AoE pulls of packs which then get nuked down in order to level up quickly, not really doing the dungeons for the loot but for the experience. It is quite an effective method, especially with the amount of players on the servers since all of the outdoor content is very heavily farmed, so having your own instance to farm is quite a bit more efficient. I’m sure some of the professional levelers have more efficient methods of leveling, but for the more normal player like me this has been a very effective and fun way of keeping up the pace.

Doing the dungeons, it has also been interesting to see how my approach to healing in them has changed or rather stayed the same. I’m still trying to get in as much of my healing as possible through Greater Heal only, in order to stay as manaefficient as possible—the big difference to back in the day is that due to how big the pulls are I still end up running out of mana with this strategy, while that only used to happen when we had a really bad pull back in the day. Actually kind of used to pride myself on being able to do dungeon runs without needing to sit and drink, but that just isn’t realistic when you pull several packs and the tank is in need of pretty much constant attention.

Something else that’s a bit different this time around is that I’m now assining spell damage and healing a somewhat higher value than before, since it does seem to be one of those stats that no one really realized was good back in the day. I still really like spirit, but it of course doesn’t help much when my primary task is spamhealing the tank though that is getting to not be as important as we have moved into Blackrock Depths since we can’t quite do the pulls we did in Zul’Farrak and we also kite the mobs a bit more than before. Still, my higher priorisation of spellpower probably means I will need to start thinking about downranking at some point, something I purposefully avoided back in the day since I didn’t feel like stepping into the five second rule more than necessary was a good idea hence trying to only use my most powerful and manaefficient spell but spellpower naturally changes the HPM calculation on all spells.

Personal experiences aside, I also have to say, overall with the implementation aside from the queues Blizzard has been fairly successful keeping most things as they were along with some small interface improvements like the new raidframes which I don’t really mind since basically everyone used an addon for those anyway. There is a small list of things I’ve found so far that they’ve missed though:

• K was completely unbound instead of being bound to Skills like it used to be
• T was also unbound instead of being bound to auto-attack
• As introduced in Legion, you can’t buy partial stacks from vendors which at times is somewhat annyoing especially with water or the like
• Warlock pets despawn too quickly, making me unable to ressurect them

Now, admittedly, all of these are very minor things and the first two are easily fixed by going into the keybindings, but they were still things that stood out to me as deviations from the original.

The final deviation is of course the Battle.net integration and layering, but both of those were pretty much forseable so they’re not really worth mentioning—and layering is getting removed at some point in the future anyway so.

All of that summarised means I’ve actually been quite happy with Classic at the times I’ve gotten to play the game and this has lead me to putting in quite a significant chunk of time into the game which has been a rather welcome diversion from Azshara progression. Here’s hoping Blizzard sees this as a success as well and considers Burning Crusade servers since from the people I’ve spoken with quite a few of them would probably enjoy those even more it for many having been one of the best if not the best version of the game.

We did the thing a few days ago actually, just been too busy with Classic to post. I don’t really have much to say about the boss really, except that it’s probably the most complex and annoying boss I’ve played so far and from a healer point of view not overly fun, which was kind of to be expected when the world first was with only two healers. Still, finally getting the kill felt really good, probably even moreso due to that!

So despite our Queen Azshara progress still being in full swing, not much has been happening lately for me in World of Warcraft. Sure, there was that heroic Eternal Palace run that was rather fun, and my hunter has finally managed to find herself a new weapon after a long search but aside from those things it has been bussiness as usual, a bit of mythic+ here and there but overall not that much going on.

I did also finally stop slacking and got my neck up to 60 for rank three of the Crucible essence since it seems I had somewhat underestimated the damage potential of that one—or maybe I just didn’t want to spend the time farming Azerite—since I figured it could prove useful for the Azshara fight considering it isn’t that healing intensive. This puts me way behind the average in my guild, with several members already having pushed to 65 for the second minor essence, but I’m fine with that since I know I have neither the time nor the motivation to get to 65 before the progress is over and after that it doesn’t really matter anymore and before 65 there are no more significant gains for me to reach even if getting 62-63 should be fairly trivial without too much time investment.

Regarding time investment, one of the reasons I haven’t had so much time to spend playing World of Warcraft is that I’ve spent the last month or so at our summer house, enjoying the company of my parents as well as helping out with some of the projects they have going on here. It’s been a nice time overall even if I’m not quite as engaged with the projects as they are and I think the change of pace and priorities from city life does me good even though it does make some things more difficult, like finding time or things to write here.

I’m also looking forward to/dreading the launch of Classic, since I think it will be a nice distraction from the current state of the game as well as something that can instill some form of joy in some of the changes implemented since then that one tends to take granted now. There is however one big niggle with that whole thing: it seems most of my guildies want to start on a PVP server while I was looking to start on a PVE one which makes me have to think whether I join the people I know I’ll like playing with and have more readily accessible for spontaneous game sessions on the PVP server or if I go with my preferred server type and have to find new people to play with there. It’s a tough choice since if their interest vanes quickly and mine doesn’t I’m kind of stuck on a server type I don’t enjoy but on the other hand if I go off alone I can’t really join in on potential spontaneous post-raid (retail) dungeon runs (Classic) making it more of a consious effort to play Classic. I still have a few days to decide and have my name reserved on both servers, so that shouldn’t be a problem at least, but it’s still an unfortunate choice to have to make.