The Adventures of TrugTrug and Parkzer in WoW Classic’s 20th Anniversary hardcore realms

I don’t play video games that much anymore, but once in a while, I’ll still sign back on if a friend invites me to play.

Last year, my friend Doug Wreden and I played World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore on and off for about a month and had a pretty good time. It was a nostalgic experience for Doug; and for me, I enjoyed trying Classic for the first time and seeing from what the modern-day World of Warcraft evolved. I’m usually not a big fan of hardcore or permadeath game modes because I have very limited time to play games and I don’t want to constantly lose my progress and just do the starting area over and over again, but Doug finds softcore modes to be boring, and hardcore did technically add a lot more suspense and tension to the gameplay.

This year, Doug and I decided to join a guild called <OnlyFangs> and do another run of World of Warcraft: Classic in hardcore mode on the new realms released as part of the 20th Anniversary celebration. <OnlyFangs> is a guild generally reserved for Twitch streamers and other online content creators, and although I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a content creator, they were adding some additional twists to the gameplay to make it more interesting, so I still joined.

The guild has competitions among the different races, so naturally, as initiation for joining the guild, you have to take a sorting quiz to determine the race you’re allowed to play. I answered all the questions and ended up with Orc.

On the day of launch, I created an Orc Hunter and spawned into the Valley of Trials alongside hundreds of other players who had gotten in right as the servers opened.

Doug also created his character—a Troll Shaman named “TrugTrug,” a hybrid of “troll” and “DougDoug.” I just named myself “Parkzer,” but after seeing Doug’s character’s name, I regretted not naming myself “Orkzer” instead.

My first near-death experience promptly came at level 7 when Doug and I were on the Echo Isles questing. I wasn’t paying close-enough attention to World of Warcraft because I was distracted answering questions from my Twitch chat and I didn’t notice that my health was getting extremely low. I quickly ran away and dragged a Durotar Tiger into a group of other players in hopes that they would save me. Luckily, a fellow Orc named Orcadontis (who I imagine is a professional orthodontist) was nearby and finished off the tiger, saving my life.

And if you’re curious, the reason it says “YOU ARE LITERALLY TROLLING” and “RUN AWAY” in big letters on the center of my screen is because I use an add-on called WeakAuras, which allows you to make custom graphics that trigger based on conditions you specify. I set up an alert that blares an air horn and shows that bouncing text in the center of my screen in case I get low of health and don’t realize that I have to run away.

At level 10, Hunters gain the ability to tame a pet. Doug wanted his Twitch chat to be able to have agency over our gameplay, so he did a series of polls that determined that my first pet would be a crab named “Crabzer.”

… Crabzer promptly died because I sent him into a group of level 10 enemies when he was only level 6. Usually you can just revive your pet, but to add to the intensity of hardcore more, Doug wanted my pet to be hardcore as well. This meant Crabzer was dead forever. Doug required me to participate in a memorial ritual by removing all my armor and laying down (almost) naked next to Crabzer’s corpse.

My next pet was a crocodile named Croczer. Unsurprisingly, Croczer faced the same fate as Crabzer when we were in a cave and a random Mage pulled a ton of enemies, so I sent Croczer in to tank and he succumbed to overwhelming damage. … Yes, we did the same ritual for Croczer too.

It’s a running joke that I love to stop playing the main content and go off to fish in video games, specifically in MMORPGs where fishing is almost never the primary objective and is no more than a side task. World of Warcraft is no exception to this, so after Doug signed off for the night, I joined some of my Twitch viewers on a journey to Mulgore and Thunder Bluff because they said there were some nice, scenic fishing spots there.

The next day, Doug and I found a party of guildmates and cleared Ragefire Chasm, our first dungeon.

Later that night off-stream, I finally got a chance to level up my fishing. While in Orgrimmar, I was joined by Thor Hall from Pirate Software, with whom I had a pleasant chat using the Proximity Voice add-on. After reaching level 150 fishing, we took a ship and ventured to Booty Bay to purchase a special item—a book that would unlock the next tier of fishing. There is an overall level 20 requirement for that though in addition to the fishing level requirement, so I wasn’t yet able to read the book I had just bought.

On the fourth day of our adventure, we ran into an escort quest where the escortee has a very long respawn timer. In order to try and get as many people in on the quest as possible as to minimize the wait time, we partied up and invited someone from our guild as well. Hilariously, our guildmate had an add-on that automatically accepts, turns in, and advances all quests, so he managed to initiate the escort before Doug and I managed to turn in our quests and pick up the next one in the chain for the escort.

We stuck around for the respawn and waited for the next cycle. Being the brilliant, attentive, responsive gamer I am, I proceeded to miss turning in my quest for a second cycle in a row. Here I am eating a protein bar and realizing that the escortee was departing without me.

Back in town, I was reunited with Orcadontis, the guy who had saved me from the Durotar Tiger over ten levels ago.

He was roleplaying being ill and giving me dental advice with his dying breath, but my absolute favorite thing to do in roleplay scenarios is to pretend like I don’t understand what’s going on and breaking the fourth wall. As Orcadontis gasped that his death was approaching, I replied “no you’re fine, you’re at 100% health,” then walked away.

On day 5, we reached level 20 and learned our next set of important skills. For Doug’s Shaman, this was Ghost Wolf, a spell that turns him into wolf form and increases movement speed by 40%. For my Hunter, it was Aspect of the Cheetah, a spell that grants me 30% increased movement speed at the cost of being dazed for four seconds if I take damage while in cheetah form. Note that Ghost Wolf is materially and substantially better than Aspect of the Cheetah.

After doing a round of quests, Doug and I were returning to town. I had my character set to auto-follow Doug while I was answering questions from my Twitch chat. Doug said that he was going to run through a group of enemies, so I mindlessly said “ok” and continued talking with Twitch chat.

Remember how I mentioned that, not only is my movement speed buff weaker than Doug’s, but I also get dazed when I get hit? Doug was able to run through the enemies fine, but when I ran in after him, I got hit once and got slowed to a fraction of my movement speed.

From here, I had a truly next-level reaction to what was happening, composed of the following series of events:

  1. Spend five seconds looking around in confusion, trying to gauge how much trouble I am actually in.
  2. Spend an additional three seconds tabbing over to Discord to unmute myself so I can tell Doug I am in trouble.
  3. Try to kill the thing that is attacking me, then give up after two seconds.
  4. Try to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah so enemy attacks stop refreshing my daze, but realize that the hotkey I assigned to that was Alt+0, which is impossible for me to hit without either taking my left fingers off the movement keys or taking my right hand off my mouse.
  5. Bring my mouse pointer down to click the Aspect of the Cheetah button to turn it off, but misclick and start channeling Mend Pet instead.
  6. Finally click the correct button to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah, though not before having my daze reset for another 4 seconds.
  7. Try to run away, then realize that the retreat path I was taking was directly towards another camp filled with five more enemies.
  8. Use a health potion, but then forget to use the two other items on my hotbar that would have rooted an enemy and healed me more, thus potentially increasing my chances of survival.
  9. Run off a cliff to try and de-aggro the now four enemies carving line art into my back.
  10. Try to land on a small platform not too far down, miss, slide down the whole face of the entire cliff, then die of fall damage.

And the best part? Doug would have been perfectly fine, but after I unmuted and let him know that I had aggro, he turned around and ran back into the gargantuan group of enemies to try and help me. Even better, note that I had already wasted eight seconds at that point, so he was very far away and it’s not like there was anything he could’ve done anymore anyway.

He also died.

From what I gathered during my post-death debriefing session with Doug, when he announced that he was going to run through a group of enemies, what I was supposed to do was stop following him, split off from him, go all the way around the group of enemies via a different path by myself, and meet back up with him in town afterwards.

This was a pretty ridiculous way to die, and I’m going to be traveling soon anyway, so I’m not too disappointed at our demises. Many hardcore deaths are fairly anti-climactic (e.g., you’re fighting something and just end up taking too much damage too quickly and suddenly die out of nowhere), so I feel like this was definitely one of the more interesting ways for our run to end.

We’re not going to be creating new characters right away, though I guess there’s nothing stopping us from trying again at some point in the future…

 

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The Adam Parkzer and Doug Wreden World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore saga

Starting in mid-April, I joined my friend Doug Wreden in playing World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore.

For those who are unfamiliar, hardcore mode, also known as “perma-death,” is a modified way of playing a game that enforces various additional re­stric­tions, the most iconic of which prohibits you from ever dying, consequenced by being forced to delete your character. WoW Classic doesn’t have an official hardcore mode, but there is a fan-made add-on that implements the functionality, which Doug and I used.

Here is our saga.

 
I joined World of Warcraft during Mists of Pandaria and never played Classic. I’m not really a fan of classic games in general—I appreciate the quality-of-life improvements that game developers add to modern-day games, so I usually don’t go out of my way to play older games unless they are particularly nostalgic. With that being said, Doug somehow convinced me to join him on a duo adventure of WoW Classic hardcore.

Doug really wanted to play Druid, which limited us to the Night Elf race. My first character was a Hunter named Parkzerect, a combination of “Parkzer” and “erect,” because this is hardcore.

We got to level 2, at which point, Doug got bored of the Night Elf leveling zone and proposed bum-rushing our way to the Human leveling area. I didn’t know what that meant, but I agreed; we set off on our journey and promptly died to a level 20+ Young Wetlands Crocolisk.

For our second attempt, I made a Hunter named Parkzerecter, a combination of “Parkzer” and “erecter,” because we were just getting started and I was even more ready than before. After six levels, I discovered that clearly was not the case, because I sort of just randomly forgot to keep track of my health bar and died to a Vicious Grell, ending our run.

I’m not great at World of Warcraft: Classic, but I play a ton of MMORPGs. I was pretty tilted at my method of death, which I found to be inexcusable due to how basic and easily-preventable it was. To express my frustration, I named my next character Parkzerblind.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. We were both insane. We tried the bum-rush strategy a second time and promptly died to another Young Wetlands Crocolisk.

… Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. We tried the bum-rush strategy a third time on my fourth character, a Hunter named Pogzer because of how Pog it was to die over and over again.

As you’d expect… we were NOT insane, because this time, we died to some sort of strange swamp beast and not a Crocolisk. Very Pog.

In the spirit of actually not being insane, Doug came up with a different strategy to make it to an alternative leveling zone on our fifth characters—we swam. I put Doug on follow and he piloted himself and my Rogue Dogpit for literally 50 minutes through the ocean.

Miraculously, this was a successful journey. I’m generally a Shadow Priest one-trick pony and I know basically nothing about any other class, so the Rouge leveling experience was novel. One of my favorite parts about Rogue was its instant-cast ability, which was very convenient for tagging quest mobs.

There was one situation where a lot of other players were standing in an orderly line waiting for a spawn, and when Doug and I arrived, we joined the line. The line soon degenerated into chaos after some inconsiderate people showed up and tried to cut in line. Hilariously, after I realized there was no point in being respectful anymore, I said aloud, “I guess there’s no line anymore” … and then promptly proceeded to catch, tag, and steal the next spawn of the quest monster, effectively saving us potentially upwards of 20 minutes of waiting, had everyone else decided to continue using the line system.

We successfully made it to level 10, upon which I did the Rogue class quest. While doing the class quest, I had to find a treasure map, so I walked up to the target holding the loot and started attacking it. Suddenly, four Defias Bodyguards spawned out of nowhere and started attacking me.

I shrieked out to Doug for assistance, and he healed me… rerouting monster enmity to himself. Tanking four level 10 monsters as a level 10 is never great news, and unsurprisingly, he died. After their successful assassination, the guards went back to targeting me, and I died as well, ending our run.

So what happened? Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to attack the monster that had the treasure map. Instead, I was supposed to use my Stealth to enter his house undetected and use my Pickpocket ability to steal the treasure map. My lack of game mechanic knowledge caused our deaths, which was dis­ap­point­ing.

As a side note, remember how, in our second attempt, I died because I wasn’t paying attention to my health? I fixed that by installing an add-on that lets me create custom alerts. Now, when I descend below 40% health, an airhorn blares and the words “YOU ARE LITERALLY TROLLING” and “RUN AWAY” appear and start bouncing on my screen (which you will see in the next screenshot). It has been incredibly useful.

Doug and I were both pretty bummed that we lost our run just because I didn’t know a particular game mechanic and the quest text wasn’t explicitly clear about what I was supposed to do, so we booted up our sixth attempt with Dogspit the Rogue.

We made it to level 11, one level higher than before… but we died when Doug jumped into a pit to attack a melee quest mob and ended up taking too much damage from two additional rangers. I didn’t see them hiding behind terrain, but Doug said he did notice them, though it didn’t occur to him that they would deal so much damage.

I further compounded the problem by not properly focus-firing the lowest-health target—I thought I had killed the melee enemy and started sprinting towards the ranged ones, but apparently, I either missed my attack or canceled my attack animation and the melee enemy survived with a sliver of health, giving it enough time to make Doug flinch during his heal cast time and die by a margin of milliseconds.

At this point, we wanted to give up and refused to give up at the same time.

Attempt seven was Drooid the Hunter, which we managed to bring to level 12 (yet again, another one level higher than before), but failed our run when Doug… uh… drowned to death.

Attempt eight was Driud the Hunter, and at this point, both of us were pretty frustrated and mildly tilted. This death was very similar to our second attempt when I randomly died to a Vicious Grell; Doug ended up getting greedy and pulled a quest mob with a slow respawn timer while he was already under attack by a monster, and through a combination of unlucky respawns of regular mobs and falling under attack by even more enemies, we died.

Out of sheer stubbornness, we kept trying. It was infuriating that we kept on dying right after finishing the introductory zone, and we really wanted to get to level 20 and clear at least one dungeon. I created Dogmilk the Hunter to adventure together with Doug’s Druid Dogcheese for our ninth attempt.

At this point, as you’d expect, the Night Elf leveling zone was very, very boring. Luckily, there was apparently a Peggle add-on for World of Warcraft: Classic, which I eagerly installed. Doug has played a lot of Peggle, but this was my first time trying it. I got instantly hooked and proceeded to clear (all the orange pegs) and full clear (all the orange and blue pegs) every single one of the 13 levels in two days.

Peggle made leveling from 1 to 10 much more bearable, but it also came with its own risks… I got so invested into Peggle that I almost got our run dis­qual­i­fied three times. The first was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that I had to pick up the Stormwind flight path, and a few hours lat­er, Doug flew back to Stormwind while I was still stranded in the questing area (which is a problem, because both duo characters have to remain in the same zone and only have a 10-minute grace period). The second was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that Doug had logged out already to take a break for dinner (which is a problem, because both duo characters must be online together at all times in order for the duo run to be valid). The third was when I was too busy playing Peggle to notice that my ship had arrived back in town after Doug had finished his Druid-specific class quest, and I nearly kept riding the ship to the next destination.

I started actually having a lot of fun after we got past level 13 and realized we weren’t going to continue the “die after one more level” curse.

Doug and I also got much better at coordination, and we managed to survive multiple seemingly impossible situations, one of which involved being un­der attack by six enemies at the same time due to a combination of miscommunication, poor timing, bad respawn luck, and unexpectedly high aggro ranges.

After we got to the mid- to late teens in level, it felt like we actually had agency over our own lives, and if we played with good skill and synergy, we could survive sticky situations without feeling utterly helpless. I had a pet with Growl that I could use to juggle tanking aggro, we had multiple healing and buffing items to use at our disposal, and we had crowd control spells to slow or disable the enemies while we kited away.

 
So… we did it. We made it to level 20 and cleared both Deadmines and Wailing Cavern. I screen recorded our first dungeon to preserve the memory, and I live streamed our second dungeon on Twitch as my first stream in over 8 months.

Our Deadmines run went extremely smoothly because we had a highly competent and overqualified team, but our Wailing Cavern run was a lot more dicey, which made it far more interesting. I also enjoyed streaming again, and it was nice seeing and recognizing some old usernames from several years ago back when I used to stream more regularly, as well as a lot of new usernames from Doug’s community who joined in to watch.

Now that we finally achieved our goal, we’re both going to take a short break from obsessively grinding WoW Classic, but it’s definitely something we’re going to keep alive little-by-little over time to see just how far we can manage to take our characters.


Edit (May 28, 2023):

It hasn’t been too long since we cleared the dungeon, but unfortunately, our run has come to an end. We made it up to level 24, and while we were clear­ing some mobs in a(n apparently) dangerous area of Redridge Mountains, neither Doug nor I saw a patrolling group of enemies nearby. We were al­read­y en­gaged in combat with a few enemies, and by the time the patrolling group came into our field of vision, they had already aggroed onto Doug and beat him down pretty quickly, upon which I also fell shortly afterwards.

And with that, our World of Warcraft: Classic adventure comes to an end. We don’t want to try from scratch again anytime soon, but there are some ru­mors that an official version of hardcore mode may be coming to World of Warcraft: Classic, so if that happens, then we may make our return for at­tempt #10.

 

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