As you explore Azeroth in a Hardcore server, one where you only get one life, it’s not uncommon to find player corpses on the ground. Every time I come across one I always wonder the last few moments of that characters life. Today I got to experience first hand the last few moments of someone’s hardcore adventure.
In the Eastern Kingdoms there is a place called Loch Modan where level 10-20 adventurers can quest. Near the end of the quests here is an elite quest called Mercenaries. Although I’m just a level 16 Warlock this was my last quest in the zone and I wanted to finish it prior to leaving. Lucky for me a level 19 Warlock named Genericlock was advertising a group to kill the elites. So I joined him and shortly after a level 20 Priest named Kimburn joined us. Two Voidwalkers and a priest, what could go wrong?
As we started killing these elites it was obvious to me that even with three people it was taking some time. The Voidwalkers also weren’t holding aggro very well. I know my level was a factor in that. Still though, I would have hoped our damage output was a bit better. Another issue is we were all cloth and I assume, as casters, our defenses were pretty low. We’d pull aggro and health bars would drop in big chunks. Still, we managed to kill and deal with two mobs at a time.
Then there was a cave. I was feeling really uneasy about this. We were having difficulty with one mob and we’d end up fearing adds outside. Fearing in a cave would be the death of us. Respawns would be the death of us. So we killed about 2 or 3 mobs in the cave and I just told them I wasn’t going any farther. I said lets get out before mobs respawn on top of us. They pulled one more and the other warlock almost died. I bet he got down to about 20hp, there was basically no green on his healthbar. That’s what the screenshot shows when Genericlock says “wow” because he almost ate it. At this point they agreed with me and we went back outside.
Things were going fine and we needed one more Brute. Inside a small cave was three mobs, one of them a brute. I stood at the cave entrance thinking about how to pull when someone poked their head in and dotted them. All three mobs aggroed and we started running.
If you don’t play WoW Classic then you might not understand what’s about to kill one of our group members. It’s called leashing and as soon as you engage with an enemy mob it’s considered leash. It will stay aggro’d on you until a certain amount of time, not distance from initial mob starting location. So in this case the mobs were going to chase us until ~10 seconds had passed without us attacking them.
Now I want to say that we ran far. Really, we were hauling butt. I tried to keep a mob distracted with my pet who eventually died, I feared a mob early, but once the other two were safe and running much farther ahead than me I just started running to catch up. At some point I was even asking myself “Why are they still chasing?” at which point I realized the Brute was dotted. I don’t blame the priest because I had even considered it but he was dotting the Brute hoping it would keep the Brute leashed and the other 2-3 mobs would deaggro. Instead, with the Brute staying leashed they all stayed leashed.
I’m not exactly sure what happened, eventually I caught up to the other two and just kept running. There was a caster mob out there so I’m sure that had something to do with it but eventually I watched as Genericloks health bar started chunking down and eventually hit zero. Someone I had been grouping with was now dead, their time on this character was done. That moment hit hard.
Surprisingly he wasn’t upset by what had happened. I really shouldn’t be surprised as all of the people I’ve met in hardcore are very friendly and helpful. From what I’ve seen it’s a great community. Still, he just lost 10 hours of progress. We chatted about what happened for a minute or two then we wished him well, after all what more was there to discuss? He was dead, we weren’t. As Andy Dufresne said in the Shawshank Redemption “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
With one more Brute needed to complete the quest we headed back into the Elites, a little more cautious than before. After clearing a path through the mobs we were finally able to locate the mob we needed and finish our quest. We did it for you Genericlock, RIP. With the quest done it was time to get out of there or else there was a good chance our hardcore journey would also be short lived.
With the danger of the elites behind us Kimburn and I were heading to the safety of the dwarven town Thelsamar over the hill. Although this is where Kimburn and I went out separate ways we will always be bonded by the experience we had fighting side by side in the Mo’Grosh Stronghold. For the Alliance!