The short version: my sister and I have been playing WoW Classic for the past six months to acquire these two full sets of armor, the Feralheart Set for me and the Soulforge Set for her.
The long version: I played a lot of WoW from about 2005-2010, as did my sister. The original, "vanilla" version of the game had two tracks, so to speak, for the endgame. There were 40-man raids, and there were 5-10 man dungeons. The latter track was designed for more casual players who didn't have the free time multiple nights a week to commit to raiding. You could simply log on, find a group of just a handful of people, and off you went.
To entice/reward these players, the game had special armor sets for each player class, eight pieces in total, which dropped off of specific bosses scattered throughout the game's many endgame dungeons.
If that wasn't enough, players could then embark on an epic, globe spanning quest to upgrade their armor to even better armor, culminating in what might be the player's first or only raid boss fight. It was designed be expensive, challenging, and time consuming. Emphasis on time consuming, because when this was released, Blizzard had no idea if they would ever release an expansion, so this content had to last years.
Due to the insane cost and difficulty, most players never completed this upgrade quest chain, especially when much better gear for higher level players dropped off of basically any monsters in the expansions. In 2010-ish, Blizzard released the Cataclysm expansion, which remade the world and made a lot of quests incompatible with the new Azeroth, so Blizzard quietly removed them from the game. WHILE I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH THEM.
To explain the rest, I need to back up. Back around 2008, I had a series of bad seizures which affected my ability to store and retrieve memories. Regardless, I continued to play WoW but didn't really retain any memory of doing so. When I got bored of the Cataclysm expansion, I simply stopped playing and forgot about the game entirely.
Cut to 2023, I started taking a new psych med which, almost miraculously, allowed me to unlock a ton of memories from the time of the incident. Ranking high among them was that, oh yeah, I played a video game almost constantly for 5 years.
And I was in the middle of doing something.
The Classic WoW servers were basically a reboot of the game, starting from vanilla and progressing from there. When I first had this realization, they were on the Lich King expansion, but Cataclysm was set to be released over the summer of 2024.
In total I had about nine months to complete two years worth of quests. But I had two major advantages. First was that with the expansions, I was 20 levels higher than the content was designed for, so I wouldn't need a group. Second was that I convinced my sister to join me.
My sister and I were inseparable growing up, but after I left home, we didn't really talk much. She also happened to be an absolute god-tier raiding tank back in the day, so not only would I be escorted through the hardest parts of this quest line, but it would give us a chance to catch up on twenty years of stuff.
The first step in upgrading all your gear is acquiring gear to upgrade, so that's what we did. We needed different stuff, off different bosses, which sometimes required beating other bosses to get to the ones we needed. But even this wasn't straightforward, because you can't just walk into high level dungeons. First you need a key, or an attunement, which added more delay onto our already short timeframe.
Collecting the first set of armor (Wildheart for me, Lightforge for her) was tedious, and mostly done alone, since our priorities and schedules were different and we didn't explicitly need each other for this. There were, however, a few dungeons we teamed up for.
The first was Upper Blackrock Spire, or UBRS, because I was the only one who bothered to get the key for it but I wasn't capable of running the game's only 10-man dungeon on my own. The other was Stratholme, because, well, it's fun. We both needed loot off the final bosses of these two dungeons, so it made sense to team up.
Getting into the dungeons, and then getting the gear to get us through the dungeons, took us from November 2023 until late March 2024. Then we got three bad pieces of news all at the same time.
First, our guild disbanded. We never really figured out what happened, there was a dispute over how loot was apportioned, a bunch of people left and formed a new guild, our guildleader threatened to disband our guild, all kinds of stuff. This was all, for me, a person who had no emotional stake in the guild and only joined to stop the spam of invites, incredibly entertaining. "It's just like the old days!" I said on more than one occasion.
The next two announcements were not as fun.
Blizzard announced that they were moving up the timeline for Cataclysm release from August to May. And as a result, they were consolidating servers. Ours would be shut down.
The server move was far from the worst thing. We could keep all our stuff, but would lose all our friends and contacts. Since the only person I really cared about was my sister, we could handle that, but it meant moving from a nice peaceful server to one jam-packed with people.
The new deadline was way worse. We thought we had five months to finish the upgrade quests before they were once again gone forever. Instead, we had about five weeks.
This meant clearing our schedules for the short term to get this done. We worked on this a few weeknights a week and for several hours on the weekend. We needed to commit, and we did.
I'm proud to say that I only messed up once. Due to the time crunch, and the vagaries of trying to collect eight different items with 10% drop rates, I got my Wildheart set before she got her Lightforge set and, for fear of missing the deadline, plowed ahead and upgraded one piece of the set on my own.
She immediately noticed, politely called me on it, and from then on I was a team player. We succeeded or failed together.
My sister and I don't talk anymore, for what I think is a very simple reason. Growing up, there was no need to. We weren't twins, but everybody assumed we were. Born about fourteen months apart, we took a lot of the same classes at the same time, had the same interests, hobbies, and friends. There wasn't much that really needed to be communicated in words, and when I moved away, we just didn't have the ability to, so we stopped talking.
The quest chain we had to complete was long. It required coordination. I very quickly learned that I wasn't going to be able to do this on my own. The chain consisted of maybe 30 quests, varying in difficulty from "buy this stuff and bring it to me" to "kill this boss which you have to summon but killing these other 100 guys first".
The story of the quests revolved around some sort of adventuring party whose adventure had gone awry. A mysterious benefactor paid them to kill a wizard and steal his stuff, the loot being their payment. The most coveted item was his amulet, which they later found out contained a powerful enchantment that allowed him to house his spirit in there.
Unable to decide who should keep the amulet, they split it and went their separate ways, until most of the company met with untimely deaths. That's where the players come in. If we could kill the ghosts holding the pieces of the amulet, we could rejoin them and give them back to the wizard, who would stop his attempts at revenge.
The thing about this questline is that Blizzard wanted it to feel epic. They wanted it to take a long time. They wanted your investment, and they wanted to pay that off handsomely. All of that means that the quests are usually fairly complicated, difficult, and take place all over the world, usually on opposite ends of separate continents.
Like I said, there are maybe 9 of what you could call "endgame" dungeons, depending on how generous you are with your counting. We went into nearly all of them, and then some that weren't even on the list. This was a grand celebration of endgame content. We did the famous "Baron Run" in Stratholme, finishing the entire dungeon in under 45 minutes. (In reality it took us about 15 minutes since we were so high level but it still felt like an accomplishment). We flew to Dire Maul and purged the place of demonic influences. We fought in the arena of the Blackrock Spire and killed the old Warchief of the Horde.
So yes, while it was easier for us, we still had a ticking clock to worry about. There were two times when I worried we weren't going to make it. One of the bosses we had to kill was called the Duke of Cynders, a kind of fire snake guy. There was a multi-step process to summon him.
- Kill the members of his cult
- Loot the clothes off their bodies and collect a full set: robe, shoulders, and hood
- Use this disguise to summon a lesser monster, kill it, and take its insignia
- Repeat this three times, and cash those insignia in for a summoning medallion
- Use this, plus another set of cultist clothes, to summon the Duke
There are two problems with this. First, the drop rate on the clothing is really low. I'm guessing about 1 in 20 drop it. That means you're killing something like 60 guys just to have a chance to summon one of the Duke's minions, then repeating three more times to get to the Duke.
The second problem is that the summons are random, themed off the elements of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. So even if you do all that stuff, there's only a 25% chance of summoning the one boss we needed.
This took a long time.
There is a shortcut, of sorts. The cultists also drop their secret texts, which you can collect and deliver to an ex-believer, and he will translate them for you and provide you with gifts in the forms of scrolls and ways to summon the bosses you want. This is also a random drop, only in the game he needs time to "decipher" the text, so you don't get your results until 8 hours later.
This process of farming and waiting took a whole weekend full of senseless violence and me waking up at 3 in the morning with a panic attack, worried we wouldn't finish. This was my second, and probably last, chance to finish what I had started so long ago. I tried everything I could to sleep through the night but it just didn't work.
We pursued both the random strategy and the deciphered scrolls strategy simultaneously, and in the end it was the old hermit who paid off. Waking up Sunday morning to eight more tranches of flavor text and useless scrolls, buried within was a medallion that would allow us to summon the Duke.
Even then, I was terrified. We weren't the only people on the server gunning for this armor set. What if we summoned him, but somebody "tagged" the Duke before we could deal any damage to him? Then that person would get the kill credit, and the loot.
I was fully paranoid at this point, using my Track Humanoids skill to make sure we were alone before making the summon and the kill.
I thought that would be the end of it, and the panic attacks did mostly subside, all the way up until the final boss. We had to fight our way through Upper Blackrock Spire and summon the spirit of this wizard in a specific place within a specific room. I was expecting another straightforward fight in which we easily overpowered an enemy intended to fight characters 20 levels below us.
Instead, he killed us in about 10 seconds.
Immediately, the panic was back. We had no guild, no friends on this new server. We were so close to the end, but if we couldn't kill this one boss, our armor sets would forever remain incomplete.
My sister, paladin of all paladins, absolutely refused to give up. We had been playing for 5 of the last 6 hours at that point, and I felt hopeless and a little loopy from locking myself in a sunless room all weekend. I could feel the panic welling up inside me. I wanted to call it a day.
She said no.
She drove me back into the spire, past all the guards we'd already killed, and launched a fresh attack at the spectral wizard.
We lasted maybe 20 seconds, but she discovered the key. He summoned "adds", little minions, that had a one-shot ability. They would instantly kill whoever they targeted, if we let them live for more than about 5 seconds.
I still thought we needed help, but she refused to give up. My sister is amazing, and she games with reckless abandon, just like a paladin should. I'm pretty sure at one point she even said "Once more into the breach!"
We changed tactics for the next attempt. My goal was to strictly target the adds, refuse to let any of them get that shot off. It was not always a sure thing. A few times they locked on before I got the chance to kill them, but we just saved it.
Boss fights in WoW are usually multi-phase, and this was no exception. The adds stopped after phase 1, and we could focus on just bringing the boss down. But he had another trick up his sleeve, as the ground beneath our feet began detonating with shadow magic. This kept us constantly on the move, my sister dragging the old wizard around the room to avoid his spells, and me in my cat form trying to get close enough to sink in a claw or two.
This was a mad scramble. Health was dropping on both sides, I felt nearly useless. After what felt like two minutes, he finally gave up the ghost, so to speak. We used the amulet to reunite his spirit with his dead body, and he thanked us.
Task complete, we flew back to Ironforge and stood in the throne room of the king, where our armor sets were finally complete, one week before the questline vanished once again, maybe forever.
