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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Perhaps I was a particularly stupid seven year old. I genuinely never figured out the Saffron City thing! I spent forever wandering around, trying to figure out how to progress the game from there, before I just randomly lucked into it.

In the meantime the Mankey I had forgotten in the daycare weeks ago was level 50-something. Which slotted perfectly into my bad/stupid team.

I couldn't find Surf in the Safari Zone to save my life as a small child.

I'd bet more of our performance difference being me having a couple years on you. I sometimes wonder how much of the improvement you described is down to personal experience, how much is collective knowledge, and how much is purely mechanical.

A lot is collective. Playing with and against friends on the playground, I realized things like "Having six mediocre pokemon is generally less effective than having three good ones."

Similarly, I played Druid in the original run of WoW, and nobody really wanted a feral druid tank in original TBC. Just wasn't viewed as workable, main tank was always a warrior. Now, in the rerun of TBC, Druid tanks are very highly rated, and warriors are on the outs. Druid became a lot better in later expansions as a tank, and with that knowledge as part of the collective culture it works backward into TBC classic.

I did Bear in TBC. It was fine most of the time. There were some fights where it was straight better. But too many important fights had Warrior specific mechanics. Does Illidan still functionally require the ability to block?

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