World of Warcraft

A short period of time after I started playing, the latest and greatest Expansion, Mists of Pandaria, was released.  Pandas have been somewhat of an Easter Egg thing for the series (I think) for a while.  I know that in Warcraft 3 anyway, there was something to do with Pandas which was optional.  They now get their own full on debut for the world of Azeroth.

The day of it’s release, Pandas popped up all over.  They were running all over the place doing quests and leveling up as quickly as they can.  Later, when I started playing dungeons, they were present there aw well.  It’s actually a little annoying as 90% of the Dungeons I play consists of me and my Blood Elf, plus four Pandas doing spin kicks.  Ok, technically one of the Pandas will be healing, since Dungeon parties are a Tank, a Healer and three DPS folks (Ramchan is DPS, but could maybe tank a lower level dungeon).  I actually have no idea what makes a Tank a Tank exactly but Dungeons are a post for another day.

I did not buy Pandaria.  I don’t really care about $60 Expansion Packs or playing as a Monk.  All of the new areas are devoted to Level 85+ characters.  I have no need.

I did however discover that I apparently can make Panda characters.  I can’t make monks or go to the new continent, but I can create Pandarians with other classes.  So I made a Pandarian Priest.  This was in the middle of Brewfest so the plan was that he would be kind of a Friar Tuck sort, where he just runs around the world drinking.  I also wanted to RP up the angle of everything being crazy exotic.

The reality is, I finished the starting zone and then never played him again, but that’s not really the point.

I really enjoyed the Pandarian Starting area.  There is a great little narrative that leads you through some of the Pandarian Lore and ultimately culminates with you choosing Horde or Alliance.  So far I’ve played the Blood Elf, Orc, Tauren, Dwarf, Undead, Death Knight, and Panda starting quest lines.  I’d say the Pandarian line is the best one of those.  The Tauren one seemed to just teeter out into nothingness and Blood Elf wasn’t very cohesive.  The Dwarven line is alright but nothing amazing and the undead quests are mostly just kind of sill and fun than being real story intensive.  The Pandarian line is nicely self contained and wraps itself up pretty logically.

Why haven’t I played the Panda again then?  Well, I choose alliance and Alliance is just really boring to play.

Our story so far has most followed the exploits of one Fury Warrior Blood Elf named Ramchan daring to choose a blade over magic, she set out to help her people battle the forces of the Scourge invading the lands of her people.  After traveling from Silvermoon City through the Ghostlands and defeating Dar’Khan Drathir in the Tower of the Damned and continued south into the Plaguelands to continue her quest against the Scourge corruption.

The Plaguelands proved to be too difficult, filled with mighty monsters at every turn.  Ramchan did manage to make the trek through to Light’s Hope Chapel where a mix of Alliance and Horde forces battled under the banner of the Argent Dawn against the Scourge.  From this point there was no choice but to travel by flight to the safety of Undercity, the Horde’s central hub of the Eastern Kingdoms.

Here, Ramchan met up with the Dark Lady and the Forsaken forces.  She took up the mantle as champion of the Forsaken cause and fought to gain the favor of the Dark Lady.  During this time there was a short plunge into darkness with a focus on berserker force and bloodlust.  After championing the cause of the Forsaken, Ramchan headed off to Kalimdor for some travels and to commune with the Tauren.  Around this time many Pandarian started appearing throughout the world.  These Pandarian Monks brought with them talk of inner peace and strength in calmness.

Eventually Ramchan returned to the Plaguelands to continue the journey against the Scource forces and the Lich King.  She became a supporter of the Argent Dawn and fought along side them valiantly.  After victories at Stratholm and Tyr’s Hand, she came to an almost eerily deserted town in the Ruins of the Scarlett Enclave.  A mightly battle had been fought here once.  High in the sky was a large skeletal citadel.

It was at this point where the met for the first time, her new enemy.  The Scourge Force’s champion, a dark corrupted Tauren Warrior named… Angus Black.

It would be destiny for these two to clash, before the war against the Scourge would be won.

September 19 is “Talk Like a pirate Day” and World of Warcraft has a minor event in world celebrating the event.  Travel to Booty Bay on the south tip of the Eastern kingdom and meet with Captain DeMeza to get a special “Buff” and an achievement.  The “Buff” is basically “You look like a pirate”.  It can be cancelled and reactivated if you decide you want to drop the look and doesn’t add any other bonuses.  It lasts for 12 hours.

I’d never been to Booty Bay before, so I had a few new experiences.  Firsly, Booty Bay is the first neutral town I’ve been to.  At least I think it is neutral.  There were a whole boatload of Alliance folks hanging around in town for the event.  I learned a few things.  One, you can flag yourself for always on PvP but otherwise, you are untouchable by the opposing side.  This seems like something that would have been good to know before I had set off to hunt newbie dwarves.

I also had some experience with Instanced areas, though I’m not exactly sure that is what you’d call it in this case.  More on that in a bit.

The bulk of the time I spent on Pirates Day was doing Booty Bay quests.  All of these quests were nicely pirate themed and wearing pirate garb from the Pirates Day Buff was a nice bonus.  It’s kind of odd as well to see Alliance folks doing the same quests.  I kind of wish there were more avenues to do cross faction quests.  You can pay money to change factions but that also shifts your race to a matching opposing race.  I want to just continue being a Blood Elf Alliance character.

Ok, not really, I like the Horde way more than Alliance and both of my Alliance characters have barely been played.

Anyway, the climax of the Pirates Quest features an invasion of Booty Bay by an opposing Pirate Clan.  This places a ship in the middle of the town and puts the place under constant bombardment by cannon fire.  I am really curious to learn how this works for other players.  The huge crowd surrounding Captain DeMezo was gone.  In face, most Player characters were gone, replaced by mobs.  Except there were some Player characters still running around.  I don’t understand exactly how the game accomplishes this.  I mean, I get the programming logistics but, do these other players see the mobs?  Do they get attacked?  Do they see me?  Maybe they are there because they are also working on fighting the Pirate invasion.

I may never know.  Sure ly I didn’t spawn a city full of mobs for everyone to deal with.  Yeah, there were lots of high level players who would have no problem fighting them off but there were some lower level folks too.  Also, thinking of monsters killing people, these quests seem to be a bit buggy as the quest givers kept getting killed.

I don’t know if I’ll really bother next year, if I’m still playing WoW by then.  The Buff doesn’t add anything and there are no significant prizes to win (like some other events I’ll get around to writing about).

So, I can guarantee, right now, without a doubt, that my ultimate downfall in WoW interest will be a lack of “things to do”.  It almost killed it for me the moment I left Ghostlands and finished all of the Blood Elf starting quests at level 20.  At that time, I had one single quest available, and it was a boring “go drop this thing off in Undercity”.   Granted, I found things to do, but that will only last so long.  I suppose you could wonder how I could ever run out of things to do, considering how much there is to do, and considering there are all sorts of dungeons and PvP arenas and whatnot.

I tried PvP, it kind of sucked.  Maybe it will be better when I’m stronger, I’ll definitely try again, but I died quickly, like most of my team, and generally did not have fun.  It didn’t help that some asshole kept screaming about how we should all just go delete our accounts for being so terrible.  He wasn’t the top player on our team or anything, but hey. he certainly knew better than us.

Still, I trudge on, with my own little goals.  It was around this time, that the Patch happened, and I totally lost my Warrior Fury Mojo.  I’ve managed to relearn how to fight pretty effectively.  It was a surprisingly easy fix.

I started over.

No, I didn’t make a new character, I started doing Undead quests, from around the low level first quests.  Why bother?  I learned I could buy mounts from other factions by becoming “Exalted” in reputation, which meant doing a lot of quests for that faction.  The Blood Elves have their own mount that I can buy at any time simply because I am one of them.  It’s a huge goofy Chocobo Knockoff.  It bobbles around as it runs and is generally not real intimidating.  While wandering around previously in Orc Territory I tried to buy a Raptor off of a Troll but he told me to piss off.  Later, I found out the Undead get bad ass Skeleton Horses.  A creepy Undead Horse seems like a much more awesome and intimidating mount for a Blood Elf Fury Warrior, and I wanted one.  Which meant becoming Exalted, which meant doing loads of Undead based quests. 

It took doing pretty much the entire “storyline” but I did it, and I got my horse.

Something kind of interesting I noticed along the way however, the Undead Quests are a LOT more fun than the Blood Elf quests.  The Blood Elf quests are almost all my hated MMO stereotype of “Kill XX of Monster YY” and “Collect ZZ of Trinket WW”.  The Undead Quests seemed a lot more story driven and often, a lot more off the wall.  some of them would simply be “Stand here while we give some plot exposition”, but they helped drive things along.  Which reminds me of another bonus on the undead quests, they had a cohesive plot.  The Blood Elf Quests were all disjointed, run around doing random shit for random strangers.  The Undead follow an epic plot of war and betrayal where you assist this Banshee chick in fighting Werewolves.

It felt like I was accomplishing something beyond leveling up my character, it felt much more gamey, which is good.

There was also a bit more comedy in the undead quests.  Like the quest where the original Questgiver wanted a break, so I got to stand in his place giving stupid pointless tasks to people who happened by.  Or the blatant Plants vs Zombie knockoff mini game.

Anyway, my next goal, aside from getting to whatever level may be, is to go through more of the starting area quests.  I have yet to figure out where the Trolls, Goblins, and Taurens start yet, but when I do, I shall do my best to become their Exalted champions.

So, until next time, when I spend the day being a Pirate!

I have 3 characters on World of Warcraft that I’ve been cycling through to some extent.  One common thread on these characters I’ve found are random Guild invites.  I have no idea how they find me, I’m often alone in an area when I will suddenly be invited to a guild.  I have always declined these.  If I can’t even see you, I don’t want to be a part of your guild.  At least talk to me first.

Which one guild did.  Instead of a random invite, I received a random question of why I wasn’t in a guild.  i can almost guarantee I was alone at the time, so i still don’t know how they found me, I was, in the heart of Dwarven Alliance territory at the time.  I had a little discussion about how I’d gotten invites but no real discussion or information.  They pitched the guild to me a bit and said if I wanted to join to just let them know.  I said sure, mostly on the grounds that they had actually chatted with me a bit and hadn’t just been casting a wide net to see who would bite.  I figured that I could always leave.

Another reason I hadn’t joined a guild was that I hadn’t really looked into the details and ins and outs of guilds.  Would I be paying some sort of fee?  Would I be locked into one guild forever?  That sort of thing.  I didn’t think either situation was the case but I wanted to be sure.

There are actually a lot more benefits to being in a guild.  You get all sorts of perks to speed up leveling and reputation gains and transport speed.  I kind of wish I had joined a guild earlier actually.

They seem to be an interesting bunch at least.  They chit chat to each other about this and that.  I get to feel slightly bad for not being a high enough level to join in any of their little group activities.  Still, it’s nice to have someone to chat with occasionally, even if it’s to make little jokes about things going on in the game.  They are also helpful if I have questions about things I’m not sure about.

On the other angle of being social, I also made a small group in order to try to tackle a boss type monster.  The previous bosses I’ve had to face I just ended up skipping them, returning later when I’m ten levels overpowered and any quest rewards are meaningless.  Unfortunately we didn’t beat the boss, a huge Yeti packing a killer throwing attack.  I did end up getting help with this slime boss that I couldn’t quite handle alone.  It’s kind of neat how it works, you basically just share credit for the quest objective while rolling a random number for any good loot. 

There are some downsides to being friendly I suppose, though I got a good laugh out of it.  Upon my first visit to Orgrimmar as a Blood Elf, I was heading out into the wilderness and as I was exiting the building, I met a higher level player running towards me being chased by something like 20 low level Boars.  He seemed more than capable of handling such a large pack but also seemed distressed about it a bit.  So I stepped up to help him fight them off.  He suggested I use my Thunderclap Attack, which I had just recently learned.  It’s an area affect attack that affects all nearby enemies.

This was my undoing.

While standing in the middle of the pack, I unleashed the Thunderclap.  This caused all of the Boars to retarget me instead of their previous target.  I put of a decent fight but they got the best of me.  I revived and found the guy still standing over my corpse laughing.  Fortunately, i was laughing too.  there really isn’t much consequence to dying in WoW so I had no real reason to be mad.  Still, I guess this is sort of the WoW equivalent of griefing.