WoWing Around Again: Orcs

Grogthar sounded too much like an ogre, so I went with Grokthar.

Let's get right into it: kill boars. And so the ABOMINATIONS begin. They moved the boars. That's right, the once-convenient boar-killing area is now overrun with... a level one hare and humans with really awful stealth skill. It appears that all the boars are in someone's farm. Yea, my second quest, right after "talk to this guy", is "kill some peasant's means of survival."

The general goods vendor does a sexy dance on the cooking fire. A quest giver describes it as "embarrassing".

The level 2 rogues have fan of knives. And don't react when I kill their friends. The first part is blatantly ridiculous, but I do like that they captured the every-man-for-himself essence of the class, along with their utter refusal to initiate combat with a player at greater than 50% health.

Highforsure whined in general chat about getting dismounted. I tried to make fun of him, but was informed by the game that I do not have permission to speak. Ouch.

I hope I get to punch the lazy peons.

I GET TO PUNCH THE LAZY PEONS!

However, the sound is all screwed up. It's like a drum. It used to be a painful-sounding smack, like something important had gotten crushed and possibly some veins were setting free their long-imprisoned blood.

Did the scorpids always drop a tail? That seems wrong. What's the point of an MMO if animals always have the desired body part?

And then the zone ended.

Okay there was a bit between that, during which I attacked non-hostile demons and a big scorpion, all of which seemed to be exactly the same as before. It looks like Blizzard ran out of time, because it looks as if they did a slight rearranging of some mob locations and rewrote some quests slightly, but left most of it unchanged. Maybe the orc/troll zone was the one place that didn't suffer the 70% failure rate.

Early Durotar was about the same. Kill humans in the keep, pick up tools, kill warlocks in a cave, kill quillboar, get sent to the Barrens before you're anywhere close to done, get sent to the other cave up north while simultaneously being sent to the tower to the west. I don't mean to sound as if I am complaining. I had a good bit of fun in the area. The helping quests had that old style feel to them, by which I mean they were randomly scattered and did not at all stack up to a smooth flow from one to the next. And I accidentally killed my quest boss early because I thought it was a rare spawn. Clearly wasn't rare, since it respawned pretty quickly.

Grokthar is a protection warrior. It's not so much the protecting part that he cares about, he just likes hitting people with shields and it's an excuse to start fights. He's a blacksmith and was angry to find that he needed to fly all the way to Ogrimmar just for fine thread for some fancy copper pants. The new Orgrimmar is way too big to travel without a mount. They should add an in-city flight system. While I was in there, I wasted some time doing the fishing daily in the wrong pool. I probably should have tried to stop that kid with the balloons. His adventure cannot end well. This isn't a Pixar movie!

"Kill 12 Durotar Harpies. Any type of harpy will suffice." Way to rub it in, Blizzard. Oh yea, you know what you wrote. "Ha ha, fuckers, you spent 15 minutes in those damn canyons trying to get a respawn of the type that someone else killed first and you've gotten NONE but all you find are the type you don't need." Three times I leveled from finding chests, including one in the valley of the harpies.

Running past Brewfest, I did a few of the quests. The keg pony looked neat, so I thought I might try for that, but then I got lost trying to find the keg-thrower and remembered that I don't like the ram-racing anyway and why waste time collecting shinies on a throwaway account? This is something interesting that I've found: since this account is highly unlikely to become a full account, these characters have limits and are likely to be completely abandoned before long. Now my goal isn't racing to 85 or raiding, but to 15 and grouping. That's my primary interest now: seeing what the low-level grouping is like these days.

I did a trio of fighting quests for a guy with the title, the actual, Blizzard-given title of , helping him test his new gladiator slaves. For the record, one of them had rowed a canoe from Northrend to Azshara.