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.

WoWing Around Again: Trolls

Let's see... troll time. Oh, gotta make that a shaman! And if I'm making a troll shaman, well, it must be named Klepsacovic.

Except some jackass TOOK MY NAME. Who the hell would do that?

*checks server*

Oh. Ner'zhul. Huh. Yep, that's where I last played, so that jackass? Me.

The place looks cool. I thought it was neat that some other initiate seemed to be coming with and then going to his own trainer. I wonder if we're going to be teamed up later.

If you're going to have non-hostile mobs, tiki target dummies are a pretty good one. Hungry cats, not quite as good. But... The damn Naga was described as WANTING TO KILL ME and what does he do? Wanders out of his cage and waits for a lightning bolt to the face to attack. Ugh. Why is it not hostile? It's a mob that stays in a cage until I specifically ask for it to come out. This is one mob that is absolutely completely 100% totally justified as a hostile mob and being described in a repetitive and redundant manner.

It seemed strange to start with mace and shield, and then my very first shaman quest reward is a staff. I feel like that would send mixed messages.

Why am I being sent to Vol'jin already? And why has everyone been talking about me? I have been here a few minutes and my total achievement is: I killed some cats who, as the quest trainer herself said, we most at risk of scratching my ankles.

After that I get two quests, with map markets on different coasts, one for crabs, the other to talk to someone. But the crabs are also right near the talking quest, so the marker is just sending people running all around. Maybe it is to ensure that I complete and turn in the quest before I run off to another island.

Capturing Swiftclaw was fun and a nice followup and route back after swimming over for the other raptors.

I got two whispers about guilds within a few minutes. None as a gnome. Racists.

I SAW ANOTHER PLAYER! She was a druid with heirlooms. She started the boss event before me. I shot a couple lightning bolts and got quest credit. It didn't make much sense. So I abandoned and started over again.

THRALL! THRALL DEFENDING GARROSH BEING A DOUCHE! *sigh* Of course this is no problem for a new player, since they won't remember Thrall being awesome and until they GO BACK IN TIME to Northrend won't know quite much of an ass Garrosh is. Or before that, aka FURTHER BACK IN TIME, in Outland, when he's a whiny crybaby.

So that's the end of the troll area. My opinion of WoW has gone all the way up to "I'd play it for free."

Coming up next, an orc mage. Seriously? An orc mage? WTF is that? Fuck it, warrior.

WoWing Around Again: Gnomes

This post is a bit of a play by play reaction. It is not short. You have been warned.

I started with gnomes. I'm not sure why. But we can't erase the mistakes of the past.

Majalah the gnome priest. I don't remember the server. It put me somewhere and I don't really care. Maybe it's a special server for people they hate for not paying them.

It's a new account because I couldn't figure out a way to use my old account. Maybe I can't. I don't care. I figure if I create a character and get really attached to it, I can remake it. If I find it too horrible to redo a mere 20 levels, that is not a good sign.

It's not off to a good start.

I'm supposedly in the middle of a very dangerous battle in Gnomeregionanon but it doesn't feel very dangerous. Anything hostile is busy fighting an NPC and the NPC doesn't seem to have much trouble. I don't think I should truly be in danger, since this is a starting area after all, but maybe at the very least, I should get attacked. Of course with all the crazed gnomes milling about (I was going to say running, but it's really more of a milling) it would be a bit too dangerous if they were all hostile. So why not make them hostile but have fewer of them? That way I get attacked without being likely to die. There we go, some illusion of danger without enough danger to quite scare anyone away, though if a tiny bit of danger is enough to scare them away, I doubt that person is going to be a contribution to the raiding game, or anything else.

Then I did a dangerous retreat to safer place, which looks equally unsafe, by which I mean not at all unsafe, just like where I started, so I don't see the need for me to have run over here, through the mulling hordes of neutral mobs.

I couldn't find the decontamination bot. I think it should have been an automatic process: run into decontamination room and the bot grabs the gnome, possibly while shouting at it for attempting to bypass decontamination protocols. After that I was told to talk to some guy for a teleport to the surface. I figured the important part was the "get to the surface", but the elevator did not complete the quest. Simple place for a minor choice and somehow Blizzard avoids it. Maybe a new new player would follow the rules and just talk to the teleporter gnome.

I seem to be a hero already. I'm not quite sure why. The S.A.F.E. Guide ran off before I could finish reading the quest.

I did like that the priest trainer told me that memory loss is a common problem after time in Gnomeland. It's just a line or two of quest text, but that's the sort of thing that can efficiently hand-wave away so many problems, such as why I have a backstory and don't know it.

The history of the Gnomerland invasion operation on the holotablepad was pretty funny. Or I'm a sucker for Star Wars references and excessively calm computers announcing doom.

I just noticed that the minimap has a marker for the current target. That's a nice touch. Maybe it's "dumbing it down", but I can't say I ever had a much fun trying to find something that I could target, but not quite see in the crowd.

Rare spawn! Gibblewilt had a bag. And a mean fireball... the guy took off almost half my health! The help feature told me that if I run out of health I'll die. The quests around the pools make a bit more sense, though I wish the living contamination was hostile. Bags auto-equip. I liked the fun of equipping bags. I don't know why, but I preferred that.

"You need to see a medic!"
"Make that a rocket scientist!"
Well done, Blizzard. This is what you do well: silliness.

The troggs are hostile. I got attacked by two at once. I wasn't likely to die, but it was still better than single-pulling neutral mobs. Someone whined in general about everyone else fucking up the daily for them.

Great Father Artcius killed me. AWESOME! Guy hits hard, easily half my health per swing. Second time around I was more careful with my health. He died. I got a bag. Woo! The respawn time on the NPCs seems a bit fast, since I think I'm the only person around.

The Paintinator has too short of a range. How does it make any sense to disable the sentry if I've already gotten close enough to aggro it and even get hit?

The battle with evil gnome wasn't all that impressive. It got worse when I saw that all the sentry bots were back. The celebration seemed lame. The music felt out of place.

Then it was off to Dun Morogh proper for the final disappointment. There are three gnomes pushing carts of rockets. Somehow, against all odds and all sense, they made it all the way to the gate without anyone exploding. Then they despawned. So much lost potential.

The first few quests were absolute garbage. Then they got better and turned into a good bit of fun, with a bit of gnomish silliness here and there, as is appropriate and expected. The big event of the area was a stunning disappointment.

So there's the gnome-specific content. It took a bit under two hours and got me about halfway to level 7. It doesn't actually take that long, but I kept tabbing out to write this and at some point, make lunch. I will use that as my measurement. I ate lunch late. So there we go, the gnome campaign was good enough to keep me playing through a bit of hunger. Not a ton, but a bit. I think that qualifies it for a thumbs-up.

Maybe this weekend I will get him up to level 20 and can tell a bit what the very early game priest experience is like. But that is for later.

Gnome Racials Really Are Overpowered

Fact: 100% of the new kills for last night included me being out of my body on pygmy oil.

We got our first Blood Queen kill. I like that fight. My DPS needs work though.

We seemed to be learning well on Sindragosa, but I don't know why people are so slow on running out.

Gnome Hunters

To my fellow bloggers: Please stop writing interesting topics that I want to respond to with more than just a short comment. Gnome hunters have gotten pushed back practically a week because of you. Please, think of the gnomes.

If any of you read the WoW general forums much, one of the MVPs is named Palehoof and he's a tauren engineer of the gnomish variety. As he was showing off his awesome new drawing my Noxy, I checked out his excessively large collection of motivational posters. One of them caught my eye. Well okay, several did, but this one was something to write about: Gnomish Hunters.

It's a fact that gnomes have very few classes. And no healers. Their lack of faith is their own problem. So no paladins or priests. And I'm pretty sure the Gnomer incident took them off the Nice List for nature, so no druids or shamans. So what else can they get? No healers, but hunters at least.

But let's face it, gnomes aren't very hunter-like. It just doesn't make sense. But what can they do? They can talk to machines. So why not have gnomes be a special type of hunter which tames mechanicals? This could be all sorts of awesome.

And just to top it off, their 41 point Machine Mastery talent would allow them to tame exotic machines. And by exotic I mean machines that do not belong in player hands, such as Fel Reavers.