I Actually Would Like to Set the World on Fire

So ... I remember why I quit Farmville. And Vampire Wars, and all of those Facebook timewasters, actually. Plainly speaking, I hate being told I have to do something.

Employment aside, of course.

Now, what this means is, I like games that offer me branching paths, and choices and such, because even the illusion of free will is better than nothing. And I hate games that basically devolve into a routine of "plant twenty dickberries and come back in ten hours."

Which ... is one of the unfortunate side-effects of daily quests in the old standby, World of Warcraft.

What's even more frustrating?

Starting back over at the beginning, through anything other than my own volition.

So, what relevance does this have to anything whatsoever?

Apparently when you perform a faction transfer, you lose your status with a neutral faction (The Argent Crusade) and have to build your way back up from scratch. Now, this is almost understandable since the faction that actually 0's out is the Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, not The Argent Crusade. Except ... none of the other factions, like, at all, do that. Even the ones that, like the Silver Covenant or Sunreavers, are just equivalents, not truly neutral.

And you lose all your achievements, and your titles, and access to the special crusader vendor.

Which means 28 days - at least, assuming you miss nothing - of building your way back up from the very bottom rank for ... apparently no reason.

Very frustrating.

It's not even current content, but it's important to my character's RP.

So ... I feel obligated to do it.

Bastids.

Cooking Travels

So today's rant springs forth from my epic quest to level my cooking skill.

What. The. Fuck.

Okay, so firstly, I discover that everything trainable or even easily purchasable goes green at around 225 cooking skill. Which means that I'm going to have to buy recipes at the far ends of Azeroth, a nuisance in itself given that I've been Horde for this huge old chunk of playtime, and I have no idea how to get from Point A to Point B as Alliance - the problem being exacerbated by the whole problem caused by The Shattering.

Hello, wowhead. So my first excursion into purchasable cooking patterns reveals the other problem caused by The Shattering, which is to say removed NPCs and patterns.

What.

Well, apparently the things that made leveling this skill tolerable from 225-300 were utterly removed with the loss of the one NPC in the game who sells them. Namely, say, Nightfin Soup and Poached Sunscale Salmon.

And the NPC who sells those patterns also sells a few others, and all of them helped to get over a rough, awful patch of cooking levels. Why should these be removed? Because Blizzard saw fit to kill off a few NPCs just to drive home how inconvenient the end of the world is. That's all well and good, but I'm sure the knowledge they alone possessed has been spread about somewhat by the recipes they sold all that time!

So, I went to Tanaris for an NPC who is dead. Well, that's awesome.

This leaves Fishing as my only source of cookable materials - even the Auction House has nothing for me fully half the time.

So I go to learn Fishing, and that's annoying enough.

I discover that those removed patterns are the only use for half of the fish I'm catching. Fully half of them. Then there's the Plated Armorfish, which isn't even useful for obsolete cooking quests: it's an item for a removed Argent Dawn quest. Hooray.

And the one fish I've caught that's still useful for cooking has the lowest drop rate of all the fish in the game, as far as I can tell.

Well done, Blizzard.

Well done.

More Reasons to Dislike Level 58 DKs

So my last post was a rant about the PVE reasons DKs are evil.

Now for a different approach.

As you probably know, I'm an avid Roleplayer. It's interactive storytelling, basically, and it's intensely fun - when you do it right.

It is incredibly rare for Death Knights (especially level 58 Death Knights) to be doing it right.

I have a theory about that. It goes like this: in lore, Death Knights are incredibly powerful, and this is reflected by the class's starting level and array of skills. They are also the most triumphant anti-heroes of the piece. As a faction, they were more instrumental in defeating the Lich King than either the Horde or the Alliance, second only to the Argent Crusade for sheer, brutal effectiveness. Death Knights are damned - and also damned cool.

This combination of factors attracts young people with God complexes to the class. The high level is a cheat toward perceived power, even in roleplay. It's actually rather telling that even RP guilds often have a minimum level set for DKs well above their level 58 introduction into the wider World of Warcraft. The level also grants them access to a variety of clothing options. The cooler you look, the more powerful you are perceived to be, the theory goes, and since Death Knights are so fascinating and overpowered to begin with, as well as actually looking cool, Death Knight player characters generally end up not being cool after all.

To put it bluntly, ever level 58 DK I have seen roleplaying (with few notable exceptions) have done so poorly, and fall into one of three categories: the Death Knight godmoder, the Death Knight eRPer, and the "not-a-Death Knight" godmoder/eRPer.

And, since the death of the Lich King, Death Knights have stopped being particularly lore-relevant! The only thing we get about Death Knights post-Cataclysm is a little blurb about Thassarian and Koltira in WPL, which tells us that since their grand mission is up, most of them have pretty much just joined whatever faction they started out as ... maybe.

TL;DR: The Death Knight class tends to be just plain bad for RP, and bad roleplayers flock to it.

Need More Rage

Caution: This posting contains a RANT.

So, I think I've figured out why it is that back in the day, Warriors were the only tanks. That reason is rage.

I am right now enjoying my second ragequit ever, and have discovered that there is a hard limit to the number of people that can be vote-kicked from a group, period.

So I mentioned I have a pocket healer now. We've been trying to keep our levels together, and it is difficult, as I want to level while he's roleplaying, or on an alt - and vice-versa.

He's 56, while I just reached 58.

I think if either of us run BRD one more time we'll both go mad, so we agreed to queue for UBRS on a whim.

For nostalgia, he said.

I should note here that I am not a very nostalgic person, and I don't remember UBRS all that well. I was very much a noobish idiot-child back in Vanilla, so it's probable that either I was never allowed to come with, or I just wasn't paying UBRS the attention it deserved but nobody got hurt since I was just healing.

The first thing we see upon zoning in is a Death Knight who made me ashamed of my server.

He died on accident before I had a chance to save him: at level 58, he was wearing cloth, leather, and mail greens.

For those who have not yet experienced Death Knights, the World of Warcraft Hero class, let me explain, with relish. And also ketchup and mustard.

There is literally no reason for a level 58 Death Knight to be wearing sub-par gear.

The gear the class starts with (at level 55) is composed entirely of plate greens. It has reasonably optimal stats, and it is sufficient for a level 55 to get by until 60.

The gear they get on the way to level 58 and joining the rest of the population is blue and can last until level 70: everything, every single piece of gear a Death Knight sees from 58-69 is either a sidegrade or, at best, a very minor upgrade.

IF the unthinkable had happened and this poor sod had been hacked, he's only 58. Rerolling his Death Knight from scratch loses him almost nothing.

So, as soon as possible, we lose the useless DK. While we wait to kick him, one of the other DPS flat-out leaves.

We get two more DKs.

And they are both idiots.

Both of them Death Grip off of me, which is actually the least of their sins, although one of the more frustrating to deal with as a tank. One of them apparently has a grudge against the very idea of wearing a helm, so we have to talk him into putting his on. They seem to want to do the [Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy!] JENKINS achievement, at-level for the instance, judging by the sheer number of eggs that ended up smashed before we ever reached the Father Flame event.

Neither of them are inclined to help me, so much as "wander off doing their own thing, which is, by necessity, in my general proximity."

The healer flat-out refuses to heal either of them, nor resurrect the first one to die (who promptly goes AFK for the rest of the instance). I can't blame him. As a matter of fact I pretty much just encourage his behavior - if there was any way for me to directly kill them, I would have done so myself.

By the third wipe, my pocket healer leaves, and I've /ignored three people before leaving, myself.

Thank you, level 58 Death Knights. You have so enriched my Warcraft experience.