It feels so right to be here with you, oh…
*ahem*
3 posts in 3 days? Holy smokes Batman! This hasn’t happened since… since… (goes to check out my blog history)
..
July. 26th-28th. Wow, I thought it would be a lot longer than that. I’m surprising myself reading through the logs.. I have written a lot more than I realize.
Just not recently.
I even have several streaks of 4 posts in 4 days.. but I don’t think I’ve ever gone 5 in 5. Time to change that. March. 1st through 5th.
Again, I am surprised.
..
Anyway, it’s not just me that’s written a blog post out of nowhere this week. Lyssi actually wrote something! Well kind of. But it’s a start. It may not be the whiny rant we were expecting, but humorous just the same.
And what is that? A new post at Clearcasting? No way! I probably can’t claim credit for inspiring her, but Arioch has posted something this week as well. This one was definitely the whiny rant we were expecting. It’s like it’s Christmas all over again.
..
I almost decided to put off this post until Friday and talk about something else instead.. but I’ve been leading up to it for 2 days now and probably shouldn’t keep you waiting any longer. I know you’re all waiting with baited breath for it. All 2 of you. Anyways.
Cataclysm.
As a mage. A goblin mage.
The very first thing to do was to get Old World Flying in Orgrimmar. Scratch that, the very very first thing to do was get out of Dalaran. Now I knew the portals were going away, but I still neglected to move any of my characters out of Dalaran. They were each sitting in their favorite inn or book spawning point. But I did not roll a mage for nothing..
You really learn to appreciate the haste stat when you play a mage. 7 second teleports feel soooo much better than 10 second hearthstones. Especially when people pay you to teleport instead of hearth. Time is money friend!
Get to Orgrimmar… holy cow. There is no other word for it: epic. Another way to describe it is: very frustrating if you can’t fly. Actually, my goblin rogue made it to Orgrimmar before my mage did. Very frustrating. But incredibly epic if you can fly.
I considered for a moment the choice before me: Hyjal or Vash’jr. Well I didn’t want to go to some flowery night-elfy mountain, so I took to the sea.
Vash’jr is really cool. I want to express how much I loved the zone without giving away too much in the way of spoilers.. but if you haven’t gone through Vash’jr in the month Cataclysm has been out already, I’m probably not spoiling much anyway.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the quests here have been “streamlined”. Whether you are for it or against it, there has been a lot of discussion about this around the blogosphere. I happened to notice a very good post written up over at Righteous Orbs when I attempted to catch up on my blog reading yesterday. Yes, I’m behind.
In one way, it’s nice to not have to “jump around” in questing, do one quest at the northern end of a zone, then run to the south, go kill something in the west and find some item in the east. Then go to the 5 corners of the zone all over again. Now you do 5 quests right here, then move a little to do 5 quests right there, then move again. This part I like.
On the other hand, there are 5 other frustrated fingers. You really don’t get much of a choice what order to do the quests. You might have 2 quest hubs to choose from at a time, maybe only 1. Sure you still technically have 3 to 5 quests at a time, but they’re all at the same place. One is just “kill 10 of these” and the other is “loot 10 of these from those same guys” and “discover some thingamajigger right next to those guys while you’re looting”.
Do I enjoy the new questing? Yes, more than the old (older?) world quests. A few more choices, a little less phasing would be appreciated. Give it another 3 expansions and I think Blizzard will figure it out.
I think what I enjoyed the most, that made me absolutely love the zone, is the PvP. Yes, this is a PvP server, in a (relatively) well populated zone! I completely missed the first week rush, I can’t imagine what it might have been like, but I definitely saw more people than in any Wrath zones. Meaning I actually saw someone. And there was blood. A lot of it.
It started with this male night elf hunter. His back was turned, he was killing some mob. He was in my way. I took care of that. It’s amazing how flammable night elves are.
/side note: I have discussed before the ethics of PvP and ganking. My personal motto is gank twice, then leave them alone. Unless they are in my way, for a quest or something. /end side note
The hunter rezzed, I killed him again pretty much instantly. That was my twice, time to move on. I had finished the quest anyway.
A little while later I got to the quest hub with the poor pathetic damsel in distress in the cave with the two guys. No, I can’t be bothered to look up names. There was a human mage in there talking to one of the quest givers. I check my surroundings, no other enemies in sight. The quest givers are only like level 81, not even elite, so I figure they won’t attack me. I wind up my pyroblast…
The enormous sphere of fire soars through the air and smashes into my foe, which is immediately engulfed in the flame of a Living Bomb.
And then from the depths of the darkest corner of the world, or of that cave anyway, crawls the Abyssal Lurker. This enormous crab (what? I’m a goblin) proceeds to smash my figure into a pulp. My dots killed the human by the way. Ok! Big elite guard in the cave, good to know. I swim back to my corpse. Verrry slowly. I hadn’t figured out yet it’s a good idea to run on the bottom of the ocean when you’re dead. It is a *lot* faster.
The human is back, along with a squidman shaman. The two looked like they had been about to leave when they saw me arrive. They stood still. I ran circles around them. I blew raspberries. I made clucking noises. I did the Single Ladies dance. They would not move. I made it perfectly clear as soon as they were out of the cave, they were dead. At this point I’m still 80, they’re 81 and 82 respectively.
They won’t move! Finally I sit down and hit /afk. They wait another minute. They target me, notice I’m afk, then slowly start to back out of the cave, still watching me. I let them get just out of the mouth of the cave, then I charge. Boom boom dead. I decided to not wait for them to rez, I had gotten the mage twice already after all. And I had questing to do.
Did anyone else notice the Weighted Companion Cube with the gilgoblins? So cute π
While I was slaughtering dozens of gilgoblins I was attacked by a draenei hunter. He got the jump on me, I died. I rezzed in a fern (those things are awesome for hiding in). Healed and buffed up, then jumped him. He was dead before his pet could reach me. Then he rezzed and jumped me. Then I rezzed and jumped him. Then I ran.
After this first encounter, we were both kill on sight. And for the most part, whoever started the fight won the fight. We were both at the point where our damage was ridiculously bursty, but we didn’t have much Cataclysm gear yet with extra stamina to compensate. He was 82, I was 81 by now.
During a lull in the war between hunter and mage, I spotted the draenei/human combo again. And killed them again. Then it gets nasty. They bring their mains. A paladin and a warlock, both level 84. The pally has 104k health, the warlock about 80k. Yeah they kill me. But only twice.
I had been chatting with a troll hunter I had seen in the zone, had warned him about a certain draenei and human who might be a little upset because I had killed them. He laughed and told me he had got them both several times already. I let him know they had their mains, and he came to help me.
We dominated them. This trollw as only 82, I was 81, and we killed the 2 84’s. Repeatedly. I think at least 6-7 kills by the time we were done with them. They did not come back on their alts that day.
Back to the draenei hunter. He did not seem to fully comprehend the Lurker in the Cave. As we went back and forth killing each other, I was leading him on back toward the cave entrance. Finally, he attacked while he was in range and he got clobbered. Then he comes back.. and attacks me again. And again. I step out a little bit further to taunt him.. then blink back to the cave and he gets owned again. I think I got him 5 times with the Lurker. Was pure awesome.
There was also a night elf hunter who got caught up in all of this somehow. She had the same cat pet as the draenei.. and if I see red that means dead. If I see a hunter, and I’ve been killing and being killed by hunters all day, you bet I’m going to kill it. She did not appreciate this. She logs onto a level 12 horde alt.
Now, anyone who logs to an alt to rant/complain immediately loses a bunch of respect points from me. My initial reaction is to point and laugh and camp them even more. But no, this one surprised me by being completely civil and polite about it:
“I’m going to f-ing report you to Blizzard you f-tard”
Yeah… about that.
Several times when I’ve gotten this in the past, they immediately log before I can even get a reply back to them. To be honest, that annoys me even more than just the obscene rants. I reply, as politely as I can:
“I’m sorry, but this is a PvP server, and there is nothing Blizzard will do about it. They just won’t”
Truth, it hurts. She responds:
“Yeah yeah I hear that all the time, shut up. That does not give you the right to constantly harass and kill me when I’m just trying to quest here!!!11”
So then I explained about how there was another hunter around who had been fighting me repeatedly, she understands and we’re all good. I offer to be more careful about which hunters I incinerate, and that was that. Turns out her husband got her into the game because he liked the PvP, but then he quit because he was tired of the PvP, and now she’s stuck on a PvP server because that’s where they started and he doesn’t even play anymore. She logged back to her night elf and we finished the few quests in that area together in peace.
See, I may be a die-hard Horde-for-life, red=dead, life is PvP ganking kind of guy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a soul.
I think that’s what it means.
Anyway.
This post is getting long. I have more to say. This means I will have something to write tomorrow!
Cheers,
Del
P.S: This post title is a reference. I will be ashamed if someone gets it, so I’m hoping none of you do.
Thank you for the morning giggle.
That elite was the joy of Vashj’ir for me when I was on my boomkin.
Both the lurker crabs and the Earthen Ring guys make reverse ganking so much more fun!
Yeah it made me laugh when this stupid rogue kept trying to gank me only to die to the elites.
Hmm…good to know about that lurker thing, seeing as how the one time I actually bothered to pretend to level Arelin, I went to Vash.
Also, lol@the mage dying to your dots. Iceblock better have been on CD or he’s really fail.
You know, I killed her and the shaman at least a dozen times, and I never saw her Ice Block. Wow. I know I did every cooldown..
A single Living Bomb is almost enough to kill someone if they don’t have Cataclysm stamina gear already. Why would you *not* clear that dot? That and the new Mage Shield thingy, gives me a sprint when it wears off π
I agree with you about the questing – I like not having run the length and breadth of the zone to kill subtly different types of harpies BUT there’s no sense of scale in having only three quests to do, all of them in the same 10ft by 10ft cube. I miss the days of STV being so full of quest markers you couldn’t see the map. That felt exciting to me.