Salty #2
Of course the rare fish are scared off when they see a great lumbering Tauren kitted out in Crusader’s Square Pauldrons and Tempered Titansteel Treads hovering over their pool.
Scaring the fish away
Time for some more appropriate fashion:
- Red Swashbuckler’s Shirt
- Knitted Tunic (Tauren don’t wear overalls)
- Embroidered Gloves
- Embroidered Pants
- Embroidered Belt
- Knitted Sandals (aka thongs…)
There will be no-one to stop us this time
That should do the trick. They’ll take one look and a Blacktip Shark and 15 Pound Mud Snapper will be mine!
Freedom?
Whilst reaching max level meant that the on rails levelling was over, and despite a myriad of playing options becoming available, it actually felt like there was suddenly less scope to just play around:
- Need to grind factions to Exalted;
- Professions must be maxed;
- Farm mats for crafted epics;
- Accumulate badges for welfare epics;
- Stay current with your gear;
- etc.
Pike recently expressed a similar sentiment, staying gear capped becomes more restrictive than levelling an alt. There can be great pressure to keep up, which in turn limits your choices of what to do when you’re online.
My much beloved ex guild leader used to insist on rep grinds (thank goodness the Hodir enchants are BoA now), min-maxing professions, dailies, the works, before his Guildies could have the freedom to… go fishing. It felt like wagging school to go in search of Old Crafty.
Of course the pressure to get to the level cap can mean just as little freedom. But unless you’re power levelling, you can drift around doing different things, exploring the world, doing instances just for the fun of it. As Janis Joplin put it, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”, and you really do have nothing to lose when levelling, but there’s a lot to lose once you fall behind the end game.
Corporatespeak
Mind you, Cataclysm still sounds great - especially Goblins and Archaeology. And here’s hoping the Epic Moose Mount makes it in for the Winter Olympics.
Blackrock Depths
The scale and size of the dungeon is amazing – epic Dwarven architecture, of even greater ambition than Ironforge. You start in rough hewn tunnels before emerging out into majestic amphitheatres, arenas, and lava-strewn forgeworks. The Dark Highway in particular is enough to make you stop and take copious screenshots. It feels like a living, breathing, working underground city.
Some of the mechanics are beautiful too – opening a wall cabinet reveals the portrait of a fallen Dwarf Lord, whose obituary message reveals the location to the Shadowforge Key. And there are many moments where you look down on somewhere you’ve been, or somewhere you’re working toward.
It’s also very complicated, and easy to get utterly lost. We did, several times, despite having copious guides, screenshots, maps, handwritten notes, and a old-skool veteran in the party. We stumbled into the Grim Guzzler at around midnight, sunk a long cool Thunderbrew, and called it a night.
There are a million bosses, many which you run into before realising, and all of who seem to drop cloth blues, despite this being the only place in Warcraft where you can forge Dark Iron. BRD is also full of truckloads of mobs, everywhere you turn. We must have killed an entire Dwarvish nation just getting to some of the bosses, so much so that we felt some kind of penance might be due.
The sheer numbers are what makes it seem like a real place - spectators cheering the arena, forgesmiths at work, miners, technicians and engineers working on weapons and great siege engines. I can see why Blizzard reduced the trash on modern dungeons, and am glad they did for everyone’s sanity, but less NPC activity does take some of the life out of the newer instances.
It would have been an incredible challenge to play on level back in the day, with 6+ pulls being common. We were all hovering around 55 last night, but despite my Bear tanking being pretty rusty, all the dungeon nerfs & player buffs meant we dominated most everything, even when our healer was annihilated by 800 angry wrench throwers.
Weekly Marmot
