The Problem of Being Horde
I’ve been feeling a bit trapped with finding something for my hunter to do, and my warrior happily grinds seals for her pets, but that’s it. I think I’ve come close to quitting WoW just for lack of something fun to do. The only thing holding me back was that I feel like I’ve only experienced half the game. My highest horde character is only lvl 33. There’s a lot I enjoy about the horde, but just when I’m getting to like them, they make me hate them again.
First let me state that I love the Tauren. They are 100% Awesome and full of win from the moment they appear in Warcraft III. In beta I made a NE, but at release it was a Tauren hunter that got to 10 first. Their philosophy and tree-hugger mentality really mesh well with what I like to do. Way more than the NEs. I had a great time, until I went to thunterbluff and met my first Forsaken. I just couldn’t sympathise with her. I gathered a few more quests from them but they just sat in my quest log. The completist in me couldn’t drop the quests, but the RPer couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t remember which quest it was that put me over the edge, but it got to the point that if I saw a Forsaken player I’d start to get nauseous.
Although I’m not a hardcore RPer, I do participate to an extent. I guess more than RP, I put myself in my characters – I RP as myself. That means if someone were to ask me to go save them from Defias invading their farms, I’d do it without hesitation. If they want me to test some poisons on an innocent dog… I have issues. I’d not only have issues associating with the person that wanted to do that, but I’d avoid anyone that would associate with that person as well. Or further, anyone that would think that’s cool to even pretend to do – IE a player. And the horde is full of them. Basically, any Forsaken or Blood Elf is portrayed as a sadist, and it made me uneasy to even group with people that rolled those races.
So, with my obsession with Worgen coming to a head recently (110% win!), I’ve been wanting to do their quests on the horde side. Knowing my problems with the forsaken, I decided to ease into it by sticking to kalimdor’s 1k Needles, and Stone Talon since alliance is severely lacking in lore there. We’ll see how it goes, but I still feel like I’m walking through a minefield of quests. Is this one going to be the one that makes me quit horde again – we’ll see.
PS: Orcs can be just as frustrating to quest for. In particular, the alliance mounted an assault on Icecrown but it failed so we were sent to investigate. It turns out the horde attacked trapping the alliance between them and the scourge, and both alliance and horde armors were devastated. Now, my first reaction was “what stupid thing did the alliance do now to provoke the horde?” I mean after the Wrath Gate, it would only be understandable. So, I went to wowhead and it turns out the thing they did was nothing – absolutely nothing. Yeah, horde saw the alliance fighting their sworn enemy that grows stronger each time anyone dies – the scourge and decided to attack the alliance. And what was the response to this imbecilic strategy – from the quest text “<After a brief pause, Korm bursts into laughter.>THAT is what it means to be HORDE!” These guys are morons.
Come on Cairne… why are you allied with these guys?
Three Moons!?
Dunno how it got to be so long, but oh, well. I’m not going to promise to get back blogging daily, but I’m losing interest in just doing champion dailies, while still really enjoying WoW in general.
Anyway, the reason I’m back today is the recent worgen thing going around. If it turns out there’s any truth to it, I WILL be renaming Znodis to something else and rerolling a Worgen hunter as my main. I’ve been in love with them since I first found the Howling Vale just exploring around in open beta. When I ran my first alt through Ashenvale, I got a screen shot of every panel of text for the quest chain for the Scythe of Elune. As you may have guessed by now, the story I was writing for the Bliz contest (mentioned in the last post) was about the worgen. But even before that I had been obsessing over them enough that I had enough material for a novel sized story. I stopped working on that when I heard they’d be reappearing in the Grizzly Hills (yes, before WotLK, that long ago), and didn’t want to waste time if what I had contradicted official lore.
So rather than trying to complete the story I made I thought I’d throw my back story out into the either before it’s completely contradicted (hopefully) with whatever happens in the next expansion. Who knows? Maybe some lazy bliz employee will read it, say that’s good enough for me, and make it official so he can slack off more. :) Interesting enough it involves the Malestrom, Emerald Dream, and the Well of Eternity.
What makes the worgen so ripe is the lack of any really official text about them at all. So let me introduce the questions I was working on and their answers (WARNING: None of this is official, just the background I developed for my stories)
The Mystic Hunter 