Category Archives: world of warcraft

rpg, world of warcraft

Baklava The Bear

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I apologize for leaving my readers in suspense about my brother’s involvement with the game World Of Warcraft (WoW). When we last left him, he hadn’t decided whether he would go beyond the initial 10-day free trial and actually start paying to play the game.

Would he would decide to pony up some money to continue playing Baklava the Night Elf Druid and Mazgul the Undead Mage? Or would he quit the game cold turkey, abandoning his characters to be deleted by some underpaid sysadmin?

What? You weren’t in suspense? Is that ice water in your veins?

Baklava and Mazgul are alive, for the moment. My brother paid 20 bucks for a licensed copy of the game, which gave him 30 more days of hot WoW action.

He was nice enough to take some screenshots for me, so now you can begin to see these heroic characters in all their glory.

This post will be devoted to Baklava. I’m sorry, Mazgul fans. You’re going to have to wait a little longer to get your Undead Mage fix.

Baklava from the main character screen. My brother calls it his ‘class photo’.

Baklava is now at Level 14, and has the ability to use a whole new slew of spells. But, a lot of time has been spent transforming into a bear, a skill a Druid can acquire at Level 10.

Baklava The Bear

I told you Baklava was a mighty hunter of deer-that-don’t-fight-back.

Now you can witness the epic battle!
Click on the pictures to get even larger images of the carnage!

Spotting his prey

Unleashing a ridiculous amount of damage via a ‘Wrath’ spell

Baklava Triumphant

Attempts to get a good pelt from the carcass prove to be unsuccessful

Baklava isn’t just about the hunting. He is also making lots of different kinds of food. He now knows how to make spice bread and herbed eggs (eating food heals you, though I think my brother gets a perverse pleasure from the act of virtually cooking for it’s own sake). Baklava is currently considering pursuing Herbology as a hobby.

Baklava has recently also taken up fishing

Another thing Baklava likes to do is sit on things. Do not question why. Baklava does not need to answer your foolish questions.

Sitting in the middle of a campfire

Baklava rides a Hippogriff

And now, the icing on the cake. A hot night elf babe.

rpg, world of warcraft

To Pay Or Not To Pay

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So, my brother still does not know if he is going to pursue a paid subscription with the folks at Blizzard Entertainment, for access to their popular game World of Warcraft.

Right now he is on his eighth day of the Free Trial. Enclosed please find an update of his progress.

The Adventures of Baklava, the herb-gathering, rabbit-killing Night Elf Druid

Baklava, a Level 11 Night Elf Druid character, is now proficient in herb lore, and can now pick weeds and herbs. He doesn’t know what to do with them at this point. But he can pick them.

Baklava is now getting good at skinning deer and rabbit, without ruining their pelts. He says you have to kill them to get their pelts.

“Can deer or rabbits hurt you in combat?” I ask.

“No, only through guilt.”

I ask them how you approach them.

“They just stand there. I shoot a spell at them and they drop dead.”

“Does it take a long time to get from place to place?” I inquire.

“Yeah, it takes fucking forever.”

However, Baklava said there are platforms in various cities where a tired Night Elf can hitch a ride on a hippogriff. He says that the experience of flight on the hippogriff is especially nice, and says that the game overall is very beautiful.

Mazgul, the unfortunately-named Undead Mage

My brother also has an Undead mage, currently at Level 7. The mage’s name is Mazgul. After creating him, my brother realizes the name is just one letter and a caret off from Nazgûl (something he didn’t intend, and makes him now think of it as a name that conveys to him a particular Lord Of The Rings-style of dweebishness).

Mazgul was wandering around a graveyard on a quest, looking for some dog blood for a spell. He walked into a crypt, when suddenly the door shut behind him. He realized he was trapped there with a much higher level monster, and was quickly and brutally killed.

As he was recovering his body, a fellow adventurer got his attention by saying, “LOL I killed you” — apparently this was the jerk who had shut the crypt door on my brother. My brother noted that when the text “LOL” is typed for a character, you hear the character laughing, which is, as you can probably guess, annoying.

Mazgul was able to finish collecting vials of dog blood. Now he is concentrating on a new quest involving collecting ten red scarves from some bandits. Yes, it all sounds a bit swishy.

A pleasing part of playing Mazgul involves casting an Immolation spell, which sets the recipient of the spell ablaze. Mazgul says that he set some Dusk Bats on fire from a long ways away, and told me that they were really cool looking as they slowly swooped down at him, engulfed in flames.

He said that Undead characters are able to use some sort of magic floating ship for transportation, which is also cool. Apparently the different races you play have differing experiences throughout the game — quests are different, as are means of transportation, where your character starts out at is different, etc.

Will Baklava/Mazgul start shelling out cash money for the privilege of gathering herbs, killing rabbits and setting bats on fire? Stay tuned for the next (and possibly, last) installment of World of Warcraft.

And now, what you’ve been waiting for – more sexy Night Elf action.

Not pictured: the owner of this lifesize Night Elf replica, faintly intoning “It rubs the lotion on its skin.”

diablo, rpg, world of warcraft

World Of Warcraft: The Adventure Begins

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So, I’m having lunch with my brother a week or two ago, when he mentions he is going to start playing World Of Warcraft (WoW).

He first downloads a free trial version, which apparently adds up to about 4 GB of space taking up his hard drive. This download takes about 2.5 days to complete on his pokey DSL connection.

After the download finally completes, he kicks off the installation program. He is then immediately informed that he does not have enough memory to run the game on his PC. So, he trudges off to the store to buy another 1 GB of RAM.

He gets the memory into his PC and kicks off the installation.

So far, he is very impressed with the game’s graphics. His main characters thus far are a Night Elf Paladin and an Undead Mage. If he chooses to play beyond the 10 day trial, he’ll be forced to subscribe to Blizzard with a monthly fee of US $15 in order to play on their game’s servers. I’m not sure what day of the trial he is on right now. I’ll ask when I talk to him next.

One thing I remember from my Diablo II days is the impressive number of petulant jagoff assholes (pja) I would run into in a typical online session.

One lovely thing I never used to tire of was some emotionally-stunted middle school dweeb with a horrendously powerful character run after me with a duped Windforce bow, all the while yelling at me “NOOB” (i.e. newbie, as in an insult indicating you are not an experienced player — it’s important that “NOOB” is capitalized, otherwise you wouldn’t know they were yelling at the top of their asshole voices).

I ask my brother, who henceforth will be known by his WoW Night Elf character “Baklava”, have you run into any assholes in the short time you have been playing WoW?

He says, “Sort of.”

The monsters roaming the countryside in WoW are apparently kind of similar to the monsters I would encounter in Diablo II. For the most part, they’re just standing around, not doing anything. When you get within a certain distance of these monsters, the AI of the game triggers them to engage you in combat. Well, Baklava was getting the holy hell kicked out of him by one monster, so he starts to run away.

Little does he realize that he enters the vicinity of a whole host of other monsters lazing about the field he is sprinting through. He passes another adventurer as he splashes across some water, leaving the monsters standing back at the bank, unable to cross. This now large group of monsters then turn their collective attention to the adventurer unfortunately now in their sights. This other adventurer messages my brother, “NOOB”.

“So you sort of deserved that one, didn’t you?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I called my brother this past Saturday afternoon. The answering machine picks up, so I hang up. Seconds later, I get a call. It’s Baklava.

“You called?” he asks.

“Yeah, I was just wondering how you were doing on the game.”

It turns out he was on a quest, when my phone call caused his internet connection to be dropped. He’s not sure exactly how it works, but whenever he gets a phone call, the connection goes bye-bye.

I apologize.

“No, it’s okay.”

“So what level are you at?”

“My Night Elf is at eleven.”

“Cool.”

I ask him how much he has been playing. He mentions that there have been a couple days where he has put a lot of time into the game. One particular weekend day involved him getting up and starting to play. Later as he is playing he realizes he has not eaten or gone to the bathroom yet.

Did I not mention that this game is very commanding of one’s attention?

Here’s some more night elves.

diablo, dungeons and dragons, rpg, world of warcraft

An Ongoing Investigative Series: World Of Warcraft, With Sprinklings Of Diablo

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Hi.

I have mentioned before that I have dabbled in the arcane arts of role-playing adventure, particularly those which are computer-based.

One of my favorites was The Pool Of Radiance, which I played on the good ol’ Commodore 64.

A few years ago, I got pretty unpleasantly addicted to Diablo II, an initially enjoyable game which eventually devolved into an unpleasant grind of killing monsters in hopes of getting some decent treasure.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company that produced Diablo I and II, has in recent years produced an even more popular game called World Of Warcraft, which is the equivalent of Diablo I and II on crystal meth and crack combined.

Both my brother and myself were at one time both addicted to Diablo II. We were both able to kick the habit. I should probably mention that we were casual addicts rather than hardcore, sit-in-one’s-filth addicts. You can take this statement however you want — I’d be suspicious of the same kind of comment coming out of an alcoholic’s mouth.

My brother recently informed me that he has started playing the World of Warcraft game.

I asked him if I could periodically provide updates to his character’s progress, impressions of the game, etc., to which he consented.

In this series I’ll recount some of his experiences, and mix these with some of my own observations about my Diablo II experience.

To keep your interest, I’ll periodically include the odd picture of a hot, busty elf.