How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Grind Part 2: OBEY THE GLOVES
Hey, I bet you want to read more about my World of Warcraft Adventures!!
So this past week I finally dinged 60. See?
After all this time, I’ve finally achieved something 94% of the planet achieved a year ago. Yay for Earth.
So of course I was immediately taken to Molten Core, because by God, if they’re going to raid Molten Core for the 9,371st time, the least I could do is tag along. My initial impression: uh… gee, this is kind of dull. Pull, pull, pull. Hey, look, I have to help keep dogs in a pile. That seems epic. Hey, a dog wandered away from the pile, I BETTER FETCH THE DOG. I’m a strong Warrior. It’s what I do. DOGFETCHING. Can I kill something yet? Like, a gnome or something? NO. MORE DOGS. And the occasional elemental thingy. Hey, look, a boss! I bet this will be exciting… no, wait, it’s dead. MORE DOGS. After about 3 hours of this I had more doggie excitement than I can stand and some ZOMGLOOT! because I was the only warrior on the raid that wasn’t already geared up past Robojesus levels. The gauntlets looked especially amusing on me amidst my array of level 53-55ish green and blue gear.
Our guild does Molten Core “off night” raids out of pity for alts such as myself (I joke that I’m my wife’s alt, and I suspect they all think I’m serious), since as you might have gathered from this recap they’ve kind of moved beyond that sort of thing. So meanwhile I joined another pickup raid, this one for lower Blackrock Spire. This was my first WOO LEVEL 60 pickup raid, and the folks in this raid actually knew what they were doing. Mainly because they’ve already done it. A lot. One person mentioned that this was his nineteenth “LBRS” run. At any rate I was main tank now for a 10 person raid. I tried to make sure that the monsters hit my gloves at all times. HEY LOOK, I HAVE GLOVES. JUST HIT THE GLOVES. It should work, judging from the female Paladin epic armor, which has about as much metal as my gloves.
Being main tank meant I moved from boredom to confusion. What, I need to pull? Where? Pull what? Wait, hold up, I’m trying to taunt… oh, it’s on cooldown. I’m sundering as fast as I can here! Could someone actually kill this stuff? I’m a mighty warrior and I’m holding a shield, THAT MEANS I CANNOT ACTUALLY KILL ANYTHING. Did I mention the gloves? HIT THE GLOVES, YOU.
I didn’t get any loot in my LBRS run, but I got something more important — I learned about life. No, wait, I didn’t really learn that much. But I learned that 10 person raids where I could screw up and get people killed and not get anything good were more fun than 40 person raids where I played dogfetcher and got Gauntlets of Lordly Egoism.
Then this weekend my lovely wife, whom, you may remember, spending time with is the entire point of this exercise, asks if I want to go raid Zul’Gurub with them. (In case you didn’t notice, the World of Warcraft developers ran out of names after they launched and ever since have just been releasing zones with syllables from the random name generator.) I say… uh… sure, and get ready to go run an errand. When I come back I AM READY TO GO PARKED IN FRONT OF THE DUNGEON LET’S GO GO NOW GO. Well, how can I turn *that* down!
Apparently Zul’Gurub is less of a well-oiled machine than Molten Core, or more likely the guild leader actually noticed I existed, mainly because I kept not backing up and getting blown up by exploding bats (bats explode! Who knew?) and I kept assisting the main tank instead of the main assist (“My CTRaid put my MA bar under my minimap! Honest!”) and I kept misfiring my abilities and turning right when I should have turned left and uh, Cavort, can you give up your slot so someone actually competent can come along? FINE! I’LL TAKE MY TWO ITEMS THAT ARE FAR MORE UBER THAN ANYTHING ELSE I’VE EVER GOTTEN BESIDES MY HOLY GLOVES THAT I RECIEVED JUST FOR BREATHING AND GO! SEE IF I CARE! Humph.
Tune in next week when I loot ANOTHER pair of gloves.