A collection of Oddities, Rants, and other funny things about the World of Warcraft
“I came back to ensure that there would be a future, to teach the world that it no longer needed Guardians. The hope for future generations has always resided in mortal hands.” - Medivh, Warcraft III
You magnificent bastard… You knew. YOU KNEW ALL ALONG!
Great Scott! It’s that time of the year again. When we all put on our ‘responsible adult’ hats and try to down young children forced to follow us in lakes of fire or shove teenagers through the Caverns of Time. That didn’t come off sounding nearly as un-creepy as I wanted. Anyway, Children’s Week – that event that brings joy to pet collectors and hair ripping fright and tedium to achievement collectors – has returned! But I am sorry achievement folk, this post is not for you. Go talk to Cynwise.
This post is for the pet collectors out there. Every year Children’s Week offers up a variety of little pets of which you can only choose 1 per orphan. How unfair! Way more unfair than having your parents die in a war so you only get one week a year to be out of a cramped little hovel in Orgrimmar or Stormwind. But ah HA! There’s a trick now you see, because unlike those poor orphans, we know the future!
One of the big features to the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria, will be the introduction of pet battles. Regardless of how you feel about them, they also bring the pet collector with alt-itits’ dream: Account wide pets! Oh yes, think of your entire collection across all characters being merged into one giant library. No more paying huge prices for both Alliance and Horde pets from the Argent Tournament, only having to get the whelps once and only once, and more relevantly only having to do Children’s Week ONE year instead of FOUR to get all the pets. Provided you’ve got at least 4 characters at or over level 70, and 2 at 80 or higher.
All you’ll need to do is run each alt through the Children’s Week quests and pick a different pet. Then when the great pet collection merge of 2012 occurs, you’ll have all your Children’s Week pets together in one big happy family.
THAT, dear Marty’s of the world, is heavy.
“Garrosh has become corrupted and has been doing some really nasty things beneath Orgrimmar.” – MMO Champion
“Sha: Lethal dark energy—absorbs hateful emotions and easily corrupts those who are unsuspecting” – WoWHead
Garrosh has become corrupted – Sha … easily corrupts
GARROSH CORRUPTED – SHA CORRUPTS
Gee, can we guess what happens to Garrosh this expac?
So the news has just been pouring out about The Old Republic’s new Legacy system, and I must admit as a raging alt-aholic I am very excited. The idea of being able to unlock new options and abilities by sampling all the game has to offer is an idea I really enjoy. Kind of like the concept of bonuses carrying over in a New Game+ on other RPGs.
For those who are unaware of what TOR’s legacy system is all about, it will be my great pleasure to inform you! Essentially, after you complete Act One of your first character on a server, you get to create a Legacy. At the moment, the system is pretty much just a legacy name that can be displayed as your characters last name “____ Skywalker” or as a title underneath your name “_____ <The Skywalker Legacy>”. After unlocking your legacy you begin to accrue legacy experience on top of your normal experience gains, and as you progress you gain legacy levels. It’s very similar to how World of Warcraft’s guild system works after its revision at the beginning of Cataclysm, but instead of unlocking bonuses for the entire guild, you unlock bonuses for all your characters on a single server.
These unlocks come from a bunch of different things too. You get an unlock for each companion you max out your affection with and complete all of their conversations, and you get other unlocks based on your alignment (Reaching Dark V, Light V or maintaining a neutral alignment at level 50). As you gain legacy levels you’ll be able to purchase other upgrades as well, such as having a mailbox or auction house right on your ship. One of the cooler features is when you get to level 50, you unlock a legacy version of one of that class’ signature abilities (like flamethrower for bounty hunters, or lightning storm for inquisitors), and you also unlock the race you played for any new character – regardless of faction or class!
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for “unlocking” things. I like achievements, I like new abilities, I like unlocking new weapons in Mass Effect, and I like unlocking the little cashbox in my bedroom that has nothing in it but I keep it around because I like unlocking things so much! So you combine my love of unlocking with my love of alts and I am going crazy! So much so that there was a vocalized noise of pain that would send shivers down the spine of the Man in Black when I heard that the 1.2 patch was going to be in April and not March! If there was one bad thing I could say for TOR’s new legacy system is that it’s per server and not account wide. If you’re Legacy level 50 with all the unlocks on one server, and then roll on a new one? You get jack. Nothing. Nada. Not even a last name until you unlock a new legacy for THAT server and start the legacy level grind again. Oh come on! Really? Is it THAT hard to make the system account-wide? Just make Legacy names non-unique! It’s not like everyone with the last name Smith is related!
Wait… If I recall there was another big MMO that was talking about making a system account-wide. Oh, of course! Only my biggest and happiest moment of the entire Mists of Pandaria announcement last year: Account-wide achievements! As someone who has had three separate achievement hunter toons, the level of giddiness in my voice when they announced that was at least 8.9 Pinky Pie’s (The standard for measuring joy). But you know what would make account-wide achievements even better? Well, how about taking a page from TOR and add some fun and interesting unlocks in there as well!
How about unlocking a signature ability from a class you’ve gotten to max level? Just on a ridiculous cooldown? Get a death knight to max level, all characters get access to Army of the Dead. Warrior? Unlock Heroic Leap. Hunters? Um… well… uh… Aspect of the Pack? You get the idea though. With each class you get to max level, you unlock an achievement that in turn unlocks an ability for all your characters. Just imagine how awesome that would be! Imagine a warlock turning into a demon and then summoning an army of the dead to assault a boss. /drool
The other idea that comes to mind is the whole unlocking races thing. At first I thought there would be no way this could ever make it into WoW. They have such a huge focus on maintaining which races belong to which faction. But once again I am happy to say that Blizzard has proved me wrong, because along with account-wide achievements, we are getting our first cross-faction race with the pandaren. So I am perfectly willing and down right gleeful to speculate that unlocking other races is not explicitly being ruled out! That means my dream of a horde gnome might come to fruition! And I know plenty of people who wish the tauren would come to the alliance. Blizzard could add a new ‘turncoat’ start area for former alliance races defecting to the horde or a ‘refugee camp’ for horde races looking to flee Hellscream’s eyes. If not how about achievements to unlock the race for the few classes that they can’t roll yet? I’d take a gnome paladin too.
In general, there is real possibility for the account-wide achievements to add new functionality to the game for people much like TOR is adding. It could even mimic guild bonuses (but not stack with them) in terms of discounts or bonuses. Maybe even be able to unlock much wanted features like account banks or cross-faction mail for accounts. There is real potential for both TOR’s legacy system and WoW’s new account-wide achievements. I can’t wait to see what Blizz and Bioware do with them.
“We can’t call it ‘The Warlock Manual’! Think of the negative press! Think of the angry letters! Think of all the ticked off mages!”
“Well, how about we add some of that time travel stuff those dumb mages like, and call it ‘DoT training’ instead?”
“That’ll work. No book-burning angry protestor ever looks past the cover anyway.”
In case this is the only gaming/cartoon/WoW/SWTOR/I like cookies/rant blog you ever read (and we are very thankful for that. See! You even get the royal ‘We’ for it!) you may have not noticed this new fangled meme involving the number ‘six’ going around. As far as I can tell it was originally started by Gnomeaggedon. It goes something like this:
Simple, yes? I have no clue where the idea to use the number six came from. Maybe someone is hoping that all these related posts will grow and become sentient becoming Six from Battlestar Galactica? Or my personal favorite six: Cybersix! Ah who knows. Let’s just kick this thing off. Let’s see here, ‘Go into your image folder’. Well, dangit. Which one? I have one for WoW screenshot and one for SWTOR screenshots. So I guess I’ll just post one from each? That can’t hurt, right?
Well… uh… that’s pretty uninteresting. Isn’t it? It’s just a pretty picture of Deepholm. I took this picture to use as a wallpaper on my computer actually. There’s just something about the textures for the environment in Deepholm that just made it look gorgeous. I actually have quite a few pictures from down there, and it is hands down my favorite looking zone from Cataclysm. I would routinely just fly loops around it while chatting with my guild, just for the great visuals the zone provides. The story there wasn’t bad either. It definitely served as a good follow-up to Hyjal in terms of ‘heroic deeds’. First, you become the Herald of the Ancients (That would have been a nice title, Blizz.) and usher their return to the world to push back the forces of the Firelands, and then you descend into the Plane of Earth, to gather the various forces against the Twilight Cultists and rebuild the World Pillar. If they had opened up the order you can do all the pieces in, it would have probably been my favorite zone of the expansion.
This image is probably the first “odd” from SW:TOR that I stumbled upon. If you can’t gather the subtext from the text box, essentially one of the customers is in on the hustle and their duping the other customer into buying the adrenals he’s trying to sell. Honestly, what really sold me on this little scene (one of MANY you can find in the game if you just wait around for them) is that it’s never made explicitly clear that one of the customers is in on the scam, unless you have seen or heard about this kind of scam before. Not that it’s exactly rare. It’s been played out in dozens of films, TV shows, etc. But I do like that it’s not explicit, it just makes it feel more… I dunno. Real?
Also, you may now point and laugh at my keybindings. My secret-not-really-shameful-shame hast been revealed!
Oh! Finally something that actually has sub-folders! Now let’s see. This photo is… oh. Oh no. Oh science, this is gonna be painful.
Yeeeaaa… this is gonna require A LOT of explanation I imagine. This is actually an old project from college. It was supposed to be a “metaphorical self-portrait”. Cheesy as that sounds, I had fun doing it. Although now that I’m looking at it, I can’t really recall what I was going for with most of this. I dunno the face card style figure with the happy & death faces is supposed to be a reference to me being bipolar. The words in the background are… barely readable. No clue. I’m pretty sure most of this probably had a deep significance to me seven years ago, when I was back in college and still cared about things having a deep significance. (Film school & Shakespeare classes killed that. I don’t care about what deep metaphorical message Orson Welles was going for by putting the moon in the upper-right corner, or why Shakespeare used more p’s & g’s in one half of a sentence than the other.) Still, in the end, I think it’s a pretty cool picture for messing around in Photoshop for a few hours.
Well, those are my images for this thing going around. Now my task is tag some more to pass this crazy thing along. I have no idea who has already been tagged or not, so I’m just gonna tag people who I haven’t seen post one of these things yet. So pardon me for any redundancies! Regardless, these are some awesome people. Definitely check out their stuff!
Are you frustrated at losing at World Of Warcraft? Do you want to know the secrets that can help you level up faster and see the full potential of this awesome game? Then you have to get your fingers on Swtor Leveling Guide!
The Ironforge Mountaineers: Protectors of the Innocent, Guardians of Dun Morogh, Slayers of Wild Beasts, and apparently were never told that fire was bad.
Some believe the Jedi originated as a secular cult of humanists pushing Eastern religious beliefs on unsuspecting Christian children in hopes of corrupting them and bringing their souls closer to Satan, who they did not believe in because they were secular humanists. These people are morons. However, here at the Land of Odd, we have discovered new and shocking evidence that proves within a reasonable proximity to the proverbial shadow of a doubt, that Jedi originated not from some cult, or whatever the heck the Expanded Universe has blabbed on and on about. No, you see, we have discovered from ancient Jedi statues scattered across the galaxy that the original Jedi were in fact… GNOMES.
As you can see, this ancient Jedi statue depicts not a kneeling Jedi, but a very, VERY, short Jedi. With cartoonishly large feet and a ridiculous hairstyle. And who else do we know that is short, has ridiculous proportioned body parts, and has really weird hair?
That’s HARE, you dolt. No, I am of course speaking of World of Warcraft’s own gnomes. You see, the original homeworld of the Jedi wasn’t Tython. That’s just where the order was created. The first Jedi originally arose on Azeroth! But of course they just called it magic. They didn’t know what the Force was, or anything about the M-words your blood stream. They just thought it was hocus pocus. Just like the Jawa “shaman” on Tattoine. Want more proof? Gnome warriors get a lightsaber at level 3!
Of course, both the Jedi and the Sith will seek to suppress this powerful new knowledge for their own reasons. Mostly because everyone hates gnomes, regardless of what galaxy you live in.
So I’m sure you can probably tell from either my twitter feed or even here on my blog that there’s been a definitive shift in attention to other things – Non-WoW things. Well, there is a reason for that. I’m not currently playing WoW. Oh yes, my subscription actually lapsed in late November, and I didn’t really bother to renew it. Oh I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Vry, didn’t you ragequit the game not even a year ago at the start of Cataclysm? Are you really quitting again?” Well, allow me to answer you, Imaginary Blog Reader. The answer is yes and no.
This isn’t a ragequit. Not in the least. Not a single character was deleted. All 11 of my darling toons are still sitting there. No, the reason is really that I just ran out of things I was interested in doing. Cataclysm itself has been an underwhelming game in a number of regards but mostly in the one that interests me most – story. The story just seems so disjointed. I’ve spoken about it here before. I kinda get that they want to establish a number of hooks that they can come back and explore further down the line, and that answers may come in an expansion or two but that really doesn’t give me incentive to play now. Honestly, all I had to look forward to was the end of the Deathwing story arc that I found personally underwhelming. Believe me, I’ve followed every bit of news about 4.3 and other than the once-a-month Darkmoon Faire and kupo-ing (transmogrification – and if you don’t understand the reference you are a bad nerd and should hand in your nerd card now) there REALLY wasn’t anything I was jumping for joy about. Nothing bad really, just nothing I was looking forward too. So I said, “Self, is this game currently worth $15 a month to you?” and I replied, “No. Not at the moment.” So I didn’t renew. Now Mists of Pandaria? If everything pans out they way they pitched it at Blizzcon, I’d be very interested in coming back to see how that it is.
I suppose it’s only fair to confess that I’ve been disillusioned with Blizzard’s storytelling a bit since Blizzcon. I may play it up for cheap laughs but I really spent a lot of time thinking and theorizing about that snake in Gundrak. Heck, I even went to the trouble of lining up the maps and figuring out that it led into that big closed up temple, not to mention all the different ideas about the unified troll empires and what that might mean for this. Or the connections behind each of the troll empires seemingly having a powerful serpent-like god at the head of their pantheon (Ulatek and Hakkar). But to hear that all that thought, all those potential theories, were all the result of “The art team stuck that in there. No clue what it is. HA HA HA.” was a bit disheartening. How many other storylines or interesting things are there in the game that I am passionate about are nothing but “It’s neat and that’s all”? I suppose we can’t all be right about things like Rades. I guess you could say I’m a bit cynical about the story of World of Warcraft now. So for the moment, there’s something else in my sights.
Ah yes. Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m not going to sit here and speak of it like it is some holy grail of MMOs, that it will push the envelope and break us through to other side or anything like that. It is WoW with a few new enjoyable mechanics, a different setting, and a whole lot more story. But that’s where it hooks me – THE STORY. If I had to attribute one thing to keeping me playing through all of Wrath of the Lich King without burning out, despite watching two guilds dissolve around me, it was that I was completely enraptured in the story of the expansion. Cataclysm? Not so much. Mists? Yet to be seen. But from the beta weekends with SWTOR? Oh sweet evil jebus, yes the story hooked me. Almost every class I played had something about it that made me sit up and go “Oh, I want to know what’s next!” Even the trooper! (On the other hand if I hear “It looks like you need a soldier” one more time, I’m going to punch my screen. So we’ll wait a bit on that class.) What can I say? Despite whatever glitches and bugs or ‘uninspired terrain’ *coughdragonage2cough* I’ve encountered through my treks through Bioware’s games, I’ve always been willing to work through or around them because dangit, they tell an enjoyable story.
So what does that mean for this blog? Nothing. It’s one of the reasons I switched to ‘Land of Odd’ instead of ‘Oddcraft’. Because I knew there was a good chance that despite my desire to write, I might not always have the desire to play World of Warcraft. I’ve still got a big stack of silly WoW pictures and weirdness to talk about, I’ll be posting more on SW:TOR, and I’ll continue to rant and rave about any other geeky things I come across. Be they D&D, cartoons, anime, SW:TOR, WoW, or any other video game. This blog will continue to be about weird rantings, strange observations, and me just being a nerdy weirdo talking about stuff he enjoys and occasionally hates. In the merry old Land of Odd, we do-as-we-please and we hope you continue to enjoy this insane ride with us. And by us, yes I just mean me. It’s the royal we. Cause I’m the king here. And as king I say… that this metaphor is becoming needlessly bloated. Yeesh.
