The Annoying Class

I know I meant for my next big post to be about love and marriage in Azeroth, but I've really rather lost my interest in little things like that at the moment.

What's got me in a froth lately is the recent addition to this game: the death knight. The other day, I was playing my level-54 mage alongside my husband's level-54 pally, and along the way we'd picked up a 54 druid. (The druid would have been more appropriate in form of a donkey than of a cat, but that's another story.) We were questing around the Western Plaguelands, in hopes that we could manage level 55 and see what all the excitement was about with DKs. (Also, I wanted to run the quests so I could find out all the lore, being one of the Knights of Dusk's RP officers and loremasters.)

Out of nowhere, here come two Horde DKs, both level 58. They wait until we are fully engaged with mobs, then they attack.

I have never been handed such a beating in my life, and I used to run WSG with a 22 pally with questionable gear.

So we make the graveyard run, rez, heal up, buff, and are promptly murdered again. Then they spit on our corpses.

It's my opinion that DKs are truly and completely overpowered. They wear plate; they get a full set of blues before they leave their instance; they can cut their magic damage by 75%; they have pets, even though historically, pets are reserved for squishy classes; they have paladin-like auras; they can dual-wield; they can hit you at range. Yeesh, they can even heal themselves! Who needs any other class?

Even a mage, formerly the bane of all plate-wearing classes, just doesn't stand a chance, between their Anti-Magic shields and their ability to grab me and drag me over to them--and eventually, their ability to throw off being a sheep or frozen, and not to be counterspelled. How do you kite someone who can teleport you instantly into melee range and then one-shot you? In spite of the obvious and glaring problems, though, Blizzard has seen fit to swing the nerf bat NOT at the DKs, but at the paladins, the guys who are supposed to represent GOOD!

It's hard enough being a Christian playing this game, with all the stupid "Jesus was a shaman" jokes. But even if I weren't, it would still be downright insulting to ANYONE who believes in goodness and light, that the most powerful class is the one that draws ALL its power from evil and darkness and all things horrid.

It's things like that which are burning me out on this game, fast.

So I make this plea public, but directed at Blizzard: Restore balance! Quit hatin' on the good guys! Bad is not cool, no matter what your twelve-year-old son told you!

Friday Five--Life and Death

Yet again, I forgot to do the Friday Five last week. Some of these questions are difficult to answer in-character, so I'm going to do them out-of-character.

• Does your character have a good relationship with his family? Yes and no. Jeremias is, of course, a very happy husband, and Sera is a perfect angel to him. But his sister vanished without a word a few weeks ago, and his father is a drunken lecher living in Ratchet. Jere sends him money regularly, but that doesn't make a relationship.
  
• How does he relate to his guild and friends? He regards the Knights of Dusk to be an extension of his family. There are only two people whom he doesn't regard as a brother or a sister: Mysin and Kadiah. Of course, they probably don't know Jere's full biography, so maybe they haven't picked up on how Jeremias will fight anyone who says anything negative about Kadiah, or gotten the layered meaning of his referring to Mysin as "sire"...He's growing out of his need for affirmation, but it does make him go over the moon when either of them praises him. He's a good kid.
  
• If your character knew he would die tomorrow, how would he spend today? Jere's one for hoping; he probably wouldn't believe it if you told him he would certainly die tomorrow. Instead, he lives every day with the full realization that he could be dead within an hour, and tries never to leave needed words unsaid or needed actions undone. His time at home with his wife is indispensable, and he's worked hard to build her a pension that would last her for the rest of her life. He's unlocked the secret to a life well spent, without even knowing it. So the answer is: no differently from how he spends any other day.
  
• Has your character ever lost someone close to them? How did they die? How did that affect your character? Jere lost his mother just before the Scourge overran Lordaeron. She died of protracted illness; she was short-tempered and irritable because of her physical discomfort and her jealousy over her husband's infidelity. Jeremias, of course, always figured that her poor treatment of him stemmed from that, so he could forgive her--but her exacting standards and constant haranguing instilled in him a feeling of never being quite adequate. (His current spiritual crisis will result in this no longer being relevant to him, though.) When she passed, of course he was unhappy--this was his mother, after all--but he was also a little relieved that she would be at rest in the Light, and no longer miserable.
• How do you, as a roleplayer, tackle the question of death in a video game where resurrection spells and spirit healers abound? I usually just avoid the issue. If Jere falls in battle, I generally treat it as he got yet another of his famous head injuries. Nobody else in the guild seems to want to press the issue, and just as well. It's like politely forgetting that you have also killed Van Cleef: the person who just did it is, for the interim, the ONLY person to do it.

So that's what I've got. Anyone else?

The All-Important Family

Today I want to address something that is going to earn me no brownie points at all with my fellow role-players.

Have you ever noticed how many people there are running around Azeroth with no parents, no siblings, no spouses, and no offspring? All these solitary souls, who've lost everyone in their lives and/or never bothered to acquire them. It amazes me endlessly that there are any children in Azeroth at all.

Yes, yes, I recognize that there are supposed to be thousands upon thousands of members of each race living in the capital cities whom we never see. But why such a dichotomy between those faceless throngs and the faces we see running around with names over their heads?

Well, let's set aside Azeroth's legends for a moment, and we'll talk about real-world legends. Look at legends such as King Arthur, and you'll find that, almost to a man, the knights of the Round Table were married. Many of the knights were related to one another within a few degrees of consanguinity, had other siblings, and most of them had parents and/or children still living.

Do you see what I'm driving at? What I'm proposing is that your character probably doesn't exist in a vacuum. Yes, I know that plenty of people lost whole families in the last few wars, but surely not everyone.

So that's what I'd like you to think about: Who and where is your character's family? Even gnomes and draenei get married. Work out what happened to the parents, the siblings, the one-true-love, the children. (For instance, I can give you in detail the identities and locations of all of Jeremias' surviving family. You may not want to know, but I can.)

Monday, if things go as planned, I'd like to discuss the mechanics of love and marriage in a world like Azeroth.