Pay It Forward

I've lately been playing my hordie hunter Lunapike quite a bit. She resides on an RP-PvP server, as opposed to Tawyn who is on a regular RP server, so seeing the game from the PvP-server side of things has been a bit of an adventure. I've been ganked by the obligatory level ??s who have nothing better to do, and I've reciprocated by raiding Southshore. I've learned to be wary upon seeing corpses of mobs laying around-- might be the other faction, after all-- and I've learned to rely oh so heavily on Track Humanoids. (Hunters have it easy here, I think.)

I have had to put up with not being able to go to Halaa to buy my arrows because the other faction has it, and I've rejoiced when we've put together a raid to take it back. (By contrast, on Silver Hand, Alliance controls Halaa about 99% of the time... so I never had to worry about it. Though in all honesty, VeCo Horde has it a bit better than VeCo Alliance in World PvP I think. Us hordies probably have it about 75% of the time when I've been there.)

I read once on the WoW website that, lore and RP-wise, Blizzard considers PvE and PvP servers to sort of be differing dimensions of the same point in history: PvE servers are where Horde and Alliance have established an uneasy truce, and PvP servers are where they are still actively at war. This, I have found, brings some depth to roleplay (nothing like getting demolished by a night elf druid after you have just killed a beast that is important to night elf druid lore) and offers a fun twist on a world that you have perhaps already explored PvE-wise... and makes for some interesting stories.

This particular story takes place in Blade's Edge Mountains. I was doing a semi-long questline that involved putting on a gas mask, talking to a projection, killing some demons, gathering keys, and powering up some big obelisks. As I headed off to do the first step, an Alliance Shadow Priest, only one level lower than me, showed up at pretty much the same time.

She saw me and hesitated for a bit, trying to size up whether or not I would attack her, I imagine. I tend not to attack people first, though, unless they are being annoying in some way, so I went right past her and started attacking the mobs I needed. She did too. We stayed far clear of each other, each of us keeping a wary eye on the other as we turned in our first step in the quest chain.

Off we went to do the second step. About partway through, I noticed that one of my mobs had some DoTs on it... DoTs that weren't mine. Shadow Priest had opted to make the first move and establish herself as "friendly". So I reciprocated a few minutes later when she seemed to bite off more than she could chew and I helped whack the extra mobs off of her.

Still, we remained silent to each other. I have seen it happen in the past; people who do something to assert themselves as "friendly" and then conveniently change their mind shortly later. Despite that, I was getting good vibes from her, so we continued questing.

Then came the final part of the chain, where you used keys to activate five obelisks. Only one person can do this at a time and Shadow Priest got there first. One by one she activated them and I stood by and watched, waiting for my turn.

And what did activating those obelisks do? Summon a level 68 elite.

Shadow Priest was level 66. And alone. Well, alone except for...

She turned and saw that I was standing there watching. I like to think that we somehow communicated something there. Some sort of nonverbal and nonemote "nod". She charged in.

After she got in the first hit I sent in my pet and away the two of us went at the thing. It was a long and hard fight and by the end of it, Shadow Priest was literally down to 3% health, but we did it.

She turned to me and /bowed, our first real communication, and I /bowed back. Then she sat to eat and drink while I went off to activate the obelisks myself. And on cue, the level 68 elite showed up.

I sent in my pet and started my attack. Shadow Priest was right there, tossing DoTs on it after I'd tagged it. This particular elite hits hard and my Mend Pet really wasn't cutting it, but with aggro constantly bouncing back and forth between my pet and Shadow Priest, we somehow managed to do it. Like last time, it had been a close one, and my pet did die in the final few seconds. But, we'd done it.

Afterwards we /cheered at each other. Then she Mind Controlled me and gave me Power Word: Fortitude.

We went on our separate ways, having completed the quest.

Flash forward about an hour later and I was doing a different quest in a different part of the zone. Somehow I'd wound up with more mobs than I could take on top of me. I ran into a tunnel hoping to shake them off, only to unwittingly run into more. I was bracing myself for the final blows when suddenly the mobs were all feared. Feared?

I turned around. Shadow Priest to the rescue! It took a while but we managed to take down all the mobs. I /cheered at her again and she Mind Controlled me again and gave me Fort again before we parted ways.

Later I Armory'd her and found out that she has over twice as many honor kills as I do, and I have a lot-- clearly she's no "care bear". Clearly she likes her PvP, as do I. But while a wise man once said "It's easy to forget what a sin is in the middle of a battlefield", you also never know what sorts of crazy alliances with kindred spirits you'll make.



And I salute ya for that, Syphrilia of VeCo. /salute

The Carebear Unleashed

Many of you who have been following my blog or my comments in other blogs for a while know that I am a bona fide unabashed carebear. My main is on an RP-PvE server, and Lunapike, my level 62 alt, is on an RP-PvP server but has the tendency to /hug every member of the opposite faction that she meets, before continuing on her way.

But what some of you may not know is that... if you call down the thunder, you'll reap the whirlwind.

Today I reached into my Holding Bag of hunter alts and plucked one out to play in Stonetalon Mountains on that RP-PvP server. I was doing a quest that was orange to me and I somehow kept aggro'ing a mob who was some seven or eight levels higher than me who was immune to seemingly all of my forms of crowd control, and I kept dying. It was sorta annoying, so I figured I'd find another, easier quest. Just as I had rez'd myself for the third or forth time and was bandaging up before heading out, an level ?? Alliance warlock rode up to me, dismounted, and ganked me.

She mounted up again and rode away, and I noticed that she had a non-epic mount...

I logged out and hopped over to Lunapike, who was parked not too far away. Upon getting to Sun Rock Retreat, I mounted up on Snowball, my Frostwolf Howler, and barreled down the road towards my alt's corpse. And ohh, what do we have here, but that level 57 warlock...

She dismounted and popped a fear off on me. I used my PvP trinket followed by The Beast Within and sic'd my lynx Alyosha on her. Game over in about six seconds.

Right as I was finishing her off, a level 66 Alliance hunter... her buddy, maybe?... rode up. He was four levels higher than me, and five levels higher than my pet. He dismounted and stared at me and my pet, the two of us still big and red. I /waved at him.

He sic'd his pet on me, I feigned death to get out of it. And then he made a very, very bad mistake...

He queued up an Aimed Shot.

With me pounding away at him with Arcanes, Multis, and Autos, and Alyosha still big and red and Frenzy proc'd... interrupt city... he queued up an Aimed Shot.

By the time he finally got that Aimed Shot off, I already had his health down to 30%. In a last ditch effort he ran up and tried to melee me and actually proceeded in trapping me, but at that point his health was down to nil and my trusty kitty finished him off easily.

Afterwards I glanced around smugly at the two poor Alliance souls at my feet, then I hopped on Snowball and trotted off.

You mess with one of my baby hunters, you mess with Pike. /grin

Born and Raised on an RP Server.

I've made a post before concerning my personal experiences with PvP servers, and I've been thinking I'd like to revisit that subject, as well as discuss another one. So, without further ado...

I play on a roleplaying server.

I play on a roleplaying server because my boyfriend picked that server, and he picked that server because it's where one of his friends plays-- as far as I know, that particular friend does not RP in WoW, so it's sort of ironic that the three of us wound up on an RP server.

RP servers are interesting places and they have their own little "culture". They have defined WoW for me and, I believe, sort of spoiled me because I was born and raised on one.

Now don't get me wrong-- for the most part, RP servers are really a lot like other servers. Not everybody is "in-character" 24/7, in fact the vast majority aren't. And contrary to what you see on the WoW website about RP servers, I have seen people "in-character" on the general channels maybe... once or twice. We have hardcore PvPers and hardcore raiders, and we have lots of casual players, just like most other servers. I do, on rare occasion it seems, see people roleplaying. I do see a lot of people with the FlagRSP or MyRoleplay addons, though not everybody with those addons roleplays. Perhaps my favorite part, off the top of my head, is that you don't get as many people named stuff like "Lolpwnsyou" or whatnot as you seem to get on non-RP servers. I don't want to chalk this up to something like "maturity" as much as I want to chalk it up to how I think a lot of people on RP servers, whether or not they actually roleplay, sort of see their character as a real character in a story and thus want to bestow their character with an interesting name.

Now I have to admit, when I first began playing I didn't see an RP server as a particularly viable choice to me, and I ended up on one mostly because I wanted to play with my boyfriend. But as time has gone on... I've discovered that RP servers fit my style perfectly. I do have a personality for my character. I do have a backstory for her. I do think about her life and adventures in Azeroth and how she would react to them. And, as I've mentioned before-- pretending like I'm actually in a fantasy world is one of my favorite aspects of this game. (Yes I'm a nerd.)

My boyfriend, who has roleplayed via message boards and forums in the past, really jumped onto the WoW roleplaying thing and even though I was a bit wary at first I've started to roleplay myself as well. I don't do it very often, but I have fun when I do and I've started to do it more frequently.

All of this has actually made it hard for me to play on non-RP servers. I miss being able to read so many interesting RP addon descriptions that make characters more than just pixels and polygons. I miss those random bits of good roleplay that I occasionally stumble across on my home server that make the game seem more real to me. And I miss the general attitude... it's hard to describe without exaggerating, but RP servers are like the bright yet clumsy and picked-on kid in the back of the class who has loads of personality if you get to know him. We're a bit different, and we know we're a bit different, and we're the brunt of jokes on occasion, but we like it that way.

And now back to my opening sentence-- PvP servers. As much as I hate to say it, it's true, I'm a carebear. =P My poor level 26 tauren hunter, who I love dearly, hasn't been getting any playtime at all recently and it's because she's on a PvP server and I just can't get into PvP servers. I've kept her on that server for so long because she is in a ridiculously awesome guild. But, sadly, a lot of important people have been leaving that guild and I think it's on the verge of disbanding. If that's what it comes to, I'll be transfering her. To an RP server of course!