Most of us read WoWInsider, and if you don’t, you should. It’s a good source of community thoughts, game updates, and tips for professions and the like. It even has an RSS feed that works great with Firefox, and if you haven’t been there I suggest you do so with this link. I bring up WoWInsider because yesterday’s post involving the styling, design, and overall feelings towards Wrath of the Lich King’s armor design struck an interesting thought to me. I love this expansion so far, and I don’t regret renewing my account to be a silly cow on a raptor again. I just recently got to 80, ran through a good chunk of Naxxramas for the first time (and wish I did it pre-Wrath) and had a great time. Even the heroics aren’t as painful as they were in Outland, but that may just be because Half a Stock is awesome.

However, there is that intermittent whining from the general public that I feel I must join in.

Armor

Clown suits.  Costumes. Whatever terms you have for them, they stuck as we first ventured through the Dark Portal and witnessed our awesome Tier 2 being replaced by..well, bright green stitch pants with gaping holes down the legs, a sky-blue turban,  putrid yellow sweatervests loaded with spirit, faux Felhound hide bracers, lavender skirts for our pretty skeletons..you get the idea. Everything was colorful, and way too colorful in some cases. Many players accepted it at first, focusing first on getting to 70 through the 8-day PvP truce that almost made Deathwing into a full-fledged PvE server for its duration.  Days and nights without horribly specced rogues spamming /spit on you after missing a cheap shot and having to use 6 cooldowns and lag abuse. Not one time where a lack of mage water was your downfall in a heated battle for a Fel Iron node.

The fact that we all looked like rainbows sunk in shortly after, and the playerbase complained of borrowed armor models (we’ll get to that) from all tiers save for 3.  Clown suits do not appeal to the populace when we expected a neat space-oriented trip through the broken lands of Draenor.

 As players starting into Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair heard about the first Arena season in early 2007, they had blissful thoughts of finally getting out of these purple pantaloons and into some br00tal spiked trousers of fiery death. Unfortunately, as they discovered from leaked screenshots, Blizzard had cheaped out on raid gear from the very first months. What Arena gear was for Season 1 was simply Tier 4 gear, taken in a different color. Not even a spike of fiery death present.

Sure enough, hundreds of BAWWW threads soon surfaced as players expected the well-known fantastic art team of Blizzard to be working with the designers in making good looking equipment. There are many viewpoints on this issue, one most frequent being that Blizzard likes to devote its art to primarily endgame content that, at the time this was occuring, less than 5% of the total playerbase (which consists of 60% Chinese/Korean players) would experience. That other 95% was left in the dust with recycled models and disappointing pixels that would no longer help stroke the epeen, but make it fall like a suspended Eat-More in the microwave.

That’s all past now. We’re in the expansion, and clown suits are no more. There’s more to it, however…

As WoWInsider explains, Blizzard was extremely influenced by Norse mythology in this expansion. Valkyries, Utgard, Thor’s Hammer, and other such things make a considerable appearance throughout Northrend, and with them comes armor seemingly taken straight from the Viking days. My hunter went from having two angry dogs as shoulders to having this uh, gigantic chunk of metal adorned with swirling grooves and motifs. Warriors are walking around with spiked maces, priests are walking around with those same spiked maces, and I believe I have a spiked mace in my alt’s bank. Female characters are no longer scantily-clad when the male characters in the same armor are walking fortresses. It’s all good to be more badass,  but can we please get some originality? I will let you read this compiled excerpt from an article I found:

Almost every armor [piece] I’ve seen looks almost exactly the same, with maybe a palette swap of all equally bland colors and designs.

This is a fantasy game, we should be able to fight evil undead stuff and still look good. Sure, Northrend is a cold place, but even a winter coat can be made to look good with a little effort. Just because something is made to be worn in cold weather doesn’t mean it has to be colored brown or some ugly shade of green.

Just seems like Blizzard laid off their character design team or something. So now, we have characters who wear armor that looks about as good as brown paper bags.

I can agree with this. Most of the armor I’ve seen from the new arena stuff, as well as most instance drops all the way from 71 to 80, is the exact same. My spiked-mace problem is existent with every person. I’ve heard from healers complaining that in heated battles, they simply cannot tell (without the help of Grid/Healbot) who is who because the tank looks like the dps, and the healer looks like the dps covered in shit.  The thread goes on to say:

I Want A Hippopotototamus for Christmas. We’ve all heard it, at least Canadians have,  from 2007′s Telus mobile commercials. It was cute. I get it. My school is streaming it between every class on a loop in a pathetic campaign to get donations for a food bank. What the fuck? This better be a huge IRL trolling attempt, because pissing people off to get donations from them is an idea destined to fail.  The familiar horn goes for about 5 seconds, and then this horrible shrill voice starts screeching about wanting the most dangerous animal in all of AIDSLAND to show up at her doorstep to sodomize her. It was written in 1953 and should have died, but Telus had to make the dipshit move of resurrecting it like an old thread (See Level 60 Nerd Looking for a Good Time) that no one cares about.  The major problem with it is that they’re looking for your kindness by playing the shit over and over since around the 29th of last month. I almost feel like going to the office and screaming FFFFFFFUUUUUUUCKKKK whenever the voice starts, it’s that bad.

Anyhow, we know the military recruiters. Be you from U.S., Canada, or somewhere less pro, they’re all over. Desperate.  Militaries are under assault from the controversial debates over whether or not they use propaganda. Hurr. HURRDURR. Of course they do. What the fuck, you expect them to actually show what it’s really like? Dogs ripping the meat from dead Afghan villagers’ tibia bones, women being raped by the soldiers that were set up to rescue them, and that one cliffpuppy thing recreated 4 times a week. They don’t show you that shit for a reason, they’d get no people. Instead, they look for high-schoolers about to drop out into their professions as CS:S Neckbeard Squad Troops and bring them into a fantastic program designed NOT to put you into the sand, but rather a pleasant forest where a soldier is bandaging up a wounded comrade inside a green tent (Actually on a 20×12 poster behind the guy). Afganistan has wooded forests amirite? The picture next to that was a helicopter flying over a village of people praising them for bringing supplies for Canadian troops standing in the background. Yeah, that happens. On the news, maybe. I’m almost sure that most scenarios are those same helicopters flying over the same villages that they just ‘accidentally’ bombed the shit out of and are hoping to get no harsh slaps on the wrist for it.

Seriously. I see them standing in the hallways just 20 minutes ago, looking at me with wide eyes hoping I’ll sign up. I’m a basement-dwelling skinny white kid that does absolutely nothing except fap and play games while I sip fruit juice out of a 1L stein. Where are all the Staff Sergeant Max Fightmaster ripoffs when they need them? I saw about 7 people come up , take brochures and a free notepad, then leave. Now that they’re gone I sort of wanted a notepad. Bawwww. We already saw those two fat kids in Michael Moore’s Roger N’ Me asking teenagers to sign up. In my skinny white kid opinion, I’d like to make it illegal to confront teens about joining. They can set up a stand in my school’s front and get people staring at them, with their stupid shit Call of Duty soundtrack blaring from a tape recorder. I don’t believe they can, however, run up to people like a car salesman and start talking about their forests and their tents and how pro you are for willingly signing up to fight for your 100% free country with awesome, ass-kicking buff guys leading you through a battlefield to victory. Call me a pessimist.

 

HURRR

 

warld eplxorur XD~~~~~

I must say, after 6-7 hours on it I’m proud to be Katakotia the Explorer. Internet boner points +1.

The tabard is faggotry, but after running through a total of 78 zones it’s well deserved. I got a letter from Motherfucking Brann Bronzebeard too.

Achievements, since their inception, have been a common thing to do for players. Whether it’s out of boredom after hitting 80 or to get said boner points is beyond me, but there’s a strange attraction to that noise that makes your neckbeard twitch in happiness. Achievements have absolutely, so far, no point beyond you recieving a certain reward or a neckbeard-twitching sound that is also shared by at least 40 other spells in WOTLK. Still, I find myself filling them in – compelled to get that Wrecking Ball one before some stupid faggots rush Vanndar. It’s sitting there in the distance, giving me a familiar smirk, and I just can’t help but go out and do them.

While Blizzard has certainly been the target of many facepalms recently (and the last 2 years), I must say that it’ well done. They obviously liked how well the Xbawqs achievement system went with its players, and incorporating it into WoW so seamlessly was most likely not an easy task. My only problem? They only track your pre-BC raid kills if you have completed a quest involving the slaying of that specific internet dragon. Yes, I wore the belt from Thaurissan for over 4 weeks and cleared the instance, but there’s no achievement filled in because no quests existed that wanted his head.

I’m writing this as I spawn camp the Time-Wasting Proto Drake. It may be a bug with the server cache, but there’s currently no way to link it in game so I’m shitting bricks near Valkyrion spamming my 4 key. If I get it soon, I will post screenies!

For a history of my character, visit Katakotia on pathofahero.com