“The Grind”
With Wrath of the Lich King arriving last week it only made sense to jump into the new content “Lich King” style. Although we had initially reacted to the beta, playing the final content was much more fun with all of our guild and friends to play along.
It only took a few hours to get my new Death Knight to level-58 beyond the starting area and into the real world of Azeroth. Upon reaching the main city (Ogrammar as we’re horde) I picked up two new professions to make me a bit of dime: mining and skinning. This is where the beauty of the Death Knight fell apart…
A level-58 character has a few options open for exploration with the Burning Crusade content being the most desirable starting point. However, quickly it became apparent that my professions of mining and skinning were useless in Hellfire and other Burning Crusade areas. Why? Professions start with a value of 1. The last expansion requires your professions to be roughly 300 before you can utilize them.
My level-58 Death Knight has no experience in the ways of skinning and mining, what has he been doing all his life? Apparently killing innocent people in small villages throughout the Eastern Plaguelands. My anticipation with leveling my Death Knight died knowing I’d spend the next few days hunting mines and killing animals as if I where a level-10 toon.
There I was, a high level character trolling Crossroads and Thousand Needles hunting for copper and tin and skinning all the low level creatures I could find. Why didn’t Blizzard consider this when they allow you to create a level-55 character on day one? If we don’t go off and grind our way to a profession level of 300 we might as well not even pick professions at all.
I was not alone in these findings, along my path I found several Death Knights with skinning knives and mining tools looking for open opportunities to cut into the earth or the dead animals skins all around them. Sure, we can kill a cat in seconds flat but the “grind” is what we wanted to avoid, this is what characters spend their first twenty levels doing!
After three sessions of mind numbing grinding I’ve managed to reach a skill of 340 in skinning and coming upon 200 in mining. Mining is still too low for high level game content so I must whisk myself away to noobville every so often to catch a few mythril nodes and pray for a gold deposit along the way.
This may not be a bug in the Wrath of Lich King expansion but it sure is an annoying design flaw.
@Culture Diversity in games: I don’t know which is sadder: That you both didn’t think of Quest for Glory or the Witcher 3 when asking how many games have Baba Yaga. Quest For Glory series explored not just European culture but Arabian (QFG2) and African(QFG3) as well. You get to deal with Baba Yaga as a villain three times once in QFG1 and once again in QFG IV (Slavic) (which you also faced Domovoi and Rasulka, along with Vampires and Werewolves) and finally in QFG 5 (Greco-Roman). I do have to thank Sierra games for showing me such diversity of cultural backgrounds in their games, they also had a series called the Incans.
Now Witcher has these Hags which seem like the kind of creature that Baba Yaga is, if you’ve seen some of them:
http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/13158/article/the-witcher-3-concept-art-depicts-baba-yaga-and-other-mythical-creatures/
They should have had one of these “ladies” at the end of Blair Witch, that would have been great nightmare fuel.
I do agree we need more game diversity of cultural backgrounds and Sierra had a lot of that. Speaking of which Ken Williams gave an interview about the new King’s Quest game being made by the Odd Gentleman
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/01/02/ken-williams-interview-kings-quest-sierra-game-informer.aspx
One point of the interview Ken says how he doesn’t like to categorize a game like “point and click” that they should be more an experience and not get stuck on trying to be next big thing. It made me think about how they tried to keep up with the changing game market back in the 90’s, struggles with FMV and then 3D games. Both this King’s Quest game and the GK1 remake are Corporation backed while the Kickstarted Hero-U and Space Venture are not and seem to be having trouble getting done at all.
@ “Selling out”: I like the saying if you can do something well, get paid for it. I think it makes sense, everyone deserves to eat even brilliant artists.
@ Hacker Punks: I cannot wait for these punks to be arrested; they committed a crime so YES they will be investigated. I had to laugh at the phrase “all the good hackers have done” yeah like what? Also apparently Sony was “asking for it” by not having better security, now I wish Sony had worked harder on being more secure it still doesn’t give the right for them to break in.
@Playing Online: I agree I don’t like trying to play with random strangers and having a group of friends is great. So speaking of Polycast we’re always open to you dropping by on Saturday Jonah. We’ve been playing Civ 5 and Beyond Earth lately.
@Christmas loot: I got a bag of holding from Thinkgeek, lightsaber chopsticks, a Star Trek communicator badge, a Professor Layton game and a doctor who Pocket watch. So I got some good geeky loot this Christmas!
@Help me mom, they hacked my Xbox!!!
I wasn’t affected this time around because I was with my family for New Year and mostly played offline. I will have to agree thou. Microsoft and Sony get hacked so often now that it’s not even news anymore. I find it ironic how a snot can spit down on a huge company whenever he pleases. Something has to change.
@STALKER: Shadow of >>>CENSORED<<<
Maybe the Ukrainian government did not want a tourist influx into their danger zone. The STALKER series did raise Chernobyl’s profile considerably. Last thing they wanted was amateur treasure hunters crawling around the Sarcophagus looking for artefacts. On the folklore cultures, there are quite a few different mystical entities that would make good game characters. In fact, there are many Russian games based on the Russian folklore. But they never make it out beyond the Iron Curtain. Not enough demand. The reason why Greek and Roman gods are so popular is because everyone knows them. On the contrary, most westerners can’t even pronounce Vodyanoy or Kikimore (mystical creatures).
@QOTW
Not as much as I would like too. I only play online with my friends, and currently we have a mismatch of gaming platforms (I have lots of consoles but no PC). I used to play a lot on Xbox Live. Have my fondest memories playing Bad Company 2, Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2 till the latest hours of the night. But university fixed that. Had no time to play anything at all. Now I can’t get back into any online gaming. I have a huge of backlog of singleplayer games and no worthy multiplayer games to keep me interested. It has been a long time since something fresh came out. Maybe Evolve and Halo will fix that.