A very tall Dwarf

robert

This is Morkhaeus, who is noticeably not a dwarf. Slightly taller, for one thing, and with legs that bend the wrong way.

I rolled Mork when BC launched, and had fun with him for about the first 40 levels, then put him aside to concentrate on other things. Then WOTLK was launched, and, well, he sort of lingered in limbo. He’s a miner and jewel crafter though, and I really want to level him in Jewel Crafting to cut down on gem costs, and so have decided to make him my third 80. I suspect by the time he gets there the cataclysm will be nigh, and so hope to level all three 80’s to 85 in parallel.

I’ve got him up to level 70 reasonably quickly – and as soon as I could get him out of Outlands and up to the Borean Tundra I did so. Really, the grind of levelling through Outlands is not an experience I want to repeat, and I hope that Blizzard do some work to make it less dull, otherwise they’ll find that players will spend 5 to 8 levels there, and never return. In particular doing the dungeons with PUGs is an excruciating experience, and does not pay good experience unless you have the quests, which are generally at the end of long chains and so not readily shareable.

Having said that, the quests in Borean Tundra are as fresh and interesting as the first time (MacMorris levelled on the other side of the continent), apart from Mork’s fragility. He’s a deep fire spec, for no other reason than it feels appropriate for a mage to be able to hurl great mountains of fire at things, which means that he can lay down pretty good single target damage, pretty ordinary AOE, and like any mage melts away like a snowflake in hell if anything gets close enough to touch him. All of which means that it’s proving a slow grind to level him.

The obvious solution is to run dungeons… but the PUG experience is proving very poor at this level. Maybe it’s end-of-expansion, or the phase of the moon, but I’m finding that people in PUGs between level 68 and (so far) 71 are either rude, incompetent, or both. Ok, that might be the PUG experience all over, but it feels like people are running alts and trying to get through instances as fast as they get through heroic instances on their ridiculously overpowered mains. Hence I see tanks pulling overenthusiastically, and dying, and blaming the healers. I see DPS stealing aggro from the tank. I see an endless stream of Death Knights who have obviously never tanked trying to tank. It’s silly. If people slowed down, took their time, took some care, allowed a bit of crowd control, the instances would go faster than the endless wipe-run back-wipe-rage quit that happens.

But the best, or worst, bit of rudeness was the first PUG that Mork attempted after hitting 70. He sat in the queue for about 30 minutes, popped into Utgarde Keep. The tank and a DPS guild mate popped in, then popped back out. The rest of us stood around for a few minutes, waiting for them to return, and someone asked if they were coming. The response “I didn’t queue for this s**t”. When asked if he would quit out of the group then, his response “I don’t want the debuff, you can wait 12 minutes then kick me”. Nice.

More on Mork over the next few days. I really need to get back to writing, now that Real Life has returned to some degree of normality. And on that note, I’ve got a party to go to.


Comments are closed.