So, I'm at work again. Expect to see these five words quite a lot this semester; I managed to pick up 39 regular hours, so I'll be at the SLC almost all the time.
Saturdays are boring. I work on the Digital Media wing of the building on Saturdays, and while generally Saturdays are pretty empty, nobody comes to this wing of the building. I might see 10 people all day. During the beginning of the semester, it's particularly slow. But I suppose I don't mind boring. It means I can sit here and think, or read, or blog, or do homework, without interruption. As usual, can't complain about my job, although I am not shy about damning it with faint praise, of course.
I went out to Gamestop and picked up a copy of the World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade. I kept hearing about how wonderful it was from all and sundry (including one of my bosses at work, who, as I can testify to, is thoroughly obsessed with the game), so I figured, I must be missing out! Although I did quit the original game some time ago, primarily out of boredom. It was fun for about a month and a half, though, so that was something. I figured I'd get at least that much of a kick out of the new one. I was also interested to start a female blood elf character, and test out the 'Reskar-effect' that I rambled about at some length yesterday.
So, I created a male and female blood elf character, just to check out the new models. I want to know: who decided that the male blood elves would look the way they do? I mean, I'm just askin'. I ran away from these extremely flamboyant dudes faster than you can say 'sex change.' Colin mentioned that he had started a female character because he figured he'd prefer to play a woman than a gay man, and I see what he means. The female character, by contrast, had a willowy, almost waifish appearance, and I gave her the sternest of a set of soft faces. I made her a Paladin and set off. Her name is Raiel, a name I created for a story a long time ago, but never really used (pronounced rye-ELL).
The first thing I noticed was that, in spite of my good intentions, it makes me vaguely uncomfortable to play a female character in an online game like this. I know no one assumes that a woman is necessarily playing just because the avatar is female, but still, it felt odd. Much moreso in a game like this than in say, NWN's single-player OC, I really feel like my character represents me, and a petite blonde elf chick is, to say the least, a strange representative of me.
I leveled Raiel up to the modest perch of 8. I guess you can get a bit of a feel for a class in 8 levels. And I have to say...so far, I find playing a Paladin to be singularly uninteresting. To be fair, I've never really played a Paladin-type class in these sorts of games before (which was the main reason I wanted to try it, actually); I'm much more a fan of engine-of-destruction type builds. (My five (good God, I've done 5? I'm such a dork) reasonably high-level 3T characters right now, for example, are two katana-wielding brawlers, a greatsword weapon master, and two death-magic focused Sorcerers. In Diablo 2, I played a frost ball spamming Sorceress. And so on.) In my view, Paladins in WoW are basically warriors with some cool buffs, and with all of the nice combat feats removed. Or, another way of putting it: healers with some armor and a sword, but really very little affinity for swinging that sword. Plus there's about a gazillion newly-minted blood elf paladins.
So, I'm a little disappointed. Having dumped $55 on this game (expansion + subscription), however, I am certainly not going to give up yet. I think probably the last thing I will try is to make a blood elf mage. Probably a fire-mage-type build, and see how much I like a crazy-DPS character.
My quandary is this...what gender character do I use? The only other racial options for a Horde mage are troll and undead, and who the hell wants to be one of those things? Maybe if I really messed around with the limited character-appearance customization settings, I could make an acceptable blood elf guy. That'd be nice. There's at least one option I noticed for blood elf males that gives you some crazy Son Goku hair. A Goku-looking engine of destruction? Well...I guess I could do a lot worse. I'd name him Mojo, but $100 says that name isn't available! Maybe Gojo, after that awesome anti-grease handwashing stuff.
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