/hug Adventures

For the /hug assignment - detailed here, I teamed up with a level 33 cat druid who goes by the name of Lkt, Tony in real life. We played at roughly similar times - 10 pm to 2 am most weeknights, and agreed to idle in Vent if we were playing to make it easier to find each other. We found Arathi Highlands to be the most convenient place to meet, with Tony already have the flight path and Tarren Mill being relatively close. We met at the wall. Apparently, we had one of the easiest times meeting, some people I talked to later took a half hour or longer to find each other. I ran to the Horde outpost Hammerfall to get the flight path; after which we decided to go kill some trolls straight south of it. It was relatively late server time, so I didn't expect to run into many people - one of the advantages of playing on an east coast server. Just in case, I made a couple of macros, one beseeching fellow Horde to not kill Lkt, as he is a friend, another that could be spammed and would rotate between /hug, /welcome, /wave, /hello and /cry. Surprisingly, I only needed each once.

The only Horde encounter we had was outside of a cave full of two types of trolls Tony needed to kill for a quest that weren't found anywhere else. As we were running out after a bad pull, we ran into a shaman and a mage. They were surprisingly amicable, and cheerfully left us alone, as seen here:

Not a great screen shot I know, but I didn't think about it until several seconds after they ran off to kill other trolls, and had to chase them down to at least prove we saw them. Afterwards, we continued killing trolls until Tony finished, and we were about to leave - until a paladin decided to get up in our business. He was a level higher than me, and though I probably could have taken him - I used my heart wrenching macro to try to convince him that I was a friendly, nice undead priest. (It's true, I'm totally a care bear, the affectionate term for a player who doesn't find great joy in tracking down and ganking member of the opposing faction. I'll even help them given a chance.) Tony tried telling the paladin that I was his friend, and I was helping him with quests. According to Tony, the paladin said little more than 'No f*** her, she's f***ing Horde!' Sadly I forgot to get a screen shot, though everything he yelled would have looked something like 'heth awolk garrrosh' or whatever. Luckily, he found camping my corpse boring and wandered off after my first and only death.

Afterwards, we killed some raptors together, I needed them for a quest. As always, the baffling part is I needed eyes, but it was something like a 30% drop rate. The age - old MMO question gets asked: how are all of these raptors blind yet they manage to find and kill me?

In either case, I had a lot of fun. It was a little annoying partying with someone and only getting half of the XP since we took turns - at a certain points Tony needs more drops off of the trolls than I did, so I let him have at it. The fact that the members of the Horde we ran into were willing to leave us along is probably because of the severe ratio imbalance of the two factions; the paladin had probably suffered plenty at the hands of bored death knights and rogues, while at best what the horde has is Justinblade. Sadly, because of the pretty heavy hit to XP and the inability to do instances, I would not call this a viable leveling strategy most of the time.