Thursday 17 February 2005

Pic of the day: Human warrioress from World of Warcraft.

WoW day 3

After having played my female Dwarf paladin, I tried some new toons. I don't know if this is a coincidence, but if so it was a coincidence four times in a row. When I created a new character without fully exiting the server, it defaulted to female although I picked different races. My next was a human cutie, also a paladin. She looks kinda sweet, and less curvy than some of my female friends in real life. This is probably a welcome change for those who had to fiddle a lot with CoH to avoid getting frontally attached melons. (Try using the armor mesh if possible, if you have that problem in CoH. Anyway it is supposed to be fixed with the upcoming anime-themed expansion.) In WoW you cannot at all influence the size of your breasts or hips, but as I just said, for humans they are adequate and not likely to cause ridicule either way.

The landscape is different in the human realm. Instead of the stark black and white of snow, there is a colorful early autumn theme. Names and places were different, but playing a human paladin was not really much different from playing a dwarf paladin. Soon I moved on to the next class.

***

My next girl was a warrior. I am particularly satisfied with her looks, I hope I can show her to you later. She looks totally apathetic, as if she would answer anything with a bland "so what?". I sense an LJ-icon in the making.

The warrior is probably the easiest to level from the beginning. While I hear that paladins are the easiest overall, I found warrior surprisingly viable for soloing. You have the drawback of not being able to prepare before a fight (with spells and such), but once you get into the heat of battle there is a continuous flow of "rage", the energy that powers the warrior's special effects. Being tough and doing good damage, I found that I was able to fight enemies my own level without pausing. Whatever pauses I got came from there being some distance between enemies.

A warrior could certainly benefit from teaming up with a paladin. But in the time I have played the game (and I write this on Saturday actually) I have never had an intelligent invitation to group. People just randomly fire off the group invite function without asking first, much less telling why they need a group or what quest they are undertaking. This is probably in part because the game is fast-paced and the group function is right there, but also probably in part because most people who play WoW are either kids or have the mind of one.

***

Having satisfied my curiosity about the human realm for the day, I went back to the frozen wastes to create a gnome warlock. Gnomes live in the settlements of the dwarves for the time being, after they were surprisingly invaded by savage NPC humanoids and panicked, covering their capital city in deadly radiation. They killed off the invaders alright, but also most of the gnomes there, and the rest ran away. Gnomes are the nerds of WoW, small and highly intelligent but not very competent in social matters.

Warlock is a pseudo-evil class that traffic with demons. I'd personally prefer that people call their cute and funny summoned extradimensional assistant something else than demons, seeing how encounters with demons throughout history has been experienced as highly unpleasant. (Whether demons actually exist or simply are projections of undesired subconscious complexes ... well, I suppose it matters but it doesn't change the experience, which is widespread across all continents and centuries.)

The "demons" of WoW are definitely cute and funny, then again the game is given a rather light-hearted veneer in many ways. More to the point, the demons are a great help. They are only available after fulfilling a quest, which is likely to take level 5 to complete alone (perhaps 4 if you don't mind dying a few times, which you perhaps don't mind in-game since there is no XP loss, just some loss of time running back to your corpse). If you nicely ask someone around level 5-6, they can probably help you breeze through the quest even earlier.

The first demon you get to summon is an imp. Imps are small, even smaller than gnomes, and their beginning attack is a fireball. They don't stand up to much melee, so you better prepare yourself to be the tanker of the duo. Ideally, however, you and your pet will both attack from a safe distance, blasting the enemy to smithereens before he ever reaches you. Don't despair if he does, though, because the fireballs of the imp are utterly selective in their damage. Even if you stand between the imp and the enemy, the fireball will not touch you but land on your opponent in a beautiful display of fiery destruction.

Leveling the warlock, especially before getting the extradimensional assistant, was markedly slower than the human warrior or any other characters I had tried. Whether this was due to the race or class has yet to be determined, quite possibly both. It seems to me that non- melee characters are off to a slower start, but this is traditional in the RPG genre.

***

I could not just leave the fourth race alone. So I made yet another girl, a Night Elf druid. Night Elves (not to be confused with Dark Elves of other myths) are saintly feminist treehuggers who live for the balance of nature. They are slender and graceful and would look really good except for their ears, long as a man's underarms. Eww. They are also too slim to be really attractive, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary, especially if you are female.

Druids are also nature-oriented, of course. They have some pretty original spell lines, although their beginning spells are not too different from the paladin. Later in life they learn to shapeshift, if they so wish, into either a warrior-like bear or a rogue-like cat form. In these forms they have styles equivalent to those classes, but lose access to their druidic spells. Or so I've been told. I only played until bedtime. I may go there again, though. Again, not the fastest of classes to level up, but the atmosphere was beautiful. The twilight colors, the music ... if you go to this game to just relax and socialize in an environment and society designed to promote feminist values, this is the place to go.

Eventually my character lay down on a bench and slept (without undressing) and I logged off.