WoW: Ramblings of a Holy Cow

I'm extremely lazy and a bit weird. Since launch day, I've only ever really played a single character on WoW - my warrior. I've created the odd random character here on there on the side for shits and giggles, but none of them ever made it past level 25. I really like just having one character to gear up, to "master", to do stuff with. That's the lazy part. As for being weird - WoW is an MMORPG. I like consistency. I'm a warrior. This is me. This is my avatar. That's what I play. I'm not this guy and that guy and that chick, I'm not also a hunter and a mage. I'm a warrior. I punch things. It's what I do.

Thanks to Argus and an extremely helpful druid taxi, I managed to get my old warrior from level 85 to 110, with his first legendary and an item level in the 900s over the course of just a few days. Getting there was alright, but to be perfectly honest, I'm bored enough to uninstall now. I've seen all the new raid content, I've seen the dungeons, we've even completed a bunch of mythical dungeons as a 4 man group with no healer and one 'DPS' who struggles to maintain 230k, also known as "40% of what the tank is dishing out". I don't mind, we still get it done, everyone is having fun, it's not a competition, whatever.

I'm sick of killing these fuckers now.

I top the DPS charts in guild runs again, I top the scoreboards in BGs, I've got semi-decent gear and I have absolutely zero desire to run any more LFR shit or to repeat the same stinking dungeons over and over again now. I went to the Halls of Valor for fun the first time around, went there for a zone quest the next time, went there for a guild achievement afterwards, now I'm supposed to go there for a class quest and at this point I'd rather shove a hedgehog up my urethra than do yet another fucking playthrough of that place. The problem isn't WoW, it's me. I don't care about repetition. I don't care to join another big fucking raid guild. I don't mind running silly little mythic dungeons with the guild in those rare moments where everyone is actually available. But I can totally stop doing that and not miss it if it means I'm no longer paying a monthly subscription fee.

Back in the beta I really wanted to play a paladin, but friends told me that only cunts played paladins. They were considered broken and overpowered and generally awful and my young self gave into peer pressure and picked the next best thing, which I felt was the warrior. It's a bit funny how paladins turned into a complete joke back when people started raiding in vanilla, because they were so useless. Meanwhile, my friends played rogues. Who's the real cunt here, fellas?

That awesome T2 set, though!

My favourite race were the tauren, because unlike most other races, they weren't super keen on all the warring and shit and really wanted to be left alone. This may not be super accurate with the lore, but it's how I interpreted their description at the time. Besides, I didn't like most of the alternatives. All male humans looked like middle-aged janitors. I mean, for fuck's sake, the majority of their hairstyle options were bald, balding, Captain Picard and skullet and they all came with creepy handlebar mustaches. I like dwarves, but I just can't see myself playing a little bearded fat man with a Scottish accent. Gnomes are tiny old people with pink hair! That's not warrior material! And then there's the male night elf, also known as the missing link between man and ape.

Things weren't much better on the horde side of things. Scrawny blue hunchbacks with tusks and Jamaican accents, the Iggy Pop fan club, butt-scratching cows aaaaaaand.... well...

You can tell he's a great thinker.

I'm not super into cows or anything, but I figured that as a tauren at least they'd see me coming before I stomped them into the ground. I also liked how they get high and chase after spirit coyotes and weird shit like that. And then my family joined the alliance, so that was the end of that plan. I did what absolutely fucking everybody did at the time and rolled the only decent-looking thing on their side - a female night elf. It was perfectly normal back then to end up in dungeon groups consisting of nothing but female night elves.

Anyhow - that shit is about 14 years in the past now, so let's fast forward to the bit where I roll a tauren paladin. You've read the fucking title of this post. It's what I did. Boosted him to 100, am level 106 now and going.
Now first of all, I don't get faction pride. Lots of people have characters on both sides and you get the same cunts in both factions. To me, the alliance and the horde may as well be the US and North Korea. Alliance gets all like, "Oh look, Sylvanas retreated, she must have totally planned to leave us here to die." Horde is all, "Shit, all our leaders are fucked, we gotta fall back. Alliance will probably understand." Aaaand they're at each other's throats again, because fuck talking. They coulda sent letters or something. "Hey, they killed our king because you cunts fecked off!" - "Yeah, sorry, they offed our faction leader after just one expansion, so we had to hearthstone out lol". All cleared up. But noooo, we need some forced conflict here. For what it counts, I think it's pretty awesome how both factions get different cutscenes in that Broken Shore battle, showing only their side of the story. You need to play both parts to understand what's going on.

Fuck the story, everyone just raged about her slightly less slutty new clothing.

That was actually quite fun. "Oooooh, so that's why she didn't help! I had no idea!" And then I started paladining hard. Prot spec, not because I'm oh so desperate to tank random LFP shit, but because I have a bulwark and I'll be damned if I ain't mogging the shit outta that on a paladin! I just char... wait, no. I casually walk into groups of enemies, because I have no charge or a heroic leap and my mounted charge is always on cooldown. Then I turn the battlefield into a giant pinball machine by throwing a bouncy shield at baddies, which whacks everyone in the face before it comes back to me. Fun.

I can soak up retarded amounts of damage. I can bubble up. I can self-heal for days. And I can still kill shit at a reasonable pace, which feels new. As a prot warrior, you'd only see stuff die of old age. Mind you, I haven't played since Cataclysm, so maybe tanky warriors are really awesome now. I wouldn't know, I go fury. And then something weird happened. Some random player appeared, fought some of my mobs with me, then sent a private message. "Need any help?"
-"Nah, I'm good. Thanks", I responded and he went on his merry way. Probably just a coincidence, but I don't get random whispers on the alliance side, unless it's gold spam or when somebody wants to tell me I'm a cunt because I killed a quest mob or some other shit.

The toxic community turned Jaina into a total bitch.

I also can't go anywhere without getting spammed to death with fucking guild invites. Right, different faction, so no guild here. I should probably set this to auto decline and worry about it later. But there's more weird shit happening that I'm not used to. I'm in a quest hub, completely surrounded by guards. Some night elf watches me for a minute, then onehits me, because a fully geared-up level 110 probably considers a level 105 in leveling gear a challenge or something. The fucker gets completely eradicated by guards in seconds, probably thinking, "Worth it!" Earlier that day Claire and I were getting corpse-camped by a level 110 alliance death knight for the better part of two hours while we were trying to get our quests done.

I'm not saying these things don't happen when you're on the alliance side, because of course they do. But I didn't get repeatedly ganked by the other faction when I leveled my worgen from 100 to 110, especially not when completely surrounded by guards and friendly NPCs. For some reason, folks on the alliance side seem a lot more aggressive towards my horde character and I get murdered all the fucking time. Such a cool idea to have forced pvp with players several hundred item levels above me, with literally ten times my DPS and health. Dunno what I expected when I picked a pvp server all those years ago. Again, I still think you get the same shitheads on both sides, but right now I hate the alliance.

Both sides are shit now, anyway. Fucking pandas.

Surprisingly, I'm having way more fun than I expected. Do I wish it was mandatory for every player to connect their genitals to a car battery, which will shock them every time they behave like a cunt? Of course I do. Does that shit still completely ruin my day? Nah. Yes, getting ganked a dozen times in a single quest is annoying as fuck, but that's really the exception, not the rule. Most shitheads onehit you once, then fuck off. Of course I'd like it better if that wasn't a thing, but then I did pick a pvp server. People don't want fair pvp. They only attack you when you have absolutely zero chance to win. I have never been attacked by a player who was at my own level and/or didn't have at least two friends with him.

Apart from that, though, it's actually pretty great. A dozen enemies at once? Let's fuck 'em up! Random rare elite baddie? Let's tank that fucker and solo it! Group play is for pussies, anyway. I'll be 110 in the coming days, then get that purple item level next weekend. Claire has rolled a holy cow of her own. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to duo mythic dungeons once we get a bit of Argus gear. One of us can tank, the other one can heal or deal damage. Maybe we'll both go as tanks. Our 3.5 man mythic alliance group doesn't need dedicated healers, so why should we? Maybe we'll both tank up and make people's lives miserable in the arena. Frankly, the only thing I really miss about the alliance side right now is my legacy pvp title.

I'm pretty sure this will get old fast and is doomed to become just as boring as my warrior's daily Argus trips. But right now I'm having the most fun that I had ever since coming back. It's probably just the novelty of it. Strictly speaking, I'm still doing the same shit, just with differently-coloured buttons. I don't know. We'll see. All I know is this - in the unlikely event that I won't just uninstall after my sub runs out, I'll be too lazy to play more than one character. I honestly don't know which of them, the warrior or the paladin, will come out on top. Gonna be fun to see whether I'll still enjoy being a cow a week from now.