Cold

Here’s my first crack at writing something serious. I don’t know quite yet if there’ll be something to follow this little story, obviously incomplete. Enjoy!

Cold. It was an eerie feeling, like icy fingers were running across her temples. This feeling she had encountered before, when….

“No, I need to snap out of it. Memories can be deadly in these far reaches,” the young draenei thought, moving closer to the fire. The flames had melted the snow for almost one foot around the setting but couldn’t do more against the winds of Northrend, constantly shifting direction. “It’s fitting. The scourge, with its for ever bolstered numbers, is always fighting us back to our outposts, like the wind does with my fire.”

She hated guard duty but when her number came up she had to grab her mace and shield and conform. “It’s not like anything ever happens here, it’s the safest place to be except for base camp,” she uttered as the chills went down her spine again. “This place… I feel it strange to touch,” she frowned, grabbing a handful of snow off of the ground. “What did the Sarge say? That I’ll love it here? I don’t.”

Valani looked around her for the hundredth time since she started guard duty. It was a shallow cave she had set up in, overlooking a valley surrounded by steep cliffs “The angle prevents the walls from being climbed and the narrowness makes it ideal for an ambush”. She was on the eastern cliff, the mouth of the cave very well hidden from suspicious eyes by a huge rock that seemed to have been cleft in half by a giant axe. Part of it was lying on the ground almost blocking access to the post and the other half stood tall and prevented anyone coming from the north from seeing the fire. Luckily the base was to the south so it was safe.

The war against the scourge was very difficult to fight. Loosing a comrade, a friend to this war was hard enough but having to see him rise from the dead to come kill you made it almost impossible to bear. It did toughen up everybody on this front and made friendships mean a lot more than drinking together and relying on another to swoop down to your aid. Not once did Valani see and hear oaths being taken that should one fall the other would make sure he did not rise again.

Swinging the hammer to crush the skull of somebody you knew and maybe liked the previous day took its toll on the troops’ though. Screams could be heard every night, the nightmares haunted everybody and spirits were undeniably low. Nobody knew if the bad dreams would ever stop. Some didn’t want them to. Those were the ones who had fought in the war against the Horde, who got a feeling of the glory. After the second war they had helped rebuild and then hired themselves as mercenaries. They had no choice, there aren’t many who would hire a soldier in times of peace. Fighting was all they knew because it had to be so when fighting the savage Old Horde. Children had taken up arms and learned how to thrust with a sword or impale with a polearm before they had a chance to learn how to write or were old enough to be left alone with a plow and handle it. They had entered the war scared and rose from it scarred but with a fearlessness hard to come by otherwise. They had survived. They had won over warriors twice or thrice their size and had a taste of glory.

Most of them died in the first battle against the scourge. The stories about the first and second wars against the Horde were now sung by bards and although one could still see the destruction that had come to the land in some remote parts of Azeroth, it was not as fresh a wound as it used to be.

The rest had to kill them again the second day, when the battle resumed. This was not something they wanted to forget lightly even though chances were they would not make it out of this war alive anyway. Children were drafted again and given a crash course in wielding weapons, children such as Valani. She barely remembered Draenor in all of its splendor before the orcs found the lust for blood and ravaged it. She was among the few who had survived the trip on the Exodar and made it to Azeroth and as soon as she could pick a sword up she did and began training with her father. Looking back to it, she knew that it wasn’t her true call, to be a warrior, but the wounds her father had suffered in the battle for Shattrath left him empty on the inside. The young draenei just wanted to see her father happy once more so she asked him to train her. He was not pleased by this and insisted that she think long and hard before going down this road. Her youth made the decision for her.

The training was rough. Valenthos, once proud Vindicator (?), did not show mercy for his own flesh and blood and hounded her with military exercises for over a year before he allowed her to even be in the same room with all the weapons he had brought along. It was for the better, she had to admit it even though at the time she was furious with him. Now she had the strength to hold a two handed sword and not feel its heaviness bring her down after a couple of moments. Valani remembered how after the initial couple of days of immaginary thrusts and parries that Valenthos allowed her he sat her down and presented the pros and cons of each weapon, what sword, if choice is given, to choose over another and why. This was the second year of her training.

She did not recall much of the third and last year, or better said, she did not know when it passed. Under his careful supervision she learned to wield all of the weapons in her father’s arsenal and moved from training dummies to sparring with some of his old friends that were still in strength. At first they made short work of her and had her kneeling within seconds of the fight starting. She will never forget what Valenthos said after the first time she hit the dirt.

He took her aside after Kalenthis left and sat her down.

“Do you know why he won?” he asked in a soft tone.
“Because I tripped,” she replied, tears still in her voice.
“No, Valani. You lost because you wanted to win. It may sound strange to you now, it did when my father first said this to me, but winning is not about sport. Not with war. It’s not about showing your opponent who is stronger or faster. You have to prove to him that you are smarter. Fights happen. Wars happen. What pitches you against another is almost never something of your choosing. What drives the both of you at each others’ throats is the will to live, knowing that only one of you can see sunlight again. You have to wait and be prepared for him.”
“So what you have taught me until now..”
“Was to make sure that you will be able to take whatever gets thrown your way. You attacked Kalenthis. That was your mistake. He is way too experienced to not know what you were going to do the moment you raised the blade. He was waiting for you to make your first move so he can counter it.”
“And he did.”
“Yes, my daughter, he did. There is no shame in loosing to a veteran like Kalenthis. He will come again. And now that you know what to do you will have a fighting chance.”

Class / Spec Conundrum

A recent conversation with one of my IRL and WoW friends gave me the idea to this post. Lemme paint the setting: we were both on my balcony, smoking, after he had just watched me get ROFLSTOMPed in AB by a very friendly combo of gnome rogue and dwarf paladin. In fact I almost got deaded by the dangerous duo, the game came to an abrupt end just as i was under 3k HP and stunned, with the rogue sprinting towards me and the paladin falling off of the LM cliff in a bubble. Yes, I had Thunderstormed them away. Yes, it’s fun. Yes, I was dead regardless. Yes, we lost. I suck at PvP.

As I left the BG and the Northrend loader screen was well, loading, we stepped out to discuss my inherent lack of peeveepee skills. The conversation started on a very light note, with him mocking me doing battlegrounds in my PvE gear (shaman PvP gear is kind of Naruto Gay looking but the reason i did this is because I don’t have PvP gear) but soon we, and by we I mean I, came to a very interesting finding:

I know how to PvP, what I lack is either hand-eye coordination, motor skills good enough or enough buttons on my keyboard. As an elemental shaman you have little to no survivability from what I see, and take this with a grain of salt, I haven’t PvP’d since 3.1 hit.

We started coming up with all these interesting scenarios, starting from duels and up to 2 vs 2 arenas. He plays a Balance drood so he knows, man, he knows the pain. Two internts for the one who finds the extremely vague movie reference there. In the old tradition of orcs strengthening through individual training against critters and whatnot he started shooting classes and abilities at me and I had to counter and then, when possible, take the offensive. A bit of verbal pen and paper PvP, if I may. We started off with the spec he knows best, moonkin. Boy, was that a short one. He managed to get two Moonfires and a wrath before I had killed him, or so to speak. We then went through Retribution paladin, which thanks to the terrain I was able to beat too (PURGE, baby, PURGE). Bottom line, we went through all the classes he knew and all those that I knew and tried to see if the Shaman class is viable in PvP. It is. Just not for me.

The one thing that did stick somewhere in the back of my head was the class/spec thing. Something felt strangely weird to me when discussing PvP and taking racials into account.

For instance a true Paladin in my opinion shouldn’t be anything other than Retribution (I shall smite thee with the wrath of all that is holy, in a very southern accent. Yes, all paladins come from Tennessee).
As much as I love the Subtlety tree for all the gimmicks and tricks you have available, a Rogue should only be Assassination according to the same probably twisted logic I have. Keep in mind, I am not talking about class or spec functionality, I am just saying that these are the specs that seem right to me according to the lore.
Warrior – the jury’s still out on that one. I managed to boil it down to faction allegiance:
If Horde then Fury
Else Arms. (for those that remember Pascal)
Another class that I’m not so certain about is Hunter. All three specs really seem viable from a lore point, given that these are times of war. Beast Mastery is for the Rexxar type of hunter, just him and his pet in the wilderness. Survival is what I see a true hunter as. ‘t was just me and da dragon, eye to eye, him breathing fire, me breathing onion type of thingy. And, like I said before, these are times of war so when drafted the hunters would obviously be marksmen.
Next up – Priests. No brainer on this one, really. Holy and that’s it.
Mages should really only be Arcane. Because they’re frickin mages and not matches or elemental eskimos, that’s why.
Death Knights is another one that’s not hard to figure out, they’re Unholy. They’re the oposite of Paladins. They’re from New York and they don’t like your attitude no matter what that is.
Warlocks should be Demonology because they’re warlocks. ‘nuf said.
Durids should be trees. They like the nature thing and like to boogey with trees and bushes. They nurture them and heal the land. Stick’em in a tree form and start’a'choppin’.
Last but definitely not least, Shamans should be Elemental. They too are one with nature but they communicate with the Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart! Go, Planet! And because this is the class I enjoy playing the most, I’ll go a little further and explain why not Enhancement or Restoration. Enhancement is a very violent approach to handling them balls that fly around you. If anything, this is close to the bestiality aproach. Not THAT kind of bestiality -.-. You pummel animals to death and then cry a bit (oh, brother, I too was running across the plains just yesterday as a ghostly wolf but now some dude needs your Lean Flank and will give me 15 s for 10. Where’s your momma?).
Restoration isn’t really my cup of tea, and I say this as someone who’s leveled to be resto in arenas during TBC. The problem I see with it is that… there’s nothing on resto anywhere. I think they needed a third spec and brought resto because what is nature after all if not the rebirth of all that’s good?

Now I’m not expecting anyone to actually read this post but I want to stress out again that this is my take on the lore from what I have seen in the game and from what I have read. I’m sure I could be wrong on a number of counts and that there are people who could tear this bit to pieces and for good reason. My blog, my idea, my rules. I’m just putting this out there.

Now it’s time to do like the gnome rogue and Vanish!