Endgame: The Monk’s Gambit

So I bit the bullet and leveled. My monk is now 90 and having a surprisingly large amount of fun. Ever contrary it seems that as everyone else is losing that WoW feeling, I’ve got my groove back.

This weekend I found myself uttering the words I never expected to slip past my lips, “Let’s just queue to Strand of the Ancients because it’s the call to arms and it’s amazing”. As it turns out, on monks it is a great place to pvp because of all the utility which comes as a standard regardless of spec. No one else slowing vehicles, fine, I can do it myself at no mana or chi cost to myself. No one else cc’ing chasing opponents, no problem, slow one, paralyze one, silence one, disarm one and rinse and repeat. Finally I have the control my control freak nature appreciates.

I’ve also being doing a lot of Tol Barad as it’s an easy five hundred honor per game. It’s just a shame that the Horde on my server don’t see the point of queuing up. This is one zone that I really wish was cross realm as I miss the massive battles with three raid groups we had the start of Cataclysm when it was new and shiny and gave semi useful rewards.

In between PvP, I’ve started leveling archaeology. My goal for this week is to cap it out and also hopefully acquire as many of the interesting items as possible. The pick up, put down nature of it suits being interwoven in between battleground queues and the screenshot opportunities it provides suits me down to the ground.

I’m almost completely geared in the current honor set and my conquest point count is climbing nicely so the next thing on the agenda will be to run those scenarios so I can experience the Battlefield which has become the Barrens prior to the patch. Given all those happy days I spent pvping in the Barrens it seems only fitting that my journey should take me there again.

 

Haunted Azeroth: Tol Barad

I love watching horror movies from behind sofas and then having nightmares for weeks afterwards. In fact as a child, I often had to sleep with the lights on because the strangest things could pray on my imagination, Sweeney Todd (possibly understandable), a butterfly getting stuck in someone’s ear, a shadow flickering against a wall or a story read under bright lights, casting shadows long into the night. Even playing WoW with headphones on, I’ve found myself jumping in certain areas so I thought I’d start to share with you some of the places which leave me with a distinct sense of unease.

Tol Barad

No wonder the inhabitants of this prison are hostile.

Cooped up in the dark and the damp, I suspect I wouldn’t be in the best frame of mind either.

On a slightly different topic, Matty raised an interesting question the other day. I’ve never had a character I actively disliked before, even my slightly strange damaged ones have had a side which redeemed them (at least in my eyes). However this left me wondering, could I make a character whose choices in life I found repugnant? The obvious choice to experiment with would be a Death Knight but given my track record …… that’s probably a definite no.