Questing for Torture

The Warcrack quests seem to come in four flavors.

1. The basic “go deliver this and/or talk to this other NPC”. Many times the target NPC is just across the room or a few blocks away. WTF, the quest NPC can’t leave his post in the leatherworking shop to talk to the dude just outside the shop? Once I had a quest to ask a dwarf NPC in a farflung inn if he was familiar with some guy nicknamed “Slick” or something. He told me that he didn’t know anyone by that name but that other dude across the inn was a little TOO interested in our conversation, if ye know what I mean, Foton. *nudge nudge* The eavesdropper was named something like Bill “Slick” Smith. Gee, could this be the guy?

2. The kill X number of X-type mob. These are the best type of quests because everyone in the group gets credit for each target mob that’s killed … one of the few incentives for grouping in WoW.

3. The collect X number of items from X-type mob. These can be a bitch. Everyone in the group has to collect their own stack of the items and if the drop rate is set too low or the required amount is set too high … grown men can be reduced to tears. My regular group had two collection quests from the same group of mobs one night. In the time that everyone had collected their share of the one item, only ONE guy had collected half of the other. (We use a looting system that I wouldn’t recommend to others unless you know where they all live: free for all loot, each guy takes his turn collecting quest items before the next guy starts, etc.)

After another hour of whacking those damn moles, the first guy finally completed his stack. The rest of us agreed: fuck this shit, we’ll do the rest when we have absolutely nothing to do in game and we’re drunk.

4. The kill boss mob. These aren’t bad and usually put out a reasonable equipment reward — probably not equipment that I can use, but a good vendor resale value at any rate. Like the other kill quest flavor, everyone in the group gets credit for the kill; although dead group members usually don’t get credit, which is horseshit because they usually die tanking the bitch or healing the guy that was tanking the bitch. (Unless the healer or tanker is a paladin — they don’t die unless they’re really stupid because all paladins are set to god mode.)

Last week, we had a group of boss mob quests we were set to do on patch day or soon thereafter. Blizzard upgrades each one to an elite mob in the patch. As they neglected to put this fine little nerf in the patch notes, we go skipping out to the boss area unaware. You can imagine the swearing when we conned each boss in turn.

“Those motherf……”
“Well, what do we do now?”
“I tell ya what we do, we talk some passing paladin into doing this with us”
“WTF you think a paladin is just gonna wander by and kill elites for us?”
“Ya, the place is lousy with them.”
“Lousy with elites or with pallies?”
“Both.”

And sure enough, 12 people in the zone — the four of us, one mage, the other seven were pallies. You’d think that paladins would have better things to do than respond to a request for aid in the public channel by a group of strangers. I guess once they get their free horse they don’t have anything to do because no less than three offered to help.

After dispatching all of our elites, the guy even offered to help us with our other quests — he had cleaned out our quest logs and was thirsty for more.

We begged off tho, wouldn’t have been right to ninja from the guy helping us. In theory.