WoWzers

One of the additions in the latest patch is a “Tip” on the loading screen while your game session begins. Up until this weekend I’d seen nothing particularly revelatory, though the tip to use Shift-B to open all your bags at once was a useful one. This weekend, though, I logged in and read:

TIP: There is no secret cow level.

Sniffle…Sob… Next you’re going to tell me that there that is no Greatfather Winter, either….

Well, at least some small part of the legend lives on.

Yeah, Jason, you’re quite the carebear. Now for the facts… snowballs and snowman costumes ROCK for PvP. Here’s why…

The snowball is an instant cast, no-mana, spell interrupt. Yeah, try it out. I’ve successfully stopped a Priest from flash-healing his mates while my people got in the reinforcements. Reagents are cheap, casting time is zero and can be used when silenced, distance is 30 ft, which means I can stay out of the Priest’s mindflay, and there’s no known resistance gear against it.

Snowmen are the perfect fall damage mitigation trinket. Jump down the lethal drop in AB, at the middle of the fall insta-cast snowman, release snowman and fall the rest. Voila, no damage.

Carebear? Maybe. But more than anything, Blizzard continues to give the ingenious new ways of beating the dumb. Thanks, Grand-father Winter.

Cem-“I slaughtered Merzen”-etor

This is the sort of thing that gets me labelled a carebear by Jonas but I gotta tell you, I love all the Winter’s Veil holiday stuff going on. I get to ride around on a Rudolph-analog and throw mistletoe at people to raise their Spirit, and the latter I can pick up by blowing kisses at guys hanging out in taverns. (And thanks to Blizzard for not forcing the kiss-under-the-mistletoe mechanism into heteronormative patterns. As a gay player, the acknowledgement that I might actually exist and be playing this game is nice.)

Other bits have been fun out in the field. Picking up holiday snow around the Ruins of Alterac makes for fun impromptu snowball fights. Some guildies and I headed up there to do the Greench quest, and while waiting for it to spawn, we’d run around and toss snowballs at each other while our party-members/targets were trying to collect more, preventing them from doing so. Finally, after the Greench popped, we had him stolen by a high-level Horde rogue. After he won, the rogue turned to us and made a /rude gesture at us. We promptly pelted him with snowballs for 30 seconds, and he was a good enough sport to stick around and let us get it out of our system. That was good for a laugh all around.

The presents for everyone under the tree, the snowmen and holiday food, the goblin gnome-o-matic, the allegory of the meaning of the holidays being lost in a rush of consumerism… I love it all, and just a few things go a long way to make me feel immersed in a real world with a real sense of tradition and the effects of passing time. That, and it’s fun to sit outside Ironforge as a snowman and turn down duel challenges, saying, “You want to duel me? You want to duel me? I’m a freaking snowman, tough guy, how am I gonna duel? I got no legs, I can’t run anywhere. You’re gonna stand over there with your little twigthrower and anything’s just gonna pass right through me because I can’t bleed because you know why? I’ll tell you why. I’m made of snow, wiseacre! I’m 100% water save for this carrot and the coal and the hat. Oh, I got these branches, you know what? You hit me there and I’ma bleed sap. Whaddaya gonna do, duel me with a stack of pancakes? Send a rabbit over here to eat my nose? You gotta be kidding me. And forget having a snowball fight, I ain’t making ammo out of my own ass. A snowman’s gotta have principles. Just save it, kid. Go back to dueling school over by Anvilmar with all the other charity cases.”