Tuesday, October 9, 2007

A Prime Number of Squirrels

Imagine this: You need to go to the bathroom. Your home, be it an apartment, house, mansion, or cardboard box, only has one. Therefore, you need to walk to it whenever you feel the need. Now, imagine that the next time youre walking to your bathroom, you happen to notice a squirrel sitting in the hallway.

Odd as this may be, you continue on past the squirrel. After all, you need to use the bathroom. However, the squirrel, instead of gathering nuts or buying stocks on margin or whatever it is squirrels normally do screeches horribly and attacks you.

You are surprised, rightfully so, and recovering from your astonishment, beat the squirrel off your leg with a club that happens to be there (if you can accept a squirrel in your hallway, you can accept that there might be a club there as well. Just go with it).

The squirrel runs off and you continue towards the bathroom, perhaps whistling a jaunty sea tune. However, before you can reach the bathroom, eleven squirrels, led by the one that originally attacked you, descend en masse and begin to savage your calves.

One squirrel is not so bad. Two squirrels could be irritating. Five is downright nasty. Eleven however, are almost lethal. You fight your way into the bathroom, slamming the door on them and stand there panting and bleeding and probably wondering what the hell was going on.

After staunching the bleeding and applying Bactine or your antiseptic of choice, you do your business and then exit the bathroom. The squirrel is still there, using a pen to draw on the wall. You try to get past it again and the same thing happens. Youre attacked by a prime number of squirrels and have to dash halfway across the house to get away from them.

Now imagine that you have to do this every single time you go to the bathroom. Ludicrous, yes?

You may be wondering what Im talking about. Well, welcome to WoW, the only place in existence where the animals are as abundant as they are aggressive.

This is a long standing pet peeve of mine in WoW. There are just too many damn animals that agro way to easily. Its just amazingly irritating trying to get from point A to point B and having to wipe out a half-a-dozen species to do so. The Hinterlands are one of the worst places for this, as there are so many wolves in the area (some of which are stealthed) that even if youre the appropriate level, you will spend half your time simply running away.

The worst example to me is Spinebreaker Post in the Hellfire Peninsula. I spent a good chunk of Sunday leveling my hunter and there is simply no good way to get there. No matter how you approach it, youre going to agro something. And the boars stun, so just riding through does not work. I probably got half-a-level just from having to kill boars I could not get around.

Now, I love WoW as much as the next addict, but they really should reduce the agro on most animals, especially if you have to constantly travel back and forth through them to get to the quest givers.

Just my .02 cents.

Cheers,
-Jason

2 comments:

Sly said...

That's why I play a rogue. =P

Jason Janicki said...

Ah - good point.