Tuesday, January 31, 2006

The soul of an enemy

Last night I played in Warsong Gulch with my lev 60 orc. Never having been in there for long enough to make sense, it was very interesting to see how it was structured. Two opposing holds representing the faction strongholds, a flag in each hold. The objective is to grab the enemy flag, and then run back to your own hold with it. For one group to win they have to a) hold the enemy flag and b) kill the carrier of their own flag, then c) plant the enemy flag at their own spot.

This sounds easy, and my raid group were all saying: this is just zerg, grab, run. But like all simple games, the strategy was a lot richer than that. Just getting from A to B was tough. Actually, just getting from A to A1 was tough, if I happened to run into an Alliance hotspot.

What did help was to team up with another player, and not run around alone. One of the guildmates I like is a warlock, and together we manage to do some serious damage. Warlocks do something neat: they make soulshards. They use the enemy as a source of energy: tap their souls and store them, then transform them to health and power - using them to call up demons to assist for instance.

There is something extremely satisfying in seeing an enemy die this way. After having been killed x amount of times by some hunter, I get to see it sink to its knees and die, drained of soul, and I know that into the bag of my companion clicks another little shard, a source of future resources I often get to share through healthstones and soulstones. Enemies turned into a renewable resource. Too bad my character is not undead, then she could have eaten their dead, soulless bodies too.

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