Sometimes when facing a daunting task, it helps to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Playing shaman has reinforced this idea in that while I can play melee on my goatem Fiadeya, she’s not as indestructible as my blood elf pally Resora. Thus I have to get creative when facing a particularly nasty baddie…or two or three.
One of my favorite shammy abilities is hex, which lets me turn meanies into adorable little critters temporarily. It’s a rather hexaggerated change in that it wouldn’t work in the real world, but it’s Warcraft and real world need not apply. I recently got the compy variation of hex and I enjoy it a bit more than the frog. I know there are other variants but I haven’t looked into them yet. I’d actually forgotten about that particular shammy ability until I started playing one regularly and now I’m somewhat addicted to turning big, mean things into little, mostly harmless things.
Recently, while doing the Kyrian Covenant campaign on Fia, I reached the quest that I struggled with on my belf priest Srirajah. It involved killing a big bad dude named Overseer Atticus to retrieve the hammer he’d stolen. Atticus had two bodyguards and Srirajah had failed to kill them all several times before a familiar, shiny belf paladin friend swooped in to save the day.
Knowing there would be no pally rescue this time, I had to get clever on Fiadeya and experiment until I figured out how to beat Atticus. I tried taking on all three at once in enhancement spec with the help of my stone elemental but even with rock buddy, she just wasn’t durable enough and got squished rather quickly.
I then thought that maybe I could handle just the two bodyguards if I hexed Atticus into a compy first, so that’s what I did. When I hexed Atticus, he turned into a floating compy holding a tiny version of the big hammer he’d stolen and I thought it was quite amusing. I wish I’d gotten better quality screenshots of it because when I went back later after completing the quest, he was still there but the hammer obviously wasn’t.
With Atticus hexed, I took out the two bodyguards easily in enhancement spec and then backed off, switched to resto spec, and sent my rock dude in to pummel Atticus. I did resto spec so I could heal myself more easily if the bad guy came to me, but rock dude handled him just fine while I shot lava and lightning from a safe distance.
I was quite pleased that I’d been able to figure out a way to handle the group of baddies on my own, but I was also a bit sad because it drove home the fact that it’s highly unlikely that the familiar blood elf pally friend or any version of him will swoop in to save the day again anytime soon. He’s ventured off on a new and exciting chapter of his life with an amazing woman and I’m very happy for them both! Time won’t line up like it used to for chance encounters but I know that change is an important part of life. Even so, I was feeling kind of bummed in that moment and I just sat down in the grass on Fiadeya and pouted for a while.
My pally friend isn’t the first friend who I’ll be seeing less of in World of Warcraft, as a couple other friends have become burnt out and lost interest in the game, which means I’ll be doing more stuff solo. Playing solo is nothing new to me, I’ve been doing it for years on my Warcraft characters as I’ve lost many a WoW friend to the changes of life. Fortunately, I still have my oldest daughter and a core group of friends that play frequently and we have a lot of fun, but the empty spaces can be hard for me to ignore sometimes.
While losing some Warcraft friends has been abrupt in the past, I’d known for a while that seeing my pally friend was going to happen less in game. So it wasn’t sudden, but I’m apparently bad at actually preparing for change and I lost my bearings for a time afterward. I came around though and saw that it was selfish of me to have such sad feelings to begin with when I should just be happy for him in his new life. Sometimes I just need a hard smack upside the head to get it back on straight.
I’m someone who bounces back quickly and after dealing with my feelings about the latest changes in my Warcraft life, I realized I’ll be okay. I’d built up and hexaggerated the changes into an epic sized baddie that would put a damper on my life forever, but I just needed to scale it down to a more manageable size, which is really what hexing is all about. Thanks to Warcraft, I’ve formed friendships that can endure outside of WoW and that is a wonderful thing that I obviously needed a reminder of. Plus, if I ever get lonely, at least as a Kyrian I can summon some feathery friends as company.
Srinity 