I’m a tiny bit addicted to World of Warcraft. Just a tiny bit, really, I swear. I was playing tonight (just because I haven’t been talking about non-stop here on my blog doesn’t mean I’ve stopped playing, I was just sparing folks further paeans to the unstoppable time sucker) as one of the expansion races, the Blood Elves. I’d noticed an herb in their starting zone called Bloodthistle.
I’d gathered up a bunch and it was just sitting in my bag. I took a look at it and thought it sounded pretty good.
A bit more damage, a bit more healing? Sounded lovely for my Paladin. I munched a bit down and continued on my way. Ten minutes later, the buff ticked down and I got this awful debuff on me.
I ate up another leaf of Bloodthistle and the debuff went away. Yay! But wait… That’s terrible! You just have to keep eating more and more to maintain your “high”, and if you stop you suffer adverse affects for longer than the original buff lasted.
The backstory of the Blood Elves is that they’re addicted to magic, so this makes a lot of sense and goes well with that high concept. But it was not quite expected. Usually items in game tell you what they’re going to do to you without you having to consume them to figure out what’s going on. Not that I’m complaining, it just seems like they tackled the expansion with a different tone than the original game. My friends and I have all noticed that BC content seems to be much more pun-filled - the original WoW has a lot of puns, but the expansion is even more so. It contains quests that make you do silly things like sift through shit (I’m not kidding, it’s an actual quest).
There’s a vendor somewhere who sells you items for vast sums of money that don’t actually do anything. I can’t remember his name though, so I can’t find the link! But he’s basically a con man, selling you junk that does stuff like “enable you to regain health when you eat” which you do anyways.
Back to this addictive Bloodthistle stuff. I suggest you stay away! A small amount of +dmg/healing isn’t worth -5 spirit for 20 minutes. Nope. Drugs are bad, m-kay?
2 Responses to “Addiction in WoW”
The guy you’re thinking of is in Shattrah’s Lower City and is named, appropriately enough, Griftah.
http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=19227#00zc
I’m really loving some of the amusing stuff like this that Bliz put in the expansion. They got really amusing and creative with some of it.
Interestingly enough this bloodthistle addiction comes into play later on in the game when you have to assasinate a Blood Elf courier in Shadowmoon Valley. Nice tie-in.