Monday - October 27, 2008

The Zombie Apocalypse

Okay, I know this one's a touchy subject for a lot of people right now, but this is my blog and therefor my opinion. If you hate Blizzard and think this was their worst idea ever, you're wrong, plain and simple.

"Scott? What the hell are you babbling about?" you might ask.

... okay, that doesn't narrow it down much, as you usually ask that, and rightly so. But this particular instance, I'm rambling about the current event running in World of Warcraft - the Scourge Invasion.

Roll back the clock to whenever the heck Naxxramus was put into the game. During that patch, for about 2 weeks or so, they had a "Scourge Invasion," to commemorate the fact that the Scourge were back and bad as ever! ... only, they weren't. In a few lonely, out of the way corners of the world, there were these little glyph circles on the ground, and a handful of level-appropriate undead meandering around minding their own business. They weren't invading so much as poking their heads out to say "Hello, we're still here, and if you don't want to fight us, that's cool. No prob. Just go around us." It was, in a word, pathetic.

Wheel the clock forward to about a week ago. I hear whisperings of another Scourge Invasion to make the lead-in to Wrath of the Lich King something special. I remember the last one, and half roll my eyes. I see zombies meandering around, and think, "okay, cool, so they're at least ATTACKING the major cities rather than politely waiting outside of them." They were weak, shambled slowly, and died quickly. A few bursts of Holy Nova took out a whole pack of them.

However, I got hit by them once, and was infected with their plague. "Oh neat," I thought, "they can spread a zombie plague." Sure enough, if you died to this plague (which had a 6 minute timer before which you had to find a cure) you would turn into a zombie yourself, and could run around PVPing other players (even of your own faction) and spread the plague further!

As neat as this was, allow me to restate that zombies were weak, slow, and fragile. I lived for all of 2 seconds, and was killed by some random player 1-shotting me.

That was a few days ago.

What I had no clue of was Blizzard was slowly escalating things. I thought the constant message of "Servers will have rolling restarts" every day was to address continued stability problems... it's actually to tweak the stats on the zombies each and every day.

See, the plague is getting worse. Lasts night, for instance, the first chance I've had to play in a while. zombies had a lot of hit points, hit for a decent amount, and the plague - most importantly - had a 1 minute incubation (which gets reduced every time you get hit by a zombie). So, even if you can't kill someone through damage, you can usually hit them enough times to zero the clock on their plague and convert them over. I decided to try this out, and got myself infected in Booty Bay, and head north.

Ganking in Stranglethorn is a time-honored tradition. It's one I've admittedly rolled my eyes at in the past, but I figured, in the spirit of the holiday and all, I'd give it a whirl. Seriously: how often do you have the chance to maraud through an area with your own horde of zombie minions? I found very quickly that any HUMANOID NPC you killed came back as an equal-level zombie. Abilities given to you in your PC-zombie state gave you limited command over them; effectively, a "hey guys, follow me" for 20ish seconds, and a 10 second burst of speed "Get'm!" ability. Other than those, they were mindless, and would aggro just like normal mobs. So, you could herd them, but not truly control them.

I got some friends, and practiced in one of the Troll ruins. I wiped the entire place out with a sweeping tide of contagion. After everything there had gone from Troll to Scourge, I was ready. I cut across some wilderness, and hit the Ogres right outside of Grom'gol Base Camp. After "recruiting" a few friends to help out, we rushed our way into the base camp, and hit the guards at the gate.

I saw their levels compared to my level 35 zombies, and though, "This was a waste of time. This is going to be over quickly." I forgot entirely that the plague will run its course whether or not the target actually dies... and within a few hits had a fresh pair of zombies. These 4 ran into the next few NPC guards, and the domino effect was well under way. I had already won the camp.

I stuck around making sure my zombies had enough direction to fully spread the plague and wipe everyone out, and then decided to head for greener pastures. Some friends wanted to kill Onyxia, so I asked to be included... only I couldn't get to Onyxia, because I had overrun the travel hub to Orgrimmar! Every time I tried to step foot in Grom'gol, I was beset by NPC and PC zombies alike! It was wild seeing something so persistent after all the "if you don't want to, you don't have to" style events. This was real. This was in my face. And best of all, it was player created. The undead hadn't overrun Grom'gol because Blizzard arbitrarily decided to invade that town for a short amount of time, it was overrun because I overran it!

Now, I can see a lot of people having a problem with this : major cities and quest hubs are being overrun. Quest givers, bankers, and auctioneers are getting killed. What's worse, is that they just add to the Scourge's numbers... I say suck it up. This event isn't going to last forever, so have some fun experiencing a REAL invasion.