To Play the Hated Thing

I hated fighting against warriors. More than warlocks with their infernal Fear spell and life-leeching abilities, and vastly more than mages, with their devious blinking and Flame-Blasting ways. Even more than coming up against the hunter, whom was arguably designed to be a direct counter to beloved Seris - my rogue in World of Warcraft. The hunter was able to launch a flare into the air, which could pull Seris out of stealth and more than likely lead to her death. The hunter could place a mark on Seris when he saw her, preventing her from slinking back into the shadows she called comfortable, allowing him to see her no matter where she went or how craftily she hid. The hunter even could even train and command an animal pet, beasts pulled from the foulest corners of Azeroth, and then send them to slay me while he disabled the abilities I relied on.

But none of them - whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter - could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.

Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one - the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access - and coin to pay - to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.

And I’m pretty sure that the warrior went through all of the work to get one specifically to kill my dear and fragile Seris.

Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best - but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon - 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper - influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody - and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question - but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.

The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe - and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.

That’s why I decided to make a warrior.

The warrior most assuredly has weaknesses. If outnumbered, he has very limited escape possibilities. Against a skilled mage adept at manipulating the frozen forces, he had almost no defense and would die a slow, painful and very cold death. A paladin, while not able to put forth the raw damage output of a warrior, could slowly kill him while restoring his own health - something the warrior cannot effectively do. Besides, I didn’t want to play a warrior to be an all-around balanced fightery-sort, no - not at all. I wanted to play a warrior for one reason:

To kill the hell out of rogues.

I never did get Icthus - the warrior - to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper - by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, I parked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams - an enemy team and a team you were on - to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.

While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating almost everything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own - rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves - and even then, none could compete with Icthus.

Except rogues.

This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did - and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior - that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 - that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.

But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude - these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.

I was the hated thing.

Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision - a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset - when effectively utilized - enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.

In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen - so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.

Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters - that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again - my Knight of the Blazing Sun - brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.

Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer - the Slayer - could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.

I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.