Thursday, October 25, 2007

Oi, Ninja!

I was quite familiar with ninja behavior long before I learned the term for it. My first encounter with it was during questing. I was in Thousand Needles collecting plants in a water elemental infested area, and there was another guy in the area working through the very same quest. Twice, I cleared the elementals from around a plant, and he ran over and grabbed it as I was finishing the killing. Grr... I relocated to another part of the lake to get away from him, but he was back in my view before long. I remembered there were a few plants on shore, and I only needed a couple more, so I headed toward them. As I collected one, I saw him swimming toward the other, so I ran over and grabbed it before he had a chance. Take that!

Last night our paladin/shaman duo was collecting boxes from around the docks in Eversong Woods, and there were enough people doing the quest at the same time that the competition for them was pretty fierce. We were getting tired of looking for them, and were tempted at one point when we saw a guy fighting right next to a box... "Should we ninja this guy?" "Nah..." We didn't. This guy didn't hesitate to take boxes near where we were killing though. Oh well... We did finally collect them all and turn them in, and then a subsequent quest asked to kill a dude at the top of a building. We'd seen him when we were up there looking for boxes, it looked easy, so we started running up there. The box ninja, who'd just gotten the same quest, was running right behind us...

What ensued was a game of leapfrog. You think we'd just party up and help each other, but somehow, it just wasn't happening here. We'd run and kill stuff and he'd pass us. Then, we'd pass him on the way up the ramp as he was stuck killing something. Boing, boing, boing, all the way up the top. He did beat us up there by a few seconds, and there was already a dude standing up there, too. At first I thought he was waiting for the respawn, so we'd have to wait in line a bit, but when our box ninja friend drew a mob, the waiting guy jumped over the edge. Well, ok.

I wasn't paying much attention to what the box ninja was fighting, whether it was the quest target or not -- I just decided to help him with the kill to speed things up. I dropped a judgement on his head, and the next thing I knew, I was being attacked by the dude we'd been sent up to kill. Ooops... so, my husband and I went ahead and killed him. To my surprise, his head dropped for us and not the box ninja, so I guess we ended up beating him to the punch. I guess we were the ninjas that time.

Anyway, the whole thing kind of sucked. I guess any time an area is crowded, and you're competing for quest items like that, this kind of thing is bound to happen. I think we're going to move to the Barrens soon.

We've both hit 11 now, and I'll have my paladin quest to do soon. I need to read up a bit on the mechanics of playing a paladin correctly. Right now, we're wildly overpowering the enemy in almost every battle, so if I'm not laying down the smartest series of moves, it really doesn't matter. I don't want to get into bad habits though.

2 comments:

Exanimo said...

I met my share of ninja's aswell but luckily you manage to take better care of yourself, perhaps keeping people too much at a distance because of this.
Anyway... the ninja who is freshest in my memory was this gnome rogue who i ran ZF with on my Warrior alt quite a while back. He was a quiet guy and the party (of which i knew none) were a friendly bunch, somewhat noobish but they did their best.
But at the final boss this Gnome Rogue decided to need all the stuff, eventho he couldnt use a single item.
I was pretty pissed so i contacted someone in his guild and he was kicked shortly after, i kept an eye on him for a couple of weeks and made sure he got removed from the next guild he joined aswell. (normally i can let go of things better then this :P )
After a while i removed him from my friendslist and simply didnt see him around any more.

Just 2 weeks ago i saw his name pop up in trade, looking for people to sign his charter or at least his mates charter. I restrained myself from giving him some abuse but when i ended up in a pug with a guildy of him i did mention it. ("you're not a ninja like that guildm8 of yours are you?)
Not sure what happened with the rogue but his guildmate did ask me alot of questions on the event and told me he would speak to him on this.

Sometimes you get punished for being a ninja and it may take a loooong time before it's forgotten ;)

Suzanne said...

Wow... often I'm running instances for practice, not loot, but I still think I'd probably bail on a pug if someone in the group was consistently rolling need on everything. That is just ridiculous. I'm glad you reported him to his guild, so he didn't just continue to screw people over without some consequence.

(Thanks for the comment! It's my very first... :) )