I Hate the Shado-Pan, Death Threats and A Toy

I've only been doing shado-pan dailies for four days but I have already grown to hate them with a passion.  It has nothing to do with the quest themselves, they are simple enough, it is the helpers they offer you.  Needless to say I can do the quests without the helpers but I want to get the Shado-Master achievement which means I have to do all the quest related achievements, but even without the meta, I would want to do all the quest related achievements anyway.

It is the one achievement that is part of the meta that is going to kill me, figuratively speaking.  Getting around with the Shado-Pan.  After my four days of quests and trying to run around with various helpers I have come to the conclusion that blizzard followed the profile of the worst players in the game and made NPCs act like them, but worse.

The helpers are horrible.  My first helper was Protector Yi and if there were ever someone I wanted to push off a cliff this is him.  I've never even run into a pug with a player as bad as Protector Yi.  I pull two mobs and Yi sees that there are another 16 in the area that I seem to be neglecting so he is not content just easily blowing away the two mobs I pulled and moves on to the others.  He has to make sure to go round up the other 16 and bring them to me, perhaps because he thinks I would not get around to them on my own.  Gee, thanks.

Every single pull I made, no matter what efforts I made to not turn each fight into a mosh pit of dozens of people he found a way to pull extra mobs.  Neutral mobs?  No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you.  Flying mobs that just pass over head?  No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you.  Mobs you were not even going to go after at all because they are not part of your quest?  No problem, I'll drag them into the battle for you.  Protector Yi should be called Caretaker Yi because he just wants to fill plot holes in a cemetery and he doesn't care if you go into one of those plots.

On a few occasions he even figured out how to pull mobs that were no where to be found.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of the mobs he pulled were from the dread wastes or kun-lai, he pulls anything from anywhere it seems.

I use the tidy plates addon so I can see anything that in within range and some.  Even if they are in a building or behind a mountain their plates will show for me.  There would be no one, not a single mob, outside of the ones I was fighting on the screen and off goes Protector Yi, excuse me, Caretaker Yi, to somehow find more mobs to pull.  If I were not sure he couldn't, as he is not a warlock or anything, I would think he was conjuring up more mobs to fight himself.  The guy is a freaking aggro magnet.

On more than one occasion I had to say screw it and just leave him to die and run off to a safe place to regroup because he would not stop pulling mobs.  Even when I was handling them and getting them down it seemed that he would look at it and say, down to only 5 mobs, need more mobs, and run off to get more.  It was one constant massive pack of mobs.

I had to kill 16 of something I believe it was, I landed where 2 were standing and engaged them, by the time the fight was done with those 2 mobs I had all 16 I needed for the quest, which is a good thing, but I also had another dozen as well and some.  I finally gave up when I was still fighting and the original 2 mobs I landed to kill respawned.   I had a pile of 30+ mobs there.  If you ever want to farm gold or something Caretaker Yi is your man because he will pull the whole zone for you but if you want to complete quests in a timely manner, no freaking way.

As bad as he is he can not claim the spot as the most annoying helper I've run across yet.  He was a warrior and I guess that fits him, pulling mobs.  He also did play the role of the tank, so that is good for those cloth type people I guess.  He was bad, even annoying with over pulling for no reason but he was not the worst, close, but not.

The most annoying helper is a huntard in every sense of the word.  Hawkmaster Nurong is every thing you heard bad about hunters and 10 times worse.  I am surprised that they did not code something in the game that if a green melee weapon dropped he would roll need on it.  That is about the only stereotype of a huntard that Hawkmaster did not emulate.  Every single fight he runs up to melee and stands there looking at the mob and occasionally dropped traps.

He should be called Trapmaster Wrong because that is all he does, lay traps and do everything wrong.  He has no pet, he puts traps all over the freaking place and on the rare occasion when he does attack he does so in melee.  I do not care if hunters do not have minimum range any more, you do not attack in melee range, even more so when all the mobs do AoE damage in melee range.  Maybe it is a good thing he did not try to get at range, he might have found a way to pull even more mobs.

The worst part is he puts the traps in the middle of freaking nowhere.  If I am fighting a mob in one place he will litter the area around the mob with traps.  Will he put them under the feet of the mob?  Nope, but he will put them all around him.

That is not all either, he pulls more mobs while he runs around placing traps in areas they are not needed.  And if someone comes near one of his oddly placed traps it pulls them.  Add to that, his timing is horrible for everything he does.

I made this one pull with one elite mob and 5 normal mobs, lets forget for a moment that these bugs hit like a jackhammer to begin with, but I can handle it.  Multi to keep them all on my pet and take out the non elites one at a time while keeping mend pet rolling and even the brutal beating my pet is taking I can handle it.

That is until Trapmaster Wrong decides to put two frost traps to the left and right of the battle, I guess to slow down anyone that might come close that is not even involved in the battle, which I really question, and ends up pulling two more roving packs with it.  Each of those two packs had 1 elite and two normal mobs, not to mention one of those two packs was close enough to another pack when it aggroed because of his traps that it pulled another pack of four normal mobs.  So my nice controlled pull of one elite and 5 normal mobs was now a pull of 3 elites and 13 normal mobs.

My poor pet had its fate decided instantly.  Sorry scruffy but you have to die.  I started to do my little retreat with a multi misdirect to make sure none tried to follow me while I made a calculated retreat.  Trapmaster Wrong kept laying down frost traps and snake traps and explosive traps like crazy, the guy apparently is not limited by the cooldowns I am and can have multiple traps of the same type out at the same time.  My pet died a noble death and I feigned death just far enough away that I knew I could pop up safely after battle and the pat walked away.

One problem, after they killed the greatest huntard in the history of huntards he reappears a few seconds later.  Right on top of where I was hiding in my feigned death state.

I was laying there in my feign death waiting for the pat to walk away when battle ended but no, he would have none of that, he reappeared standing next to my body laying there and the pats came flying at him.  He couldn't wait 5 seconds for them to walk away before reappearing?  He couldn't wait until I got up before coming to rejoin me?  Freaking jerk.  They started beating on him and doing their AoE stuff, hitting my hiding body in the process and I was yelling at the screen, die already you idiot.  But he just kept taking the hit and laying trap after trap after trap moving backwards.

At least that moved them away from me some so when they were just out of range enough I hit camo causing me to pop up and took off like a bat out of hell to a safer place so when the wrongly named hawkmaster joined me again he would not pull mobs again.

He ended up doing that to me a total of three times.  Huntard is a perfect way to describe him.

The last of the dailies was of course one of those ones to kill some bigger boss at the end of them and I landed and started to lay the smackdown on him.  Hawkmaster did not cause any problems this time because there were no adds for him to pull but when the fight was over there had to be a dozen traps all over the place around the mob I was fighting.  My pet was tanking him so he was in one place and never moved.  What was the reasoning of placing all these traps all around him?  He could have placed even one under the mobs feet, but no, that would make way to much sense.  Lets place them everywhere in the area he is not.  Yes, that makes sense.

I said to my screen, talking to him of course, I am a hunter, if I wanted traps I would lay them.  Just attack the freaking target that I am attacking you moron.

All their helpers are like Yi and Nurong, they are all completely useless and are all more trouble then they are worth.  If I did not know better I think their secret agenda was to try and get me killed.  The pandas do not really want outsiders around so they make me travel with these people so they can kill me.  I swear that is it.  I swear they are there to kill me and not help me.

If it is not their secret agenda to kill me off and these really are the elite strike force for the pandaren people then I really question how they survived, how they evolved.  Survival of the fittest and all, they should have been wiped out a long time ago, their own ineptitude and stupidity should have done them in.

If these are the best of the best I wonder how the hell they escaped being slaves of the Mogu.  These are the worst fighters I have ever seen in game, worse than the worst pug I was ever in.  If anything it made me wish I were in a looking for dungeon pug instead of doing these quests.  These helpers made me understand how good even the bad players in randoms are because I don't think any player could ever be as bad as the shado-pan helpers.

Speaking off odd occurrences while doing dailies I have to make mention of one of the dailies I did a few days ago for the august celestials where I had to kill Ellia Ravenmane, the end quest of the quest line.  Nothing special, challenge a person to a battle at the end of a daily quest line.  We have all done it a dozen times right?  But have you ever received death threats in the mail after you did one?  I don't recall ever getting a death threat from a quest mob, nevertheless I got a few of them from her.  She did not take losing to me very well it seems.  Ellia likes to tell me it isn't over and I will meet her again and she will get her revenge.

I must say, between death threats in the mail and NPC helpers that make me think of bad pugs as good ones, the game sure has developed a real sense of life to it.  Like a real RPG should have.  Nice touch blizzard.  But damn you, I have to do 15 dailies with each of those NPCs?  You bastards.

As for toys, I found a new toy the other day too, thanks to my tidy plates showing me things that hide behind walls.  When doing one of the quest I saw an NPC named scotty, being a star trek fan I said to myself, self, I need to find him and kill him, a named mob that doesn't have a quest marker on it has to have something cool right?  After some stumbling around I found a way to get to him and he dropped a coin that turns you into him but it only has three charges.  Either way, it is another nice little toy in game and don't let his elite tag fool you, he is a push over.

If it were not for my plate addon I would have never noticed he was there.  Love tidy plates.  If you need a plate addon take a look at it.

I wonder what hell the shado-pan will subject me to today or if I will come home to another mail from Ellia telling me she is going to get me some day.  Either way, the game sure has a life to it now, even if it is a funny one.