Saturday, June 5, 2010

Duelling Crusaders

I'm lousy at duels.

I tend to think in terms of PvE, not PvP, and duels --especially spur of the moment ones-- emphasize that.  I think the first duel I ever accepted I ended up running away from, because the warrior involved was absolutely crushing me.  (I now realize he probably had heirloom gear, but still...)  I'm one of those people who motor through the front gates of Orgrimmar so I don't have some enterprising young whelp challenging me.

So, it was with some trepidation this morning that I was doing my Argent Crusade dailies and I received a challenge from a Tauren Warrior while in the Valiants' Ring.

My mouse cursor hovered over the Decline option of a good five seconds or so, but I had second thoughts.  Oh, why the hell not, I thought.  We're both mounted and technically pretty equal.

We started out the duel matched evenly: both of us with our shields up and on full, and exchanging equal blows.  I was thinking that he hit me first, so if it came down to a complete war of attrition, I would have to do something to sneak ahead of this guy.  From experience, I knew the first one who broke would be at a disadvantage, but I didn't know what else to do.

Then all of a sudden I started watching the Tauren's lifebar plummeting toward zero.  He'd forgotten to keep up his shields.

He panicked and tried to run, and I was able to run him down and get a good joust in before the fight ended.

Yay me; winner by TKO.

I hung around to finish up my daily, and the Tauren reappeared.  "Give a guy an achievement?" he whispered to me.

Oh hell.  I was feeling generous.  Particularly so since I'd not actually won a duel before.  I became a sacrificial lamb, left my mount's damage in place without healing it, and just let him beat me.  (To be honest, that wasn't that hard of a thing to do, since I'm not the greatest mounted jouster either.)

Feeling pleased with having done a good deed for the day, I went back to grinding some quests in Stonetalon.  I pulled into the Horde outpost there, and while I was catching my bearings the magical duelling flag popped down.

You have got to be kidding me.

I hovered over the Shaman, and discovered she was L31.  Apparently she must have discovered my level at exactly the same time, because she scooted away as quickly as possible.

Sometimes, it's good to be the 80 in a low level area.

EtA:  Oh, and I almost forgot.  I finally got that Azure Whelp pet to drop in Azshara.  Time to go buy a lottery ticket!

18 comments:

  1. I feel the same about dueling.. most of the time I just ignore it and go on my way. Occasionally I decide to accept and give it a go.

    And grats on the whelp! Since you seem to be a bit of a pet collector, have you ever heard of warcraftpets.com? It's a neat site to keep track of your vanity pet collection. I love it and rush there to update everytime I get a new pet.

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  13. @NaturalGamerGirl:

    I'm not sure what happened, but I think I might have accidentally deleted your comment when I was trying to remove all of my comments due to the Blogger issues this morning. If you can repost, that'd be good.

    I've had the pet collecting grow on me over time. At first I just wanted to get the 25 Pet Achievement, but now that I've gotten a few of the whelps, I want to see if I can get the rest.

    I'm grinding my way through the Crusader Dailies just so that I can get the Sunreaver Dragonhawk mount. Any self respecting Blood Elf would want the natural mount of Quel'Thalas. (And it's much nicer than the striders, anyday.) I'd like all of the regular drakes (the proto-ones pretty much require raiding, so they're out of my reach), but I naturally ended up with Frenzyheart in Sholazar.

    Thanks for the link, I'll have to check it out!

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  14. Yes, blogger is doing some funky things with comments...

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  15. Yeah, I noticed. I tried deleting, then perma-deleting, and things disappeared only to reappear after a new comment.

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  16. The issue seems to resolve itself if you permanently delete it. instead of just deleting it.

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  17. I don't know about you, but I'm still seeing all of the deleted posts.

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