I must admit I find your posts quite hard to respond to sometimes.
And for that I apologise, as you noted I am indeed extremely pessimistic about pretty much everything. It is my natural reaction to most things, especially if they're good for me personally.
but don't assume that they're behind every problem or are skulking about all the time doing evil things.
I'm not assuming them specifically or even any one person. I have however been trained to see every choice in the quest as impactful with the potential to have negative consequences.", as it turns out even the decision to take a book we collectively forgot about could blow back up in our face if not handled correctly.
I am paranoid about everything we do because the lesson I have learned isn't to count the bonuses, it's to wait and see how we've messed something up because of our actions. Stay away and try to establish ourselves instead of rushing in did result in temporarily helping the farmstead, but in the process, at least 450 other people who are our very explicit allies are now dead.
The only time I think we've ever had an option not come with a sting in the tail was when we got a nat 100 with Vok'fon. There's some which are still developing, but I'm fairly confident I can guess where they're going to go.
So to reiterate, I do not blame every problem we face on a mysterious group of intriguers (merely the ones I can prove, this is WoW after all), I am however conditioned to expect that every choice Grok makes
will come back to bite him, because so far almost every decision has even if its not in the way I anticipate, since to give all credit where its due you do keep me on my toes in that regard.
As for high expectations, sort of. Its not so much that my expectations are high as much as it is an anticipation of getting splattered against a windshield. As you say we're mostly fighting against mindless shamblers, but had immense trouble dealing with an oversized fruit bat. You've said in the past Grok would have trouble taking on an Ogre, so I go "we're fecked if an abomination turns up."
I'm not expecting to be a blademaster yet*, but I am expressing frustration with being told that the best way to improve is to do the fighty fights, but then have all the skills that improve from the fighty fights get locked, as I somehow don't expect fighting a relatively short battle to equal 100 crunches, so its just annoying to see what is metaphorically wasted exp when we need all we can get.
*Though the wow timeline continues to be an excellent demonstrator of how age seems to matter very little, with Thrall having become a full shamen and big ol warrior who'd liberated the clans by the age of at most 17. Arthas is comparatively reasonable, he was 20 when the events of WC3 go down.
As for feeling things, a large chunk is my own impatience there I'll freely admit, but emotions? Those were never gone. They're not good indicators of Grok's improvement, when he was never the most emotional person before, and we were seeing that he still had them even before he got onto the blimp, feeling happy talking to his friends, interested and curious at the debates of magic going as he described what happened and embarrassed when his father laid a wut on him for not understanding the bloodstone he had and so on. Nor did he ever not involve himself in things, mostly being held back by injuries rather than a lack of motivation. Neither of these things are indicative that he isn't depressed, I just don't see touting them as proof he's getting better, especially since what cut him off from the elements was personal self loathing and a feeling of not being worthy.
What has happened to Brill does not strike me as helping him at all in that regard given his reaction at the end there.
For Thrall, he outmanoeuvred feldad, (after failing in the first place, wonderful showing from Azeroth's most powerful Shamen there) and was subsequently outmanoeuvred by Grok of all people, while the result of his manuvering seems to have been an attempt to merely return things to the status quo and not fix the issue. And I've already made my views on how the forsaken are being handled by him pretty clear. His issues with handling the horde at peace are problems, but they're not the issues on display here, nor are they ones that have ever been addressed in WoW. As for unreliable narrator, this is true, but I am able to use what I know of the setting (both canon and this one) to try and figure these things out.
Indeed we are killing scourge, as you've also noted until now we've been killing the weakest scourge. As a result I'm dreading the casualty list we're going to get from tangoing with potentially 2 elite banshees, ghosts, a ghost worg, multiple sentient undead backed up by their minions, 1-2 actual necromancers with one being a proper representative of the scourge all with next to no magic the necrolict and blademasters likely thinking this is below them. Of course if Tirion ends up tagging along it'll end up looking like a level 110 escorting a level 5 through the zone.
However, I think you missed my grumbling, I've not bee complaining about our inability to master a skill in a month, but we are constrained by an inability to catch up with the difficulty curve. Our utility against the undead is mostly against the undead that are too weak to make killing them have, otherwise we're going to end up bleeding our forces incredibly quickly into uselessness, assuming Grok and his friends don't die first and our social skills are from good enough to make a major difference in the areas we're dealing with either. Grok sure as heck ain't going to be replicating what he did against Thrall.
