Young and in his prime, Kazimierz takes his duties seriously in all aspects of his life. His services as a shaman, to his clan, and to his friends are all undertaken with gravity and efficiency, and he fights with little of his people’s customary bloodlust. Kazimierz has served minor roles in battles and skirmishes from Mount Hyjal to the Scarab Wall and well beyond, and he has served as mentor for several shaman—his now-betrothed among them. Steadfast, loyal, and (according to some) a little uptight, Kazimierz lends totem and axe to any cause he deems worthwhile.

Kazimierz is far from my first character, and indeed began life as an orc warrior in the late days of the Burning Crusade. Finding the playstyle quite unsuited to me, I eventually rerolled him as a shaman and fell in love with the class. 85 levels and two expansions later, he’s still my solid main and I’m enjoying Enhancement more than ever. Until recently dual-specced Restoration, he’s now Enchancement/Elemental for filling ranged DPS slots when we’re short, and I’m loving playing him as much as ever.

Kazimierz lives on Wyrmrest Accord with the rest of his clan, and wears his Loremaster and Seeker titles with pride.

Kazimierz the Seeker <Bloodriver> of Wyrmrest Accord-US Level 85 Orc Shaman 10 / 31 / 0 2 / 7 / 32

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Achievements

7480 — 736/1352 (54%)

Recent Achievements

• 25 Cataclysmically Epic
  
• 10 Eclipse
  
• 10 Heroic: Hour of Twilight
  
• 10 Heroic: Well of Eternity
  
• 10 5000 Valor Points
  

As my guildies (seriously, thank you guys! I couldn’t have done much of anything without your help) dispersed, I couldn’t help wondering…what drove me to do such a long, painful line of quests? There was essentially no reward; the dagger and robes I received during the course of questing don’t have unique skins, and the cost of the materials for the arcanite buoy was close to ruinous. The legendary mount and title are long past obtainable, no other items can be shown to others—the Scepter isn’t even an item that can be equipped and shown to other. Why, then, did I spend many hours of my own time and that of my guildies to finish this archaic questline?

I believe it’s my completionist desire, the same one that drove me to get Seeker and Loremaster, and which still propels me on occasion to keep questing on Kazi. I pay my money every month for this game, and I love it…and like every other game I’ve loved, I am doing everything I can to prolong the game. Which, I suppose, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in a game which continuously updates, but it keeps me busy. The questline has also tantalized me for a long time; I’ve written before on my fascination with the entire Ahn’Qiraj war effort event, and this questline was in many ways the focal point of that event. It’s also going away in Cataclysm—it’s been confirmed that the blue dragon which gives an entire third of the scepter’s questline is being removed, and it’s likely they’ll remove the rest as well. Regardless of why, it’s still a major thing I can check off on my ‘To Do’ list…now, to get that Eye of Sulfuras….

Resurrection magic is available to four of the ten classes in Warcraft in a ready manner, with no cooldown or other limitation beyond mana and cast time (and combat). Dismissing this as pure game mechanics is impossible; the Scarlet Crusade (and later Onslaught) have frequent references to to resurrection in quests related to them. However, the aforementioned permanent deaths in-canon mean that there must be some sort of limitation on the use of revives, else there would be no such permanent losses. Though clearly open to interpretation, my personal take is this: reviving spells combine a potent healing effect with a re-anchoring of the soul to the body. Thus, at least /some/ of the deceased’s body must be intact and present, and the spell must be cast relatively soon after the soul leaves the body, before it can find its way to the Twisting Nether and whatever afterlife awaits. Without a body, there is nowhere to house the recalled soul; without a soul, the body is lifeless.

This view of resurrection has support in both mechanics and lore: in-game, you can only stay ‘attached’ to your corpse for a few minutes before the game kicks you out to the spirit healer, and you need to be close to a player’s body to cast the res in any case. In lore, meanwhile, bodies are often burned or otherwise destroyed (by voracious rats in the Forsaken’s case) to prevent such revivification. However, these still provide no compelling case for armies to leave their dead as corpses; many battles would be finished or calmed enough to resurrect before time was up, and there are certainly enough spiritualists around to do so. As such, I would offer this explanation: resurrection demands a heavy toll, either to be channeled (as most holy users might) or bargained for (as a shaman might), which relegates it to something used in extreme circumstances only. The Scarlet’s love of ressing could then be explained by the dreadlord who leads them; it’s entirely possible that his influence can supply the necessary strength to revive soldiers as a matter of course, rather than something extraordinary.

Of course, as I said, this is mostly conjecture on my part, and anything that works for you and those you RP with is fair game. The most important thing is to have an idea of the assumed limitations of such things before someone deflates a dramatic death with an offhand “Why don’t you res them?” or the like. The relative rarity of a player ICly killing off one of their characters makes it potentially an extremely powerful event, worthy of plenty of consideration to make sure it’s an event to remember.

Now that Faeldray’s glowing introduction has me all blushing, I suppose I should share a few things about myself…as you might have guessed, that’s my namesake up there, hanging out in Orgrimmar. I raid casually, RP, and level a multi-server army of alts, but Kazi’s been a solid main for a long, long time. I started playing in January, the year Wrath came out, and have mostly been settled into either a family-only guild or one of Bloodriver’s colonies (as their Token Orc) since. I don’t care for guildhopping, and the people there have been great friends over the years, having introduced me first to the joys of 5-mans and later of raiding.

Of course, Bloodriver is also where I met my sweet Faeldray, so I might be just a tad bit biased. >.>

I’m fond of the lore (retconned and spliced as it may be), love questing, and I apparently can bang bits of texts together to make a credible story every now and then, WoW-based or not. Blogging is still kind of new to me, being a rather private sort of person in that annoying Real Life place, but I’ll do my best to earn my keep, so to speak. Good to make acquaintance of all of you.

-Kazi

It has nothing to do with the fact that I can now blame him if anything goes wrong on this blog. Nope, totally not that.

This came after my host decided to delete his blog along with mine that got hacked, despite the fact that his had never been touched by those jerkoffs (I still feel awful/angry/upset about the whole issue). While I was thinking of the best way to get his blog back up and running, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t remember asking if he ever wanted to join me here. I think you can figure out what happened after that.

So, with that, I’d like everyone to welcome Kazi as the new co-author of Petoholics. He even has admin rights and everything. Shiny eh?

Hopefully he will grace us with a post soon.

Totally unrelated note: I’m still catching up on my Google Reader after my 2 week vacation and whole crap, did the blogosphere ever erupt with that feminism in WoW issue. I did like how it has created some wonderful thought-provoking posts but certain people sure got nasty about it all. Having said that, if people aren’t sick of talking about it, I have a spin-off post that’s been forming in my head.

So in lieu of a post that actually requires me to write, >.> I give you a long overdue and hopefully entertaining episode of The Adventures of Kazimierz and Saraku!

Hidden Tauren House

This first video is Kazi and Saraku’s visit to the little tauren camp that rests in the mountains between the Barrens and Mulgore. This place is of particular importance to me because when the wall-walking trick was still in-game, I discovered the way there all on my own when I was still a newbie (Niqora was level 40ish or something) and it was my very own secret spot. I was saddened when they removed wall-walking and thus removed my only way to get to “my” house. With the introduction of the zeppelin that travels between Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar, I was able once again to visit my favorite spot in-game (although now it’s less special now that everyone else can too). Regardless, it was great fun to wander around it again with my adventuring partner, Kazi.

Jumping Off Tall Things

Everyone knows the Temple of Storms in Storm Peaks, right? It’s only one of the tallest things in that game that you can get to the top of. In the next two videos, Kazi and Saraku get a bunch of their friends together to participate in an activity that in character, Saraku calls “jumping off tall things”. In the first video, we slowfall/levitate all the way to the Emerald Dragonshire in Dragonblight. In the second one, we make it to Venture Bay in Grizzly Hills.

By “we”, I of course mean the people who were lucky enough to remain within casting range of the mage/priest. Poor Kazi.

Yeah, I know Kazi did all the driving the whole way there. But I provided directions and Crusader Aura, so that makes me a good co-pilot…right? Right?

On a side note, I think Kazi should start a blog of his own and join the Bloodriver troop of bloggers (even if he isn’t technically in Bloodriver, he’s an honorary member in my eyes). Dooooo eet, Kazi.

Kazi had offered to help me out with something on Saraku (looking for an engineering recipe I believe) and on the way he stopped to see if the raid boss dragon in Duskwood was around. We tried to 2-man it, discovered that it uses a cheap sleeping cloud trick, and ended up running back to our bodies. Then we rode around some more…well Kazi drove, I rode in the side car of his Mechano-hog. Then we started talking over vent about exploring and we discovered that Kazi had never been to the little tauren farm south of Silithus and neither of us had been to the Tanaris Islands.

This called for a road trip!

We hearthed to Dalaran, took the portal to the Caverns of Time, and then I hoped in the side car again as we made the trip. There was some fatigue getting out to the islands but we made it in plenty of time (yay for Crusader Aura). This is the part where I completely forgot to take screenshots. /sigh

The Tanaris Islands are 2 islands that are only inhabited by a handful of Bloodsail pirates, a scorpion, and a buzzard. However there are a bunch of buildings and contraptions that are interesting. After studying the architecture we discovered that the north islands have gnomish buildings and the south island has goblin buildings. Between Wowwiki and our own thoughts, the place could be a testing ground for engineers, an old competition grounds, or what’s left of a battle between the two races. Either way, it was pretty neat.

Then we headed over to the tauren farm, which is a good half hour ride over water (thank god for shammy water walking). There was a small detour as we explored the rather large cave that’s on the way there and Kazi claimed it for the Horde by planting an Orgrimmar banner in the ground. While admiring the tauren farm, we started talking again about exploring and I mentioned the dancing troll village that I had heard about between Felwood, Moonglade, Winterspring, and Darkshore.

At this point, there was no chance we were going to pass us that challenge. We were off again to Winterspring while I found this video to guide us down the right path. There’s some LONG falls you have to take to get there so you pretty much need some way to slow fall or survive the drops. In our case, we both had engy parachutes and I had bubbles. Engineers FTW. Kazi used his nitro boosts and parachute right at the first big jump, and he sailed right over the village and almost over the mountains on the other side into Darkshore. Being more nervous about it, I took the jumps slowly and one at a time.

Now at this part, I not only remembered to take screenshots but also remembered that Xfire has a built-in video capture. So I will let them speak for themselves.

I like how I ended the video with us fishing in the boat.

EDIT: Forgot to include this little tidbit from WoWWiki:

The Shatterspear village will become an accesible subzone of Darkshore in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. A screenshot of the village released via press kit shows an ancient nearby.

Speculation has it, that these trolls are the next troll tribe to join the Horde (following the Darkspear and Revantusk tribes). The ancient standing in their village, the proximity to Moonglade, and the fact Trolls are going to be able to become Druids in Cataclysm, causes a suspicion that the Shatterspear Trolls are either becoming a “playable race” (Just saying that the Troll Druids are of the Shatterspear tribe) or that they taught the Trolls of the Darkspear Tribe how to become druids, as well.

Next time on The Adventures of Kazimierz and Saraku, we explore the Tauren house in the mountains between Mulgore and the Barrens!