After Hallow’s End, the Underpowered Death Knight finished up getting Exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpents. Her last day of those dailies just happened to be a Sky Race day…
I hadn’t managed to accomplish this with any of the other alts with whom I’d done this rep grind. I suppose I’d finally had enough practice with the Sky Race to figure out where to take shortcuts in the course… or maybe I just got lucky.
Now level 98, the Underpowered Death Knight returned to Draenor and set about doing the Pinchwhistle questline to acquire the plans for a Salvage Yard. She died so much that she was getting increasingly rez-timered, until I worked out a strategy of calling up an Army of the Dead on every pull. This meant waiting out the 10 minute CD on that spell between each pull aloft, hovering on a flying mount — thank goodness for Draenor Pathfinder!
Having at-level questing actually be difficult/challenging is kind of the point of being “Underpowered”, but having that much downtime wasn’t much fun.
Next, she did a little bit of archaeology and some treasure hunting, looking in places where I vaguely remembered having found treasures with Kamalia.
She paid a visit to Khadgar, too, just to clear that first step of the Legendary questline from her log, and to her great surprise, this popped up:
A little while later, the Underpowered Death Knight was somewhere in Frostfire Ridge, up above the Bloodmaul ogre stronghold, when she found a strange portal. When she tried to enter it, she was repelled with a message that she had to choose a class specialization before entering that scenario — and then the portal disappeared. She shrugged her shoulders and moved on.
When I logged in the next day, she had a letter from Khadgar:
So that‘s what that strange portal was. Well, how about that! I certainly hadn’t had any plans to go looking for that, and it was sheer dumb luck that I stumbled across it.
The Underpowered Death Knight wears the title “the Patient”, but by this point, she was not-quite-halfway through level 99 and I was starting to get rather impatient to just get to level 100 already. But now I had a dilemma. The XP yields from dailies in Pandaria and even quests in lower-level zones in Draenor had gotten quite small, but the mob strength and density in higher-level zones in Draenor are large enough that I knew I would have a difficult time getting anything done there. While I was pondering what to do, Pilgrim’s Bounty began. In past years, I’ve just done the initial round of Pilgrim’s Bounty quests and not bothered with repeating them. This year, though, being so close to the level cap… I did just enough of the first few quests in Spires of Arak and Nagrand for the XP gains from doing the Pilgrim’s Bounty dailies to get the Underpowered Death Knight to that final DING!.
The Underpowered Death Knight started out as a playstyle experiment: sometimes I feel bad for the mobs that I just mow down with most of my characters, thinking about how the experience of the mobs, even though they are in theory of equivalent level, is like my experience in PvP — un-fun because I feel helpless against my foes. So I thought it would be a nice change of pace sometimes to play with a character who has to choose her battles carefully and pull tactically, a character for whom one battle with an equal-level foe could potentially go to either combatant… but if adds come along, then she’s toast. And so the Underpowered Death Knight didn’t actually do that much at-level questing, or even that much below-level questing. She turned into an alternative leveler, gaining much of her XP from the holidays — especially the Tour-the-World holidays of Lunar Festival, Midsummer Fire Festival, and Hallow’s End — so that she could get overleveled enough to easily do the quests that she wanted to do for Mog gear rewards… which kind of felt like it was defeating the point of having her be “Underpowered”. I think this playstyle experiment has run its course, and the result is that I don’t really like being “underpowered” and I’m really rather tired of touring the world during the holidays.
The Underpowered Death Knight is “underpowered” because she has no specialization, no talents, and no glyphs other than a couple of entirely cosmetic minors and because she wears the lowest level plate armor that will still let her Mog. With Legion being so heavily focused around class specializations, what with the Artifact weapons and all, I’m not sure what she could even do in Legion content.
So I think that having reached level 100 makes a good stopping point at which to retire the Underpowered Death Knight.
She’ll still be around, from time to time, because I have a handful of Transmogrification kit ideas for her that I haven’t used yet. After all, my other main reason for creating the Underpowered Death Knight was to have a blue-and-white (and occasionally green) Tauren.
Previously: the Underpowered Death Knight visits Frostwall
OMG! OMG! Cat’s been looking for one of those portals forever. Congratulations! She’s not so under-powered after all, she’s got Portal Power!
Thanks! It really was dumb luck that I found the thing, and when I saw it, I was all “hey, what’s this wierd portal? I don’t remember seeing that around here before? I wonder where it goes?”
I hope that Cat finds her portal soon!
Congratulations on the mount and on 100! That’s awesome for both. I found your blog long after you had started the Underpowered Death Knight, but I’ve enjoyed reading part of her journey. It has really made me think about trying something similar. I hate to be derivative but the idea seems fun…well, your other points make it seem less fun, but I like the idea of a certain level of challenge. I’m not sure what direction I’d go though. Hmm, I feel a rambling thinky post coming on. 🙂
Good writers and topics do that…inspire 🙂
Thank you!
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? 😉 The Underpowered Death Knight concept was itself derivative of (and increasingly watered down from) the Ironman concept, so I look forward to seeing whatever challenge concept you devise for yourself 🙂