Slow Rider

My Loremaster/Scholar is an idiot.

I mean, if any of my other hard-working characters give him money, he wastes it all on studying ancient artifacts and collectible knick-knacks and the inscriptions on tiny statues of dwarf elephants and stuff.

The guy is a frickin' antique store hobo with holes in his pockets.

And what does he do with all that awesome knowledge of the ancients?

He dyes his clothes different colors.

What a moron!

Still, everywhere he goes, everybody seems to love him for no good reason and the good times roll.

I'm serious, you ever make a character that strangers seemed to like a lot more than your other characters?

Like everytime you group, everybody gets all excited and happy and morale goes through the roof and people are just charging into battle fearlessly and nothing ever goes wrong and you get all sorts of compliments and junk?

The guy has got some kinda positive energy virtual aura or something.

Its actually kinda creepy when it happens.

And it's getting kinda aggravating for my other characters.

Especially 'cause the guy is so damn stupid with our money!

But he is pretty fun to solo with.

I mean, its kinda like doing the Darth Vader Voice, its take me a while to find the "groove," y'know, but once I get in the swing, I can fight forever and endlessly, healing myself, sucking power out of the bad guys, putting monsters to sleep, debuffing 'em so bad that I can actually tank a little, and whirling my staff around and smashing skulls, getting a little visceral action in there and stuff, sure.

And if I want to try something crazy, I can always kite-n-joust some really tough stuff, although it looks a little funny to see an old Gandalf-lookin' geezer running around all panicky kiting stuff heh.

Well, whatever, its pretty frickin' fun.

And the debuffing thing is what makes folks go berserker-style in groups, I think.

'Cause anything that can help a clown in cloth armor tank, like Loremaster Debuffs do, really helps a guy in some real armor tank heh.

Anyways the only thing that really bugs me about him, besides the way he's always wasting all our money on absolutely useless crap, is that he runs so frickin' slow.

I'm serious, all my other characters are hobbits, y'know, so they're all low-riders, they got bumper-cams, like in a sportscar commercial, zooming along low to the ground, and when they run it feels pretty fast (especially on my hobbit hunter who has the run buff, I mean, on that character I'm always tempted to make the VRROOM VRROOOM noise out loud on voicecom when I power him up heh).

But my loremaster is this big ole human geezer who runs like molasses in a wiffle-waffling corduroy dress.

And to make matters worse, he's always gotta stop and wait for his infernal-ass pet to catch up to him, 'cause pets run even slower than he does for some reason (wtf is that all about, anyways?).

And the pet can't follow him down steep slopes, and sometimes it paths off all crazy to get around objects in absoshmiggenly lethal ways, and its lower level than my Loremaster is so it aggros mobs that wouldn't normally bother him (actually just running near somebody in combat would put me and the bird into combat mode for some reason, probably to keep me from helping people in fights with powers like Leechcraft I ain't supposed to use in combat, I dunno, mebbe they fixed that in the patch), and blah blah blah, the pets are a frickin' festival of aggravation most of the time.

I wish my Loremaster was smart enough to pick the stupid ass bird up and carry it like a football or something heh.

Okay, that wouldn't work for the bear, but mebbe the bear could pick up the Loremaster and carry him around like a football, if yer one of those guys that use the bear, I dunno, the only bear that I ain't afraid of in this game fulla killer bears with nasty debuffs is the one I got for a pet 'cause he's such a wussbag ahaha.

Well, whatever, it feels so daaaaaamn slow to play that guy.

But I guess that's realistic, 'cause he's an old geezer who would grumble whenever you told him he had to run up a couple flights of stairs in slow motion to save somebody or something heh.

"Where do we have to go for this quest? Oh man, yer kidding me, I'm already out of breath and that's all the way across the map! Its gonna take me hours to get over there, even without any bathroom breaks!"

Not exactly Gandalf, that.

But I suppose thats why Gandalf was always ditching out on the Fellowship, y'know, like in Isengard and Moria, and then he'd only come back after he found himself a sweet eagle ride or a killer horse to sit on in the books, none of that Marching Along Through Swamps and Bogs In a White Dress, Sweating His Ass Off in Deserts and Picking the Twigs Out of His Beard and Munching Dusty Elf Crackers for good ole Gandalf, nossir, he's too smart to fall for all that pedestrian shiz heh.

"You guys go on ahead without me, I'll just show up mysteriously at the ending and help you do all the really cool stuff once I'm done with this important phone call."