I like vendor trash

One of the funnier realisations I came to recently, thanks to all the five-man pugs I've been running, is that I like vendor trash and that I'm disappointed when there isn't enough of it. Sometimes I'll port out of an instance, go to the blacksmith in Dalaran to repair and sift through the loot, just to realise that there isn't actually any loot for me to sift through. It's one thing to not win any of the rolls for the good stuff, but not even any grey rubbish for vendoring? Sadface. Drak'tharon Keep is really kind to me in that regard, as I'm always guaranteed to walk out with at least an Icy Fang or two and a couple of Bent Raptor Talons.

I'm not sure where this love for useless stuff comes from. I'm pretty peculiar about my bags, always carrying around a lot of potions and miscellaneous gadgets just in case, and insisting that everything has its proper place in my backpack. (For example off-spec gear is always stored in the bag to the very left.) With that in mind, you'd think that picking up lots of rubbish would annoy me since it messes with my perfect world order, but somehow I get a kick out of sorting through all my virtual possessions, deciding what should be sold, what should be go to the bank alt for auctioning, what should go to another alt and so on.

In some of the old world instances, this love for sorting could sometimes get in the way of actual gameplay. If I go to wowhead and look up a random type of trash mob in the Deadmines for example, it's not hard to see why. A Defias Blackguard alone has the potential to drop several dozen different greys, ranging from all types of weapons and shields to armour for every slot and of every type. And that's not even counting the semi-useless drops like really naff scrolls or random bits of cheese. Add to that that people generally don't have the largest bags available to them at low levels, and you might not even have reached the second boss yet by the time when you have to either stop looting or start chucking things out - at which point your party members might start to ask if you're AFK, as you're just standing there, looking at your bags and wrecking your brain about whether to throw out the two Lesser Healing Potions or the Red Defias Mask first...

So as far as that goes, I was grateful that they toned this down a bit in Burning Crusade. About the worst that could happen was that you ended up with full bags in the Botanica, thanks to all the miscellaneous flower parts and Gnarled Claws from the fleshbeasts there.

However, in WOTLK I think that they've taken it a bit too far. I think the first time that really hit home for me was when we cleared the trash around Freya in Ulduar for the first time, and all the damn little flowers dropped nothing but cash. I mean, the amount of mobs that drop money requires some suspension of disbelief as it is, but I can live with that. Humanoids? Logical. Dragons? Eh, dragons like shiny things, though I don't want to know where they keep their small change. Mechanicals? Well, maybe the engineer recycled a piggy bank when building it. But flowers? Seriously? Walking flowers should drop Thorny Vines or some other flowery bits, not cash. Neither should jormungar worms! It just feels wrong.

I never thought I'd say it, but I almost miss places like Uldaman: where bats drop bat skulls, robots made out of rocks drop rocks (surprise!), and basilisks have squishy eyes that you can pop out for fun. I guess it's just one of those small things that make the world feel more alive to me, having to convert mob parts into cash myself, instead of everything inexplicably dropping coins for me right away, just to save me the hassle.