More Notes from Midnight

The husband and I are continuing to play a lot of Midnight, both together and individually. Over Easter we both had a few days off and used most of that free time to binge on the game together. It was actually really nice that we were equally excited to play for once. Often our shared play time consists of one person gently coaxing the other into doing a specific thing they want to do, while the other just goes along for the sake of playing together without necessarily caring that much about the activity. However, right now we're both equally keen on the new WoW expansion.

Delving Deeply

We jumped into delve week with so much gusto that we already have the achievement for doing all the delves on tier eleven as both tank and dps roles. For the first round, I tanked on my warrior while he did damage on his mage, and then we did the whole thing again with him on his death knight and me on my hunter.

Delves were already a source of fast gear in War Within, but with the extra streamlining Blizzard has done, my hunter went from freshly dinged to full champion gear in something like three days. Some of that was probably luck, but they also upgraded the vendor at the end of delves so that he sells gear for other slots than trinkets now, so when he had something my hunter could use, I was able to just transfer some Undercoin from my main and bam, another gear slot sorted.

Despite this I was never running out of keys, and my levelling alts are already swimming in them before they've even hit max level. A guildie surprised me by saying that he didn't like the change because he used to farm key shards via World Soul memories in War Within at the start of the season, and now he felt more limited by being hard capped at six keys per week, which was a stance I'd never even considered. For me the effort required to farm keys had just always felt like too much and often prevented me from doing even four delves on alts because I couldn't bear to go through the same lot of key-awarding activities on every single character. Now that shards come from seemingly everywhere including treasure chests, they've just become a complete non-issue for me and I love it.

I also learned that you can apparently meet yourself in delves. This is my priest (who was my third character to 90) sitting across an "echo" of my hunter. 

Soloing Nullaeus

Somewhat related to delves, there's the new nemesis boss. Let me backtrack to the end of War Within for a second: back in September I stated that I was still planning to do ?? difficulty Ky'veza at some point, but then Legion Remix happened and that was just so much more fun that I never even bothered with Ky'veza again. (Not to mention that I'd already found the regular version of the fight extremely un-fun. Having every single mechanic be a one-shot if you mess it up is just not my cup of tea; I prefer the elation of being able to recover from a slight misstep over feeling like I have to force my brain to achieve 100% perfect execution through endless repetition.)

When Midnight came out I heard that the newest delve boss was really easy, so I went to check him out sooner than I normally would have. Normal mode was indeed a cakewalk and I one-shot him without even having read any kind of guide, but ?? still took a bit of practice (though not nearly as much as Zekvir or the Underpin did).

Nullaeus basically feels a bit like Zekvir with all the edges filed off: there's crap to dodge on the floor, something to interrupt, something to dispel, and adds you need to kill, but everything is easier. The stuff you need to move out of doesn't hurt so much that clipping it a bit will kill you, and when adds are summoned, the boss goes into an immunity state and leaves you alone so you're able to focus on the adds without also having to worry about him.

Finally, this boss is where Valeera really shone as a companion for me as it was noticeable that she'd been tuned to be much more competent than Brann. One of the difficulties with Zekvir was that Brann would only interrupt or cleanse every other cast, but it could be inconsistent when he'd do it, which made it hard to coordinate with his abilities. Valeera in dps mode on Nullaeus just interrupts every single cast that needs interrupting, or alternatively, if you set her to heal, you need to do the interrupting yourself but she'll reliably dispel you at all times so you don't have to worry about that.

Doing ?? Nullaeus on my protection warrior was my first experience with Valeera set to healer and the healing orbs she throws are also much more consistently targeted than Brann's potions used to be - one will always land right on top of you, with the other two to your left and right, so no having to race across the room to find Brann's latest drop in Narnia.

One of the things that challenged me on ?? Nullaeus was, ironically, maintaining focus for the interrupt through the tedium of nothing much happening. On Zekvir it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on, but here there's so little going on that after a few minutes my mind tended to wander and I would lose focus and miss an interrupt (which was a guaranteed one-shot).

The other thing was the tank buster, which I didn't even realise was a mechanic exclusive to tanks until he flattened me from full to dead with the boss at about 1% health. It was only when I googled what the heck was going on that I learned that this one ability exclusive to tanks is meant to be mitigated - while I'd been able to get by with sloppy shield blocking for most of the fight, his damage increases during the final burn and that's why I'd died. Still, after about half a dozen attempts he was down.

Majestic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been very motivated by the profession system and have been enjoying the new "high value beast" designation for skinning targets. This has since intensified with a renewed focus on what are called "majestic" beasts, which need to be called forth with a special crafted lure and have a chance of dropping valuable epic materials.

This is a system that has existed since the profession revamp in Dragonflight, but I distinctly remember crafting my first lure back then, using it, and getting absolutely nothing useful from the mob it spawned - which led to me concluding that the whole system was a waste of time and then never bothering with it again.

In War Within, I became somewhat more aware of the value of these rare materials as certain patron crafting orders kept requiring them, but I just tended to skip those. However, in Midnight the new epic profession tools that Blizzard has added all require the new "majestic" materials to craft, so I've been on a mission to learn how to lure all five of these beasts so I can hunt and skin them every day. While the RNG can be frustrating for sure - the day after I'd crafted my shiny new epic skinning knife with a boost to perception I didn't find a single purple item on any of the beasts - doing my daily tour of the four zones is a routine I enjoy right now.

It's also motivated me to pick up fishing again - prior to this, the last time I maxed out my fishing skill had been during Shadowlands. During Dragonflight and War Within I dabbled a little but found it too difficult to make sense of which fish had value and why. All the beast lures require specific fish, which has provided me with a new motivation to gather that is easy enough to understand.

Nightmare Prey

Seguing from the subject of hunting to the prey system - I did already mention it positively in my last post, but I did want to give nightmare difficulty another shout-out now that the husband and I have had a chance to dig into that too. Basically, I really like it! Sure, we'll both complain when we're on a squishy character and things go terribly wrong when too many random events happen at once, but as I also said to him, it weirdly reminds me of vanilla gameplay in a way, in the sense that one of the biggest challenges of questing in the open world in vanilla WoW is accidentally pulling more than you can handle, and Nightmare Prey kind of pushes the same buttons for me as it expects you to keep an eye on your surroundings and prepare for the worst at any moment whenever you're on a hunt. That's cool and I like it!

They also work pretty well in a party - I haven't fully figured it out, but it does seem like progress is shared to some degree as long as you're not too far apart, as we'll always find our prey at the same time. It even overrides the penalty you get from dying, where it will say that your progress has been reset to zero, but if your partner pushes their own hunt to completeness while you're close by, your own progress indicator will also instantly go back from empty to full. 

Exploring Midnight (Professions & Abundance)

I've got to admit, after finishing the Midnight campaign and hitting the new level cap on my warrior, I initially felt a bit lost. Not in the sense that there was nothing to do, but in the sense that I wasn't entirely sure what it was I wanted to do next. I already knew that I was going to spend some time going through all the side quests with the husband later, but activities to gear up initially felt quite limited due to access to a lot of expansion features being more time-gated than ever. (There are two whole delves that you can't even access yet, at all, and I only found out because I googled them after I couldn't find their entrances on the map.) However, I also wasn't sure whether I really wanted to get back into the gear grind just yet anyway - and levelling my army of alts towards an uncertain future at the level cap didn't seem particularly appealing either.

Eventually it hit me that what I really wanted to do was level professions on my alts. The Dragonflight profession revamp didn't really work for me when it first happened, but something about the tweaks Blizzard made to the system in War Within just made everything fall into place all of a sudden, and as a result I had a lot of fun spending time gathering and crafting throughout that expansion.

With me being armed with a better understanding of how things work right from the start in Midnight, I decided that the next alts to follow my mining and blacksmithing warrior should be my hunter (skinner/leatherworker) and my warlock (herbalism/alchemy). Well, those two and my tailoring/enchanting priest, but I've mostly used her to dip my toes into healing some random dungeons. I can't tell whether people are genuinely a little less unpleasantly rush-rush at the start of a new expansion or whether I've just become desensitised to the whole experience by now, since I simply know that I need to constantly be running in order to keep up. Regardless, those few normal mode pugs I've had were all pretty okay.

But primarily, I've spent time on my warrior, hunter and warlock flying around and simply gathering. I like the system with the "special" gathering nodes, but I feel like it must already be getting difficult for Blizzard to keep coming up with new ideas for them every expansion. I'm not sure anything will be able to top the explodey ones from War Within for me, which I genuinely came to enjoy once I'd gained the ability to mine them a lot faster.

In Midnight so far, my favourites are the "wild" nodes in Zul'Aman, which spawn little rock elementals (ore) or lashers (herbs) when you gather them. Fighting those is extra work, but since they also drop extra resources it feels to me like you actually get more bang for your buck on each node. (Initially the lashers were much less lucrative than the rock dudes, but just this morning I did another round of herbing and it seems that Blizzard has now buffed their drops to be more competitive.)

Unfortunately, the overload effects that I've seen so far all seem pretty boring. I don't think I've tested all the herbs yet, but not a single one of the ore effects actually felt worthwhile to me, which was disappointing. Maybe once I've upgraded my skill tree for the special nodes a bit.

The most delightful surprise however has been skinning. I love skinning for the soothing "swish swish" sounds and for the fact that you can basically do a lot of gathering as you go along, without having to go out of your way for it. The problem I had in War Within was that once I was done with questing, farming more leather always felt like a chore, since I basically either had to go out and kill things specifically just to skin them, or keep an eye on opportunities to skin other people's kills (such as when certain world quests were up).

In Midnight, Blizzard introduced a new feature called "high value beasts", which show up on your mini map as little knife icons. Skinning one of these marked creatures will yield much more leather than normal. I've really enjoyed flying laps around Eversong and Voidstorm looking out for these little treasure troves, since it makes for a farming experience much more similar to a classic mining or herbing round. The only slight disappointment I've had with the system so far is that it seems to be completely random which animals get the buff, and sometimes it's given to something like a neutral eagle soaring so high up that you can't actually attack or otherwise aggro it.

Professions aside, another thing that's been interesting to me have been the new open world activities. I loved almost all of these in Dragonflight, and still enjoyed most of them in War Within. Midnight so far seems a bit... eh. Sartheril's Haven and the different factions there are a nice callback in terms of lore but gameplay-wise it just feels like an old-fashioned daily hub to me. Stormarion Assault looked like a chaotically fun group event at first but in reality just seems to come down to several minutes of AoE spam. We'll see whether my opinions on these change as the weeks go by.

The one thing that immediately charmed me was the Abundance event. When I first did it in duo mode with my husband, it didn't seem that exciting, but I soon heard whispers that it was great in a group so I decided to sign up for a raid one night - and it was insane!

To take a step back and explain what it is, it's basically just a timed mini game where you run around a cave gathering resources (mostly little bubbles that you simply run through, but there are also some things to tap regardless of your profession, like ore nodes or plants) and depositing them at the altar of Dundun, the loa of Abundance. There's probably a whole sub-genre of single player games like that, but in WoW it's just this little side activity.

Anyway, what made it so funny in a raid group was that the altar has a shared progress bar, and every time it gets filled up, Dundun yells about GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE and unleashes some kind of bonus that lets you gather even more (such as additional bubbles falling from the sky). With enough players in the raid you could trigger a cascade where people would basically deliver resources almost faster than the bar could deplete itself again, so that it was constantly going up and down like a yo-yo, with Dundun yelling and spawning extra treasures non-stop.

Also, did I mention that Dundun is voiced by Darin de Paul? As a SWTOR player, that's just a whole extra level of bizarre.

Anyway, this madness was incredibly fun, and not even that overpowered because there was a pretty low hard cap on your personal rewards anyway, so it's not like we were unduly enriching ourselves. The problem was just that since the cave wasn't an instance, the whole zone would lag like hell, much to the chagrin of people who weren't busy worshipping Dundun.

So I can't say that I'm entirely surprised that Blizzard quickly ended up nerfing the whole thing, though it's still sad to me. You can still do it in a raid group and Dundun still triggers more bonus events that way, but they aren't even remotely as crazy and entertaining as they were beforehand. Oh well.

Cata Continued

I finally hit level 85 in Cataclysm Classic! About time too, as the Mists of Pandaria pre-patch is only a few days away. 80-85 took me a little longer than expected mainly because I took a bit of a break about halfway through, otherwise it probably wouldn't have taken much longer than 70-80 did.

I ended up loitering in Northrend for longer than expected, since there were a few milestones I wanted to hit before moving on and the XP I got along the way wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I have this memory of many years ago, that XP gains in Outland became absolutely abysmal the moment you hit level 70 and the game wanted you to move on to Northrend, and it's stuck with me ever since that Blizzard hates you lingering in old expansion content. However, I'm starting to wonder whether I didn't exaggerate that effect in my mind over time, because as I said, continuing to quest in Northrend past level 80 wasn't all that bad. Sure, XP was reduced, but it wasn't abysmal. I actually ended up making it to 82 and about a third into level 83 before moving on to Cataclysm properly.

The main things I did in Northrend were the cooking and fishing dailies, as well as finishing up my exploration of the continent by uncovering all of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. In the former zone I also did the Loken quest chain, because unlike many players back in the day, I absolutely loved the Sons of Hodir. I briefly contemplated doing the Argent Tournament in Icecrown as well but ultimately decided against it as I didn't want to get bogged down with doing jousting dailies.

The last goal I finished up was getting my leatherworking skill caught up to the appropriate level, which required me to do a bit of farming for leather and other mats. I actually found it strangely zen to farm yetis in Storm Peaks and revenants in Wintergrasp, and it made me realise that this is an activity that I kind of miss in retail. Skinning as a skill still exists of course, but since skins - like all gathering nodes - are shared, the best way to farm leather is not to farm by yourself in a quiet corner of the map, but the opposite: to find an area where lots of people are killing skinnable mobs and then clean up behind them (and since the skins are shared you won't be "stealing" from any other skinners). It really drove home for me that while these shared gathering resources are a good thing in many ways, they have also taken something away from the game.

Anyway, once I was finally ready to get started on Cataclysm content properly, I did what I had planned and hauled my butt over to Vashj'ir, as I felt that it had been ages since I last visited that zone and I figured that it might actually be nice and nostalgic to replay after all this time. This turned out to be... partially true.

My initial review of Vashj'ir back in 2010 was pretty positive, but already a few months later I noted that replaying the zone on alts felt like "a massive drag". This time around, the first few quests felt pleasantly familiar and nostalgic. Back in original Cataclysm, mounts were not account-wide yet, so I had to do at least the first hub and a bit on every alt in order to earn my underwater breathing buff and seahorse mount to be able to navigate the zone.

As I continued deeper into the zone, my memories became fuzzier and I realised that there were some bits I barely remembered at all, such as the whole Nespirah chain. However, by the halfway point or so things definitely started to drag again this time too. I got the "2000 quests completed" achievement at some point and it struck me that almost 10% of those quests took place in this one zone alone, which is insane.

There's nothing wrong with any of the quests by themselves (and the Battlemaiden chain provides nice insights into the world of the naga), but it's just the fact that you have to go through almost 200 of them in a strictly linear chain just to cover a plot that can be summed up in two sentences. The same story could have been told in less than half the number of quests; there's just way too much "kill 15 naga" filler.

It's funny because at the time, I didn't think Cataclysm questing was that bad, but having revisited several older expansions in recent years it seems undeniable to me that Cata was an absolute low point in terms of questing. Mists of Pandaria was a noticeable step up again, but even BC and Wrath have aged better than Cata - in my opinion at least.

Gear progression was another interesting thing to observe. I'd started my journey in mostly tier five from BC and only replaced a few pieces of that while levelling through Northrend, and for very marginal upgrades at that. And then I started doing quests in Vashj'ir and the stats on the green quest rewards just went through the roof. By the end of level 83, after questing in Vashj'ir for a while, my health had nearly doubled compared to what it had been at level 82.

Finishing all of Vashj'ir got me most of the way to level 85. For the rest, I did the introductory quests to the other four Cataclysm endgame zones to unlock all the portals in Stormwind, as well as a bunch of cooking and fishing dailies. (I'd forgotten how much I used to love those in Cata.) At some point the Midsummer Festival also started, adding more supplementary XP from bonfire visits and torch tossing dailies.

I also got the "Stood in the Fire" achievement while doing the Uldum intro thanks to Deathwing paying the zone a visit. 

I was surprised to see the Darkmoon Faire return after only two weeks, but then I recalled reading somewhere that Blizzard increased the frequency of its visits in Classic due to the sped up expansion schedule compared to the game's original run.

I even paused to do a bit of archaeology when I found myself flying past dig sites. I was surprised how good they were for XP and pleased to see that Blizz had already increased their yield a bit to five fragments or more per unearthed relic - I vividly recall that when archaeology was first added, you only got about three to four pieces per successful survey.

Now my plan is to perhaps continue doing the cooking and fishing dailies as well as possibly level my leartherworking some more. I'm not planning to dive into Pandaria the moment it launches as I expect things to be very crowded and I'd rather avoid all the mayhem tied to that. With my modest goal of wanting to see the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I should have plenty of time to get there at my own pace, as long as I do so before the release of the later patches.

I've got to admit I found myself wondering why I still care so much about this night elf hunter. Sure, part of it are the fond memories I made with her during Vanilla Classic, and another part is that I simply enjoy things like levelling professions, regardless of how useful it might turn out to be. However, I think at this point it's also that I'm kind of hoping that eventually she'll be united with my warband in retail. I don't think she'd bring anything particularly rare to the table, but she may well have collected some transmogs that I don't own in retail yet.

I know Blizzard hasn't even hinted at Classic merging with retail, and in fact said at the start of Classic that the two would always be separate. However, with Classic about to move into Mists of Pandaria, that seems like forever ago now, and I find it hard to imagine any other endpoint than an eventual merge with retail, regardless of how many more expansions will actually end up getting the classic treatment. I can be patient.

Gathering in a shattered world

Most of the alts that I've created since the Cataclysm have a gathering profession of some sort, sometimes paired with a matching crafting profession. I'm finding it quite noticeable how gathering has been changed in the revamped old world.

Mining has probably undergone the biggest changes. It used to be... not really difficult, but somewhat messy, as different ores with different skill requirements were all over the place. I'm sure that everyone who's ever levelled a miner before the Cataclysm knows the feeling of finding a random iron or mithril node in what's otherwise a low-level zone and then doing a dejected /cry emote next to it because you didn't actually have sufficient gathering skill to collect the shinies. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, give me a break, I only just started on tin! And who ever thought that Stonetalon Mountains should have mithril nodes in it anyway?

This could sometimes be frustrating, but it also made ores very valuable because it was hard to do any focused gathering. Thousand Needles used to be considered a good place to mine iron for example, but it had just as much - if not more - copper and tin nodes taking up space, and nodes were generally pretty sparse to begin with, at least compared to something like herb spawn points.

Well, let's just say, the Cataclysm changed that as well. There are still "transitional" zones where you'll find more than one type of ore (for example tin and iron in the Wetlands), but never more than two different types, not counting the rare spawns like gold and silver. A lot of zones however have been "purified" completely. Western Plaguelands? All iron, all the time. Badlands? Same with mithril. Searing Gorge? Also nothing but mithril. (I thought that was funny actually, considering how all the outposts are called Thorium something-or-other. It doesn't quite add up now.) In addition, the number of ore nodes in general struck me as having been increased a lot and it's now more on par with herbs. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but it really was very noticeable. For example I'd go to an ogre cave in the Badlands and find four or five nodes right around the entrance, then another five inside, and by the time I came back out again everything outside had already respawned again as well. To someone who's used to ore, especially certain types, being a rare and precious commodity, that's simply insane.

It shows on the auction house as well, with many ores only going for a couple of silver per piece these days. I reckon that levelling a crafting profession that depends on mining, and especially on particular kinds of ores (*cough* blacksmithing *cough*), must be a lot easier these days than it used to be, even without any nerfs to the actual crafting requirements. I guess that's a good thing, though I have to admit that finding multiple different ores in each zone somehow felt more natural to me.

Now, skinning has sort of gone the opposite way. It was always the easiest gathering profession to level, because you didn't have to seek out any gathering nodes, you just clicked to loot the body of each beast or whatever else Blizzard considered skinnable a second time to get some leather as well. Unsurprisingly, the spoils from this weren't worth a whole lot. I remember always vendoring light hides for example, because there was just such a huge oversupply that there was no point in trying to auction them for even the smallest profit.

It's still just as easy to level skinning, but there just doesn't seem as much to skin as there used to be. The mobs in most low-level areas have been thinned out considerably so you're less likely to have to kill anything that just happens to be in your way, and it's harder to find a good leather grinding spot when everything's so far apart. In addition the number of "kill ten wolves" type of quests has been reduced greatly because people always complained that they are boring, so you generally don't have reason to kill as many skinnable mobs anymore as you level up. This shows itself on the auction house as well, and I was shocked when I saw one of the aforementioned light hides go for more than a piece of iron ore. The mind boggles.

It also stinks big time if you're a leatherworker. Mind you, the skinning/leatherworking combo has involved a certain amount of leather grinding for as long as I can remember, but Cataclysm has taken it to new and ridiculous levels. My baby hunter found herself grinding mobs in Elwynn Forest for ruined leather scraps of all things, because they are the best way of getting through the first couple of leatherworking levels. I remember once upon a time I was annoyed when mobs in the Barrens still gave me scraps long after I had moved on from that, but now I struggled to get any at all! Oh, and ten levels later I was back to grind yet again, for light leather this time as my levelling had taken me onwards to medium and heavy leather dropping creatures way too quickly. What a nightmare.

Herbalism has probably changed the least, though herb spawns appear to be even more plentiful these days than they used to be. Good times to level inscription I guess, though not so much as an alchemist, because the difference between common and rare herbs seems to be just as pronounced as ever, if not more so. Case in point, I needed a lot of goldthorn to make it past a certain skill level range of my alchemy, but all I could find in the level-appropriate zones were piles and piles of blindweed, fadeleaf, khadgar's whisker and kingsblood. Eventually I looked it up on Wowhead and they actually had comments there guiding you towards what's only a handful of very limited goldthorn spawn points in multiple zones. I understand that different herbs grow in different environments and that this puts limits on how much you'll find of each - and in fact I like it, it feels more natural, unlike the single-ore zones mentioned above. For example kingsblood always grows out in the open, and since there is a lot of open space it's easy to have a lot of spawn points for it. Goldthorn on the other hand only grows on hills and rocks, which is obviously limiting - but even in Arathi, a zone which is nothing but hills and rocks, there was hardly any to be found, which I found rather disappointing. It would be nice if Blizzard considered rebalancing things like that, but I'm not holding my breath.

Can I skin this?

A more light-hearted post today. I've been levelling my hunter's leatherworking lately and it's been tedious. (In fact, that's a whole other post really, levelling crafting professions in Cataclysm...) So I've been travelling across the land, killing and skinning things, and once again I can only be amazed by the things that you can and can't skin in WoW.

You see, I'm no expert on this skinning thing in the real world, but I would think that in general you should be able to skin anything that does, in fact, have a skin, meaning a soft and supple outer layer that you can peel off if you're so inclined. However, Blizzard has some boundaries in place that prevent you from skinning certain creatures that you'd expect to be able to skin. Who has never considered the option of a tauren leather hat or a gnome skin bag (depending on your faction)? Then again, maybe you just find that idea creepy, which is probably why the game doesn't allow it. Skinning anything that's too similar to a human sort of brings up images of deranged serial killers.

Still, in a fantasy game like WoW, the borders can get fuzzy. Yetis are quite humanoid if you ask me, yet we never have a problem hunting and skinning them en masse. Yet if you want to wear a furbolg's shiny coat for example, you're out of luck. For me it's the worst with naga - I don't think they are particularly human-like, considering that they don't even have legs - but for some reason they are still taboo. I've known for years now that they can't be skinned, but every time I kill one on a character that can skin I still have that brief moment where I long to turn their shiny scales into a handbag or something. As if to tease me, Blizzard allows some naga to drop scales that can be used for crafting - we just have to hope that they fall off their bodies on their own while we're focused on killing them, or something. There are also a variety of armour pieces whose names imply that they are made of naga hide - I do wonder who makes them?

The worgen are another funny case. Prior to Cataclysm they used to be skinnable, and made areas like Duskwood a wonderful place to level a character with the appropriate professions. However, since they became a playable race in this expansion and started wearing top hats, they are suddenly off limits for skinners. I mean, I never expected to be able to skin player characters, but finding that the evil worgen NPCs in Duskwood for example have become useless to me as well was somewhat disappointing.

On the other end of the spectrum, we then have things that can be skinned but I don't think it makes any sense: silithids, nerubians and certain spiders in particular. Sometimes the items we get from them even explicitly state that they are made of chitin, which just bugs me all the more. I learned in basic biology that this stuff makes up the exo-skeleton of spiders and insects, or in other words, the bits that are not soft and supple. So I find the mental image of my hunter chipping off bits of "spider bone" rather odd. Not that I'm any less grateful for the spiders in Tol Barad providing a convenient source of savage leather - I just don't think that it makes any sense.

Do other people have pet peeves when it comes to skinning, i.e. creatures that they'd really love to skin but can't, and others that just leave you scratching your head?