Over the holidays, one of the buds announced that he was ready to train as an Artisan Enchanter, the final segment to maxing the enchantment profession.

I was immediately suspicious. Other than expecting a “congrats” or some such, why was he telling us this? Because he sure didn’t word it like, “good news fellas, I can finally enchant your shit in a worthwhile way instead of those crapass enchantments I was giving you before” … it was more like “hey, I need to train artisan now” *insert uncomfortable pause in the conversation*.

And how I hoped my only commitment in this latest project would be tossing some gold his way.

Turns out his enchanter trainer is buried in the middle of an instance, lousy with elite mobs of our level. Ain’t that fucking great.

I was so sure he was mistaken, in fact, that I checked the web myself to make sure he didn’t have his facts confused. That kind of evil genius is EQ-type bullshit … which I might call Sony-type bullshit, but to be fair, EQ’s bullshit preceded Sony’s involvement by many months.

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Sometimes, my evilness surprises even me.

I’m hanging around this camp, doing some necessary dirty work, minding my own business, when I spy a chest. For the cheap seats, chests are filled with loot — mostly junk — but once I found a pixelriffic item in a chest, so now I have to open ALL of them. I’m like Pavlov’s dog with these things.

Anybody can open chests, and therein lies the problem: fastest ninja wins.

I check around to see if anyone else has noticed it yet; there’s only a noob paladin, of appropriate level for the camp (unlike me, farmer that I am) and he’s busy with a couple of healers. So I scuttle over, trying to act casual, pull the solitary mob guarding the chest and proceed to rock its world.

Going in for the kill shot, noob paladin zaps a group invite on my screen. WTF is with these people? Do they have /invite macro’d or some shit? I could still be typing /invite or right-click inviting the first guy, they’ve already got their entire group assembled. Unbelievable.

I politely decline, adding that I’m just farming crap, because I really don’t feel like doing all the camp quests for the dude. Which would take hours.

Now I watch. Good God, did he see the chest?

He did. Sadly, for him, his aggro radius for this camp is HUGE compared to mine, so the entire building comes down around his ears when he tries to open the chest. I make like I’m busy with a winky dink healer several feet away and absolutely cannot assist him with a dozen mobs — I think I even turned off attack a few times so I didn’t dispatch my mob too quickly.

Noob pally has to run away, the entire building in tow, and I move in to nab My Chest. There’s a couple of vendor-type items (KA-CHING!), which I loot, and there’s a couple of crap items, which I don’t loot.

Because I’m that evil. I knew Mr. Paladin would be back as soon as he shook his escort, and I didn’t want him thinking I was a ninja — even though I am. Might need his help some day with an elite badass.

Snakes don’t crawl this low.