The mysteries of an old alt's vault

When I haven't played a character for a long time, the contents of their bank become something akin to the one piece of Tupperware that drifts into the back of the refrigerator. After awhile, you completely forget what's in there -- and you'd really rather not look. It's best for everyone involved if you continue ignoring its existence entirely. However, potentially caused by flu-induced delirium, I decided to crack open the Tupperware that is my rogue's bank to see what lurks within.

I actually do play my rogue quite a bit nowadays. In fact, midway through Cataclysm, she became my main. However, the contents of her bank remained completely off-limits, as I hadn't played her since early Burning Crusade. I simply did not want to chase down that rabbit hole. Until now. The very first item I saw in there? A stack of 42 Minion's Scourgestones from my days of farming the Western Plaguelands' Sorrow Hill back in 2005. This is going to be rough.

The Minion's Scourgestones were only the first of such items. I actually enjoy monotonous item grinding. I often use World of Warcraft as a glorified chat channel, and it's nice to have a fairly mindless task you can perform while still working toward some sort of goal. I spent countless hours beating up undead in the Western Plaguelands to raise my reputation with the Argent Dawn across many alts, simply because I could. The mobs weren't difficult, so you could pull them without ever worrying about death, but they also had enough health that beating them up was satisfying. Mobs that are too difficult detract from the farming session. Mobs you can 1-shot become tedious.

In that vein, I also found a stack of 45 Oshu'gun Crystal Powder Samples. As far as I can remember, I had no particular goal in mind when farming those. None of the items you can get from those powder samples held any allure at all. But they were items I could farm up to put towards raising an utterly meaningless bar and it took little to no brain power to do it while blathering on about lore in guild chat. I could have been grinding elemental motes to sell for profit on the auction house, but I've never cared much for wealth in-game. That said, there were 6 Motes of Earth right next to those powder samples.

I also found quite the selection of shirts: a Fine Cloth Shirt, a Primitive Mantle, a Black Swashbuckler's Shirt, a Brown Linen Shirt, a Dark Silk Shirt, a Gray Woolen Shirt, a Rich Purple Silk Shirt, and many more. Why did I need so many shirts? Light only knows. After those, it gets interesting.

There are a few Blood of Heroes, and while they're grey items now, simply possessing them held a great deal of prestige way back in the day. They spawned randomly throughout the Plaguelands, and looting the item spawned two badass elites that would seriously ruin your day. There are also two Black Blood of the Tormented, which were soulbound items used to acquire a Libram of Rumination, which added 150 mana to a head or leg item. Back in the day, librams were the only way to enchant those equipment slots at all.

While the Black Blood itself was soulbound, the resulting enchantment was not. Enterprising rogues (such as yours truly) could sneak through Blackrock Depths solo, assassinate their way to the Dark Coffer within, and loot the Black Blood unscathed and sell their services to whoever needed the aforementioned enchant. In The Queue, I often voice my love of Blackrock, and what rogues could pull off on solo ventures in that dungeon very well may be the source of that love. You never felt more rogue-like than you did on a solo trip through BRD.

A Tabard of the Argent Dawn lays neatly folded in the bottom row of the bank, a memento from the Scourge invasions that heralded the coming of Naxxramas's first release. To this day, that tabard remains one of my most prized possessions in World of Warcraft.

Then, hidden in the very first bag slot of my bank, there lies a Two-Handed Sword. That

Two-Handed Sword, an item so generic it is literally called a Two-Handed Sword, probably holds more meaning than any other item in my rogue's bank. Shortly after the announcement of Wrath of the Lich King, a guildmate of mine, a crusty old dwarf named Quid, asked me to run a sprawling roleplay storyline with him to explore the concept of what it is to be a death knight in advance of the class's actual addition to the game.

The player behind Quid, and subsequently the character itself, wanted to kill the Lich King above any other accomplishment in the game. He channeled his excitement for that event through his roleplay and this story in particular. We used the white quality Two-Handed Sword (complete with Unholy Weapon enchantment) as a stand-in runeblade to avoid soulbinding the item. That way it could change hands, be equipped, and be put on visual display throughout the story. Unfortunately, the story never met its conclusion. Quid, the player, died unexpectedly before the release of Icecrown Citadel. He never had an opportunity to kill the Lich King in the end, something that had become a bleak trend among my raid team. Somehow, the faux-runeblade ended up tucked away in my rogue's bank.

All these years after the fact, it would be a bit corny to retroactively dedicate my first Lich King kill to Quid, but that's alright. Being the crusty ol' dwarf that he was, he would have hated the sentiment anyway.