Now, hit me in the face.

I love the Servants of Allistarj. What's that? You don't know about them? If you're one of those classes that only loves their weapons for their stats, you can go ahead and skip this one; the rest of you read on.

Ok, now that the prissy casters are out of the way, let's talk technique. How often have you had an awesome new weapon drop that not only bests your old one stat-wise, but looks just plain bad-ass? So you equip your shiny new toy, go out to farm for those blasted Sunfury Attack Plans, only to discover that every single swing is missing. And then you get killed by a mob four levels below you.

It's only then you see this in the chat log: "Your skill in Polearms has increased to 64."

Damn. So now what? You've got to go train your skill up. That means running around with the lowest level weapon you can buy, flailing ineffectually against various types of bears until they die from a lucky hit, forcing you to find a new one.

This is where the Servant of Allistarj comes in. This chappy is a level 54 mob in The Blasted Lands. He has no special attacks whatsoever. His only means of damaging you is hacking at you with his one-handed sword. No stuns, knockbacks, drains, etc. This means that once you're over about level 60, the guy can't really kill you unless you fall asleep.

He does have one special ability, though: he can't be killed. Well, OK, he can be killed, but only if you're on a long quest chain that nobody bothers with any more, and even then you've got a very small window of opportunity in which to do him in. But apart from that, he can't be killed [1].

So what you do is, you aggro him, pull him somewhere out of the way of the various nearby patrols, turn on auto-attack, and go watch TV. Or paint a picture. Or read your sizeable collection of Terry Pratchett novels. You need to stop by every once in a while and just chug a health pot, or maybe keep him at arm's length for a few seconds while you bandage. Also keep in mind that you can actually go AFK while in combat. If nothing else, just hit jump every 15 minutes or so.

If, however, you are a Paladin like myself, you can just judge Light and switch on Devotion Aura. If you've got enough armour and a fast enough training weapon, you can pretty easily out-heal the poor guy. He's just gonna stand there fruitlessly chopping at you for the rest of eternity.

Incidentally, I just got a point in Defense. It's now 330/330!

Seriously, I have gone off, made a snack and a cup of coffee, checked my mail, created this blog, and only lost about 30% of my health, if that.

So, the next time you get a cool new weapon, and discover that you only really trained one-handed maces so you could equip [Last Year's Mutton], go have a chat with the Servant of Allistarj in The Blasted Lands. He'll appreciate the company.

Incidentally, for you casters (and Hunters) out there: Dr. Boom for the win.

For those of you wondering about the title, that's largely paraphrased from what a Kendo instructor once said to me. I had to try very hard not to laugh at how absurd it was for me to be standing there, repeatedly beating him over the head with a wooden sword, with him saying "harder!"

[1] Back before Blizzard "fixed" them, you could kite these guys all the way to Stormwind. Once there, they would aggro the guards. At this point, the Servant would gleefully run around Stormwind, killing everything. The only way to get rid of them would be to page a GM and wait for them to come along and death-touch the poor chap. Incidentally, it was on just such an occasion that I levelled up my Druid's dagger and unarmed skills...