All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.

It is an art to turn any negative situation to your advantage, and no less so when roleplaying in WoW. In the fine tradition of "turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones," it pays for a roleplayer to reconsider a number of in-game situations which seem to get in the way of roleplaying, yet which actually offer a special opportunity to showcase your creativity.

The biggest stumbling block WoW roleplayers trip over is often some aspect of the game mechanics themselves. Your roleplaying may lead your character into a deadly conflict with another player, for instance, and yet even if you kill the other in a free-for-all PvP arena, he or she can just resurrect and be back to normal in a few minutes. Alternately, you may find an epic BoE drop off a Skettis Kaliri and be hard pressed to explain how a rainbow-colored owl was flying around with a huge sword inside its body. You may even ponder why every single ogre you've ever seen is male.

Naturally, of course, there are ways around all these problems -- it's just a matter of finding plausible reasons for things. You may say to your bitter rival, in the event of a deadly conflict: "I do not kill fellow members of the Horde! We shall duel for honor and be done with this!" Likewise, when recounting your discovery of your BoE epic sword, you might explain: "As I killed the strange owl, I suddenly noticed something gleaming in the grass just next to its corpse! This [Blinkstrike] was lying there, sticking out of a stone in the ground!" Your character might even make an effort to explain away in-game oddities: "I have deduced that the entire race of ogres must be hermaphrodites -- both male and female at the same time! They are so ashamed of this that they all hide the fact, pretending that ogre females are hidden away somewhere!"

Well, okay, maybe not buy, but I'm all about trading stories! For example, it's my belief that some of the best World of Warcraft posts never see the light of day. Why? Because they're closeted on guild forums, safe from prying eyes. But you know you all have seen them. These threads take on Legendary Thread status within our respective guilds, and grow into in-jokes over time.

Here's one of my favorite of the recent posts I've seen on my guild's forums that has exploded into a truly silly string of "contest" posts. This original post was made by my Rogue class leader when he was looking for a Blinkstrike to call his very own.

Enter the "Win a Free Pocket Rogue" Sweepstakes!

Last week we did a little joke with Phat Loot Phriday (and, if I can brag for a moment, did everyone read my completely-made-up WoWWiki article that the beautiful people over there didn't delete?), but there's nothing funny about the loot this week-- it's one of the most droolworthy world drops you'll find in the game.

Name: Blinkstrike
Type: Epic One-hand Sword (which means, yes, it can be dual-wielded)
Damage/Speed: 143 - 267 / 2.60 (78.8 DPS)
Abilities:

• chance on hit: adds an extra attack to your swing.
• What, no other stats? Nope, it doesn't need any other stats-- that proc might be the best one in the game. Players who've had one say it procs about 5-6% of the time, which is nice, but here's the big deal: unlike most "extra attack" procs, this one supposedly chains. As in, you hit once, get an extra attack, and then get another extra attack from the extra attack. One player reported seeing 8 hits chained in a row-- that's around 1300 damage without any crits with one swing. Ummm... yeah. Unstoppable much?
  
• Because of that, this thing is perfect for combat rogues, but fury warriors will love it too (Tanks will find better defensive swords, but they have to PvP sometimes, too, right?). Bewarned: the chaining thing is very likely a bug, but even if Blizzard nerfs that, extra attacks are teh win.

How to Get It: With a weapon as crazy as this one, you know they're not going to just give it out. In fact, that's exactly what they're doing, but very, very rarely-- it's a very rare World Drop, which means it could drop from anywhere at any time. Some servers haven't even seen them yet, though, so if you really want one from a drop, you'll be killing things for a long time.

The better option would probably be to just farm the gold-- they're selling on the AHs for anywhere from 1500 to 3000g. At least it's not as much as an epic mount, right? If you do go the raising money route, make sure you can find a seller first-- make friends with your guildies, in case they get one, and keep an eye on your AH and your realm forums to see if anyone's found a Blinkstrike to sell.

A Blinkstrike is more of a weapon you just come across if you're lucky, rather than grinding or questing for. But everyone can dream, right?

Getting Rid of It: If you're crazy, a vendor will give you 10g, 19s, 34c for it, and it'll DE into... well, it'll DE, but no one has DE'd it yet-- probably a Large Prismatic Shard or a Nexus Void Crystal, if I had to guess. Of course, if you have one that you can't get rid of and can't use, feel free to drop it in the mail to Punishment on Thunderhorn-- I'd love one!