To transfer or not to transfer

Like I mentioned quite a number of times before, I am feeling the pre-Cataclysm blues big time. I’m pretty fed up with leveling alts even though I only have 3 80s, all in ICC25 gear. Not full but BiS as much as possible. I haven’t stepped in this raid for about 2 weeks now and I can’t say I miss it at all. I really don’t know where I had the stamina to take all 3 in one week to the place, in both 10 and 25 man versions but it’s gotten the best of me. So that’s that. I will only join if it’s a raid that will be downing the LK and they feel confident enough to pull my sorry ass through the fight. I know’em all in theory but I’ve had precious little practice on Arthas so that might be a bummer. Of course, there’s always the option of buying my way to a LK kill, the prices on my server vary from about 20K for a 10 man kill (in which I understand you do nothing but go in and pull to die – a fair thing, I say. If I need a boost to the kill there’s no way for the guild doing the boosting to trust me that I’m not going to drop a defile in their midst).

I have leveled a slew of characters to the mid-30s at least to get a feel for the class (currently Rogue – 52, Warrior-35, Paladin – 33, Druid – 35, Hunter – 37, Mage – 31). Add that to the Shaman, DK and Warlock at 80 and you get a lot of playtime. And the worst part of it all is that they are all on the same server, which leaves little room for the Worgen and Goblin I intend to try my hand on when Cata launches. Only one spot and only one class I haven’t ever played past 11: Priest. I really like the class, probably because it is the archetype of the healer and I always wanted one that I could trust.

Yes, I know that shamans can heal. I was resto for all my BC life and the beginning of Wrath but maybe because of the limited gear I had and the lack of tool optimization (or at least that’s what I thought) early on led me down the Elemental path and I’m sticking to it. I want a disco priest. Dipping too low thar? Have a bubble! Oh, alright, lazers incoming, brace for the hit, Spock!

Aaanyway, the thought that popped in my mind was to transfer a char on another server. But which one should it be? My gut feeling is that I should transfer my Shaman, to a PvE realm but that would have me risk cutting him off the gold supply – not that I’m good with gold, on the contrary. My professions on the shaman are Enchanting and Skinning, which is a remnant of LW + Skinning I originally went with. I kept Skinning because of the extra crit and because I have a LW friend that can craft stuff for me if I get him the mats. If I transfer him away then I won’t have my friends to level with. No bonus points for that!

My Lock will be staying on the realm it’s on because that’s where my PvP team members are. Period.

My DK… I barely play her anyways nowadays and I’m afraid that if I were to transfer her away it would mean the end of things. She has Mining + Jewelcrafting as professions and could potentially mean she would be able to support herself but I only have a handful of JC patterns I know because by the time I reached 450 I was fed up with everything JC related and only logged to do the quests when I was really bored. Really bored. Now that having been said, is it worth transferring a lowly alt to a new server? One that I don’t really know if I will play at all? I don’t think so.

What to do?

Cold

Here’s my first crack at writing something serious. I don’t know quite yet if there’ll be something to follow this little story, obviously incomplete. Enjoy!

Cold. It was an eerie feeling, like icy fingers were running across her temples. This feeling she had encountered before, when….

“No, I need to snap out of it. Memories can be deadly in these far reaches,” the young draenei thought, moving closer to the fire. The flames had melted the snow for almost one foot around the setting but couldn’t do more against the winds of Northrend, constantly shifting direction. “It’s fitting. The scourge, with its for ever bolstered numbers, is always fighting us back to our outposts, like the wind does with my fire.”

She hated guard duty but when her number came up she had to grab her mace and shield and conform. “It’s not like anything ever happens here, it’s the safest place to be except for base camp,” she uttered as the chills went down her spine again. “This place… I feel it strange to touch,” she frowned, grabbing a handful of snow off of the ground. “What did the Sarge say? That I’ll love it here? I don’t.”

Valani looked around her for the hundredth time since she started guard duty. It was a shallow cave she had set up in, overlooking a valley surrounded by steep cliffs “The angle prevents the walls from being climbed and the narrowness makes it ideal for an ambush”. She was on the eastern cliff, the mouth of the cave very well hidden from suspicious eyes by a huge rock that seemed to have been cleft in half by a giant axe. Part of it was lying on the ground almost blocking access to the post and the other half stood tall and prevented anyone coming from the north from seeing the fire. Luckily the base was to the south so it was safe.

The war against the scourge was very difficult to fight. Loosing a comrade, a friend to this war was hard enough but having to see him rise from the dead to come kill you made it almost impossible to bear. It did toughen up everybody on this front and made friendships mean a lot more than drinking together and relying on another to swoop down to your aid. Not once did Valani see and hear oaths being taken that should one fall the other would make sure he did not rise again.

Swinging the hammer to crush the skull of somebody you knew and maybe liked the previous day took its toll on the troops’ though. Screams could be heard every night, the nightmares haunted everybody and spirits were undeniably low. Nobody knew if the bad dreams would ever stop. Some didn’t want them to. Those were the ones who had fought in the war against the Horde, who got a feeling of the glory. After the second war they had helped rebuild and then hired themselves as mercenaries. They had no choice, there aren’t many who would hire a soldier in times of peace. Fighting was all they knew because it had to be so when fighting the savage Old Horde. Children had taken up arms and learned how to thrust with a sword or impale with a polearm before they had a chance to learn how to write or were old enough to be left alone with a plow and handle it. They had entered the war scared and rose from it scarred but with a fearlessness hard to come by otherwise. They had survived. They had won over warriors twice or thrice their size and had a taste of glory.

Most of them died in the first battle against the scourge. The stories about the first and second wars against the Horde were now sung by bards and although one could still see the destruction that had come to the land in some remote parts of Azeroth, it was not as fresh a wound as it used to be.

The rest had to kill them again the second day, when the battle resumed. This was not something they wanted to forget lightly even though chances were they would not make it out of this war alive anyway. Children were drafted again and given a crash course in wielding weapons, children such as Valani. She barely remembered Draenor in all of its splendor before the orcs found the lust for blood and ravaged it. She was among the few who had survived the trip on the Exodar and made it to Azeroth and as soon as she could pick a sword up she did and began training with her father. Looking back to it, she knew that it wasn’t her true call, to be a warrior, but the wounds her father had suffered in the battle for Shattrath left him empty on the inside. The young draenei just wanted to see her father happy once more so she asked him to train her. He was not pleased by this and insisted that she think long and hard before going down this road. Her youth made the decision for her.

The training was rough. Valenthos, once proud Vindicator (?), did not show mercy for his own flesh and blood and hounded her with military exercises for over a year before he allowed her to even be in the same room with all the weapons he had brought along. It was for the better, she had to admit it even though at the time she was furious with him. Now she had the strength to hold a two handed sword and not feel its heaviness bring her down after a couple of moments. Valani remembered how after the initial couple of days of immaginary thrusts and parries that Valenthos allowed her he sat her down and presented the pros and cons of each weapon, what sword, if choice is given, to choose over another and why. This was the second year of her training.

She did not recall much of the third and last year, or better said, she did not know when it passed. Under his careful supervision she learned to wield all of the weapons in her father’s arsenal and moved from training dummies to sparring with some of his old friends that were still in strength. At first they made short work of her and had her kneeling within seconds of the fight starting. She will never forget what Valenthos said after the first time she hit the dirt.

He took her aside after Kalenthis left and sat her down.

“Do you know why he won?” he asked in a soft tone.
“Because I tripped,” she replied, tears still in her voice.
“No, Valani. You lost because you wanted to win. It may sound strange to you now, it did when my father first said this to me, but winning is not about sport. Not with war. It’s not about showing your opponent who is stronger or faster. You have to prove to him that you are smarter. Fights happen. Wars happen. What pitches you against another is almost never something of your choosing. What drives the both of you at each others’ throats is the will to live, knowing that only one of you can see sunlight again. You have to wait and be prepared for him.”
“So what you have taught me until now..”
“Was to make sure that you will be able to take whatever gets thrown your way. You attacked Kalenthis. That was your mistake. He is way too experienced to not know what you were going to do the moment you raised the blade. He was waiting for you to make your first move so he can counter it.”
“And he did.”
“Yes, my daughter, he did. There is no shame in loosing to a veteran like Kalenthis. He will come again. And now that you know what to do you will have a fighting chance.”

The /report that changed the /roll

In case anybody was wondering, I am still playing although to a significantly lesser extent than what I was used to. RL is a bitch and it has puppies, as my boss likes to say.

Out of the ~ 30 hours of playing per week I am now down to maximum 10, spread out across three max level chars and two lower alts which I cannot bring myself around to push to 80. Nothing interesting happened over the last few weeks. My previous guild has pretty much migrated to a bigger one and I’d like my DK to join it as well. If not for that elusive LK kill, at least for the actual good times I’ve had playing with my old guildmates (and when I say old I mean… erm… well we were in the same guild for about 6 or 7 months. It’s still the longest stretch of time with a guild for me).

The one thing that did remind me that I have a WoW blog (not that I’d forgotten) was what I did last night in an ICC 25 run. I’m partly embarrased of this incident so be gentle.

I’m one for reporting spammers every time I see them. My general rule against spam is as follows: If I see the person posting the same message twice in the same chat window it’s spam. Ofcourse, there are some special exceptions, like when he/she is correcting typos made in the first announcement and so on. This doesn’t only apply to /2 /1 and whichever other channel I might be on. Yes, I’m a bit of a grammar nazi IRL so this bothers me, moreso as on EU servers English is often enough botched. I also do this in raids if somebody is either spamming useless crap or using the good-ole formula of one word per line. Report Spam. Problem solved.

So I was in an ICC 25 PuG raid the other day on my Shaman when Wodin’s Lucky Necklace drops off of trash between Festerface. This hunter was a very chatty type of person, in a mildly annoying-but-let-it-be type way. He had nothing constructive to say, wasn’t particularly funny but at least he was awake during the snoozefest. Which I wasn’t, and as I’m currently in between changing homes (leaving one rent for another, yay me!) I wasn’t in a very friendly mood either.

Anyway, the RL links the drop and the hunter begins rejoicing, as if he was the only one with a bow and nobody else had a claim to this drop. ‘Yay, my neck! OMG it’s mine’ type of lines, over and over again, all in the span of a couple of seconds filled the raid chat. To which I instinctively right clicked his name and reported spam. The RL then proceeded to ask for the MS roll from people who wanted it. I would have liked to roll on it too, my Enhancement set is in dire need of a neck upgrade but I was there as Elemental so not much I could do as long as there were numerous others rolling. This hunter didn’t. Which I found strange but didn’t pay much attention because WTH, I was annoyed and not being able to roll on an item usually makes me a very grumpy panda. Just later I pieced it together, when said hunter left the raid without a word. In my reporting him as a spammer pro’lly he was not allowed to roll by the Powers that Blizz because it is some sort of communication (is it now?). I killed his chances of winning this much sought after item. And I felt bad about it. Sort of. What were the chances that he’d get a roll higher than 92, the winning roll, anyway?

It got me thinking, though. I believe this is worth investigating. Perhaps it can be used as a tool for blocking others from rolling. I would never do it on purpose for my own personal gain, but I believe others would. I know others that would and I hate them for it. Mommy, does this make me an evil person, for even conceiving it?

Ulduar

I don’t have a strategy guide for this yet and will probably never be well-versed enough to be able to put one together. I just want to finish this so bad that I actually talk about it with non-WoW playing friends. They look a bit weird at me at first but by the time I get to explain Yogg-Saron they switch from “afro-american fella, wha?” to “mm, fuck off and die” and then they get a look of “meh, I’ll tolerate it, go on if you really want to share”.

The problem with this is that I’m a terribad storyteller when it comes to things I’m passionate of. I start at the beginning then jump off to explain what happened before the beginning. Case in point, and I’ll give you the abridged version:

“So we have to go kill this old god thing and it’s fucking epic, people say!”
“Why do you want to kill him?”
“Well he’s bad and all that good versus evil jazz…”
“Didn’t you say you were an orc? They’re bad,” said my friend that has played Warcraft 1 and 2 but not 3 because he had a shitty PC then that couldn’t meet the minimum requirements. He also played and watched LoTR and all the orcses there are undeniably bad.
“Yeah, well now we’re good. It’s complicated.”
“And the Alliance? They’re bad?”
“No, they’re good too.”
“Well aintcha fighting? Who’s bad? There’s gotta be somebody who’s bad, you know, all that good versus evil jazz.”
“Uhm, I told you it’s complicated. We’re all good, Yoggi is bad and that’s why we have to kill him.”
“You want to kill Yoggi? What in the world will happen to Boo-Boo? And why aren’t you working together if you’re all good?”
“His name is Yogg-Saron, we call him Yoggi for convenience and anecdotal reference. And we’re not working together because the Alliance can’t forgive us for what the old Horde has done.”
“Us? Wow, don’t you think you’re a bit too involved?”

At this point in the conversation I’m usually like “shut up and eat your french fries!” but because I really love the idea of Ulduar I let it drag on for a while, back and forth like that and then delved into explaining the story. I started with the whispers and then went back to explain why he is bad and why he is old and why is he imprisoned and who imprisoned him and half an hour later I realized that I hadn’t really said anything about the actual encounter which became a bit frustrating, knowing that I might never get to be enthusiastic in front of that particular friend about WoW ever again without being cut off.

Shortened story even more short, I ended up comparing Yogg-Saron to Cthulhu and I particularly remember that at some point I even went crazy monkey metaphorical and said something in the lines of “if Nietzsche is the father of Nihilism, then Lovecraft is his house. Imagine that Nihilism is tea. H.P. Lovecraft will not only be the cup but also the teahouse.” I know Nietzsche was actually anti-nihilistic but he didn’t so it worked just fine.

Now where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, I’m not good with story telling if I’m passionate about the subject. Ask me about last week’s fail PuG on any given day and I will be able to tell you who failed, how and why plus a couple of alternative solutions that might have prevented the failing. Oh, and if you do, invariably one of the two solutions would be that the one who failed wasn’t born.

Ulduar looks to me to be one of those off-beat places so out of ‘our’ WoW times that only Nozdormu might have put it together. I’m loving the vehicle fights and even though at this level of gear they’re mostly stupidly easy, the last bosses can cause you to wipe if not executing the fight properly. Dang it feels nice to not be able to brute-force everything!

I am quite unhappy with the fact that I have not managed to kill Yoggi (Boo-Boo can fuck off and DIAF for all I care) and I’m actively watching for groups that might be forming just for this. I often wonder if there are others out there that miss the flavor of one instance or raid, and if there are, what raids tickle whom.

Gief Priest

I want a priest.

I want a lvl 80 priest that can carpet bubble the raid and look cool while at it. I want to be the saviour of the day, the one whom others look up to and respect and think “When I grow up I want to be just like him!”

I have a priest. It’s currently level 6 and by God, when i get home from work I shall log it and start leveling it up! I will love it and shower it in BoAs and call it Enrique! I will pew-pew healz on all my targets and may all my 13 SP be that which saves their lives!

Actually I won’t. I have wanted to have a max level priest for the better part of Wrath but I can’t pull myself together to level one and for two reasons:

1. The level grind. I have a very low tolerance to stupidity and players that just have fun (teh horror!) in the game without paying heed to my snyde comments and somewhat helpful advice. The ones running about the place facepulling every mob known to Elfkind and saying that they do it for “teh lulz”. Grinding to 80 can be done in two ways as a priest, at least that’s my view of things. You can:

a) level through questing. Again. For the billionth time. The same quests. Over and over. WTF is wrong with Mankrik and why doesn’t he bloody well go looking for his wife? She’s just off the road to the right…

b) level through dungeons. Meeting all those nice players that Blizz wants you to know the first and last name of. And those that have no talents. Or wear SP gear as tank. Or whatever to that effect.

Option c) would be leveling through PvP but I don’t have the best track record for that. I find myself yelling for no apparent reason at the screen and going off to grab a smoke as soon as the Alliance Wins window pops up. Seriously. I have smoked 7 cigarettes within 3.5 hours. I know I PvP in my PvE gear but that only makes me squishy, not retarded as some have implied. I know I have some silly macros that I like to show off at the begining of some BGs (in the lines of Group 1 Defend Galv, Group 2 Argue that we need more at Galv, Group 3 QQ about GS and PvE players doing PvP… you get the idea) but I really mean well! Honestly!

2. The gear grind. Not a wek ago my Warlock has dinged 80 and it is proudly sporting 4.2 k GS atm. I have gotten to the point where I can either run a dungeon for weeks on end waiting for an upgrade to drop while conveniently upping the 5 Northrend reps at the same time or I can bitch and moan about Queue times for DPS and go the emblem way, slowly but surely reaching some 4.8 k GS in about a week and then giving up.

You see, around 4.8 k GS (most items ilvl 232, some lower, a few higher) is the you-no-raid barrier. Your GS is too low for those that want to steamroll through old content and too high to merit the pain and suffering of putting together a raid of your own for the same content. You just know that only people with a lower GS than yours will whisper and want to join, otherwise they’d be in the aforementioned raid. And now begins the Frost Emblem grind, where every T10 piece you can muster the will to grind to is an upgrade too low (GS wise) for the work put in.

I reference GS a lot, I know I do, it’s because with free server transfer to the realm I play on this addon has single handedly revolutionized raiding. It is all the rage and all that is most often required, despite being utterly idiotic. If somebody is dead he will get the achievement. If he is dead he will get the chance to roll on items that would find a better home with somebody who actually knows what the fuck they’re doing. Or he might just put together a VoA 25 raid and make sure he’s the only one of his class and win the phat lootz that way.

Back to the gear grind. My shaman is in a rather nice spot right now. I could do with some upgrades but I’m well off on my way to having a spot on any GS requiring raid. In fact I’m so well off I’m actually there, the highest requirement I’ve seen so far is 5.6 K which I got and some extra for the coating. My DK, on the other hand, is on the second bump on the road to gearing up. The “only need a few items from ToC 25 that never drop so I can meet the requirements to start PuGging ICC10 and take it from there” bump, to be more specific.

In other non-related news, I have picked up my 3rd piece of T10 for my offspec (Enhancement) and I’m looking forward to my 4th. Well, not really, I get to use my off-spec so little that I actually can’t remember why I have it. It doesn’t cut me corners in the queue for my daily, I only get to bring it out on certain fights in guild raids and it’s a nuisance to have to relog for addons when I do dust it off. My Enh addons are out of date and have probably stopped working altogether. My Flameshock macro wasn’t even updated to reflect the haste component of the DoT ticks. I wonder why I’m not resto at times.

But then I remember. I’m a fail healer. Always have been. I suffer from that “all raid must be at 100% HP or else!” syndrome. I got that in early Wrath, when not running away from Ingvar’s Whirlwind meant death and if the respective person happened to not be at max health I would be blamed. I used to have a mantra as a healer, that I shared at the beginning of every PuG dungeon I ran: “There might be deaths. DPS may die or I may die, but never the tank”.

And on this note, of me sucking at healing and getting tunnel vision and whatnot, I will not level a priest healer. But I so very much want to

Personality Change

I oft find it amusing to see my personality and the way I interact with people based on the character I’m playing. I’m not all that much into the RP part of the game although I would like to (I even created a character that OMG! has a background story that is not a Mary-Sue type thing) but… I’d best explain it on a per character basis.

When I play my Shaman, my main, I am very tactful. I offer advice and help if I’m very bored. I do not speak a lot in raids (or type) unless I have something really important to say. I end up deleting most of the stuff I begin writing because I either do not find it witty enough or deep enough to share. I take on extra duties beyond what my role in the raid implies (because I’m just that nice and will spot-heal/dispel/help CC/whatever I find I can do to ease somebody else’s pain) and I go to great lengths to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I never get angry, or if I do, I do not let that transpire in /s, /p, /g or /raid. I will try to put together raids or send out invites, sort out roles and explain tactics.

When I’m on my Death Knight I’m almost the opposite of the above. I will make silly jokes, call out players for mistakes, demand justice, insist for anything that might bring me an advantage. I’m ruthless and cutthroat in both manners of language and approach. I will point out bad gemming and bad gearing (roll for a+AGI item from a different DK? Come on!), I will throw a tantrum over loosing a roll for an item I badly wanted and will express it in writing, not to its fullest potential but still. You do not want to meet me when I’m on my DK and am having a bad day. I will pick fights with people just for the fuck of it and not give up even tho I might be proven wrong (but that almost never happens). I’ll be snappy and go the extra mile to make others feel what I believe to be an intellectual superiority.

My Warlock is the bridge between the two. I am calm in general but likely to call out people that get on my bad side. I will cry a little on the inside when I loose a roll on an item I wanted but will congratulate the winner nonetheless. So far I haven’t been in any raid on this toon yet (dinged 80 6 hours of playtime ago) except for a VoA 25 PuG the other day so I don’t know how I’d react under raid circumstances. In the VoA raid I was humble and happy to have been invited seeing as I had the worst gear of the lot but when this aspect of my ‘lock game will improve I wonder and actually can’t wait to see how it will go down.

A time to say goodbye

It is settled.

Because old habits die hard, after a great number of weeks when I wasn’t able to make the raid or it stopped at the same damn bosses we usually stopped I decided to switch guilds. In a sense. The problem we’d been facing was that, like most guilds, we weren’t able to field our best team on any given day. Lag, RL issues and generally Murphy’s Law of “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” kicked in and we grabbed some guildies that weren’t really ICC material (although with the 15% buff that doesn’t mean a lot, really) and we hit our head over and over again on Putricide.

I was AFK for a week or so for delicate personal reasons and when I came back the first thing that I got after logging in was a whisper from another officer that said that we are forming another guild, where only the creme of the crop will go to and where progression will be taken seriously. Which is good news. I’ve had some very nice moments with the guild I’m currently in (still sorting out the logistics of the new one and the website and such, I guess) but, like all good things, it came to an end. If I were to find a reason for this, it would be that while we tried recruiting so we can push forward, the quality of the recruits actually pushed us back.

A lot of drama has come to pass and now when I log in, instead of the usual friendly nametags before I can barely remember if I ever spoke to some of the online people. Like ever. It’s been fun, that much I cannot deny, specially the moments where I would log one of my alts and the same person that I had just given some advice to would try to pick on me. I’m not usually a conflictual person but I have been known for making people leave the guild after picking on me or wronging me or the guild. Actually it only happened once but the feedback I received made me considder a career in this.

What pains me a bit is that one of the people I really admire in the guild, the guild leader of my previous one (we merged) might not make the shortlist. He is a very good SP and truly dedicated to the spec and to the guild. He is one of the more friendly people that I met in WoW and if somebody needed any help with anything, he would step in. He is however not that progress orientated and because he’s on PST playing on an EU server he rarely gets to raid with us.

Oh, and speaking of the 15% buff, it is absolutely, positively, ridiculous how big a difference it makes. The latest PuG for ICC25 I was in had a healer have to quit on the trash leading to Marrowgar so we 24 manned it all the way. We 1 shot everything we fought, Uncle Fester and Rotface and wiped with 4% left to heal on Valithria. We had vent but it was mostly used for theorycrafting and having fun. Got myself a nice upgrade too, the neck piece from Lootship. I stand at an all-time high of 835 haste but I cheated a bit. I’ve got some pure + haste gems in my gear but wth, I wanna see how 1.5 sec LB casts look like. As a matter of fact I already see this after the relic procs but i wanna have that cast time relic-free.

Burnout

I am feeling the burnout and I’m feeling it bad. Not a month ago I was cheering happily when I heard that a raid that I’d missed and was ongoing at the time was very close to healing Valithria Dreamwalker to full. I would have wanted to be there but at the same time I was just happy to have been a part of it, to have had my contribution to the strategy used.

Last night I happened to be, along with a host of other newer and older guildies, in an ICC25 PuG. Rule of thumb, if you PuG ICC25 you part ways after Saurfang the Younger’s loot has been distributed, or at least on my realm. This time it went so smoothly that we even went ahead, under the firm yet not obvious command of a resto shaman. The second I whispered him for an invite I knew it was bound to be a good run. As it happened, I logged right in front of him from the alt I had heard the ad on. He handed me the invite and then cheered as I accepted. We destroyed the lower spire in less than 40 minutes (flask popped on Marrowgar), I won nothing (again) and then we took a vote if we should keep going. Ballot counted, it was a yes, we went to Rotface first and after a 30% wipe we nailed his arse to the floor. Festergut was a one=shot kind of deal, bang on the enrage timer. Yeah, apparently two top 5 damage dealers (a lock and myself) got hit with the Vile Vomit thing 6 times each and we each had the spore 3 times and had to move to the anchor position. Lost the roll on the Dislodged Foreign Object which I wanted like there was no tomorrow and would have had me drop all my alts in favor of this one magnificent shaman (magnificent with the trinket). Now it’s back to the grind for gear, emblems, achievements and gold.

Now this wouldn’t have bothered me one bit a couple of months ago, hell, if I’d gotten the 25 man kill on the pretty twins back then I probably would have been in a different place altogether now with my raiding and probably with a LK kill or two under my belt. After smoking that ‘oh, wow, we did it and Skada says I rule’ cigarette I went back to my computer (raid disbanded afterwards, it was very late), logged back to my warlock and grinded. Like nothing had happened. When I killed Anub 25 for the first time I called all my WoW playing friends and told them all about the fierce battle I’d been through and how I emerged on the other side victorious and with something to show for it. Woke a couple of them up too, this happened at around 2 AM local time.

I am bored out of my skull the second I log in. I could download a couple of addons to improve my Enhancement reflexes and ‘rotation’ or I could go play the AH, I’m terrible with gold, I could set up a raid or do some dailies, I could look up the best possible way to regem based on my current stats. I don’t do any of these because I don’t feel like it, and I don’t take a walk in the park instead. No, I stay indoors and feel pissed at the world. I’m a couple of steps away from being the /2 Grammar Nazi we have all come to loath and hate.

I also know that this is common so I’m asking for advice here. How do you shake things up? How do you avoid this feeling?

Onyxia 25

Oh, my God, that was like soooo 3 patches ago. I know, I ran Onyxia back then on my shaman and rocked the place. The first day it was out, on the very first attempt at killing the almighty dragon I got the achievement for the speed kill. And that was shortly after I had begun my gear transition from PvP only to PvE only. It was easy, a loot pinata, if you will, and all you needed to know were the tactics for downing her. Oh, and the loot… similar to ToC loot but class and spec erm… specific? Yes, please! No more having to roll higher than the hunter that /roll ed just because it’s a mail item and, as we all know, all loot is hunter loot.

Fast forward to today. My DK, ok geared, entry level ICC to be more precise, joined a PuG for Onyxia 25. I whisper my achievement, GS (-.-) and accept the invite. Immediately I search for other DKs, Retribution Paladins and Warriors, because i only need the 2h sword. Crit and Expertise? Yes, please! Just a glance showed me 5 death knights, including myself, a warrior and a paladin. Small chances but hey, it’s the last day before the reset so why not give it a whack?

After waiting for some 20ish minutes for the raid to fill we go in, clear trash and start buffing, what you would normally expect from a raid, PuG or not. One priest healer said brb 2 minutes, we wait 5 and then start the encounter. What we did not think about was to do a headcount. Everybody got summoned, I’m sure of that because I usually do it myself and only need a dedicated clicker and this time it was no exception. So we go in, P1 goes by smoothly and we start the transition to P2, ya kno, the part where as melee you run behind her and try to squeeze a few more blows.

Adds spawn, tanks pick them up, the ranged group is doing its thing, AoE fest going on down on the ground. Swiftly we reach the 50% mark when one tank goes down. That, of course, lead to a wipe, the other two tanks were far off and couldn’t pick the adds up fast enough. Ok, one try went south, replace the healer and let’s do better on the next. Am I assuming to much that this would be the normal attitude?

I was, apparently. Immediately after we zoned in again after running from the spirit healer all three tanks dropped group. Then two healers plus the AFK one which was kicked immediately after we wiped. Immediately after, a bung of DPS dropped too. The raid leader, through this all, was in Dalaran, searching for replacements, and was patient enough to stick around until the empty spots were filled. The reason I mentioned the headcount earlier was that upon analizing recount we noticed that 2 DKs weren’t on there. Mouseover in raid frame and we saw that they were in Undercity, respectively Durotar. They had gone through all the ready checks and clicked Yes. Why they would do this boggles my mind, I cannot for the life of me figure it out.

Anywho, half an hour later, numbers bolstered we line up and buff again, ready to take on Mother O. The new group is littered with druids, 3 tanks, 2 healers, 1 feral and 2 boomkins but we take what we’re offered and can’t afford being too picky. Onward again, wipe again but this time we made it through to P3 where we wiped because as soon as Onyxia landed almost all the DPS rushed to her and adds chewed the tank’s and healers’ faces off. Half the raid dropped group instantly and the other half soon after.

Is it something fundamentally wrong to wipe? As long as I can think back, this is almost normal, you die once, regroup, try again. Everybody in that group had some stakes in this otherwise there were a lot easier ways to pick up 3 Triumph Emblems. Is it a lower tolerance to failiure that’s involved? Are all elitists and if they are, why did we wipe?

The answer, I believe, is a lot simpler than this and has a lot to do with good players caring for the community. Everybody in the raid, as I remember, was in a guild. It is impossible to reach the current level cap without any interaction with another human being. And while it is no longer dominant, there is a community of players that actually give a crap and try to help others, either by tells ingame or on guild chat, or even on the WoW forums. If you meet such a player in a random heroic he will not only pull his weight, but rather pull the whole group’s weight as well. He will be the tank that outdamages 2 DPS, the DPS that does over 50% off total damage or the healer that will heal your ass off through the incredibly slow paced run.

When grouped with such a player, seeing him excell and pick up their slack, they think it’s ok to not give it the best shot they possibly can. They are used to being carried and will think that it is their God given right to do sub-par DPS. Usually tanks and healers do not fall under this category and they only come in two flavors: the ones that outright suck and you can usually spot by the weird gear choices and gems/enchants and those that do their goddamn jobs.

Back to the MS, as Gevlon likes to call them. They have gathered the good gear and boast with their incredible GS, they write stuff like L2P n00b and join the Anal [ability] bandwagon. And they drop group when they notice that in a particular raid it is expected of them to pull their own weight.

Elton John said: “It’s a sad, sad, situation/ And it’s getting more and more absurd”. This fits like a glove. I don’t know how this can be avoided in the future but I’m afraid that no amount of work Blizzard can put into the game will fix it. Because they can’t. And I fear that this will be the downfall of the game, once those good players quit due to burnout or whatever reason.

Playas be playin’, Scammers be scammin’

I know I wrote a couple of posts ago that scammers no longer seem interested in their ‘job’ and have been getting sloppier. Mental paranthesis: i consider scamming to be a business, as it is in fact, but for some reason that eludes me, I do not actually blame the one scammer but the industry for what’s going on. I respect the person trying to steal my account because, after all, we are going head to head on this. Me trying to stay safe and them trying to corner me into giving up my password. That is being changed daily. And authenticator. That generates a new code every 20 seconds and that can only be used within this window.

Back to business: after being disappointed by the last dude that tried to persuade me last, I was very nicely surprised by an in-game letter that I received via mail.

I actually thought that there was another vanity pet coming out that I was not aware of. Or that I had, unknowingly, undergone some tedious chain of quests that granted a pet in the end. So I opened the message hastily and read it. First thing that queued a question mark in my head was the “You are drawn in the system” (oh, noes, the matrixes are after me, ruun!) phrasing. After that the “achievements awards” looked odd (English is not my first language but I think that there might have been a better way to say this). The website listed made everything clear as daylight.

Just then I checked the name the message came from and saw that it’s not BrEAnni but BrAEnni and had to tip my virtual hat to the person who came up with this scheme. Good job, scammer! Better luck next time! Or never.