Another one for my collection

Oh, you beautiful, magnificient beast. You are mine now, for I won the roll. I shall climb onto your scaley back and we shall soar the skies of Azeroth together. I shall name you Chuck.

Some Cataclysmic thoughts

Well, well folks. It is finally here. Cataclysm launched as of 12.07.10 and I have basked in its amazing glory for a whole week now. Some initial notes, likes & dislikes, gripes, adventures etc...

1.) You want HOW much hit?
Much of the rogue mechanics are the same as it ever was. Get hit capped, get expertise capped, then stack agility, agility, agility (before patch 4.0.1 it was attack power, but nowadays agility >>> every other stat). The only problem is...the new hit cap for level 85 is around 1700 for poison attacks! Ludicrous number, given that around 700 was the HARD white hit cap pre-patch. Of course new gear will have more hit on it and I'm sure once I'm decked out in tier epics I'll have all the hit I need, but as of right now...I'm 85 and equipped in mostly normal-dungeon blues, and I'm lacking a LOT of hit. A lot of my attacks miss, and that bothers me. Pre-patch I was impeccably capped, and to have the words "dodge! parry! miss!" pop up over and over is...very unsatisfying.

2.) Reforging - blessing in disguise?
Ah, reforging. For a measly 10g, you can take those magically imbued stats on your gear and transform them into some other stat you like better! Oh, but only 40% of that original stat can be used. Oh, and it can't be a stat already on your gear. Blizzard has an odd way of coming up with strange rules and trying to somehow justify it in a way that befits the fantasy game world. Anyways, it sounds like a pretty sweet deal, being able to customize your gear and get that last 2 points of mastery you wanted! But that comes at a price...it's confusing! With all these choices for capping out your stats and tweaking your final few pieces, things get hectic. Should I gem for that stat or reforge? Or should I enchant that stat instead? With three different options available for increasing your stats (four if you count on potions/food for a certain stat), it's the curse of having too many choices. And unless you design a spreadsheet, it's near impossible to figure out which is the best way to go.

3.) Soaring over the Azerothian sky
Flying in Azeroth is amazing. I mean, if you had told all these level 80s who were used to flying everywhere that suddenly they had to get out their dusty ground mounts again, all hell would've broken loose. I still use flight paths too, if I plan on going a long distance and want to go AFK for a little bit. But for hopping from spot to spot to pick up a quick quest item or to track down that quest mob, it's so much easier hopping on your drake (or in my case, my fancy new cenarion war hippogryph) rather than your clumsy ground mount. All the new drakes they've introduced in the expansion are pretty badass looking too!

4.) Is it just me, or is this a Sanctuary?
I am just plain shocked at the lack of PvP in the new zones. When cata first hit, I braced myself for the inevitable - a whole bucketload of level 80s trying to quest at the same time in the same zone, could only end in massive amounts of unprovoked pvp. I knew this would be unavoidable. Yet to my surprise, I was ganked only once while levelling from 80 to 85. For the most part people just seem to be focusing on levelling their own toons, getting gear, etc. I did witness a few occasions of pvp in a neutral zone, but basically if you wanted to stay out of it, you could. Could it be that the introduction of flying mounts (and hence the ease of getting away from unwanted pvp) be what is causing this? Or is it that simply players are too focused on the new content to gank their hated foes?

5.) Control that Crowd
People keep stressing the importance of CC to get through these new cataclysm dungeons. I definitely see the merit - trash pulls are harder and there are more mobs, and of course cc is always useful when pulling more than one thing. I suppose it got neglected in Wrath when everyone was just too powerful in end-game gear to be bothered to cc. CC is nice, it adds some complexity to trash pulls rather than the old tank and spank. But part of me wonders whether it will continue to be important once people start raiding and start to become too powerful for these dungeons. As of now practically no one has any raid gear. In normal dungeons cc is important, in heroic modes almost a necessity. But what about once everyone has done the first few rounds of raids and farmed some gear? Will cc still be important? I have my doubts - why bother cc'ing if you can tank 8 guys at once?

6.) Goblins, seahorses, indiana jones, and more!
Some last thoughts: Goblins are now the new butt of every joke, sharing the same fate as gnomes. Seahorse mount is awesome but still fails to redeem the many flaws of an udnerwater questing zone. The Indiana Jones references are funny at first, but disappointing that blizzard ripped off on it so thoroughly as opposed to making up original questlines. Glad to see they've decided to keep the tabard-rep system, it will make getting exalted a total breeze. lol @ people selling stacks of embersilk for 1000g - prices will drop by about 900g or more within a month. I'm lovin these new guild level perks, but I'm concerned that it's a little too convenient and powerful - it will really leave those solo gamers in the dust. New armor sets look pretty nice so far, I was worried they'd repeat the hideous burning crusade catastrophe of rainbow-brite neon colored armor.

That's it for now, but there will be many more new developments as we get into the expansion hardcore...we've only scratched the surface of Deathwing's revenge!

Them goblins love me

Well, it has been a long hard road but I'm finally exalted with all the goblin factions! It has certainly seemed like the longest grind since you have to start out at 0/36000 hated. That means that in the space of 2-3 months I've managed to rack up 84,000 reputation points total. I amaze even myself sometimes with the ability to mindlessly grind for hours.

I gave myself that extra push over the weekend, partly due to the nice 10% rep gain boost buff you can get from doing the seasonal event (pilgrim's bounty). I kept grinding dire maul and turning in ogre suits, and wrapped it all up with about an hour's worth of griding pirates to push all the reps into exalted. Phew. I wish you had a title for just doing that, but alas you do not. Although I did get the achievement 25 exalted reputations!

I'm also about halfway there with ravenholdt. The 10% boost is really nice, and it should save me a lot of time with the junkbox turn-ins. The beauty is that the majority of the work (pickpocketing mobs) doesn't require you to be wearing the 10% rep buff, so I can just sit in blackrock spire and grind away, and only need to get the buff when I actually TURN IN the junkboxes. Whereas when I was grinding dire maul I had to make sure I had the buff on me. By my calculations I should need only about 600 or so more junkboxes, I have about 100 sitting in my mailbox, and given that I can crank out about 150 per hour, I should be good to go. I just need no distractions whatsoever this week. Oh wait, I think it's Thanksgiving this week...rats!

What to do after I get exalted with ravenholdt in a couple of days? Well, there's darkmoon faire of course. I'm just about to hit revered, after which I will need about 60 decks. I have about 15 sitting in my bank, so I think it's safe to say I probably will not get able to get this one before cata. Not to mention the fact that the next time the fair is in town will be at Elwynn forest, and there is just no way I'm running 10 min to get to the fair, turning in my decks, running 10 min back to the nearest mailbox to mail the trinkets (which you receive as rewards for deck turn-ins and can be worth quite a bit of money), and repeating this process all the while risking getting ganked by alliance. So I will just have to wait another month to turn them in at Thunder bluff or Shattrath. This will give me some more time to get more decks made anyhow. I'm hoping once cata hits northrend will clear out and I should have an easier time gathering herbs without any competition or fear of getting ganked.

What next after I finally get my insane title? Well, I imagine cataclysm will keep me busy for a while. Grinding to 85, doing all the new raids and dungeons, unlocking achievements, etc. If there is still some time left before the cata launch I'd like to get some other factions to exalted. I'm pretty far into revered with the Kalu'ak, I'd like to get that up to exalted. Then I'd like to get those nether-ray mounts by hitting exalted with the shatari skyguard. Apparently you can grind rep pretty fast with those guys so I'd like to add their 6 mounts to my growing collection. After that? Well, there are always more alts to level up.

Deathwing is coming...

You better watch out
You better not wipe
Better not hack
I'm telling you why
Deathwing is coming to town

He's making a list
And checking it lots;
Gonna find out
Who's throwing moar dots
Deathwing is coming to town

He sees you when you're raiding
He knows when you're AFK
He knows if you've been a total noob
So stay out of the Death and Decay!

O! You better watch out!
You better not wipe
Better not hack
I'm telling you why
Deathwing is coming to town

Cataclysm launching December 7th!!!

Almost Insane

It looks as though I'm beginning to see the light at the end of that long, long tunnel after all. I am proud to say that I'm THIS close to being Insane in the Membrane.

After a grueling series of Dire Maul runs, daily Auction House perusing, Scholo & Strat farming, herbing, milling, inscribing, skinning, and of course, killing, I am now the following:

Revered with Bloodsail Buccaneers
Exalted with Shendra'lar
Revered with Ravenholdt (5700/21000)
Revered with Steamwheedle Cartel (6100/21000)
Honored with Darkmoon Faire (1100/12000)

I know, I've only met 2 out of the 5 rep requirements so far, but it really feels like I'm getting close. I only have a short grind (I hope to the gods of Azeroth it will be short) away from exalted with the goblins and ravenholdt, and darkmoon faire...well, I've decided that can wait until cata if it has to.

What was really crapp (and still is sort of crappy) is that Blizz first announced that the Insane title will not be removed from the game in cata, so players can take their time. Which was fine. Then about a month before launch (so a couple weeks ago) that in fact, they WERE removing it since DM is getting reworked and shendra'lar is no longer going to be available. So all of a sudden the price of pristine black diamonds (which you need about 80 for exalted with Shen) skyrocketed to where they were being sold for about ~1000g a pop, compared to ~300g before. Ugh. Luckily I had turned in about 60 of them prior to this, and while farming I picked up a couple more, so I only had to buy about 15 at the inflated price (I found some discounts at ~700g!).

What really sucks now is that because so many people complained about Blizz's shitty management, they decided to keep the insane in the memebrane, but remove the requirements for getting exalted with Shen. I mean, What...The...Fuck. For those of you who have worked so hard to get exalted, you get to have a nice shiny feat of strength! Yay, BIG FUCKING WHOOP. I mean, who gives a shit about a feat of strength? Shen is undoubtedly one of the hardest (if not THE hardest) part of that achievement, due to the near-zero drop rate of diamonds. And now those people who spent hours of their lives on working on this rep...now everyone and their moms will be running around with the insane title, and there will be practically no way to distinguish between those who spent an extra month farming the Shen rep, and those who took the pussy way out in cata. Thanks Blizz, thanks with a big capital FUCK YOU.

Sigh. Well, now that rant is over with, I must say that the other rep grinds aren't so bad. Ravenholdt is not giving me too much trouble, I simply go into blackrock spire and pickpocket for a couple hours and I get ~150-180 junxboxes. I just need to rinse and repeat a few more times and I'll get exalted in no time. The goblins are annoying, because I was hoping not to have to run DM anymore after getting my shendralar rep and just farm pirates. But there's just too much competition from level 40's trying to quest...the pirates don't respawn very quickly and they aren't that clustered together either, making that a slow grind. So I might just have to hit up DM some more.

Darkmoon Faire is going rather slowly, due to the sheer amount of decks needed (100+) and the sheer amount of herbalism materials needed to make either a TBC deck (24 primals + about 15 stacks of outland herbs on average) or a WotLK deck (24 eternals + at least 30-40 stacks of northrend herbs). It's really insane. I've been using a combination approach of scanning the auction house daily for cheap cards, cheap low-level decks, cheap herbs & mats, and just farming herbs myself. Outland decks require less materials, but the drop rate for primals and herbs are much lower, so I've just been farming herbs for hours in northrend. I average about 20 stacks of herbs per hour even with heavy competition. That supplemented with whatever cheap mats I can find on the AH means that on average I can produce ~1 deck per day. The bonus is that I'm also levelling up my shaman through the herb-gathering. Each node gives me 5000xp, and already I've levelled up twice just from herbing nonstop.

All in all, the achievement is, in fact, pretty insane. I'm hoping to have everything except DMF wrapped up before the cata launch (which is only a couple weeks away!). Although the title will have less meaning due to every schmuck having one, it will still be nice. At least I will know that mine was more deserved than the other lazy people who skipped Shen.

Thoughts on 4.0.1

I am lovin this new pre-cata patch. Oh, I know, it wasn't exactly fair and I know plenty of warriors, combat rogues, paladins, hunters etc are out there QQing about the nerf. But some people did come out winners - namely all casters (have you recently raided with a shadow priest or warlock? They pump out simply ungodly numbers on the recount charts these days), elemental shammies, and mutilate rogues.

To be honest mutilate rogues didn't get a buff, but when it seems as though all melee classes got a big nerf, I sure feel lucky that my DPS has not dropped by any noticeable amount. All the talents are still about the same (minor tweaks here and there), and the only big mechanic changes are:

1. Rupture is now part of the mutilate rotation. Before you used it to get the bleed effect if no one else was applying one so you could get the 6% damage buff. Now every rupture tick will grant you energy regen, which means it's absolutely CRUCIAL to apply the longest duration of rupture on the boss and keep it up at all times. Not that this really complicates the mutilate rotation - before it was: mutilate, mutilate, envenom. Now it's: mutilate, mutilate, rupture, mutilate, mutilate, envenom. Oh noes one additional button to press! I swear rogues have the easiest rotation given how much damage they do.

2. The execute phase, which is sort of a major change, but a good one! When the enemy is below 35% health, your backstab grants you 35 energy regen! Which means when the boss drops below 35%, you can basically spam backstab until 5 combo points. The energy regain from the backstab (which is even more if you glyph for it), plus the extra energy from any rupture ticks means that during the execute phase, your energy bar never drops below 50% - more often than not I find myself not being able to use up my energy fast enough! What limits me is the global cooldown on backstab, which is just...insanity. Backstab crits for well over 10k too.

Ah, I've gotten totally sidetracked. The REAL buff that I'm happy about is the recuperate ability. Use your combo points (which can be on a mob already dead) to heal yourself for 3% health every 3 seconds....doesn't sound like much, and it won't do you any good if something hits you real hard, but for soloing dungeons? Fuggeaboudit. Yes, I could solo dungeons before - even some vanilla raids and end-game TBC dungeons. But obviously with no healing ability I'd fight a pack of mobs, then either have to eat or bandage myself in between. Sometimes long boss fights took me dangerously low, not to mention that it was annoying to have to fill my hp back up all the time.

But now with this recuperate ability, whenever I see my hp dropping a little I just use whatever combo points I have going on to HoT myself! Since most vanilla/RBC dungeon mobs don't hit that hard, the HoT is more than enough to get me back up to full and I can go on to the next pack with no downtime!

More importantly, I can now solo things I just couldn't do before. Fights where if I just had a little bit of healing in addition to potions, maybe I could survive. I soloed the tiger boss in Zul Gurub the other night - sure the boss doesn't hit hard, but those 500-1000 hits start whittling down your health as the fight draws on. But with recuperate ticking away, that damage is cancelled out! With other abilities like evasion, bandaging myself between phases, and healing pots, I was able to bring down high priest Thekal! Although sadly he did not drop his awesome Zulian tiger mount...someday!

I can even solo level 80 group quests now (omg I know so OP - whoever has heard of a rogue soloing anything?). I did Threat from Above, which wasn't easy - it took me down to about 10% health. But I figured out that after you bring down Chillmaw, you can simply vanish and the cultist adds will not despawn! So you focus fire on Chillmaw with the HoTs ticking away, right after she goes down just vanish! Move away, heal up, sneak back in and sap cultist 1, blind cultist 2, kill cultist 3, kill cultist 2 right as he comes out of blind, kill cultist at your leisure. Gotta love that 45 second timer on sap.

I realize that of course, some of this would not be doable without being decked out in end-game gear as I am. And I'm not sure if Blizzard intended for recuperate to even be useful to level 80s - I read somewhere it was intended to reduce downtime during levelling. But whatever, until it gets nerfed somehow in the next patch, I'm going to keep soloing things and enjoying the ride.

zomg Arthas dead

Christ, how did I forget to blog about this one?? Last Thursday the guild downed lich king on 25man!!! We did it on our 4th try! People were dropping like flies during the valk/defile phase, but once we made it over that speed bump, things were smooth sailing. Arthas went down, some purples dropped, everyone celebrated...peace and prosperity for all!

I still want my icc drake, but with the big scary new patch coming out which will destroy all our talent trees, who knows if that will actually be accomplished. Maybe if they don't remove it from the game (though I have a strong suspicion it will be gone when cata hits), I can farm it at 85...

Farmville??? Get a life.

I can't stand all these facebook requests I'm getting to start playing Farmville. So and so has sent you a gift on farmville! So and so wants you to adopt a sheep on farmville! So and so has just slaughtered a pig and wants to offer you some pork!

I mean, COME ON people. It's sad how addicted some people are at this game. Case in point: recently there was a mayor or governor somewhere who just had to resign because people found out he wasn't getting work done and playing farmville all day instead. I was just in Hawaii and I saw more than one person playing farmville on their laptops in the lobby downstairs. I mean, WTF!!!! I had a freaking kidney stone but I still went snorkeling despite debilitating pain. These people chose to ignore sunny beaches and beautiful waterfalls so they could do what? Raise some virtual corn crops on their virtual farm? Get a grip!

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with these cutesy little sim games. Heck, I've played quite a few myself and I think they're fun and addicting at times. But let's get one thing straight here: games like farmville are CASUAL games, meant to be enjoyed as such. They are meant for your iphone, to be dabbled in 15-min sessions while you're waiting in line at the airport. They are only meant to be played on your computer during episodes of extreme boredom when nothing else is available (ie wow patch days).

See, here's the way I see it. There are hardcore games, and there are hardcore gamers. In my opinion only three types of games qualify as hardcore - First person shooter, Real-time stragety, and MMORPG. The reason I say that is because hardcore games NEED to involve some sort of competitive online gameplay that pits you against other players - this aspect is what makes the game hardcore. The three genres mentioned above are the only ones where there is a large enough gamer base to ensure a true competitive playing environment. Sending your friend a basket of corn over farmville DOES NOT COUNT.

Hardcore games are not meant to be played safely in your own little world. Hardcore games are not meant to be friendly nor user-friendly. Hardcore games have a steep learning curve - they give you a few basic pointers then throw you out into a vast online world of competitive douchebags. You will be beaten and humiliated to a degree you will never experience in a game like farmville. No one gangs up on your livestock, teabags them, and /spits in your face before leaving.

Ultimately, hardcore games turn people into hardcore gamers. After losing a brutal match, you nerdrage, vow revenge, and begin learning. You read up on strategy online or on forums, you upgrade your computer to run the game better, you start devoting more and more time into becoming a better player, and before you know it you've become - ta-da! - a hardcore gamer.

So what I really don't understand are these people who play casual games as though they were hardcore gamers. People who devote wayyyyyy too much time into playing a silly little casual game. If you're going to spend 5+ hours a day playing a game, people, at least play something worthwhile. It takes the brain power equivalent of a nematoad to play these casual games (I mean, are you even doing anything besides clicking??? If you're not using at least 80% of your keyboard in any hardcore game you fail). If I ever played that much farmville I'd hide myself from all online communities and cover my face in shame, not broadcast my latest farmville achievement on facebook.

But I digress - if you want to be a total pussy of a gamer and spend hours feeding your chickens, be my guest. But please keep all that shit out of my face (metaphorically) by not informing me every 5 min via facebook of all your remarkable farm-related accomplishments. And please don't have the audacity to assume that I would ever want to disgrace myself and my laptop by taking part in your little farm adventures.

10m vs 25m

I think I posted sometime before saying that 25mans were actually easier than 10mans. I'd like to officially retract that post.

My evidence for such a preposterous claim came from a very limited experience of end-game raids, particularly in 25mans. I think my observation was from the simple reasoning that it's impossible for anyone to die when 7 people are simultaneously casting heals on you! Oh how naive. It is very much possible to die despite 7 HoTs and flash heals going off on you. When the boss can cleave for 70k, there's just no hope for non-tanks.

Anyways, ICC raiding has changed that outlook drastically. 25man raids are much more difficult, not due to the increased damage or HP, but from the number of adds (which usually TRIPLE), limited space to spread out in, and the sheer difficulty of trying to assign 25 people to do different things at once.

Don't get me wrong, I still think there are certain fights where it's actually easier in 25man. Sometimes when the raid has to split up into groups for more than one boss, the fight does get easier with more people. For example I've done the assembly of iron in both 10 and 25man version - the 25man run went much smoother because we had 3 dedicated tanks, who each had a dedicated healer (whereas in 10man you'd have someone be a "makeshift" tank receiving some heals once in a while, or a risky range/interrupt tank). But this is probably one of the very few examples.

In ICC particularly 25mans are very challenging. No wonder it took our server's top guild over a month between the 10man heroic and 25man heroic kill.

The problems of spreading people out to avoid splash damage become exponentially hard going from 10 to 25 man. Because while you can make up for increased boss hp and damage with your increased DPS and healing, there is nothing you can do about the size of the playing field.

Take the blood queen fight for instance. In my opinion one of the hardest fights to execute well in 25man. Spreading out that many people in that tiny little room, in addition to working out the bite order amongst ~20 dps characters becomes a nightmare very quickly. Oh no I have swarming shadows! Run in a circle! Oh wait no there are people EVERYWHERE and no matter where I go I will kill someone. Bite this guy! Oh wait he's dead from getting hit by 6 bloodbolts because people didn't spread out in the air phase.

Last night the guild attempted 25man lich king, which was really really tough. We didn't down him obviously (but we got close!) after repeated attempts, whereas 10man lich king took two tries. I remember everyone complaining about how much defile sucks and then seeing it for myself on 10man and thinking, "this is a piece of cake". Well, I think everyone was talking about 25man, because defile really does suck. When one of them unluckily drops on someone in the middle of the raid...there's just no way to run out of this thing. The longer you stay in it, the larger it gets, and by the time you realize it the entire platform is covered in that disgusting gray ooze. And your raid has either died or committed suicide off the platform.

Oh well, we're tyring again tonight. Maybe we'll get super lucky and get it this time.

Patchwerk want to play!

I love it when the weekly is Patchwerk. After you get like 5 people together the raid chat is usually like this:

Raid Leader: Alright we need a healer and some more dps.
guy 1: Why don't we just 5 man it?
guy 2: Yeah Patch is super ez mode
warrior tank: I can 2-man Patch with just a healer
paladin: I can solo Patch, it just takes a long time

I'm hoping when cata hits the market, even I will be able to solo Patchwerk. Oh noes, he cleaved me for 2k! XD

Action adventure vs RPG

So I started playing Zelda: Spirit Tracks for Nintendo DS while I was on a trip. It's something to do while you're sitting in an airplane trying not to get naseous. I have to admit the game looked kind of stupid but I enjoyed it very much. Playing with the stylus seemed cumbersome at first, but once you got used to it, everything was pretty nice and seamlessly designed with only a few minor hiccups.

Anyways, my whole topic of debate today is, as the title suggests, action-adventure games vs. RPG. Some people confuse these two concepts which are as different as night and day. Super Mario Bros is an action game. The Myst series is an adventure game. Zelda is the hybrid of these two - the bastard child known as action-adventure.

Zelda is about as classic action-adventure as you can get. I would even go so far as to say Zelda invented (or at least re-invented) the whole sub-genre. It's a mix of delightful puzzle-solving and fast-paced sword-slashing, bow-shooting, whip-cracking action. It's fun and addictive, but it is not an RPG. I suppose the argument some people would make is that, "hey, you're assuming the role of Link, therefore it's a role-playing game." Well in that case, I suppose Frogger, Street Fighter, and Rainbow Six are all RPGs as well. In any game you're assuming the role of the protagonist, that criteria alone does not define an RPG.

I think that the true definition of the RPG genre lies in the combat system. It's the mechanics of combat (if there's no combat, I don't think you can really even call that an RPG. Better classify it as adventure) that sets an RPG apart from action or action/adventure. In a true, old-school style RPG, combat takes place randomly and apart from the rest of the world you explore - quite literally, you enter a "combat sequence" and which is usually turn-based. Compare that with Zelda or Golden Axe, where combat is integrated seamlessly into the exploration of a dungeon. When you attack your enemy in an RPG, it is not the matter of pressing a button to swing your axe. You instead give a command to a character you are controlling - everything outlining whom/how/where you will attack (physical attack? Magic spell? Which spell? Directed at whom? Use item? Which item? Etc etc). This is what enhances that role-playing experience.

Sometimes a hybrid of these two can be very fun as well. Take for example FF12 - for over a decade Final Fantasy has been regarded as the classic RPG format, yet with FF12 they broke that invisible wall between "explored world" and "combat world", integrating combat seamlessly into the adventure. But you still give your characters commands on whom and how to attack, and these actions are still turn-based. All they did was allow you to see the enemy approaching (and avoid them if you can) and remove the tedious 5 second intro to a combat sequence, hence greatly accelerating gameplay and winning points with me!

WoW is another great example of a action/RPG hybrid. I will venture out on a limb here and declare that the "adventure" element of WoW is largely optional. While there is a large amount of storytelling and lore present in the game, no one is required to participte or even read any of it. There are very few cutscenes or scripted events you are forced to watch, and enemies you have killed always resets after a certain period of time which largely negates any sense of storyline continuity. It's inevitable in an MMORPG - the story can't advance at the same pace for millions of people, after all. Despite the lack of "adventure", WoW is hugely popular and for good reason.

I love RPGs and its hybrids. I like action-adventure as well, but it tends to frustrate me more than I'd like. A common facet of all action-based game is dexterity. You have to be able to press buttons in a well-timed manner, or else you miss that jump or don't get to hit that enemy just at the right time. This is 99% of the reason why I feel the urge to throw the controller when I play Zelda or God of War. OMG, I did all that work to get here and I just died because I couldn't press a button at the exact 1/10 of a second. With an RPG it is not crucial at all - sure my dps might be lower if I don't press the right rotations, but milisecond timing is not required at all. And I certainly will not wipe the raid by being off by a few seconds. You need to be aware, but you do not need to have the fingers of Paganini.

So the next time you're wondering what genre a video game falls into, ask yourself these questions:

Can you die from one little badly timed press of a button? Can you die/get hurt by falling into a pit? Do you find yourself pressing the "attack" button in rapid succession a lot? If you answered yes, it's probably an action/adventure*.

*The Diablo series is a special one. It's technically closer to action than an RPG, but it's true nature is hack-and-slash, with RPG flavors thrown in (mainly in terms of character-customization). We'll discuss Diablo in depth later.

I slayed the Lich King...but I did not shoot the Deputy

Yes, you heard me correctly. I am now a Kingslayer!

Well, the actual slaying of the Lich King took place almost a month ago. On the night before I left for my wedding & honeymoon trip, my guild decided to give me a nice little present by taking me along on their icc10 hard mode runs. They decided to down the lich king at the end too just so me and a couple others could get their Kingslayer titles!

The run started at 7pm sharp. We had sort of a snag at the start but once we were all focused, we started clearing one boss after another in rapid succession. We either did them all hard mode or went for once of the achievements (except LK himself, obviously) - which in some bosses are just as hard as the HM itself. Marrowgar, Lady D, Gunship, Saurfang were all a total breeze on HM. We did rotface and fester achievements, also a total breeze. Professor Putricide on HM cost us only one wipe if I remember correctly. We did the achi on blood council, HM blood queen (cake walk), we went for an achi on dreamwalker but it glitched on us sadly.

We were going for an achievement on Sindragosa, but man, that fight is always hard for some reason. So many things have to go just right for it to work. We wiped 6 or 7 times without even getting to phase 3 in which you can do the achievement. Finally we just said screw it and downed her even though the tank had already messed up the achievement part.

And then...big bad LK himself! To tell you the truth, the fight was really, really anticlimactic. I'd wiped so much before even getting to phase 2 that I had no idea the only hard part of the fight is the beginning! Everyone complained that the defile mechanic was hard but it was super easy. You see disgusting grey goop under you, you move out. Simple as that. I didn't have to worry about much else besides avoiding defile and hitting LK. Oh, and stunning valkyrs. My dps was nothing to write home about since I was so new to it and all, but we downed LK on our second attempt. All in all, the full icc clear (including achievements and hard modes) took us 5 hours, and less than 10 wipes total. PRO.

We got to watch the end cinematic, we all put on our new titles - Kingslayer - and took a group photo! LK was teabagged many a time that night.

Sigh, it made me think, what the hell was wrong with my last guild? Their GS was just as high, they seemed to be good players. Was it just lack of experience that made them struggle so much with LK? Perhaps. Who knows how long it took my current guild to get to the point they could 2-shot LK on their alts? Probably took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

Well, now I'm back from 3 weeks of travel and ready to WoW hardcore. Brewfest is going on! Probably my favorite wow holiday of the year!!!

zomg roflpwn

The first thing about WoW that really confused me was the language, or "lingo" if you will. There were a lot of acronyms to learn, for one thing, and everyone tossed them around as if it was the most natural thing in the world to say "LFW max 450 LW skill BYOM PST".

If I had to describe the corruption of modern-day English in the WoW universe, I would break it down into three main categories: acronyms and/or condensed words/phrases, intentional misspellings and/or misnomers, and absolute nonsense.

When I was nearing 80 and finally started to play with other players, it was really embarrassing that I didn't know many of the common acronyms everyon used in the dungeons - even the ones that were for rogues. For instance the tank would ask me "rogue CC the caster" and I would stare blankly. After embarrassing situations I finally learned (through google) that CC stood for "crowd control", ie, he wanted me to sap/stun the mob. I love sharing random WoW acronyms with my friends - just the other day they cracked up when I referred to them as my IRL buddies (In Real Life).

Then of course there are the condensed words. Many of them are intuitive, such as pally (paladin) or warr (warrior). Some of the ones that threw me for a loop were:

belf (blood elf) - for the longest time I thought people were misspelling the word elf by adding a B in front of it somehow. Then one day it hit me - aha! B-elf, as in blood elf!
pots (potions) - where the hell are these pots that everyone is talking about? Can you cook in these pots? Then while reading something on wowwiki, I finally got it.
trix (tricks of the trade) - to be fair, rogues don't learn this skill until much later in the game so I had no way of knowing what the hell tricks of the trade was...or why people kept asking me for it.
disc priest (discipline priest) - this one was tricky, since the "disc" in discpline is pronounced differently from the way the actual word "disc" is pronounced. Also, I don't play a priest.
chanter (enchanter) - duh, this one should've been kind of obvious.

My favorite category are the words that are intentionally misspelled words and made-up names. When I first heard people saying "Can I haz buffs plox?" I thought it was pretty childish (I mean, how does plox even sound anything like the word "please"?). But once I learned to sort of accept it as part of the wow experience, I kind of liked it. It's almost like you actually ARE in some fantasy universe where everyone talks kind of like an idiot! So I joined in and now you will routinely hear me say "lulz can we haz moar buffs plox?"

The made-up names are sometimes very clever. The word loot is used a lot to refer to easy bosses in ICC - "lootship" (gunship) and "lady lootwhisper" (lady deathwhisper). The two abominations in the plague wing of ICC are referred to as "the potatoes", because well, they look like potatoes. Some other ones I like:
DDR - referring to Heigan the Unclean, because you have to do a giant square dance for the fight.
Patchwerk v.3.3 - Festergut, which is basically a DPS race frenzy/gear check, similar to Patch back in Naxx
Crazy Cat Lady - Auriaya in Ulduar, who summons cats during the fight.
Twins - the Val'Kyrs in ToC, because there are two of them :P

And then finally...the absolute gibberish/nonsense that people say. The classic example being "pwn" - we all know what it means, even though the word itself is completely ridiculous. Then people start adding other words to it to make up words like roflpwn, uberpwn, pwanage, facepwn, etc etc to grow a whole nother dictionary full of ridiculous words related to pwn.

All in all, the average outsider would really scratch their heads and wonder what is wrong with all these people. But I mean, JRR Tolkien invented Elvish (which some people study and learn seriously) for his Middle-Earth, so is it so outlandish that the made-up universe of WoW has its own quirky language? I think that's what I love about the game after all, the fact that the programmers try hard to remind people that it is just a game, and encourage all sorts of silliness from the players themselves. And you know, at first you might be confused, but once you understand why people talk the way they do and why some words are the way they are, it's pretty funny. It goes to show that not all gamers are fat, weird nerds - in fact most of them have a sense of humor.

I, for one, can't stop cracking up whenever I see the guild name: Sup Gurl I'm Full Purpz (translated: Hello female player, all of my equipped items are of epic (purple) quality or better, I hope this knowledge will impress you and induce you to engage in sexual relations with me).

Insane in the Membrane

That's the latest little WoW project I have going on. "Little" being a very loose term here...

For the past 6 months I've been drifting from guild to guild, constantly in search of better players, better progression, better consistency, etc etc. I've outgrown several guilds that weren't progressing as fast as I would've liked, and my current guild is pretty good, except they've decided to take a break. Which basically leaves me with my thumb in an unpleasant place.

Side note: I really miss my old guild. We raided 6 nights a week, I was part of the "core" group, the GM loved me...sigh.

Anyways, I usually like to level up alts instead of gathering achievement points, but this one really intrigued me. I'd been wanting to try it out but obviously it's a very daunting challenge. I mean, why else is there only like 4 people on the server with the title?

Having spent a few weeks on getting this title, I can tell you a couple of things.

1.) Having money helps. If you had endless money things would go a lot quicker. But I kind of enjoy the slow, seemingly endless grind in a bizarre self-destructive way. Having a good gold reserve is nice for filling in the gaps between all the things you're willing to farm/grind for. For example, I'm finding that librams are not that hard to come by. Pristine black diamonds (aka PBD, the bane of my existence) are definitely NOT easy to farm. I'm finding that dropping 2-300g on one of those is a good investment since it's such a rare drop. Time = money, right? Besides, I've been making a pretty penny selling all the enchanting mats I get from sharding the greens/blues I've been picking up. Not to mention all that runecloth. SO MUCH RUNECLOTH! I'm swimming in bolts of them.

2.) Having many alts help. Consider having at least 2-3 serious alts - by serious I mean not some level 1 toon with 1 bank slot. You should have 1 dedicated banker toon with the bank slots/bag slots maxed out. This will help a lot in keeping track of all the shit you need for the achievement, all the shit you'll want to sell on the AH, and everything in between. The other alt should definitely have inscription, if not maxed out at least at outland level. Darkmoon cards are really freaking expensive, with any purple deck going well over 500g on my server. Making your own cards will save you lots of money. Doesn't have to be an herbalist though, I've been routinely finding stacks of 20 outland herbs for <10g. Oh, and consider making a DK, powerlevelling skinning, and then collecting rugged leather.

3.) Having a friend helps - this is especially true for the bloodsail buccaneer rep. Try ganking booty bay guards by yourself. I guarantee you will die at least a few times when you're eventually mobbed by 12 guards (well, unless you're a paladin maybe). My man has been sending me any cheap PBDs, darkmoon cards, librams that he can find on the AH whenever he's on. He's also turned all my runecloth into bolts for me to sell. Needless to say, not everyone is as lucky to have a charming, ruggedly handsome troll priest helping them out, but seriously. Have a friend or guildie help you out with stuff like checking the AH for you while you're offline, or sharding greens you pick up. You get by with a lil help from your friends!

4.) Most importantly...switch it up a bit. I farm DM a few times, then I switch to an alt to gather herbs, switch to another to gather leather, while checking the AH in between the switches with my banker toon. It does not need to be one long boring grindfest. Take a break from routine and go kill some syndicate mobs. Take a break from herbins to go run strat/scholo for PBDs. Take a break from skinning to visit the darkmoon faire that's in town. Go grind scorpids for blood. Go pickpocket some junkboxes. There's literally so much shit that needs to be done for this achievement, there's no reason not to switch things around and give yourself a break from the same old DM run.

My projected timeline is to have this title by the end of the year. Will it happen or will I pussy out? Only time will tell whether I'm worthy of the title, "insane in the membrane".

An enhanced gaming experience

My latest project is to level up a shaman to 80. I enjoyed playing the hybrid class when I levelled up my paladin - mostly because being able to heal yourself makes such a HUGE difference. Pallys and druids are, I think, the ultimate hybrids - they can heal, DPS, and tank all in one character.

I hear that when WOW first came out, shamans were designed to be able to tank as well, but blizz scrapped the idea due to balance issues. So now their role is limited to DPS and healing.

I guess I chose a shaman due to a relatively simple reason - they seemed to be in high demand. I often see trade chats asking for a shammy because of their ability to bloodlust. To be honest I think a good group doesn't need that last-ditch bloodlust boost but I guess people like having that safety net. Anyways they seemed like a fun class to play, what with high armor from mail and being able to use totems and such. So I made a troll shaman (I love trolls, I don't know why).

I got to level 50 as elemental, decked out in heirlooms of course. And I have to admit, it was a really tough grind. Tough in terms of being able to keep my interest in the character. I absolutely hate casting delays! Having to wait 2.5 secs to cast a lightning bolt?? My generation was raised on instant gratification and microsecond attention spans, I could not deal with that casting time.

I guess I only picked elemental because the gear requirements for elemental and restoration are very similar, and I wanted to be able to heal eventually. Everyone loves utility! But elemental was just not my style, I must admit. I found myself meleeing more and more often, and relying on my shock spells rather than channeled casts or lightning spells.

Well, so I struggled my way to 50 playing like an enhancement shaman, with the talent build of a elemental shaman, and it finally hit me - respec! I moved all my talent points into enhancement, and WOW. Suddenly I was a one-woman wrecking machine. With slow 1-hand dual wielding, amazing crits, windfury weapon, improved shock spells and + attack power, I could mow through mobs nonstop. When using only shock spells and instant melee spells, my mana barely dipped. If it started going down after a big pull, I just switched to water shield. With points into maelstrom weapon, I could pretty much instantly heal myself with my healing wind spells during big pulls. My crits were amazing - whoever has heard of a 900 crit at level 54?? I'm pretty sure my rogue didn't pull that much at level 60. Basically, I felt invincible.

I have 3 levels to go till outland, and all I can say it...I wish I had respecced a lot sooner. I might already be at 80 if I had been enhancement all the way.

All the Single Ladies...

All the nooby raiders
All the nooby raiders
Now put your hands up

Up in Icecrown, we got a boss down
I got my eyes on the loot
You went AFK, and now you wanna say
Hey bro I really needed that
I rolled need, you rolled greed
You didn't pay any attention
cuz I've been sapped and feared, for three good years,
Ya can’t be mad at me

Cuz if you liked it then you should've rolled need on it
Cuz if you liked it then you should've rolled need on it
Don't be mad when you see me DE it
Cuz if you liked it then you should've rolled need on it

Help, I'm an alt-aholic

I rarely play on my main these days. Sure, I'll try to squeeze in the weekly raid, and of course I raid on the 2 nights a week that the guild attemps ICC (although attendance has been quite spotty of late). If WG happens to be going on I'll jump in on that too. But stuff like daily quests, daily heroics, getting achievements and titles just don't appeal to me anymore. I certainly don't need any more frost badges and with 20k gold saved up, I don't feel the need to spend an hour doing dailies for a measly 100g. Ah, yes, it's good to be rich.

Although I do enjoy doing classic/BC dungeons just for fun. Who doesn't like to solo those and feel totally OP?

But anyways, my playing time has been drastically reduced on my rogue. I don't even log into my paladin anymore now that she's finally hit 80. I had all these grand designs to pimp her out in awesome tanking gear and get insta-queues and invites left and right, but once I started the long and gruelling process of gearing up...*shudder*. The idea of running 100+ heroics and tanking raids with idiots was just too daunting. But hey she's at least all ready to go once Cata hits the market.

These days I play my shaman (lvl 49), and I have mixed feelings about it. I figured it would be a fun hybrid class to play but it gets so frustrating that the cast times seem so long. I guess if you want to be a caster long cast times are something you just have to get used to (at least until you can start stacking spell haste). And I suppose I could play enhancement shaman, but then you're really reliant on your totems and I find totems to be very, very annoying. I see shammies in raids who have to run to the front of the group, slap down 4 totems, run back to the rear to start dpsing, etc etc. It just seems like such a nuisance to be honest.

When I've had enough of my shammy I like to play my mage for a bit. She's only level 15, which is when levelling is still fun and not so much of a grind so I like it so far. Decked out in heirlooms she packs quite a wallop! And being a pure DPS class means I have to be a little more cautious about pulling a group of mobs which adds a little more challenge and excitement.

When my mage bores me, that's when I start new characters willy-nilly. I have like 5 alliance characters on a PVE realm that I've gotten to level 10 and lost interest in. Recently I started a night elf rogue which is kind of fun because the night elf starting zone is the only one I've never quested in before. In fact, I've never quested in any of the level 20ish alliance zones so maybe that's something to work on.

It's tough to focus on one character and level it all the way to 80. I have all these great ideas - I'll start a character and try out herbalism, thinking "this will be great, I can send all these herbs to my main and level up her alchemy when cata comes out". Or try Skinning, thinking, "this will be great, I'll save this leather and give it to my leatherworking alt and make money off the rest I can sell". Of course none of this has yet to come to fruition since all of these alts are nowhere near enough high level to be useful to my main or to make any significant money through gathering professions. My hope is to someday have a giant gathering system set up to where my mains can get whatever they need from the alts - but I fear that will be the day I become pimply and eat hot pockets all day in front of the computer.

Starting an alt is irresistably fun for me. I can't really explain why, but I just love creating a new character, customizing the look, giving her a name, then outfitting her in all the best heirlooms I can get my hands on. My new rogue I just started already has heirlooms shoulders, chest, two daggers, trinket, and a gun. It's pretty ridiculous how fast I can kill those level 5 tigers. And when you first start, the quests are so easy and you gain a new level every 5 minutes, and you get to start a new profession and watch the skill points go up quickly, and there's always something to look forward to with every level gain. And that sort of continues until 20-ish, and things start slowing down.

I think the biggest hurdle is the level 30-50 range. That's when it really feels like a grind and levelling is slow. Once you get past 50, you sort of feel "invested" in that toon. Plus you've got most of your talent tree mapped out by then and there's Outland to look forward to in just 8 levels, so things are not quite so tedious.

I have all these alts that I managed to get to level 25-30 ish and then just gave up - my druid, who's still sitting there in her heirlooms looking at me with sad cow-eyes. My belf hunter who got deleted because I just hated having to send my pet in before I could do anything. My warrior that was well, just plain old boring to play. I've tried every class except for a priest. Perhaps in cataclysm I'll make a goblin priest...

Everyone likes to start alts, right? Or is that just me?

Da lich king & recruitment

We are now 11/12 in ICC normal, meaning we have but just one boss remaining - The Lich King, the Prince formerly known as Arthas Menethil. (HA! Puns.)

In the last 2 weeks since Sindragosa's demise, we've given a handful of attempts at the Lich King. He's pretty tough, as we all expect him to be - I mean, he is like, THE big bad boy of WoW, at least for the time being. Once Cataclysm comes out, I'm sure a team of 2 paladins and a druid will be "farming" him for the mount...sad but true. I mean, look at me, I run ZG and Kara every week for mounts with an uber raid consisting of a rogue tank/dps and a pvp disc priest.

Anyways, yes he is tough. The fight is complicated and it seems pretty stressful for the healers, since they really need to be on the ball about dispelling and topping people off and such. Then again, he hits the tanks like a truck so I'm sure it's stressful for them as well to watch their 60k HP dip into the triple digits every now and then. Come to think of it, it's really stressful for the DPS to kill all the adds that spawn constantly. Damn, the fight is stressful for everyone, it seems!

I'm happy to report that we seem to be making progress. We were able to get him to phase 2 and killed a Valkyr before she could drag our paladin off the ledge. I'd say maybe in another 30-40 wipes we may be able to get this.

Unfortunately our main tank is leaving us after this week, so we'll have to get someone else in who will need to learn the fight over again. Sigh. The biggest roadblock to raid progression is not skill or gear, it's the number of people who can consistently raid. Frailty thy name is the casual raider!

So we shall see how things go. We have a couple more attemps scheduled before our MT leaves. After that I might switch guilds yet again. You see, I was recruited during a pug! It was ICC25 and man, was I on it. I was on steroids or something, pumping out 14k dps on saurfang. My name was #1 on the charts starting from the first trash pull all the way up to festergut (where we wiped twice and everyone left). The raid leader, another rogue, just came right out and said it - "I want to steal you from your guild". His guild had the kingslayer, was 9/12 in heroic mode, so yeah I was about to say "take me, take me now!". Until he mentioned that they raid starting at 7pm... >.> Living on the west coast sucks.

But I'm still thinking it over. I mean, if I really wanted to, I could make that raid time. My work schedule is flexible, I'd just need to get my ass in early. But it can be done. Plus their 25man group runs a little later so I could definitely do that. I guess what's holding me back really is laziness. Switching guilds mean you start at the bottom of the food chain again. There's the stress of trying to impress people, the potential of clashing personalities or annoying 14 year olds on vent, loot drama, awkwardness between ex-guildies, etc etc. So much to take into consideration.

Although next week I might ask if I can raid with them for the 25man. If they seem like nice folks I'll seriously consider switching. But nowadays I'm a lot more picky than I used to be. I hope I haven't become a gear snob/elitist jerk. I'm still in touch with the common man, I swear! My pally alt is only at 3k GS so I know what it's like guys!

Journey into the Heart of ICC

We downed Sindragosa last night! After 2 weeks of wiping we finally brought her down. I don't want to get into gory details but man...phase 3 sucks. Literally no one could screw up in phase 3. In the end it came down to 50% perfect coordination and 50% luck I think.

Some memorable things said during our 3 hours:

General chat: I got 99 problems but a lich ain't one

Tank: It's time for that stupid dragon to DIE!!
Me: Isn't she already dead? How do you kill that which has no life?

"Betrrraaaaayyyyyy yoooouuuuuuu!!!"
"Cold hand of death upon yooouurrrrr hhhhhrrrrrrttttrrrttttt!"
"None shall surviiiiivvvveeeee!"

Seriously that Sindragosa sounds like a big-time rage-aholic. Her screaming doesn't get old. At all. Especially not after 8 wipes.

Elitist jerks

I've been giving some serious thought about joining a new guild. I've been in several different guilds now, all of them more or less "casual" raiding guilds. Well, one of them was actually hardcore in the sense we raided ALL THE TIME, but the only problem was that we sucked. Hardcore.

The problem with most hardcore raiding guilds is that it does require a big time committment. The top guilds on the server all raid 4-5 nights a week, and start raids at 7-8pm servertime, which is inconvenient for me given that my time zone is 3 hours earlier than server time and I have a full-time job.

There is one guild that I've had my eye on. It's definitely one of the top guilds, and they start raids a little later so I can technically make the raid times. I've inspected the guild members and my gear seems to be comparable to theirs. I just switched my profession to enchanting so I can have even more of an edge in raids. I feel like if I were to apply, there is a pretty good chance I'll get in.

So why haven't I sent in an app yet?

I'm not sure if I really want to play with any of these people. I've been in pugs with hardcore raiding guilds and I must say, they're all assholes. Universally, without fail, they're elitist jerks. They openly bash other guilds, call people names and mercilessly kick anyone who makes one mistake. It's as if having the "kingslayer" title automatically entitles them to act like douchebags towards everyone.

It's pretty juvenile to act that way. I mean, have these people stepped out into the real world and tried to bully everyone on the basis that they've killed the lich king? Most people would stare at them blankly before punching them in the nads. I can understand partly why they would do that. Having good gear myself, I find it weary when players with inferior gear pester me or act like idiots. Like last night when I was trying to do the weekly and this one shaman kept saying, "If we're not doing full clear I'm leaving." Umm, yeah, it's not like we had 5 other shamans in the raid, not to mention you had a 5k GS with full pvps...strange thing was, even after multiple ppl said "no way I'm just here for weekly", this guy didn't leave. All bark and no bite, I see.

I have to admit I felt a stronge urge to type in caps "STFU about the full clear, no one wants to be here for 2 hours", but I didn't. Because it's important to be polite, even when you can't see someone face-to-face. Because I wouldn't have said anything to him had my gear been worse than his. Because some extra sparkly pixels and programming language doesn't give me license to bash others whos pixels and programming language are not as sparkly as mine.

Back to my original thought. I don't think I want to be playing this game with 24 assholes 4 nights a week. Sure, my current guild hasn't down LK yet, but they're so nice and polite to everyone! No one ever yells, no one bitches and moans, and they're all so friendly. I'd rather wipe on Sindragosa for 2 hours with those guys than earn my Kingslayer with a bunch of douchebags.

Upgrades, upgrades, they make me happy

Haven't posted in a while due to some personal issues. I had a shitty couple weeks that made me lose interest in WoW, and I thought "maybe I'm growing tired of WoW". Silly me. After playing for a couple hours I was hooked again.

Anyways, I got into a 1337 (l33t, leet, however you wanna spell it, apparently means awesome in some nerd language) PuG for ICC25. Someone was spamming trade chat for more people and I checked and found he was in Vanquish, one of the few Kingslayer guilds on the server. I psted him, he asked me a few questions I normally don't get from puggers. I mean, normally they ask for GS, and if you give them a number above 5.3k or so usually no more questions and you're in. But he wanted to see my achievements, asked me if I knew the fights, asked what kind of numbers I can put out on single-target fights...I answered them honestly because there are few things more embarrassing than saying you've done a fight and then getting the achievement for doing it the first time.

Anyways I scored the invite and things went really smoothly. Up until Blood Queen there wasn't even a single wipe. Some nice gear dropped, although I had most of them. The Vanquisher's mark dropped twice but of course I didn't win it...sigh. A dagger dropped and I didn't win it (but it was a 1.80 speed and I already have the best-in-slot for my MH wep so no tears there). On the Blood prince council the +hit helmet dropped! I tied with another rogue and we re-rolled and I won! I've been looking EVERYWHERE for decent +hit gear (without resorting back to ToC gear...yuck!) and I finally had something! Now I could swap out all my +hit gear and replace with +expertise gear, which meant I could swap out my +hit gems and +expertise gems for +attack power gems! I know kids, WoW is complicated.

Anyways during the blood queen fight someone asked about the NBA game, and I mentioned my boyfriend was watching it. Teehee, I know it's silly but I love being a female wow player sometimes. The excitement you can incite in these boys ages 12-20...the raid leader begged me to say something sexy on vent or no loot! XD

Blood queen didn't go too well because of the chaos than ensues when 25 people try to spread out from each other in a tiny room. But I walked away with lots of badges and a sweet new helmet. I bought a belt upgrade, swapped out my gems and now my gear score is 5956! Almost to 6k!!!

Victory for the horde!

In my new guild, there are two raid groups. The "A" group has been stuck on the lich king for a while and the "B" group (that I used to be in) has failed to get past putricide repeatedly. There was a little bit of a gearscore discrepancy but overall the "B" group gear wasn't too bad. We had a great MT and a so-so OT, awesome healers and pretty nice DPS. Yet week after week we'd get stuck at putricide.

I think that's where the difficulty level hits a brick wall. The first four bosses are practically a joke for any 5k+ GS group these days. The strategy is simple, everyone's done it a million times, pretty straightforward stuff. Festergut is a little more stressful for healers and Rotface involves more movement, but after a few attempts people usually get the hang of it.

Putricide and onward is where the shit really hits the fan. The slimes that spawn on Professor is not the friendly, slow-moving slime like in Rotface. No, this sucker flies across the room and hits you for 10k or more. And it's not just the adds, professor himself starts slapping you silly in phase 3.

Blood council is a short fight but requires lots of movement and raid awareness, not to mention a decent 3rd tank. Again, another boss group B attempted but couldn't down. Dreamwalker is doable, but we didn't even attempt Sindragosa - I hear she's harder than LK himself.

Anyways, last night I ran with group A. I didn't notice anything really different up until the plague wing (except that perhaps I wasn't the top DPS in all the fights - definitely a good sign). But then festergut and rotface went down in the first attempts with absolutely no problem. Even when the MT went down in the last 30% of fester, we just kept spanking him and down he went. We had only 1 slime explosion before rotface ate it as well.

Then on Putricide, we wiped once. The second run, we burned him to phase 3 in a really well-controlled manner - people were doing what they were suppose to do and killing off the adds ASAP. When phase 3 started we burned all our CDs and not one raid member ate it before we brought him down. And my new dagger dropped too!!!

Blood council and Blood-queen took 2-3 tries but again, once the new people (myself included) saw how it was done and got the hang of it, they went down smoothly. We were all too sleepy to continue, but tonight is Sindragosa and possibly LK!!!

It got me thinking why group B was stumbling when group A did it all so easily. I suppose they have more experience but after a few attempts generally people get it. Was it the gear? In group B the off-tank usually hovered at 5k - 5.2k or so. Was that the problem? Was it the DPS? Was it that we couldn't burn the bosses down fast enough? Was it the heals? Were they struggling to keep everyone up throughout the difficult phases? Maybe it was a combination of all those. Maybe it was just the lack of experience. All I know is, it feels good to win.

Damn you professor.

Professor Putricide...you, sir, are a tough nut to crack.

I've gotten THIS close to downing this guy about 8 or 9 times now, and my god...it just makes you want to rip your hair out. I've never encountered anything quite so frustrating. Seriously, we had him down to his last 100k of health last night when the last raid member went down.

When we did the fight with my last guild, we couldn't get him past phase 2. Phase 1 and 2 were hard enough because we could never kill the adds fast enough. Things would start getting a little shaky and BOOM! The green slime would kill off a caster then everything just went downhill. I used to think, damn if we could just get to phase 3 (where adds stop spawning), this will be a piece of cake.

Oh how wrong I was...how naive and foolish of me...

It turns out phase 3 is an absolute nightmare. This is an intense DPS race and I guess we just didn't have enough of it. We have about 1 min to kill him off before the tank explodes (quite literally) and wipes out half the raid. And if even one person dies from this explosion, the professor gains 300k+ health. So even if half the raid survives one explosion, the professor has just healed himself AND they only have a few seconds until the off-tank will explode as well. Oh AND the professor has a buff that makes him stronger and stronger. Oh AND the room starts getting flooded with slime. Slime slime slime slime slime everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

How can I describe the heartbreaking agony of seeing that bastard's HP tick down to 1% only to die before you can score that one last critical strike that would've killed him? How can I put into words how everyone feels after we repeat this 4 or 5 times?

Morale is very very low on nights we do Putricide.

A career move

I've had herbalism and alchemy on my main (rogue) for almost a year now. She was my very first toon and I happened to read somewhere that herbalism/alchemy was a good money-maker, so I went with it. In hindsight, skinning/LW may have been more useful as a rogue but alchemy actually worked out quite well for me. I never made much money with selling potions and elixirs, but once I learned epic gem transmutes I was making good money off of those. Plus with mixology my flasks lasted 2 hours and doubled the AP bonus, giving me an edge in raids as well.

The problem was herbalism. Besides being able to pick a couple frost lotus here and there for my flasks and maybe using lifebloom in dire situations, it was practically useless! I don't pvp a lot so I didn't really need that extra survivability, and as time went by I hardly ever went herb-gathering. Why bother when you can get cheap stacks of herbs at the auction house?

For a while now I've been thinking about switching herbalism out for a more "hardcore" profession. Looking through the armory, anyone who belongs in a serious raid progression guild seems to have 2 crafting professions since they give much more useful bonuses. Enchanting, JC, BS, LW, tailoring all seemed to be popular choices. For a rogue, though, the most common choices were enchanting/LW or LW/JC.

I actually wanted to start JC, since I could cut my own transmuted epic gems and sell them for even more profit. But my pally alt was already at 400 JC so I didn't feel like sinking another 2k gold into that profession. So I went with enchanting. I picked my last herb about a week ago and dropped herbalism altogether, and began levelling enchanting.

The amazing part is how easy (and how expensive) it is to level a profession when you have lots of gold. I basically cleaned out the AH of all the enchanting mats that were available, as well as any cheap green items I could disenchant for mats. When the AH was empty I farmed low-level instances for shards and did easy quests for items to DE. The next day I'd buy out every single dust and shard up for auction and farm some more instances.

So after about a week my enchanting is at 420. I've put about 5k gold into power-levelling it, and now I have +40 attack power on each of my rings! And I'm actually making a small amount of gold from selling enchantment scrolls too. I don't know if I'll ever recover my 5k gold but hey, now I can apply for a hardcore raiding guild without being laughed at for having a gathering profession.

My new goal is to get that mechano-hog, although everyone keeps telling me to save my money for cataclysm. I'll have to level my alchemy by buying all the herbs I need, which I imagine will be quite costly. Sigh. Time to go level an herbalism alt...

Feats of strength

I hear a lot of rumors that some of the classic WoW dungeons will be removed in cataclysm. Kind of like how Naxxramas was "moved" and revamped in Northrend, except some dungeons may not be available at all. I hear lots of people say on trade chat, "LFM Black Temple run, get your achi before it gets taken out in cataclysm!"

Now I don't know if Black Temple will get taken out or not, but even if it did I don't really want to do BT. My old guild (the ex-ex-guild, the fail guild) tried that with a few 80s and a few 70s, and wiped miserably at the Illidari council. For some reason I just didn't find that dungeon to be very fun. I think maybe it was because it was just a little too overwhelming to find your way around that place. And the mobs weren't quite as easy as I thought. When you're ICC epic'ed out you tend to feel rather invincible and nearly being killed by a boss in a level 70 dungeon hurts your ego a bit.

I do know that Wailing Caverns might be taken out. I read on the official WoW site that the player's actions in WC (rescuing Naralex) will change the Barrens into a lush teeming jungle or something. Well, one would suppose that maybe WC will no longer be a dungeon then since you've already accomplished the objective?

Anyways, I've decided to try and clear all the old-school dungeons before cataclysm comes out. While I was levelling up I never got to do most of them. When I turned 80 I did go back and solo most of the lower level ones. A couple nights ago my bf and I did WC together, which was pretty fun. I remember back at level 17 spending 3 hours to clear that place with a full group, only to DC right before the Naralex part. Heh, this time around it took 30 minutes, most of it spent running.

Last night we decided to try Zul'Gurub. I knew even though it was for level 60s, it was a 20man raid dungeon so I'd need some help. My bf came along and our rogue/priest combo made it all the way to Hakkar without any incidents - I even got the rare razzashi raptor mount from Bloodlord Mandokir!!! This is one sweet-looking mount!

At Hakkar we ran into some problems...he mind controls the person with the highest threat, apparently. So I kept getting mind controlled, run off and kill the priest, then the boss would reset because no one would be left to hold aggro on him. After 3 wipes or so we enlisted the help of our friend, an 80 DK. The 3 of us downed Hakkar in about 2 minutes!

I think this week we'll try Scholomance and Stratholme. I've always wanted to complete the tier 1 set (shadowcraft) just for shits and giggles, and I know they drop in those places. Hehe, won't my guildies be surprised when I show up for ICC in full tier 1...

If I had a million dollars

I'd take a month off work and play WoW. Obviously I wouldn't quit my day job - a million isn't quite enough to retire on these days. But gosh, I sure would like to be able to play WoW for days on end without being bothered with work and bedtimes and such.

I now have 4 alts, all fully decked out in heirloom gear and collecting dust in the barrens somewhere. I started all these chars with the intention of trying something new - healing, tanking, caster DPS, etc...and trying new, different professions and level in places I've never quested in.

The thing is, I only get like 2-3 hours per night to play. I log in with my main and it takes at least 2 hours (and sometimes much more) to do my daily random dungeon, do some daily quests, scan the auction house for some deals, do wintergrasp, maybe do a quick PuG or two...and this is on nights I don't raid with the guild. If there's an ICC scheduled, forget about it. I don't even have time to collect my 2 daily frost badges.

So by the time I'm done with my main it's already dangerously close to bedtime. I might log in with one of my alts and attempt to do a quest or two, but of course it's hard to make any progress in 15 minutes of WoW time. I could stay up till 1am and risk going to work the next morning half-asleep but alas, even I know that would be too irresponsible and detrimental to both my career and my relationship. Besides, I just can't function that way anymore (ah the good old days when I could stay up till 3 in the morning playing the sims and still show up for a 9am class).

Oh all the games I'd play if I just had one month to myself to do nothing else - no work, no bedtime, no chores...just one bad-ass quad-core processor gaming PC, a case of diet soda and me. Starcraft II is coming out soon and I'll cry if I can't make time for it.

These pants won't do at all!

I really miss the days when pretty much any item I got from a dungeon was a big upgrade. Like when I first got to northrend and started doing dungeons (before the random dungeon finder I avoided groups like the plague). Pretty much any old +agi leather piece that dropped was bound to be an upgrade from a crappy green quest reward.

But now, I'm getting to the point where I can't just equip any old piece that drops, even if it has better stats. I need to worry about stacking the RIGHT stats, not just agility, agility, agility like I used to (I used to stack stam way back when I was a real noob). Expertise caps, hit caps, poison hit caps, armor penetration and haste, crit rating...it's exhausting keeping track of them all. And trying to juggle all your gear so that you're not over-capping stats means even if a higher ilvl item drops, I can't just equip it! Because then oh no!!! Now I'm under the expertise cap and way overcapped on hit! Do I go spend ~800g to re-gem my gear and tweak my stats, or hold out on upgrading my pants until that exact piece that I desperately need drops another time?

Being a hardcore 80 has its drawbacks! It's nice to go to my level 12 alts and not have to worry about this stuff...OHMYGOD a green item I can equip! Hooray!

Here we go again...

So I changed guilds again...I think this is the 5th time overall, and the 3rd time I've switched guilds for a genuine purpose: to progress further in ICC.

I was looking around for a PuG when I saw "LFM dps ICC25 mostly guild run" - always a good sign, a guild sponsored run is much smoother and better managed than a 100% pug. Of course there's the danger that the guild will ninja your loot but that gives them a bad rep and hey, there's always the chance they'll ninja someone else's loot and not yours! Read my previous post "Are they really ninjas?" on my thoughts concerning ninjas...

Anyways, it was indeed a smooth run. I was the only rogue in the group so there was no danger of losing a roll on a really important drop (ie, dagger). The raid leader seemed really chill, wasn't yelling at anyone or freaking out about people DCing or dying...just seemed like a polite, fun dude. During the second boss I get a whisper from one of the guild guys: "we're short on rogues in our guild - msg me if you want to join us".

It was definitely tempting. I didn't see any Kingslayer titles but I knew this was a pretty big guild and judging from the general gearscores I could tell they had gotten further than my current guild. I told him I'd think about it. I walked away from that run with two pieces of new gear which they graciously insisted I take! After the raid broke up I messaged him back asking for a guild invite. He checked with the officers and presto - I was in a new guild!

Whenever I switch guilds I feel like an asshole. Yes, I pay $15 a month to play and I should do what I like and what makes me happy but still...it's hard to shake off that feeling that you're betraying your old guild. Sure, I didn't know them for that long, a couple months or so, and I was certainly never buddies with them, but still. I changed to their guild so I could progress into ICC and now I'm ditching them for another guild for the same reason. I feel even more guilty now because that was the ONLY reason I left the guild this time. My ex-ex-guild was falling apart whereas my ex-guild is doing fine and actually making some progress in ICC, just not fast enough for me.

I'm sure they understand, but part of you does wonder if they now hate you just a little bit.

And of course, there's a bit of anxiety coming into a new guild. Will you get a spot at the next raid? Especially in 10 mans, if they've already got "regulars", will you get invited to run with them? Will they have alt 10 man runs that you can go on? Or are you doomed to wait around for 25mans week after week?

I know you need to earn your stripes. When you first join a guild there's no guarantees no matter how geared or skilled you are. There will always be older members who seem to get priority just for being the veterans. Somehow in my previous guilds I managed to get to that "veteran" status and there was always a spot reserved for me. But I've seen new people join the guild and complain about not being taken to raids - will that be me? I'm guessing at least for the first month or so, yes. I'll have to resort to more pugs, I suppose.

Then there is a feeling of awkwardness with the old guild members. I swear it's just like running into an ex. Will it be like that with the old guild? But then again I'm still friends with the GM from my first raiding guild. Did I mention that he's back to WoW? We chat for a bit and even did a pug together. It was pretty fun actually, but then again he had also left the old guild too.

I hope it all works out. But hey, if not that's ok too. There's lots and lots of guilds out there and cataclysm is coming out soon so I'll just kill the lich king once I'm level 85! I'll probably be able to solo that bastard by then.

Putricide

I'm happy to announce that my guild has finally downed Rotface. Well, we've actually downed him before, but always after about 2 hours of struggling. But this time, I think the fight "clicked" with everyone and we were able to get him on the second try. And since Festergut is a piece of cake to us, we're now at a point where Putricide is our biggest hurdle in our ICC raid progression.

When a fight clicks, it's a beautiful thing. It truly is. There is a difference between downing a boss out of sheer luck and a well-executed, smooth endeavor. During the former people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, they're screaming on vent, running into fire, into poison goo, into adds...and somehow at the end of the fight the boss is dead and so is half of your raid. You know that is all luck, perhaps even a glitch of some sort.

But when people finally get it and they know what to do, there's a strange sort of serenity. People flow from one spot to another almost as if it's perfectly natural, like water flowing through a riverbed (zen moment). Occasional mistakes are made here and there, but no one is freaking out. The adds come out and are gracefully kited away to be killed out of sight. And vent is dead silent. No raid leaders screaming at you, no tank screaming for heals, no heals screaming about adds...it's absolutely quiet as everyone just functions as one unit. And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing when you're at that point.

Unfortunately we're not quite there with Putricide yet. But I think it's beginning to click. We got him down as far as 55% health...just 20% more and we would've had that fight. Next time, there's always next time...

For Honor!!!

You know, PvP isn't all that bad...I have to admit that my previous opinion on PvP came from: 1. the numerous times I've been ganked by a higher level player, and 2. the four times I was beaten mercilessly in warsong gulch.

I have to admit that the higher level BGs are a lot more fun. I did Strands of the Ancients for the first time and that was highly enjoyable. It felt like an actual battle as opposed to capture the flag - remind me again how capturing the flag will do anything for either Horde/Alliance? Anyways, I liked sitting in the guns and shooting at all those flimsy ally catapults. Mwahaha! Tremble at the might of my projectile fury!!!

And of course, Wintergrasp feels like a giant clusterfuck which is always fun too. I even did Arathi Basin, which was surprisingly fun. I do get a little more anxious because there are less people and all, but it turns out that I *may* not be as horrible at pvp as I previously thought. I was quite surprised at how many people were completely powerless against my clumsy stunlock. I was able to take down plate-wearers, and even brought down a paladain 1-on-1 all by myself! AND she used lay on hands too, so it's like I actually killed two paladins.

It may be that I'm good at pvp, but the much more likely explanations are probably one or more of the following:

1. I got lucky against a few noobish ally players with crappy gear
2. My gear is really really awesome - which I cannot lie, it is pretty badass
3. My fiance was playing with me and was right behind me the whole time healing me

I think it may have a lot to do with #3...I did keep wondering why my health was barely dropping...

Do these pants make me look fat?

Damn, last week was an excellent week for me, as far as loot goes. The guild ran ICC10, and on Lady Deathwhisper a sweet little trinket dropped - whispering fanged skull, +131 crit and chance to increase AP by 1100 on attack!!! No one else wanted it for some reason, not even the DK (although he had needle-encrusted scorpion, +114 crit, so that may have been overkill). I finally had something to replace my +hit rating trinket! Did I mention I was way overcapped on hit? It was somewhere near 700 at one point until I replaced some enchants and gems...

Then on Saurfang the cold-forged ring dropped so I got to swap out the ilvl 245 one. Not so much a big upgrade as far as gear score goes but still nice. I was hoping we'd finally clear the plague wing too since the night was still young (we cleared the lower spire in under an hour) but things sort of took a turn for the worst...let's just say there's drama in every guild. Sigh.

The really nice drop, though, was during an ICC25 pug. The leather boots dropped off Marrowgar and I rolled a 3...and ended up losing it to the druid who rolled 17. So I was pretty pissed. But then Deathwhisper dropped Heartpierce! And I rolled...100!!! I kind of felt bad for the other rogue who was still using his ilvl 232 daggers from ICC heroics but hey, that's how it goes.

I did all my random heroics, my weekly, both VoA raids and even got some ICC25 action, so now I'm up to 75 frost emblems. Just a few more and I can upgrade my stupid helm and bring down my hit rating some more.

What I really need, though, are new pants. Right now I look like my upper half is wearing one set, and my lower half is wearing a different set. It looks really stupid, though not quite a clown suit. Yuck.

Ahoy! To Outland!

My main is a rogue and I love her dearly, but I started a paladin alt a couple months ago. I figured either I could spend time trying to get as many achievement points as I could, or start an alt now that I didn't have much more to do with my main except a few dailies and raiding.

The playstyle is completely different from when I leveled my rogue. As a rogue with puny hit points and armor, I had to constantly stealth and sneak around, trying to catch mobs one-on-one. I could never solo any group quests or bring down elites anywhere near my level.

With my paladin, though, I constantly do my best to aggro as many mobs as I can possibly handle - usually 4 or 5 at a time. Being protection-specced and having heirloom gear helps, yes. But still, it's pretty insane how much more damage I can take as a prot pally, even at low levels. I revisited all the quests that I could never solo with my rogue (king bangalash quest, the silithus deathclasp quest, etc) and easily completed them on the first try. Oh and did I mention I can heal myself, or in emergencies press a button to heal myself to 100% AND like regain 1/4 of my mana? I certainly don't go through potions like I did with my rogue, I can tell you that.

I hit level 58 last night (finally!!!), so I can quest in outland now! I've been dying to run some instances to practice tanking - I actually enjoy it, even though it's a little stressful at times. The only problem is that I've never been very familiar with the old-world dungeons so I only did a few of them...trying to do sunken temple when no one in your party knew where to go...not fun. But I've been run through a few outland dungeons and I'm definitely familiar with most of the Hellfire citadel and Coilfang Reservoir ones. So I'm eager to practice my tanking there. And the gear upgrade from azeroth to outland is a big jump so I'm looking forward to replacing my crappy greens!

Soon, maybe in like a couple weeks if I have the time, I'll be able to get her to northrend where I know ALL the dungeons like the back of my hand. And with being a tank and all, I'll get into dungeons instantly, so I'll just be leveling through dungeons (which in my opinion is quicker than questing due to less downtime...not to mention more fun). Then I'll hit 80 and not be a noob anymore for having just one 80!

WoW...I mean GoW

God of War 3 has been on the store shelves for a while now and I still haven't played it. You know why? I just don't have the time. I only have 2-3 spare hours on any weekday, all of which are spent playing WoW.

I mean, you log in thinking you're only going to do your daily heroic and sign out, but then you check your AH alt, start doing some dailies, check trade chat for any fun PuGs going on...and before you know it you've spent 3 hours straight playing wow.

Anyways, my original point is that I really want to play God of War 3. It looks so good. 1 and 2 were AMAZING games. I don't even really like button-smashing action games normally but GoW took the whole genre to new heights. Stunning graphics and sounds, smooth gameplay, clever puzzles, nice storyline...but most importantly, the controls are so brutally satisfying. Pressing the right combos mean you can rip the head right off of something, and the way the camera zooms in and follows your every bone-snapping, blood-spraying, organ-slashing movements...it's gaming nirvana. Only once every few years do you see a game like GoW, that takes a done-to-death genre and makes an awesome game that you just don't want to put down. Even when you beat it, you wanna beat it again...on hard mode.

I'll probably break down and buy GoW soon...it just means I'll have to split my time between two things somehow. And I still haven't played Final Fantasy 13 (I've played every single FF game except FF11 so...). Somehow I will fit all this into my life. Goodbye, weekends!

The inevitable

Wow...so I checked my old guild's status on wowarmory.com (I practically live on that site btw...is that sad or what? It's pretty much facebook for your wow character). Practically half the people have left the guild and scattered into other guilds.

I heard through the grapevine that they're "merging" with another guild. They're planning on making the original guild a "levelling guild" and then when people are geared enough they'll be invited to the "raiding guild" - ie the one they're merging with, and be able to raid ICC.

I scoffed pretty hard upon hearing this. I forsee that in a month or so there just won't be anyone left in the old guild. Who wants to stick around knowing that they've been "benched", so to speak? Plus, ICC isn't just about gear. Based on what I know about the general skill level of some of the colossal idiots I used to raid with, I know some of them couldn't survive in ICC with full tier 10 gear. The huntard with the empty gem sockets and no enchants, the warrior who used to taunt off the tank for funsies, the pally who couldn't do the one task he was asked to do (dispel), the mage who liked to stand in the fire...the list goes on. Don't get me wrong, some of them were decent players, but they've already moved onto different guilds now (and are probably raiding ICC).

Oh god, I sound like an elitist jerk now. Hey, it's ok to suck at the game...as long as you're not bringing other people down with you. That's when drama starts. And NO ONE likes guild drama.

PvP vs. PvE

Heh, the word "versus" is used three times in that title. Technically it reads: Player versus player versus Player versus Environment. Confusing!

Anyways, up until recently I've avoided any sort of PvP conflict like the plague. Perhaps I still have traumatic memories of being ganked for hours at Tarren Mill, but I hate PvP. It's too stressful for me - players don't act in any sort of predictable way like mobs do. They don't go after the tanks, they go after the healers (a very smart strategy...you'd think the mobs would figure that out too). Players fight smart, they can drink potions, they move around a lot as opposed to most mobs who are completely stationary (another good strategy...why stand there while I stab away?) And the worst part of all, mobs don't /spit and /laugh at you after killing you. Grrr.

Obviously, avoiding PvP entirely is impossible. Especially when you play on a pvp server like I do...but I've done a pretty impressive job of avoiding confrontation whenever possible. Many a time I've gotten a glimpse of an ally (even if they're a few levels below me) and ran out of there as fast as I could on my mount, and didn't even dare returen to the same zone for an hour.

Battlegrounds are a bit better than the random world pvp (ie, gankfest). At least the level brackets prevent blatantly unfair situations and there's sort of a "goal" besides just killing other players. I do admit the occasional Alterac Valley is kind of fun because there are so many people per side. I just follow the crowd and when I see an easy kill - like when I see a stunned clothie at half health or a 6-on-1 fight - I jump in, put in a few hits and move on. Shameful, yes, I know. But it's the only way I can pvp without getting an anxiety attack.

Some people say it's weird I don't pvp given that I play on a heavily populated pvp server, AND I happen to be a rogue - the king of all pvp classes. But raiding has always appealed to me much more than pvp (and probably always will). Recently, however, I've been "forced" to start pvp. My fiance (who practically does nothing but pvp) has been saying that once he hits 80, we'll start doing arenas. I've secretly dreaded the day he turned 80...which he did a few days ago. And so it begins...

We've started doing wintergrasp together, which actually I really enjoy and look forward to now. It's like Alterac Valley...on crack. There are like 100 players! I've only played offense (I heard no one ever wins defense on my server) which rocks - you've got like 100 players at the fortress waiting for the siege vehicles, right? Usually a few ally players venture out (because they're idiots I guess??) and immediately get slaughtered by the bloodthirsty people waiting for them. Then when the walls go down, it's a total fucking madhouse - everyone is off grabbing as many kills as possible. I go after any clothie I can find, mutilate, kidney shot, mutilate, and BOOM they're dead. Then a DK will death grip me and kick my ass, but I rez, run in, and repeat this whole chaotic process again.

I was planning on spending my emblems for heirloom gear to start an alt, but I spent it all on pvp gear instead. I figure if I'm going to be doing this, might as well do it right. Besides, um, I suck at pvp. Trying to do arenas in my pve gear (as awesome as it is) would be suicide.

Best case scenario: we do arenas, we end up doing pretty well, we're both happy.
Worst case scenario: we suck at arenas, I go back to raiding full-time, my fiance finds another partner. We're both happy.

There's a pecking order here

Or should I say, a healing order.

Last night I found myself back in Ulduar with the new guild. I wasn't quite sure why they wanted to do Ulduar because the gear really wouldn't be useful to anyone, but they explained that they wanted to clear the room with Freya and collect all the frost lotus that respawn every 30 min. Genius!

We made it past Flame Leviathan - it was a piece of cake, and I even got the achievement for not repairing the vehicles. I don't think they even downed the towers before FL...pretty impressive. We got XT-002, Kologarn, Freya, Hodir, Auriaya, and Thorim in quick succession, all on the first try! Mimiron was not so easy, but we only gave it a couple tries before people were tired and had to go to bed. I think we would've definitely downed that sucker if we'd kept going though.

The only problem was I kept dying. Quite often. I got the light bomb during XT-002 and went down. Then Kologarn gripped me within the first 10 seconds of the fight and I died. And then I managed to stay alive for all the other bosses, but I think I died at least 3-4 more times on the trash pulls.

When I get hit for 25k by some exploding trash or I get caught in an AoE at half health, ok I probably deserve to die for jumping in without thinking. But when I died during XT-002 and Kologarn, I can honestly say it was not my fault. I have no control over those "special attacks", and all that can be done is to heal the bejesus out of me...which no one seemed to be doing.

Yes, I know the healer can only heal so many people and all, but this was never a problem in the old guild, because I was always top healing priority after the tanks. Everyone always made sure I was topped off at full, always had HoTs on me, always the first to get a battle rez if people went down. Not to toot my own horn here, but I was usually doing more DPS than anyone else, sometimes doing twice as much as the next guy. So yeah, keeping me alive was important.

I guess I can't really blame the new guild for healing the "veteran" members over me. Especially when I jump into fire like an idiot most of the time with low armor and low health. And maybe it was just bad luck that I happened to get the light bomb or got stone-gripped. And I guess healers need to play with you for a bit to really get a sense of what type of player you are, and know how much or how little healing you require (I require lots!).

Well, tonight is ICC and I hope I get a spot. I was putting some pretty good numbers up on the recount charts, even if I was dying left and right. No longer at the #1 spot all the time, but hey I've got something to work towards.

Are they really ninjas?

I've been pugging a LOT lately. Every Tuesday I make it a point to run vault 10 and 25 just in the hopes of getting the tier 10 gloves or legs. I've yet to see a single rogue piece drop though, but at the least I score badges out of the run. I also try to pug ToC 25 - although last week I won the roll for the 1.80 speed dagger (gouge of the frigid heart! Won it over another rogue who rolled 93 by rolling 98!) and this week I won a kickass belt, so I may not need any more gear from ToC. We'll see though.

Anyways, we're doing ToC25, right? After the twin val'kyr are defeated, the raid leader (who had been a real asshole in vent the whole time so I muted him) says roll on the gear. I won the dagger, then the second item was death's choice, some hot caster trinket which everyone wants, apparently. Well, he looted that, the crusader orb, and the trophy of the crusade and left the raid. People were squawking and QQing about how he was a ninja.

Then last night I did ICC 25. We had a great group and I was hoping to make it past Putricide and all that, but after Saurfang the raid leader loots Deathbringer's Will and left the raid. Again people were QQing all over trade chat about what a ninja he was.

And here's my opinion: is it really ninja'ing? I mean, the raid leader is the guy who had to spam trade chat for 30 min to get 25 people together for a raid, he had to keep track of all the spots that were filled, he had to inspect everyone's gear to make sure they didn't suck, he had to organize the vent, he had to loot and give out the raid warning for people to roll...I mean that's a lot of annoyance. I won't say it's hard work, really, but it's annoying to have to do all those things. I tried to organize a 10 man raid once and that was hard enough. I really feel like the person who did all the annoying things to get a 25 man raid going, deserves a nice prize at the end of it. So people shouldn't be QQing about what a ninja he is - if you want that item, make your own raid and ninja it yourself!

Of course I might be the one QQing if the raid leader ninjaed some sweet rogue item from the raid, but given that none of the items taken were of any use to me, it's easy for me to stand back and say these things. But honestly, what do you expect when you give someone 100% of the rights to loot everything? Sometimes life ain't fair.