Screenshot Friday

Goddess watch over me

Well ok then

I had a completely different topic that I was going to write about today, but drama reared its ugly head last night.  Since this is still on the top of my head it is for the best that I just get it out.

That’s why I have a blog right?

Wednesday nights we try to get into ICC and knock out a few bosses so that we can start at the hard stuff on Saturday night while we are fresh.  I was excited because we had 8 sign ups going in.  When I logged over around 7 pm (10 pm server) I thought that I had like 15 mins until we started.  Nope, raid was scheduled for 7:15, oops!  Ok invites out!  I ended up with 6 people.  Shit.  Zakk backed out because he had school and was tired.  Ok that is one more ranged I need to find.  I looked through my friend’s list, my favorite DK was online.  I asked him if he wanted to come, yay ok just need 2 ranged.  Our warlock wasn’t online yet.  At this point it is like 7:10 ish so we decided we were going to wait for him.  I get us a hunter and an ele shammy and had a shadow priest as back up in case Ara didn’t make it.  I switched over to my mage that just sits outside of ICC to make tables for us and popped in to make a table for everyone else.  When I switched back I saw that the ele shammy was gone.  Ok no prob, I whispered the shadow priest and brought him in.  It is now about 7:25 ish and we are 10 mins behind starting time.  Still no Ara.  We decide to give him a few more mins since not everyone was in the instance yet.  7:30 rolls around and I ask everyone what they want to do.  Do they want to wait for him or have me go back to dal and get another ranged dps.  Everyone tells me to get another dps.  So off to Dal I go and nabbed a boomkin, who I think we have ran with before.  Head back over, we buff and start clearing trash.

We are on the first pack of trash pulls, it is around 7:44 (30 mins after start time) and Ara logs into vent.  Being the snarky person I am I say “Oh look it is the warlock who lost his raid spot.”  Bad choice of words apparently.  He is all pissy that we didn’t wait for him.  Said that he was only 4 mins late and it was a dick move to not wait for him.  He signed up to go.  He then logged out of vent and logged into the game.  That is when he started whispering me and telling me how shitty it was of us to do this.  I reminded him that the raid started at 10:15 not 10:30.  I even told him that I got the times confused a bit.  I told him that we had waited for him and that we had just replaced him shortly before he logged in.  He stopped replying to me.  The priest I had picked up said that his primary spec was healing so I asked him in whisper what healing spec he was; Disc.  Ok that could work, him and Kate could heal the tanks and Vel can raid heal.  I whispered Ara and asked him if he wanted to come in.  We were still on trash, he could easily come in.  I would step out have the priest take my healing spot.  I wasn’t going to kick a pug or ask someone else to step out.  He wouldn’t reply.

I tried several other times to get him to reply and answer me on if he wanted to come in.  At this point we had downed Marrowgar.  I won the healing trinket, (go me!) and was pretty set for the night so I was even more amiable to stepping down.  I asked in Officer chat if Andrew and/or Vel would be up for raid leading.  Vel has been dealing with a lot of health issues so he has been kind of out of it so he said no.  Andrew said that he could probably do it.  They asked why and I filled them in a bit.  Before we got to Lady D I asked Andrew to talk to Ara since he wouldn’t reply to me.  Ara however was in Ony so Andrew said to forget him.  The hunter that was with us said he needed the fights explained so I gave a quick recap and we took her down.

We wiped once on the gunship because only 2 dps went over to the other ship to kill the mage.  This meant that Ness got creamed by Saurfang and we of course wiped because the mobs were out of control over on the other ship so Dily couldn’t get back over.  He also didn’t have his rocket pack equipped.  >.>

Run back and then the best part of the night happened.

Andrew comes back up and says that he has the “no ship” bug.  I told him I could see him and would pay his repair bill if he tried to jump on the ship.  He is on his polar bear and heads towards the ship.  He then runs up to the ship and jumps.  I stood there and watched him just sink through and die.  It was the most hilarious thing I had seen in a long time.  I literally couldn’t stop laughing.  I even got short of breath I was laughing so hard.  I was still laughing when he came back up and I opened a trade window to give him some money.  He wouldn’t take it and said he got no durability loss.  I told him it was worth the gold just to see that.

We buffed back up and this time knocked out the fight.  Get ready for Saurfang, I tell everyone what to do, tell them where to stand and we go.  The beasts come out and the shadowpriest gets chewed on.  Does he run?  Nope, just stood there and got nommed.  I’m yelling at him in vent to move and telling everyone to kill the beasts, don’t let them touch you.  CC them, kite them, whatever they have to do to get them where they aren’t hitting people.  Several times the beasts didn’t leave the platform and instead were chewing on the melee and tanks.  Again I am yelling in vent to kill the beasts.  Normally we get our one mark when he is around 50% and have him killed before he gets a 2nd mark.  He was at 74% when we got our first mark.  It was of course Kate.  I swear he just loves her.  He marks her every week.  So now I have one dead dps and my other healer is marked.  The beasts are still nomming on people or staying up on the platform.  Shit, Kate died.  I cannot solo heal this fight.  I am NOT that uber.  I would have asked Vel to toss out some heals, but at this point there were only 2 ranged dps left alive so I needed him to dps those beasts down.  When the tanks went down I ran out to the ship hoping to hide, which I succeeded in.  Everyone else was dead.

As we are coming back the hunter says that he has to go.  I notice a friend is online and I ask him if he is willing to come help us down Saurfang.  He says yeah he can bring his hunter for just that fight.  We buff up and I let him know what I want done.  I remind everyone to NOT GET HIT by the beasts.  We go back in and while we did better than the first attempt we still had issues with the beasts nomming the melee and tanks >.> but at least the ranged did better on CC and getting the beasts down faster.  The 3rd time proved to be the charm and we got him down.  I still am not sure how it happened.  Our friend the hunter got the first mark.  I tried to keep him alive, but after so long the damage being done by the mark is just more than can be healed when there are only 2 healers.  He went down.  With his dps gone we just weren’t getting Saurfang down fast enough and a 2nd mark pops up.  I get it this time.  Shit.  Again, I tried to keep myself alive.  I managed to stay alive until right when the first tank went down.  Then as I am dead on the ground I see the other tank go down.  I don’t even know who was left alive other than Andrew, but Saurfang went down.  Apparently Andrew had tanked him the last little bit and we somehow got him down. Woot!

Westan had to leave but luckily Matt came online at that point so we made him get on his hunter and come kill the trash and the mini boss with us.  Ara still has not replied to me.  At this point he is on his druid tank and doing heroics.  I send him a whisper asking him if he is still not talking to me, after I don’t get a reply I send him another one saying “guess not.”  I then get an angry whisper about how he had a shitty day at work, got stuck being there late, rushed to get home for the raid for all of this to happen.  I am talking in O chat about this to Andrew and Vel.  I double checked the raiding rules (which I had written weeks ago) and the #1 rule is “Be on time.  If you are not on time we will replace you with someone else even if that happens to be a PuG.”  We didn’t have to wait for him.  We did wait for him though.  We waited longer than we should have before replacing him.  Vel then takes this opportunity to change the guild message of the day to something about by signing up for the raids you have accepted the raiding rules.  Ara then gquit.  Immediately after that he starts spewing at me in whispers about how dickish that GMOTD was and how it was just the last straw.  While all this is happening, we are fighting the first mobs in the upper spire.  The chick is not going down and we are just getting swarmed with the copies.  My mind is only half there as I am dealing with the angry whispers.  We wiped.  I take partial blame for that one, but not full blame.  The adds were left to beat the crap out of everyone and not everybody was focusing on her so the copies healed her back up.

Meanwhile in gchat several other people who had not been online earlier are all confused as to why Ara had left.  As we are explaining somewhat Vel is asking if he can be a total dick.  I replied “go ahead, why not” and he gkicked Ara’s warlock.  I thought he was just going to make a snarky comment, guess I was wrong.  I don’t know what happened when Ara signed back on to his lock because I had logged off Bloodhoof and our vent.

I logged over to Drak’Tharon all upset over the entire night.  I popped into SR’s vent to see if anyone was there.  Several people were down in one of the group channels so I just stayed up on top not wanting to nose in on their group stuff.  Tir was also in vent and he popped up to chat and I just fell apart.

I might pick on Tir, but I do like him.  He is a great guy, just takes some getting used to. 😉

He was really awesome.  He listened to me go off and just kept whispering me to stop and breathe.  If I hadn’t been so upset I would have laughed.  He reassured me that as the RL and an officer I had done the right thing.  We had rules and I stuck to them.

I have the VERY bad habit of taking everything personally and getting my emotions involved.  For example as I am writing this I am upset all over again and crying.  Go figure.  It is something I am very aware of and just cannot seem to get better at.  Maybe this means I just shouldn’t be in any form of leadership position, who knows.

We ended up talking about my post yesterday.  Apparently he got a lot of teasing from everyone about it.  Good thing he can handle it.  As I told him, it isn’t so much that we disagree on the topic, we just have completely different viewpoints.  This isn’t a bad thing, but it can cause problems if the parties involved aren’t aware.  In all honesty I am *really* not all that worried about being in a group with him leading.  The dude knows his shit.  I just have to give him hell.  I do it cause I care, truly. 🙂

I just now got a really nice email from Andrew checking to make sure I was ok.  Thanks hun!  He too reassured me that we did the correct thing last night and that things just got blown way out of wack.

I am not really looking forward to logging in tonight, but I will be there.  We have a really easy weekly raid quest and should be able to get 2 if not 3 groups through it and still tackle ToC.  We’ll see how things go.

Wish me luck.

What is your raiding game?

A recent conversation in vent and a post on WoW.com has me thinking about this.

Echo of Fate is a 10 man guild.  We raid, but we are not a raiding guild.  I am immensely proud of our raiding achievements.  We have said that we want to be able to kill The Lich King, but until recently I never thought that we would actually do it.  We have always just been behind the curve.  When everyone was raiding in Ulduar we were still in heroics and pugging Naxx.  When people were ROFLstomping ToC we were just starting to test the waters in Ulduar.  When people were banging their heads in ICC, we were running heroics and Ulduar.  Yes, Ulduar.  We only fairly recently ventured into ToC and Ony.  Now we can go in and clear those out fairly quickly.

Our runs in ICC have been getting better each time we go in.  The last two times we have gone in we have one shot the first three bosses and two shot Saurfang.  Last week we managed to take down Festergut.  At least 10 other guilds on our server, who have been raiding ICC a lot longer than we have, still have yet to take him down.  We came up from no where and are slowly making progress.  I am hoping that we can keep our steady group of raiders and go on to take down the Lich King.  It is my goal.

The other guild I belong to is Shadow Rising.  They are a raiding guild.  They currently do 10 man progression and are trying out 25 man ICC.  In fact they were in there last night.  They aren’t fully fleshed out for 25 man ICC and still have to use PuGs but they will be raiding ICC fairly soon.  Their progression team (team peanut butter as I like to call them) is on the Blood Princes.  The other 10 man team (team chocolate :D) has cleared up to Saurfang (I think).  When I finally hit 80 and get my gear going I will get to join team chocolate (assuming I am made a raider) and raid with them.  To this effort I have been spending most of my time leveling my baby lock.

No she does not need to wand faster either! >.>

While in SR’s vent the other day, several people (mostly Tir) were talking about the 25 man progression of the guild.  Tir comes from a high end raiding guild.  It is what he does.  I come from a lower end 10 man raiding guild (see above).  We have two very different views on the end game.  I want to raid with friends and have fun all while beating the ever living shit out of a boss.  I’ve been lucky because my friends I raid with know how to raid well.  I know there are a lot of people who don’t have that luxury.  Being in a guild similar to what Tir is used to is almost anathema to me.  I play to have fun, to escape, not to give myself more stress.

When I think of 25 man progression raiding I get a headache.  Ari called it herding kittens, but I think of it more like dealing with a ton of whiny, bratty 8-10 year olds.  If you have ever had to deal with kids at that age then you can see where I am going with this.  Fun just doesn’t seem to come into play with this set-up.

Now before someone chimes in about how I haven’t done 25 mans and therefore have no real bearing on how they work or how they don’t; know that I am keeping an open mind in regards to 25 mans with SR.  I knew going in that it was their goal.  I just need to wait and see what it really turns out to be like.

On to my other thoughts running around in my head.

The WoW.com article spotlighted a 10 man strict progression guild and it got me thinking about the disparity in raiding rewards.  All the special stuff drops in 25 man.  Legendary weapons, trophies and primordial saronite just to list a few.  You HAVE to be in a 25 man raid to see these things.  Sure you could pug them, but if you aren’t the guild that started the pug you can forget keeping the items or even getting a fair shot at them.  Very imbalanced to me.

Blizzard opened up 10 man raiding because of the high praise they got for Kara and ZA.  It also opened up a lot of the content to people who had problems creating 25 man raids.  Despite all of that, they still treat 10 mans as extra raid IDs for 25 man raiding guilds.  This leads people to think that 25 mans are where it is at and that 10 mans are just easy mode raiding.  I don’t know about you, but in the 25 mans I have pugged, I could have fallen asleep (even being a healer) and no one would notice.  In 10 mans, you can’t have someone sleeping.  As a result you become (hopefully) a much more reactive player and can pull kills instead of wipes.  One of the comments on WoW.com said that all 25 man raids have a core of 10-15 people who know what they are doing with the rest being essentially dead weight.  I tend to agree with that comment in theory.  This is further backed up by another comment Tir made about getting a few more people raid ready so that the others could be carried though.

Wait a moment here.  Why should you just carry people through?  Why should a raid be made around the idea that you will HAVE to carry people through?  That puts unfair stress on the people who know what they are doing.  It also ties in nicely with my ideas of 25 mans.  They aren’t “better” than 10 mans, they just allow more people to be carried.  Most of the people who are the most vocal about 25 mans being better are usually the ones being carried.  You put those same people in a 10 man and their obvious short comings are still there.  They still stand in the fire.  They don’t switch targets.  Their dps is sub par.  Yet you are the scrub because you are in a 10 man raid.  Yeah, uh huh, like I believe that load of crap.

Tir did make a comment that I agree with: 25 man ICC is not the place to learn to raid.  If you haven’t mastered the ability to not stand in the bad or how to switch targets correctly so that the RL and/or healers don’t yell at you to get off the boss or move.  Here is a tip: WHEN THERE ARE ADDS OR NASTY THINGS THAT ATTACK YOUR PARTY MEMBERS: KILL THEM/IT!  DO NOT ASSUME SOMEONE ELSE WILL DO IT.  SWITCH TARGETS!

>.>

Unless you have been specifically told to stand in something that is different than the regular floor, your best bet is to move and move fast.  Don’t wait for your channeled spell to finish.  GET THE FUCK AWAY.

It is really that simple.

Now I’ve gone and made myself pissy.  Note to self – Talking about stuff that gets you ranting is not a good idea when you have stopped drinking soda and haven’t taken your pills for 3 weeks.

I am so full of it that even a mountain looks small

Lying to my boss is seriously almost 2nd nature at this point.  Yes this is bad, but frankly the man is gone 75% of the time and what he doesn’t know doesn’t hurt me.  😀

Sorry for the late post but he was in the office today after being gone for 4 days.  He is leaving tomorrow morning for the rest of the week too.  This means he has stayed at work all damn day and kept me busy.  Thus late post is late.

I’ve been feeling guilty lately in regards to my little brother.  He finally started playing WoW and I am never around to play with him.  He made a character on Bloodhoof since that is where I have money and resources.  The problem comes about that I am over on Drak’Tharon leveling my warlock.  I have apologized to him about it and he said it is ok, then turns around and asks me to level a character with him.  He said that the old world is virtually empty and there isn’t really anyone to play with.  There are a few problems with this.  One – on Bloodhoof I don’t have any more free slots and I don’t want to delete any of my toons.  This means that he would need to get to the level of one of them so we could play together.  Two – I am currently trying to level my warlock to 80 then get her geared up to raid.  I really don’t have the time to level a toon with him.  Three – I REALLY don’t want to level a whole new toon until I get the warlock finish.

He was going to make a toon on Drak’Tharon last night, even had me ask Arioch what their guild needed.  Then he changed his mind and said that since I really wasn’t situated there (meaning having cash to give him) he said he could wait for me to get to 80 then we could roll new toons together.  Assuming he doesn’t expect me to do nothing but play that toon with him, it could work.  Set aside specific times where we play, assuming I am not raiding of course.

I tried to level last night, but Tir was bored so that meant he decided he was taking me through Kara.  At first I was excited because that means I would be able to get the Mongoose enchant.  Foolishly I thought we were only going to do the first 2 bosses then I could go back to leveling and get my random done for the day (gotta start on those badges somewhere).  Yeah that isn’t what happened.  He had intended to do the whole place.  Since he is a fail DK tank (I kid . . .  not really ;-)) I kept dying.  He is a level 80 killing level 69-71 mobs.  I shouldn’t be pulling aggro off him.  I died so many times it stopped being funny.  Luckily we had Del on his holy pally so I didn’t have to corpse run like mad.  Tir of course blamed the fail lock, but we all know who the real culprit is. 😉

The best part was him crying for me to come help him kill shit.

Man I could sit and pick on Tir all day.  😀

When we got to the 2nd half of Kara we tricked Ari, Doz and Orange into coming in and finishing up the instance with us.  Where I promptly outrolled Ari on an enchant that dropped, thus earning the title of ninja.

Just for those out of the loop, when you beat out someone else’s roll on an item that they want, you are a ninja.  That is the rule.

Tir is a ninja too.  Just ask Soth.  😀

I am like 2 bars away from 73.  I need to get her over that hump, get her 2 badges and move into Dragonblight.  I still have all the D.E.T.H.A. quests to finish up and the few scourge ones left in the buffalo village.  I still haven’t made it up to the northern camp or finished up the mage stuff on the Amber ledge.  Good thing the quests are still yellow.  I do want to see the Horde version of the Wrathgate.  It will be awesome to see both sides of that fight.

I have another post churning around in my head but I need to work it out a bit more before I pop it out.  Hopefully it will be out in the next day or so.

See what we did there?

Oh what is this?

No we are not dead, dead, DEAD, fucker

 

Yes we finally took down Festergut.  This moved us up from being ranked #81 on wowprogress.com to #71. 😀

No there wasn’t a naked bug going on, Ara decided to take his clothes off. 

See! The clothes are there!

 

We managed to pull it off with 9 guildies, which was awesome.  The hunter there nabbed the bow off Lady D.  He tells us at the beginning of the raid that he is looking for a raiding guild.  We told him that we weren’t a raiding guild.  We just raided.  He didn’t bring it up again during the entire run.  As awesome as his dps was, he didn’t exactly listen to all instructions, so I am not really all that keen on asking him back.  In fact I didn’t even put him on my friend list.

Loot was had by several people.  Sadly we had to shard 2 items.  Kate made out quite nicely.  The healer trinket dropped off Marrowgar and Vel won it.  He looked over his stuff and decided that he’d rather keep what he had so he gave it to Kate.  Then when we knocked out Saurfang Jr the staff dropped.  Despite Zakk rolling on the healer staff (no hit = healer staff) Kate won the roll and now can get rid of her ilvl 200 offhand.

Guess what?  Mis got the shield from the Gunship battle.  Huzzah!!  Now he won’t have to farm HoR for the other shield.  Oh and he can get rid of the ilvl 200 one he had before.

Andrew nabbed a ring, Shavok got the mail boots off Festergut, Auralio got a cape for his off spec and I nabbed the leather bracers off Festergut.  Aren’t they nice? 😀

We took out the mini boss to get our extra frost then came back and tried a couple times on Rotface.  I know that he is a tough fight.  Hell Shadow Rising wiped 44 times on him before they got him down.  After seeing him though, I am confident that we will get him down.  We just need to work on our coordination.  When we hit him up it was late and people were about to pass out.  Lots of movement in that fight.  I think I might change the enchant on my boots for it.  Every little bit helps.

I am finding more and more that all I want to do in the game right now is to raid ICC and to level my warlock.  This means that I am rarely on Bloodhoof.  Now that my brother has started playing I feel even more bad about not being around.  He joined my server just to have me not there to even talk to.  On the other hand I am now 72 on my warlock and I just want to get to 80.  I should probably spend more time on Bloodhoof.  Ehh well I guess I will figure it out eventually.

Anyway – Grats to Echo of Fate!  We are now 5/12 and hopefully we can get 6/12 this week 😀

Screenshot Friday

It was "this" big

Why do you play – part deux

Continuing from yesterday, I will talk today about the other reasons I play.

The gameplay has sucked me in since the beginning.  I had never played a game like WoW before.  The movement in game took a while for me to learn.  Andrew still teases me about not being able to swim.  Swimming was the bane of my early months.  I couldn’t figure out how to get underwater and then I would drown once I did figure it out.  At one point he threatened to come over to my apartment at like 9 pm at night to show me how to swim under water.  It was said in the tone of voice that your mom used when she was furious at you and if she had to come over there you were going to regret it.  Yeah I learned how to swim underwater pretty quickly.

Everything was so different from what I was used to that it was a novelty.  Even now, almost 2 years later I am still finding things that keep it being a novelty for me.  Even if it is a simple as finding a tree in Felwood that has teeth and drools.  I get excited and talk about it.  Then I take a picture and share it with all of you!  Yes I am just that sharing of an individual. 😀

As I mentioned yesterday I wanted to raid with my guildies from the get go.  The fact that I am now raid leading them in Icecrown is just mind boggling.  Who would have thought that the nub player who couldn’t swim underwater is now telling people to “not stand in the neon green shit” and to “quit dpsing the boss and kill those adds.”  The most boggling part is they listen to me.  Or at least make me believe that they listen to me, then make fun of me.  Yes I feel the love.  To prove my love for them I play such wonderful things like banana phone and Richard Cheese just to get the mood right.  Several of them hate me now for this, but I still think they secretly want me to play the songs more.  Just a feeling I have. *evil grin*

Moving on . . .

Raiding is a blast, but can suck so hard when you do nothing but wipe over and over again.  I am so very new to the whole raiding scene so I haven’t exactly gotten used to wiping over and over again.  I still get pissy over it.  I think the funny thing is I would rather attempt new bosses at the end of a successful run than do them when we freshly start out.  It almost feels like we are more successful when we do things that way.  I also could just be delirious by the end of the night and think things are going super well when in fact they aren’t.  It is always a possibility.

ICC is the first time, outside of being a newbie tree, where I have had a steady challenge in healing.  I have had to go back and look at my healing methods and change things.  I think our biggest set back on our healing is we don’t quite trust that the others will be able to pull off their jobs.  For example:  Kate is assigned the MT, Vel is given the OT and back up raid heals and I have raid heals and back up on tanks if they need it.  See the overlapping?  I see bubbles going up on the raid (Kate), I put HoTs up on the tanks and spam nourish when they drop in health and Vel just chain heals like a mad man.  None of us are “truly” just doing what we were assigned to do.  I don’t know if it is because we are in a mentality from 5 mans where we have to keep ALL the bars green, or if we just are trying to help out the other healers.  The result is a TON of overhealing.  I am not talking about just a bit of overhealing that happens with HoTs being overridden, I am talking about a metric crapton of overhealing.  Yes it is that bad.  Ah well that is meat for another post.  My point (yes I had one :p) was I have these things to think about where I never did before.

I never knew I liked puzzles like this.  Huh, who knew?

Ultimately there are many things that keep people playing.  I think we all have to agree though that the one thing that keeps us all pushing ourselves is the purple pixels.

Don’t deny it.

You did it for the purplz.

Why do you play?

I have been thinking about this question a lot lately.  Why am I playing this game instead of doing something else?  Is it the people, the gameplay, the raiding challenges or is it the purple pixels?

Some days it is all about the people.  A real life friend (Andrew) got me hooked to this game.  He bugged/begged me for months to come play with him.  I managed to hold him off for almost a year.  To be fair the first part of that was him trying to get me to play Final Fantasy Online with him before he switched to WoW.  At the time I didn’t understand why he wanted me to come play with him so much.  I know better now.

I used to listen to him and his friends talk about in game experiences and I felt so left out of the circle.  They were all raiding in TBC and excited over the things they were seeing and doing.  It made me want to be a part of it.

When I was first hooked I spent an inordinate amount of time just looking around and learning about the new world I was in.  I made so many characters.  At one point I had two gnome warriors (I know, I know) who were identical except for their hair color.  Each day that I would play would see me playing a different character.  I didn’t want anything to do with a guild.  I was under the impression that guilds were nothing but hotbeds of drama.  That they told you how you had to play and you were left with no personal choices in the game.  No I couldn’t tell you where I got these ridiculous ideas from.

Andrew finally got me convinced to join his guild.  At first I joined on my rogue Tristianah.  Yes at one point in time I liked playing a rogue.  I like to think of this time as being innocent to the world.  I had no idea about stats, rotations or even what I was really supposed to do.  I would start each fight by pulling the mob to me using my throwing knife.  Stealth?  I didn’t know how to use it other than to pick pockets.  I was very unhappy to find out I couldn’t pick the pockets of guards in the cities.  At that time I had no idea whose pockets I could actually pick.  Ahh the early times.  Anyway, I joined up on my rogue and then immediately stopped playing her.  I had suddenly decided I wanted to play my druid.  Ok so now the druid got invited to the guild.  A week later, bored.  Oh look my hunter!  Boom, another guild invite.  It went on like this for quite some time.  The only character I kept out of the guild was my paladin Jacquebear because I had made her my bank toon.  It wasn’t long before I was listening in on their vent while they raided in Kara.  Right then I decided that I wanted to raid with them.  They sounded like they were having so much fun.  I knew that I was missing out on a lot just from all of the laughing everyone kept doing.

I have since become part of the raiding team.  I am an officer and raid leader.  I have said it before and I will say it again:  I have amazingly awesome guildies.  We might not be the top guild on the server (#81 for 10 man progression, out of 83 >.>) but damn if we don’t rock at what we do.  The current content is kicking our asses, this is true, but I have full confidence that we will be able to beat it.  Each time we go into ICC we get better and I am not just talking about gear.  We have a solid core of about 6-8 raiders and each time we raid we just get better working with each other.  I cannot wait to take down the Lich King with these people.

On the other side of the pond, as it were, are my horde guildies.  I am still very new to these people, but they have made me so welcome and it makes me wish I had moved a toon to play with them sooner.  Del and Orange were the first to befriend me and have helped me so much it is just mind boggling.  Zambra and Tel were the next two to really make me feel welcome, even though Zambra DPSes with his wand on his warlock.  On Sunday when everyone else was raiding ICC, it was just Tel and I left in the guild not raiding.  He helped me out in Nagrand with all the PITA group quests.  Tel thank you so so very much for your help!  Zambra is totally awesome because he gave me a bunch of really expensive enchanting mats to get the last few old world points I needed.  I seriously cannot thank you enough for that and I will repay you for the mats!  I am still a bit too much in awe of Arioch and Soth to talk to them much, but they have been nothing but nice when I have.  All the other guildies (Zug, Arvash, Dozzer, Pie, Sorak and many others who I can’t remember their names >.>) have been easy to talk to and joke with.  The knowledge that should I get camped by an Alliance jerk; I would have people willing to come kill him over and over again, is warming to say the least.

Just a warning to any Alliance on Drak’Tharon that read my blog.  If you kill a nub blood elf warlock in the guild Shadow Rising, Zug will come hunt you down.  If you aren’t scared of Zug, you should be.  My Alliance characters on Bloodhoof are scared of Zug.  That should tell you something.  Chuck Norris is a flower compared to Zug.

Just saying.

Even though I have wonderful guildies, even they aren’t the main reason I play.  Sometimes I just have to get away from them for a while.  I used to “escape” from Bloodhoof by playing my blood elf warlock on Undermine.  Now she is on Drak’Tharon in Shadow Rising.  I can still “hide” from Bloodhoof on there, but then where do I hide from Drak’Tharon?  Sorry not going to tell you.  😀

Yes World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer game, but that does not mean you HAVE to be playing with people all the time.  There are too many other things that can be done solo.  Hell just ask Darth Solo all about it.  Recently he has started to play the non-solo part of the game, and I for one think it is great.  There needs to be a balance.

So yes, the people are a reason why I play, but they are not the only reason.  Tune in tomorrow for the next part of why I play WoW.

Sucking them in

I talked to my little brother today.  He has been playing MMOs since Ultima Online.  He used to play Everquest & Everquest 2.  Instead of joining WoW, he played Age of Conan.  I have been trying to get him to come play with me online since I started playing in April 2008.  He kept refusing.

Apparently his step-son (kind of, his girlfriend’s son; they live together) Aidan, started playing a few weeks ago.  Eric still didn’t start playing.  Then my mom calls me and tells me that Ron’s (my step-dad) aunt sent him WoW for Christmas.  I guess his relatives all play or something.  Well Ron doesn’t exactly have the time to play so my mom wanted to know if I knew anyone who needed a copy.  I offered to nab it for the 2nd account, instead she decided she was going to give it to my little brother.  This way he could play with both Aidan and me.  When I called him today he said he had been meaning to call me and find out where I was playing.  I filled him in on where I was playing.  Let him know if he wanted to play Alliance I could hook both him and Aidan up with money and bags.  If he wanted to play horde I was less able to help him since I didn’t have an 80 yet.  He said they would most likely go to the Alliance server first and see how things go.

It is cool getting someone new into the game.  I kept wanting to talk to him about all the awesome stuff out there but he needed to get off the phone.  So I will update you all when I get more info from him.

I have been spending all my game time, outside of raiding, on Lyssi and grinding up her levels.  I finally hit 68 and got into Northrend late last night.  See told you I would make it by the end of my weekend. :-p  A big part of me feels guilty for not being on Bloodhoof more often, but frankly I am in a leveling mood.  I go in moods in this game.  I am there for the raids and several people have ways to get in touch with me if I was really needed.  Right now it is kind of slow outside of the raids so I technically shouldn’t be that needed.  Plus Mis is back so I can step back and let him do his GM thing. 😀

Andrew made a comment to me yesterday that kind of bugs me.  He said that things don’t seem to happen if I don’t show up.  This translates to if I don’t make a raid, no one will raid.  I don’t like having that kind of responsibility.  Sometimes I just don’t want to raid.  Take last night for example, I did not want to raid.  Oh I wouldn’t have skipped out on them, I just really didn’t want to be there.  I think it might have come out while we were raiding too.  I know that while we are learning a boss we are going to wipe, and wipe and wipe some more.  I just didn’t have the patience to wipe a ton yesterday.  While I appreciate getting help on leading the group, even from PuGs that are obviously more experienced than me, it still drives me up the wall when they take over the raid.  Yeah I need to get over it.  I also need to talk with Mis and find out how he wants to do the raids now that he is back raiding.  Normally he was the raid leader, but since he has been gone I have been doing it.  I enjoy leading the raid.  It is making me pay more attention to what in the hell is going on.  When I first started raiding I wasn’t the most prepared.  I rarely watched the videos and just kind of expected the raid leader to explain stuff.  Now I am the person explaining stuff.  This means I have to actually know what the hell I’m talking about.  Scary stuff, let me tell you.

I apologize again for such a short post yesterday.  I was so out of it the entire day.  I made myself wake up earlier than I would normally on my day off, but even then I’m not normally that spaced out.  I need to get food in my house.  I seriously only have frozen meat and rice.  I don’t even have canned soup.  When my ex lived with me I always had a ton of food in the house.  Now that I am back living alone I rarely shop.  I need to get a better balance.  I think I will stop at the store on my way home from work tonight.  Let’s hope I don’t get on autopilot and just drive home before I realize it.

On a final note, Kate was awesome and gave me her win last night.  What did I win?

THIS

Yes I squeed in vent.  😀

Another one bites the dust

We are the champions

 

That’s right, we took down Saurfang Jr.  We were on the ball on Saturday night.  I went in all spazzed out because we had failed so badly on Wednesday only to have everyone exceed far and away beyond my expectations. I also got these boots which are pretty awesome.

Tonight is supposed to be Festergut and an attempt at Rotface.  I keep hearing conflicting stories about Festergut.  One story tells me that as long as everyone is doing 2.5k-4k dps we will be fine.  Another is telling me I need a minimum of 5k on each dpser, yet ANOTHER is saying I need 6k-7k.  I don’t know which one is the right one.  I *think* we have enough dps for it, but I guess we will find out.

Andrew finally got a dual spec on his pally and went holy.  I have agreed to run instances with him to get his “healing” down.  To my knowledge he has never played a healer, so this should be interesting.

Sorry for the short post today, I am kind of brain dead this morning.  Yes I have the day off, but I am still brain dead.