An update . . . finally

So I have been in Ohio for about a month now.  A little over a week after getting here I got a job through a temp agency and I’m still there.  The job itself isn’t bad, it is just soul sucking.  I went from being in charge to being on the very bottom.  It is quite a tough pill to swallow.

 

The people I work with aren’t bad.  I’ve already found 3 WoW players and get to chat with them about the game.  That is the beauty of not hiding what you enjoy doing.  You can find friends where you least expect it.

 

The biggest pain that this job gives me is the drive.  It wouldn’t be so bad if people actually knew how to drive here.  I work 27 miles away from where I live.  This is all freeway driving mind you.  Even if people drove the speed limit (65, ugh) it should take me less than 30 mins to get to work.

 

Yeah right.

 

On a good day it takes me 45 mins and on a bad day over an hour.  This is just the driving.  This doesn’t include the 3 blocks I have to hike (uphill mind you) from the parking lot to the building I work in (I work downtown).  The walk itself isn’t that bad tbh but it has a lot of crosswalks where you have no light to stop traffic, and traffic just doesn’t stop.  On my first day of work some woman was killed at the crosswalk I have to cross twice a day.  Good times I tell ya.  According to one of my coworkers, that crosswalk is the deadliest one in Ohio.  Nice to know >.<

 

I think my biggest issue was I was brought in to do something at a higher level but because of other things that occurred out of my control, I was put into the shit job.  I have too much experience and ability to spend 8 hours a day printing & sorting emails and scanning documents.  My boss is trying to get me involved in more projects (yay!) but they won’t start until after Thanksgiving and will be all overtime work.  This means long days and working on the weekend.  The money will be nice though.  It has been tough reconciling what I get paid in a month is what I used to get in one paycheck.  Oh well.

 

So far I have been adjusting well to living with Slice.  We haven’t fought yet so either the honeymoon phase isn’t over or we just get along too well.  I’m honestly not sure.  The only times we seem to get heated are during bad raid nights.  Then we both yell at each other and get pissy.  However, after the raid is over we settle down like nothing happened.  Of course Sorak is laughing and saying “I told you so bitches!”  Which is fine and dandy.

 

I don’t know if it is the pre-expansion blues or what but I just haven’t felt like logging in.  I log in to raid and that is pretty much it.  I think a big part of it is I used to log in to spend time with Slice, but now that we see each other every day it isn’t necessary and I find myself without a real reason to log in.  I have alts I want to level and that’t about it.  My dorf lock is in Outlands so there isn’t a major reason to pick her back up again since I’ve done those quests a million times.  My human mage is very close to 85 but I just haven’t bothered to finish leveling her.  She is in Twilight Highlands to see the Alliance side of the story.  Even that isn’t enough to make me want to stay playing her.  She ends up being used to just make money on the Alliance server.  I did run the holiday bosses on her each day and snagged that XP.  So who knows, she might not move again until there is another holiday boss to queue for.

 

Horde side I just log in to do my cooldowns and raid.  While I am excited to being so close to finishing my orange staff it almost doesn’t feel worth it, at least at this stage.  I don’t know if I’m just burned out on Firelands and need a new raid or if it is something else.  As of writing this I am 63/250 towards finishing my staff.  With the double raid lock outs coming I am hoping to get it finished faster.  It has kind of turned into a joke to remind me to channel the bosses.  What makes me mad is I can’t seem to get anything when we kill Rag.  Which I find to be bullshit.

 

Slice got into the Star Wars Beta and let me play a bit this weekend.  It reminds me of Dragon Age but set in the Star Wars galaxy.  It is kind of odd hearing your character talk and having choices to make while playing, but it was fun.  I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy it for the midnight release or even leaving WoW for it, but it will definitely be a diversion for when I need it.  Kind of like AoC, which I have been neglecting!

 

Part of the reason I have been doing that is because I bought stuff with real money for my demonologist but I am at a loss as to where I can level with her.  The game isn’t exactly straightforward and doesn’t tell you a damn thing.  I know there are 2 other cultures that I can go level in their zones but then my alts who are of those cultures won’t have anything “new” to see.  That is the part I am not happy with.  I have no clue where to take one character without losing something for another one.  Since I spent money on one toon I kind of want to see her maxed out before I move on to the others which means I haven’t really done much in the way of playing.  I think I made a new alt, but that is about it.

 

A large part of the issue is I no longer have internet access at work.  This means that all of the blogs that I used to read all day are being neglected and not getting read right away.  This builds up my reader until I can get home and get a moment to read it.  I have several that I haven’t touched in over a month, which is bad because my reader only stores posts for 30 days.  When I get home from work I find I don’t have much time to read.  I usually have to start dinner or get other stuff done before I can sit down at the computer.  It is even worse on raid nights.

That is another thing I am not used to.  Raiding used to be 5:30 to 9 pm.  Now it is 8:30 to midnight.  Yet I still have to get up at 6:30 am (that much hasn’t changed) so I am exhausted by the end of the raiding night and just want to call it.  This of course isn’t an option.  Plus I don’t know if it would even be possible to change the raid times.  We have too many odd schedules to change things now.

 

So yeah that is my update.  Not a whole heck of a lot of stuff to say, mostly bitching, but hey that’s me!  So if you used to have me comment on your blogs and notice that I’m not doing so until later (if at all) then this is why.  Anyway I miss all of you and hopefully I will be able to afford a smart phone soon!

Mah Orb!

I have the worst luck when it comes to getting orbs on my druid.  She is (as far as I know) the only maxed out leatherworker in the guild.  We have several mail/leather wearers who want stuff made.  I’ve offered to make stuff for them, but I need orbs.  Their answer was to run some heroics with me on my druid and give me the orb.

Well that is the idea.  How it actually happens is far from that.  Last night is a prime example.

At some point yesterday afternoon I decided I was going to powerlevel jewelcrafting on my DK.  He was just going to sit there in Org so why did I need a gathering profession on him?  While doing arch on my rogue on Sunday I came across a ton of ore nodes, so I mined them.  How many times had I seen them while doing arch on my druid?  Lots!  So I wasn’t going to waste them when I had a character that could actually mine them.  The result was I had a ton of mithril and iron sitting in my mining bag.  This got me to thinking that power leveling wouldn’t be that difficult.

Onward to the guide!

I had Slice find me a powerleveling guide (cause he wasn’t working so why not) and when I got online last night I started farming the copper and tin.  Apparently I needed some stones that came with the mithril so I farmed some more up in Felwood.  It helped that I had two dig sites in the area.  Multi-tasking amirite? 😉

The tricky part was knowing exactly how many bars I needed and how much ore I should keep to prospect.  I tried to follow the guide, but I just didn’t have enough gems.  So I took what I had and went with the guidelines.  I got lucky and only needed to buy a few gems.  I think I got him to 222 and found I had no thorium.  Off to Winterspring!

As I am trying to find nodes (seriously someone must’ve just been there and strip mined the place) Yui pipes up in gchat about not being able to get any gear for his druid (he obviously doesn’t raid with us because the only raid gear we get is druid gear).  I told him that my leatherworker could make him something I just need the mats and most importantly I needed the orbs.  So he was all “let’s run a quick heroic.”  Sorak was online and jumped all over that.  At this point Slice, Sorak, Yui and I were all in vent.  It was said in vent AND gchat that the run was so I could get orbs to make something for Yui.

We got Rep to come in as the 5th guildie and we queued up.  We had Yui tanking on his bear, Sorak on his rogue, Rep on her DK, me on my druid as a boomkin (I so fail in this spec) and Slice healing on his priest.  Slice no longer had a dps spec so I had no choice but to dps.  If I am lucky I can pull 6k on her in a non-moving boss fight.  Yeah I am pretty bad.  Yui’s bear isn’t really all that geared either.  But hey we have Slice, he who healed the 4 DKs in heroic Grim Batol, how bad could it be?

Well . . .

We got Lost City for our random and it was apparent that Yui was VERY squishy.  More often than not I had to switch out of boomkin and throw out some heals to help Slice.  Disc can have problems when 3 people just start dropping health rapidly.  Add on top of that only 1 CC option (and we all know how much Sorak LOVES CC) trash packs were painful.  The first boss took forever.  We just didn’t have the DPS numbers that all of us were used to.  I’ve honestly never seen these boss fights take this long, ever and I ran heroics in the first 2 weeks of Cata.

We FINALLY make it to the last boss, down him and I roll need on the orb.

Wait!

What is this?

Slice ALSO rolled need on the orb!

WTF?!

Seriously!?!?

Guess who won it?

You guessed right!

The fucker!

Of course everyone starts laughing and Slice is all “What?”

Me, being me, laid into him.  I reminded him that the entire run was to get me the orb so I could make Yui gear.  NOT so he could have an orb for his cloth cooldown.  He claims he wasn’t paying attention and was watching The Guild. /sigh

Now this is not the first time this has happened to me.  I tend to not run heroics on purpose.  I don’t like the feeling of “having” to run them every day.  Especially on my druid.  So when I am in a heroic on her it is because I need to get an orb for someone.  9/10 times that I have run heroics with my guildies for the purpose of getting an orb, someone else will also roll need on the orb and I get nothing.

It isn’t like I am taking the orbs and making gear to sell on the AH.  I am gearing a guildie who needs the gear to raid.  It took me at least 5 runs to get 2 orbs to make Zerl’s belt.  The 2nd orb I got was actually in a heroic that Arv asked me to come and heal on the last boss because they lost their healer.  It wasn’t even a guild run!

/sigh

At this point it is past midnight EST.  Rep & Slice are both east coast.  It was decided we do a 2nd run.  This time we got the dreaded heroic Grim Batol.  I reminded everyone (aka Slice) to not roll on my orb.  I also asked them to please loot so I could skin the drakes (hell if I am making gear might as well get the leather right?)  The pulls were painful and people weren’t looting!

We get to the first boss and things are going well.  I am the only ranged so I am trying to take out the purple trogg.  The problem is my dps is so bad I can’t kill him fast enough.  I start dying to his hits AND all the hits of the other troggs.  Sorak tries to help me on his rogue, but he quickly dies too.

After 2 attempts Sorak switches to Fayle and said he would take care of the troggs.  This time we didn’t have an issue with the troggs.  Woot!

As an aside, they really need to change up the boss skinning.  If I have to have 530 skinning to skin him then he needs to drop something better than1 measly piece of leather.  I have to carry around skinning gloves for 1 piece of leather!  Soooooo not cool.

The 2nd boss wasn’t as bad as he could be.  At one point I got way out of range due to several falling rock spots and fire pits on the ground.  As I am trying to heal myself before I go back on the boss Slice life grips me to the rest of the party.  The fucker.  I hate it when he life grips me.  He does it on my lock during raids because “it looked like you needed to be moved” when I had things under control.  He also doesn’t have any kind of warning when he does it.  It just happens and you are jerked across the fucking screen.

Not cool.

He thinks it is the funniest thing.

Grrrrr.

We skip the 3rd boss and die to trash.  At this point Sorak has switched to tanking and is the worst DK tank ever.  I still am not sure why he keeps trying to tank.  He even admits he has no rune management.  /sigh.

We make it to the boss where Yui goes back to tanking.  Rep and I have one of the adds and Sorak has the other.  We were so good on the adds we got the achievement.  I even got a shiny new staff.

I also got the orb.

MAH ORB!

It’s update time!**

So let’s see, lots of stuff to update on.

No not really ^_^

I’ve mostly been plugging away at my alts.  I got PPP to 81 (as of last night).  I had to go *gasp* shadow once I hit 80.  I tried killing stuff as Disc, and it was just too painful.  Even when I was in Northrend I didn’t have too much of a problem killing stuff as Disc.  Man oh man though.  The mobs in the new 80-85 zones have a metric buttload of health.  After killing 2 mobs I was hearthing back to Org to pick up a 2nd spec.

I felt so sad.

Now usually people pick up a healing or tanking off spec so they can bring utility when they can’t deeps.  Here I am upset that I have to get a DPS spec.

/sigh

Since I leveled Disc through dungeons I never looked into playing Shadow.  I knew that it was similar to an affliction warlock, but me being me didn’t bother doing any research before I threw together a spec and ran off to pew pew.  To give myself credit I did try to use the dummies to get an idea for button placement.  I couldn’t find the level 80 dummies in Org so I got stuck with the level 85s and a bunch of my spells missed.  Oh well.

Off to Mt Hyjal!

The first few quests around the starting hub are going well.  Getting the rotation down . . . HERB!  Feeling pretty good.  I moved on to the next part and I am minding my own business, killing twilight peeps when suddenly I’m being hit with moonfire and insect swarm.  My first reaction is to bubble and run, which I do, only to die a few steps away.

Ok, no big deal.  PvP server.  It is expected.  Run back to my corpse, rez, re-buff and start to drink . . . MOONFIRE!  And I am dead again.

Seriously?!!?!

Drak is pretty lopsided for the Horde.  The few Alliance players tend to avoid the Hordies mostly due to sheer numbers, unless they are roaming together in a pack, then they will actively chase you.  Most people won’t see much world PvP on Drak outside of TB.  Not me. If there is world PvP to be found, I will be killed by it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind world PvP, but when you camp someone for no reason it is BS.

This time I came back to my corpse, looked around and rezzed in a safe place.  Flew away to buff and drink.  I was more aware now.  I kept looking around.  I saw no one.  Went back to doing my quests.  I had to pick up the staff slivers.  As I am looting one BOOM!  MOONFIRE!

At this point I am PISSED!  I haven’t even bothered trying to fight back with this guy.  It is around 11 pm at night PST, 1 am server time.  It is late and I just wanted to get some quests done before I passed out for the night.  This jerk of a druid is holding me up.  I asked for help from guildies.  My brother parties up with me to come help only to ditch me when TB comes up.  Gotta love family right?  No one else seemed to be willing to come help at that point in time so I said fuck it and switched to Lyssi.

That’s right bitches, I got my MAIN!

This means war!

I fly out there and have no problem finding the druid.  Two dots and the fucker was dead.  I waited a bit, flew up (why do people NEVER look up?!?!) killed him again after he rezzed then flew away.  To make him think I was done with him.  Gave him a few to feel like he was safe, found him again and dotted him up.  He tried to get away, he even flew up to escape my range.

HA! I will still get you!

I flew up, dotted him up AGAIN! and took a fall.  I took an 85k fall damage hit, but he died.

I popped a healthstone and logged out from a spot watching where my priest was questing.

Logged back into my priest, looked around, no druid.  Rezzed, buffed, drank . . . HERB!  Went back to questing.  Was fine for all of 5 mins then BOOM!  MOONFIRE!

Did this moron not have enough?!!?!

I released and logged back into Lyssi.  Killed him again.  Logged back into PPP when I couldn’t find the druid.  As I was running back to my corpse I found him.  He was actually standing next to my ghost form.

Did I switch back to Lyssi?

You bet I did!

Killed him again!

Then killed him one more time for effect.

At that point I couldn’t find him anymore.  I quickly switched back to PPP to rez.  At this point it was almost midnight and I had work in the morning.  I hadn’t gotten anything completed.  Which of course pissed me off some more.

Stupid Alliance druid.

The next day at work I was telling Cynwise and Psynister how I needed to learn to PvP on my priest.  Psynister told me that he was going to finish his “How to level a shadow priest” guide and this worked out perfectly.  When I had been busy at work I had gotten behind on my blog reading so I went over to his site and got updated.

Just a plug here.  If you aren’t reading these blogs — You are seriously missing out.  These two guys are awesome.  Totally nice guys who just kick serious ass.  Go read them! 😀

So now I have more of an idea of what do to when I get jumped on PPP.

Not that I will remember or anything.

Most likely I will run, die, then go get my main.

It is how I roll.

**Also – You need to say the title like they do on the Jersey shore when it is T-shirt time. No I don’t watch the show. Give me SOME credit!

Cata & Thoughts

Lyssi dinged 85 on 12/11, she was the 7th 85 in the guild (we now have 15). Since then I have been grinding rep dailies and trying to get my professions up. One thing that drives me nuts is she is an enchanter, but she is a blood elf. This means she has 535 enchanting. This also means that she won’t get the achievement until she hits 535. 😦 The downside to trying to level professions at the start of an expansion is that everything is ASS expensive. Plus I am leveling tailoring/enchanting. You really can’t farm those mats with any kind of efficiency. Strike that, I guess you could run dungeons to farm, but that is about all I can come up with. I really want to get my tailoring up high enough so I can start making the new cloth. You know, the SUPER expensive soulbound cloth that is on a 7 day cool down.

Yeah that stuff. >.>

I think heroics might have come close to breaking me.

It isn’t the CC (which I love btw!) or even the mechanics, I think it is the sheer inability to complete the bosses.

It is one thing to wipe over and over again on a raid boss, that is expected, but on a heroic? Yeah that quickly gets old.

It is stupid things too! When a boss charges — MOVE! It is that simple.

I’ve taken to really using my portal. Especially in Heroic Grim Batol. The new warlock abilities are pretty awesome. We actually have cool downs now! 🙂 I think that once I get used to the new dungeons I will really be pumping out the dps. Right now I am pulling anywhere from 7600-8800 dps, which I know is low but it is still up there in the groups. A large part of my problem is lack of hit. I reforged and I am still sitting at like 11% which is ok for heroics, but damn if I don’t need a ton more of hit.

Other than heroics I have really been enjoying the expansion. Some people might be complaining about being “on the rails” with the direct questing, but I am really enjoying it. I don’t like having to run all over to find that one quest giver to move me forward in the story. The extensive phasing is interesting as well. I really like in Hyjal how the burned forest is changed (due to your efforts) into a flourishing one. The phasing did help out a lot on the first day of the expansion. I was actually quite surprised that I didn’t see more people around. I’m not complaining, but it was an interesting feel.

Since Tattia is one of the few leather workers in the guild I have been trying to get her leveled up as well. Up until this weekend I really haven’t had much time to devote to her. I started her out in Hyjal (druid, hello) then took her to Vashj’ir. I think between the two starter areas I prefer Hyjal, but the quest rewards are more caster friendly in Vashj’ir. After completing both these zones I am about 75% of the way to 84. She is headed into Deepholm tonight until she hits 84, then she will take a detour to the Twilight Highlands to open up the Dragonmaw Orcs, then back to Deepholm to finish it up. I leveled Lyssi through the Twilight Highlands with only a small detour into Uldum. Tattia will level to 85 in Uldum. I liked the Twilight Highlands, but damn do those mobs hit hard!

I have been slacking the last few days on Lyssi with her rep dailies. After a particularly bad heroic I had to log off in tears I was so upset. I know I am not as hardcore as Zug, Sorak and Slice, but damn when it is obvious a boss is not going down we need to cut our losses and let go. Come back when the gear is better so the dps and heals can do their jobs. Banging my head against a wall that doesn’t budge is not a lot of fun for me.

Ideally I’d like to get used to the dungeons on regular before I run them on heroic. So far I have completed Stonecore once on regular, Halls of Origination like 3 or 4 times on regular and Grim Batol on regular. I’ve gotten Deadmines twice on heroic (both times did not finish it) and Grim Batol twice on heroic (again not completed). I still have 4 more dungeons that I haven’t even SEEN on regular and SFK on heroic. I will say now that I have been “bad” in that I haven’t looked up any of the strats. Part of it is that I have been so busy at work then having the stress of making sure I got to 85, then gearing up and getting my professions up, etc. It is a wonder I haven’t gone completely grey.

After my stress quit on Thursday I said I wouldn’t be doing dungeons for a while. I have keep true to that and didn’t do a single one since then. I almost thought about queuing up Tattia and attempting to heal a regular, then I quickly killed that idea and settled in for a quiet weekend. I even made a goblin and on Sunday I worked on her for a while. I had gone through my roster on Drak and I realized that I didn’t have a warrior. So Verica the goblin warrior was born.

Get this, she is being leveled . . . prot.

I know! I know! Shoot me now. Sorak asked me why I always have to do things the hard way. I don’t know if this is really considered the hard way, but we’ll see. I have barely made it out of the Goblin starting area so I haven’t even attempted to do anything else. It is kind of funny because the victory rush that I get when I kill mobs almost makes me feel like I HAVE to find another mob to kill and get the heal, EVEN if I don’t need to have my health refreshed. I start to get annoyed if there isn’t anything around me to kill. I kind of feel that way about nightfall procs on my warlock too.

TL:DR the warrior is fun. 🙂 She is a nice little diversion from everything else I need to work on.

PPP will be next in line after Tattia. I want to prove to Slice that Disc healing CAN work even at lower gear levels. Plus I want a high level alchemist to transmute stuffs. I miss playing her too.

Tonight’s plans involve leveling Tattia & getting back into the swing of my rep dailies on Lyssi. Tomorrow is regular dungeon runs with Doz. Luckily I have a 4 day weekend. Hopefully by next week I will have 2 85s ready to raid.

And keep your fingers crossed that I don’t go nuts and kill everyone in the meantime 🙂

Last night

Was a ton of fun.  At least that is what I keep hearing from everyone.  Slice was telling me that over and over again while on the phone after the raid.  My brother kept whispering me telling me how much fun he was having.  Sorak pings me on gchat and tells me how last night was a lot of fun.  When I was talking with Repgrind she also told me she had a lot of fun.

Who knew raiding would be fun like this in the 11th hour?

I personally was just stressed to the max healing.  So while everyone was having fun and getting phat lewts, I was freaking out over healing and developing a stiff neck.

Normally I wouldn’t be freaking out but trying to 2 heal ICC with the “new” mana regen was not fun.  Arv and I double druid healed.  He didn’t have much experience with resto druid healing, but he is pro so I wasn’t worried about it.  The problem I was having was the fact that I was going OOM in every fight.  There wasn’t an opportunity to sit back and let my passive regen happen.  I know that if I was having a problem that Arv was probably having even more of one.  I was using a flask of pure mojo AND spirit food.  I was popping innervate every time it was up and mana pots when I was dead in the water.  The druid healing style of Wrath doesn’t fit with the current system.

In ICC there is a TON of damage coming in from all angles.  The tanks are getting whacked with huge hits and the raid is being slammed with constant damage as well.  All during Wrath druids would blanket the raid with rejuv and pop in a few regrowths as needed or even spam nourish.

You can’t do that anymore.

Nourish now takes too damn long to cast.  You don’t really want to use it because it just doesn’t work with the fast paced environment of damage in ICC.  There is the option of using it with nature’s swiftness, but it doesn’t heal for as much as healing touch so you don’t want to gimp that big heal.  Let’s face it, if you are using your NS macro, then you are hitting your “oh shit!” button and you need as big of a heal as you can get.  So Nourish is out of the running.

Regrowth got its timer lessened.  Now you get a nice big heal upfront and a very short duration of a hot.  I really do like this spell, don’t get me wrong, but I am not used to the new version of it.  My mind still thinks of it lasting longer so I still treat it like it is the old version.  This results in me forgetting to keep it up on the tanks.  Otherwise this is your go-to spell.

Rejuvenation isn’t all that changed.  With everyone’s health pools being so large this heal doesn’t feel like it does all that much anymore.  I hit this spell more out of reflex than anything.  I am then left feeling very unsatisfied afterwards.

Kind of like how I felt with some of my exs . . .

Yeah you knew that was coming 😉

This all added up to me freaking out.  Yes I have healed since the patch changes, but it was with Sorak and he is so damn OP it is ridiculous.  Although it was freaking hilarious last night when he logged into Sorak to heal Sindy with me.  He hadn’t logged into him since before the patch so his talents had to be set up and he had to put his buttons back on his action bar.  Then he was all “What! I have to dps to heal!?!”  Yeah it was funny.

I think that was my favorite part of the night.

It certainly wasn’t the part where I had to swim on VDW.  Sad tree is sad.  I always feel ineffective when I have to swim.  For the most part I can hit the bubbles and get stacks (I ended up with 30 when she hit full health), but I always end up at her ass end and have to run to the front where all the fucking portals are.  So yeah, not exactly fun, but what are you going to do?

I do agree with Slice though.  It was really nice to see people get upgrades for once.  My brother has been attempting to level his hunter for months.  He took like a 6 month break when his computer died.  He now has a new one (I am so jealous of it and how gorgeous everything is on it) and finally dinged 80 on Friday.  We ran him through a bunch of dungeons and got him some crafted gear.  When he set foot into ICC last night he had a 3200 gearscore.  He was in a few purples, several blues and even some greens.  I think he is in half leather too.  Poor guy.  He did snag some pretty nice upgrades, including the bow that drops off LDW.  I think he creamed his pants when he saw it.  Now he just needs to get all gemmed and enchanted up before tomorrow’s LK continuation.

It was cute.  I got a whisper from him last night when we were closing down shop “Can I go with you guys again on Thursday?”  Yes you can silly.  We aren’t going to bring you through ICC just to tell you that you can’t come to the LK fight.  I really hope that we don’t have anymore DC issues so that we can get him a title.  I am excited for him.  He might not have ever raided in WoW before, but he definitely learned fast and everyone was very pleased with him.  I hope he will be able to raid with us at 85.

I really enjoyed getting to play with Rep.  She is already a ton of fun, but to see her in action is pretty awesome.  Her toon wasn’t even Ulduar ready and she was holding her own in ICC.  As she said it helped to get a buff when everyone else got a nerf, but even then you have to be a good player to pull off what she did in the gear she had.  I was very happy to see that she got several upgrades too.

I don’t know if there really was something that made last night more fun than our raids usually are, or if it was just knowing that this was the last time we will ever have to raid ICC.  I like to think that our guildies & raiders are just awesome people.  We had people come in and raid who really didn’t want to.  Thank you guys again!  It warms me to know that you guys are willing to help out when needed.  If they hadn’t then the raid might not have happened.  Sorak and Slice both thought that we wouldn’t be able to pull it off.  I was going to pug people if I had to.  I wasn’t going to get people’s hopes up with being able to raid then tell them “oh we didn’t have enough people, sorry no raid for you.”

Yeah I didn’t want that.

In other news PPP is now 65 and cruising through Outland.  I have a feeling she will be replacing my druid in Cata as my primary healer.  I don’t know if it is just that I haven’t come up against what Northrend can throw at healers or if Disc is just so easy that I have a false sense of healing security.  I do know that healing as Disc is easy and yet a lot of fun.  While I bitch and moan when the tanks pull the whole room and I end up OOM keeping everyone alive, I still feel all pumped that I was able to pull it off and keep everyone alive.  I usually emote flexing on PPP.  Then flex in guild chat.  If I didn’t have to keep my hands on the keyboard and mouse I would totally flex IRL too.

*flex*

Like that.

😀

Seriously? /sigh

I’ve been working on leveling up my priest.  The goal was to get her to outlands this weekend.

Well that goal failed.

I blame the cooking holiday.  I had too many alts that I needed to get cooking up on.  I got the DK, PPP and Lyssi all up to 350 cooking.  I um also kind of got the achievement that I kinda bitched about last year.

In fact, I got it twice >.>

The first time I was on PPP and I was furious.  Then I got it on Lyssi and at that point I was like “yeah this just happened.”  I actually got around 50-60 turkeys in a row on Lyssi.  Sad thing is they only count up to 40.  Since I want the turkey pet on at least 1 toon I need to do this holiday.  I’m going to try to get it on Lyssi since she is my main.  She only needs 3 more rogues (orc, dwarf & troll).  My favorite was the gnome rogue that was stealthed in Dal.  Not only did I see him as I walked by, but I hit him with the feathers while he was stealthed and he turned into a stealthed turkey.  Seriously made me cackle.

The REAL irritation came from leveling the priest.  AB is my favorite BG so far.  I hate WSG and AV just confuses the hell out of me.  So that leaves me with AB.  Even with the addition of DKs in the 50s bracket, it hasn’t been that bad.  What has driven me nuts is how people are playing.  Instead of staying and defending the 3 flags we have they have to LEAVE the moment we get a flag and go rushing off to the next spot.  I had 2 separate runs where I was left with one other healer. 

Yes you read that right, they left 2 healers to guard the blacksmith.

I kept asking for at least one dps to stay and help us, but nope, the 2 healers were left guarding the blacksmith.

And you know what?  We fucking pulled it off too!

*flex*

In fact that particular run the blacksmith was the only flag that we still controlled.

*double flex*

Then there was the dungeon runs.  Currently I have Sunken Temple (yay!) & BRD Prison in green, BRD upper city in yellow & Dire Maul East in red.  4 dungeons are available to me on my priest at this time.  You will usually (about 95% of the time) get the dungeons that are in yellow.  This means that I get BRD upper city every time.  This is the worst one.  Normally I like BRD, but this is just soooooooooooooooooo very long.  On top of that most people don’t know the place so they tend to fuck up things.

I was in a group where the tank seemed to know what he was doing.  We got up to the bar and were in the process of fighting the big stone guy when one of the 2 hunters hit multishot.  This of course pulled the bar patrons and we wiped.  Excuse me if I cannot heal through 100 mobs attacking everyone at once.  The tank bitched us out and dropped group.  Eventually I was left alone in the group running back to my corpse.  That was fun >.>  I did a bunch of BGs after that just cause I didn’t want to deal with that place right away again.

Now before anyone says anything, I have been making fantastic use of my ignore button.  Tanks who pull like crazy people, ignore.  Stupid DPS, ignore.  Jerks, ignore.  It is rare when I finish a dungeon and don’t have to put someone on ignore.

This dungeon run takes the cake though.

After a 20 min wait (as heals!) I got into a BRD group.  I zone in and see they are in the bottom room and I asked if it was prison.  The mage said no it was upper city.  I said oh ok I had a key and proceeded to run to the door.  The warlock and ret pally followed me.  The warrior tank and mage were a little bit slower.  At first I didn’t know that the warrior was a warrior, I thought he was a shaman.  Want to know why?  Cause he was wearing a caster leather kilt.

Yes, leather, with int and spirit.  The guy can wear plate, but has on a leather caster piece, “because of the stam.”

/facepalm

His words, not mine.

The dude was decked out in heirlooms, you would THINK he would know better.  But no.  I had already planned to put him on ignore once the run was over.  His tanking just added ooph to that decision.  He was so squishy it felt like I was healing a dps trying to tank.

HE WAS HORRIBLE.

He only attacked one mob at a time, did absolutely nothing about casters until they were the last mobs left.  Just completely terribad.

He also acted like he had no idea what to do in the dungeon.  He even said at one point that he didn’t know where to go.  In fact everyone acted like they didn’t know what to do or where to go.  So I took over.  I showed everyone where to go, pointed out bosses etc.  We even made it out of the bar without aggroing the patrons.

It was when we left the bar that all hell broke loose.

The patrol that comes in to “investigate the disturbance” spawned the moment we walked out the door.  On top of that the mage’s water elemental pulled the mobs over to the side.  The warlock’s felguard, the water elemental & the ret pally ended up tanking most of the mobs.  It was all I could do to heal everyone.  In fact I was completely oom by the end of it and I had popped my potion, my racial and inner focus.  I was literally tapped out.  On top of that the tank was going on about how “pro” he was.  I chose to not fight with him and point out it was me that saved our asses there.  Not his dipshit self.

After that we did ok.  I explained the dwarf fight.  Even then the tank didn’t grab the guys when they spawned.  He waited until they hit someone else and I had to use pain suppression.  /sigh

The shit hit the fan when we got to the room of spawning death.  I think it is called the Lyceam or something like that.  It is where all the trash re-spawns like crazy.  I explained the room before I opened the door.  We get inside and I start moving towards the platforms and the tank goes off in another direction.  I was all “over here” when I saw that the mage had found a torch bearer and marked him over where the tank was heading.  I thanked the mage and apologized in chat.

That is when the tank exploded.

He started going off on me.  Said “Priest shut the fuck up.  You aren’t the only one who knows what they are doing here.”

Excuse me?

What part of you saying “I don’t know what to do” did I misunderstand?  He then started calling me names.  Made reference to me being a guy, to which I replied “No I’m female.”  The mage then chimed in “No wonder you never shut up.”

Wow, did he seriously just say that?!?!

I whispered sorry to the warlock & the ret pally since they were both nice to me.  Put the tank & mage on ignore and dropped group.  It wasn’t until I looked at recount that I saw those two were from the same realm. /sigh

Why me?  Seriously.

I think I might have to quest for my last 4 levels >.>

And so it came to pass . . .

That I will be getting a non-affliction off spec.

YES I KNOW!

Trust me I have been depressed ever since it was decided.

Now begins the research.

I almost didn’t even know where to start.  Yes I know EJ is the *place* to go for information on raiding specs.  Trust me I know all about it.  The problem is I can’t stand EJ.  The posts are FILLED with their math proofs.  While I like math and enjoy it, I don’t even come close to liking it enough to be able to read those posts without wanting to gouge my eyes out.  So I avoided going there immediately.

The other problem I have with EJ is it is tough to find the basics.  For example, if you just want to know what the standard rotation is, you would have to wade through pages upon pages of math and top tier gear choices to maybe find the rotation you are supposed to use.

I already know where to get the specs (there are awesome raiders in Slice’s guild that have a demo raiding spec I can check out), I just needed the rotation.

Several months back (before I left SR) I had been told to start looking into a demo spec for the fights that needed more burst.  I went to twitter and asked there.  I got a TON of info and I was so very grateful for it.  I didn’t copy and paste it all into an email or anything because you can always go back and get your old tweets.

Unless you know, Twitter decides to crap out on you.

Twitter no longer shows when people have replied to me.  In fact I have exactly 5 replies on twitter.  3 of which are from September of last year, and the other 2 are from July of this year.  All 5 of them are completely worthless.

All of the lovely Demo lock info that I was given is now gone.  Because I had already asked once, I didn’t want to even go there and ask again.  Mostly because twitter doesn’t show any replies to me.  This means even if people gave me the information a second time, I wouldn’t be able to see it.

Fucking Twitter.

So yesterday when my boss left I started searching.

I started over at Killing Em Slowly because I know Ful has given me great advice in the past and he has put up a sidebar with the basic info on all the different specs.  I checked out his demo post.  While it was awesome (as per usual with his posts) it wasn’t what I needed.  He says that he doesn’t raid Demo.  He just uses it for BGs and 5 mans.

Ok, so no good, need to find something else.

I decided to brave EJ.

I know, I know >.>

So after about 20 mins of searching I finally found the *new* thread.  Where I got a ton of info that wasn’t fully bogged down with math.  Here is the link just on the off chance that someone else facing my situation wants to see where I got my info from.  The guy who wrote this post did an excellent job.  Mad props to him!

EJ says this about what spec to use:

META / RUIN
Spec: 00/56/15
Utility: Target 5% crit debuff, Raid spell power Buff
Other: 30 yards range, No spell pushback reduction, No threat reduction
This is the most common and best performing Demonology talent spec. It provides more utility than any of the other Warlock specs any higher DPS than any of the other demonology specs. In addition, the spell power buff provided by this talentspec is far more powerful then any of the alternatives. Through seed of corruption and sometimes immolation aura, this spec also does more AoE DPS than either affliction or destruction. This thread and it’s data is primarily focused on this talent spec, it produces significantly higher DPS than the others and is the only truly valid talent spec in end-game raiding.

This is what he says about glyphs:

Miscellaneous: Glyphs
In this section I will list the DPS value of each glyph for each talent spec. The 3 best glyphs will be highlighted. Simulationcraft was used to determine these numbers, high end ICC Heroic gear was used as a base.

	00/56/15	00/41/30	00/40/31
Conflagrate	0	0	844
Corruption	47	24	15
Felguard	302	237	0
Immolate	93	81	186
Imp	0	0	211
Incinerate	59	227	195
Life Tap *	333	127	133
Metamorphosis	65	0	0
Quick Decay	159	171	142
Shadow Bolt	27	0	0

Note on Glyph of Life Tap: The value of this glyph greatly depends on the amount of spirit on your gear, all specs scale slightly better (regardless of glyphs) with crit than spirit, however due to demonic pact; the meta/ruin profile prioritizes spirit as the raid DPS gain is far more significant than the personal DPS lost (Roughly 10 times more significant). If you do have very high spirit, then glyph of life tap may be viable for the other talent specs as well.

So ok those are the basics down.  Easy enough.  Now to find the rotation . . .

Meta Ruin, 00/56/15

Life Tap	If the Glyph of Life Tap buff is not active
Shadow Bolt	If the target is not currently afflicted by the Shadow Mastery debuff
Immolate	If your target does not have immolate active or the duration of your immolate on the target is shorter than the cast time of immolate.
Curse of Doom	If this spell is off cooldown and your target will not die within the next 60 seconds
Soul Fire	If Decimation and Molten core are both active.
Corruption	If this debuff is not currently active on your target
Soul Fire	If Decimation is active
Incinerate	If Molten Core is active
Life Tap	If your mana is low or the time remaining on your glyph of Life Tap buff is low.
Shadow Bolt	If none of the above

 

Extra tips:

Cooldowns

1. Demonic Empowerment, Use it on cooldown, do not wait for your Felguard’s demonic frenzy to stack or such.
2. Metamorphosis, Use this ability as frequently as possible, thus if you can use it 3 times in a particular fight- use it 3 times in that fight. So long as you’re using it as many times as you can, it can be helpful to synchronize this with other events; for example if there’s about 2 minutes left in a fight and your target is currently at 40%, then wait for your target to drop to 35% before using metamorphosis. Using Metamorphosis well requires good knowledge of an encounter, if you do not have that simply use it on cooldown.
3. Immolation Aura, You can use this ability once per Metamorphosis, it can be worth while to try fish for procs to go along with this high damage ability- for example you could try wait until the 4pc Tier 10 bonus procs for 10% more damage, or you could wait a few seconds until adds spawn- so long as you use immolation aura before there’s less time remaining on metamorphosis than the duration of immolation aura you’re not missing out on any damage. Note that if Metamorphosis runs out while immolation aura is still active, immolation aura will also cancel itself.
4. Trinkets, If you have use trinkets, it’s generally a good idea to use them on cooldown. You may however want to consider synchronizing your trinkets with metamorphosis for 20% extra damage while you use your trinket.
5. Potion, Since you can only use 1 potion during combat (and 1 pre-potion before combat starts), you should try use your potion during either heroism/bloodlust or if you pre-potted and your guild uses early heroism/bloodlust, use your in-combat potion during metamorphosis+decimation

 

Ok so yeah, lots and lots of stuff to absorb.

One thing that I am happy about is I really won’t have to change my gear all that much.  I do lose out on the 3% hit that affliction gets so I need to get a bunch more hit.  I managed to snag some bracers on Tuesday that have haste and hit on them verses the crit ones I have equipped.  I lose a bunch of spellpower by switching them out so I haven’t changed over.  I need to go through my options and see what I can do about getting me some more hit.  I do have the hit trinket, but it might just be smarter to re-gem.

Here is my armory link if anyone wants to check her out and give me some ideas.

Looks like I wont be rocking out to Dragon Age this weekend 😦

PS – I totally flaked out on my 1 year blog anniversary.  My first post was 09/14/09.  Wow I fail.  Oh well , happy anniversary to me! 😀

Pity party table of 1

Last night we were supposed to start at Sindragosa.  Unfortunately one of our healers got stuck at work.  Since we would have to pull in another healer and Soth wanted a new weapon off a boss we had already killed, it was decided to just restart the raid.

Things got off to a rocky start.  I am not sure what is wrong with me but I was having the same problems last night that I was having on Tuesday.  I made sure I ate before the run so that wasn’t it.  I am starting to think it is something completely out of the game period.  Zam thought it might be raid jitters or something.  I don’t think it is.  I was making a marked improvement each week without any issue.  I can’t see suddenly acquiring that after not having it since I first started raiding with SR.

It is most likely all the outside stuff that is going on.  I tend to think and then over think stuff.  My brain never stops.  I have a hard time falling asleep at night because I cannot get my mind to turn off.  This ends up with me staying up far too late and getting like 4-5 hours of sleep a night.  Like right now, I just zoned out writing this while my mind went off on other topics.  It isn’t even like I am thinking about just one thing.  I have 5 or 6 different topics floating around in my head.  *sigh*

Re-setting the raid turned out to be for the best really.  Soth got his new weapon so big congrats go out to him! 🙂  I also got a new wand and hit exalted with the Ashen Verdict.  I think I am now at 5792 gs.  As Tir said the other day “pimp my lock” indeed.

I am going to take Soth’s advice and get rid of the hit on the gems.  If I get to soft cap (11% for me) I should be ok.  That means I only need to have 289 hit.  With the gems I am sitting at 332.  When I remove them I will be at 312 which is still higher than the 289 I can drop down to.  When I have hit issues it makes me miss being Alliance and having a Draenei in every fucking group ever.  I think EoF had at least 2 in every raid we were in, usually 3 or 4.  It really was overkill.

I am not raiding again until Sunday.  Hopefully I will be able to work out some of the stuff that is plaguing me, both in my head and in the game.  I can stand at the training dummy and knock off my rotation like no one’s business, but put me in a raid, and it all goes to hell.  Ari is such a nice RL.  She tries to help me with my class failings.  I was told on Marrowgar to not switch to the spikes unless Ari was impaled.  On Lady D I get to stay on the mana shield.  Festergut I get to be the anchor or if we have extra ranged I get to be in the boss crotch.  Even with those lovely concessions made to me, I still fail.  5-6k dps is not good when everyone else is doing 7-10k.  I don’t think I can even go with the whole “you aren’t as geared as they are” thing because I am not really that far behind everyone anymore.  I end up feeling like I am given these buffs and they are being wasted, which means I probably shouldn’t be getting them anymore.

What drives me nuts is when I get told “you did fine” etc.  No, no I didn’t.  Each chain has its weakest link and being that link repeatedly is not something I am enjoying.  Yes I stay out of the bad, yes I follow instructions, but damn it I need to pick up my damage.  Other than cookies and soul stones (and sometimes curse of elements, you know when I FUCKING REMEMBER TO USE IT) I don’t have a lot to bring to the raid except DPS and I am not even bringing that.  On the dummy I can pull 5300 dps.  According to maxdps.com self buffed (which is all I am on the dummy) I should be pulling 5300 dps.  Put me in a raid (fully buffed) and I get 5300 dps.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Ok so dps is low, but overall damage is where the importance is placed.  It is one thing when your damage is higher and your dps is a bit low in comparison to everyone else.  Last night, not only was I bad dps, my overall damage was significantly lower than the next person.  They were at 17-18% overall, I was at 13-14%.  1-2% I am ok with. 3-4% not so much.

So how did I end out my craptastic raiding night?  By dying repeatedly in AB.  Normally when I get AB I defend a node.  Lately it has been the farm.  I run up, assault it and guard it.  Usually there are 2-3 other people who stay with me.  I got AB twice last night.  The first time I was going solo.  I was left alone at the farm for almost the whole time.  About halfway through a DK joined me.  As soon as fighting started at the BS he left to fight, leaving me alone at the farm.  The Alliance kept sending 5-6 people to the farm, while I was standing there alone.  My poor VW bubble only absorbs around 10k damage.  Being MC btw, sucks ass.  There was this shadow priest that just had a hard on for me or something.  She made it a point to MC me every time she would attack the farm.  At one point she attacked the farm solo just so she could MC me before the DK killed her.

We of course lost that AB.

Back in Dal I was staring at the last book spawn point I need debating if I was going to crash out (it is 11:30 mind you) or what when someone asked me if I wanted to group up with several guildies and do a BG.  Since I still didn’t have my win I said sure why not.  We get AB again.  I got left alone at the farm, again.  I got gang raped at the farm, again.  Luckily Zug was in vent and in our BG group and came to help me.  Zam was also on his DK and showed up to help.  For a while it was just Zug and I at the farm, dying repeatedly.  I did manage to kill a fucking rogue and a fucking DK.  I fucking hate you guys in PvP btw.  I’m sure I sounded like a pissed off bitch when I was yelling about the fuckers dying over vent.  I don’t care.  They deserved to die for camping me in a BG.  Grrrr.

I probably shouldn’t PvP outside of WG anymore.  It probably isn’t good for my stress levels.

We still didn’t win the BG.

So yeah.  Failing at PvE and PvP in the same night.  If you will excuse me I think my table is ready.

Warning, pissy healer in group

Yesterday, for unknown reasons, I was pissy. Hell I am female, do I REALLY need a reason? What did I decide to do with my pissiness? Why heal heroics of course!

Ness and Dily were available so we had Ness tank and Dily bring the pew pew on his shadow priest. We queue up in heroics and because I was also feeling sassy, I announced in party chat that I was an angry healer and that if they thought they weren’t getting heals, then they most likely weren’t. I did that complete phrase with a smiley at the end.

The DK and pally we picked up thought I was joking. Silly dps.

The DK kept wanting to rush, rush, rush. We were in ToC, you can’t exactly “rush” in there. I told Ness to drag the instance out as long as possible. Dily and him laughed and agreed. Despite my “not healing you” mantra, no one died. Although it was quite close for the DK. Good thing he was blood huh? ^_^ At the end of the run he was telling us all what a good run it was, but it sure took a long time. I replied that we had done that on purpose because he told us to hurry. I am convinced this dude was a kid. His replies never changed in tone. They were all very childlike, which is pretty easy to see in WoW when there aren’t assholes (besides myself of course) around. The kid was decked out in triumph badge gear and was only pulling around 2k dps. It was sad really.

After that run was done more guildies had come online so we were able to do a full guild heroic. I switched to Millea since I didn’t need to heal. We got AN and gave Dily shit for his tanking abilities on his pally. I swear to god I was running away from the boss’ face when suddenly I was eating a pound. Heleva says over vent “Did you seriously just eat a pound?” Well I can safely say that I was not the only dps in the group to eat one. Andrew ate one on his rogue, and I am not quite sure how Vel died, but he did. One min I notice I am almost out of mana, the next I see that everyone but Dily and I are dead. We died shortly afterwards. Yes, we wiped in AN. I blame Dily ^_^

We ended up doing another run to cycle in some alts. Got HoS. I got a pretty cool picture of my mage frozen while running towards the big stone boss dude. Which I of course forgot to email to myself so I could upload it up from work. If I remember I will upload it into this post when I get home from work. EDIT – I remembered! 

Run failmage! Run!

 

Fail mage failed in dps against Dily’s DK and Vel’s druid, but that was to be expected.

Fail mage dps is fail

 

After that run Heleva went to get food and never came back online, Dily logged off to sleep for work in the morning and everyone else went off to do their own thing. I debated getting into another group, but decided I was too pissy to be able to be objective about the PuG. Instead I popped onto my DK and decided I was going to finally get her to 68 so I could go to Northrend.

While I was plugging away on her Vel asked me if I wanted to come with him while he was grinding Lower City rep in Shadow Labs. I jumped on it for the XP and possible drops. Ness wanted Outlands rep so he joined us. Fun times were had by all. 😀

I also managed to snag a few upgrades. Including some sweet plate pants with INT on them. Oh yeah baby. My Death Coil is going to do oodles of damage now :D. The only thing that would make those pants even better would be spellpower. There is a red socket so I guess I could technically put a spellpower gem in there. hmmmm *ponders*

Now before you all get all on my case about being a deathtard with the INT, I want to remind you that sarcasm is good for a balanced healthy lifestyle.

I totally am keeping the pants equipped though.

Rebuttal

Ok so as some of you know I got into it with Dark/Soth over at Clearcasting  during this post in the comments section.  Today Arioch had Dark post his viewpoint.  Instead of posting a really long comment I am going to utilize this blog to reply to his post. ^_^

Don’t look at me like that!  It gives me a blog post 😀

Dark feels that people in heroics should be doing a minimum of 2k dps in heroics.  Thinks there is no reason why everyone should not be taking advantage of all of the resources available online and all the BoE gear out there.  Since DPS is easy, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to pull off 2k.  If they can’t pull off 2k then they shouldn’t be in heroics and need to stay in regular dungeons until they do.

Now this assumes that every person who hits 80 has already spent a lot of time researching their spec, their gearing needs and has a bank full of gear ready to go.  This is being called min/maxing.  I call it twink leveling.

Your average player is NOT going to do this.  You mostly find this with people who already have a main who can support this kind of money sink.  Yes it is a money sink.  Instead of using quest gear from Storm Peaks and Ice Crown to start regular dungeons you will pay money for BoEs that drop in heroics or raids or even crafted epic gear.  They will have the best gems that are appropriate.  Might not use the epic gems, but usually the blue quality.  Everything will have the best enchants that aren’t the really expensive ones.

Now I am not saying that you shouldn’t have gems or enchants on your gear.  Far from it.  I just think it is a waste to put an epic gem in a piece of gear I am going to replace quickly.  Epic gems go for the minimum of 150g on my server.  That is for both uncut and cut gems.  Half the time you can get the gem cheaper when it is already cut on the AH.  If you have an enchanter then you probably don’t have too much of an issue of getting enchanting materials.  I feel enchants follow along the same lines as the gems.  You don’t need to use the +10 stats on a chest piece that you are going to replace right away.  +8 stats is perfectly viable.  Hell if it is still a blue or a green you could even put +200 health on it without having too much of an issue.  Although I am sure Dark will disagree with me on that one as he has in the past.  Since we are talking about a fresh 80, they most likely will not be exalted with the Northrend factions, but they should be at the least friendly or even honored.  At honored, most of the factions will offer the lower tiered head enchant.  Failing having any rep with these guys, you can always get the PvP ones from WG.  Those are definitely not ideal, but are much better than having nothing.  Stone keeper shards are fairly simple to come across.  You just need to do a couple WG dailies and you have enough.  They even sell shoulder enchants if you don’t have rep with Sons of Hodir or are a scribe.

There is a huge difference between a brand new player coming into heroics and an alt.  New players usually, not always but usually, will not have access to the resources an alt will have.  New players don’t always know that they should go online and look up information on their class and spec.  They tend to not know about the blogging community and the gems that are found in it.  Until someone mentions to them that these resources are out there, they usually won’t go looking.  I look back when I first started playing.  I knew nothing of EJ or bloggers.  I was told about wowwiki by Andrew and that was in reference to picking a class for the game.  I used to use that to tell me what each of the stats did.  I had no idea that spirit was horrible for a rogue.  When I went back and looked at my lower level toons after I had been playing for about a year and saw what kind of gear I had them in I cringed.  At the time though I was thrilled I had such “good” gear for them.  To give you an idea: the rogue had all spirit gear, the balance druid was decked out in agility and the hunter had intellect stacked.  I still can’t believe how stupid those choices were, or that I spent money buying the gear off the AH.  Hell, my ret pally had a one hander and a shield as did my warrior >.>

These are the people who probably don’t do too too bad with their limited knowledge.  Most of them are quite responsive if you give them tips.  I was in a heroic VH with an affliction warlock that was spamming seed of corruption on a single target.  I told him my main was an affliction warlock and would he be willing to get some rotation advice.  He said “sure!”  I told him the rotation he wanted to use, when to use seed of corruption and even some ideas of where to put his teleport.  We got really lucky with the bosses in that run.  We had the dog and the giant alien.  Essentially stand there and dps fights.  His dps on the dog was 1100 using essentially shadowbolt spam.  On the alien he jumped up to almost 1500.  He was thrilled.  He wasn’t that geared out, not even fully ilvl 200.  Just right for heroics.

On the other side of the spectrum you have the people who should know better but don’t care.  These are the ones that piss off most people.  They stand in the fire, they roll need on spellpower plate as a warrior, because “it makes their thunderclap more powerful” and they wont accept help from anyone.  These people have no excuse for their 800 dps in a heroic.  These people usually grow up to become the ones spamming trade and general looking for more for their raid and requiring the achievement and 5k dps for Naxx.  >.<  These are the ones that not only want to be carried, but expect you to do it.  Screw these guys.  They will probably ninja the loot anyway.

What most people (elitists) tend to forget, or choose to forget I am not sure, is earlier in the year when heroics and Naxx was the only thing around, 1-1.5k was the norm.  People who could regularly pull off 2k+ dps were awesome to have in your group.  I remember when I started doing 1600 dps on my warlock.  I was over the moon.  The people I was running with were also proud of me.  I didn’t manage to pull off 2k dps regularly until I got into the T7 level of gear.  My guild didn’t raid so I didn’t have acess to that gear outside of pugging, which I didn’t want to do.  For running heroics though, I was perfectly fine.  We didn’t have issues getting bosses killed.  We might not have gotten the heroics completed in 15-20 mins, but most people didn’t get them completed that fast either.

Fast forward to today.  The badge available in heroics is the T9 level of gear.  If you run regular dungeons, you don’t get badges outside of your first random of the day.  At least I didn’t on my mage.  After you get 30 badges you can get your first piece of tier gear and move up from there.  Just queue up and go.  Some people will say that they have been seeing people in the harder heroics that don’t belong there.  I think people forget that you can still queue up for specific dungeons and the dungeon finder is not necessarily broken.  If you actually stop and think about it for a moment though, you will see that these people are perfectly geared for the instance.  They are doing the standard dps for the level.  You are the overgeared one doing above average dps.  Why are you holding these people to your standards?

It puts an unfair burdon on a game that is supposed to be fun.  I joke about my fail mage because she is a fail mage.  I have no intention of raiding with her.  I just want her to be compitent to run heroics when I get tired of healing and want a change.  I love my warlock, but I need to work on my key bind situation and currently hers is all messed up which makes her not very fun to play.  My mage fills this hole.  I will admit I get lazy in my guild heroics runs and don’t really do as well as I should.  When I am in a total random I put out the very best that I can.  This is on top of being a good mage by providing  a table, buffing and removing curses.  I manage 1600-1900 on bosses, if I am lucky with the hot streaks I can pull off over 2k.  My overall dps is usually around 1800-1900.  For the level I am playing, this is perfectly viable.  Could I be doing more?  Most likely.  My spec isn’t ideal, I don’t have enough crit and a bit too much hit.  However, I am having fun.  I like being able to use a blast wave to knock the zombies off the healer in CoS then follow up with a free flamestrike.  If I went with the raiding fire spec I would have to say goodbye to my fun spells.  I refuse to get duel spec on a dps toon unless I am going to PvP with them, which most likely will not happen.  I play this game to have fun.  I don’t need to be at the top of the meters to have fun.

I just like to be at the top of the meters to piss off Zakk, but hey that is another story ^_^

Ultimately you should do what makes the game fun for you.  For Dark it is having every last drop of dps being wrung out of his toon 😉 for me it is laughing at my fail mage.  I don’t doubt we both have a blast in what we do.  I also don’t think there is a right or wrong to this.  I just have a problem with people telling me I am bad for wanting to have fun.

Heroics are not srz bzns, raids are, but heroics aren’t.

So let’s take the stick out and have fun playing the game that is our addiction.  ^_^