and things went downhill from there

I like the aesthetics of this new expansion, but so far it's beginning to look like it might be as much as grind as the previous one (just with a story that sucks less).

The guild is starting its first raiding tier on Friday, and as one of the guild officers, I would typically be along for that. The problem is that our GM has set the minimum gear level at 175 - which is reasonable.

I'm currently at 148. There is little hope that I could get to 175 by Friday, and even though he's insisted that he wants me to join them, I've put my foot down and said that I won't come unless I meet the gear level - at least, not until they've cleared the first few bosses ate least once. I don't mind getting carried for the first bit while I get gear, but I refuse to tag along as a hard carry when they are working on new progression.

Part of the problem is that I've actually been putting in fewer hours than a lot of other people in the guild. Also, we've had at least 100 new people join since the start of this new expansion, so we are currently running with a glut in almost every class and role. This means that we are practically tripping over healers at the moment.

Which is bad for the under-geared ones like me.

I was commiserating with the others in the officer channel last night. I said, "The problem is two-fold. Either people don't announce that they need people for a dungeon run until they've already filled the tank and healer spots, or they advertise right as I'm in the middle of a Torghast run, and the spots get taken before I'm done."

The other problem is that we have some seriously hardcore keeners who are already almost out-gearing the current tier. When Otto B. Farminpurpz is looking for a healer to run his M+ key, is he going to select the healer who isn't even geared enough for an M0, or the one who can help them power through the place in 20 minutes?

One of the roadblocks when you are behind the curve is that as others pull further ahead, it gets harder and harder to convince them to step back a bit and give you a hand in catching up.

Not that I'm particularly upset about it. While I'd like to be raiding with the guild on Friday/Saturday, it's not the end of my world if I don't. I'm just not feeling quite as invested in this game as I used to, and I'll find other things to do with my evening. I love some of the aesthetics of this expansion, and I like the storyline so far, but... I've been doing this for over a decade. I can live with backing off a bit.

This iLev 610 gear has been dropping from my garrison caches for months, and I have been routinely selling it to try and crack the quarter-million gold mark. A few weeks ago I got the head piece in one of the cache boxes, and as a lark I tried it on before I sold it. To the helm's defence, it did not match any of the rest of my gear, so it was - for lack of a better description - butt ugly.

I sold it to one of my garrison vendors, but its hideous after-image gnawed at the back of my brain until I went and bought it back again. I began to wonder if the rest of the set was as unattractive as the helm, and my plan for an anti-transmogrification set was born.

Over the past few weeks I have been hoarding every piece of the Communal set that dropped in my garrison until the shoulders finally arrived this evening.

I ran off to the nearest transmogrifier and gleefully filled every slot with this woeful set...

...and in my opinion, the result is actually rather pleasing, and not at all what I had been expecting. The armour actually looks serene and priestly - very much the look that one might expect on a healer.

I took her back to her roots and copped a picture of her in the Undercity, just because that seemed appropriate.

Kind of I have been wanting to do this to my work monitor since Monday. I have four monitors, and while any of them would suffice, I guess I would probably give preference to the analogue one. To that end I may download an animated GIF with a target in the middle and blinking arrows pointing at it. Just before I put a hoof fist through it I will shout something mildly non-sequitur like, "Suck my balls Jimmy Kimmel!"

Apparently we have contracted out our help desk and asked them to staff it with people who not only do not know our systems, but are only passingly familiar with recent inventions like electricity. "Prithee, tellest me more of this stone upon which thou wouldst attempt in futility to inscribe numerical annotations thereon."

"Our CSD database has not been updating since the 6th"
"Please do not be giving me technical details at this point. I am still needing to be looking at cost analysis for this application problem you are experiencing."
"And I'm telling you it's not the application, it's the data. I have tested it already with multiple applications...!"

I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the fact that a) I was apparently the first to notice that our Customer Operational Reporting database was missing, well, everything past the 6th if I attempted to access any of that selfsame customer data, or b) the fact that their "fix" restored the missing data, but borked everything prior to the 6th, or c) the fact that after they had made things profoundly worse, they earnestly asked, "I am sorry, but I am having to ask. Your original problem is now fixed, correct?"

Argh!

We downed the first two bosses in the new Dragon Soul raid instance this evening. The first boss was laughably easy - as I suspected he would be after running it in LFR - and the second boss wasn't a whole lot harder. There was a lot more RNG on the second boss, and most of our wipes were due to people adapting to burning cool-downs when we got an unfortunate combination of slimes. Still, I never doubted we would be at least 2/8 before the night was over. I don't think the third boss will give us a lot of trouble either.

My main concern on the night was that my dps is a good 5k lower than the next person in the raid. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, my gear is a mess because they've had me switch roles and specs a couple of times. It would be better if I had two complete sets of armour, but most of my gear is actually better itemized for healing than dps. Likewise a lot of my gemming and reforging. I had made a vow to look into that when I logged in this eveing, but the RL whispered me as soon as I got in game and asked if I would be ok if they swapped me in and out of healing and damage roles for various fights. Ah well, I'll see what I can do about the armour.

The other problem is that most of my efforts to gear up recently have been concentrating on my druid. Our GM announced that he is going to be taking a break from raiding because they are into volleyball season, and he won't have enough time for raiding now. One of our other awesome tanks is also taking a break from the game, leaving just the paladin. Since my bear is just a couple pieces of gear short of being able to tank this new place, the RL asked if I would mind grinding out the last 2-3 pieces so that they can move me into a tanking role. To be honest, I don't really mind. I've been playing the priest for so long that the change will be nice. Mind you, I will need to relearn where all my tank buttons are...

After reserving a name for the character, I created a Worgen druid shortly after Cataclysm dropped, and then promptly started neglecting her while I worked on my main Horde characters. After getting three of my Hordies to 85, I figured it was time to spend some time with the puppy.

My goal this evening was to grind out low-level quests until I could get her to level 20. First, level 20 seemed like a good goalpost for an evening's play, but I also wanted to see if the Worgen racial travel form was as evocative as I have heard.



The short answer is yes. When they are running, they bound along like you would expect a half-feral creature to run, but when they stop running they stay in their travel pose which looks less like a "mounted" pose than a "mount me" pose. The Worgen are kind of a neat race with a reasonably interesting back-story, and I like the graphics for the characters though I don't get why they didn't give them tails in their canine form - the Draenei and Tauren both have tails, so I know they have tail subroutines built into the game. Overall though I think the Horde got the better deal. Worgen may be cool, but Goblins are fucking awesome, and the Forsaken back story is downright epic.

What was really interesting was playing through the Foresaken starting quests, then playing through the Worgen ones to see the story told from the other side.

And I think people just look for things that aren't there. Here is Balto in her travel form. With her clothing removed. Well, okay, maybe it's a little suggestive...



I love the squirrel in the background. Just in case you didn't recognize it as a squirrel, the game kindly put a name plate over it like an obsessive person with a label-maker going around sticking labels to everything in the house; "Door", "Chair", "Cat", etc.

I really didn't want to roll an Alliance toon.

( ... but it seems you leave me no choice. )

Yes, we're still playing World of Warcraft. For the most part I have been doing boring stuff in the game, like grinding for reputation and money. Yesterday atara was talking about how she would like to play a druid, so we (sort of) re-created our tauren sisters that we had been playing over on Cenarius. Rather than paying to transfer them over to our new server, we just created a new pair of druids, and we are levelling them up together.

All is quiet on the guild front. After swearing that we would never adopt a DKP system, we quietly adopted a system that does the same thing under a different name. So far there has not been a rash of drama and /gquits over it, but that may be because people are holding off to see how well it works before they get indignant. That might also be because this is a remarkably mature and drama-free guild. There have been a few people quitting in the middle of the night here and there, but new people seem to join at about the same rate, so we're holding at a steady 96 accounts most of the time.

Starting in October we are going to be putting a bit more effort into progression, and to that end we wrapped up a loose end that had been vexing us for awhile.
( Take that, bitch! )
For the most part taking Engineering as a profession has been a pointless money pit, but there are a few things that I would miss terribly if I gave up the profession. My personal teleportation devices to Gadgetzan and Blades Edge Mountains have proven to be very useful - if a little flaky. Usually when my Gadgetzan teleporter malfunctions it just tries to kill me, but when my Blades Edge teleporter malfunctions...
( ... the results can be amusing. )

With the expansion pack just around the corner this will become moot for awhile, but it was no less frustrating a couple of nights back (and it is always worst when the various class leaders aren't along on the run. What's that expression about "when the cat's away..."?) Since it looks like we are going to be doing ZG all week it has the potential to be a continuing source of annoyance until next Tuesday.

Scenario: You are running ZG because you couldn't get enough bodies for MC. Your raid has already wiped once on a pull of trash mobs, and you continue to lose people on every pull of what should be very routine critters. Assume for argument's sake that four of the people are actually healing, and a fifth (the lowest-level of the bunch) is desperately splitting his time between healing and cleansing the poison that's ripping through the cloth-wearers. As to the other two "healers" on the run...

[Poll #903454]

If you answered G or H then you were probably on our raid the other day.

(Seriously guys, I don't care how you spec, but when people around you are dying, it won't kill you to cast the occasional heal, or drop a poison-cleansing totem, or...)

One of the last upgrades I got with our previous guild was this nice little wand from Instructor Razuvious:

Wand of the Whispering Dead Binds when picked up Wand 119 - 222 Shadow Damage          Speed 1.50 (113.7 damage per second) +10 Intellect +9 Spirit Durability 75 / 75 Requires Level 60 Equip: Increases healing done by spells and effects by up to 22. Sells for 14gold 89silver 94copper to vendors Item Level 83

The wand has become an integral part of my attack when I'm playing solo. The routine looks like this:

Holy Fire
Smite
Shield (on self)
Shadow Word Pain
Mindblast
Wand... Wand... Wand... (repeat until dead)

It's not the fastest way to take down an opponent, but it is very mana-efficient. I could usually burn through 20-30 crunchies before having to stop for mana regeneration. The wand usually hits for 130ish per shot, with crits sometimes taking it close to 300. All the time, though, I couldn't shake this nagging curiousity about what kind of damage I could be doing with the wand if I was specced for shadow. Curiosity got the best of me last night and I bucked up the 15g to re-spec. I went with a full Shadow DPS spec, and tossed in the boost to wands under the Discipline tree. Having thus rendered myself mostly useless for raiding, I caught a Windrider up to Easter Plague Lands and unleashed my new arsenal on the first hostile critter I encountered.

O.M.F.G.

It's been awhile since I played a shadow priest, but I still remembered the basic attack.
Curse of Weakness
Mindblast
Shadow Word Pain
Shield(on self)
Mindflay
Mindflay
Wand... Wand (crit for 590)
Critter: x.x

In my previous incarnation as a shadow priest I made the mistake of not taking Spirit Tap as a talent. This time I bought it up to 100% proc, and I wonder now how I got by without it. By the time I turned my attention to the next hapless critter in the area, my mana had already ticked back to nearly full. Just for giggles, I teamed up with atara's warlock, and we went on a tour of destruction through Silithus. We were a two-person wrecking crew. My damage output is nowhere near what she's tossing out with her 'lock, but it's more than double what it was before I did the switch to shadow. It is going to be really tough to spec back to holy once I'm done playing with this one.

It took a few hours, and quite a few tries, but we managed a Horde first on our server; we cleared the spider wing in Naxxaramas.

First pull was at 14:00, and we finally downed her at just after 20:30. Some of the wipes were a learning experience, some were just plain bad luck. We ran 30 minutes past the scheduled end-time for the raid, but we could taste a kill in the making and we all decided to stick it out for as long as it took. By the time we got to the kill, we'd burned through three repair bots, and just about every potion and consumable we had in the guild bank. We went into the final fight with only minimal buffs, leaving us to suspect that strategy and timing was much more important to the fight than all the potions and other goods we'd been burning through.

To give you an idea of how frantic this fight was, here's some of the things that happen during the encounter.

• After the first 20 seconds, and every 40 seconds after she randomly encases three people in web and sticks them to the wall where they will take about 750 points of damage per second until they are freed.



• After 30 seconds, and every 40 seconds after she releases a wave of baby spiders that swarm into the raid.



• Every 40 seconds she sprays the entire raid with web, stunning them for 8 seconds and dealing out about 2100 points of damage.



• She hits with a necrotic poison that reduces healing by 90% for 30 seconds.



• She occasionally fires off a cone of poison dealing about 2100 points of damage to everyone in front of her (important for the raid to stay behind/beside her for that reason).



• At 30% health she enrages and her damage production goes up considerably (as if she wasn't tough enough already.

As you can see, it's a pretty intense fight. And this is the easy wing in this instance. O_o
( This was one tough little bug. )
I have also been informed that it's the anniversary of my former guild. Grats guys. From what I've seen and heard, it sounds like you're progressing nicely. I'll crack a Gordok Green Grog in your honour.

What follows is geeky talk about WoW.  Those of you who don't play, or aren't interested are free to roll your eyes indulgently and carry on.  (No, really, you probably won't even find this interesting on an abstract, academic level.  Too much obscure geekery distilled into one post.)

. . .

It was an interesting weekend in Warcraft.  We probably spent a little more time behind the keyboards than we'd have liked, but even so we managed to get outside a few times and experience actual sunshine.

Sometime last week the guild finally manage to down the twin emperors, and last night we cleared away the trash mobs leading to Cthun.  A few of the guild cashed in for some new weapons from the NPCs outside his chamber, and then we (mostly) stripped naked and ran into his room to see what we were in for.  I got blasted for 9000ish points of damage running into the room, so I had to watch the fun from the doorway, but I think that atara managed to snag some screen shots.  Even though it was far from a serious effort, we managed to get him down to 92%

We did our usual BWL run on Sunday, and cruised our way to the end in near-record time, only to wipe repeatedly on Nefarian again.  Our raid leader was a bit angsty about this, as we used to have this guy on farm status, and we haven't managed to take him down in over a month.  We just can't seem to get past phase one in the fight - and considering that it was a fairly easy bronze/red combination on Sunday, it's easy to see why people are getting a little upset.  After AQ last night we all trucked over to Nef's chamber again to try out a new strategy.

The new strategy went something like this:  The cloth-wearers (healers/casters/etc) stood in the centre of the room, in range of both entrances.  We split tanks left and right to handle the drakes as they came into the room, and had a couple of roving tanks to pull any runners away from the healers (I need to berate my fellow priests later for generating too much threat.  Stop using Flash Heal, damnit!).  Our rogues and hunters focused fire on the bronze mobs, while the mages and warlocks dotted and burned down the reds.  Everything went awry on the first attempt, but once we'd convinced the tanks to stay put, it went better on the second try.  When we (finally!) survived the first part of the fight, Nefarian landed and we made him our bitch with relative ease.  That felt good.  We needed that kill.

The guild has given up doing serious runs on Fri/Sat, but we usually have enough around for an AQ20 and/or ZG run.  We have them both on snooze-button status¹, so we'll often do them both on the same day because they're so quick.  I like both instances, so I'm usually up for a clear of either.  Anyway, we'd just got a few pulls into ZG when one of the other raiding guilds began pestering our raid leader for help.  Apparently they had cleared Molten Core all the way to Ragnaros, but didn't have enough people online to tackle him before the instance reset.  They said, "the 20 you have in ZG would be enough to let us take him down."  We put it to a vote, and decided to help out a fellow guild.

In the end we did more than help out.  They only managed to scrape up 6 people from their guild for the run, and we filled out the other 34.  There was a lot of idle guild-chatter about this, including sentiments like, "What the heck?  They ask for help and then only bring six guys to the raid?  Why do we need these guys along in the first place?  Let's just boot them once we get into the instance - we've downed Rag with less than 30 before."  In the end we behaved honourably.  They did clear it all the way to Ragnaros after all, even if only 6 of them could be bothered showing for the main boss.  It turns out that they weren't bad folk either.  When one of their hunters won the roll for a tier 2 piece and learned that one of our guys needed that piece to complete his set, he graciously passed.  Classy.  I like to think that I'd do the same.

Oh, and I got my Leggings of Transcendence (bouncebouce!)  Two sets of the pants dropped, and the two of us who needed them tied our rolls at 39, so I guess it was just meant to be.  I'd have been happy to get the Prophecy pants - or any pants other than the ones I was still wearing.  I'd bought them in the auction house months ago and they were getting a little threadbare.  One of these days I'll compile an equipment list so that you fellow Warcrafters can all point and laugh at my mishmash of mismatched armour.  I'm just happy to have over 7K in mana now (buffed, mind you.  Just over 6K without buffs).

One other item of interest is that we ran Liveside Stratholme a couple of times on the weekend, trying to get a drop for one of our newer mages. I mentioned to the others in the party that we'd scored three Righteous Orbs the last time I'd run that instance. Getting that many of them in a run is unusual. We got two on our first run, and six on the second. I have two of them in my bank, waiting for me to decide their fate. Question to y'all: should I save them for future enchants, or sell them and put the money into my horse fund?

^{1 - snooze-button status = wake me up if you need me to cast a heal or something.  Or - to quote one of my favourite lines from an article on the dangers of over-equipping the people for whom you GM, "I yawn.  I consider casting a spell."}