So, I like healing. My druid rocks, but there’s a problem – once she does the guild runs, she’s locked and can’t help out friends with their runs or just go wipe with a PuG, for fun.
To solve this, I decided that my pally tank should be holy offspec. Said and done, I grabbed some crafted gear, healed a couple of dungeons and heroics, even managed to get a decent collection of purples in the end. However, queuing as tank/healer means that 99% of runs I end up tanking, so my holy experience is limited.
When I changed my offspec, the friend I was leveling with told me I’ll enjoy holy so much I’ll never go back to my druid. She couldn’t have been more wrong. The longer I heal on my paladin, the more I love my druid. No, she’s not that good at tank healing, but I can run! And throw HoTs all over the place! And even a quick Nourish! Swiftmend myself while running instead of counting on the other healers!
This was never more obvious than last night. After a not-very-successful ICC25 plagued with lag and drama, we decided to get an alt run going to ICC10 for the weekly. Lots of tanks, not enough healers, so I reluctantly volunteered to do it. The final setup consisted of two good tanks, an assortment of decent to good DPS, a good healer (tree) and two mediocre ones (tree and my paladin). It didn’t bode well when I saw the second tree’s gear – no T9, some blues, decent for heroics but not much else. My gear’s in pretty much the same shape (ilvl 219 mostly), and ungemmed/unchanted to boot (it was too late to do anything about it). Read more… »
I’m not running out of ideas, but this Blog Azeroth shared topic is a good opportunity to talk about something I like – me!
“What do you do when you can’t WoW?”
My old laptop. Stepping on it was a bad idea.
I’m lucky. I have a reliable internet connection, a backup, two WoW-capable computers and a boyfriend with all the above. None of my WoW absences have been caused by technological disasters (except for some ADSL deaths), but I do occassionally end up in places where WoW simply isn’t possible…
Sadly, I don’t have any simple solution for entertaining yourself while you can’t play. Very basic things work for me…
1. Reading. I love to read and, while I probably still do it more than the average person, I’m nowhere near my all-time highs. No computer/internet = a lot of catching up. I miss staying in bed all day because “OMG what happens next?!?”.
2. Writing comes with reading. I write book reviews on blog and I always want to rant or rave about how cool the last book was or how the writer sucks. I usually take advantage of WoW breaks to fiddle with the design too.
3. I used to watch a lot of TV series a couple of years ago, but my attention span has gotten smaller and smaller, so I haven’t done it in a while. That said, last year I took the laptop with me on holidays in places without internet and had a blast catching up on Lost and BSG. I still haven’t watched the last 2 episodes of BSG and that holiday was 10 months ago… Read more… »
Although I didn’t have much time for her lately, Khrista is settling in well on her new realm.
First off, I made a bank alt and pimped her up. I don’t care about RP, even though I’m on a RP realm now, but I like WoW fashion so I’ve got a couple of outfits for my level 1 night elf. Right now she’s doing the pirate thing and showing off her boobs in Darnassus, but I’ve also got a Lovely Red Dress for her (turns out they became un-soulbound in some patch…).
A few days ago I decided to try (again) to play with my friends over on Defias Brotherhood. I want a(nother) healer and I had already leveled a priest to 23 on Alonsus. I had 2 choices:
1. X-realm a level 80 for support and level a character from scratch;
2. X-realm an already existing low-level character (namely said priest).
There’s pros and cons for each, but I ended up with option 2 for three reasons:
- I want to raid with my guild on the 80s I like (druid and paladin), and I don’t want to play at all on the 80s I don’t like (mage and warrior);
- all my chars on Alonsus are complementary, they help each other with their professions, so I’d be losing either my maxed enchanter (mage) or my farming engineer (warrior);
- I really couldn’t be bothered leveling another priest to level 23. Yes, it’s a low level, but getting to 15 for the dungeon finder was painful and I don’t want to do it again. (It wouldn’ve been easier if I’d rolled a shammy, but I don’t have any BoA shammy gear, while I have a full-set of cloth BoA.)
So, decision made, and Crista of Alonsus was set to become Khrista of Defias Brotherhood (damn you level 25 rogue who took my name!). Since the whole point of x-realming was to benefit from my level 80s, I made an extensive (mental) list of stuff I need to take with me. Since I’m such a nice person, I’ll share it with the world.
It never occured to me that healers are usually played by girls. I was DPS for 2+ years and most of the girls I knew back then also played DPS. I avoided healing, actually, it felt like way too much responsability for a noob like me. And then… in a moment of boredom I rolled a baby druid and discovered that healing is fun and rewarding, and that I actually like the responsability.
Since then, I’ve been paying more attention to articles about healing and a recurring theme keeps popping up: girls tend to roll healers because of their nurturing instincts. (And, to continue, males roll tanks because they like leading and “roar, me protect group”.) My first reaction would be to rant against traditional gender roles and all that, but… looks like in my case it’s more or less true. I like the way people depend on me. I like the way I can shield them from horrible death. I like that I’m the one in the back and not the leader. I like my falling leaves :P
Two weeks ago I started a new job. Not a big deal… except it’s my first 9 to 5 (6, actually) job, and that’s been messing with my WoW schedule.
Until now, all my jobs had been very flexible – I regularly played in the morning and then worked from noon until raid time. This had a few very obvious advantages: farming when no one was online, less lag in Dalaran and so on. And, of course, much more time to play.
When you leave home at 8.30 and come back in the evening at 7… things change fast. My first and most important problem was raid times: we raid until 12 server time, and that means 1 a.m. for me. Sadly, I’ve discovered that going to bed at 1.30 and waking up at 7.30 every day doesn’t really work – I’m a zombie both at work and in raids.
So what can I do? I’ve found a few solutions:
1. Sleep. Simple but effective. I skipped a raid a few days ago and I slept. A lot. The next day I felt much better at work and I was still rested for the next raid. Read more… »
After all the “OMG new LFG rocks!”, it’s time for everyone to get all angry and talk about how them hardcore raiders are ruining their dungeoning experience. To that I say: we’re not all that bad.
The small group of friends I run dungeons with is mostly comprised of progression raiders. We’re geared, we’ve run the instances countless times, we want to get them done and collect our badges. Hell, our alts are better geared than your main. But it’s OK though – we’re not expecting you to know all the bosses, put out 3k DPS, chain pull everything or heal 3 packs of trash. We have the advantage of experience, gold and friends.
What we do expect is a bit of courtesy. “Hello”, “please” and “I don’t know how to do this” never killed anyone. Actually, it might even help you – we have a lot of alts and can give advice. We all want to get it done and we’re not trigger happy with the “Vote to kick” button. If you’re a nice person we’ll even boost you, take you on more runs and shower epics on your head if the RNG is kind. Even if you suck, we won’t QQ in party chat, we’ll keep it in whispers or in the guild because we don’t want you to feel bad, and most people don’t like unasked-for advice. If we end up with an idiot in the group, we will defend you because, guess what, some of us still remember how heroics felt like when 2k DPS was good.
Did you spot the key word there? “Nice”. We are nice people who want to be treated the same. If you’re being a dick, the claws come out. Double so if you’re a dick who’s being carried. If it gets out of hand, you will be kicked. We can get a replacement in the guild or simply wait some more; you’re not irreplaceable, not even you’re a healer or a tank. And please, if you get kicked for being an overall nasty and unhelpful person, don’t go crying to WoW.com afterwards about how them hardcore raiders are bad mean evil people.
That’s all you need to know. If the people you’re running with mock you for being an inexperienced player without offering any helpful advice… drop group. Douchebags aren’t worth getting angry about. Just keep in mind that douchebaggery is not a trait of all raiders.
My happy WoW life will soon be disrupted by the real world: I start a new job next week. While it’s obviously a good thing, it will also bring something not-so-good – less sleep if I want to continue raiding and much less play time in general. With that in mind, I’ve taken advantage of my last days of freedom to accomplish as much as possible, and it’s been going well. Although I couldn’t finish 2009 with a ding, Shiny hit 80 in the evening of January 1st 2010, making her my 4th level 80 character. Not a bad start for a WoW year, I’d say.
A day and a bit later, she’s on the right track: I had a lot of emblems of triumph on my druid, so I invested them in a Breastplate of the White Knight, then I got boosted through the new ICC normals and picked up a cool shield and a pair of pants. Add some ToC normal loot and a pair of T9 gloves to that and Shiny isn’t in bad shape. There’s a lot of work to do, but I have 2 more free days and I plan to get her ready for T8+ raiding at least.
A fresh 80 tanking Onyxia? Yes, completely possible, but as they say at the Oscar speeches, I couldn’t have done it alone. I was lucky to have a boyfriend who let me raid his bank and steal his hard-earned epic gems, a friend with a pally tank main, who told me what gear to get, gave me tanking tips (and led the way and tanked on the drake in Oculus!) and lent me mats, and a bunch of guildies who tagged along to get my ass boosted. Special thanks to Blizzard – catering to the casuals my ass, their approach to emblems and the introduction of the ilvl 219 instances is an awesome thing for the non-casuals too.
While doing dailies I get a whisper: “tank?”. I wasn’t queued in LFG. I wasn’t even in an instance area. Now, I don’t mind going to a dungeon when it wasn’t planned… but is it too much to ask for a “hello” and a “please”? I might be overly sensitive, but this is just the tip of a big iceberg of egotism. Is “WoW is just a game” the ultimate excuse for everything, from dropping most words in a sentence to abusing other players?
For many, yes, it is. You don’t know those people, you’ll never going to see them, you might not even run into them ever again, especially with the new cross-battlegroup LFG. Why not be a complete dick? Why not limit conversation and manners to the absolute minimum?
Well… because there is a person on the other side of the screen. It might be a school bully or it might be someone’s grandma or young son, and whoever it is, they deserve some consideration.
So why do people do it? It’s probably what everyone is deploring about the internet: it just doesn’t feel like human interaction anymore. People become just a means to an end, a way for you to get fun or epics. Who cares if the others get anything out of it?
I know an article in the sea of articles won’t convince someone to change their ways, but hey, if I get one person thinking, I’m happy. Look at it this way: I try to play the game with “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” in mind. Do I like people dropping group as soon as they enter the instance? Do I like ninja AFKers? Do I like being called “omg noob u suck lol”? Do I like people slacking in raids? Do I like single word conversations? I don’t, so I try to treat people like I’d like to be treated. It’s not hard, really: say please, say thank you, don’t be unnecessarily mean (no, not even to noobs), try to give constructive advice or stfu.
By the way, the language barrier is not an excuse: if you can play on that server, you know the words for “please” and “thanks”; if you’re worried your lack of knowledge might be misunderstood, just freaking say it.
TL;DR: Don’t be an asshole/bitch. Use common courtesy. Make the game a better place for everyone. Save the whales.
This blog started out as a collection of stories written by several players. However, I soon realized that most people don’t get the writing bug so often, and I can’t badger them into writing if they don’t feel like it. So, after many months of inactivity, I’ve decided to just scrap that idea and turn the blog into my personal playground. All the old posts have been moved to their own category and from now I’m on my own.
First, an update. Last time I wrote I was leveling a druid on a Spanish server. In the meantime, I transferred her twice: once, to Defias Brotherhood, to play with some friends (who turned out not to play too much), the second time to Alonsus, my main server. Due to a series of events I quit my guild, which offered me the opportunity to change mains. After a brief confusing period, the druid (renamed to Jen) became my main, I found a new guild and I’m currently loving healing.
Then, the plan. This blog will probably end up as my WoW diary – QQ about the idiots I find in PuGs, random musings, funny stuff and screenshots. It definitely won’t have theorycrafting or guides, so be warned.
It will have some Monty Python though, just like this title. (Slightly NSFW video, especially the sound.)
