Stories of WoW

I was going to write a post about why healing really is fun now, and how you shouldn’t despair, just wait to get more gear and better groups, why pugs aren’t always horrible… then I decided that everyone else wrote about that already. Instead, here’s a couple of likes and dislikes from my first month of Cataclysm.

Favorite spell: Lifebloom
I’m a Wrath druid, so until a month ago, I only used Lifebloom with Clearcasting for the mana regen. I fully expected to hate the spell, because keeping 3 stacks up on a tank sounded like a pain in the ass. I couldn’t have been more wrong: I love it! The huge bloom is a (literal) life-saver when the tank gets knocked out of range.

Least favorite spell: Regrowth
Get out of here, mana drain with a shitty HoT. If the patch notes are really saying what people believe they’re saying about Empowered Touch, Regrowth will lose its only use: a heal that allows controlled blooms.

Favorite instance(s): Throne of the Tides and Deadmines
Throne of the Tides is so. so. pretty. I love the look of Vashj’ir, even though the underwater mechanics make me cry. While I don’t particularly like the bosses in Throne of the Tides, the graphics more than make up for that.

In contrast, Deadmines is pure fun (especially since Blizzard spared us the long corpse run!). The encounters are well-designed and I absolutely love the “dodge the lines of deadly lightning” game. It surprised me a lot, since I used to suck at stuff like Halion’s beams… turns out, doing it while not having to focus on healing is great!
(Bonus: The first time we went there my guildies bet that I was going to die. I did it perfectly on the first try. They failed. Hah!)

Least favorite instance(s): Grim Batol and Blackrock Caverns
I hate Blackrock Mountain. I’ve always hated Blackrock Mountain. I learned the corpse run pretty fast and I haven’t fallen in the lava yet, but the color scheme is annoying, Karsh is a bitch to do and Beauty is not fun in a group with little to no CC. (They’re taking away some puppies though!)

Grim Batol is just plain depressing, the bosses are nigh-impossible with a bad (or even mediocre) group, and the first few times I wiped there for ages, even with the guild. I did have good experiences lately (a pug that cleared it in less than an hour!), but I’ll never like the place.

Continue reading One month of Cataclysm

I wasn’t excited for Cataclysm. I was really (really) enjoying my raiding break after 6 months of feeling I had to make every raid (due to a lack of healers in the guild). I was really (really) enjoying leveling my hunter in the new world and taking it easy. I was even reading quest text! That hadn’t happened since my first char killed her first 10 kobolds! (Sorry Gerald.)

But Blizzard doesn’t care about my excitement or lack thereof, so launch day came and went, with its login server instability and giddiness in the guild. I’ve been panicking about the guild for months (too many healers, not enough tanks, a pregnancy – not mine -, not knowing who is coming back and in what roles, hoping some people don’t come back at all) and I kept doing it. But after disagreeing with Kurn about guild prepardeness, I did start making some plans, scaled to our 10-man pretty casual level (no spreadsheets :P).

One of the points is that the first raid is scheduled for sometime in January. I’m a slow leveler and it’s somewhat of a running joke in the guild, with people urging me on whenever I’m playing a new alt. This time, I decided to hell with it all. I had enough time until January to get to 85, I was expecting it to be slow, and I wanted to enjoy the ride. So I took it easy, I cleared zones even when I was supposed to start new ones, I barely dungeoned and… I still managed to ding 85 Sunday night. The only concession I made was moving to Twilight Highlands before I finished Uldum, since it was getting late and I had set a goal to be 85 before the new week.

And now it’s time to panic again. After basically running with 2 healers in Wrath, now we have a ton. Inactive and social members came back and they all want to heal… which meant I boomkined a lot. The good part is that the new eclipse is really, really cool. My damage is still shit (my boomkin-main boyfriend facepalmed when he saw my numbers), but I am finally enjoying the spec. The bad part is that I am a healer and the future doesn’t look bright.

On the short term, I have to relearn healing and it looks scary as hell. I started playing my druid mid-Wrath, so I never ever used Lifebloom. I’ll probably need to make a big flashing Power Aura to remind me it exists. I don’t yet understand how all the spells work together. I feel my heals are horribly underpowered. And, since we only have 2-3 tanks in the guild (to 4-5 healers), it means I’ll get to pug a lot. I’m excited at getting to heal again, but judging by the tanks I’ve seen so far… it probably won’t be very fun. (Then again, I can’t wait to troll some idiots again! It gets my blood boiling when someone thinks s/he can boss me around and I love bitching back.) Right now, the one thing that makes me hopeful is the amazing blogosphere. There are so many good druid bloggers who can show me the light, thank Elune!

On the long term, we’ve got some raid balancing to think about. While I don’t hate moonkin anymore, DPS is not what I do, but with the amount of people wanting to heal this expansion… I might have to do it more than usual. We’ll see when we get there, but I really hope some of the would-be raiders will realize they don’t have enough time to dedicate to it… then we can split the healers between main and alt runs and everyone will be happy!

Jen is not a very happy druid at the moment and the most annoying thing is that I can’t put my finger on the reason. But, since it’s Monday and I really, really don’t feel like working, I will try the solution that always works to cheer me up: planning gear upgrades! While she was a baby druid I had immense fun thinking of her future level 80 gear, and I hope this will work again for level 85. First thing: buy that goddamn Therazane rep and stop being stupid about my reps!

P.S. Blizzard, I am not Very Manly!

Looks like it takes something bad to get me writing. We’ve been on a raiding break for a while, I had an amazing time leveling an alt and not feeling pressured to raid, everything’s been quiet. I wasn’t even excited about Cataclysm, I was loving the changed world so much I didn’t want to go back to “serious” leveling. But it’s here and guildies’ excitement got to me too.

One of the best parts of Cataclysm was knowing that our collective efforts will make a difference. We’re a small guild and most of us are friends, so it’s not like I need a carrot to make them stick around, but I was looking forward to getting achievements together and leveling the guild. Seeing achievements pop up in guild chat, seeing our shammy get to 85, seeing our guild get to level 2 (then back to 1, then back to 2) felt so nice. It was us! Our guild was getting better! We could get to 85 and run heroics and raids and kill critters and get our guild leveled even faster!

Or not. Blizzard decided that XP from achievements was imbalanced, so they removed it completely. Er, what?

I was a bit confused on the subject until recently, so this is how it used to work:
* You did your thing, doing quests or dungeons, and the guild gained XP up to a cap. The cap is very low, making the pre-Cataclysm complaints (OMFG you’re killing small guilds!!!) worthless. We had maybe 5 people active on the first night, and around 10 on the second, and we hit the cap in no time.
* You gained guild achievements (e.g. doing heroics or raids in a guild group) and the guild earned extra XP, beyond the cap. This was removed.

The result? All guilds that have some active players will level to 25 on the same day, due to the “gated” progress. The argument, I think, is that it’s making it fair for small guilds, because the big ones would otherwise ding 25 in a few days.

So what? I’m in a small guild. We’re here because we want to be here. I don’t give a flying fuck if some 25-man guild gets the perks before us. Working together for our smaller goals felt amazing and Blizzard took it away. I’m not a whiner and I generally agree with Blizzard’s reasoning, but I simply can’t understand this one. Wasn’t it easier to just make the achievement gives significantly less XP? Even that small amount would still be an incentive.

If I knew I was contributing to the guild, I would gladly go clear Mount Hyjal or Scarlet Monastery. If the achievements are now just shiny numbers on a list, I am not even going to bother. I have all the personal achievements I wanted; if I don’t have something on my characters, it means I don’t care. Some people like to see achievements flashing just for the sake of it. I never got the point unless they showed something about skill (heroic achievements in ICC, for example), had a reward (Stinker!) or amused me in some way (To All the Squirrels I’ve Loved Before). Going to a level 70 raid with 8 other people from the guild, just for the sake of it, is less fun to me than leveling my non-heirloomed warrior who dies every 3 kobolds, and this killed a part of my Cataclysm enthusiam.

I don’t expect Blizzard to read my blog, but the thread on the official forums has some very articulate posters. I hope they listen to them.

Ever since I read Larisa’s post about her guild’s anniversary party I’ve wanted one of my own. Only one problem: the guilds I was in weren’t the type to organize in-game events. Then there was Soulbound… but they didn’t seem overly excited either when I suggested a party.

Looks like it was just a matter of timing and just getting it done without asking everyone.

The reason
On October 26th, the guild had its 6 months anniversary. (No, I’m not a weirdo that remembers the exact day she signed a charter. It just so happens that we made the guild on my brother’s birthday.) It was just the perfect opportunity: a celebration of our achievements and a way to say goodbye to Wrath of the Lich King.

Before the party
It started with a lot of planning, a lot of walls of text (mine) in the officer forums, a lot of camping for prizes, and my first eBay experience. We decided on having TCG loot cards for the winners (“what if the eBay codes don’t work, aaa!”), Black Tabbies for the people who came in second place, and raptor hatchlings for those in third place. I was a bit stressed out since, given the previous lack of interest, I was afraid we’d end up with more prizes than participants… so I was blown away when almost 20 people accepted the invite on the calendar. (I was also even more stressed out since our Vent only had 15 slots, but a guildie went and bought us a new, bigger one, woop!)

What went down
In the end, there was about 15 or 16 of us, with me playing master of ceremonies (getting that summer festival dress was worth it!). We had 3 competitions and an afterparty.

First off, we had a naked gnome race. I was going to make it an ‘any class/race combination’ (to see who chose the one with the best survivability), but my plan was shot down by my fellow officer V who said NO WE’RE MAKING NOAMS! You can’t say “no” to her, so we made noams :D

The victi… err participants had to run from Dun Morogh (gnome spawn point) to the Dam in Loch Modan.

It’s funny how adults can turn into squeeing gnomes when a level 5 leopard starts chasing them :D

Continue reading Happy birthday Soulbound!

Monday was a good day for science WoW. I haven’t cared much about seasonal events after I got the violet drake on my warrior (which I don’t play anymore), but eh, why not spend 20 seconds at the Headless Horseman. About a minute later… my shaman had this baby:

It looked like it was my lucky day, so I figured my priest kinda needs a new mount too. I logged onto the other realm… and got an invite 5 seconds later: the guild was having another go at Arthas. I was dead tired, but I couldn’t say no.

Two hours and a half later, he was hugging the floor, a first kill for this guild.

Before the patch, I was afraid killing him would be impossible with the new talents. Turns out I was very wrong.

Now, Soulbound isn’t full of super pro imba players and I won’t pretend I’m God’s gift to healing. I get tunnel vision and I get lost in a straight corridor. But this guild has… some sub par players.

Like the hunter who had never seen the LK and apparently never read up either. And who hadn’t changed one gem, so he had all crit and was doing an impressive 4.5K DPS at his peak.

…Or the other hunter, who was doing great DPS… while sitting with the group and not noticing the Necrotic Plague on her.

…Or the raid leader whose only method of troubleshooting a wipe was asking “Was healing a problem?”. (“No idiot, the hunter who wouldn’t run was a problem so I let her die instead of getting the plague all over us!”)
(After the 3rd time she did that, we decided not to bother yelling at her and we just dispelled her and hoped the Plague would jump to someone who can see the BIG BLUE DBM announcement.)

…Not to mention the noob disc priest who had to frantically whisper friends during the fight asking what to do… or the noob priest’s friend, the holy pally, who had only come back to WoW a week before.

The run was a bit frustrating at first, but I kept telling myself that I am not here to look down at them from my “my main has a frost wyrm” heights and that they do have a couple of very good players. The private channel where me and my friends could freely bitch helped too.

To conclude, if this group managed to get Kingslayer, anyone can. If you’re still working on the LK, don’t despair, you’ll get him down eventually. (Just please, don’t be that hunter.)

Tonight, we’re off to get KS for our alts on Alonsus too!

Edit: Of course, after writing the above… my “we killed LK in May” guild went to Sindragosa on alts and proceeded to wipe in the dumbest ways for an hour. Including yours truly trying to edit an in-game event during the raid and iceblocking everyone except the tank.