I love failpug stories. I even love my own failpugs – raging is cathartic. Last night, when I zoned in Slave Pens and saw Weinodk the tank with Blood Presence, I groaned inwardly – and outwardly, to the guild. My first plea to please put Frost Presence was ignored as he ran ahead letting me remember (once again) that a shaman is not a druid, and even if it was, Rejuv at level 60 didn’t do squat.

Then he said this was the first “hard” dungeon he’d tanked. I told him about Frost Presence again, holding back the snark but fully expecting to be ignored and, lo and behold …“Oh, sorry, that must be why I’m losing aggro, I’ll put Frost”.

Yes, I managed to find the rare breed of new player who actually listens to advice.

The run continued in a just as amazing manner.
* The DK took care of my mana. More than me, to be honest.
* The other DK didn’t use D&D because he was higher level and didn’t want to grab aggro.
* The warlock always kept me soulstoned.
* The whole group was patient with the DK, gave advice, and didn’t utter a ‘wtf’ or a ‘noob’.
* The DK apologized when he ran too much ahead of me. He apologized even when I let him die because I was busy eating instead of healing.
* The DK tried to get us to queue for another dungeon (he wanted a harder one to practice his new found skills), but we declined politely and he understood. From his language, I’m pretty sure it was a kid, which makes this even more impressive. It wouldn’t have been the first time an over-eager 12-year old pissed me off.

In the end, we weren’t pr0, we got lost a bit on the way, we fucked up a few pulls and I did forget I have Earth Shield until halfway in… but it was one of the most pleasant runs I’ve had in a while outside the guild. I hope my DK doesn’t become one of those gogogogogo tanks in 20 levels…

Exactly a month ago, Windsoar had a blog anniversary. A little less than a month ago, I asked for a blogging topic in her muse thread and… I pretty much let it go, since I was busy/lazy. But it got me thinking and tonight something happened to remind me of it.

/cast Muse

You state you’d like a Healer, Tank and DPS fairly geared and ready for current content. How’s that going?

(That’s what I say in my about, by the way.)

That page was written when I started this blog – I was raiding on my druid, gearing my mage and leveling my paladin. In the meantime, things have changed.

My druid is still my main and her healing gear is pretty good. I have a +hit offhand which I can’t seem to get rid of, and I could use a new trinket, but all in all nothing to complain. Her moonkin gear is decent (if not fully enchanted and gemmed)… ignoring the fact that my moonkin could get nice wild growth bonuses since I use my resto tier gear. Since I’m only moonkin once in a blue moon, for 6 bosses, I haven’t bothered investing in moonkin tier yet (not that I had the Frosts to do it anyway).

My paladin is slowly but surely gathering a nice collection of pretties. Last week’s ICC alt run got me a new weapon and a belt to replace my sucky ilvl 219 one, plus a few healer items. The tank set is way ahead of the holy one, but I can now say I can safely heal at least the first 6-7 ICC bosses too. Problems still arise, of course, but they have more to do with my druid twitchiness than with gear. (I’m so used to bouncing around while throwing HoTs, a stationary paladin is a huge change.)

My mage… is pretty much abandoned now. At some point I’ll run 3 more heroics on her to get enough Frosts for a new Saronite, but that’s about it. I don’t really like the playstyle, so I can’t get interested enough to learn to play her properly.

My warrior is where things change. She’s been my mote farmer ever since I quit my guild back in Ulduar and I thought I was done with melee, but seeing our warriors kick ass in ICC made me want to play her again. Her gear is a bit on the depressing side (average item level 214 according to this site – useful, by the way, for those of us who are curious but don’t want to clutter their addon list with GearScore) and she can’t even go to HoR heroic, but I did a few randoms on her and my axes are still fun. My current goal is to get her two Bryntrolls – because I love matching weapons (used to have two Jawbones, now I have two – ugly – Edges of Ruin). I haven’t yet found a point to this gearing, since the odds of me raiding on her again are really slim, but hey, pretty weapons smashing the faces of mobs!

This brings us to the other topic of this post, the WTF moment. Last night I queued up for a random dungeon. First surprise, the whole group was from Alonsus. Rare, but nothing extraordinary. The tank is called Tzepes (as in Vlad, the Impaler), so I know he’s Romanian, but I don’t like broadcasting my nationality so I shut up and kill. 5 minutes into the instance, the healer drops group, and we get someone called Krina from another realm. The name sounds Romanian again, but what are the odds? Very high, it seems, as she asks the tank, in Romanian, to go slow. At that point, the other 2 DPS in the run pipe up and say they’re Romanian too.

And then the healer asks if I’m that Jen with the blog. At this point, I’m looking at the screen and going WTF. The odds of 5 people in the same random PuG coming from the same country were small… the odds of one of them actually knowing me were tiny. I’m not sure if I’m proud or just weirded out… but it’s a fun story to tell nevertheless. Let’s just say I’m famous. Hi Krina and everyone else on the Cruelty battlegroup I might end up playing with :)

[Regular posting might resume soon or not, depending on how work goes. I have a lot of single abstract gnome screenshots to post...]

So, after the week from hell at work, I finally had a weekend all for myself*. I sadly spent the good part of Saturday watching my neighbours argue, but the rest was good – mainly because I still had the yummiest cake ever left over from my birthday on Friday.
[*actually written last week]

So I woke up, got angry, got back home and entertained myself with some good ol’ questing and pugging and my tartlette chocolat.

I tend to get sidetracked by alts easily, so I’ve been focusing on Khrista. Jen doesn’t need anything outside of raids and the daily heroic, Shiny is on a break since the guild doesn’t seem to need alt tanks, and farming heroics for holy gear is not very exciting… so baby priest time it is. I’m a bit masochistic, but I like the dungeon pugging (and my friends keep talking about raids and heroics in our channel, so I want to do that faster!).

I’m so pretty admirers are showering me with roses

First off, Love is in the Air dailies are pure gold (and by “gold” I mean “XP”) for lowbies. they’re short, they’re fast and even the ones that require more work can be sorted easily with money (if I don’t feel like questing, I just buy the bracelets). So I shared some chocolates with the world, killed a couple of baddies for Crushing the Crown, did a couple of quests until 30 Lovely Charms, and then I went out to meet some new idiots err friends in PuGs.

In love with some random guy or girl who happened to give me some chocolates. I’m so easy.

I came, I saw, I kicked ass even if I’m holy

After a week of SM Graveyard, I had a major surprise when I found myself in Razorfen Downs, and a second major surprise when I realized I’d never been there before. Makes sense, since my highest horde is level 21 and I never bothered with dungeon achievements on my Allies… but I thought I’d at least set foot in there with a guildie or something.

Look at me and my yellow balls of holiness!

After the initial surprise, I remembered RFD being mentioned as one of the confusing dungeons for Alliance, alongside Wailing Caverns, and I started worrying… but I had a group who knew the place and I just had to follow them around. Result: fun! It’s been a long while since I discovered a new place, and the company was pleasant. Thank you, random guys on the Rampage battlegroup.

RFD was an one-time-only thing, afterwards it was SM all over again (Library this time). Things are going better than when I was leveling my druid and it’s easy to see who’s more likely to know what they’re doing: orange gear = good.

Ok, I cheated, my DK was closer to Scarlet Monastery.

Well, up to a point. I join a group – me healing, a mage and a ret paladin in full heirlooms, a druid tank and a hunter. We pull, a BoE caster staff drops, everyone needs, the druid wins it, is happy and equips it right away. Equips it instead of his +agi fist weapon and +intellect offhand, that is. I inspect and find the usual “super-hybrid” druid you’ll find so often in the low level instances – if it’s leather, it’s his, stats be damned. I make a mental note that he might be harder to heal and we move on. Then druid starts tanking in cat form. The paladin has Righteous Fury and he either doesn’t understand English or doesn’t care. Me and mage start bitching in /say about someone with full BoA being so clueless. I tell druid he’s not getting any heals until he goes back to bear form… so he goes ahead in cat while me and mage hide behind a corner. At some point, the paladin leaves, still with Righteous Fury and still without saying a word. The druid finally gets the point, switches to bear and gets heals. We eventually wipe at some point because druid couldn’t hold aggro, then the group disintegrates.

I wave farewell to the mage and wish him happy pugging. It won’t be, but we can at least try to look on the bright side of WoW.

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…).

On the leveling side, it’s going well. After a few boosts and motorcycle rides around SW to turn in quests (yay for friends!), I headed off on my own and ran some Stocks and Gnomeregan. On my home server, Gnomeregan is among the few places no one will boost. Really, 20g is not near enough for the horror that is Gnomeregan.
(Gno-me-re-gan, OK? If you can’t spell it, just look at the screen, it’s not hard. Anyway…)

Surprinsingly, all the runs went fine. Things seem to have changed since I leveled my druid in low-level dungeons. Right now at least 2 players out of 5 have BoA, most of the rest can at least do their role honorably, some of them are even friendly and I haven’t seen anyone bitch all day. I am thouroughly impressed and I hope the trend will continue into the higher dungeons.

To make it even better, on the last run I got the antenna helm and the Satchel of Helpful Goods decided to actually be helpful and gave me a healing neck.

I’m considering doing a bit of Holy questing… but it looks painfully slow, so I’ll probably stick to my initial plan of only doing dungeons until 80 and dual spec. Oh, and selling low-level cloth is amazingly profitable – a couple of hours of instances gave me enough cloth to make 150+g.

This has been so fun I’m not even sad I missed our ICC alt run!

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.