Stories of WoW

So, I made a cow.

I stayed away from the dark side for the longest time. So far, my highest horde is a level 21 paladin abandoned on some server I don’t even remember the name of. And yet, yesterday I spent an afternoon giggling at my cute cow and her two companions, and had an absolute blast.

The trouble with me and horde is… aesthetics. Belfs are hot, but they can’t be any of the classes that interest me. Undead seemed ok, until I rolled one and hated her walk. My troll lasted 3 levels before I decided I can’t play something that hideous, and I haven’t even touched orcs. And then… I saw a couple of drawings of tauren and they suddenly looked very cute. Shaman was one of the classes I hadn’t tried, and my boyfriend’s fresh 80 elemental is pumping out crazy DPS. And since Blizzard gave us cross-faction heirloom mailing and my druid’s spellpower chest was just gathering dust in my bank… Muffin was born.

I wasn’t exactly expecting to play her more than a few hours; my horde alts tend to have that fate. And then there was a herd – my friend Laura and Barry rolled their own taurens, Truffles and Baloon, so now we’re a happy group of hunter, future bear/kitty and future elemental/resto. Leveling is srs bsns, so we already have a guild (Moodles!), big bags, lots of BoA and a burning desire to pwn RFC and DM. I even invested in a new heirloom weapon, because hey, my abandoned alts have emblems they’re not using.

We’re proud level 10s and so far our exploits have included:
* dancing in the happy fields.

* lazying around while bugging friends for charter signatures and deciding which set of BoA gear to use.

* enjoying the view (Mulgore is PRETTY! I never knew!) while yelling “aaaa a level 6!!” (Mulgore has wolves that want to nom level 1 cows on their way to the mailbox).

* obliterating every mob in sight (mobs not pictured because they were dead/about to be dead).

* made friends with an Alliance raid who eventually killed Cairne and left us unable to turn in quests (oops).

The first day was a success, with me getting my earth totem, Truffles getting her bear form and Baloon his first pet, so we look forward to the future!

P.S. Yes, /moo as a cow is hilarious.
P.P.S. Yes, we are very excited. This is what we were doing while at work today:
Jen: i want to go home and moo
Laura: me too!!

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.

Valithria Dreamwalker is supposed to be a healer’s dream. We get to shine and prove our worth! Damn you, DPS and your e-peen!

Well, I’m thinking of dusting off my feathers and going critchicken for the fight, because so far I suck at healing it. When we started our 10-man tries last night, strategy was pretty fuzzy to me, but the other dragon healer had already done it and the RL explained in detail, so everything sounded just fine. Keep HoTs up on the boss, go in portals and get stacks, collect loot.

Hah. As if.

First off, of course Valithria doesn’t show up on Grid. However, thanks to Keeva’s awesome guide, I was prepared. Or at least semi-prepared – I didn’t know we were going to do Valithria that night, but I have Quartz so I just enabled the appropriate module. Now I could see my HoTs, but healing a boss portrait instead of my nice green rectangles was still annoying – not to mention that the portals made me lose my target. Another macro, another try, lots of frustration over refreshing HoTs (did I ever mention I hate stacking Lifebloom?), anyway I was starting to get the hang of it.

Except not. I was flying around and hitting green clouds… but apparently I wasn’t, because my stacks were still pitiful. I still don’t understand what animation I should see, because my tree sure looked like she was hitting things… I could probably get 4-5 stacks tops in a portal. Come out, frantically try to target the dragon again, mess up my rotation and Nourish too soon… then miss the next portals. Or get the portals, but lose the stacks before I got in. Or just after I got in. The other healer had 30 stacks or more; the most I managed was 8 (and it was by accident).

[This should be a picture of me in the portal. However, I was too busy failing to hit the clouds, so I didn't have time to take a screenshot. Use your imagination.]

Now, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Playing in 3D on 2D screen is hard, and this kind of fight has always been weird to me. I can’t see if I’m above, below or on the same level with the clouds/dragons/orbs of death! To make things worse, it was already midnight, on a Thursday evening, and I was tired even before I started raiding.

To make a long story short, we manage to wipe at 99% a few minutes before the raid end time. We pushed on (even though it was 1 a.m.) with the other dragon healer doing all the work. I was told to stay out of the portals if I didn’t need mana, because I was getting her clouds – erm, I seriously doubt my 2-3 measly stacks were getting in the way – and help with raid/tank healing (our raid healer was a very nice but undegeared shaman who was struggling).

Our best attempt after that 99% was a 90%, by which point (1.30 a.m. already) I wanted to strangle someone. Probably myself. With 2 dragon healers with proper stacks, it would’ve been a breeze. So I’m sitting out tonight, partly due to tiredness/work, partly because I’m sure that any other healer with half a brain can probably manage the bloody stacks better.

My only hope is that we go to Valithria on Sunday evening for our 25-man. Getting proper sleep before the raid might help.

There’s a little trade troll inside of me.

Ok, I’ve admitted it. I love Trade, and raid General chat, and people spamming shit in Local Defense. I don’t know why; after all, most of the time it’s just mindless spam, QQ or calling other people noobs. And it gets worse: I like getting involved. You know the dude telling the other people to STFU and trying to be funny? Yes, that’s me.

In my defense, I also contribute useful info. I actually answer people’s questions with legitimate info. I report spammers, even though I doubt anything happens to them. I don’t go as far as joining the Anal or Dirge spam. Still…

I have to sit on my fingers not to join the raid General chat. Ok, so it’s no more than “Guild X sucks” or “Hai guild Y!”, but then I see names I know! Or I think of a really witty comeback! Then I have to remind myself that we’re mid-boss fight and I’m supposed to look at Grid and not the chat, dammit. (I got in trouble for that with raid leaders more than once.)

I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. Until I learn it, I’ll call it the need to socialize. And my superhero complex. The world needs me to set idiots straight! Really.

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).

Continue reading A holy paladin walks into Icecrown…