Stories of WoW

Holidays are fun and exhausting. Fun because we saw a lot of great places (and great beaches!), exhausting because after the first 3 days I fell dead asleep at 10 (and because a loud 3-year old – not mine – can be hell).

Beach. I has it.

However, I did have my laptop with me and I did manage to find a good wifi connection, so my latest project, no. 4 in my quest to get all healers to 80, Aushra the shaman almost hit 60 while I was in Turkey.

This means two things:
1. I’m having fun! I like shammy healing and I think she will be my new main alt when she gets to 80. Also, OMG RaF is the best thing EVER, totally worth buying a second account.

2. Since my priest on Defias is 66, I am basically doing Outland twice, at the same time. This is not fun. I hope Deathwing sits on Auchindoun because the place is a shithole filled with tanks who don’t understand that if I’m being mana drained I need more fucking breaks than usual (yes, even though 2 hours ago they ran with a priest who could heal blind and one handed and was always on 110% mana).

It also seems like I’m a lucky charm. [That, or actually having main spec healers helps.] The guild is struggling through summer holidays and class balance, so with one healer gone things get pretty tough. Raids weren’t very happy while I was gone, but everything seems to be back on track. Class balance is still not ideal and we’re using a lot of offspecs/alts on occasion, but we are 6/12 in ICC heroic and we also managed to do a bunch of frostwyrm achievements. I’m constantly impressed by how well we’re doing considering we almost never get 10 main spec, main char, 100% sure sign ups… last night we ran with 1 offspec healer, 1 alt tank, and 1 guy who can’t follow instructions or do basic things, and we still got 3 or 4 achievements (mostly 1 shots) and a heroic. We might really get those pretty skeletons after all…

Here’s another beach to end with. Yes, you should envy me because I had a great holiday :D

There is one problem with my guild (aside from the “will we get 10 people tonight or not?”). The problem has caused me a lot of sleepless nights in the past week. We’re too bloody chatty.

Soulbound raids (in theory, at least) from 8 to 11 pm server time. I chose those times because 11 ST is midnight for me, which meant an hour earlier than my previous guild, which meant I could go to sleep earlier and not be a zombie at work.

Easier said than done. All my guildies are so nice that I end up spending 2 more hours on Vent after the raid. Or instead of the raid. Or before and after the raid. It gets worse when leveling alts. We’re RAFing and want to get to 60 before I leave on holiday tomorrow, so me and Valli have been spending every free moment on our alts, and on Vent of course. Apparently our bitching at PUGs is entertaining, because we keep getting company, sometimes Vent-only, sometimes for leveling/boosting. And it’s so goddamn fun that I can’t quit.

Two days ago, it was “boost your friends day”, so Valli’s boyfriend grabbed his mage and took us plus a guildie to a leisurely walk in Uldaman. The place is a shithole as usual, but being led like a pack of hyper sheep was much more fun than an actual PuG. (Fact: men really are better at directions.) After 2 hours of picking up quests, turning in quests, waiting for the dead dwarf to come back to life, I actually started to find “That’s what she said” jokes funny. Went to bed at 1.30, braaaainz at work.

Yesterday, it was “raid called early so let’s get to 50 day”. We helped a druid get her quests in ST done (I have such a soft spot for baby trees), which meant a long, LONG dungeon, with a bunch of uncooperative players who didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to follow instructions. By the time we were done, I realized it was 2 am and us girls and our shammy had been chatting for 3 hours. Went to bed at 2.00, braaainz at work.

They’re mean, evil people and they’re making me lose sleep. But how can I resist it? We really are girls in WoW too, so we do squee over pretty dresses, grumpy boyfriend was laughing his ass off in the background, the crude jokes were flying, I was being bitched at regularly… a perfect day of WoW-life.

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Turkey, hopefully on a good note: we seem to have enough sign-ups, of the appropriate classes, for the raid tonight, so we’re going to try Deathwhisper and finish our Storming the Citadel heroic.

See you on the other side, with more tan!

Roleplaying and me – not a love story
I don’t understand RP.

I can see RP as a form of creative writing; getting into a character’s head is probably very useful for authors and doing it with a “real” avatar might be easier. That being said, despite being a book lover, I find in-character blog posts utterly boring. I honestly tried to read a few and didn’t last past the first paragraph. Why would I want to know what your undead priest did yesterday? (Yes, I know it’s somewhat of a contradiction, given how I apparently do care what the real person behind the priest did in last week’s raid.) The only sort-of-RP stories I’ve enjoyed were Tam’s Gerald posts, but that’s only because he’s funny.

My priest on Defias Brotherhood RP-PvP

On the other hand, in-game RP is fascinating… from a voyeuristic point of view. I have characters on two RP servers and seeing RP is interesting, it’s experiencing a completely different side of WoW, even though that side isn’t for me. However, I found RPers quite unwelcoming, despite being told the opposite. I ended up on my first RP server because I had RL friends there, so I posted on the realm forums asking for a leveling guild that doesn’t require RP. Cue 20 posts telling me to gtfo back to my server and stop ruining their fun. Needless to say, I had an appropriate name, knew the rules and wasn’t in the least interested in griefing… but hey, better flame, then ask! Then came the Too Many Annas ‘incident’ and the throngs of RP ‘defenders’ coming down on one person who didn’t know better… yep, friendly folk.

In conclusion, so far RP servers seem just the same as normal servers: idiots and nice people alike. And the spelling? No, people on RP servers aren’t better at that, no matter how much I wish it were true.

As for RP itself, I have trouble understanding why someone would want to become someone else. I can find rational explanations, of course, from depression to a desire to explore one’s hidden sides, but I never had any sort of impulse to do that. It probably has a lot to do with my reasons for playing the game: it’s less about the lore and the fantasy setting and more about the social side. When I meet people, I want to meet Billy or Mary, not Ghortok the orc or Xxbelfgirlxx. How can a connection with a fictional character mean anything? If it’s just a different form of fiction, why wouldn’t I just read a book? The odds of finding a good writer are higher than finding a good RPer, and then I’d be able to lose myself in the story without having to interact with anyone. (Antisocial? Maybe.)

My green haired night elf
So we get to something I’ve thinking about for a long time: racial choices. My first character was a human and I tried to make her look as similar as possible to me (oh, the sad day I discovered I can’t have the proper ponytail). It took me a year to consider making something non-human; they all seemed so alien and not-me.

I don’t RP, but I still like pretty clothes.

Since then, my preferences have changed: human aside, I have two level 80 draenei, one night elf, and my following 80s will be a night elf and a draenei. On the Alliance side, I might level a gnome to 80 at some point (my rogue is cute as a button, but I just can’t make myself like that class), and if I ever went Horde I’d have a collection of blood elves and maybe a tauren and an undead. I refuse to play other races – I find dwarves ugly and/or boring, while trolls and orcs are just plain horrible (yes, even the ‘nice’ faces). I keep reading about people who love their ’sexy orcs’ and it boggles the mind: how can someone think that horrible green scowling Hulk can be pretty?! Sorry orc lovers.

But why?
Today, this post from Pilf got me thinking. Why do I play the classes I do? It got me thinking so much it got out of hand and I decided to make a post instead of a huge comment.

And I think the real explanation finally occured to me: I play those classes (and always female) because I find them visually appealing (sexy, pretty, nice, cute… etc) and that’s how I want the real me to be seen. I want to be a pretty girl in real life, so I want to project that in the game world too; I assume that people who play ‘ugly’ characters do it in a more RP-ish way (the characters have their own personality, so their appearance doesn’t reflect on the ‘owner’). I doubt my preference for pretty characters comes from some massive feeling of not being good enough: I’m a fairly standard European woman and I’m generally OK with my looks. Of course, I’d change things if I could (wouldn’t anyone?), but I don’t see anything majorly wrong with me.

Instead, I think WoW is a perfect playground for dress up and a distorted mirror to see a “virtual Jen” closer to the “real Jen” I’d like to be. I get to play hot girls and dress them up in pretty robes (the only thing I hate about heirlooms is the way my clothies never get to wear pretty things). I get to stare at my elf’s boobs in raids (they’re better than mine, but hey, I’m happy with virtual ones). I get to change her hair and tattoos once a week, even though I’ve had the same haircut for 10 years in real life and I generally can’t be arsed wearing make up. I get to talk about virtual fashion with friends I can’t see IRL.

Is there a conclusion to this? Probably not, but I’m interested in other opinions on the subject. Please keep in mind that, even though I’m personally not interested in RP or in-character blogs, that doesn’t mean they suck and need to disappear. No flames please, kthx.

I knew we were close, but I didn’t know we were this close. Soulbound was formed on April 26 and on May 19 we killed the Lich King, after only 4 nights of attempts as a guild.

I wasn’t really in a raiding mood at the start of the evening, due to a deadline for part-time job, and I was trying to squeeze in a bit of work on every raid break or buffing session. Not focused tree wasn’t focused. On the bright side, the team was doing well: we had enough sign-ups, our poor paladin (who’s been Kingslayer for 2 months and I’m sure is sick of the fight) agreed to heal again, we had the right balance of classes… so we went in, tried, died, tried, watched the tank plummet down with the edge, healers flying, DK getting disconnected in a Defile, tried some more and then we hit 20%… 15%… 11% OMG guys gogogo… 10% and panicked priest who didn’t know what happens there.

Vent pretty much exploded with “OMGOMG we did it!”, “DON’T RELEASE!!!”, “I can’t believe this happened”, “Fuck, I’m disconnecti-oh no, it’s the cinematics” and “Meh, crap loot”. It took us 5 minutes to get the perfect pose for the kill shot, turned on the special effects and tada! Soulbound 1 – Lich King 0.

It feels very great to be Kingslayers*. We know we have a good team, we work very well together, there’s no drama, name calling or yelling on Vent… and I’m starting to relax now because we delivered what we promised to the recruits. The funny thing is… that last try felt easy. There was a bit of panic when I started to run oom, but it wasn’t the most frantic kill I’ve done by far. Everything just seemed to come together nicely – even though my mental conversation with myself was along the lines of “dontdienowdontdienow fuck spirit c’mon rejuv tick faster AAAA innervate 10 more seconds fuckfuck i hope the other healers have more mana shit what if i get teleported and fuck up omg i wonder what percent we’re on, don’t have time to look OMGYAY!!!!”. It was intense and my hands were shaking in the end, but I had the biggest grin on my face last night, it even made working late bearable.

To finish off this amazing evening… we went to get the dwarves achievement at Razorscale. Yeah, we were feeling that nice and we decided to make a few guildies happy (well, I wasn’t feeling nice but I got emotionally blackmailed). Let’s not mention this monument of boredom ever again. Or the fact that enrage wiped us when the last person only needed 1 bloody dwarf.

From now on, bring on the hard modes! We’re got a bunch of frostwyrms to get.

*It also feels great because our former guild hasn’t killed him yet. But we’re not spiteful, nope, not us. I won’t look forward to walking around Dalaran with my title and meeting a couple of idio-ex-guildies.

Having a guild is a bit scary and a bit exciting. Making decisions is fun, but being responsible for 10+ other people isn’t so much. So far it’s been good, though… Soulbound is almost 2 weeks old and is going strong.

I wrote an entire eloquent post in my head on the way to work, but inspiration isn’t with me right now, so here’s a bullet list with random things about Soulbound:

* Yesterday was our first full guild raid! That in itself was a reason to celebrate (no more trying to find PuGs 5 minutes before start time!), but it went better than we’d hoped: we got the Lich King to 20%. Our previous best attempt, a 39%, had ended a few days before in headless chicken chaos, because we hadn’t really expected to hit phase 3. I am VERY happy we have a Kingslayer among us, and a very calm guy at that, because he spent each promising try not only healing his ass off, but also telling us, in a soothing voice, not to panic. I go into headless chicken mode very easily, so it helped a lot.

* We really, really need more healers, since right now it’s only me, a priest, and the Kingslayer paladin who really, really wants to switch to his rogue.

Random LK image because posts without images are boring. That’s me being carried off to my doom.

* We also really need some ranged DPS, but we’re hoping that a frequent PuG will leave her guild and take her (also ranged) boyfriend with her.

* Our official GM is a man, but we’re a not-so-secret matriarchy. Valli and I spend way more time than we’re supposed to chatting on company time, planning recruitment and DKP and rules and mischief. She’s the raid leader and the brains, I’m the moral support, DKP/buff addon keeper and tree standing in the fire.

* We only do 10-mans, but we won’t be able to compete in the 10-strict rankings because most of the people in the guild have 25-man gear and achievements. We won’t get GuildOx epeen, because the 10-man non-strict charts are of course dominated by the 25-man guilds, but the good part is that we don’t care. Maybe we will in Cataclysm, but that’s a long way away.

* We have managed to increase our numbers while still keeping to people we know. One of the biggest surprises of last week was an app from a DK we used to play with and whom I’d tried without success to talk into joining Soulbound. He submitted a long, proper application, with a lot of details, even if it wasn’t at all necessary as far as we were concerned. (The general reaction of the guild management was “OMG Darth WANT!”)

* Inviting old guildies has two perks:
1. We know them, we know they’re good players.
2. The guild chat reactions after invites are priceless. It all feels like a smaller and happier high school reunion at times.

* Inviting old guildies also has a downside: I (we) feel more responsible. I suppose all officers feel the same to an extent, but when you play a fairly major part in nudging a friend away from his/her guild… there’s more to it than just providing some organized raids.

* I haven’t had so much fun since… since TBC, probably, before bouts of drama turned my old guild into a not-so-pleasant place. Vent is loud and inappropriate, wiping for 3 hours in ICC heroics is a blast, there’s no need to learn new people’s voices, because I knew everyone before inviting them… I hope the happy feeling lasts.

* I am panicking in advance for July, when both the GM and raid leader will be on holiday and I’ll be on my own. I am in awe of people who can RL and still do their roles, since healing and staying out of the bad seem to take up all my attention.

But in the meantime… Go Soulbound!