Reflections From The Pond

Archive for the ‘Whoopass Can’ Category

Ulduar really is a pretty place, the most beautiful raid instance I’ve ever been in (those titans sure knew how to build things) and now I have actually seen it all!

Last night we met up with Algalon the Observer in his Celestial Planetarium nested within Ulduar. It was actually our second date with the guy, our first being Saturday last and we seemed to have gotten it off at the wrong foot, so we decided to work on our relationship a bit more.

Algalon is an Observer, sent by the Titans after Loken, the Titans’ designated Watcher of Azeroth and jailor of Yogg-Saron, was driven to betray his comrades by Yoggi whispering to him, and subsequently killed by many a bold adventurer in the Halls of Lightning.

Algalon is here to analyse Azeroth for systemic corrption, and if he deems the planet beyond saving, the Titans will cleanse the place by killing all living organisms and start all over again.

Not to put any pressure or anything on us, only the entire future of Azeroth rests upon our shoulders. To further add to the burden, we will only have one hour to convince Algy that there’s hope still for Azeroth and it’s denizens, before he says screw this place, I’m going back to the heavens.

That actually happened last time and it was really disappointing, especially as it seemed we were getting along so well (and by this I mean we managed to stay alive longer and longer every try).

This time, last night, we nine-manned the Golf Cart and the Aerobics Instructor since our guild master and raid leader chose to be fashionally late, but as the very last Chamber Overseer right outside the Planetarium keeled over he logged into the game. He claimed he’d had some medical emergency resulting in a stitched hand, but we suspect he had planted a spy in our Vent channel and was drinking beer and watching football or something til it was time to kick ass and chew bubblegum :P

We had an interesting group setup, 2 resto shammies and a paladin for healz, a DK and paladin for tankz, and two shammies, a rogue, a warlock and a mage for the pewpew, so we fenced the gauzy see-through dude in with our totems, extended our collective hand and said “May I?”.

Algalon, possibly trying to follow some date guide line or other by not appearing to be too keen or too interested or too easy, made us work rather hard at convincing him we were worthy.

I know we were very overdressed for the occasion in our ICC 25-man gear compared to Algalons Ulduar-10, kind of like coming to a Sunday afternoon tea dance wearing ballgowns and tuxedos and the real diamond tiaras and cuff-links, but still the dance had some tricky moves and there was a bit of toe-stepping, black-hole-missing and general dying going on.

But we rose to the occasion, got our collective feet sorted out, and with 20 minutes left of the date we convinced him we weren’t that bad actually by doing our utmost to kill him.

There was a moment of dread and terror as there were quite a few seconds (which felt like minutes) between Algy disappearing as a target (woah, where’d he go? to the heavens? no, that can’t be! we still have 20 minutes left!) and the actual achievement popping up. But then there it was, spamming our chat windows:

Now, I just have to convince everyone that we must go meet him in his 25-man variety as well!

Larúe, ze resto shammy, is the girl I raid with nowadays and yesterday I was on melee healing duty in the Blood Wing, trying to take down the Blood Queen Lana’thel. I was standing smack in the middle of the melee, spreading the love and tender care around with my greenish-white lazor beams and buckets of waters and of course the imba, over-powered one and only Healing Stream totem.

The Queen is not yet a farm boss for us and so we were wiping a bit but making steady progress, fine-tuning the nibblings and positionings and group hugs in the middle, and then we suffered a tank disconnect. A serious one, it seemed, because even after we had all died and run back and gathered up in the Queen’s room he had still not gotten back on either WoW or Vent.

What to do? Well, the raid leaders decided that one of the retribution pallies should eqiup his pvp gear and act as a soaker for the Blood Mirror. And so he did.

Now, the Blood Mirror does not follow any threat table, or damage done, and it is not random, it is simply a spell that falls upon the player who is closest to the player tanking the queen. Anyone silly enough to get between the tank and the soaker would become the soaker himself.

Or herself.

I know what you are thinking, but no, I did not get between the tank and the soaker.

However, the soaker, our retribution paladin in pvp gear, died for some reason or other, and then I was not between the tank and the soaker, because as it turned out I had suddenly become the player closest to the tank and thus I became the soaker.

I did not expect to last long, even though I wear mail and carry a shield and have oh I dunno, 16 k armor or so, but my fellow healers went into overdrive and practically smothered me in heals, so many green numbers popping out all over my screen I could hardly see anything else. Or so it felt like, anyways.

They managed to keep me up for almost a full minute, all the time raining green heals on me, and I got some weird sort of omfg is this how it is-experience. I’ve been healing for a long time and have been dishing out a lot of huge green numbers myself, but to see them coming in in such a steady stream, almost fighting each other for space to drop on my head, and from so many healers, was rather amazing, perhaps because it was so unexpected.

I’ve been tanking a lot with my own furball tank, ze druid Joaquime, mostly 10mans but a few 25mans back in TBC, but I can’t remember ever feeling so giddy and high just by being healed.

Perhaps I was more blasé and used to it then, doing it regularly, or perhaps I had not the scrolling combat text enabled then. I don’t know, but I expect I will be talking about this a long way down the road, perhaps even when I sit in that home for the eldery, and tell my fellow elders about this one time, at the Blood Queen…

This is for Gnomeaggedon.

Late was the hour in which Jools the priest choose to alleviate the Lovely Charm grind and once again get out in the world and meet new people while at the same time help defeat evil in the world, thus being ultra-efficient. She queued up in the LFG tool as dps and lo and behold, mere minutes later she was invited to join a party of bold adventurers.

They ended up in the Pit of Saron. Jools normally don’t particularly fancy that place, but since she had of late turned to the shadowy way of doing things she was not overly concerned…

The tank was a DK and his first words were:

hi all

first time tank

The group leader, a shaman, asked the DK if he knew the tactics for the boss and the DK said:

no

sorry I’ll leave

The shaman stopped him from leaving and then asked him not to pull so he could briefly explain a few things.

Our healer, a paladin, piped up saying he didn’t really want to waste time in this pit, but the shaman said let’s just try and the paladin stayed, saying he was gonna see how things turned out.

With the shaman’s encouraging words of

as long as you keep aggro you should be fine

we set out through the quarry.

First group speed bump passed! Nobody left although we had an unexperienced tank in our midst!

After the first mob was killed the paladin had inspected the DK and wondered why he was signing up to tank when he was in full dps gear, without even a slightest hint of defense. The shaman suggested that the DK go put Stoneskin Gargoyle on his weapon instead of whatever rune he had on, and the DK obeyed, promptly put up a Death Gate and returned within a minute or two, and we all waited patiently. Nobody dropped group!

The paladin was working himself up, wondering why the DK didn’t queue as dps when he apparently had no tank gear at all and initiated a vote to kick the DK.

The vote was not passed, the DK stayed and so did everyone else!

The shaman politely asked the paladin to not drama, that a DK in Frost presence and with the Gargoyle on was not that bad, if he knew how to play.

In the paladins defense, I must say he did a very good job healing the DK, snatching him back from the clutches of certain death a few times, and it can’t have been an easy job, especially since the DK did not have the best of tank skills.

At the first boss, I got aggro from the adds and since I for some reason had thought it a good idea to have Dispel Magic on my usal Fade hotkey I took a bad beating and died. The others managed to get the boss down though, probably mostly thanks to the healing skills of the paladin who kept the DK and everyone else alive.

Tank plate loot dropped and the DK won it, thus getting his first piece in his tank set.

The paladin said something about the difficulty of healing the DK and the DK started mouthing back to him, but the shaman told them both to calm down and they did! None of them left!

Another vote to kick the DK was initiated and not passed this time either, and still noone left! We were all still grouped together!

The ambush and the rock-dragging mobs were cleared without problems, and then we faced the second boss, the one with the bombs and the pursuit and the poisons. The tank in his one-piece tank set tanked it, the paladin healed him through it, and the rest of us dps’d the boss down!

We had one casualty, the 4+ k dps mage kicked the bucket at the end of the fight, but by then the boss was so far gone the rest of us could easy kick him over the edge and down him.

And then we faced what many people think is the hardest part of the instance – the multi mob packs on the slope up to the tunnel.

There on that slope we wiped, and there on that slope our group fractioned.

The mage who so far had said nothing dropped group without a word, and a few seconds later the paladin was gone too. We had faced two bosses down in a fairly ok pace and with no wipes, but on this first wipe they chose to drop out.

No hard feelings though, the paladin had done a great job healing in what must have been hard circumstances and smiled when complimented on it.

The shaman re-queued us and we waited for a few minutes for replacements. I was starting to wonder what took so long, we had a tank of sorts in our group after all, when I saw that the DK had checked dps and not tank. I commented on it, and the shaman was just about to requeue when two more players joined us, a druid healer and another DK tank.

The new DK tank had only a few k more hp than the old one, but he had a tank set and the slope was swiftly cleared. We even had time to squeeze in a few jokes!

We wiped two times in the tunnel but there were no expletives, no ffs!, and noone dropped group! We all corpse ran back and rode the way to the tunnel together, stopping outside it to buff up and get ready.

The druid said he hoped the pretty cloth boots would drop from the end boss but was a bit sad the he could not need on them due to Blizzard’s loot rules. I said I didn’t need them so I would pass and not greed or DE if the dropped, and the shaman said he would do the same.

We cleared the tunnel and engaged the Scourgelord. He took a while to get down, we did not have the most uber dps in the world, but he went down eventually. The boots did not drop for the druid, but he got the staff as an offspec.

And then we all said thanks for the run and went our separate ways.

So this is the tale of two pugs – the one that did happen and the one that did not, the one where the group fell apart on any of the numerous occasions it could have, on any of the vote kicks, or the wipes, or the inspecting of players, or the waiting around, where it could have broken up but it didn’t.

So, shaman of awesome from Eonar, I really hope I will meet more people like you, patient, kind and helpful. You kept this group together through the rough start, you calmed the ruffled feathers and you saw it through to the end.

Thank you.

Should we feel sorry for Ensidia? Larísa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn asks this question in a recent post of hers.

My answer is “yes, I really feel sorry for Ensidia”, but not because they lost their achievement and not because they will be out of the game for three days. I feel sorry for them for being so utterly stupid.

As I see it, Ensidia’s action and their subsequent ban and revoked world first Lich King kill is a direct result of one of two things: Either they knew they were doing it wrong, or they did not.

Doing it wrong

Now, I don’t play this game at Ensidia’s level, I am not in a sponsored guild getting payed to play, so I can only guess at what obligations comes with that sponsorship, and what pressure they are under to provide results.

I am not a top player but that does not mean I can not personally feel the competitiveness and the will to get better, to desire to top those charts, be it as dps in a 5 man dungeon run or a guild member in a server wide guild ranking. I guess Ensidia would feel the same way, regardless of whether they are sponsored or not, and lately the competition at the top must have become a lot more intense than in previous raids. Never before has so many guilds been at the top, competing for those world first kills. As I write this, four guilds have defeated the Lich King in the 25man version according to GuildOx, with many more to come soon as many guilds have already defeated the first two bosses in the Frost Wing, opened their way to the Lich King.

I guess every one of those four guilds, five with Ensidia, were desperate for that little extra edge, that little extra boost that would push them to the top so they could claim their victory.

So when they noticed that their use of Saronite Bombs actually had a very very positive effect on the encounter, it actually seemed to trivialize it or a part of it as far as I can understand, did they stop to consider that this must be a bug, that this was not the encounter working as intended? If they had been using these bombs in their usual dps rotation, would they not be surprised that they did not only do damage in this encounter but actually helped rebuild the throne?

Or did they make a simple cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the risk of using the bombs was worth taking in order to get that first kill? Was the competition so fierce that the possible delay of asking a GM what was going on might result in another guild claiming the kill? Did they gamble on their legendary guild status to protect them should they be caught?

I don’t know, I can only speculate. But no matter why, the question is how they could be so incredibly stupid and believe they would not get caught? Every other world first and first kills have been scrutinized and achievements have been revoked during the entire WotLK raiding season, so how could they be so stupid and think their kill would survive if there was even the slightest whiff of something funny about it?

Granted, they have apparently been treated leniently by Blizzard before, but on the biggest bad guy of them all in this entire expansion? Come on.

Or did they not know?

But what about the other scenario? What if they didn’t know they were doing it wrong then?

You know, I have a co-worker whose mantra is “it is not criminal to be stupid”. He is right of course, it is not criminal to be stupid, to sit on a chair all day and do nothing except being stupid.

But while it is not criminal to be stupid it might well be criminal to act stupidly and most people do stupid things once in a while, some more often than not, and with very different consequences.

If you construct bridges, you are expected to dimension them properly or you might end up with a collapsed bridge.

If you are a construction worker, you are expected to know that using a power tool to cut reinforcement bars comes with certain restrictions or you might end up with a burning building due to a stray spark.

If you suddenly find 300 million Euros on your bank account when last you checked there was nothing but an overdraft, you are expected to contact your bank and not run off to South America for a life long vacation.

If you had spent years playing a computer game, analysing it into the smallest detail, poring over logs and videos to perfect your performance, knowing every spell in the book and having done all bosses many times on 10mans and 25mans and in both normal and heroic versions, if you were that player, facing the last boss in the game, the biggest badass of them all, and if you find that the platform you are standing on, the one that is slowly falling apart, suddenly stop falling apart and instead start to rebuild itself and thus making the entire encounter so much easier, negating the need to deal with the adds, would you not be expected to suspect Blizzard might consider that an exploit? Especially given their track record with exploit bans in this expansion?

The first three are examples of criminal stupidity, the last is an example of plain simple utter moronic stupidity.

So should we feel sorry?

I have made my thoughts on using so called exploits clear before, I think it is Blizzard’s job to make the game fool proof and if anyone finds a way to use the game or fight mechanics to work for them in a way Blizzard has not foreseen, then all the cred to them. If Blizzard does not like it they can always fix it, but why punish the players?

If I had my way, Ensidia would keep their achievement and would not be banned. They found a way around Blizzard’s encounter and beat it fair and square with the tools available to them.

But Blizzard obviously think otherwise, and we all accept their right to run their game their way every time we log into the game, so even if I don’t like their way of handling these things I have to accept it and be aware of if I want to keep playing. And anyone who plays this game at the top end can’t be unaware that Blizzard comes down hard on players they think are guilty of exploiting the game.

I don’t know the whole picture, I was not there, and I haven’t tried to look into it anymore than the posts on wow.com and Ensidia’s own site, but I can’t see it happen any other way. If they did know what they were doing, or if they did not, it does not matter, either way it was so senselessly stupid to not alert Blizzard to the fact that there seemed to be something smelly going on. It seems like such a waste.

Or is this entire thing a publicity stunt?

It was “only” a normal kill, after all. Maybe they are so sure of their own superiority that they believe this three-day ban will not interfere at all with their getting the world first heroic Lich King kill that they don’t mind giving the competition a three day head start.

And that would indeed be an achievement.

Imagine a world where you’d be deprived of three of your five sensory inputs, a world where you could not smell, you could not feel and you could not taste anything. Imagine how you would be confined to experience the world you live in by sight and by hearing alone, and how you would interpret that world.

Now, welcome to the World of Warcraft.

In WoW, you don’t ever touch anything, you don’t get any tactile input whatsoever. The rain or sunshine on your face as you ride through the great big wilderness, the magic bolts incinerating your innards or the melee swings ripping open your body, the pain in your knuckles as you scrape them against a boar when levelling fist fighting and or the warm smoothness of your lover’s skin under your fingertips when you engage in a bit of roleplaying in a secluded spot, these are things you only feel in your mind.

In WoW, you never smell anything, you don’t ever get any olfactory stimulation. The blood and sweat of your fellow raiders, the musty odour of your horse or perhaps the not-so-faint oily aroma of your mechanostrider, the sweet smells of the herbs as you gather them, the dry dustiness of the old inns and houses around the world, you can only imagine these smells.

In WoW, you never taste anything. Perhaps you are better off actually not knowing what Pungent Seal Whey or Bitter Plasma or Spider Kabob taste like, but wouldn’t you like to taste that Black Coffee or Delicious Chocolate Cake?

In WoW, you experience the world around you through vision/audio. You interpret the world through your eyes and ears and you react accordingly. But in a hectic environment, with a lot of information flooding through your eyes and ears, you will find it difficult to experience and interpret everything, and to react upon it. The more information, the more difficult the interpretation and the slower the reaction.

In real life, in the afk world, you would not need a flashing warning across your eyes and a loud sound to alert you to the fact that you were standing in a fire. Your burning feet would scream in enough pain for you to not even have to think and make a conscious decision about stepping out of it, your brain would have bypassed that and reflexively thrown you out of it. If you happened to be dressed in sturdy leathers or possibly chain mail, impregnated with enough dirt and blood and other body substances to form a rather functional fireproofing, perhaps your feet would not be the first to react but your nose, sniffing at that horrid smell of something burning.

In the afk world you don’t need to get a skull over your head to show that you are infected with some nastiness that takes out a sizeable chunk of your health every second and will spawn a gooey ooze that will follow you around and pulse more nastiness around itself until it meets another ooze and falls in love with it and the two little oozes becomes one. Ok, bad example for a RL comparison but I guess you get my point?

But in WoW, when you are staring intensly at your screen on that ugly mofo Gormok the Impaler and you also need to keep a close watch on the health of the other 24 raiders in there with you, chances are it will take you a second or three before the information that it is YOU that’s in the fire has filtered down through the layers in your brain, and then you may need an extra second or two to react and by then it is too late and you will be dead.

In WoW, when you are gathered up in a chummy group with most of your fellow raiders, humping hugging the leg of the rotted slimy abomination in Icecream Citadel, seeing the small yellowy flakes around you that indicates infection is nigh impossible in all the fireworks and slime spewing going on, and chances are you will spawn the baby ooze in the middle of your raid bringing the wrath of your healers down upon your head.

Enter the BossMods.

A BossMod is an addon that highlights certain things in a fight to help you see it and act upon it. They can also provide you with timers for those bosses that have various timed phases, such as Kel’Thuzad laving his phase shifted state and physically entering his room after three minutes and 48 seconds.

There are a few varieties of BossMods, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters to name a few, and most come pre-packed with a lot of nifty features enabled, most of which you don’t really need. The BossMod is there to make it easier for you to fish up those vital snippets of information out of the massive information flood coming your way in a raid, remember? They are not there to make you drown in even more information.

So what you want to do is set your chosen BossMod up to show you things where you find them easy to see. For some reason, BossMods often come configured to be as obnoxiously in the way as possibe, showing their pretty bars of various formats spot on in the middle of your screen. I don’t know about you but I generally want to see what is going on and not have it obscured with a bar showing me that a new ooze will spawn in 6 -5-4-etc seconds, so I have moved all such things to the sides or the top/bottom of my screen.

The next thing you want to do is check all fights and chose the information you think is relevant for you. I am lucky in that my guild goes for an exploratory “blind raiding” run first, spending an evening in the new raid wing without having read up on the tactics, with all BossMods disabled, just exploring and gathering information and trying things out, so when the next raid rolls around and it’s time to kick it up a notch, I generally know what I want to keep extra track of or where I need extra help to not screw up.

For example, in my BigWigs I show the Unstable Ooze Explosion because that is something I am not likely to see myself as my focus is generally on the people bunched up around Rotface’s legs. I don’t show warnings for Mutated Infections since I see them anyway on my Healbot and even though we are not blind raiding anymore on this one we still have someone call out who’s infected just to help people react. I use the Flash’n Shake though to alert myself to the infection if I have it, shaving that extra second of reaction time off. I don’t show warnings for Slime Spray because as I generally have the boss targetted I see his cast bar and, being so close to him, I see his animation too and can react to it without problems. I don’t show warnings for Ooze Merges because I don’t care about that. I show the Boss Death simply because I like the triumphant sound it plays when the boss keels over.

Another example, on Festergut I don’t show warnings for the spores because so far I have had no problem getting one, and I don’t show the Inhale Blight warnings because I see it clearly enough myself and there is not really anything I can do to prepare for the extra damage. I do show the Pungent Blight warning because I want to be prepared to heal my designated targets up to full asap when that happens, which takes some pre-planning and clever distributing of Riptides. I don’t show the Vile Gas because it should not be a problem if people spread out as we are supposed to. I use the Proximity Display just so I can avoid being too close to someone and vomit on them should I be in a ranged group healing. I have the Berserk timer enabled so I can see how close we are cutting it and I have the Boss Death chime of triumph enabled for the same reason as above – I like the sound.

These are the settings that work for me, resto shaman generally on raid healing. If you are anything else, tank, tank healer, melee, ranged dps, you probably think something else is vastly more important and should set your BossMods up accordingly.

There are a few problems associated with BossMods though

One is what Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn describes in a post recently, discussing another post over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog, that are we really playing the game if we allow BossMods and other addons to show us what to do? How can we complain that the game is too easy if we always use the training wheels of BossMods? Well, I decided a long time ago that addons let me have more fun and help me play my game better, but I definitely want them customized to my liking and to help me with what I want and what I need and nothing else.

Another problem is that even if you tailor your BossMod to show those and only those timers and warnings and messages that you yourself find indispensable, a BossMod happy raid leader or raid assistant may still flood your screen and your eyes and ears with raid warnings and countdowns in chat, putting a huge dent in your pretty customized layout.

Thirdly, you learn the encounters as if the BossMod paraphernalia were an integrated part of them. You train yourself to react upon the BossMod instead of the fight, which risk leaving you flailing helplessly if the BossMod plays trick on you.

Example: I was dragged into a late night Naxx Undying run with my priest Jools a few weeks ago. We started with killing Sapphiron and Kel-Thuzad, steamrolled through the Abomination Wing, Patchwerk went down in notime, and then we faced Grobbulus. And there we failed.

For some reason – perhaps because none of us had run Naxx in a long time – no one had an updated BossMod and the players targetted with Mutating Injection did not get a skull on their heads. They did not notice that they were infected and thus they dropped huge poison clouds in the middle of the room. Perhaps it was something else as well, because some players’ screens lit up with a lot of error messages so they could not see where they were going. The other healer was trapped out of range and I got confused trying to circumvent the spreading clouds so I failed to pop a pair of wings on the player going dooown.

We were all trained to trigger a run to the side when we had a skull on our head and not when we had an infection. So we relied on the safety net of our BossMods and it failed. Not a big deal, it was late at night and we were tired and/or inebriated, and we had had a good laugh together during the previous boss kills, but our reliance on addons did cost us that Undying title that time.

BossMods, like any other addons, can be turned on and off at your pleasure. If you feel you no longer need a certain warning, or you can do better without it, turn it off. Maybe you can still play as good as before, maybe you want to turn it back on.

So, use the BossMod as training wheels for as long as you need, but don’t be afraid to take them off sometimes and see if you can balance on your own. If not, no big deal, just make sure you keep the BossMod updated :-)

Lately I have read quite a few posts where the author is telling his or her readers about the behaviour of other people in random PUG runs.

I have yet to see a post about the kindness and general decent behaviour of others, but then again I don’t expect to. Like a favourite blogger of mine said, how fun is it to read about this wonderful day that I had, when I met a bunch of lovely people and everything was just great. Not that fun, eh?

So writing posts about the bad behaviour of others is kind of expected from a blogger, and most of these posts I am talking about are both emotional and eloquent and quite entertaining. Nevertheless I find some of them a wee bit disturbing.

Not in the sense that I find getting upset or enraged over something that happened in a computer game silly or immature – quite the contrary, I often find myself getting rather emotional over what happens in the game, be it joyous happiness over the kindness of strangers or raging annoyance at obvious asshattery.

I can totally understand the need to pour your frustration and annoyance and rage through your keyboard to your blog and work it out of your system that way. That does not disturb me at all, I am well aware of the powerful cleansing of your mind you can achieve by putting your feelings to paper.

No, what I find slightly disturbing are all the screenshots provided in all these posts, screenshots with the names of the offending players and their realms clearly visible. Screenshots of characters, conversations and damage meters. Sometimes even a handy Armoury link is provided so the reader certainly will know which player is being discussed. And his gear. And his specs. And his achievements. And his guild.

But I never ever see an invitation to the player named and shamed to come defend himself, to explain his actions, to provide a reason for what he did or to perhaps even apologize or ask for forgiveness.

I do not doubt that bloggers found their experiences involving the player or players named truly abrasive, that they consider them to be pure and total asshats not worthy of being treated like humans but rather be squashed like cockroaches.

Maybe they are right in thinking so. Maybe they are not.

We see only one side of the story, we don’t see everything that lead up to the major showdown. We see only small snippets of screenshots and not the preceding conversations or which fights the damage meters actually are reporting.

I am not trying to downplay anyone’s bad experience and I am not trying to cast a doubt on anyone’s truthfulness, but the fact remains: My rage posts detail my experiences. They are not dealing with something written on a stone tablet handed down from above, they are not dealing with something determined by a jury beyond any reasonable doubt. They deal with my interpretation of what happened.

Sometimes it may be hard to interpret things differently, but sometimes there might be a plausible, however farfetched, alternative explanation.

You were kicked from a group without a word? Possible explanation: someone misclicked on Vote to Kick when they were going to inspect you and two more accidentally clicked Yes when it popped up in the middle of their screen in their hurry to get rid of the obstacle. Shit happens, and since you all were on different servers they could not re-invite you.

Someone Needed on everything that dropped? Possible explanation: new to the system and didn’t want to seem greedy, or perhaps they did need it, or perhaps they had a new minimalistic roll addon and had mistaken the Need icon for the Greed icon.

The tank ran through the entire instance without letting anyone stop for mana breaks and could not hold aggro for shit? Possible explanation: tank’s 8-year old son is playing without Dad/Mom realising, or perhaps the tank assumed that if anyone needed a mana break or help they would call out.

I know there are asshats out there, there are players who can wreck your dungeon runs and your entire game by treating you or other people badly. I have a few posts myself on this blog about such people, and there are more coming up.

In these posts of mine, I don’t give the offenders any slack, I don’t consider them worthy of the slightest respect, I pour my heart out with malice and sarcasm and biting sentences and I thrive on it. I even posts screenshots occasionally to prove that the conversation I am referring to took place.

But I never ever show the name of the player. I never ever give an Armoury link.

I may post screenshots with other players’ names when I tell about fun things, about weird runs or good runs or just plain hilarious runs. But never when I rage post. For me, rage-posting is enough of a catharsis in itself. I don’t need to name and shame someone to feel better, and I definitely don’t need to name and shame someone who doesn’t know about it, regardless of what I think they have been doing.

This is for two reasons:

1. It won’t make things better.

Trust me on this one, naming someone and getting a lot of commenters to agree that the player thusly named is, indeed, a filthy stain on the pristine white weave of humanity is not going to improve matters. Just look at yourself, how would you feel if someone you had encountered on a bad day suddenly plastered your usual haunts with clippings of you displaying your worst behaviour? Would you think, oh what I little rascal I was there, I’d better go mend the errors of my ways, especially since there seems to be so many nice and not at all prejudiced people agreeing that I am scum of the earth.

No? You would not think so?

And why would you think so? Someone is openly ridiculing you, maliciosuly calling your gear and choices and skills and possibly even your ancestry into question, and others are chiming in. Why would you feel anything but mad and upset and enraged?

So, one act of possible asshattery resulted in an act of asshattery, with the one crucial (to me) difference that there is no alternative explanation or mitigating circumstances for the second one, it is an act of not possible but certain asshattery.

Which leads me to the second reason:

2. What if it’s wrong?

If you felt that naming and shaming a real asshat was ok, maybe to warn people for the dude or because you actually truly believe that telling strangers they suck is actually going to make them nicer, how do you feel about naming and shaming people for something that turned out to be a truly honest mistake or caused by a bug of some kind.

Would you feel good the day Blizzard announces that there is a known bug that will in certain circumstances cause players to be randomly removed from groups, and you have just done your best to wreck the reputation of the players you were grouped with before that bug occured and removed you from your group? Would you feel comfortable knowing that the rage and hatred you spewed out on your blog against someone will be out there for ever, linked to various forum or copy-pasted on others? Would you feel comfortable knowing the assumptions you made were all wrong?

Because, you know, assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Shit happens. Conspicious circumstances may be just conspicious circumstances and nothing else. We are prone to see patterns where there are none, and for some weird reason most of us always jump to the worst conclusions straight away and cling to them. It usually takes a lot of mental effort to actually shake that and be prepared to believe that maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe it was just bad luck, maybe it was Lady RNG at her best.

I am guilty of this myself, like I said before I often blow of steam here on my blog, but after that I always always try to see things from the bright side, to find another angle and an alternative explanation. None of these alternative explanations need to be probable, or even plausible. The fact that they are possible is enough for me to blur the names of the people I am talking about.

Because, you know, what if I am wrong?

I’ve been talking about the joys of exploring before, and by exploring I do not necessarily mean just world exploring, I mean going into new instances without a clue of what will happen there.

Well, I know there will be mobs and bosses and Bad Stuff happening and hopefully some shiny things dropping now and again, but that’s about it. I don’t know if there will be fire or frost or poisons or void zones, if we need to spread out or stay together, if we need to run away from stuff or to stuff or maybe behind stuff.

The thing is, we will find out, and we will find out together, and although I know we will make mistakes and mess up I also know we will also have so much fun learning and progressing together.

Raiding is great but there will be plenty of time to research fights and follow in other peoples’ footsteps later, the thrill and joy of looking at bosses and their lairs with fresh eyes for the first time is one of my truly favourite things in game.

So you can imagine how I felt when the leaders in my raid guild announced that we were going to enter Icecrown Citadel without any prior knowledge gathering concerning its denizens and layouts! No reading up on tactics, no looking at videos, all bossmods disabled, we were just gonna walk in there and see what would happen.

And so we did.

We entered Icecrown wearing nothing but our raid gear and with our eyes and ears wide open. We looked at the scenery and the inhabitants of the place, we noted their abilities and their tricks and their way of doing things, and we talked to each other, both during the raid nights and subsequently on our forum, discussing and working out tactics of our own.

We did not one-shot all of the four bosses in ICC but within the first week we had killed them all as number 9 on our server (according to GuildOx), 6 days after the gates were opened.

The boss we had the most trouble with was Saurfang, but it was great fun to spend an entire night and a half wiping on him, working out different raid setups as our raid leaders ran around the platform deploying us chess pieces raiders to our designated spots carefully spaced so we would not splatter hurt on each other, and having the ranged practice Blood Beast targeting on melee so they would pick up the right beast immediately when they spawned and eliminate the risk of a beast running loose and hitting raiders in its way, and working out healing rotas so we would cover everyone and not lose any marked people.

We nailed our difficulties one after the other by trial and error and teamwork and after a lot of biting of dust and kicking of buckets it all slotted into place and we performed a flawless Saurfang kill even earning us the server first I’ve Gone and Made a Mess achievement!

Anyways, this post was not intended to brag about our raiding, but rather point out that it is quite possible to raid successfully without reading up on other peoples tactis or watching other peoples videos.

And, most importantly, to have a blast doing it!

I mean, these raid instances will be around for a long time, you will always have a chance of reading up on stuff but you will have only one shot at getting that fresh powerful feeling of wonder and awe and amazement that comes from experiencing something for the first time so why not make the most of it? Stuff those tactic guides and work things out with your guild, your friends! The kills will taste so much sweeter then, I promise!

Now another gate has opened in the Icecrown Citadel and we are putting on our Explorer’s hats again, bringing out our map-making kits, ready to go beat our sticks and heads and just about everything else we have available against anything that will come our way.

There be dragons there for sure, bring them on! :-)

Yesterday after a fast ICC and TOC we went to Sartharions Lair deep under the Wyrmrest Temple to get yet another Twilight Drake for a guildie.

It was not the first Sarth 3D kill I’ve been in on – I got the Twilight Vanquisher title on one of my very first raids with Adrenaline 3 months ago – but it was still a special one because this was the first time I would be allowed to roll on the mount. Because it is such a rare mount and a result of a group effort you need to have been present at at least 2/3 raids during the last three months to be eligible to roll for it, and my three month anniversary with Adrenaline had rolled by just a few days ago.

This time the RL’s decided we were going to zerg it, so four of us healers swapped to our pewpew specs and outfits, leaving only two healers to deal with keeping people alive.

After a few tests we went for it and poor Sartharion went down like a snowman in hell. He did manage to splatter the tank and a few of us around him at the end, but he was so low on hp that the remaining raiders finished him off without even breaking a sweat.

And when it was time to roll for the mount I rolled highest of all eligible members and won it!

Larúe got herself a beautiful twilight dragon!

The twilight dragons are not part of any of the usual Dragonflights - Malygos’ blue ones, Alexstrasza’s red ones, Ysera’s green ones, Nozdormu’s bronze ones or Deathwing’s black ones – but seems to be the result of a breeding program by Deathwing’s consort Sinestra in Grim Batol.

With the discovery of the twilight egg nests withing the Obsidian Sanctum, guarded by Deathwing’s henchman Sartharion, it is now suspected that Sinestra did not act alone but that Deathwing himself was involved in this breeding of twilight dragons, and that he has far-reaching plans of plunging Azeroth into a new Cataclysmic twilight…

I got a Purple Ribboned Holiday Gift in the mail some days ago, seems a guildie of mine had been overcome by the Winter Veil spirits, or had possibly drunk too much of it, and had sent all his guildies a gift!

Upon opening it, I found it contained a Club!

To me, this is the essence of Club-ness.

It is a piece of sturdy plank, considerately wrapped with cloth at the handle end so the wielder won’t get any splinters in her tender hand when whacking it around, and – like an afterthought – a huge nail is hammered through the bad end of it for extra efficiency.

This is a club made for one purpose – to hit people and to make sure they stay hit.

It is what I have always wanted! :-D

You’ve all encountered them, I guess?

The “new” tank primadonnas – the ones that drop out just after the group has zoned into the dungeon, presumably because they don’t like the instance and can’t be arsed running it.

I’ve been around a few of those and every time I see one drop from the group without a word (or with a word in a few cases actually) I have muttered to myself and the group about what a bloody nuisance it is – now we have to stand around for 5-10 minutes before we get another tank from the dungeon finder and can get down to business.

But what if it the drop-out tanks don’t drop our because they think there’s a pea under all the layers of mattresses? What if they have other reasons to drop? Maybe not all, but what if some or perhaps just one or two of them leave the group for another reason than “this instance sucks”.

You see, not all tanks are the 40+ k health variety who have done nothing but run instances since lvl 10 and knows how to hold aggro and chain-pull their way through the dungeon as fast as possible without ever standing in Bad Things.

Some tanks are actually new to the whole tanking business. Maybe they have levelled by questing a lot, maybe they just decided to try out that tank offspec with that dusty tank set they have accumulated over the odd run. Maybe they have just come back to the game after a break and their tanking skills are a bit rusty.

And they are all human. Behind every toon of whatever race there is a human playing it, a human who messes ups and forgets things like the rest of us.

And maybe, just maybe, someone new to tanking or someone feeling a bit rusty tanking does not want to do an instance where they feel they are out on deep water, where there are potentially nasty multi-mob packs with casters, or where there is a tricky boss of some kind, or perhaps where there are dragon flying involved.

Those things are easy when you know how to deal with them – everything is easy when you know how to do it and has done it a million times before – but if you are new to them maybe you don’t want to put yourself through the pain of over-aggroing dps and the verbal abuse that follows when you miss a mob and it wreaks havoc on the rest of the group. Or even the verbal abuse from people inspecting you and finding you wanting.

Somehow the norm for a random heroic seems to have become a tank with a minimum of 30 k health buffed, preferably 35+ k, and woe to the poor tank who does not fill out his plate armour or furry hide to that extent. Because we all know that it is impossible to do a heroic with a lesser geared tank, right?

My warlock was in heroic UK last night with a tank sporting 23 k health buffed, which indicated that he was fairly new to tanking. At the end of the first long passage, the one with the abominations and the mob packs, the tank lost aggro on a mob and it went straight for the healer and flattened him.

PUG Healer has died.
PUG Healer has left the group.

Without a word the healer just ditched us all. One single mistake on the tank’s part and the healer just folded his tent and left. Must be quite encouraging to be practising tanking with such a group.

Later that day my warlock took a trip to heroic ToC and got in a group with a tank having about 25 k health unbuffed. The cat druid in the group lol’d at him and said he had more health than that if he went bear. The tank offered to go dps but of course the druid didn’t want to tank.

It was a new tank and definitely not the best one I have encountered, on the first boss trio he kept two bosses on him throughout the fight but he didn’t even once taunt or attack the hunter, who kept peppering the healer with his arrows. I suggested that the tank range taunt or something, because that hunter’s arrows are pretty painful (been on the receiving end of them a fair few times), and the rest of the group also chimed in with constructive advice like “FFS!”, “Get aggro noob!” and similar. Encouraging and stimulating responses, don’t you think? 

I told them to be nice, people has to learn sometime, and we actually got through the run without any more hickups.

I’m not saying we should treat the tanks with silk gloves and fuss over them no matter how bad they are, or that I find it acceptable behaviour to just drop out and leave the rest of the group hanging twiddling their thumbs til the spot is filled again, but being a new tank running PUG randoms must be a very scary and scarring experience.

And if people can’t tolerate even a single wipe how will the new ones ever get confident and learn their stuff?

I know, I know, in a perfect world, tanks would gear up and learn the  instances in the normal versions first, they would know the drill before they entered any heroic varieties, they would know how to pull and how to taunt and how to always keep aggro.

Or they can go as dps and roll on tank gear that drops, and use the emblems to purchase even more gear, but even a geared tank is a new tank if he has never practised tanking.

So maybe, just maybe, when a tank drops the group right after having zoned in, it is not because he can’t be arsed to do that particular instance but rather because he has been there before and knows that he will have trouble with something and he knows the healer and/or dps will give him shit for it.