Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘joy’

Larísa tells the tale of the anniversary celebration of our guild Adrenaline with such joy and wonder and I can only agree. Go read it!

I have just a few points to add:

- Gnomes die all to easily!

- I suck horribly at pvp!

- Water breathing is a beautiful spell and should not be banned! Also, I had no idea how many crooks and nannies there are in the canals!

- Speaking Swedish with people you’ve only been speaking English to for many months suddenly reveals a lot about their origins when you hear their native dialects instead of slightly swedish-accented English.

- Gnomes die all to easily!

I have been in guilds previously where we have arranged fun events outside of raids, lots of events ranging from photo shoots to celebrations to pvp extravaganzas similar to the Turpster one (slightly down-scaled) to peace festivals and naked gnome races and other gnome marches. Actually, I still am in most of those guilds although I sadly I rarely have time to play those of my toons very much nowadays.

These events have all been fun and rewarding and most of the time the people participating were the usual suspects, you know those 5-10 people who turns up for anything and have a blast together.

Here almost the entire guild turned up and I think a part of the reason for us doing that was because this anniversary was set on a raid night, not on an off night. The anniversary and the celebrating of it was important enough for the guild to take a night off from progress raiding in ICC and spend some time together having fun in other ways.

I like that. Not only was it easier for me to be there since the raid nights are already negotiated as game nights, but it also showed that while the focus of the guild is raiding, the people in it is what is important – it gave me a feeling of being appreciated for who I am (me!) and not just for what I am (a slightly confused resto shammy chucking heals on everyone, an interchangeable cog in the raid machinery).

Already looking forward to the third one!

Varian Wrynn, King of Stormwind, decided some time ago to graciously lend his strength to all intrepid explorers of the Icecream Citadel, increasing our total health, healing done, damage absorption and damage dealt.

This buff started out at 5% and has been increased every 4 weeks in 5%-increments and is since Wednesday at 20%.

This buff has also been the object of many heated discussions and has some less than flattering names, like the pity buff or the l2play buff, like it is somehow demeaning or insulting to be offered some extra help – you can politely refuse the help and carry on without it if you so choose.

I’m not gonna delve into the pro’s and con’s of this buff anymore because Chas over at Righteous Orbs has already done so most splendidly and eloquently quite a long time ago and I can only say I agree with him completely.

(Incidentally, that pretty bear sitting in the screenshot in the first part of his post is me! Mah bear!)

I am just going to say that last night me and my guild went into ICC once again and made full use of the 20% increase from the buff.

Thanks to our sweetest Guild Master (sadly, soon to be ex Guild Master) we did Flu Shot Shortage especially for me! (probably because I keep pestering the RL’s about achievements) and it went like a charm. I am convinced we could have done it last week as well but never got around to ask for it then.

Then we went for Rotface heroic and in one of the messiest fights ever we got him down on the first try with just a few people still standing at the end, a bear tanking, a few dps’ers and me healing and popping off a Shock whenever I could to help bring him down those slow long last percent.

Could we have done it without the 20% buff? Not in this particular go but doubtless in another.

Was it easy? No, it was messy and frantic and hectic and hard, there were definitely no facerolling involved.

Was it fun? Hell yes, scrambling around to keep people alive and do some abysmal dps and stay alive myself with a pounding heart and sweaty fingers.

And then after having killed the Gooey Newsman (on normal, not pushing our luck) we proceeded onto the Princes and after a few messy tries the pale belf trio bit the dust as well.

Same here, not easy at all but so much fun. Not moving while trying to be in range of as many as possible for heals, shooting at kinetic bomb balloons, popping heals at whomever ran past, bracing for that fire ballon explosion, punding heart and sweaty fingers here too.

Doubtless we will be throwing ourselves at long wipe nights again when we face other heroic encounters, but it is fun to once in a while one-shot encounters, albeit very precariously hanging by the proverbial thread.

The Strength of Wrynn is like the lazy man’s version of running heroics for Emblem gear – I don’t have the time or inclination for excessive emblem farming to get me that 5% incremental increase in output so I freely admit I like the buff.

It gives me freedom to play the game at my leisure and do what I enjoy in Azeroth. And that’s my reason for playing.

Have you ever been at a philharmonic orchestra concert, or maybe watched one on TV?

If you have, you know there will be a lot of people up there on stage playing. There will be violins, flutes, basses, drums, trombones, or to sound like I’m into music and really know what I am talking about (I don’t!), there will be strings, brass, woodwind, harp and percussion.

And there will be one guy waving a stick in front of them. The guy may be a woman, but for simplicity’s sake I will refer to this person as ‘he’.

This guy, he doesn’t play any instrument, he doesn’t sing, he just stands up there in front of the lot and waves his stick about.

And yet I think he is the most important person in the whole orchestra.

I am quite sure every player in the entire orchestra knows the pieces they are playing by heart, know them so well that they could perform with their eyes closed and their hands metaphorically tied behind their backs.

The solo players know when it is their turn to step up into the limelight and rip off those dramatic or alluring or simply beautiful tunes.

The flutists know when to trill, the drummers know when to make loud noises, every player knows their place in the symphony, but without that lone guy in front of them the whole would not be whole, there would be misses and slight time gaps and the entire beautiful music composition would not be so beautiful.

Why? Because ‘that guy’ really is the most important player in the entire orchestra – he hears the music in his head, he hears how it is supposed to go and he leads the other players to his tune, coordinating their music, making sure it flows along, softly or dramatically, with just the right beat to make the entire piece a joy to your ears.

Now, think of your raid as a philharmonic orchestra.

You have percussion tanks, you have brass and woodwind dps, you have strings and harps healers.

To make it a really successful raid, a raid that is a pleasure to listen to, you need a conductor – you need that guy with the stick.

Your raiders know the piece, they know how to play it and they know when to step up and do their solo stuff. But just like the orchestra, having that guy waving his stick around helps make the music flow without hiccups or pauses or the drummer making loud noises too soon.

Calling out the flow of dps back and forth, calling out switches between tanks, calling out when to move out and when to collapse again makes your raid play wonderfully, orchestrating the major flows and important happenings in the raid music.

You might think a boss mod is an acceptable substitute, but it is not. A raid leader who calmly leads his raid through the perils makes me comfortable – someone knows the whole picture! – and confident – I know what to do but an audible cue is confirming I know what to do! – and I also know I play better with more vocal raid leaders than with the more quiet ones. Not a big deal in a farm raid but in a progress one every bit of help is appreciated.

So, in my opinion a raid leader who conducts his raid through the boss encounter like this is worth his weight in gold (and I am told master conductors fetch a pretty hefty salary too).

And if it fails and you wipe you can always use the stick to beat your raid up with. :P

So of course I joined the train of bloggers and blog readers heading for Argent Dawn and the Single Abstract Noun guild.

My first char there was a troll shaman named Tesz, and she got as far as level 4 on that first night. I really wanted a druid, but I have this aversion against Taurens for some reason, so I settled for a shaman.

The more I thought about it though, the more I realised I really did want a druid, and a feral one to boot. Possibly my recent tanking epiphany had something to do with it, but I do have a deep fondness for furball tanks, they are just so incredibly cute, so I thought what the hell, I’m gonna spend most of the playtime shapeshifted anyway, I will roll a tauren druid!

I figured I could always race change to Troll of I will keep playing her in Cataclysm :P

And then I thought more about it and decided to roll a male tauren. That’s right, a male one! If I’m gonna be big and bulky, I’m gonna be REALLY big and bulky!

So I got me my first ever male toon, a coal black tauren with a broken horn and long braids.

Name-wise, I was a bit torn. Some of the people in the guild use their blogger nicks in some form of other, and I was thinking of using Tessy with some diacritic mark or other just for the ease of recognition (not that many people would know who I was anyway, backwater blogger as I am :-) but I have this thing with names and toons, you know.

My toons tend to take on a life of their own, and I can’t just indiscriminately give them all the same name. Tessy, that’s me! That’s one of my own names and my usual internet nick and it will forever be the name of my first WoW toon, Tessy the human rogue. I could justify creating Téssy the human Death Knight because I could see a story there, how the human rogue got lured into the Lich King’s forces and became a Death Knight, but a Tauren? There was no way I would ever gonna come up with a character sheet that enabled me to feel that a switch from human female to tauren male had some basis in reality without invoking dreadfully painful surgery or really mental magiccery, so I had to find a new name.

Argent Dawn is a role playing server, and the taurens do seem to be lightly based on native americans (to me at least, but I’m not an expert on either taurens or native americans and this should not to be taken for gospel!), so I googled for native american names starting with T – the T since I wanted to keep some connection to Tessy.

And I found Teetonka, which apparently means “he who talks too much” in Sioux, which rang true to a blogger like me (not that I talk that much, but still).

So Teetonka it was, this new huge black bull of mine, but it was not until after I’ve tanked the very first guild run into Ragefire Chasm (more on that later) as I realised how truly aptly named this bull was and how splendidly his name ties in with the Real Bear Tankatude.

To quote the Big Bear Butt,

Perhaps true Bear Tanking Attitude comes from the simple fact that, of all the classes in the game that can tank, we are the only ones that “go commando” into battle, waving our mighty wang in the enemies’ face and screaming “I’ve got a great big tonker and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it!”

This is so true.

(On a side note, this being my first male tank because, as BBB says, the lady tanks like my beloved durid Joaquime have their own way of doing things so I have never actually waved a mighty wang in battle before, and given what I know about men, I would imagine it really takes balls of steel to wave such a precious body part around in the vicinity of sharp axes and plate clad knees. Bring it on!)

Teetonka – tauren tonk in Single Abstract Noun! That’s me!

And I levelled peacefully in Mulgore, meeting guildies all over the place, when the call went out in gchat for a Ragefire Chasm run.

I was lvl 10 at the time, doing my Bear Form quest, but due to the lack of other tanks or tanking pets of appropriate levels I actually had time to finish off this quest line and learn how to transform into a big horned brown-black bear.

Which is why I found myself outside RFC fifteen-ish minutes later, where I discovered remembered I was wearing trash gear. Not grey trash, but white trash, which was marginally better, but thanks to the skills of  a hot belf chick hunter (to be read a s hunter of the female persuasion and not hunter of chicks) and the generosity of the guildies who had put leathers in the gbank I was quickly outfitted in pretty green Embossed leatherwear, giving me a whopping 471 health and almost twice the armor!

And in we went, me and Chas the hunter (see above), our priest healer Conjaw, the mage Tahliana and the shaman Baksylyk hurrying in a bit belatedly but catching up.

Do you know that at level 10 a bear has two special spells? I had Attack, Growl and Maul on my actionbar, no way of getting up rage before a pull and I was half-convinced we were gonna wipe on the first pull and I’d be running aorund trying to hit things and people would die and people would yell at me and people would drop group.

But then I remembered that this was not a random group, this was a group of bloggers, people who seems to have their heads screwed on straight, simply put: nice people!

So we talked, we joked, we apologized when doing something silly, we worked together, I marked (I marked!) Tahliana sheeped, Chas’s pet offtanked, Conjaw healed us all, Baksylyk totemised, we all pewpewed and we progressed through this adorable pocket MC in the middle of Orgrimmar.

I either bodypulled by inching closer to the mobs – they are lvl 14! – or someone pulled for me and I Growled the mob away from them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not and I had to run around to hit the mob. Sometimes the dps got a bit triggerhappy (or not, they were holding back as it was since I was lvl 10 and they were ranging from 10 to 15) or simply overggroed me and if I was lucky I had my Growl available for a bit of mob ping pong, if not it was a bit of a tank ping pong.

We wiped a couple of times but we cleared the entire place, finished off our quests and I had an absolute blast!

See that bear in the front? That’s me! Mah bear! (With his mighty wang well hidden, I might add,  since this blog is approved for all audiences!)

Looking forward to the next run already!

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…

There are bosses in RL too, you know.

No, I’m not talking about the one sneaking up behind you while you browse WoW blogs at work, I mean the real nasty bosses that eventually may kill or severely cripple you.

Bosses like depression and diseases, self-inflicted or not, some of which may be one-shotting you, some of the more slow-moving variety but in the end not less painful or lethal.

Do you think a RL BossMod would help?

It’s one thing knowing that smoking is bad for you, that a sedentary lifestyle is equally bad, that additives in your food may be bad, etc etc but how would you feel if a Skull Icon suddenly popped over your head with a raid warning telling you in no uncertain terms:

Tessy has Couch Potato!

Couch Potato – debuff caused by a sedentary lifestyle. All stats are decreased by 1 every day as long as the debuff is on. Failure to get rid of the Couch Potato will result in one or more severe debuffs like Depression, Muscle Atrophy, Heart Disease and Premature Death.

Depression will adversely affect  the targets health, her social relationships and her sleeping and eating habits.

Muscle Atrophy will render the target unable to move.

Heart Disease may take one of several forms, including Coronary Heart Disease, Cardiovascular Diseases and Congestive Cardiac Failure.

Cleansing the Couch Potato debuff requires the target to engage in Physical Activity. Physical Activity will increase that targets Strength, Agility and Stamina. If the Activity goes on long enough, the target will gain the Runner’s High buff, granting her a Spirit increase and a sense of remarkable well-being and power, aka King-of-the-World-syndrome. As the buff fades she will keep a feeling of happiness and being one with the world, affecting people around her and increasing their Spirit.

In a raid environment, you can’t say “yeye, I’ll run away from the boss tomorrow”, you need to do it NOW! You need to do it right away or you risk wiping the raid.

In real life, you can say “yeye, I’ll get off the couch/stop smoking/eat healthier/whatever tomorrow” and you only risk wiping yourself.

In fact, I can almost see that Skull icon hovering over my head as I write this, so I will take my body, which is already aching from a sweaty kettlebell workout two days ago after a month long hiatus, out into the sun and work on getting me that Runner’s High buff.

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