Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘joy’

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

A Happy Winter Veil to you all!

Getting Exalted with the Sons of Hodir on my shammy did not only make her able to finally purchase a nice and shiny shoulder enchant for that extra 6 spellpower and 5 critical strike rating, it also stocked up her coffers and made her if not filthy stinking rich so at least slightly smelly wealthy.

Gold in my pockets, itching to be spent!

Dual Talent Specialization, here I come!

Since my enhancement gear consist of a gladiator chest someone must have pawned off on me on some VoA run when I wasn’t looking, I decided to go elemental. Lightning Bolts and Lava Bursts, Flame Shocks and Thunderstorms!

I did actually have a lot of gear I could adapt to the more pewpewy shaman ways, but since it was all old worn resto gear it was heavily deficient on the hit rating side.

A few new gems and enchants later, it was not so heavily deficient, but still a lot short of the magic number 263, which seems to be the hit cap for elemental shamans with their racial skill and Elemental Precision and hoping for your friendly neighbourhood shadow priest or boomkin to hang around close by.

A quick look-round turned up a head enchant with hit rating which looked interesting. Only downside was that it required Revered with the Sha’tar, you know those caretakers in that big old forgotten city of Shattrah? And since my shammy was a latecomer on the scene she did not have that much rep, she was about a thousand short of being honored, so in total she would need about 13 k rep.

Now, how to get that?

There were a few quests that gave Sha’tar rep but I didn’t remember if I had done them or not and I didn’t really fancy going all over Outland to try to find out where I had ditched them – gief a quest tracker that tells you where you dumped the quest chain!

However, the Tempest Keep instances gives Sha’tar rep, in both the normal and heroic variety. So my shammy trundled off there, flew up to the Mechanar and started the kill spree.

And she died.

Those nasty Arcane Guardians hit for a lot even on a mail-clad lvl 80, and they call for help!

So it was no easy peasy walk in the park, it did take some planning and Hexing, but it was not that bad, the mini bosses were pretty easy and soon she faced the first real boss in there.

And soon he was dead.

She had originally planned to just kill mobs up to the first boss, maybe try him out and see how hard it was, but then reset the instance and farm rep again, but the not-too-hard boss kill bolstered her and she went on to the next one, the fire-loving Nethermancer Sepethrea.

Long suppressed memories of this horrible boss was suddenly brought back and I died and died and died. Having only a few instant-cast attacks which also share a cooldown made it difficult to get enough spells off before the elementals were upon me and beat me to death together with their lady chief, and I needed to focus on dps and not healing myself because it only prolonged the agony.

This only spurred me on though, and my plans of quick rep farming was gone – I was going to beat this boss! And I did! A combination of heroism, fire elemental, elemental spec and resto gear, lifeblood, gift of the naaru and a rather large piece of luck made the flaming lady bite the dust eventually!

Wohoo! Who dah shammy?!?

The gauntlet up to the last boss and the boss himself was a piece of cake in comparison, and I snagged me the Mechanar achievement and about 2 k of Sha’tar rep.

The next day I went to the Botanica, and there was nothing in there that was really difficult, I breezed through it and got the Botanica ach and another couple of k of Sha’tar rep.

Was going to get me the quest for the Arcatraz key and also attempt the heroic versions of these instances, but the acute need for the head enchant was removed by a new pair of legs won with a lucky offspec roll and a new ring from the Headless Horseman.

Still, it was very fun soloing these instances with my shaman, and I do think I will go there again and try out the heroics.

Because, you know, who dah shammy?!?

You know one surefire way to make me start to tremble and feel icy clammy slithers of dread down my spine?

It is when someone I know comes up to me and says “we need to talk”. Guess I am one of those that see the glass as half empty because that “we need to talk” opener, however worded, always fills me with apprehension of the bad kind.

So when one of the officers in my new guild whispers me just before raid start and ask if I have a minute to spare because she wants to talk to me you can imagine what happened. Did someone suddenly turn down the temperature in the room?

I know I haven’t been slacking too much in this last month I have raided with my shammy. I have made some a few a lot of mistakes, but I like to think I have learned from them and did not do them twice, and also think that I managed to do a few many some things right from the start.

So this talk a month after I got invited to the guild when I happen to know after having read somewhere that a new members’ trial period is a month should not be something to be afraid of, right? If I sucked badly they would have told me something before, right? Right? Right?

Still, I shiver a little as she asks me how I like it in the guild.

I reply truthfully – I like it a lot! The people are fun and friendly and nice and helpful, the raid leaders are calm and cool and I have a lot of fun raiding there.

And then she replies to me, saying not the words I dreaded but those I hoped to hear – they are happy with me and would like to offer me a full membership!

Yes! Yes, please! Thank you!

I still tremble but as I get promoted from Trialist to Raider in Adrenaline those clammy shivers are now replaced by a broad smile and tears welling up in my eyes and I jump up and down in excitement.

I R Raider!