Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘misery’

My guild downed the Lich King-25 yesterday for the first time.

I was not there.

For what feels like weeks we have been struggling on that damned icy plateau of the Icecream Ciatdel, with that prince turned evil and his various minions.

We have had good raids, bad raids and all you can imagine in between. We have had screwups and lag and dc’s and just about everything going wrong but somehow we have been inching our way through the encounter, overcoming the setbacks and getting more and more practice and confidence in.

The raid ID’s been extended so we could focus on the Lich King only and not waste a raid night clearing away the rest of his cronies.

And yesterday you could feel it in the air, in the forum posts, in the in-game atmosphere. The LK was gonna die.

And he did.

And I was not there.

I was not not there because I was away having fun in RL, or even away doing important stuff in RL.

I was not not there because I was on reserve duty for the night.

No, I was not there because at the time the raid invites started, at about half an hour before the raid start, my laptop chose that very moment to go all Matrix on me – green pixels raining down all over the screen.

Several attempts at restarting the crappy piece of hardware yielded the same result – green pixel rain and then finally nothing but an all black screen.

Dead. Ceased to be. Gone to the happy hunting grounds. Ex-laptop.

Emergency reallocating computer assets at home (ie kicking my husband off his own old excentric computer and logging in there) did not help. The old excentric computer did not take kindly to having my needful addons installed and flatly refused to allow me to set them up – I managed to allocate Chain Heal to my left mouse key, not that it was very helpful though because the player frames refused to show up on my healbot anyway so I could not target anyone.

Fleetingly considering using the mod-less way of healing, with targetting every individual and clicking a key, I decided against it – I know I can’t heal very efficiently that way and I did not want to jeopardize this evening’s chance of a successful kill.

So I asked to be replaced.

I was in the raid, on-line in time, haven’t had a dc in ages, prepared and pepped and ready to go kick the LK’s butt – not some minor obstacle boss but the last biggest badass boss in this entire expansion, the one everything is revolving around.  I’ve been quitting all other WoW-playing to not strain my bad shoulder so I will be able to keep raiding with my guild and this is what I get for it?? My fucking crappy useless laptop decides to go bust on me??

The disappointment was so heavy I could choke on it.

I am really really happy for my guild, but really really sad for not being there with them on this first kill for this silly frustrating reason.

I know there will be more chances to see the Lich King dead, but like the sying goes, there’s no kill like the first kill.

I wish I’d been there.

I have been rather erratic in my posting schedules at all times, but as you may have noticed I am not publishing very much at all these days.

It is because I don’t play very much nowadays so I don’t have that much to write about.

My not playing is not because I don’t want to but because my years of working in front of a computer – and of course my years of playing WoW – has finally caught up with me and I have developed what is flashily called Shoulder Impingement Syndrome – fancy word for intense pain in the shoulder caused by repetitive action that irritates the shoulder lubrication sacs.

This pain comes and goes but a pretty surefire way of making it come knocking is using the mouse for prolonged periods of time.  Actually using the mouse is the only surefire way to feel da pain. Typing does not bring it on, nor does any other computer related activity I can think of.

Come to think of it, making the bed and doing the dishes also hurts rather bad… I’d better inform my husband of this.

Shoulder Impingement is reversible, all you have to do to make it go away is to adopt an ergonomic workstation, rest, stretch and strengthen the muscles of the shoulders, back and neck, take regular breaks from the computer, sit properly and of course refrain from doing whatever hurts. Like click-clicking on the mouse for hours on end every day.

So, I can use my Mousetrapper at work but I can’t really use it for playing. I learned how to use a regular work mouse left-handed a long time ago to help prevent repetitive injuries (much good that did, duh!) but it took a while and I am not sure I am up for trying to change my play style to use my gaming mouse with my left hand. Nor am I sure I should, I think I should not risk getting syndromed in the other shoulder as well.

But I am not quitting da game entirely. I raid a couple of times a week and I can do that without pain if I remember to sit correctly and to stretch regularly – not gonna let the Lich King get off that easily!

I am just taking a break from the other kind of playing, you know that questing, levelling, socialising fun not going anywhere goofing around-kind of playing. And I might well write the odd piece of WoW-related rant yet!

I also found that WoW is not quite like sex - if you are not doing it, talking about it (or reading, in this case) is not even a poor substitute, I’m just not that interested in reading about WoW when I so rarely play :-(

To fill up all this time that suddenly opened up for me I have started to exercise not only my shoulder but the rest of me as well (again), and to satisfy my need to write about things I started up a small blog about my daily endeavours to get into shape and random unsorted thoughts about life, the universe and everything.

I will be around, and probably be back again sometime soon (with an impeccable posture and Arnold-sized shoulders).

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 am a member of two different guilds on two different servers.

One of them, my Aerie Peak guild where I have most of my chars and where up until a month ago I was an officer, is a  casual raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

The other one, my Stormrage guild to which I applied and got invited with my shaman a month ago, is a raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

Real life constraints (raid end times vs my getting up in the morning times) had made me unable to raid seriously with my Aerie Peak guild for a long time and as I had been working on getting around this in a variety of ways without success and the only way untried was emo’ing my way to making the raids end earlier, I decided to not put my guildies through that since everyone seemed happy with things the way they were and applied to another guild where the raid hours suited me better.

I didn’t make a secret of this, I told my fellow officers about it and when I got accepted I retired as officer, telling everyone why and where I was going with my shaman and I kept all my other chars in the guild.

I retired because it would not feel right to still have a say in what the guild was doing and where it was going when I was raiding with another guild, and also because the months of trying to make things work for me had been rather draining my energy and I wanted to relax a little and not worry about every little thing.

I still play all my chars on Aerie Peak a lot, and I raid with my Aerie Peak guild too when I get the chance. Why shouldn’t I, they are all sweet and nice and wonderful people and really I like playing with them. I would not have applied to another guild had I been able to raid with them more.

Because I like to raid. It is fun, it is challenging and it is social. I like to quest and play solo a lot too, but if I hadn’t been able to raid at all I think I would have quit the game.

So to satisfy my raid itch, I found this Stormrage guild, and you know what? They are also sweet and nice and wonderful people, they dragged me into their chat channels and bid me welcome and didn’t blow up on me when I made mistakes.

I was worried at first, they are focused about their raiding, they do 25mans and hard modes and although I really wanted to try it out I was not sure I was cut out for those challenges. But you know what, I was and it’s fun! Great fun!

So I was happy, getting to know my new guildies on Stormrage and still spending a lot of time with my guildies on Aerie Peak. I was eating my cake and having it too.

I made a point of not mixing the two guilds, if anyone asked me I answered, but I didn’t volunteer any information or told stories from one guild in the other. I do not think one guild to be better than the other, they are simply two guilds with different styles, both good.

Also, I was terrified of my Aerie Peak guildies thinking I now saw myself as teh uber raider, doing all these 25 mans hard modes, or that someone would feel I was trying to poach people from one guild to the other. So I kept quiet and kept having fun in both places.

And then drama flared in my Aerie Peak guild.

The GM left, being badly burned out, and one of the officers and raid leaders left as well, saying he is going to make a new guild dedicated to more focused 10man raiding. Nobody else have yet left but some people have signed off the raid core and it is not unlikely that more people will leave.

The new GM, a lovely and passionate and adorable person whom I really care about and who was appointed officer just before I retired, came to me in her need and asked me to help out, and perhaps even coming back to being an officer.

I would do anything to help my guild and this girl out, she is absolutely outstanding in her dedication and passion and will to make things work and a fun giggly person to boot, I might even consider being an officer advisor or similar for some time til everythings sorted out, if they want me.

But I am not going to leave my Stormrage guild. I told her this, and it was perfectly ok.

And as my Stormrage guild is recruiting and could use a few more people for our coming hard mode attempts, I also told her that I might ask a few of the people who left, if any, to join me on Stormrage. Not asking them before they left, or even hinting that I would ask them, or in any way leaning or persuading or poking someone to leave. Not poaching on my Aerie Peak guild, because the people I’d ask would not be in the guild anymore, but rather poaching on the guild my ex-guildie is forming.

Logical, and clever, don’t you think? Any people leaving my Aerie Peak guild now is not leaving because I asked them, they are leaving of their own accord, right?

I wish it wouldn’t make me feel like such a rat.

My computer, my beloved laptop, although getting on in years (it’s soon three years old!) and although it has been to the shop twice, has never had any problems dealing with the graphic settings of WoW.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

You know which posts I miss the most from all of the 70-ish or so that’s missing from my year-long blogging?

It’s not all the discussions concerning mana regen and healing tricks and druid tanking and stuff like that – much of that has changed and can be found on other websites as well. It’s not the macros posts – I still have the macros on my chars and can put them out here again if I want.

I miss my personal posts and rantings- the ones about what I had experienced myself in this virtual world – the post about the priest being a Jedi, the one about Daissy’s (then known as Dizzie) first trip through the Dark Portal, the post about my lvl 6 priest Tessytoots participating in taking down the Turpster on Sporeggar, the one complaining about the questionable imagination of Blizz gear designers, my fare-well Vashj-posts and many other topics like these. They were sort of my own WoW-history, and it was fun to occassionally re-read them to see what I was going on about back then.

I’m starting to lose faith in Blogger Support and I doubt I’ll get my missing posts back – it’s been almost a month since that fatal day now.

At least I am backing up my posts now – I have two different feed readers saving the posts, I e-mail them to me as soon as I publish them, and I copy-paste the entire html code into a notepad file that I save on a different hard drive. Only thing I can’t backup are the comments, but I am trying to find a way to do that as well.

Blogger Support seems to be reachable only by a very long and very winding path and a whole lotta luck seems to be required, but I keep trying to get through to them to get my lost posts restored. I feel a bit empty every time I log in here, but hope ain’t lost yet.

Meanhwile, I have managed to salvage some of my old posts from various caches and I will be putting them back here as soon as possible.

I even have some new posts forming in my head now that I have gotten past that initial shock and stun trauma from the severe Total Blog Post Loss.

For those of you not familiar with blogging but want to start I have a few tips:

1. Always always always back up your blog posts.

2. Never ever mark all posts and press Delete if all you want to do is remove the labels.

Now excuse me while I crawl away to cry and feel sick in the corner while hoping and praying that the staff at Blogger support can help me retrieve the missing pieces of my life.

Yesterday was a sad day.

One of my best friends in the guild had decided to leave us and join another guild. I was very unhappy to see him go and I will miss him a lot, but I understand his reasons for wanting to leave and I can’t say that they are wrong.

I know we will keep playing together, heroics and bg’s and dailies and hopefully even some pug raids, so its not like it was goodbye for ever, but still… And now my friends list is about twice as long as usual, after I put all his chars on it ;P

Yesterday also brought a shocking revelation!

Last year, this guy I played with rather much got fed up with the game and everything and decided to go out in flames, which he did rather dramatic and eloquently, I must say. With the hindsight that comes when you have seen both sides of the fence, so to say, I can understand his reasons for not being happy and they were not all unfounded, but he was a bit on the black-list for a while there.

He popped up a few times after that but presently he ceased showing up. I assumed he had transferred servers or quit playing, and eventually I forgot about him.

Last night, another WoW-friend of mine whom I met a few months ago and play a lot with from time to time nowadays told me he had a confession to make. He told me he knew me, that we had been playing together a lot before, and then he told me he actually was the very same guy I mentioned above, the one who blew up and (I thought) quit the game!

I was like hahahahahaha omfg are you serious? It’s you? It’s really you?

Curiously enough, I was not angry or upset or anything like that, I was just hilariously wtf-ed and had a lot of questions. Where did this char come from? Did you lvl him from scratch? Where is your other char, the one you played before? And what I found most amazing was: How could you keep this a secret these past months when we have played together?

Writing this, I still feel like I am about to bubble over with incredulity and zomg-ness, but what I feel most is actually genuine happiness that he’s back :-)

I promised him not to mention any names in my blog and I won’t tell anyone who he is, but it will certainly require some serious wilful restraining on my part, cause what I really want to do is stand on the rooftops and shout to everyone I know that he’s back.

Got a tell from a guildie, asking if I could heal heroic Magister’s Terrace. Well, of course I could, been through it all just a few days ago, remember?

Cocky, cocky, cocky… should have known better than to make such a bold statement…

It was me, my shadow priest friend, a rogue, a mage and a paladin tank heading into that sunny place. We got through to the second boss with a few minor glitches, but generally doing ok. On Vexallus, however, it was a dead end. Literally. I have never felt as useless as a healer.

If I diverted my attentions away from the tank to toss a Renew or Power Word: Shield on any of the dps’ers dealing with the adds for a second too long, the tank’s health dropped precariously and I lost him more often than not. Tried both spamming Greater Heal and Flash Heal with the same results. Dead dps or a dead tank.

If I tried AoE heals like Circle of Healing when all of us got hurt, the instant ~1000 heal/gcd did not add up fast enough to keep the tank alive through the boss’s massive onslaught. Result: a dead tank.

We had a shadow priest with us and we tried with his Vampiric Embrace backup heals, and we tried with him in healing gear for backup heals, and we tried making him shield/renew every add-taker so I wouldn’t have to add the precious second and a half of the global cooldown from shielding another group member to my cast time for the tank heals. Same results, all dead, dead, dead…

We wiped 7 or 8 times at that boss, getting him down to 10 % on some occasions, but never did we get to kick his sorry excuse of an ass.

*walking out of there with a huge repair bill and a hanging head, confidence in my healing skills seriously shaken and general spirits somewhere down around my ankles*

Soooo… time for some more research! How can I avoid feeling sucky again?

Trawling dah intarnet yields some conflicting information, but they seem to agree on some things.

Only been in there a few times, and only twice in heroics, and I was a bit busy both times trying to keep my group members alive so I cannot vouch for all this information from my own experience. (Yet.)

Weirdly enough, Vexallus melee attacks are Arcane damage only, albeit about 3 k of it in heroic. He has a ranged attack as well that does about 2,5 k Arcane damage with a dot that ticks for 250 Arcane damage every 3 seconds for 12 seconds.

He also has a randomly targeted Chain Lightning (Nature damage) that jumps from target to target with increasing damage, making it imperative that all group members are positioned as far away from each other as possible.

At 10 % health he will start casting Overload, a AoE spell with unlimited range (=it will hit all of you) that does 1 k Arcane damage and gives a stackable debuff that increases Arcane damage taken by 10 %.

Vexallus also spawns a pair of adds, called Pure Energy, when he reaches 85 % health and then at every 15 % drop in hp until he reaches 25 %. The adds move slowly flying around the room, (although likely to hit the tank at first since he is closest to their spawn point) sparking off Arcane energy bolts dealing about 3 k damage to the targeted player.

When killed, the adds give a debuff in the form of an Arcane dot, ticking for 300 damage per seconds for 30 seconds but also increases the player’s damage output by 50 %. These debuffs stack up to 10 times.

Sounds like a real heaven for a healer, right? No trouble at all healing through this inferno of Arcane blasts and dots ticking away…;P

Anyways, I found some tricks that might make me feel a little better (and maybe get him to drop that sweet Rod of the Blazing Light for me…)

If you have a lot of gold (or some Primal Manas just lying around unused) you can get some Major Arcane Protection Potions, or maybe some Arcane resist gear, maybe equip your Violet Badge for the fight, which will make your healer breathe a little easier.

A lot more healer-friendly than the usual zerg seems to be the approach known as the Slow and Steady.

In this case, after each add is dead, you just hold dps on Vexallus until the debuff has worn off after approximately 30 seconds, to avoid stacking the debuff and make the healer miserable. The 300 damage per second tick is easily healed through with a Renew.

When all players are debuff-free, start dps’ing again until the next pair spawns.

After the last pair is killed you immediately go for Vexallus, dps’ing him down fast and furiously to avoid that nasty Overload. The Overload can be interrupted it seems, so a warrior with Shield Bash, a rogue with Kick or a mage with Counterspell would come in handy here ;P

Another useful tip I found was that the chandeliers in Vexallus’ hall seems to act like grounding devices that suck up the debuff, so if the dps stand as close to these candles as possible the debuff will hit them and then pop off. No need to wait that 30 seconds for the debuff to wear off then.

Other interesting facts I found about this fight was that he actually does no physical damage at all, meaning that he doesn’t actually need to be tanked by the tank. A warlock or shadow priest with good Arcane resist can tank him, and I have read that a Demo warlock’s Felguard actually makes a great tank for this encounter – something I’d definitely would like to try next time I bring Paynne in there.