Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘rant’

When you screenshot something in WoW the shot gets saved in your Screenshot Folder, and it gets an auto-generated name.

The name will have the prefix WoWScrnShot followed by the date it was taken and a six-digit number, possibly denoting the exact time of the shooting.

In your Screenshot Folder, all your screenshots will be handily placed in order, so you can easily find them when you want to go back and reminisce about the good old days, right?

Wrong.

Well, right in so far that they are placed in order, but wrong wrong wrong in that you can easily find them, because you can’t!

You see, the date stamp of the screenshot is not the convenient year-month-day-variety every sane person uses, but some ancient month-day-year variety. This means that your last shots will not be last in the file list but squished in somewhere at the residing place of the current month. You browse shots from January 2009 when you suddenly find yourself looking at Festergut kill shots from a week ago, and then you are back in February 2009. Aargh!

My folder currently have 460 shots from the last year and it is a pain to look through to find a particular one because of this inane filing system. How hard can it be to make sure images are saved in a logical, chronological order? Wake up and smell the 10’s please!

Oh, and you think 460 shots are a lot? It would have been at least 2000 more but last time my laptop kicked the bucket the workshop decided that formatting the hard drive would help resurrect it and promptly wiped all my screenies :-(

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?

Do you ever get the feeling when you open your closet door and look at all your clothes stuffed in there that you have nothing to wear? Or when you are out shopping that you find nothing at all you would like to wear – a whole bloody city full of nothing but bloody clothes boutiques and there is not one bloody piece of garb that you find interesting enough to buy?

Happens to me a lot. My clothes – the ones I do manage to buy – are nice, good-looking and comfortable, yet when I stand there in my dressing room in my underwear looking at them I often find nothing in there I really want to put on, and I generally hate going shopping. Total outfit paralysis.

Usually ends up with me grabbing something I know I will find comfortable wearing, which explains why I am always dressed the same and the hot little dresses I for some reason keeps buying usually languishes away at the back of the closet.

It’s like that for me in WoW as well sometimes.

My shammy has her bags crammed full of shiny gear and yet she usually wears the same stuff. She has a lot of jewellery but same thing applies here, she usually wears the same necklace and rings.

She is now standing before the Triumphant Vendor with some brand new Crusade Trophys burning in her purse and she has total outfit paralysis.

I was going to replace her helm and shoulders since they are ilvl 232, but Elitist Jerks with their Best in Slot list seems to find that the Elemental helm and shoulders of the t9 are actually much better for a resto shaman than the resto ones, while looking a bit further ahead it seems the Resto head and shoulders of the t10 is the ones to go for and EJ suggest wearing the tunic and the gloves of the t9.

So what should I get? I don’t want to spend a lot of gems and enchants on gear I will replace real soon, and I don’t want to miss out on the t9 2-set bonus. And I don’t want to spend too much dkp on buying the t9 tokens now that the t10 marks are in stock. So t9 ilvl 245 helm and shoulders? Tunic and gloves? I already have very nive ilvl 245 tunic and gloves  (althought not tier stuff) and which gear will actually last me the longest if I should lose the set bonus?

And – most importantly – will I look fat in it?

Ze warlock has similar problems.

She has gathered up a nice bunch of Triumph emblems but there is actually nothing in the shop she wants to wear. Or rather, she is very attached to her current gear since it is things that has dropped for her in raids with her friends and it has a lot of sentimental value to her. Nothing like winning a roll and picking up a lovely silk dress from the innards of a dead mob to form a real bond with your gear.

Also, the fact that the Iceshear mantle and Raiments of the Corrupted looks absolutely hawt on a dark-haired green-eyed gnome while the t9 looks, well, let’s just say that sloping shoulders starting at your ears does not look good on anyone, this fact does not make her very inclined to buy them.

The t9 set bonus, the increased damage of her pets, is very alluring though since she is a real warlock and a real warlock uses pets, so I guess she will eventually overcome her dithering and buy the legs and gloves.

Anyways, who said it was easy to gear up with this new badge system?!?

You have all done the Sons of Bitches Hodir grind, right?

I started doing it with my shammy since even though she was a baby of late TBC she was my first raid toon in WotLK, and I didn’t have any old rep with either the Aldors or the Scryers to get her some shoulder enchants.

So I waddled through the snows of the Storm Peaks, flying back and forth between Nifelheim and the terribly tall Tower of Storms to make the ice giants come to look upon me as a friend instead of an enemy.

And after what felt like an eternity in hell and a Sisyphus challenge of some magnitude my shaman got Honored with the giants, and could purchase a set of sparklies for her shoulders.

And it was so dreadfully boring I was on the verge of quitting the game. I guess I got mired down in other dailies as well, because I don’t think it actually took that many days to actually get honored.

Honored she was, my little shammy, and honored she stayed. The priest, the druid and the warlock, was already Exalted with the Scryers and I never even entered Storm Peaks to get them more advanced enchants, so deep was my hate for the polishing of the helm.

Then, when I joined Adrenaline, I started doing the Bitches Hodir dailies again to get her the extra few sparkly points, and although I was not overly fond of the dailies my initial hate had subsided some and I didn’t choke on doing them and didn’t even once contemplate hiring a child to do them for me.

After a looot of days, and generous donations of Relics of Ulduar from my guildies, my shammy finally got Exalted!

Fast forward a bit, and now the SoB shoulder enchants are Bind to Account! Only problem is, my shammy – my only char able to buy the shoulder enchants – is on Stormrage and the rest of my toons are on the Peak.

So, in a slight attack of insanity, I decided to start doing the SoB grind with my druid.

She was at the time Hated by the SoBs but I was pretty sure she had done a few of the pre-quests, and I criss-crossed the Storm Peak trying to find where I left the quest chain. Swearing and checking wowhead, I finally found a Slag-covered thingy in my bags that apparently was vital in gaining the giants favor.

So, I did the Slag quest and the rest that opened up, and when I had done them all I was more than halfway through Honored! From Hated to Honored in a few hours!

Apparently the rep rewards for all the quests have been upped quite a bit, I seem to remember getting about 450 rep for each daily now as opposed to like 200 before.

I popped in to the AH and bought me 600 Relics of Hodir at a bargain price, less than 45 silvers apiece, and returned to Nifelheim and talked to the Quartermaster. 650 rep per Relic turnin and some 400 Relics later I was Exalted…

….

Quite the anti-climax.

I was expecting a weeks-long grind and I was done after only a few hours. Took me longer to find the quest where I left off than doing the entire Hated-Exalted rep gain.

So I bought my girls some new glittering shoulder enchants, but what shall I do with the 200+ Relics of Ulduar still littering my bags?

When it is only slightly epic? Not-quite-epic? Epic light?

I’ve always thought epic was, you know, epic. I hear that word and my head fills with images of grandeur and awesomeness, of fantastic tales of love and terror and marvellous adventures affecting a whole world. Epicness, simple as that.

In WoW and according to Blizzard, Epic denotes a certain level of item rarity.

You can find poor items all over, common ones too, uncommon items are (surprise!) slightly less common than common ones, rare items are rare, epic items are rarer and legendary items are rarest of them all.

After having played this game for some three years I am still rooted in the belief that epic actually is epic, that once I get an epic item I need never look further, I can sit back and relax and treasure my own, my beloved, my preciousss rings with matching preciousss jewellery and assssorted garments.

I guess my never getting past tier 4 raiding in TBC can partially explain this, I never actually got the chance to regularly replace my epic items because the ones I wore were the absolute top of the line for me, the best that I could attain. Sure, I had my share of badge gear as well but most of what I was wearing actually dropped for me from some boss or other and I had wrested it from a still-warm dead body after having made a lucky roll. In a very Tam-like way.

Enter WotLK.

I actually wore most of my sssweet and preciousss things until level 80. I still wear some of them, my durids tank rings for example, her well-earned Violet Signet and her Shermanar Great-Ring, both from Karazhan.

Now that is epic to me. Those things were so good, so awesome, so grand and wonderful that I did not need to replace them during all my Northrend adventures while levelling, and yet they were only from the first tier of raiding in TBC.

I could totally live with the fact that the Northrend level 80 epics would be even more grand and awesome than my level 70 epics and that I had to replace my well-worn gear when I hit 80 and started adventuring with the big boys and girls. I mean, it’s a whole whopping ten levels difference.

But then I realised that the level 80 epics I started accruing during my Naxx10 runs and through various crafting friends and reputation aquiantances, they were not really epics at all. They were slightly less than epic, apparently.

Even Blizzard themselves say so as the Naxx10 gear and similar does not count as epics in the (infamous) Epic achievement. Apparently, the real epic gear is being handed out in Naxx25 or in raiding instances a tad more respectable than Naxx10.

It seems that although all epics are epic, some epics are more epic than others.

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.)

What’s in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, would it not?

But what about a rogue? Or a warrior or a shaman?

My first ever toon in WoW was my female human rogue Tessy. Tessy is my usual internet nick and my own second name.

Tessy the rogue was the one I explored most of Azeroth with, and being my first, she was also my precious, my flock leader, my main, my real main, regardless of the fact that she’s been mostly retired lately, cooking and fishing and pick-pocketing things.

When I transferred from my original server Vashj to Aerie Peak the name Tessy was taken there. Some lowbie Horde, not even high enough level to show up on the Armory, was apparently called Tessy and thus the game would not let me keep my name.

My warriors name was also taken, she was originally called Dizzie but there was already a gnome on the Peak called that. Finding a new name for her was not hard, she is now known as Daissy which I actually like better, somehow the girlish flowery sound of Daissy suits her lone fury warrior style way more than her first name, even though she no longer sports her pink pigtails but rather a thick reddish mane down her back.

Now, when I transferred my shaman Larue from the Peak to Stormrage, she faced the same trouble – someone had taken her name! I overcame this difficulty by adding an acute accent to the u, giving her the same name spelled Larúe. Maybe this will even improve things, helping people to pronounce it as she was often referred to as Laurie instead of La-ruu.

But what about Tessy?

I tried many different combinations and none of them felt right. Tess was taken and so was Tessie.

Unlike when I moved my shaman recently, I was at this time suffering from acute hatred of any kind of diacritic marks because of the difficulties involved in typing these when sending mails to or trying to invite people with marked names to groups so I was not even thinking of trying any of them out for myself.

To be able to play her at all and not be stuck in limbo I picked one of all bad varieties and ended up with Tessye.

Tessye! It feels so wrong! I am not Tessye, I am Tessy and I want my name back! Silly stupid e weighing down that pretty name!

I wonder if this is the reason (partly, at least) that I am reluctant to play her nowadays, because she feels like a stranger and not like my precious beloved slightly confused rogue who is as likely to sit down and smell the roses as she is to sneak around sapping mobs and picking their pockets or trying to backstab someone with her fishing rod equipped.

But having overcome my diacritiphobia somewhat by naming Larue Larúe, I wonder if I should maybe consider a name change for my rogue.

While I won’t be completely happy until she is Tessy again, I could perhaps be slightly happier if she was Téssy instead of Tessye?

I have recently been contemplating a switch from social 10-man raiding to a more hardcore 25-man raiding.

The difference (for me) between social and hardcore is a difference of focus. It is not a difference of skill, of time, of knowledge, I see it simply as a difference of focus.

A social raid focus on bringing the humans behind the toons, and may end up with for example two warriors tanking, two paladins healing, three mages dps’ing but no priest and no shaman.

A hardcore raid focus on bringing the toons, on the on-line world, and making sure that the raid is balanced class-wise to get as many possible abilities and buffs at hand to maximise the chances of being able to handle all kinds of situations, to maximise the chances of success.

A social raid chooses the players first, and the toons they play tag along. The goal is of course to see content, to down bosses and perhaps even to do achievements and hard modes, but their focus is on having a good night out with friends, and if the raid halter a bit because one or more of the players are not exactly up to speed, the raid works around that somehow.

A hardcore raid chooses the encounters first and the toons they need to beat these encounters, and the players who control them tag along. Their goal is the same as the social raids, and this goal is also their focus. Content, bosses, achievements and hard modes, and if a player is not up to speed she must learn to be so or she will not raid again.

One way is not more right than the other, it is simply two different ways of playing the game. One is bringing a bunch of friends and see how far you get, the other is deciding how far you want to go and seeing which friends you need to bring to get there.

However, as I was doing this contemplating, I’ve come to realise that the difference is larger than I initially though. It is not just a difference in which players or classes you bring, which goals you set up or how you deal with players who can’t meet the requirements of the encounters.

It is also a difference in how you treat your own toon.

I’ve come to realise that I will have to look over my gear and possibly probably certainly need to do some regemming and re-enchanting and even altering my selection criteria for what I pick to wear.

In a social raid, you are never quite sure what kinds of buffs and abilities you will get. Even though many buffs overlap nowadays, you can never be 100% certain you will have Replenishment, Blessing of Wisdom or Mana Spring totem, Spirit or Intellect buffs, just to name a few healery-related buffs. Or if you dps you can never be 100% certain you will run with a draenei in the group for that nice 1% extra hit chance.

Most likely you will have these buffs available, but you can never be certain and this uncertainty makes you gear your toon to be self-sufficient.

You don’t want to end up out of mana half way through the bossfight because all your replenishing friends were out of town that night. You don’t want to see your heavy hitting spells miss the boss because without that pretty draenei shaman in your group you are not hit-capped.

But it is different in a hardcore setting, and especially so in a 25-man setting. You know you will have Replenishment, you know you will have Intellect and Spirit and mana regenerating buffs. You know you will run with a draenei.

It frees you up to increase your spellpower, haste and crit and lower your mp5. It frees you up to replace those hit rating gems and enchants with something else.

If I ever get the opportunity to go down the way to the 25mans hardcore raiding I will have to stop being so damned self-sufficient and start relying on other people to be there.

It is kind of scary actually, like standing on a top of a high bridge with a bungee cord tied around your feet, contemplating the jump, knowing it will be a wonderful thrilling exhilarating experience, but still dreadfully afraid that you just will go splat at the bottom instead of bouncing back up.

You know Archavon the Stone Watcher?

Big craggy dude hiding in a vault inside Wintergrasp Keep? Formerly a mighty raid boss, nowadays farmed for easy emblems?

Oh, and he also happen to drop some shitty old lol-epics like a pair of shabby trousers or maybe a battered hat. Pitiful, laughable stuff, I know, just look at the ilvl on those things – 200! They won’t even show up on an Epic achievement! Puh-leeease, I would not want to be seen dead in them!

Well, actually I would like to be seen living in them, they would be a huge upgrade from the leggings and headpiece Jools is still sporting, old left-overs from her srs raiding days back in Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair.

They have served her well in her journeys through Northrend, and are actually still serving her pretty good. She is working through her heroics in this gear, and on her first and so far only Naxxramas run with a mostly-alts-group consisting of Plague wing and Spider wing she dished out more than 60% of the healing done while the other healer, a terribly rude and annoying priest with Northrend blues, greens and some heroic epics but whose stats were on par with Jools’, somehow hovered around the 20%-mark, with the remainder being brought up by various self-heals from the dps and tanks.

She even managed to solo heal Noth the Plaguebringer without losing anyone when the other priest had been grating on everyone’s nerves long enough and had been removed from the group  – not only did he heal terribadly, he was also constanly whining about how he wanted to go to Ulduar and kept bragging about how he could 2-man Flame Leviathan and generally being an irritating twat, who then demanded that the group run out and summon him at the stone after he had died and released because he had no flying mount. A perfect example of How Not To Behave In A Pug.

All in all, I think Jools did pretty good that run.

Archavon the Stone Watcher is a boss on Naxx level of raid difficulty. Jools would have had no problem healing in that encounter, and maybe the gods of dice and random numbers would have smiled on her and dropped the holy cloth for her. Not that it would have been noticeable on her Epic achievement.

But Archavon is not the only boss in there, is he? No, he has some company – Emalon the Storm Watcher and Koralon the Flame Watcher.

Emalon is a boss on par with Ulduar, the next tier of raiding difficulty and thus he drops even shinier loot than his compadre, and Koralon is the latest addition with the sparkliest loot and is also the hardest to bring down.

It is this last boss that everyone wants, they are after the tier drop goodies that he strews around when he falls.

And I totally understand that, had I been dressed in tier 7 stuff I would have drooled over the possibility of upgrading to tier 8-something even though it is shit fugly.

I think Jools might have been able to hold her own in the Emalon fight even in her old worn robes, the priesty healing is simply amazing (I knew that of course but has temporarily forgotten after having raided with my resto shaman and mostly been ambling along questing and pvp’ing with Jools) and the new stuff she learned at 80 was beautiful.

Koralon would probably have been slightly harder. Especially with the proverbial fires and people needing to get out of them.

So people want a healer that they feel confident can handle all three of the encounters, Koralon for the actual loot and the other two for emblem pinatas, and they check this by looking at the Epic achievement. Because everyone know that gear is everything, rite?

People can be up front about that they are going to check your gear, and polite and apologetic when they say that sorry, you are not geared enough, in which case I say no problem, good luck. Or they can be rude and say lol and simply remove you from the group even though you have a comment in your LFG saying newly dinged 80 and you wonder why they invited you in the first place, in which case I put them on ignore.

The merchants in Dalaran must be overflowing with vendored Archavon and Emalon drops now (maybe they will hold a garage sale soon?) because there is no chance in hell that anyone who actually would benefit from those things has a chance of getting them.

The Vault of Archavon is effectively closed to anyone not epicced out, and it seems like such a waste to me.

It is the Fault of Archavon.

Or possibly quadruple spec.

Remember how I fiddled about trying out druid healing specs but avoiding the overcooked broccoli form because, well, eh, for no other reason actually than the slightly withered look of it. No, I tell a lie, I actually avoided it partly because every time I see a tree I think aha there’s Zetter (our resident tree!), and the one time I actually specced into this brassicaceous form (for a Masquerade Party!) I couldn’t find myself on my screen, must have been that damned Zetter blocking me all the time! Oh, wait…

Anyway, I suddenly felt kind of extremely silly trying so hard to heal as a druid and not take advantage of their imba 51 point spell, Wild Growth, so I decided to rectify the situation by karaoke! doing the one thing a poor dual specced druid should do. I specced lazer chicken, of course!

Fast forward a few days to a Naxx run, which I entered as my beloved prime time spec, feral, but for the very first time I was in there as a full-time kittycat – miaow! – instead of the tough tank-with-my-face slim and well-muscled pretty bear, and I promptly discovered why meleeing the in Naxx is hell.

Especially for a class with a pathetic aoe (well, not pathetic maybe but not a fast one in my tank-oriented bear spec due to the 50 Energy required). So maybe especially for a druid that refuses to realise that cat and bear have slightly differently oriented specs nowadays. And especially if you don’t want to switch to bear for the much more powerful bear swipe because you don’t want there to be any confusion as to who the tanks are in this run, m’kay.

The trash pulls was a pain (single-target ftl in the crackling aoe fireworks), and Anub’Rekhan was even worse.

Run to boss, open up the can of whoopass, claw that boss til he bleeeeds, uh-oh, he calls on his little friends so run away, little girl, run run after the big friends instead and scratch and claw and bite them to death, and then scoot across the room to refresh all your bleeding nasties on the big ugly arachnid, only to run out again when his little friends came back for seconds. Lather, rinse and repeat.

I spent more time running back and forth than I did dealing out pain! Well, maybe not, but it was an awful lot of running around, and only one dash.

So, since a druid is all about shapeshifting, I promptly switched talents and moved over to the feathered caster variety. Granted, I had no hit rating whatsoever in my former leafless healing set, and of course I had forgotten to change my glyphs from the resto to the whoopass variety, but I still did an imba amount of damage compared to my poor kitty! Yellow numbers popping out ftw!

And in this form I did something, never recorded once in over 200 surveyed worlds (bonus if you recognize the quote) 50 Naxx runs, I snagged me a Safety Dance achievement!

Fast forward a few days again, when the meandering wit and erratic whims of my druid made her ditch her feral spec and actually go for a fully fledged leafed resto build. Yes, one including the flaxen walking brassica.

Happy as a kid in a candy shop she ran around in Stormwind trying to talk to her stationary kin (who were not responding btw) and was going to take a quick peek at her resto glyphs that she luckily still hadn’t gotten around to swapping for pew-pew ones when I realised that her primary spec, the one that’s always been feral, you know, the one that now had a brand new decidous branch (/giggle) instead, this spec was not decked out in resto glyphs but was, in fact, still sporting heavy duty bear tank glyphs. The resto glyphs were, naturally, still safely attached to her moonkin spec.

/facepalm.

So shall I get me new glyphs? Or shall I swap my specs? Or, given that I probably will feel the urge to reclaim my furriness real soon, and it’s not entirely improbable that I will actually get me two feral specs, one for the in-your-face tankmaestro and one for the sleek death-on-paws, shall I just turn a blind eye to the glyph department for the time being?

Or shall I just avoid the entire mess and go level my priest instead?