The Law of Alts

First off this post has nothing to do with Paladins. Just getting it out there.

As Patch 4.2 started looming closer and now that it's hit, I've been working on my resto shaman to get her up to snuff and do a bit more raiding on her than I did during the previous tier of raiding content. This is a similar pattern to the days of Wrath for me as I focused only on the paladin until she was BiS geared out for non-heroic raid content. Well, that's starting to happen again, although this time I didn't have to get both the paladin and Shaman up to max level from scratch so the whole process is going faster. That and some days I really feel like playing a badass resto shaman as opposed to a face rolling ret paladin.

So in an effort to not get burnt out on Mirax, I took Rhysati to a Bastion of Twilight run today. Her tier shoulders did drop, but I lost on them to a hunter. However, Rhys did get an upgrade for her enhancement set in the form of a new helm. (Which I felt really bad because our guild's main enhancement shaman was there on his prot pally and needed the helm for his main toon.) I feel like my shaman is stuck in the law of alts, but a twisted version as the only raid drops she's gotten in Cataclysm so far have both been for her off-spec. So the main sees gear for the alt and the alt only sees gear for the wrong spec. I love it. Someday I'll be a tiered out shaman again. Blizz just needs to leave a raiding tier in place for a full year so everyone gets bored of it and starts gearing out their alts.

It's Patch Day! Now What?

As I write, Patch 4.2 is going live on servers and I along with everyone else is patiently waiting for the servers to come back up so we can all go check out the new quest hub. The main issue with patch day is what the hell do you do while you're waiting for servers to come back up? I've already read up about the patch on both WoW Insider and MMO-Champion. I even posted to my guild's website with places for guildies to read up about the patch. Then being that there was still three and a half hours left until the scheduled time for the realms to come back up I went grocery shopping which sadly only took me an hour. So now I still have time to kill while waiting.

I think it's the aniticipation of new content that has me bated and dying to jump on and play. I know I'm going to play the new content and probably get burnt out on it quickly, but I still want to play it.

Bittersweet Victory

Yesterday the main tank in my guild ran an ICC 25 doing achievement for the mount as well as to get us our Kingslayer 25 so we can go do a Light of Dawn run next week. However, a a big part of his motivation for doing these runs is to get me my Shadowmourne and our guild the 'We Are Legendary' achievement. For the most part everything went great during the run. We cleared everything, wipes were only caused by people screwing up achievements and thus wipes had to be called. The only downside really to the whole night was me and my silly quest. I'm still on the infusions portion of the questline and am the person in our guild who is farthest along. (We never downed Putricide 25 during ICC's heyday so I could never progress with them until a post-Cataclysm ICC 25 run.) I had already done my plauge infusion a few months ago and thus was on Blood Queen. Everyone held back dps so I could be the first one bitten and so that I could get all three bites in and then we killed her. To may dismay, my quest wasn't complete.

I had read up on the quests months if not a year or more ago when it was looking like we were gonna push for the orange and before the raid lockout was shared between 10 man and 25 man. Due to how long it had been since I had read up on the quest I didn't realize that the buff I needed I got by standing infront of the BQ with the tanks. I also don't play a tank so I didn't even know what the extra debuff they get was callled. So to my dismay I have to do it all again next week when we do heroic mode and have to do the Sindragosa one on heroic as well. Ugh. I feel like such an idiot.

Priestly Ways

I have been having a ton of fun playing on my Level 72 BC dugeon twink Priest, Elscol. She's done Sunwell more than all of my Level 85s combined. She's almost to revered already with the Ashtounge Deathsworn. She has almost as many hit points as the tanks she heals if not more than they have. All in all, she is a little badass and I love playing on her to death. This being said, it sometimes makes me sad that I level capped her and can't (well won't) finish leveling her to 85. Thus I want to make a new priest and level them all the way to 85.

A couple things make the possibility of a new priest a little silly if not hard to do. First off, I have ten characters on my server so I don't have any open slots for a new one. I don't really want to get rid of a character because I have one of each class and I think that's kinda cool. Except I don't play most of them. I think I really only seriously play the Paladin, Shaman and existing Priest at the moment. The Druid and Warlock also get a bit of love, just not as much. The hunter is up at 65 so I probably won't do anything with her and the Level 61 Death Knight is slated to become my farm-bot as soon as I get around to leveling her so that the Paladin can pick up a profession that's a little more beneficial than mining (I don't tank on Mirax so the extra stamina is useless.) My Rogue is my only Worgen and as the newest to the bunch she's not gonna get deleted. Plus if I ever go to level Mirax's Ravenholdt rep I'm gonna need a toon that can pick-pocket. Periodically I get curious about playing a Warrior and I'll admit Victory Rush and quest grinding go hand in hand. Plus Ayrl is supposed to be leveling with Mälik's Warrior, Grizz. This only leaves the Mage, who coincidentally is my only Horde character on this server. Mälik moved his Horde Druid, Moocat, to a different server where we all had rolled Horde alts. I broke up with my boyfriend and his unplayed Troll Rogue is the only character still left in the guild we have on the Horde side. But I don't just want to delete the Mage. I spent way too much gold on her giving in to my desire to know every single pattern that I can on each of my crafting toons. That and she has a ton of patterns in her bank and bags as well as some nice gear that I have no way of transferring to a different character. So I think I'm gonna follow Mälik and transfer her over to our Horde server.

That was the first issues with a new Priest.

The second issue is that I didn't always love playing Elscol. When I first rolled her she was a Dwarf named Escol, though still a Priest, and I had no issues playing her as long as I didn't have to kill things. Oh god, just leveling to 20 was painful. I first started playing her when my ex, his friend and I all decided to start toons together. They both rolled Gnomes and myself a Dwarf. The ex was a Warrior tank and the friend was a Warlock. We had a perfect little leveling party. But after we initially started them all we never played them again together. The friend eventually leveled his lock and the ex eventually deleted his warrior, and Escol was left sitting there gathering dust. I tried to level her several times, always to the same painful conclusion. Then, Mälik rolled a Paladin tank and suddenly I had a buddy to go run Gnomergan with. Except he made fun of how ugly Escol was and a quick trip to the Battle.net site later she was reborn as Elscol, the Human Priest, whose name was finally spelt right. Then the ex and his friend rolled Dwarf Shaman and Duel Spec was lowered to Level 30 and only 10 gold and Elscol now had a Shadow spec for dealing damage. However, this resurgence was short lived as Cataclysm was released and leveling the Paladin, Shaman and Druid from 80 to 85 became more of the priority. However, the mystique of the Priest remained as an alluring thought and once that was accomplished and Mirax was geared for raiding I picked up healing on Elscol again and the rest is history.

So yeah, I'm not sure I want to lose my only Mage on the server and I'm not sure I want to relive the pain of being a low-level Priest. Heck, I'm not even sure what race I would be. My guild needs a Gnome Priest for our Stay Classy achievement, but I can't stand being that low to the ground. I like the spirit bonus that humans get which as a raiding toon will be quite handy. However, I have a human priest already and I don't like having too many characters of the same race. Currently I have 3 Humans, 3 Draenei, 2 Night Elves, a Worgen and a Blood Elf. Also, being a girl I like my characters to look hot or at least pretty. So I have some things to think about. But in the mean time I think I'm going to transfer that Mage.

The Lure of Shiny New Healing Gear

Just looked at the new Tier 12 for Holy Paladins. Sweet Jesus that's an awesome tier set with equally awesome set bonuses. I have been seriously considering making Mirax's MS Holy instead of Ret as we always need healers and usually less melee dps. Between the fact that I keep getting asked to heal on her (I've only ever faced Cho'gall as a healer on any toon) and the fact that I feel like my Paladin is a superior healer to my MS Resto Shaman (who I've also thought about Maining as I do love playing her), becoming a Holy Pally is something I'm thinking really hard about and have been ever since I first found out the new Pally abilities for Cata over a year ago. So when 4.2 comes out next week we'll see what happens.

Toxic Link is a Toxic Problem

Why do people fail so much at Toxic Link on the High Priest Venoxis encoutner? Every time I try to go run a Z-heroic on my Shaman, I get Zul Gruub and inevitably we wipe over and over on the first boss due to people failing to run far enough from me the healer who is usually up against a wall. I can't run through the wall. Trust me I've tried. It's not that hard. Just run the opposite direction of the green line. Like a reverse Blood Queen. But no people keep failing at the concept. 


It's too late for me to be PUGing out anyway. Good night.

Heroic Mode: We Can Do it, Now What?

My guild is comfortably farming Blackwing Descent 5/6 and Bastion of Twilight 3/4 and a couple of us have actually killed Cho'gall and thus the guild can make attempts at Heroic Halfus. I was discussing the issue of heroic raid bosses with the guild's main tank last night. We both agree that the guild can do it, it's more a question of if we should and would the guild want to?

From what I can tell our guild members all want to down raids but their reasons for doing so are varied. Some people are concerned with the lack of raid drops they have been getting. Others want the achievement for the full raid before even attempting heroic modes. Still others just want guild members to show so we don't have to PUG. Personally, I would love to see our guild make attempts at heroic Halfus. I think we can do it and not to mention there's better loot associated with heroic modes.

They Hate Me, They Love Me and They Hate Me Again....Or, They Love Me, They Hate Me and They Love Me Again

What is it with PUGs and loving/hating their healers? I currently have a toon of each class that can heal and I do heal on those toons. So naturally I que up in the Dungeon Finder as a healer or get asked to go raid as a healer and I swear that every other group literally hates me and every other group in between those loves me. Doesn't matter if I'm on the Priest, Paladin, Shaman or Druid, that's how the story goes. Like 1-2-1-2-1.

So what gives? Is WoW just full of more idiots than ever or something? Because usually the groups that hate my healing are failing in other ways as well. For instance, two nights ago I tried to run Zul Aman on my Shaman. The first group had one dps that was over 10k and 2 that were at 8k if they tried and the tank was the top damage on every fight. They hated me and the mage kept bitching at me because he kept dying. I got sick of being the one blamed for the fail when the tank couldn't hold aggro and the hunter who could barely do more than 4k dps kept flirting with death preventing me from spreading my heals around. So I left group mid-bossfight and requed. Once again I got Zul Aman and the tank was the highest damage and we had two dps that were barely 8k. Almost the same group makeup. However, this gorup was significantly easier to heal. The other players knew how to watch their aggro and their feet and kept telling me how much they loved my healing.

All of this proves a point I've been trying to make and get some of my newer guildies who are about to be raid ready to understand—your healers and tanks are only as good as the group they are running with so not only know your toon well, but know the fights you are going to be doing.

The More Trolls You Know

first off, I think Guild Portal's site is broken. I can't even update the welcome note for my guild. It saves, but doesn't update the page and I have Super Admin access.

On that note, I think this will become my new WoW blog as Blogger has been reliable and is highly customizable.

Now the bulk of the post on which I wanted to cover.

Last night I made the comment to our main tank, Sheltem, that sometimes your ability to down raid bosses is less about your knowledge and gear and more about who you know. This came after I got asked to go to a Cho'gall run with Longjohnboom, one of the noteable Trade Chat trolls on our server. Longjohn is a really good player who knows his toons and being asked directly to run with him was kind of an honor. I ended up recruiting Sheltem to come tank and after about 5 tries I finally got Mirax her Bastion of Twilight achievement. Shelt had to agree with me on my comment about it matters who you know.

I've been on my server for over two years now and have been active the whole time, but I primarily only do things with my guild. During Wrath a rogue kept asking me to go run things with him like Ulduar hardmodes for the drake and Trial of the Grand Crusader runs. But that was only one character. And now with Blizzard's introduction on Real ID friends it's easier to keep track of people you like running with. Unlike Longjohn, all my toons don't start with the same prefix. However, if someone knows Star Wars Rogue Squadron female characters my naming scheme makes sense (except Mirax should be Human not Draenei.)

Anyways, my lesson here is that it doesn't hurt to make friends with the trolls on your server. They might just lead you to new opportunities.

Moving Forward

The following is supposed to go on my Guild Portal Blog whenever it fixes itself.

Things sounded a bit bleak for my guild after the last entry I made an indeed they were. We had a meeting where the former Guild Leader, one of the founders of the guild and the person who had called the meeting, asked those in attendance "Okay, who wants to Ebay the guild?" Not a good start to the meeting.

Thankfully that question brought out strong comments of guild loyalty and a bit of outrage as a few players had been making slow and steady steps to recovery, like running raids at the scheduled times even when there were only 3 people from the guild in the raid group and several people running informal PVP groups in  Arenas and BGs nightly. Some people also got upset at the meeting and /gquit on the spot. So there were some shake ups, but for the most part we were able to restructure the guild a bit and give it a bit more focus and drive.

As a result of all of this, our raids have seen higher guild attendance, more players are joining in PVPing and we are on a new wave of recruiting that so far has been successful. However, all of this progress in resurrecting the guild has brought up some of the old issues that plagued us when we fell from being 9th on the server in 10-man progression to 76th during Wrath.

During the early days of Ulduar as people were getting burnt our from Naxx 25 runs, we focused and became a 10-man raiding group with a focus on doing Ulduar hardmodes. This began before the initial Ulduar nerf and as a result we were actually about to achieve several of them during Ulduar's heyday as the preemo tier of raiding. Unfortunaly due to the length of the Ulduar raid we had to spread out raiding to three nights a week and players began to get burnt out. Combine with the normal spring lull that happens in our guild this was basically the death of our hardcore raiding group. When ToC came out the few who were interesting in raiding were split between wanting to complete the content we had started and the lure of shiny new even more epic gear. As a result, raiding in our guild died and when it did finally start up again we had an influx of "Wrath baby" raiders who didn't have to think in order to raid and collect loot, and thus we began the era of carrying under-performing raiders through content because bodies were all the was really needed to to clear content.

So now after the whole dying guild episode, we're back at the point where we have people but they may not quite be up to par. I know I am one of those as I keep volunteering to heal on my Paladin and her Holy set is not quite as good as her Ret set and thus my healing suffers. There's been many times where our main tank and raid leader will call me on it. And while he can be a bit of an arrogant ass at times, he means well and without him we don't progress as a guild. Aside from my own shortcomings as a Pally healer, I've still been running a lot of older content for fun with him and he has been confiding in me about some of the short comings of other guildies who are geared to the teeth but dps, heals, tanking is not matching the gear level. I know I'm still having trouble learning how to be a Holy Pally again (I miss Scared Shield and the HoT Flash of Light would automatically trigger on it) so maybe these other players are still having isseus adjusting to changes to their class and specs. Several of our DPS only classes have had to roll different specs than what they used to (i.e. Combat Rogues now being Mutilation, Arcane Mages going Fire, etc.) whereas Mirax is still mainly a Retribution Paladin and really only had to worry about learning Holy Power management rather than a whole new set of spells and abilities. But Cataclysm has been out for almost 6 months now, so why are people still not up to par. It's a mystery to me, but hopefully things will improve as we get back intoa  regular weekend raiding schedule.