Now that 4.0.1 has settled

I title this a bit hesitantly because, really, this patch feels far from settled, despite countless server restarts and the fixes put out thus far. From the bug where druid battle-rez + warlock soulstone + shaman self-rez ankh can only be used once (out of all 3) per combat, when that is only supposed to apply to druid battle-rez (once per combat, regardless of individual druid 30minute cooldown availability). Let me squash down my unimaginable rage at the major druid change of destroying permanent-tree-form in exchange for a tree-uber-heal cooldown, despite the awesome threat that druid tanks are currently putting out.

Have I mentioned I was born a feral druid during The Burning Crusade that loves to tank whatever baddies are out there with her bear face? That I loved my awesome insta-threat, hellish mitigation, REAL hybrid “do everything” during raiding back in TBC? Oh, I have. I knew that. Well I’m loving the bear stuff, but it doesn’t outweigh the other druid changes that make me cry if I dwell on my lovely druid. I’m still tanking stuff as I wind down this expansion, still enjoying the game. My druid tank was carried through 4/12 Heroic ICC10 this week, to finish 6 more bosses on regular! And the leather loot gods loved her.

Well, after the saga that was re-installing the game, and the two days it took me to finally download the expansion and the updates and patches, I was glad to get in game and see some of the changes. Many good things, and many bugged-out-the-wazoo issues.

Good: Interface changes with party and raid frames being much less hell, Justice points (stop skipping bosses, puggers, you are making us miss out on justice points!), better stats information panel. Reforging useless junk into useful loot (as a bear tank, arpen MADE ME WANT TO HURT KITTENS) is kickass. Skull bash is the new feral druid spell interrupt/charge and it’s freaking beyond awesome.

Bad: I really don’t like re-learning the classes I’ve played for two years. But there’s more I don’t like.

Glyphs, need more glyphs. We can play with so many, yet there are so few REAL choices. I want glyphs that let me play how I want to play, not that pigeon hole me into a style the developers forced. Speaking of style, wtf healing options are all over the place. The best is reading paladins on twitter cry about wanting their old heal-bomb style back. As a healer, I loved knowing my tank and knowing what to expect from a fight because I could anticipate how to heal. Last minute stressful triage is NOT FUN so someone please tell me why the devs thought moving in that direction would make people WANT to heal. Then they also had to slip a buff to Vengeance in to beef up tank threat.

My video drivers now hates my guts. My favorite addon, Cellular, that manages to give me a tabbed window for every whisper I get makes my game crash when I’m trying to switch toons. (As someone on the same little RP server for going on 3 years with 6 80s and an assortment of little toons I like to hop around on, crashing EVERY TIME is a great way to MAKE ME QUIT THE GAME. ahem)

Things I don’t really like: the new spell queue thing going on. When you hit a button it gets queued, whether the GCD lets you use that ability now or not. That is taking some adjusting from this 50% clicker. :/

All in all, still not sure I’ll be around for Cataclysm. I don’t mind walking way from this. I’m kind of anxious for real life to improve. It just hasn’t yet and this is a pretty inexpensive way to enjoy my time until real life gets “better”. I’ve met amazing people here though from all over the country & world and that I will miss, if I really feel continuing to play won’t be much fun.

Checking myself, for the billionth time, with gear set XYZ

This post inspired by @GeekShui and @phineasdelgado I’m a bit worried, Phineas seemed a bit revved up to come to blows over what I may say!

Filed under: addicted, awesome, bears, general, rant, screenshot, warcraft

Do Healers Have A Bad Attitude? (via Falling Leaves and Wings)

I think there is some solid points in this post. I find it exceptionally interesting that this comes on the heals of similar sounding posts at Pugnacious Priest and Spinksville.

This past weekend I made the decision that I was going to finally follow through with leveling an Alliance character through the WotLK quests. I usually do try to see the “other” side of each expansion to see how things are different. Having transferred almost all of my alliance characters over to the horde (FOR THE HORDE!), rather than transferring one of them back I opted to resurrect a character that hasn’t been played since Vanilla. My level … Read More

via Falling Leaves and Wings

Filed under: awesome, blog, Blogroll, healing, heals, pug, rant, tank, tanking, warcraft, wow, blog, heals, pug, reblog

The Tank/Healer team and 2 way streets

This is not an invitation to tell me I’m doing it wrong. You might be a better paladin tank than me, and I’m totally cool with that. I’m a pretty happy tank given decent people in my party/raid, and that’s all I want, to do my job and be happy.

I own a lot of healers, and a lot of tanks. I learned to play World of Warcraft with my bear tank, and then spent a lot of time learning to heal with the shaman, discipline priest, druid and finally paladin. But on my Battlegroup there is a severe tank shortage (actually I believe this shortage might be in the game itself, overall) so my daily random (heroic or otherwise) is often spent tanking on the four characters of mine that can actively tank in-game. So, I know what tanking is, and I know what healing is. And I really enjoy the dynamic that grows between tanks and healers. I know the Wrath dungeons backwards and forwards. Gearing 4 raiding toons will do that, and I’ve levelled 3 others besides. I like taking a random pug and leading them on a merry chase through the dungeon without stressing a healer (sometimes it’s me, the healer, wanting no stress!) It’s a mark of pride to me to have no incidents and no issues. I can usually tank and spare a few cheerful words in party chat, too!

This was the situation that found me zoning into heroic Violet Hold on my protection paladin with my partner in crime’s demon warlock, and a party that included a Discipline priest healer. Now, I love discipline priests, I love healing as discipline (I have never touched holy and don’t intend to). But in certain situations, a discipline priest can make a protection paladin’s life hell. I learned that the hard way with my partner in crime’s paladin tank. And it’s not the player’s fault, it’s the mechanics of the game that make protection paladins and discipline priests abilities and mechanics just not mesh well in some situations, which leads to stress for me!

If you’re a disc priest healing a paladin tank and they have no mana, don’t bubble them. Because you’re supposed to be observant and know how your spells work, and I’m letting you know how paladins work. They will love you if you do this.

So what are these mechanics that don’t always play nice together? For protection paladins “Spiritual Attunement provides the paladin with a percentage of mana, based on ability level, each time they receive healing.” -wowwiki and for priests “priests deeply specced in the discipline tree, their strength lies in preventing damage.” -wowwiki

Those two sentences hopefully point out the problem here. Preventing damage means no health bars to fill, no healing received. Get it? Discipline priests have the goal of keeping everyone alive by preventing a majority of the damage, and the tankadiin has the responsibility of using his mana to hold aggro on all the mobs in the instance. Typical healer/tank combo. But mitigating the majority of the damage is cross purposes to what the tank needs to keep his mana bar full, to hold aggro on more mobs. In raiding environments this isn’t an issue because things simply hit so hard there. In a majority of instances, the paladin tank can just pull a few more mobs to dodge/block more or take enough damage to eat through the shield and really do some damage so that a heal that pushes health up also increases mana stores. But in situations where the tank has no control over more mobs (Brann encounter, Halls of Stone; Violet Hold timed mob spawns) or simply when the mobs die too fast (overgeared dps, weak mobs) that the tank gets absolutely zero chance to dodge/block or take damage.

I found myself in the perfect storm situation of both of these problems. I had no control over the mob pulls, and they died so fast I barely had a chance to dodge/block. My mana regeneration comes from a few places.

1. Blessing of Sanctuary (Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage taken from all sources by 3% for 30 minutes and increasing stamina by 10%. In addition, when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 2% of maximum displayed mana);

2. Judgement of Wisdom (giving each attack a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s base mana);

3. Divine Plea (You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec) 1min cooldown

4. Glyph Seal of Command (You gain 8% of your base mana each time you use a Judgement with Seal of Command active) My judgements have a cooldown less than 9seconds, thanks to 2/2 Improved Judgements.

5. Seal of Wisdom (Fills the Paladin with divine wisdom for 30 min, giving each melee attack a chance to restore 4% of the paladin’s maximum mana)

I was facing a lot of crowd pulls (just my luck) of 4 mobs, and despite all these tools I was barely hanging onto mana. I didn’t have time to stop and drink because the mobs keep spawning and they were spawning far away from each other. I had to run instead of drink to the next pull. I didn’t want to switch to Seal of Wisdom because Seal of Command became my threat when I stopped consencrating, and was glyphed to give me mana anyways.

So I asked my priest to try to avoid Power Word: Shield on me. It was my last hope to try and retain some mana. They tried, but they were totally confused why I would ask such a thing. And I was too busy really to try to explain that I NEEDED to take damage to get my mana up, that my other abilities just weren’t cutting it. I felt really bad about that, because knowledge is power and I feel they’d just be a more informed healer and possibly could make their next paladin tank’s life less hell in situations where their tank’s mana isn’t cutting it.

And that’s what this comes down to. Tanking and healing is a partnership. Healers want their tanks to respect their mana pools at all levels of the game, while leveling, while pushing through stockades, while in a heroic dungeon, while raiding. And tanks want healers to respect their pull strategies. And, in some cases, tanks have mana pools that need respecting too!

Lovely Ambrosine over at forthebubbles.wordpress.com got to this topic before me (I am a pathetic excuse for a blogger) and there’s a bunch of commentary there. Every comment from someone who both has a disc priest and a paladin tank, or is part of a duo of very close players of those two classes, and weren’t end-game min-maxers that barely do random pug heroics, were helpful and understanding of this situation. I love her blog and tweets quite a bit. But you won’t ever catch me taking gear off my tank, reducing my hit/expertise/crit immunity.

I think I was not violating some silly sacred cow that seemed to erupt on twitter in response to me asking the healer to try to avoid voluntarily bubbling me. Previously tame tweeters acted like I was laying down the law on the poor priest on how to do their job, when all I did was ask them to not bubble ME because it was interfering with MY job. 99% of all the hullabaloo that followed had no bearing on the specific situations where a paladin tank is really at the mercy of the game because the dps are awesome and kill things too fast or the mobs are limited and the priest is too good and mitigates all of the minimal damage the mobs deal. And a majority of the tweeters, not knowing that my twitter question was posed neutrally, but that I was the tank in question, assumed the tank (hi, me) didn’t know how to play, didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t understand discipline priests, etc.

Dear disc priests. I know how you heal. I love how you heal. You should learn how I tank and get mana. Then go do it in heroic violet hold with uber dps. Maybe you’ll consider your words a bit more carefully before lynching someone you feel is beneath you because they were struggling with mana.

I did love that naked-outfit idea in the comments at For The Bubbles though…

Filed under: drama, healing, heals, paladins, pride, pug, QQ, rant, tank, tanking, bubble, disc, mana, paladins, priest, PW:S, tank, twitter

Why do we segregate the playerbase

I stumbled upon a great read today over at MMOmeltingpot.com and it immediately had my attention because it’s a topic that I’ve long cherished, the dreaded Casual vs Hardcore debate. And I don’t mean I’ve cherished the debate because I’m trying to draw the line and clearly indicate who is what. But really, why do we try to label each other? In The World of Warcraft, we’re all playing the same game, with the same tools. At least the first half of that is definitely correct. I think. (Addons don’t change the basics of the game!)

“I think the base terms of hardcore and casual are grossly misrepresented. There’s raiders, and then there are non-raiders. There are people who just do 5 man instances, heroic or not, and then those that don’t even do that, and just stick to questing, leveling professions and doing soloable achievements. There are theorycrafters, followers of Elistist Jerks, browsers of wowpopular.com, people who spec from first principals and those that don’t have a firm grip on the direction of their spec (which Cata will help with, somewhat). There are altoholics who love to level, or maintain as many 80s as they can, or those that have 1 main and bank alt. There are people that prevent the progress of their toons at level 19, 29, 39, 49 or 59, just so they can gear up that toon for BG dominance (they’re called twinks in game, though you may wish to ask your parents about the real world term “twink”). Then there are world PvP, BG PvP and Arena PvP players. There are people that log 6 hours a week of game time or less, and they could fall into any of those categories. There are those that log 35+ hours a week, and they too, fall into any of those categories.

The player who logs 35+ hours a week, just leveling alts, gathering and leveling professions or running 5man heroics and doesn’t do raids could be considered just as hardcore as the player who 9 hours a week to do 25ICC heroic only. Both players might have a very good understanding of their specs, talents and spells for the level of play that they are at.

And out of game, you’ve got bloggers, blog followers, ranters, forum trolls and care bears (though that can be in-game as well).

Yeah, narrowing down the field of WoW player definitions to hardcore and casual is like to describe colour in terms of black and white.”

Quotes straight from linked post. Pathak’s homepage can be found here.

So what do we get by trying to categorize? Is it really that difficult to have a discussion with other players without “identifying” their loyalties? The great thing with twitter is that I’ve been able to chat with other players so far outside my own comfort zone and really get a feel for what they love about their game. It’s another amazing example of how the Internet can tear down barriers between people. And while I’ve waded into the muck a time or two (yeah that was me talking about pvp-geared-toons in my heroics giving me headaches, namely pvp-geared-tanks&healers) (oh and that #realid fiasco sure did raise some tensions between the different life-stories of the players) it’s been an eye-opening experience I’m eternally grateful for. While I knew a fellow guildee was a teacher in his real life, I’ve met probably half a dozen at least on twitter. While I have a few server friends that pvp a lot, I’ve actually been able to watch the discussion of pvp in a manner that made it… make sense to me. Thanks to twitter. And all this without FIRST identifying that player based on their play style. On twitter, all I care about is that they tweet generally interesting things and love the game to some degree. Really I’m not that picky. Look at my Warcraft list. It’s freaking huge.

I don’t think I have a point except to draw attention to this FABULOUS little review of what it means to play this game, which just highlights why I think these labels are pretty silly when used in arguments/debates/discussions of any kind, really. Although we may still have to work on our ability to talk nicely to each other, and not assume everyone sees the game from the same point of view. Let’s knock the labels down to mumbo jumbo first, then we can work on being nice, maybe?

Filed under: pride, rant, warcraft, wow, addons, casual, hardcore, labels, twitter, warcraft

A bit too much cheek. (via Pugnacious Priest’s Warcraft Blog)

Not sure how I missed this until now. But I think it’s something a lot of gamers, players of female toons, regardless of our out-of-game-sex/gender, face. How we respond probably has a lot to say about us. I’m not quite sure what, but I know it says something!

With rose-colored-glasses, I’d like to claim that our toons can appear this way because in game our “allies” are incapable of jumping on us because they don’t like, or perhaps like too much, the gear our toons are wearing and the skin we’re showing. We don’t have that same trust in real life. That “safety” isn’t there.

Things to ponder.

This  probably has to be the most cheek I’ve seen on any gear model.  They are Elemental Rockridge leggings from Mara She is not displaying her cloak now ( obviously) but that is an option.  I can choose to ‘hide’ her indecency untill I get different legs but I haven’t. I think she looks tarty ( a judgement)  - and I find that somewhat amusing.  It’s rather unfeministic  of me.  I know guys play female avatars so they have a “better ass” to look … Read More

via Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

Filed under: Blogroll, pretty, rant, roleplaying, screenshot, Uncategorized, characters, feminism, gear

Speak da’ Truth

*The title for this post was inspired by the troll-lovers in my RP horde guild. An entire afternoon spent reading troll-flavored common has rotted my brain.

**The renaming of this blog was approved by Bossy Pally herself.

***I think I’ve worked the kinks out of the feed above with loot/achievement junk. LOOK FACEROLLER YESSSSSSS (I will never have that on my druid it seems).

If I were to pick words out of the ether to describe myself, I often use words that communicate a flash point. I am like an unstable mixture waiting for one movement, one change in temperature, one change in light to burst into reaction. It’s very strange, really. Mostly I try to be a calm and rational being, and most people consider me to be dull and or boring in the real world. But oh do I react to things, even when I hide those reactions. (I feel sorry for my vent companions in heroics, especially lately. I’m a ranting monster about people pulling off my tanks, healers healing too early, etc.)

I agonized the first time I broke my long-term guild contract in warcraft. It’s where I learned what DPS was, and became aware of this wider facet of the game than the single player aspect. Sure I chatted and socialized, but some over-reaching goals became clearer to me. I developed a sense of community, and really grew attached to people in the game.

Eventually I landed into a more relaxed atmosphere with really great players on the same server and even though only one of my toons was there, I made sure they knew if they ever needed me or any of on my toons, if I could I would be there. It’s worked out well for me and for them I think. We killed Putricide finally. We can 2 heal the entire first wing of ICC10. We have a blast.

But recently as my old home really broke up some have found their way into this haven of mine. Sure I still have my alt-bank guild. Sure I still pug raids with my other 80s and each of them seems to be gaining a solid rep. But I had grown to like the atmosphere of my new home. (Bank guilds are a tad boring!). However, many of the people I really cherished as people, but hated to raid with, have found their way in. I’m glad they’re having fun, I’m glad the guild is growing, I’m glad the leaders have bigger goals in mind and are moving in the right direction for them. But…

The push for progression two weeks ago led to a mini-spaz session of mine. And I had to reclaim my inner-understanding that I am not tied to a raid for any reason. It’s fun, and I like the people, or it’s not (and in that case why am I there?). The RL pushed hard, really really hard, on a progression kill, to the point where people that at the start of the raid had been promised 6 emblems had only gotten 5, the free emblem was still available, but raiders had to start leaving. And the RL wanted to pug new fillers in, which unfortunately would only have resulted in locking them to an unproductive raid, and given them no loot, not even one emblem, to show for it.

I objected. Pretty loudly (using the above language too). And after the fifth wipe, and the third replacement when it became obvious more people had to leave, I finally left myself. I let the raid leader know I didn’t want to be part of a raid locking people to the ID that didn’t get jack done.

I got over it pretty quick, though I’m pretty sure the raid leader has me on his unhappy list. I do like everyone in the guild, and while I may object to some things, I like to think my solid support outweighs it all. But I’m getting the feeling that my quiet support is taken for granted or just plain unappreciated. And after ditching a guild VOA raid full of whiny bad attitudes trying to get gear for alts (and being pissed if any other guildy dared suggest bringing the same class alt as competition for gear), I got a stern talking to. It ended when I pointed out “look, I’m not being difficult. I’m not being demanding. This is just me. I’m vocal and when I don’t like something I say it. I am not trying to instigate drama.” and I couldn’t resist adding “ask the ex-guildies that just joined us” and before I could continue he said yeah he had been hearing about it.

So now I want to rant and cry like a spoiled child. I was here first and yet ex-now-new-guildies are talking bad about me and my “attitude”.

There’s this aura hanging over me, and it finally led to a required renaming of the blog. I was inspired by Bossy Pally herself. I also spent freaking 45min searching every blog post I had read in the past month about paladins to share a specific link with a friend. Determination and stubbornness, I sometimes have it.

Filed under: guild, rant