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

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

And Odd World

So, I live on a RP server.  I like it.  I like the people and the attitude of 99% of the players.  Maybe I should consider writing out some background/frame of reference for my toons and possibly roleplay a bit more.  I like to raid, but my temper is such that 3 nights a week makes me happy.  More than that and I get annoying to be around.

Yesterday, in seeking the Scholo elder, I had to ask guildies for how to get on the roof.  Don’t say a word, I’m happy to be a TBCwowkid, thank you very much!  So I was helpful as I usually am and helped one belf spriest and attempted to help a belf pally.

Bad mistake.  The dude logs onto his 70 ally and is all into heavy flirting and getting me distracted from my elders quests.  

….

I must be too old for this game.

Yay I got the explorer tabard, which is silly since all I completed was Northrend.  Now to get the title Elder on the Druid!

Filed under: druid, rp, wow

Dead time

Yikes, between work and WoW and family crisiis from this economy I’ve had no brain to compose suitable postings.

My guild cleared 10man Naxx for the first time last week, and I was there as enhance since it was a weekend when both awesome trees and the uber priest were online and ready to go.  We also downed Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad on night two.  Let’s just say we were on a roll.

Sunday we attempted Malygos and got him to 15% on our 4th?..maybe our fifth try.  It took us three nights to clear Naxx so now I’m pushing for us to continue gearing up and accomplish it in two nights, or with only two healers.  When I’m there as resto the tree and the priest are just too damn fast most of the time.  You don’t wanna see my overheal numbers.

We spent our first night of raids this week 25manning Naxx, and I think most of us felt it was…. not as comfortable.  But that led to a ton of drama over our raid scheduling for some people, whether we want hard and fast teams (two of them) set up, or how we can manage to build flexible and balanced teams that aren’t so much based around cliques.  Loot systems came up.  It was just nasty.  Mainly because I spent my time “we founded this guild…” on repeat.  

Apparantly I’m the “naysayer” in the guild.  Because I don’t like to wipe more than five times on the same boss, after every wipe I focus on what we did wrong and clarify on vent what we will do differently the next attempt, and don’t like to tolerate loot QQ and bitching and moaning from those that barely log on enough to gear up in 80 and heroic instances, let alone come to our raids.  How the hell did I find myself in position as enforcer, again?  I guess it never left me, even when I gquit from my previous guild and most of these guys followed me not long after.

So, a lot of minor unpleasantness.  Joy.  I did manage to score some awesome loot and maybe if I can figure out how to java-link the wowhead stuff, I’ll do it!  Being the only shammy in the raid and often resto, makes me a happy shammy!

Filed under: drama, guild, loot, Naxx, wow

Dead time

Yikes, between work and WoW and family crisiis from this economy I’ve had no brain to compose suitable postings.

My guild cleared 10man Naxx for the first time last week, and I was there as enhance since it was a weekend when both awesome trees and the uber priest were online and ready to go.  We also downed Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad on night two.  Let’s just say we were on a roll.

Sunday we attempted Malygos and got him to 15% on our 4th?..maybe our fifth try.  It took us three nights to clear Naxx so now I’m pushing for us to continue gearing up and accomplish it in two nights, or with only two healers.  When I’m there as resto the tree and the priest are just too damn fast most of the time.  You don’t wanna see my overheal numbers.

We spent our first night of raids this week 25manning Naxx, and I think most of us felt it was…. not as comfortable.  But that led to a ton of drama over our raid scheduling for some people, whether we want hard and fast teams (two of them) set up, or how we can manage to build flexible and balanced teams that aren’t so much based around cliques.  Loot systems came up.  It was just nasty.  Mainly because I spent my time “we founded this guild…” on repeat.  

Apparantly I’m the “naysayer” in the guild.  Because I don’t like to wipe more than five times on the same boss, after every wipe I focus on what we did wrong and clarify on vent what we will do differently the next attempt, and don’t like to tolerate loot QQ and bitching and moaning from those that barely log on enough to gear up in 80 and heroic instances, let alone come to our raids.  How the hell did I find myself in position as enforcer, again?  I guess it never left me, even when I gquit from my previous guild and most of these guys followed me not long after.

So, a lot of minor unpleasantness.  Joy.  I did manage to score some awesome loot and maybe if I can figure out how to java-link the wowhead stuff, I’ll do it!  Being the only shammy in the raid and often resto, makes me a happy shammy!

Filed under: drama, guild, loot, Naxx, wow