Miscellaneous Musings on a Quiet, Sunny Sunday Morning

I knew this day would come.

Last night I received my usual invite to Blackwing Lair, helped summon people by being a clicker, made and distributed food and water, and organized the Mage Int buffs.*

Then I turned my attention to the reserve listing, and discovered there was nothing Cardwyn needed. Sure, there were a couple of T2 pieces I'd like to get to finish out the set, but as far as gear I could use right now? Not a thing.

One of the pug Mages last night even whispered me, asking what I'd reserved, and I told him that I was good. "I got the Claw last week, and that was the last piece I needed," I replied.

"Oh cool, congrats."

"Thanks. But yeah, I'm just here to help out."

I still could use enchanting recipes out of Molten Core and AQ20, and there's always the need for idols in Zul'Gurub, but Blackwing Lair is the first raid that Card has semi-officially "outgrown". And when I started progression raiding and my gear needs were so great, this moment seemed so far off that I felt Card was never going to get enough DKP to finally finish the task. But in a weird quirk, the opening of Naxxramas helped me out because the official Friday night BWL raid shut down in favor of an extra day of Naxx raiding. Its replacement, the Saturday night BWL run, used a soft reserve system, which meant I could pick and choose the specific pieces of gear to roll on based on who wanted what. And after the people ahead of me in the progression raid finally got the Tear of Neltharion they'd been waiting over half a year for, my turn came with nobody else to roll against. By then, I'd accumulated the other popular BWL Mage pieces, so all I had left were the Tear and the Claw of Chromaggus. And, in two successive weeks, I got both pieces without any other competition in the reserves.**

So here I was, after six months of running BWL, and I finally "finished" it on Card.

It felt... weird, but also freeing. I grew to enjoy running BWL, the goblin packs notwithstanding. There's an ebb and flow to the raid that is comforting in the same way that a well geared MC run simply works. You can make small talk, laugh, joke, make quips about the various methods of dying to goblin packs (my favorite: blinking away from one bomb right into another), and in general just relax. When you have as many regulars as we have, you know the raid is going to be okay. It's only in the details where we have a few anxious moments, like getting a bear tank for said goblin packs, but we somehow manage to work things out.***

And I'm not planning on giving up my spot in BWL for quite a while. I love it too much.

***

In case you haven't noticed, the MMO blogosphere has simply exploded with talk about Valheim, the latest hotness game. Which, I might add, is still in Early Access on Steam.

Yes, a game from a small publisher --that isn't finished-- is getting a ton of exposure in a way that I haven't seen since, oh, No Man's Sky.

The major difference between Valheim and No Man's Sky is that Valheim is complete enough for people to play via Early Access, so you'll know pretty quickly if it's a dud or not.

And by all accounts, Valheim is good enough, and far enough in development, that there's plenty of blog posts discussing it in such a way that the major AAA publishers wished people would talk about their upcoming releases.

That's nice and all, but PC is one place you're not going to see any Valheim posts for quite a while.

The reason? It's in Early Access.

I haven't bought a game in Early Access, and I'm not planning on starting now. I waited until My Time at Portia was officially released before purchasing it. Same with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and in that case I waited until the final release was on stable ground before purchasing the game. Since that's my policy, I'm going to do the same with Valheim. That's for one really really good reason: I've got a ton of games already purchased that I can play without needing one that isn't finished. And really, I think it more likely that I'll get a PC of my own before I get a chance to play Valheim.

So I salute all of those who took the plunge and are enjoying the game, but I've been George R.R. Martin-ed enough times for me to not jump in.****

***

As long as I live, I will never understand how multiple meters can come up with such disparate results. 

I'm not often one to toot my own horn, but on last Friday's Naxx run I got top DPS. 

Now, to be fair, the top Mage on the raid team lost her buffs on the first pull when an abomination got loose and wandered into the main raid, killing about 8 of the ranged DPS. And if you've ever played a Fire Mage, just whose name ends up on an ignite is a pretty random thing, so the fact that Card showed up there was just luck.

But hey, I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when I had TinyThreat on the threat meters and wasn't paying attention to the DPS meters until I started getting congrats from the other Mages. When I saw the results, however, I felt that I'd finally gotten something right in the Naxx raid. Until I looked at the Warcraft logs.

When I pulled them up, it claimed that while I was the top Mage, I was more back into the middle of the pack. 

Which got me to thinking just how is it possible for the two to be so far off.

The only thing I could figure is that I was out of range for some of the DPS, but that didn't make sense since I didn't really have to move to get into position to cast (Patch came to us instead of the other way around). Now it is possible that the melee DPS started earlier than the ranged, but not that much earlier to make that much of a difference in the TinyThreat DPS meters. For a fight as long as Patchwerk's is, we'd have had to have held off for 20 seconds or more to make that much of an impact. 

So all I can do is shake my head, shrug, and do my best.

***

With all the talk about BC, I thought about revisiting my past and reviving a toon long since retired:

Time to pay the bar tab and get moving.

Yes, Neve will ride again in BC Classic!

*I'm the only Mage designated "Raid Regular" who attends all of the pug raids put on by Valhalla, so I've simply absorbed the job of organizing which Mage buffs which group. (If a guild member attends, I defer to them, but most of the time they're simply happy to let someone else handle this gig.) Once in a while I'm the sole Mage in a raid, such as Zul'Gurub, and when that happens I like to have fun with my posts in raid chat. Such as the time I posted "Mage Int buffs: Cardwyn Group 1, Jaina Group 2, Khadgar Group 3, Rhonin Group 4."

**A soft reserve system means that you can reserve an item (or two, depending on implementation), but other people can reserve that item too. So, if that item drops, the only people who can roll for that item are those who reserved it. Instead of 20+ people rolling, there are far fewer people to roll against, increasing your odds of winning. But for a new L60, a soft reserve system is a godsend: if you DON'T reserve anything, all the gear that drops that doesn't have a reserve on it means that you have first dibs on that gear. There's also no limit on the number of non-reserved items you can win. We've seen in ZG and BWL runs people who are fresh L60s make out like a bandit and take home 6-7 pieces of gear in one setting. And one more thing of beauty about the system is that even reserved people do have a shot at non-reserved gear: all it takes is the non-reserved people to not roll on that first, non-reserved roll, and then a second open roll takes place where anybody who could use the item is invited to roll. It may sound complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it the soft reserve system is fantastic for people needing to gear up. We've accumulated a LOT of regulars to our soft reserve raids because they work so well, even among the most highly rated guilds on the server. I'm also pretty sure that the progression raid as well as Valhalla as a guild has gained people due to Jes' handling of the soft reserve raids. 

***Or rather Jes does. She's a natural leader, and yet she works hard to pull off a smooth raid. She's also pretty well known around the server as one of the go-to people for enchants, so that helps with name recognition, even when she's on one of her alts.

****Can you believe that Patrick Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear was published 10 years ago? I didn't even realize that until a month ago.

Well, This Is Different

The last seven days were pretty eventful, game-wise.

Not for any earth shattering content update, or even for some in-guild or on server drama*, but for personal reasons.

A week ago, I began laying the groundwork to have Card begin showing up at the Tuesday Molten Core raid that Az currently attends. I figured I could switch off between the two for a while until I could determine a better long term plan. I knew where I needed to go --finish as much T1 as I could and obtain Zul'Gurub level gear with hit bonuses necessary to hit BWL (and higher) bosses-- but getting from Point A to Point B was the question.

My problem has always been that Rogues are far more in demand than Mages in Z'G for their ability to interrupt some of the bosses, so that even on those pugs when I do bring Card, the raid leader is frequently left trying to find a Rogue.** And so I volunteer to switch to help out.

Nevertheless, it looked like I could get Card moving in the right direction again, so it gave me the chance to relax a bit. I could go incognito, play around with an alt or two, and just keep an eye open for an instance that interested me and I could hop on Az or Card to see about getting in.

But some of my WoW friends had other plans.

***

By midweek, I began getting whispers from several of them, asking me to come along on Friday night. They were running MC after all, they said, so I had no excuse. Then on Thursday, I was tag teamed and leaned on until I cried "Uncle" and signed up.***

"I feel like I've been the subject of an intervention," I muttered as I clicked the sign up page.

The Friday Molten Core run went well --I don't think I've ever been in an MC run that was terrible, whether or not we actually kill Raggy-- and so I succumbed and said "okay" to signing up for Blackwing Lair on this coming Friday. What actually sealed the deal was that the guild sponsoring the BWL run decided to keep the MC run after all, but move it to Thursday.**** I still felt undergeared for BWL, but after last week I figured they were gonna pester me until I signed up anyway, so I decided to save them the effort.

We're here to kill you and all you can
do is whine about your beauty sleep?

Card found a new (old) home for Molten Core, and my friends successfully pulled me into Blackwing Lair. And that was that.

Or so I thought.

***

Monday was a holiday here in the US, and I had an eye to work on some projects around the house and begin work on a set of speakers for my wife's old mid-1980's all-in-one stereo.***** I got up early, and after I helped my wife get ready and out the door for work I pulled together a list, visited the hardware store, and began work on replacing a few rotted boards on the gate for our fence. I managed to free the boards but the bolts were stuck, so I hammered at them to free them up. Almost instantly ants boiled out of the so-called "good" wooden beams, and I realized that the entire gate would have to be junked.

Frustrated with that turn of events, I went back inside to cool off a bit and took my annoyance out on a metric ton of unsuspecting demons in Azshara.

While I was singlehandedly depopulating Azeroth of demons, I received a ping from one of my WoW friends.

"Hey, the guild is looking for a Fire Mage for their AQ40 raid team."

Then a separate ping from another friend announcing the same thing.

I sighed.

"I haven't even been in BWL yet and you want me to jump to AQ40? At least give me a chance to see how I handle BWL first."

Unlike Blackwing Lair, I did have at least some experience with AQ40. Back in 2010, my (now disintegrated) Horde guild decided that it would be fun to enter into AQ40 just to check the place out. We tried 5-manning it, and since we couldn't even get past the Prophet Skeram we returned a few days later with a full 10 man raid# and eventually made it through and downed C'Thun. I remembered Skeram for obvious reasons, but I also remembered the Twin Emperors because we a) didn't have a warlock along to tank the arcane Emperor, and b) because a Pally had magic damage, guess who got the job of trying (and largely failing) to tank that emperor. I also remembered C'Thun, because once you think it's dead, oh no.... You get C'Thun Part 2.

But I was told that I'd be fine, and respeccing as a Fire Mage was easy. I had my doubts, as I originally started Neve (remember her?) way back in pre-history as a Fire Mage and I knew the limitations of the spec, especially when not in a raid environment. After all, there was a reason why I spent a lot of years in WoW playing a Frost Mage. While I'd miss Frost, I could respec as necessary due to the synergy Fire Mages get when working together. (Greater synergy than Frost, to be fair.) 

But still, with very little T2 and almost no Z'G gear (like the Bloodvine set), Card was going to stink on the DPS meters. The guild's own documentation had a set DPS number goal for certain bosses --the ones you can just go balls to the wall and blast away-- and I knew I was likely not going to make that minimum number. So I told my friends that there was really no way around the fact that I needed to get my gear up in order to effectively raid with a main raid group. "I don't want to hold the raid back," I replied more than once.

"Go ahead and talk to the raid leader about it," I was told. 

"I did, a month ago, and I know where I need to go to get where I want to be."

And that, I thought, was that. 

Some hours later, I'd recovered from my disappointment at fixing the gate and was busy cutting wood for the speakers when my wife got off of work and came home.## After shaking off the dust, I followed her inside and we talked about her day while I grabbed a drink. I happened to walk by my work area and I saw Discord flashing, which I wasn't expecting.

It was the raid leader/co-GM.

"Somebody blabbed," I muttered, and I clicked to see what he had to say.

Sure enough, he'd heard that I was interested in the Fire Mage position and wanted to chat. 

"Well, here we go," I said, replying to his direct message.

I'm not going to discuss all that was said, but from his perspective the biggest barrier was whether I could raid late on Monday nights EDT. I paused a second, because I never even considered that part. Friday nights, and even Thursday nights are one thing, but Monday? But you know what, I'm up late enough that for me it isn't an issue, so I replied that yeah, I can raid on Monday nights.

But for every concern I had he had an answer, and he assured me that they'll work with me to get my gear to where it needs to be.

The next thing I knew, I agreed to go to AQ40 that night.

 

I almost went in the wrong instance.
For the record, this is AQ20's entrance.
The least the Qiraji could do is put a nice sign out front.

I'm actually surprised I didn't slice off a finger while I finished up my cutting, because I certainly wasn't that attentive at that point. I was thinking that "I've got to respec, then practice the respec, then figure out what pots to take to the run, etc. etc."

Then I got pinged in Discord by the Mage lead for the raid, and he dumped a metric ton of info on me about 2-3 hours before the raid invites were to start. There was a spec to mimic, Weak Auras settings to be installed/used/understood###, a basic rotation to work on, some pots to get, and some YouTube videos to watch to understand the mathematical and in-game underpinnings of how Fire Mages tick. (I still haven't gotten to that video yet. Sorry, Haldol.) Somewhere in there reading up on the strategies for AQ40 got lost, but oh well. I was going to do what I was told to do in raid, so I wasn't planning on worrying about that. Not with all this other stuff to absorb.

So here I was, at 9:30 PM EDT, drinking from a firehose and using the Scourge in Eastern Plaguelands as unsuspecting guinea pigs. 12 hours ago I was thinking about project lists, with saying hello to my old buddy C'Thun not exactly high on my priorities for the day.

***

And so that was how I went from looking for a new MC home to raiding AQ40 in one week.

What, you want to know how it went?

Oh.

It went well enough, I suppose. I made a decision to not look at the meters, because I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I only died six times on 4-5 total raid wipes. So not bad. The AQ40 mounts were dropping like flies, but since I was a guest I waited until everybody else from the guild got one first. That kind of got some of my friends upset, because they felt I should have been more assertive about that, but I wasn't about to barge in and do that sort of thing. That's not me, and I'm not going to change.

But what actually did keep me going throughout the raid were the whispers I got from my friends, who were really happy to see me up with them on the raid. And from the chat that the guild's Mages invited me into. Of course, knowing a couple of them already --Mages tend to stick together-- helped, but the espirit de corps of the group was infectious. 

The Prophet Skeram and the Twin Emperors were as I remembered them, so my memory isn't too far gone, but the "trash" in AQ40 definitely hit a LOT harder at level. So that wasn't entirely unexpected, but it meant that it took us a lot longer to get to the end than what I remembered.

Oh, we didn't down C'Thun, but I wasn't expecting us to beat that thing either. Burning down C'Thun at L80 is an entirely different experience at L60 in Classic, and things that don't hurt at L80 certainly do at L60. But I felt that the strategy that they were working out was fairly sound, it was just a matter of execution.

So that's it. I think it likely I'll be on the bench for next Monday's raid, because more than 40 signed up and I'm the new guy, but I'm fine with that. 

I presume the awkwardness will fade with time, and I've got a long ways to go before I feel like I'm actually contributing to the raid.

But yeah, this was a very different week than I expected.

Thanks gang. (And yes, I know that at least two people involved do read the blog. Commenting is always another matter, but I've been there, so I get that.)

*The guild I'm in has --on average-- about 3-4 active members as people have faded from playing or moved on to other guilds. It's purely social, as only two of us raid, and when I joined I didn't even raid at the time. It is one of numerous small guilds on the server that are frequently overshadowed by the medium and larger sized guilds on Myzrael.

**Yes, really. I'm not sure if it's just my luck or what, but in the Z'G pugs I've been in we always seem to be running short on rogues. At the time Az was still pretty much my main, so it wasn't a big deal.

***There were some issues getting the loot system for BWL properly configured so they ran MC once more. I was completely unaware of the switch until that moment, as I try not to poke around other guilds' Discord servers.

****I signed up for MC before BWL. Shh; don't tell anyone.

*****I've mentioned her stereo here before. I've gotten the turntable and radio working, but the cassette player will be a tough nut to crack as the rubber belt has disintegrated. The worst part of the stereo, however, are the speakers. They're crap, just a speaker in a box without any sort of engineering behind it.

#Until my first Zul'Gurub run earlier this year, that was my sole foray into raiding.

##Apparently I look hilarious wearing an N95 mask, but when you're cutting medium density fiberboard (MDF) you NEED one of those masks to keep the crap out of your nasal cavity. Saves you surgery and medical issues in the long run.

###I just want to know who came up with all of those settings/configurations. The amount of work it would have taken to initially come up with all of that would have been considerable, and that's not even counting the Weak Auras application/add-on itself. 

EtA: I have now gotten to watch that video, and after a week's worth of playing around with the Fire Spec, I understand what the video was talking about. I certainly wouldn't have understood it on Monday night, because after more than half a decade of being a Frost Mage, Fire was essentially a foreign language.