If Two's Company and Three's a Crowd...

You know how I'd mentioned a while back that I rarely see another Ret Pally in pugs when I'm queued with Quint?  Tomakan's Retardin failpug had been so long ago that I'd figured the WoW gods weren't planning on taking any sort of revenge for my post.

How wrong I was.

On last Tuesday after getting some lowbie WoW time in with Soul's wife, I pulled out Tomakan to run a pug or two.  I wasn't exactly surprised to see the Scarlet Monastery in the load window, and truth be told, I was looking forward to it after having been in the other lowbie instances for a while.  We zoned in, and I noticed that we had a Pally tank.

"Who's healer?"  One of the DPS asked.

"I am," I replied.

My response kind of got lost in the scrolling text as we had our hands full with the quick pulls in the torture area of The Graveyard.  Good thing the tank was a Pally, as he dropped a Lay on Hands on himself when he overpulled around the bend where I momentarily couldn't reach him.

Then I realized he hadn't used Lay on Hands.  A Shaman was healing too!

"LOL!" he said.  "I thought I was the healer!"

"Same here!" said another DPS, another Shaman.

"You mean we've got three healers here?" the tank asked.

"Yeah, Tom's healing!"

"Oh sweet, and two of us are Pallys too!  Let's pull the entire Graveyard!"

I did not think this a good idea.  At all.  But at least I knew how to run back in case of a wipe (don't ask), so I figured why not.

The tank began pulling.  And pulling.  I think that it took three waves of pulling to clear the entire open area in the Graveyard, but I was able to keep the tank upright.  Mana was good, and with two other healers around throwing down totems, we didn't lose anybody.  There was a brief moment of concern around the bends getting to the bottom of the sepulcher where the final boss was, but once I got within LOS I was able to keep the tank upright.

"Oh, that was great!" one of the Shamans said as we finished.  "We have to requeue again just so we can do that!"

So we did, and gave the undead in The Graveyard an encore performance.  Two Paladins and three healers can fuel some insane ideas, I suppose, and if there was an undead heavy instance somewhere between Graveyard and, say, Strat or Scholo, I'm sure these puggers would have been game to try it.  Thankfully, for my sanity's sake, there wasn't.

Two mornings later, I figured that instead of doing my dailies under Quint I'd run Tomakan through an instance or two.  Lo and behold, I get The Graveyard again.  Pally tank, but sadly no other healers.  With everyone in the low 30's, the Graveyard is quick enough of an instance, kind of the A-N for lowbies.

We finished the instance, and three of us --the Pally tank, a hunter, and I-- queued up for another run.

And we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

"WTH?" the tank asked.  "It's never been this long before."

"Must be the 5 AM crowd," I said.  "I just hope we don't end up with Gnomer again."

"Me either."

What pops up after a 20 minute wait?  Gnomer.

I start distributing blessings, and I noticed something strange in Pally Power.  Where are all the...

"Hey!" the tank shouted.  "Four pallys!"

Yes.  Not two, not three, but four of us.  I'm pretty sure this is quite a few WoW players' nightmare, but it gave me the chance to see how this was going to work out.

Ironically enough, it wasn't so bad.  Okay, I'll admit that seeing Judgements flying around like they were pigeons in a park was very strange, but it wasn't the aggro hell that it could have been.  We didn't have Retardins in the group, and conversation was more along the lines of when to jump to the lower level.  I kept thinking why I couldn't have had one of these other three in the Razorfen Kraul run rather than the Retardin I did get.

But yes, this sort of grouping can happen, and people can survive this without wanting to claw each others eyes out.  If it can happen with Pallys, I wonder what it would be like with Death Knights....

Hai! I can haz tankz?

So... I got woken up this morning by my boyfriend's 22 month old daughter. I'm sicker than hell and she has been sick, but my boyfriend has been up and down all night tending to her, so I got up to let him sleep...

I have her in my lap as I queue up for a random dungeon. Surprisingly, I get an instant queue pop - usually for a healer, its about a 2 or 3 minute wait. I see that I got ToC. "Cool... I haven't done this one in a while..." I thought to myself.

We start the jousting event and everything seems to be going ok... After the jousting BS, we stand there buffing and we notice that the guy who queued as tank is still in his fury gear and fury spec. We ask him, "hey, you know you're tanking, right?" He said, "yeah I know". He charges in (still in fury everything) and I can't keep him alive... Of course, we all die... as we're running back, he swears he has tanked as fury before. We were all like "sure you have..." The pally in the group leaves and we requeue... what does the warrior do? Queues as tank again. WTF. I just stated "Thanks for the facepalm moment... I don't have time to debate whether or not you can tank this as fury because you already failed once. Adios"

Really? C'mon... I know there are some stupid people out there... but seriously... And people are wondering why I may take a WoW break... /facepalm.

Predicting Cataclysm's Release Date

Ok, so I took a few minutes to gather some rough data about how long the previous expansions were in the different stages of release, and I think it's interesting to look at. 

So lets take a look and see if we can't draw some parallels from the context of these charts.  See what I did there?  Oh man I love cheezy jokes.

First up is the Burning Crusade.

From this we can tell the release took about five months of additional development from the release of the Friends and Family closed Alpha build.

Next up is Wrath of the Lich King.

Here again we see the additional development time was roughly 5 months after the closed Alpha began.  This and the Burning Crusade graphs look pretty similar.

And here we are with Cataclysm.  I'm taking a rough guess as to the release time here, seeing as the two previous expansion packs required 5 months of development after the Alpha.

Now, assuming the time until release is correct we notice a sharp incline in that slope.  This could mean a few things...  Blizz is actually getting the Beta tester into content much faster (one month as opposed to the previous where Burning took 3 months, and Wrath took two months), and as a result has a lot of the development done by the time Beta testers are in game.  Which would lead to more of the "oooh, lookie that - Aaaaah lookie that" sorta posts by the blogging community that is in Beta, and thusly generate more discussion / publicity / positive feedback / hype for the upcoming release.

Or, this could mean that Blizz is actually getting the Beta testers in there so they can actually get feedback on things sooner (something tells me this is probably not the case).

The data seems to boil down to this: Cataclysm will more than likely be released after the 5 months of additional development, which happens to coincide with Blizzcon (Surprise!).  They'll use Blizzcon to hype the crap out of the game and release it right afterwards and sales will skyrocket (as usual with Blizzard products).

So here's my prediction: Cataclysm will be released on October 26th.

I'm Working on my Backhand

Puggers will sometimes make a comment that throws you for a loop.

This morning, I was fishing in the Dalaran Pool, having a beer with Marcia Chase, waiting for the LFD tool to do its work.  Dal was about as peaceful as it was going to get, given that it was 5 in the morning; there were only a few shouts here and there from people asking for alchemy work, and I'd turned off Trade Chat a long time ago.  (Yes, Cassandri, I know I'm a bad man for doing that.)

Suddenly the LFD screen spat out that it was ready, about 5 minutes early.  I quickly vendored the flotsam I'd accumulated, reset my Seal of Command and Blessing of Might, cleared my screen of junk, made sure I was out of Crusader Aura, and ported in.

Utgarde Pinnacle was the destination.  I surveyed my puggees, and discovered that three of them were from the same guild from another server.  Sometimes that's good, sometimes not, but I shrugged, dispensed Blessings, and got ready for the fight.  The tank asked if anyone needed any achievements, which I thought was a nice touch.  He still intended to engage all the bosses --he needed Emblems-- but he said that this will be a quick run without any achievements required.

We started down that initial hallway and made it to the outer passage before I realized something was wrong.  The Judgements were simply not showing up.  I grumbled, thinking that I'd missed the Seal of Command, but sure enough it was there.  Then what...

Oh crap.  I was still equipped with a fishing rod.

I corrected that in mid-pull, and apologized to the group.  "That's good to know," the tank replied, "as I was doing more DPS than you.  For a minute there I was thinking we'd picked up a fail DPS."

If a toon could flush, Quint would have done it, but I kept my mouth shut.  It was my mistake, so I deserved the ribbing I got.

The rest of the pug went well enough, and I got my DPS into it's usual mid-3000 range for UP.  The guildies in the group kidded back and forth with each other, so this felt like a comfortable enough run.  Ymrion was dispatched, and the guildies asked if I was interested in a Pit of Saron run.

"Hey, any chance to see if that hilt will drop is fine with me."

"I'm convinced it's a myth," the tank said.

We ported in to PoS, and the run went fairly well --except for the unhappy convergence of two drakes and another group of trash at the same time, that is.  Sometime right before Ick and Crick, the tank said, "You know, Q, you're a pretty decent guy given the server you're from."

I knew our Trade Chat was bad, but I was surprised.  "A-52's supposed rep again?" I asked.

"Oh, it's not supposed.  Just about every pugger from that server has been a dick."  He then described in detail several escapades where A-52 people behaved like complete jerks in pugs.

I realize he meant it as a compliment, especially when after we finished PoS and I had to leave, he had some genuinely nice parting words.  However, the implied sound of "well, at least you're not a dick" bothered me.  Talk about your backhanded compliments.

For all of those people who say "it doesn't matter, you'll never see this person again," as an excuse when you behave badly in a pug, well here's a newsflash:  people remember you.  People remember the server you're from, or the guild you're part of, and they'll associate that bad behavior with everyone else from that server/guild.  Given the number of bad experiences that the tank and his guildmates had with A-52 puggers, it's a miracle I wasn't booted at earliest opportunity.  Why waste time when most of the people you run into from A-52 are jerks?

Now, that said, have you gotten any backhanded compliments in the game?  Been stereotyped in one way or another?  How did you break the mold?  Maybe the question should be 'Did you break the mold?'  Did you do something unexpected?

=o Its been awhile.

Its been awhile since I last updated. I made my move to Arizona and transferred my priest to Tichondrius.

I haven't done much as far as WoW is concerned and I don't think I'll be doing much - at least for now. I honestly think my WoW days are coming to a close. This isn't for sure... I just feel the game has lost its luster and I'm quite bored with it.

I'll probably eat these words and start really playing again in the near future (aside from the random dungeons/battlegrounds/alts). After all the crap I went through within this game, it might be time to take a bit of a hiatus.

I'm really hoping Cataclysm will be better than WotLK - looking through the Blue Posts/Talent Tree updates, etc some things seem pretty cool... others... well.. not so much. I guess I'll just have to see.

Anyway... I'll try to keep my chin up and hop on WoW and maybe get some raiding in again...

To boldly go... Oh, who am I kidding?

This morning, I managed something I've never done before, and not in a good way.

I queued up for my morning run, and I got the Old Kingdom as my destination.  I was surprised --and pleased-- to find nobody immediately dropped group when we finished porting in.  Surely this was a good omen.

The tank even put up raid markers on who he wanted us to kill first in those Ahn'akar pulls before Nadox.  He took his time, and we didn't wipe on that trash.  As one of my guildies likes to put it, there's something wrong about an instance where the trash hits harder than some ICC bosses do.

As runs go, it was pretty average.  Two of us wiped on aggroed Twilight trash (courtesy of the Warlock), but otherwise nothing special.

Until we got to the Herald.

We settle in, the Warrior tank runs up and starts the fight, and I pop Avenging Wrath and close.  One swing and...

I pulled aggro.

With one swing.

On a boss that a tank had a good four or five seconds to get a lock on aggro.

If it wasn't for the fact that everybody else in the house was sleeping, I would have been shouting at the top of my lungs.  As it was, I kept a good stream of invective going.  "WTF is that?  How the hell did that happen?  It was just a Judgment!  I was behind him, dammit!  I wasn't even the first DPS to close!  I didn't even do anything like Divine Storm or Consecration!"  And then... "Oh crap, HoS is still on CD!"

I stopped hitting and bubbled, allowing the tank to draw aggro back, but I've never had that happen before in a boss fight.  Even with tanks geared as new 80s.  After that, I had to essentially reduce myself down to auto attack to keep from pulling aggro the rest of the fight.

Talk about embarrassing.

Anyway, last night I got Tomakan out of the garage to run him through the LFD tool.  He's about at that stage where most of the LFD instances are ones where I've been in several times, with one lone exception.

And naturally, what pops up into view?

Gnomeregan.

If you check Quint's list of achievements, you'll find Gnomer in there.  However, that comes with two caveats:  I was L80 at the time, and I cheated and bubble/dropped down to the bottom level.  Therefore, I had almost no clue about how Gnomer was for a properly leveled toon.

We ported in, and immediately the tank says "I don't know anything about this place."

"Me either," said the Warlock.

"Don't look at me," I said.

The tank wasn't thrilled.  "Does anybody know their way around here?"

"I do," the DPS warrior said.  "It's been a couple of years, but I've been in here before."

Well, something was better than nothing, so off we went.

Gnomer would make MacGyver think he'd died and gone to heaven.  Bots, wires, gizmos, airplanes, and all sorts of stuff littered the place.  Infected and/or irradiated Gnomes everywhere, with Dark Iron Dwarves at the bottom of the city --with land mines!-- ready to help out ol' Thermaplugg.

Given that we didn't really know where we were going for almost all of the run, I got plenty of chances to drink while the guide poked around in different directions.  Still, I was eternally grateful that the Lock didn't rely upon Spirit Tap to replenish his mana.  I even whispered him my thanks, to which I got a "lol np" in return.  Dude, you have no idea how nice it is that I can concentrate on the tank and not worry about getting my mana depleted after every trash pull.

There was only one brief moment of uncertainty when a wandering group of trash aggroed on us while we had our hands full with another bunch, but in general the run was pretty smooth from a fighting standpoint.  After Tomakan's last fail pug, having one go smoothly was a pleasant surprise.  Hey, and I even got a few items I could use (as in, I remembered to Need the items I wanted).

In a bizarre way, I'm looking forward to the Scarlet Monastery.  I know those instances, and every time I think I'm done with that place some random quest sends me back there for another item.

So you're minding your own...

...and you suddenly get smacked in the face. 

Do you:

A) Dust yourself off, apologize for being hit, and ask for another

B) Act like nothing happened, as this occurs a lot

C) Try to maintain some civility while letting the person know their behavior is not acceptable

Well this happened to me more or less. But before I get too deeply into the post, I want to explain a few things. 

First off, I have three level 80 tanks, and have experienced current (at the time- my pally only did Nax and EOE) "end game" content with each one.  I have a fairly damn good idea of how to tank.  Secondly, I hate hate hate hate the Halls of Reflection.  Some sort of swear word literally escapes my lips IRL when that dungeon pops.  Most of the time I will leave group immediately instead of waiting around to see if it's a fail (as you will see why in this post) and it's not becuase I doubt my ability to actually tank it. I don't care to rack up a repair bill for a dungeon where the only thing I need is two frost badges and my level of faith in the average LFD random guy is not that great. 

Also, I use tidy plates addon with the threat plates theme.  This turns name plates into a threat meter, and I can see if I have aggro on a target (name plate is small and green) or if I need to get a taunt in on something (large red name plate).  This gives me a very very good idea of what's going on and if I need to get some hits in on something at range.  And lastly, there's a guild member who just joined recently and could really use some loot out of there in the group with me.

So here we are... in the LFD que quickly followed up by the HOR loading screen.  #($*&#)(@#.
Group makeup: Warrior tank (me), Warlock (guild mate), Hunter, DK, Druid healer.

The events start and the group immediately heads for the corner.  I tell them I'm not going to be doing the corner, and to come back to the door.

Everything is going OK on the first few waves of trash.  I had to blow shield wall and last stand at one point because I was getting no heals.  On the first boss, everybody dies, but the boss manages to drop as well.  So the group runs back in, gets loot nobody needs and starts up for round two.  Two waves towards the second boss I just drop from lack of heals.

Chat legend:
Green = guild member
Black = Me
Grey = Pug
Demonikal = Fuckin retard DK
Silfactor = mouthy druid
(I'm not going to black their names out, because if they want to be internet tough guys they can deal with having their names posted)

So everybody runs back in and the group chat looks like this:

It's a fact.  I can't tank when I'm dead.  Yep.  So the group continues past the second boss.  I try to pull the giant out of the hallway to avoid getting the extra adds, not that they're a big deal, it just takes longer.  Halfway down the hall the DK charges in and pulls aggro.  /shrug  Ok... whatever.  The DK then says "lol fail tank" 

And at that point I had had enough - it was a combination of a bad day at work, not wanting to even be in HOR, and retarded dps that can't even assist a tank.

So I'm tired of the whole childish "lol fail tank" crap when t he healer is the one having troubles and I get called names?  I'm so glad I'm stuck in the dungeon with you guys.  (Also I find it very funny the guy was playing a female character in a fantasy game and was so quick to toss out that derogatory comment.)

Five minutes later:

Haha!  Asshat DK got kicked.  Feeling a tad guilty for making the rest of the group I said I was sorry, and immediately regretted it.  In fact, I wasn't sorry.  I wasted 5 minutes of your time.  Deal with it.  So I get called an "inconsiderate fuck" for actually choosing option C above.  What the hell?  What does it matter?  It matters because I don't have to put up with bullshit, and I chose to take a stand.  Grow a pair and stick up for yourself, man!

I'd rather have time to charge mobs and have a lot of space to work with as opposed to having mobs come around the corner when my thunderclap and shockwave are on cooldown and instagibbing a party member.  And most importantly, I'm the tank.  You follow me.  That's just how it works.

So we're on the last icewall before the dungeon is over, and the red pug actually says something intelligent!  The funnies thing, however, is the DK who was kicked from the group was bothered enough by the kick that he actually made a character on my server just to talk some more smack.  And he had the cleverness to name it (MyCharacterName)isgay. 

Rest assured, Demonikal, I never doubted your ability to display what a gem of a person you truly are!  Just slap a sticker on your helmet that proudly proclaims how special you are, and keep jumping in the LFD.  I'm sure you'll find more people willing to tolerate your bullshit.

And I'm still boggled by Silfactor's attitude.  Just because it's a random person you probably won't spend time with ever again does not mean you have to tolerate behavior like that.  I can't believe you're willing to just more or less whore yourself out to the LFD.  It doesn't matter how it treats you, it will be over soon and then you can go about your business, right?

After that dungeon run, I was in a rather foul mood.  It's a good thing my arena teammate was on and looking to do some matches.  It was a nice stress relief.  Who knew arenas could be less stressful than dungeons? lol.

Between matches, I received a whisper that made my night though.  I guess we stomped his team at some point.

So you want to know why tanks freak out now and again?  Here's your answer: retarded DKs and mouthy druids.