For Great Justice

The WoW gods have a sense of humor.

If there was any doubt, this morning's LFD run with Tomakan dispelled it.  I was sitting on just a hair over 51000 XP, and all I had to do was breathe hard at a couple of the easier Nesingwary beasts and I'd make L34, safely out of the grasp of Gnomer.  What was I doing instead?  Working on Engineering, naturally.

The alert that a group has been found appeared, I put away my Engineering gear, and zoned in.

Gnomeregan.

You have got to be kidding me.

"If I'd have known that I'd end up here, I'd have gone and bashed a few monsters to get to L34," I said to the group.

The Night Elf Druid was amused.  She massaged Tomakan's shoulders and gave him a few hugs.

And naturally, the tank dropped.  Ah, Gnomer, the Ahn'kahet of lowbie pugs.

The time spent waiting around in the instance for a replacement tank was longer than the initial queue itself, so the rest of us began to slowly move down the entry ramp, taking it one or two monsters at a time.  By the time we got to the first intersection, a tank ported in and we resumed a regular pace with the tank leading.

Well, sort of.

Seems that our Night Elf Rogue decided that we weren't moving quickly enough, and he started pulling mobs all by himself.  To complicate things, the tank had to go AFK for a few minutes, so the first time the Rogue pulled a mob, we didn't have the tank available.  We got lucky that first time, but the second time the tank went AFK for a moment the Rogue did it again, and luckily for us the tank came back at just the right time to save us from a wipe.

But I was not putting up with this.  I whispered the tank what she wanted to do the next time the Rogue went, well, you know.

"LOL, I don't care if he dies, he pulled it."

"Fine with me," I replied.

Fortunately  --or maybe unfortunately-- the Rogue decided he had to go.  So while we were in the final trash pull right before "Mr. Electric Justice"* he up and says "Bye!" and drops group.  There were upwards of eight in the trash pull, and going one player short was a recipe for disaster.  I was sure that the Rogue timed it so that we would have a wipe, otherwise he'd have left in between pulls.  Too bad for him, the tank handled aggro well, and all I had to focus on was her.  We survived the trash pull, got a replacement Human Rogue, and finished the run.

There were plenty of times when the run could have gone really bad, but we got lucky.  Well, there's also the matter of having players who know their job in your group, and letting the tank do hers.

Contrast that with a couple of runs of Scarlet Monastery yesterday.  Tomakan ported in almost immediately after selecting the LFD tool, and I found out very quickly that the previous healer had left after a tank/healer fight.  "I hate those," I said while buffing people.

This run turned out to be the Library, so I knew what to expect.  However, it seems the tank didn't.

The group had already cleared the Huntsman's area and about 1/3 of the trash leading up to the librarian prior to my porting in, but when we started going forward the tank ran right up the middle rather than trying to clear the wings first.  He started getting overwhelmed, and I was doing my best to keep him upright, but the Hunter and Mage behind me kept pulling aggro away from the tank.  Then in the middle of the pull, the tank ran out the door behind me while I was trying to cast Holy Light on him  (The spell failed because he left LOS.)  This left one DPS to pick up the slack and causing the Scarlet Buddies to aggro on the one person actively casting spells nearby:  me.

As the tank ran out the door, he also went out of healing range.  I tried running back into range and casting Holy Light on the tank, but it's too late.  The tank dropped, and I then focused on trying to a) keep myself upright and b) keep the melee DPS upright.

"WTH happened?" one of the other DPS asked, just as he bit it.

"The whole room got pulled," I said as I watched my last Holy Light come too late.

And naturally, during the runback the tank dropped.  So did another pugger from his server, one of the two that was having aggro issues.  (For the record, they were both from the Thrall server.  Make of that what you will.)

The tank that replaced this one was much better; she knew how to clear the rooms, and when to wait on everyone else.  Once the Library finished up, there wasn't any question in my mind.  She queued the two of us up, and I went on a repeat of the Library with her.  She didn't really need to say much during the run; we just simply worked well together.  When one of the next group of DPS asked if I could handle the Healing, I said sure.  "I've already done before with this tank."  (For the record, the DPS was annoyed that I followed that tank and healed her first before the other DPS during the courtyard run.  Come on, I know the rule:  healer keeps the tank alive and vice versa.  Tank dies, we wipe.  Plain and simple.)



*Just what is it with that boss saying "Electric Justice!" as it attacks?  "Electric Justice" sounds like an 80's Metal band, like a competitor of Spinal Tap or something.

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.