Share and Share Alike

We're closing in on a week's worth of pre-patch --this is Day 6, given that the actual pre-patch took up the entire day-- but this is the first day I've had to really get around to leveling Briganaa to any extent.

Tuesday was a wash, obviously, but Wednesday I was swamped at work which ran late. Oh, and Wednesday was also the date for what became known as the Flight Point Raid.

The Flight Point Raid?

Why yes, I'm glad you asked.

Some of us, milling about at the starting
point in Winterspring. And that chimaera
that just loves to wander over by the FP.

 

It was a raid put together by the guild to get all of the new Draenei (and the occasional other new toon) the various Flight Points across Azeroth. From Silithus to Blasted Lands, from Darnassus to Azshara, we were summoned from place to place by a core group of warlocks and their associated clickers. Card and Az had a part to play too, as I would fly/port ahead on a toon and then help click the summoners across the continents to bring the rest of the warlocks over, then I'd switch back to Briganaa and get her a summons as well.

The presence of the L60s came in handy in case any of the high level enemies aggroed on our raid. We didn't need to kill anything, but there was a curious chimaera in Winterspring that gave me pause.

All in all, there were about 15-20 new toons that benefited from this raid, Briganaa included. But the lone drawback was that being summoned all over Azeroth meant that I didn't get much of a chance to do any leveling on Wednesday. The event was originally slated for Tuesday, but we all know how Tuesday turned out.

Thursday and Friday were spent getting my son from college and then raiding Naxx (Friday night). Saturday was spent with the youngest mini-Red's high school graduation and then a Blackwing Lair + Ony run.*

So I made it to Sunday, finally getting the chance to get on Brig and level her for a couple of hours. 

But I've discovered that there's a bit of a monkey wrench in the leveling plans: this computer is shared.

My wife and I share the desktop PC. Normally, this isn't a big deal, because I play WoW late enough in the evening that her social media habit doesn't interfere with my gaming.** But if I'm going to be boosting and aggressively leveling a new toon, that means my gaming will begin to intersect with her PC usage.

And on Sunday, it did.

In lieu of ongoing negotiations about PC sharing for this pre-patch and early TBC Classic rollout, I've been exploring what options I have. At one time we did have a 2012 laptop that was to be used by both the kids (for school) and my wife for when she wanted to look something up while she was watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading, but that fell apart years ago. Literally, as in the hinges ripping out of their spots and the case frame cracking and needing duct tape to hold together. As of now, the only other PC in the house --that isn't one of the kids' or is used for my work-- is an old 2007 Core Duo machine that runs 32-bit Vista. And let's be honest: it's not much of a solution. It struggled to run WoW back in the day, and once I replaced the graphics card it did run better, but Classic's minimum requirement is Win 7. So unless I'd be interested in replacing one obsolete OS with another obsolete OS that's a no go.

I'd been thinking of building a PC of my own for a while, but now, when I finally have the motivation to do so (and have the funding as well), there's a certain semiconductor shortage to deal with. 

So... I'm going to soldier on as best I can, negotiate for the time that I can, and just go from there.

*I also had a plumbing emergency during the day, where the water intake for the refrigerator began leaking and I very nearly missed graduation until I finally fixed it with less than a 1/2 hour to go before we had to leave.

**The kids and I have gotten her a) a tablet and b) a decent smartphone for her to use for social media over the years, and she simply will not use them. She likes sitting in front of a keyboard and computer screen, and that's that. For a brief period of time we even had a "family" laptop, and she absolutely HATED it. She likes what she likes, and there's nothing I can do about that.

Upon Reaching the Flip Side

I'm not going to talk about the extended downtime that it took for The Burning Crusade Classic and WoW Classic to become two separate entities, because I'm sure there will be plenty of posts on the matter. I will say, however, that I really feel for the IT personnel who had to work so freaking long to get the data integrity issues in the mail system sorted out.

I've been there, and I can sympathize.

***

But the servers are now live, and the BC pre-patch is up and running.

I logged in before work this morning, and my first order of business was to migrate most of my toons to BC Classic. I'm keeping one totally behind to clear up toon space, and I cloned Card back to the WoW Classic Forever server.

And then it was time for toon creation.

Raid be damned, these two came first:

Feels weird seeing Q without Quel'Delar.

Always good to see Neve again.

Then I turned my attention to the Draenei Shaman I was to create.

I spent quite a bit of time tossing names around, wanting to have something that sounded like a Draenei but one that would fit her class as well. As you can guess, I already knew I wanted to create a female Draenei because my Draenei toons from my Retail days --largely represented by Tomakan-- were all male toons. And for some reason I tended to suck at having those toons succeed at jumping skills. So I figured why not go with a female Draenei?

"The Caboose" is how a couple of friends described female Draenei to me, and the name kind of stuck. 

Anyway, I spent some time kicking around names with a friend last night while we waited for the servers to (not) come back online, and something she suggested was to model the name off of Brigid, the Irish Celtic goddess (and also the name of St. Brigid of Kildare, who was likely based on the earlier goddess.) We initially had some trouble getting that name to morph into something Draenei like, until I discovered that the (roughly) British Celtic equivalent of Brigid was Brigantia.

"Hey, I can work with that," I thought.

Some tweaks later....

Emphasis is on the second syllable.
So, brig-AH-naa.

I actually spent most of a meeting listening while tweaking Brig's appearance. Given BC Classic's limitations in toon customization, I spent waaaay too much time obsessing over this. Neve and Q were easy: just look at Retail, and emulate. But Brig had to be just right. I did seriously consider silver or gold hair, but I kept her hair dark. It just seemed to fit better.

***

And that was that.

For all of the excitement of other people getting a chance to start the pre-patch, I've been very, well, low key about it. Part of that is work; it has amped up considerably the past week or two and I've had that very much on my mind. Another part is that my youngest graduates from high school this Saturday, and I'm SO looking forward to that. Then there's my oldest, who is graduating from college next Saturday; and I'm so happy to see her achieve her dream. And finally there's another part that I have to get my son from college; he has to be out of his dorm by noon on Friday, so I'm driving up Thursday afternoon and get a hotel room for the night.

But there's also the reality that I have to blitz through leveling to get Brig up in time for raiding, and that's a pretty daunting task ahead. I'm pretty sure I'll be sick of boosting by the time Brig finally reaches L70 and is properly attuned.

One Last Update

This morning I woke to receive a "re-evaluation" notice from Blogger, which said they didn't find any malware, so they restored the posts.

Hell, I could have told them that.

What I don't get is if they get a report about malware they don't have a quick scan of the offending pages. That'd shake out any malware present and not force them into a manual re-evalutation.

But hey, I only work in IT Security.

Oh, How Nice

Apparently PC has been reported as a "Deceptive Site", so I filled out a form to Google to dispute this.

This blog is so freaking old that I'll have to go back and see which link is the "bad one", which is likely an old blog that no longer exists.

Oh. Yay.

Ups and Downs

The emotional roller coaster continues unabated, which is kind of weird since the past couple of days' worth of events had nothing to do with any of my toons directly. (Yet.)

The other day I got a whisper from Shintar of Priest With a Cause:

"We killed KT!"

Woooo!

"But also, our usual raid leader ragequit the raid on Sapph
what a night"

Wait, what?

She assured me she'd get a long blog post out of this, and she wasn't kidding. It's well worth a read. But I'm still incredibly proud and happy for Shintar and the rest of the Order of the Holy Fork for beating Classic just before pre-patch. Way to go!

***

As for our BC preparation, the raid lead team was busy reviewing and slotting where each person was willing to go, and we finally got down to the nitty gritty. 

We needed Shamans and we had too many Mages.*

So I put my money where my mouth is and volunteered to switch my main to an Enhancement Shaman.

I'm still going to play with Card, but she's not going to be my primary toon. And neither will Linna, although I'm likely to utilize the boosting service for her. 

So this upcoming week's raid is going to be bittersweet: the last time before pre-patch that I'll have Cardwyn as my main.

***

What will Card do afterwards?

Most likely, she is going to take some well deserved time off. She'll leave the Plaguelands to others for a while, port down to Stormwind, and walk back home to the family farm in Eastern Elwynn. There, she'll spend as much time out in the sun as possible, trying to chase away dark memories from the inside of Naxxramas and Ahn'Qiraq, along with landscapes where the very air takes on a sickly hue. She'd never take the wheat and barley growing in the fields for granted again. 

Things have changed since Card started out. She has several nieces and nephews now; two of the farmhands, James and Robyn, married and moved into a small place Card's Mom and Dad built for them on the northern edge of the fields. They now have a couple of children of their own. Linna is still out there with the Knights out in the Plaguelands, keeping Light's Hope Chapel open and the Scourge at bay.

Mistress Evelyn is semi-retired; Card's family built a small place for her adjacent to the farm buildings so she could continue her pursuits without constant travel to Stormwind. Instead of visiting the children of Eastern Elwynn, they now come to her for lessons. 

The ebb and flow of children suits Card to no end. She gets to play with her nieces and nephews, go fishing at the nearby pond, and even do things she used to hate, such as turning manure. Being out in the sun, in nature, and surrounded by friends and family keeps the darkness at bay. It also serves as a reminder of why she fought in the first place, which can get lost in the heat of the moment.

Perhaps that call will come, a summons to cross the Dark Portal and face Illidan and the Burning Legion, but for now time is Cardwyn's most precious resource, and she intends to use as much of it as possible making herself whole again.

 

 

*Not one or two, but four, including Card.

Yeah, It Figures

Figures that Blizz would drop the news about BC Classic a couple of hours after a post.

So.....

June 1st eh? With a May 18th Pre-patch?

Not amused, I am. Naxxramas' Event went on longer than the two weeks' worth of pre-patch for TBC Classic.

Boosting services on the servers --the ones you pay for in WoW gold, not the ones that Blizz wants you to use-- will be brisk, especially if you want multiple Shamans (or Pallys on the Horde side) in raids fairly quickly.

I look at the two weeks as a push by Blizz to capitalize on their own monetary boosting services, but given that most of the toons in need of a boost won't be able to get one (Draenei and Blood Elves), why stick to two weeks?

Unless they asked the sweatiest of the sweaty guilds for advice on lead-in to release day, that is.

***

Oh, and I left my old guild today.

Within the past few days I noticed that a lot of my old guildies began logging in like clockwork, with TBC Classic on the horizon. To be fair, I was never on Az when they were, because I was either doing some leveling on alts or raiding/whatnot on Card, but when I logged into Az to do some farming, I noticed the last logged in times and went "hmmm....."

After a couple of days of this I began to get irritated. I'd been the only one to consistently login over the months, and I guess they figured they could pick up where they left off. It was at that moment that I realized that I'd moved on without them, and I really didn't need Retail Orphans any more. So I gave the GM role back to the original GM and /gquit.

Az is now a free agent again.

Will she join Valhalla? Nah. Not for now at any rate. She can remain independent, especially since she has been doing her own thing for so long. Besides, I'm going to be busy doing raid stuff, and Az will be an alt that I'll goof around with from time to time.

The Maiden Voyage of the Loot Master

I should have taken screenshots.

Really.

I'd never performed any raid lead functions before, and I mean the "real" raid lead functions, not merely organizing the Mage Int buffs. But last night during our regular Zul'Gurub pug run* I assumed the role of Loot Master for the first time.

Courtesy of my new gig being part of a raid lead team, I knew I was going to have to learn this job anyway, so I figured no time like the present. I'd already been growing more and more concerned about the burnout that the pug Raid Lead had been facing, and I wanted to take on a greater role in her raids to make her job easier.

So last night's ZG run was a great testcase as to whether a) I could handle this technically, and b) I could handle this without getting too much stress.

While I realized that I wasn't going to be as smooth as she does it --she's been doing it for months-- I have no idea how she juggles all the hats on these smaller raids.

***

We spent about a half an hour before the raid working out the settings for the LootReserve add-on, which is what we use for our raids with the Soft Reserve loot system**, and then based on a quirk of Classic I had to assume the Raid Lead position and then grant her Assist so she could perform all of her 'regular' tasks.

It actually wasn't that bad.

It helped that the raid was composed of a mix of guildies (still feels weird saying that) and regulars, and they were very encouraging throughout the raid. The two other Mages stepped up to help out with managing the Int Buffs and taking care of other small things I'm used to doing, so it freed me to focus on the Loot Master's job.

Which actually contributed to my death at least once. 

I was busy looking at the reserves and whatnot in the approach to the spider boss while we were killing those spider packs. Since my mind was on that, I kept spamming Arcane Explosion and not paying attention to my threat levels. Naturally, I pulled threat and died.

"A Card in her natural habitat: eating dirt" was how I described it in Mage chat.

"What happened?"

"Died due to skitterer packs."

"How?"

"Was busy looking at reserves, spamming AE, not paying attention."

"Yeah, that'll do it."

I died one or two more times, both of them directly related to me focusing on the Loot Master job, so I'm not terribly concerned. But given that I'm not exactly swimming in gold, that money spent on repairs did hurt.

***

Since I'll be taking this job going forward on the two 20 person raids, I'm sure I'll get better at this as time goes on. And I think I can do this when we get to BC and I graduate to the DKP tools we currently use in our progression raids. Of course, stakes about loot are a bit higher there, so hopefully I'll have this down enough to not cause any drama all by my lonesome.

*While technically it is a pug, this raid (as well as our Saturday BWL and Sunday AQ20 runs) has so many regulars from across several guilds that it's more of a semi-pug at this point. 

**If you're considering running Soft Reserve, the LootReserve Addon is AMAZING. For both raiders and the lead team. For raiders, you get a GUI that handles everything you wanted to do (so you don't overwhelm the Loot Master with requests to the point the LM's account is throttled by Blizz). For Loot Masters, you only have a half dozen settings to worry about without having to type out commands on the chat line. If it was all command line driven, it'd take forever.