Some paladin: “LF1M healer, Ramparts heroic!”
Roch who was looking for something to do: “Yay! Me me!”

Invite gets thrown out, and the first thing I hear in /p is some gibberish in a foreign language I don’t happen to speak.

I wait a few minutes, maybe they were carrying on a conversation in their native language before I came in, maybe they’ll switch to English now because I’m there. Nope, doesn’t happen.

“Mind speaking English in /p, please?”

They completely ignore me and go on. I ask again a couple of minutes later, with the same result.

/leaveparty

3 seconds later, whisper from the paladin:

“wtf dude why you leave?”

I explained politely that obviously they were not going to bother to show me a little respect by speaking in a language I did understand, so I wished to have no further dealings with them.

“lol dude we were not in instance so it was nothing important to you and my friend can’t speak english so what he had to do?”

Er, if he can’t speak English, 1. Why can’t you take it to whispers, 2. How am I supposed to communicate with this guy once we are in the instance?

“he is lame I know but I never saw anyone who will left because of language”

I pointed out that the instance would be infinitely easier if they took a healer that spoke the same language instead, goodbye, good luck, have fun.

No but seriously.

When I have people who speak my native language in the party, I make sure we switch to English when people who don’t speak it come in. It’s called respect, and it’s wholly irrelevant to the subject whether the topic of conversation is interesting to the other person. It’s passively excluding others, and I’ve had it done to me enough that I won’t ever have it done again or do it to anyone else.

A little anecdote: When I and my friends first joined Love Vendor, it was the reroll project of a group of real life friends. We joined LV because two of the founders were an officer and a prominent member from my old guild, both of whom were good friends, and they had assured we would be welcome in the guild.

However, we found ourselves increasingly excluded because guild chat was almost exclusively in Norwegian. We felt discouraged from ever starting a conversation or joining one. Even if we happened to be speaking in English, someone would deliberately respond in Norwegian – after one of those episodes, I even got a whisper saying “isn’t it hard being in a guild where you don’t even understand the language being spoken?” (bully-speak for “Why are you here?”). Thankfully eventually most of them got tired of their little reroll project (Haomarush was apparently too low-pop for their taste) and went back to the server they came from, minus our two good friends, and we reclaimed the guild chat.

But I heavily dislike this bully-tactic, this “we don’t care for you so we’ll do whatever we like, and you are the weird one for being offended” doesn’t sit well with me, and I won’t stand for it. If people aren’t willing to show the respect and stick to a common language, they aren’t people I would like to group with.

I miss the good old days. I know most of “us” does.

I miss rocking WPL and EPL with my then-best ingame friend, Ryven the warlock – just roaming around doing quests while tackling whatever Alliance that came at us. I miss the day we got hit by two Grammarpolice rogues to whom we introduced to the wonders of Free Action Potions. I miss the paladin who attacked us while we were just sitting by Scholomance watching the lake whom he summoned an infernal on. I even miss spending hours and hours farming the materials for my Hide of the Wild (Elysiane’s first ever epic!) and Truefaith Vestments, with generous amounts of help from my guildies and friends.

I miss farming up the blue dragons in Winterspring for that Robe of Winter Night pattern that never dropped, ever, and seeing “bouncing dragons”. I miss the night I got Eye of Divinity and did a wild dance in my little dorm room. I miss farming Dire Maul whenever Rotten got it in his head that he wanted a tribute run. I miss the messy, crazy, yet funny UBRS runs where after the group assembled you still had to pay a keyholder. This isn’t even as much the “good old days” as the others, but I miss doing Sareya’s hunter epic quest and the group of friends who stuck around to watch me, cheer me on, and yell encouragement on Vent.

I miss hanging out with Ryven, standing in front of an elite this or that for minutes, thinking of ways we could two-man it (we eventually two manned Araj the Summoner, this warlock-shadowpriest duo in blues and greens). I miss those rare people whom I enjoyed questing with.

I never thought I would, but I miss the day of our first Jeklik kill with SFT. I miss the night I got accepted into PN, and I had to leave my UBRS run shrieking with glee because they asked me to join their BWL raid, now, immediately (I saw Nefarian before Hakkar or Ragnaros). I miss shaking with panic and peppering Shisha my class leader with a million questions about the drakes, while being given the most amazing welcome in our healer channel and gchat. I miss being resigned to my death that night due to being minus an Onyxia Scale Cloak. I miss going into unbearable giggle fits on Firemaw because of the coordinated “Tanks go in…” “…everybody out” cues of our warrior officer and raid leader. I miss someone inevitably aggroing one of the troll groups before the bridge to Hakkar every week.

I miss the screaming, chaotic happiness of seeing Nefarian dying after weeks and weeks of “Let the games begin!” and the fiery death that followed. I miss the bets on who was going to die during the jump of death to Buru. I miss the night I tanked Razuvious with Shisha (which, incidentally, put me off tanking for a long long time due to the massive amount of responsibility involved). I miss going to see Kazzak with Monk and Crxn, and clearing Scholomance and Stratholme 3-man because they wanted to help me level.

I miss the tens of people who were around then and ceased to be around now. I guess this entry is more for them than it is for remembering and honoring what happened. Thanks for being amazing people – and wherever you are at the moment, I hope you are rocking it.

A short rundown of what I have been up to lately:

Spent the entire evening chasing world dragons, and I don’t exactly know what for. A rogue friend whispered saying he was going to try to 3-man some world dragons with their T6 geared tank and a T6 paladin – and that if I wanted to come, I was welcome. So I logged Sareya, also picked up Zilli and Severian because they are awesome, and off we went.

Lethon and Taerar went down without any problems, Ysondre and Azuregos sadly were not up, but Emeriss gave us some serious problems – we were 5-manning at that point as Zilli had to leave.

First try was a bugged quick wipe where Emeriss first did not respond to my Misdirection at all (I’d be shooting him and he would just be standing there, then 10 seconds later he would start chasing me instead of the tank), then ported me to himself from 30 yards away (really not sure what for) and I managed to fall through the world trying to run back. Njoh, our tank, had to port back to Shattrath to get his NR gear and queue us in a battleground so that I could get out. Second try was a heartbreaking 18% wipe when both healers got slept during Corruption of the Earth and Njoh bit it, shortly followed by the rest of us.

We had a couple more unlucky tries, on the killing try both our paladin and I were dead and running back constantly with Mark of Nature on trying to see how long we could avoid the sleep clouds before we got stunned. Luckily we both died during the last Corruption of the Earth so it was pretty much 3-mannable from there. It was fun and I netted a little over 80g from the three kills, would not mind doing it again.

Rochalie stepped into Karazhan for the first time last weekend, not as a tank however but as a healer. The tank spots for the night were full and I didn’t feel like bringing Kaliah or Sareya yet again, so I decided to do a little work on my holy gear bringing it up to par, and respeccing holy. A couple of enchants, some crafts and three nights of PvP later she was sitting at 1.2k healing and 15%ish spell crit, which I ended up attending the raid with.

Impressions: Wow. Paladin raidhealing IS ezmode.

I had two holy priests backing me up, so I hardly had an opportunity to cast anything other than Flash of Light at any time. My night could be summed up as “spamming my mouseover FoL macro while mentally afking” yet in my horribly undergeared state I still topped healing and was second on overhealing, a miracle in and of itself and a testament to how painfully easy mode raidhealing as a paladin is. Unlike on my priest or shaman I never had to worry about overhealing because mana was simply never a concern, ever.

Roch walked away with 22 badges, Wrynn Dynasty Greaves and a couple of additions to her lolret set which she in all likelihood will never use (just took them to save them from getting sharded). The healing libram and Chess shield also dropped and were promptly won by the other prot paladin. The second I walked out I ran to the badge vendor and picked up Libram of Repentance, finally fulfilling my goal of uncrushability. I might be OTing next week (Zilli says he is looking forward to it), until then I can be found trying to calculate a way to gem Wrynn Dynasty Greaves with maximum stamina while trying to remain uncrushable at the same time.

Also healed a full Karazhan run on Kali last night, it was pretty “ugh” running with a load of S3 geared people who took some time to readapt to PvE. We did manage a full clear in about 3.5 hours though and now Kali’s 7 badges short of the badge leggings, I think after I get those I will retire her (ie no longer consider that character a “work in progress” and she will take a back burner). The fact that I got 3 major upgrades last night also figures into this, Earthblood Chestguard, Girdle of Gale Force and Dragon-Quake Shoulderpads all dropped and were looted to me.

I never managed to warm up to the shaman class as a whole. I’m not sure why but something just didn’t click, even though Kaliah was my first ever character and one that has a lot of good memories associated with her. Tried elemental, nope. Enhancement, never managed to like it, melee just ain’t my thing, and the day before it got buffed I respecced resto anyway. And resto, ugh, I never found a healing satisfaction in it like I could on my supposed “master of healing” priest. I might dust her off after Wrath and see what happens, but as of now, I don’t see myself doing anything serious on Kaliah.

This post made me laugh very hard.

I’ve been saying for awhile that I want to hit some 25mans with Sareya – that finally happened this past weekend. I have a good friend in the server’s most progressed Horde guild, who likes organizing our weekly Karazhan runs in his spare time, and who keeps his alts in Love Vendor. This time he went and set up a Gruul run. It was pretty much a friends affair, some TI people, their friends (which is to say some very fine folks from Love Vendor, including yours truly), friends’ friends, friends’ friends’ friends and eventually we got a full raid.

We had a very strange and unbalanced group makeup at the end. The token caster DPS we had was a warlock – a T6 mage was brought in to tank Krosh but swapped to his alt for Gruul. Two tree druids, a shaman, three priests as healers. The rest of the raid was entirely physical dps, most of which were after Dragonspine Trophy. Four hunters, a load of DPS warriors, two rogues, a retribution paladin and a prot one. Oh, and a T6 feral druid to OT Gruul, and a prot warrior to MT.

We were initially fairly worried about the lack of healers, but things mostly proved to be smooth – we botched one HKM pull as something got loose and began oneshotting our already scarce healers, but the second try went very well. My sister-in-crime Jundo, the alt of another Love Vendor-ian, and I were assigned to tank Kiggler, and I’m glad to say we didn’t mess anything up. Maulgar yielded the hunter shoulders, but let’s face it, the lack of agility on Demon Stalker makes it an inferior choice to the S1 shoulders Sareya is sporting, so I passed without hesitation.

After a couple of crazy trash pulls (one of the mobs decided to call out for friends) we finally got to Gruul. Buffed, flasked, Misdirect order assigned, onwards we ran in and started the fight.

What with the lack of healers, of course the inevitable happened and we lost the MT at around 20% – this was the point where I started thanking our lucky stars for having so many melee DPS. Nord the druid OT took over tanking, and rogues were popping their Evasions, the sole kitty druid going bear, warriors Shield Walling one by one as the others spammed Execute.

It actually is slightly funny watching melee drop like flies when the MT dies, but I digress.

I reckon around one third of the raid was dead when Gruul himself also bit the dust. I honestly had not expected to have such a fast and flawless raid seeing how we weren’t really an organized effort and we had all kinds of people – casuals, Black Temple raiders, PvPers, and best of all, the ten year old daughter of one of the LV paladins, for whom it was a first raid (the little one won T4 leggings, and apparently was so excited that she ran straight downstairs to tell her mother).

I like the Gruul fight from a hunter’s perspective. Oh, it definitely is easier than watching the health bars of the entire raid. I can bandage or HS out of Shatter damage, and my higher hitpoints mean it’s easier to survive unlucky Slam/Shatter combos – I survived one or two that would not have been possible as a priest. Managing my pet in and out of Cave In was also a lot easier than I expected. I usually would leave him attacking and Mend Pet was enough to keep him up. If he got too low I pulled back for a little. I’m proud to say he didn’t die.

Other than that, it’s the usual “watch where you are standing, and keep an eye on Omen”. I had to keep popping Fel Mana potions even though I had Viper up, but I’m definitely not complaining.

Gruul ended up dropping leggings I wasn’t interested in, Eye of Gruul, and the much-coveted Dragonspine Trophy. Sareya lost the roll on the Trophy, but I’m very glad to say one of “us”, my sister in crime Jundo, ended up winning it.

So how did she do? How did she do?

I couldn’t believe I had done so well – I did put 100% into it, but with a raid that had characters who were clearly superiorly geared, I didn’t think I stood a chance. The top three is entirely comprised of Love Vendor members/alts as well, which makes me very proud of my guild. We might not be the most hardcore of raiders any more, but when it’s needed, we do know how to step up and deliver the damage.

All in all I loved the fact that I got to go, and I loved the fact that the raid was so successful – the success means we might actually do this again, and perhaps even move on to Magtheridon and a little of SSC/TK.

In other news, Love Vendor might actually start running their (well, our) own Karazhan raid again, seeing that we got some fresh blood in the form of old friends’ alts, who are all fairly experienced and itching to start raiding. I personally enjoy being a free agent for a variety of reasons (basically, in a formal, organized raiding guild you might have to tolerate people you don’t really like, but as a free agent I get to pick and choose my own people to raid with), but getting into some guild raids with people I haven’t played with for so long doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.

Quoted from a wow_ladies post, which was quoted from a post on the official forums in turn:

The thing in question is changing the rewards to require much less effort to get the exact same thing. It’s not elitist or selfish to believe that is bad. No one is saying that you should have to work *harder* to see Black Temple, just that you should have to put in the *same* effort, even if it takes a longer period of time. I don’t expect your path to be any harder than my own, the posts here saying this are requesting equality – not special treatment for high end players. Selfishness is expecting to be given the same reward for *less* effort than others. It is not being unfair to expect everyone that spends $15 a month on this game to play by the same rules.

I could not agree more with this.

Honestly, I’m sick of all raiders being labeled special snowflakes because they want everyone else to put in the same effort to get where they got – and I can entirely understand where they are coming from (although I myself have just had a little taste of T5 content before I quit my guild). I quit a while after the SSC/TK attunements got lifted, so that meant I could actually go see TK. I still hated it back then, and I hate it now.

First off, it does undermine my personal feeling of accomplishment, please and thank you. Getting to raiding instances can and should be a challenge. Why should my green and blue geared alts be able to stroll through the door of Hyjal (even if they won’t succeed, but that’s beside the point). No, the so-called casual is not “entitled” to go see those instances because they pay the same amount of money as others do. Like with everything in life, some things have a price, be it time commitment or a certain amount of organization. If you can’t deliver what is needed, sorry. Raiding high-end instances is not for you. You don’t deserve it because you simply exist.

I don’t see why this feeling of accomplishment is begrudged to the raiding crowd. Yes, people want what the majority can’t have. That’s what makes them special. Why does the majority not think that completing a heroic or killing Gruul is an amazing accomplishment now? There was a time when completing heroic Shadow Lab or Shattered Halls made you someone (that is, before all heroics got nerfed to hell and back and the key requirement got lowered – god I remember literally crying in frustration because of the pre-nerf Murmur). There was a time when Gruul or Lurker loot was omgawesomesauce and it made everyone admire you.

Then more and more people started doing them, they were nerfed in some way, and they lost their value simply because of the sheer number of people able to run through said content. People PuG even the harder heroics. Karazhan is regarded as “heroics plus”. Most guilds don’t even do Gruul anymore because it’s a waste of time to them. Now BT and Hyjal are where it’s at, and come 2.4, it will be the Sunwell encounters people ooh and aah over.

And yes, those people worked their butts off to get into BT and Hyjal. Kael is still regarded as being a harder encounter than most of BT and MH. People beat that, put in the necessary time and effort, and got where they are – why should others just be given an easy ride, and the raiding crowd should be insulted to boot? Even if you haven’t killed Kael, Rage Winterchill is the Loot Reaver of Hyjal still, and the first few bosses of BT are regarded as equal in difficulty to that. I believe the top Horde raiding guild on my server spent more time on Kael than they spent getting the first five bosses of BT down. This was a reward in and of itself – because they beat a surprisingly hard encounter, the game rewarded them by a sense of accomplishment AND making the next couple of encounters fairly easy by comparison. Why should the so-called “casuals” have access to that? Isn’t the effort you spend supposed to be proportional to the reward you get, the reward being the right to be in those instances and have access to better gear?

Another reason why I feel lifting the attunements is wrong, but this one is a little personal (I’m probably just still bitter, heh): My guild had just gotten around to killing Gruul by the time the attunements were lifted to SSC and TK. Most of us were already attuned to SSC, not so many to TK due to Magtheridon still being quite the challenge for us. I felt that was wrong. That we simply did not deserve to be in SSC or TK yet (you would be amazed how many people had not mastered “do not stand in the &%!^ing Cave In”, I felt it was pure luck that we killed Gruul at all) . That we should follow the natural progression order and that it was there for a reason.

Did the management share the view? No. As a result, we got to spend some time on Hydross because they insisted we could take him without resistance gear, that we just needed to “focus a little harder”. We got to spend quite a few nights wiping on the so-called Loot Reaver – surprise, if you can’t move out of Cave In, you can’t dodge big flying orbs, either. Not to mention most of us were lacking in gear.

Likewise for Hyjal and BT at the moment – there is “I should be there because I got attuned the proper way, and picked up required skills and gear along the way”, and then there is “oh look I can get into BT and Hyjal now, let’s go!”, and a whole world of pain as a result.

wow_ladies member Yueni has also made an awesome post on the subject here, which I believe is worth reading. I especially agree with the way she differentiates between casual and hardcore – like she put it, it’s not how much time you spend, it’s simply how you spend it.

I personally view the hardcore mentality as a constant desire to improve in every way. As simple willingness to put in effort to learn about an encounter, learn about your class, learn about the game mechanics. This is how people get where they get when they get there. A casual guild might wipe on an encounter over and over and over again and just get it down by repetition – a hardcore guild might stroll in, take a look, get a feel for it, and down the boss in a couple of tries.
Why? Because they probably have done their homework on the boss, watched videos, tweaked their character, gotten the required gear. Whereas a casual just won’t bother because the ingame accomplishment simply doesn’t mean as much to them.

To me, casual is “we don’t take this as seriously as others” and that’s perfectly fine – it’s not an insult. Some people play the game for the sole purpose of downing bosses on the bleeding edge content. Some people play to have fun and don’t care where they are or how they get there. Some people are in the middle. It’s a “to each their own” affair. One side is not superior to the other, they just take delight in different things.

However, returning to the original point, the effort (read, not time, effort, for time is not always equivalent to effort – I think a lot of us know how easy to be mentally AFK in raids) one puts in should be equivalent to the reward one gets. If you spent extra time gearing up, learning game and boss mechanics, farming the consumables and gold needed for raids, the bosses you get to see and the purplez you get to wear are your rewards. If you simply don’t have the will or the time for that, as I am at this moment, that’s fine too, like me you end up running Karazhan once a week, taking sneak peeks into Zul’Aman, leveling alts and PvPing. And generally having as much fun as a raider would have downing Illidan. No one has a problem with that.

But if you come over and start crying because you don’t have the time, can’t be bothered to put in the effort because this is “just a game”, insult the entire raiding crowd because they obviously have no life, and overall act like you are entitled to seeing some of the best content the game has to offer, then you can just GTFO. We have a problem with that.

And that’s what I have to say on the matter.

Kali just healed heroic Shattered Halls!

/proud

My baby is all grown up.

I know, I know, that isn’t really news to most people… but even though she has healed most heroics, there just are some heroics that truly test your skills at what you do. Like Shattered Halls. Like SL. Like BM (oh god, I wouldn’t even heal BM on Ely, no way). Like Arcatraz pre-nerf.

And heroic SH is amazing with a paladin tank. Pullpullpull smacksmacksmack, spam max rank Healing Wave with the occasional Chain Heal and LHW. Never a dull moment.

We did wipe a couple of times, but that was because the paladin got arrogant and kept pulling like a madman. We told him to chillax and take it a little slower, and it went fine from there.

We also had a rogue who died on every boss. It was fairly amusing. Something would just happen to him and he’d end up splat. Void zone + Death Coil on Nethekurse, didn’t realise Porung was a boss and got seen through stealth, of course got to tank more than once on Warbringer… and ate a charge + Whirlwind on Kargath. It was just impossible to save him. Frustrated me a little, cos he’d be like “heals” and if you have never healed it’s hard to realise what “this heal needs to be cast if the tank is to be kept up while I get around to you” means.

And it was the daily so… yay for 7 badges, and 50 gold from the daily + the quest in SH =D

Massive drop in rating, not sure what to chalk it up to – horrible play, unfavorable matchups, not working well as a team, everything. DPS felt abysmal tonight, it was as if no matter what we did, things weren’t going down. Last season we had a mage who I would call overall less skilled as a whole, yet we did so much better.

I believe the issue lies simply in the lack of coordination and communication, first of all – match starts, I’ll start brainstorming on targets, if I miscall a target no one says anything, match ends, suddenly “we should have done this and that”. Anyone has a better idea, I want to hear it then, not have to have a complete change of strategy halfway through a match.

Another point is that as a team we simply have different ways of thinking, I will be thinking “what poses the most target to us as a whole” ie thinking defensively, while my mage is thinking “what can we burst down fastest” ie offensively. As a result, if the expected burst doesn’t happen and we need to go on the defensive, we fall apart due to lacking the mana efficiency and not really having planned ahead to coordinate the crowd control.

Case in point: Warrior, resto druid, disc priest. I vote we go for the priest and CC the warrior to keep him off me, negating the threat of mana burns – also, the druid will be busy healing the priest (so no cyclone), they will be forced to go on the defensive as a whole, and it’s not terribly hard to keep a priest stunlocked and CSed to deliver the DPS. My mage votes we drag the warrior out of the healers’ LoS, pin him down, and nuke him before heals come in. The approaches are very different, and depending on our individual playstyle and the options available to us at any given moment, both might work, only one might work, and none might work (we used one of the above approaches, which ended up not working).

We’re simply not clicking as we did with the setup last season, and risking QQing a bit, me feeling horribly inferior doesn’t make things any better. I have a lot to improve as far as my game is concerned, and I’m aware I’m still not quite there yet – pre-TBC I hardly ever did organized PvP for ranks (still sporting Stone Guard, that’s Horde rank 6 for you Alliance folks), and playing alongside two Conqueror titled people who were PvPing when Elysiane was in short pants, one of whom runs 2k+ teams on his main, doesn’t help my nervousness. I feel like I always fall short of some invisible standard, and that our losses in some way can be chalked up to that.

I’m considering a major UI overhaul as part of improving my game, probably going to work on that soon. UI is my one weakness as I’m a creature of habit and it takes me a while just to get used to the simplest of addons. I’m still using the Blizz default UI with Proximo, Grid and the usual Enemy Cast Bar addons for arena. But I think I need something better organized (it’s all a massive mess atm) that basically rubs in my face what the hell is happening at any point at any time in a match.

Other than that, Sareya got a lot of new goodies as a result of our last Karazhan badge run, which I’m really happy about – Curator finally coughed up his ring, Chess gave me the boots (which I am banking for the moment), nabbed the leather leggings no one wanted from Netherspite for the +agi over my old ones. And after the run, had enough badges to get the amazing Gauntlets of Sniping. At this moment, sitting pretty at 1640 AP, 25% crit, and 580ish agi, all unbuffed, not even Hawk. Also one single hit rating short of the cap.

Although the one bummer came when I neatly gemmed everything blowing hundreds of gold after the raid, put them on, admired my new stats…

…and realised hey, my metagem isn’t working anymore.

/facepalm

Go grab two Nightseyes, resocket gloves, resocket leggings.

Proceed to really be pissed off at self for wasting the gold. That two blue requirement is really a killer for PvE, where all I currently want is red and yellow gems.

I was thinking that if I ever get Ring of a Thousand Marks, I would socket and use Fiend Slayer to make up for the lost hit over my Violet Signet, and if I stick in agi/stam gems those give me the requirement for the meta. Which means I can resocket the gloves and leggings… yet again.

Think I might just skip that.

Anyway, I think that at the moment, as far as PvE gear goes, Sareya has about hit her ceiling. There are no upgrades I need from Karazhan (save for Ring of a Thousand Marks, which I see as more of a sidegrade than an upgrade), and the only immediate “upgrade” I can think of is the badge bracers, giving her a marginal amount of +AP and some armor penetration. And I can regem my helm if I ever really start bugging myself about that one single hit rating needed to be capped. All in all I consider her ready for 25-mans and Zul’Aman, except our circle of friends isn’t going anywhere with that stuff, and I don’t want to apply to a raiding guild with Sareya as my main.

But that’s another woe entirely.