…of the fact that Elysiane now has 1089 shadow damage in her shadow gear.

Really not too shabby for a priest who spends most of her time as holy/disc, is it?

I might get her that blue PvP set just to try out shadow – already have enough honor to buy the nonset epic boots, and I have the bracers already, so I could scrounge up 300 resilience in PvP gear easily. Thing is I just spent 400g on gemming and enchanting said shadow gear so do I want to spend another 50 on a respec that might only last a few days, and buy the blue set + gem it, that’s another thing already. I could do dailies (failies!) and get my gold up, but I’m way too busy grinding honor on Kaliah and leveling Starlet my little cow to bother with all the failies every day.

I want to get Spellstrike Pants crafted for her, she’s wearing the epic drop from SL heroic at the moment with 7 spelldamage gems. And hopefully get Fel-tinged Mantle from heroic MST to drop (all I’ve seen from Vexallus so far is that damn dagger over and over again when Elysiane goes, and the staff, of course, when Rochalie goes, it’s like a joke, Roch has been coveting the breastplate and Ely the mantle for ages). That should put me over 1100 easy.

Hm, I wish we didn’t need a paladin tank for ZA so I could bring Ely as shadow every once in a while – I feel way too responsible for the success of our raids though, I would feel guilty if I didn’t put my best effort into it.

Dear warrior who popped Recklessness just to kill a priest,

L2P.

Love,
Elysiane.

Dear druid who decided to gank Starlet twice while she was engaged with mobs and never otherwise,

I hope you enjoyed the two corpseruns when Zilli swooped in on his mount.

Love,
The cute cow.

Dear Blizzard,

Please fix the damn queues, because I’m sick of auto-losing due to Horde always starting at least 5 people short.

Love,
Elysiane.

Dear Horde,

Grow brains.

Love,
Elysiane.

Another Love Vendor production… Lineup: Prot paladin Roch, holy paladin Mahad, fury warrior Zilli, rogue Kaldar, warlock Juicydots.

Result: Kael deaded and stripped of his Commendation too, Rochalie is a happy happy tankygirl.

He dropped the Shoulderpads of the Silvermoon Retainer and the offhand sword – the shoulders went to Mahad for his retlol set, and the sword to Juicy for RP value, good times. Kaldar also dinged exalted with SSO upon the Kael kill, that’s what I call dinging in style.

Took part in a Gruul/Magtheridon/Doomwalker/Kazzak raid yesterday, hosted by the old guild of most of us Love Vendor-ians. It was fairly smooth for the most part, and lots of fun too – Zilli, Moonky, Kaldar and Rochalie attended, and from the reactions, it’s obvious that all of us have missed 25-man raiding.

The first HKM pull was botched as usual, thanks Moonky for ninjapulling, but from there on it went pretty smoothly. I never ran OOM or had any difficulty healing (was healing the MT of PN, the High King tank). We were a little heavy on healers anyway, and I guess it showed, it was useful though due to lack of a proper mage tank.

We had double Defender tokens, one of which Zilli won. The roll was actually won by another warrior, but since he wanted it for offspec, it was given to Zilli. This comes into play later.

So we run in, say hi to Gruul, slap him in the face and question his mother’s sexual orientation, he gets plenty pissed and gets killed in due time. I also find out that bubble does not absorb Shatter damage (WTF?) but I digress. Anyway, Gruul drops Aldori Legacy Defender, and Zilli is about to die of excitement. For reference, he has never seen the Nightbane shield for about 6 months of raiding Karazhan straight, with Nightbane kills every week, and still is rocking the Azure Shield from badges. It’s a running joke in Love Vendor that he will never get that shield.

The call for rolls go out, he rolls a 83, two other people also roll – significantly lower numbers. We’re all holding our breath, waiting for the shield to be looted to Zilli, congratulating him. A minute passes… two… no shield, and no other calls for loot going out, so we know something is up. Eventually, the master looter announces “Well Zilli won this roll, but we want to make it one item per person, so the shield will be looted to someone else.”

Our reaction was along the lines of “What”.

Now, I’m all for the “one item per person per run” rule normally. It keeps things fair where a roll system is used. But, one cannot change the loot rules mid-run and expect obedience. We were promptly outraged, a couple of LV peeps spoke out and stood up for Zilli, and eventually the shield was looted to its rightful owner.

I got some whispers from the MT, one of the PN officers, afterwards, telling me to “not start something” – uh excuse me, I didn’t start anything, just stood up for my friend with about two sentences, which was the right thing to do, but I digress yet again.

Moving on to the newly ezmode-ified Maggy we did quite well, although I remembered one of the things I really disliked about PN before I left, the minutes-long waits before each boss fight for no apparent reason. Coming from a guild where organization for each boss-fight takes about 30 seconds and where I always am pushing people to buff on the move, res the dead and move on while looting is done, taking tanking turns to ensure someone else is pulling trash while I am drinking, etc, the 20 minute wait before a boss fight does not sit well with me at all.

Magtheridon was fairly flawless, and there was a little debate of doing Hydross afterwards, but due to lack of properly geared tanks we went for Doomwalker instead. He took two tries to go down (stopping DPS on Overrun and not chaining Lightning Wrath is totally srs bznss), but he did eventually. I disconnected at about 20% though and he was dead before I got back, was a bit bummed that I missed the loot distribution and gold.

We got in 2-3 attempts at Kazzak afterwards, but with the amount of “helpers” who constantly ran in and died plus a couple of Alliance deciding to be asses, all our attempts were short-lived. We gave up after those attempts and called the raid.

It was a fun evening, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again – was definitely really fun to be getting back into the hang of raiding in a fun environment. I can’t wait till Love Vendor gets to a state where we can organize 25-mans, possibly as a joint effort with another guild.

Ugh, 2v2 sucked tonight – losing to one shaman-druid/DPS team after another.

Suffice to say that it’s really irritating to do everything in your power to keep JoJ up, keep stun/silence for important moments, deal with 500 kinds of snares going around on both your partner and yourself (keep BoF on myself and I just KNOW Zilli will be rooted or snared at a crucial moment, keep BoF on Zilli and I’ll be risking JoJ falling off from the druid)… and then see your partner not being able to seal the deal after getting said healer to under 20% repeatedly. My death soon follows since a moment comes where I’ve used up all my get out of jail free cards, and what with getting chain stunned/Kicked/Gouged/Pummeled there really isn’t much I can do.

Vent was literally just “argh Cycloned” “argh stunned” “argh Pummel got resisted” “argh missed my Pummel” “argh lag” “argh couldn’t interrupt” “argh rooted” seriously, I don’t think there was a single interrupt that actually hit on time today, /facepalm. Zilli went maces and made his Stunherald though, and mace stun seems to help loads, giving us that little edge – which obviously is needed since we suck with interrupts so much tonight. I really can’t stand when we get outplayed by our own setup, simply because the other warrior is interrupting me like he was a rogue and the other paladin is free to cast.

Hopefully we’ll take off at some point, although compared to the previous season we find it hard to even stay above 1500, let alone break into the 1700s like we did previously. Warrior priest paladin 3v3 isn’t going too badly though, all we need is to find a priest who actually plays more, since Severian prefers his rogue now. Maybe we can break 1600-1700 once we start playing with a bit more diligence.

The more I play Rochalie, the more I realise just how much I enjoy every aspect of the paladin class. Pre-TBC, just like the majority of the Horde, I looked down on paladins and derided them as a one-button class that required no skill. When TBC hit, I promised myself that I would never, ever, ever, ever roll a paladin. When my old GM was trying to convince all of our priests to go shadow or reroll paladins, I still faithfully stuck to my class and didn’t budge. Even when my boyfriend rolled one, and sang the class’s praises, I was stubborn.

In time I rolled one of my own, though, solely because of PvP reasons – most people would remember how in S1 warrior/paladin was the warrior/druid of S3 in 2v2. We played rogue/priest and regularly got beaten by the combo, so I made a paladin to go with my 2v2 partner’s warrior.

Of course, with leveling a paladin being what it is, and me getting sidetracked by other projects constantly, by the time Rochalie hit 70 we were well into S3. Plus, along the way I had decided I would go prot instead of holy – after a holy priest and a resto shaman, felt like a change was long overdue. So I tanked my little heart out for a long while.

However, at one point, our Karazhan runs ended up having too many tanks and too few healers, so I went holy for one run to ensure the run actually went ahead. And surprise, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. Then messed with holy PvP a bit with the same result – loved it. After ages of being a priest and even as disc, being as squishy as they come, wearing plate and being able to heal forever for a change… amazing.

Nowadays, Rochalie is the only 70, in fact, the only character that I log on to with any regularity aside from my bank alt. Even though she rocks either a holy or a prot spec depending on the time of the week, I enjoy doing all the daily quests with her. I love taking her through content no matter what it is. She’s been able to afford her epic flying on her own, and with ease, and is back up to 4.5k gold in no time again. She’s well on her way to a netherdrake and being exalted with SSO. She gets to go to Karazhan every week and she still enjoys the content there, despite being my 4th character to go through the same content. I run battlegrounds with her just for the sheer fun of it, not to grind honor or marks. She’s refreshed my enjoyment of the game, and all this from a class I used to loathe.

I’ve been asked whether I considered switching mains – the answer is yes, and I’ve scrapped the idea as soon as I thought of it. No matter what, the priest class has a special place in my heart and I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

However, the inadequacies of priests are glaring at the moment. A class that is advertised as “master of healing” is so far from that state that it’s painful. For every healing situation one can think of, there is a better alternative than a priest and/or stacking priests.

Want a healer for heroics? Take a paladin or a shaman – you get very powerful blessings, or totems and Bloodlust, plus the advantage that your healer won’t fall over dead if a stray mob so much as looks at them the wrong way. Want a healer for small-bracket arenas? A druid is by far the superior choice. Large-bracket PvP? Paladins are your man. Raids? You need a single priest, specced into Improved DS, bringing any more is a waste when you could be stacking paladins and getting more blessings. AoE healing? Lol shamans. I rolled a priest to be the best at what I do, not to sit around watching other healing classes be better than my own class at everything, because it sure was not what was promised to me. And no, going shadow is not a viable option – I want to heal, healing is what I rolled a priest for.

Looking at class changes, I don’t reckon Blizzard wants to fix this issue. Priests are the hybrid healers of the current highly-specialised healing scene, and ever since TBC, there is no support for hybrids in any part of the game. You either specialise or gtfo, and priests are “jack of all trades, master of none” when it comes to healing. A very fragile jack, at that.

So, as things stand with priests, I don’t see myself going back to Elysiane full-time anytime soon. Sure, she gets dusted off whenever my guild needs an extra healer for something Roch isn’t geared for, or when I get the urge to go melt faces a little. I’m really looking forward to a priest revamp, but until that day comes, I am perfectly happy with Rochalie.

We see it in battlegrounds all the time. “OMG Horde/Alliance sucks!” “We lose all the time!” “Nooooooooobs” (in the case of certain younger players who are out of school due to holidays).

But seriously, question yourself.

Are you fighting near an objective every time, or are you just farming HKs midfield while waiting for someone else to do the job for you? Are you leeching somewhere in AV and complaining about your honor per hour at the same time? Do you respond to help requests? Do you defend? Or do you just follow the mindless zerg around and hope you win? Do you play armchair general in /bg?

Your side might lose. Your side might lose a lot more often the other side, or so it might seem. But you are part of the team you are criticising, like it or not. It’s in your hands to win – even a couple of geared people who know what they are doing can turn the tide of a battleground (The day where Randomize, Cuteip and Rochalie queued together and won 8 EotS’s in a row comes to mind). If everyone who yelled insults in battleground chat actually worked towards the objectives, the game would be won.

Other than that, my battleground wisdom for this weekend, made after seeing 10 Horde zerging the middle when we had no towers: